The Hollywood Book of Death: The Bizarre, Often Sordid, Passings of More than 125 American Movie and TV Idols

by Parish, James Robert

  Unaware of the tragedy, Edie had driven home. When she heard the bad news, she refused to believe her husband was gone until Jack Lemmon went to the morgue and confirmed that he was indeed dead. Edie asked Lemmon to put several Havana cigars in Ernie’s pocket before the burial.

  The funeral was held on January 18, 1962, at the Beverly Hills Presbyterian Church, and attended by a host of celebrities. Pallbearers included Jack Lemmon, Frank Sinatra, Billy Wilder, and Dean Martin. The comedian was buried at Forest Lawn Memorial Park in Hollywood Hills, California, where his marker reads: “Ernie Kovacs 1919–1962. Nothing in Moderation. We all loved him.” The hard-working Edie was saddled with $600,000 in gambling and tax debts that took her years to pay off.

  Over the decades since his death, a solid portion of Ernie’s work from TV’s “Golden Age” has been salvaged for TV syndication and home-video distribution, proving to be the lasting tribute to his far-out talents. A less happy legacy occurred on May 22, 1982, when Ernie and Edie’s 22-year-old daughter, Mia Susan, died in a Los Angeles auto crash. She is buried at Forest Lawn to Kovacs’s left. Her marker reads “Daddy’s girl. We all loved her too.”

  Brandon Lee

  February 1, 1965–March 31, 1993

  Brandon Lee always had a burning desire to act. But during his efforts to break into the entertainment industry, he insisted, “I don’t want to be known only as Bruce Lee’s son. When you have a built-in comma after your name, it makes you sensitive.” Yet in many ironic ways, the phrase “like father, like son” certainly applied to martial-arts screen idol Bruce Lee and his only son, Brandon. There were many coincidental parallels between the two generations of Lees: both were anti-establishment rebels who boasted of their reckless disregard for safety, and each had a near-fanatical determination to succeed in show business on his own terms. Each was a prize example of muscular toughness. Both men had a premonition that their lives would be short.

  Bruce Lee died in Hong Kong on July 20, 1973, at the age of 32, while making an action movie called Game of Death. Although the coroner’s report attributed Bruce’s death to cerebral edema caused by an allergic reaction to a painkiller, wild rumors of how the world’s fittest man “really” expired have endured for decades and new ones continue to develop. In March 1993, almost 20 years after Bruce Lee’s passing, the 28-year-old Brandon Lee would expire in a tragic accident on the North Carolina set of his own starring vehicle, The Crow.

  Because of the bizarre facts surrounding Brandon’s freak mishap, there was immediate speculation that he had been a victim of foul play (many people have thought the same thing about his father’s death). Others reasoned that Brandon’s tragic end had been preordained by fate, a fulfillment of the young actor’s premonition that he was “going to die young just like Dad.”

  Brandon Bruce Lee was born on February 1, 1965 (the first day of the Chinese New Year), in Oakland, California. He was the son of San Francisco-born Eurasian Bruce Lee and Linda (Emery) Lee, an American of Swedish heritage. (The Lees had married in 1964 and would have a second child, Shannon, in 1969.) The year after Brandon’s birth, Bruce gained a degree of show-business recognition when he played Kato in the Hollywood TV series The Green Hornet (1966–67).

  By the time of Bruce’s hit action features—such as The Big Boss (1971) and Enter the Dragon (1973)—the Lees were living in an expensive Hong Kong mansion. (According to Bruce Lee lore, when Bruce, whose Chinese nickname, Li Siu-lung, means Little Dragon, bought a house called Lowloon-Tong, or Pond of the Nine Dragons, in a Hong Kong suburb, he incurred the jealous wrath of the neighborhood’s resident demons. The curse, per the tradition, lasts three generations.)

  Meanwhile, at the tender age of five, Brandon appeared in one of his father’s movies, Legacy of Rage (1970). It was a clip of a Hong Kong TV appearance young Brandon had made with his famous father. By the time Brandon was eight, he could speak Cantonese fluently.

  Following Bruce’s death in 1973, Linda took Brandon and Shannon back to the United States to live in Los Angeles. The trauma of his dad’s passing had a tremendous effect on Brandon, who became a rebellious loner. He was obsessed by his celebrated parent and intent on following in his father’s footsteps. When Linda enrolled the nine-year-old Brandon in martial-arts lessons, the boy saw a photograph of his famous father on the wall. He ran crying from the training studio.

  Brandon proved to be a difficult, self-willed teenager, always challenging authority. In his senior year, during the spring of 1983, he was expelled from the private Chadwick School in Palos Verdes for “misbehaving” and had to settle for a GED diploma. Actor Lou Diamond Phillips, a close friend of Brandon during this period, would remember that his pal was “a boiling mass of energy.” Deciding to fulfill his destiny as an actor, Brandon enrolled at Emerson College in Boston as a theater major, but left there in 1985. He took acting classes at the Strasberg Academy in Los Angeles.

  On his 21st birthday, Brandon made his professional acting debut in Kung Fu: The Movie. In this made-for-TV movie, David Carradine reprised his role of Kwai Chang Caine from the hit 1972–75 TV series Kung Fu. (Ironically, Bruce Lee had been a contender for this starring role before Carradine won the assignment.) Brandon was cast as an assassin.

  In the next few years, acting jobs eluded Brandon. He spent much of his free time racing his motorcycle recklessly around Los Angeles, refusing to wear a helmet. Then his acting career took an upward turn. In the cheaply assembled Laser Mission (1990), shot in South Africa, he appeared as a government agent. Much more mainstream and popular was Showdown in Little Tokyo (1991), a violent action picture that featured Brandon as the hip American partner of Dolph Lundgren (as a Los Angeles cop and martial-arts master).

  With his movie career finally accelerating, the six-foot, 155-pound Lee was cast by Twentieth Century-Fox (in the first of a three-picture deal with the studio) as the lead in Rapid Fire (1992). He played a pacifistic college student pressured into becoming a killing machine. Critics thought the action movie was schlock, but many noted that wiry, muscular Brandon had an exotic charisma.

  Brandon Lee and companion, Lisa Hutton, at a Hollywood premiere.

  © 1992 by Albert L. Ortega

  By now, Brandon had come to terms with the fact that, unlike his father, he would never be a world-class martial artist. Insistent on establishing his own identity, he vetoed a sizeable role in an upcoming screen biography of his dad—Dragon: The Bruce Lee Story (1993). Off camera, Brandon was known to some of his California peers as a lover of practical jokes.

  By early 1993, Brandon’s life was in high gear both professionally and romantically. He was sharing a Beverly Hills home with year-older Eliza (Lisa) Hutton, a Hollywood casting assistant. The couple planned to be married in Ensenada, Mexico, on April 17. First, however, he was scheduled to star in The Crow, a movie based on a high-tech action comic book. Lee was cast as a rock star who is murdered by a gang and returns to Earth in the persona of a bird to avenge his and his girlfriend’s deaths. Producer Ed Pressman hoped this entry would be the first in a series of movies starring Lee as The Crow.

  The movie was shot at the Carolco Studio in Wilmington, North Carolina. The shoot was jinxed with problems from the beginning. On the first day of filming—February 1, 1993—a carpenter on the crew received a severe electric shock and extensive burns when the crane he was riding struck high-voltage power lines. On March 13, a storm smashed some of the movie sets. Another time, a cast member went to check his prop gun before the cameras began rolling, only to find a live bullet in the firearm. Adding to the production confusion, a disgruntled set sculptor drove his car through the studio’s plaster shop.

  On March 31, The Crow was eight days away from the end of the shoot. Everyone was working extremely long hours to complete the movie on time. Shortly after midnight on the morning of the 31st, Brandon reported to soundstage #4 to do a flashback scene depicting how his screen character had died. In the story line, a drug dealer fires a .44 Magnum revolver at Brandon
’s character as the latter enters his apartment. The filming procedure called for Lee to open the door, carrying a grocery bag in his arms. The bag hid a trigger mechanism he was to pull that would set off a small dummy explosive charge just as the on-camera villain fired the blank shot.

  At 12:30 A.M., the on-camera performer playing the drug dealer was standing approximately 15 feet away from the star. He aimed his firearm at Lee and pulled the trigger. Brandon set off the charge as planned, but then he collapsed on the set, bleeding profusely. It was quickly discerned that he had a hole the size of a quarter in his lower right abdomen. While crew members phoned for help, the emergency medical technician assigned to the set began CPR on the badly injured star.

  Lee was rushed by ambulance to the New Hanover Regional Medical Center in Wilmington. Upon arrival, he still had detectable vital signs. After the staff stabilized him, he was taken into emergency surgery. During the five-hour procedure, 60 units of blood were used on the patient. Shortly after 7:00 A.M. he was placed in the hospital’s Trauma Neuro-Intensive Care Unit. His condition deteriorated progressively until finally his heart stopped, and he could not be resuscitated. Brandon was pronounced dead at 1:04 P.M. At the time of his passing, his fiancée was with him, and his mother, Linda, had flown in from Boise, Idaho, where she lived with her businessman husband, Bruce Cadwell.

  The media had a field day with this freak accident, pointing up the parallels between Brandon’s death and that of his celebrated father. Soon after the mystifying tragedy, Detective Rodney Simmons of the Wilmington Police Department (the first officer at the scene of the accident) examined the final footage. To explain the tragic mishap, he suggested that “One of the lead slugs could have come off its casing and lodged in the gun.” (According to this theory, when the gun was reloaded after the close-up shot, the metal tip had remained behind the gun’s cylinder. When the blank went off, it was speculated, the explosive force propelled the dummy tip through the gun barrel and lodged it in Brandon’s body near his spine.)

  An autopsy performed on the actor’s body on Thursday, April 1, in Jacksonville, North Carolina, discredited Detective Simmons’s theory and confirmed its alternative: that Lee had been shot accidentally with a “live” .44-caliber bullet. How such a thing could have happened remained unexplained, as did the fact that protocol had been broken by having the on-set villain point (and fire) the gun directly at Lee, rather than “faking” the shot (which was industry tradition).

  On April 3, 1993, Brandon was laid to rest beside his father in Lake View Cemetery in Seattle, Washington. Among family members and friends attending the services was Brandon’s 23-year-old sister, Shannon, who was then living in New Orleans and was a singer. Linda Lee Cadwell did her best to keep up everyone’s spirits at the funeral.

  On the following day, Sunday, April 4, a memorial service was conducted at actress Polly Bergen’s home in the Hollywood Hills. Among the two hundred who attended were action stars Steven Seagal and David Carradine, actors David Hasselhoff and Lou Diamond Phillips, and Brandon’s close friend Jeff Imada (who had been the stunt coordinator on The Crow). Linda and Shannon led the tribute services.

  On Wednesday, April 28, 1993, there was a special ceremony to unveil a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame for Bruce Lee. That evening, at Mann’s Chinese Theatre in Hollywood, Dragon: The Bruce Lee Story premiered. On hand for the bittersweet occasion, Linda Lee Cadwell told the press that she felt it important for her to attend because the screen biography “is a tribute to our family’s life.... I feel the film is a tribute to Bruce as a father and to Brandon as a son.”

  A special end title had been added to Dragon: The Bruce Lee Story, dedicating the movie to Brandon Lee. The tribute quote, which applied to both Bruce and his son, read, “The key to immortality is first living a life worth remembering.”

  Eventually, The Crow was finished and did well at the box office (partially because of filmgoers’ morbid desire to see the late Brandon Lee in his fatal role). There have been further screen sequels and a weekly TV series.

  Years later, for a cable-TV biography of Brandon, his mother observed that Brandon, like Bruce Lee, was an energetic spirit who had made the most of each day of his life. As she quoted from an old saying, “Life, if thou knowest how to use it, is long enough.”

  Carole Lombard

  [Jane Alice Peters]

  October 6, 1908–January 16, 1942

  The same attractive qualities—directness, genuineness, and zest for life—that made Carole Lombard so well-liked in private life shone forth in her movie performances. Seldom has a show-business celebrity been so beloved by all who knew her. She was quite womanly and attracted an array of male admirers. But she was also blessed with a salty, down-to-earth humor and a lack of pretense that made her “one of the boys.” She was good at acting, but loved sports equally as well. She knew how to host or enjoy a rousing party, but was just as content when helping those in need. She was well-respected in the entertainment industry for her business sense, since she could cut a better movie deal than many talent agents.

  Lombard was one of the first American luminaries to die in World War II. She had completed a successful war-bond selling tour and was heading back to Los Angeles when her plane crashed into the side of a Nevada mountain. If Carole could have heard the eulogies following her passing, she would have been embarrassed by such extravagant praise. She would have insisted that she was merely doing her job.

  She was born in 1908 in Fort Wayne, Indiana, the third child of Frederick and Elizabeth (Knight) Peters. When she was six, her parents divorced. The same year, Mrs. Peters and her three children visited the World’s Fair in San Francisco and eventually chose to resettle in Los Angeles. One day in 1921, movie director Allan Dwan was visiting a neighbor of the Peters family and noticed the tomboyish Jane playing street ball. He hired her to play Monte Blue’s sister in A Perfect Crime. It was four years before she made another feature, this time playing a small role in Tom Mix’s Dick Turpin (1925). By then her name had been altered to Carol Lombard.

  Carol had just negotiated a five-year Fox Films contract when a near-tragedy occurred. She was coming home from a hockey game one foggy evening with her escort when the car in front of theirs slid backward down a hill, hitting their vehicle. The sudden impact shoved Carol forward against the windshield. Her face was badly cut from the corner of her nose to her left cheekbone. The attending medical intern sewed up the wound with 18 stitches. While recuperating, Carol began studying cinematography. She accepted that she would have a facial scar, but that proper lighting and good camera angles could minimize it.

  Once she had recovered from her mishap, Carol signed on at movie director Mack Sennett’s comedy factory as one of his famous “bathing beauties.” During the next 18 months she made more than a dozen two-reeler comedies. But, with the coming of talkies, Carol moved over to Pathé Pictures and then joined the lustrous Paramount studio. In her first movie there she played alongside Charles “Buddy” Rogers; in the credits the studio misspelled Carol, adding an “e” at the end. Carol—now Carole—didn’t care: “Since they’re paying me so well, I don’t care how they spell my name.”

  Starlet Carole Lombard in the late 1920s.

  Courtesy of JC Archives

  Carole got great on-the-job training at Paramount, appearing in five releases each in 1931 and 1932. She married one of her leading men, William Powell, in June 1931. He was 39; she was 21. In 1932 she made No Man of Her Own (1932), matched with a rising young star borrowed from MGM, Clark Gable. By August 1933, Lombard and Powell had divorced, and one of her more constant escorts was crooner-bandleader-movie personality Russ Columbo. More friends than romantic partners, they supposedly considered marriage, but he died in a freak shooting accident on September 2, 1934.

  By 1934, Carole had become a top-flight screen personality. It was, however, her performance in the screwball comedy Twentieth Century (1934) opposite John Barrymore that made her a legitimate screen star. She was
now earning $3,000 weekly. On the recommendation of her ex-husband William Powell, Universal borrowed Carole to join him in the wacky antics of My Man Godfrey (1936). It was a huge success and ensured her major stardom. In 1938 she signed a two-picture deal with David O. Selznick. Then, on March 29, 1939, she married Clark Gable, who had just completed the filming of Gone with the Wind (1939). The couple built a house at the 50-acre San Fernando Valley ranch she bought for them and soon became known as one of Hollywood’s most compatible couples.

  Next, Carole signed with RKO at $150,000 per movie plus a percentage of the profits. She was one of the first Tinseltown stars to obtain such a lucrative deal. By 1940 she had a new ambition—to become a producer. She alternated heavy drama (They Knew What They Wanted, 1940) with lighthearted fare (Mr. and Mrs. Smith, 1941). In December 1941, she completed a serious comedy, To Be or Not to Be (1942), with Jack Benny.

  After the attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941, Hollywood Victory Committee chairman Clark Gable scheduled himself and Carole to lead a bond drive at Indianapolis, near her hometown of Fort Wayne. Her mother and her publicist accompanied Lombard when Gable canceled out of the trek.

  On January 15, 1942, Carole sold more than $2.5 million in war bonds in Indianapolis. Her parting words to the crowd were, “Before I say goodbye to you all—come on—join me in a big cheer—V for Victory!” She could not make up her mind between taking a train or a plane back to the West Coast. She flipped a coin and chose the plane, glad to be getting back to Hollywood and Gable. (Her mother, who had never been on an airplane before, was leery of flying and had been warned by her numerologist that January 16 would be an unlucky day.)

  Around 4:00 A.M. on January 16, 1942, Carole, her mother, and her publicist Otto Winkler took off on the 17-hour trip to the West Coast. At a stopover in Albuquerque, New Mexico, several passengers were bumped off so that army aviators could take their place. Carole, however, persuaded the pilot to keep her and her party aboard. After refueling in Las Vegas, the craft took off for Los Angeles. At 7:07 P.M. that January 16, the TWA airliner slammed into Table Rock Mountain, 30 miles southwest of Las Vegas. The impact killed Carole, her mother, and 20 other passengers and crew (including 15 military personnel). It was two days before a rescue team could remove the charred bodies from the snowy death site. Carole was just 33 years old.