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

by Parish, James Robert

  Among the many who sent condolences to the grieving Clark Gable was President Franklin D. Roosevelt. The telegram read, “She brought great joy to all who knew her, and to millions who knew her only as a great artist. . . . She is and always will be a star, one we shall never forget, nor cease to be grateful to.”

  A few years before she died, Carole had requested in her will that she be buried in a white outfit and in a “modestly priced crypt.” Following Lombard’s wishes, the famed Hollywood couturiere Irene designed a special white gown for her. A private funeral service was conducted at Forest Lawn Memorial Park in Glendale, California, on January 21, 1942. She was buried in a white marble wall crypt in the Sanctuary of Trust there. In a nearby alcove lay Russ Columbo, who Lombard liked to say was the great love of her life.

  In July 1942, Governor Henry Schricker of Indiana named the state’s naval air squadron “The Lombardians.” That same year, a liberty ship was christened the Carole Lombard with a tearful Clark Gable attending the ceremony. Although he would marry twice more, the guilt-ridden Gable never stopped grieving for Carole. When he died on November 16, 1960, he was buried in a crypt next to hers at Forest Lawn.

  Years later, Wesley Ruggles, Lombard’s director and friend, would say, “When Irving Thalberg and then Jean Harlow both died too young, the whole community experienced a shock of loss, but it was more industrial than personal. . . . But we couldn’t comprehend losing Carole, and we never adjusted to it, either. She was irreplaceable, and we just keep on missing her.”

  Perhaps the finest tribute of all is that Carole Lombard’s solid body of film work continues to be appreciated, decade after decade, by admiring audiences.

  Jayne Mansfield

  [Vera Jayne Palmer]

  April 19, 1933–June 29, 1967

  The inestimable Bette Davis once said of the voluptuous (a 40-inch bust) and supposedly brainy (an alleged I.Q. of 163 that was perhaps a press agent’s gimmick) Jayne Mansfield, “Dramatic art in her opinion is knowing how to fill a sweater.” Columnist Earl Wilson noted of the buxom platinum blond with the photogenic face and whispery, childlike voice: “Jayne surrendered all her privacy and considerable dignity to the daily job of getting her name and picture in the papers. Her home, whether it was a house, apartment, or hotel suite, was always open to reporters, and photographers were constantly running in and out, stumbling over her dogs and cats. . . . Jayne’s life was a constant quest for greater recognition—ironically, she received the most attention when she died in a grisly car accident. If only she could have been alive to enjoy the sensational publicity.”

  She was born Vera Jayne Palmer in 1933 in Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania, to an attorney and an elementary-school teacher. When Vera was three, her father died. Mother and daughter were in the car when he suffered a fatal heart attack while driving down a hilly road; it is lucky that they survived the ensuing accident. Thereafter, the child was placed in the charge of one of her mother’s friends so that Mrs. Palmer could return to the classroom. In 1939, Jayne’s mother remarried (to Harry “Tex” Peers) and the family relocated from Phillipsburg, Pennsylvania, to Dallas, Texas. While attending Highland Park High there, the future actress fell in love with another high school student, Paul Mansfield, and they wed secretly on January 28, 1950. When Vera became pregnant, her parents hosted a second (public) marriage and on November 8, Jayne Marie was born. By now, Paul was attending the University of Texas in Austin and Jayne was working as a dance-studio receptionist and performing as a member of the Austin Civic Theatre. When Paul Mansfield was called to active military duty during the Korean War, the star-struck Jayne left her infant daughter with her mom and hurried off to California. She enrolled at UCLA and—keeping her marriage and child a secret—entered the Miss California Contest. She was a local finalist, but Paul made her drop out of the contest. Before she returned to Texas, Jayne had one movie bit part (in Prehistoric Women, 1951).

  Voluptuous film star Jayne Mansfield at the height of her career in the mid-1950s.

  Courtesy of JC Archives

  While her husband was serving in Korea, Jayne went to college in Dallas, studied acting, and appeared on local TV programs. When Mansfield became a civilian again in 1954, she made him live up to his promise to take her to Hollywood. Highly focused on becoming a big movie star, Jayne pushed her way into Paramount Pictures’ talent department and was almost signed to a contract on the spot. With her naturally brunette hair now dyed platinum blond and with an agent in tow, Jayne made Female Jungle, not released until 1956. Paul Mansfield was dissatisfied with the “new” Jayne and returned to Texas without her. (Their divorce became final in early January 1958.)

  Jayne’s aggressive new press agent, James Byron, did much to make his well-endowed client a well-known commodity—largely through her cleavage. Nothing was too ridiculous or insignificant for the career-hungry Mansfield. She gained tremendous press attention by wearing a much-too-small red bathing suit on a press junket to Silver Springs, Florida. Next, Jayne was a Playboy magazine centerfold, which led to a Warner Bros, term contract. She was cast as a mistress or a moll in her celluloid assignments, including Illegal (1955) and Hell on Frisco Bay (1956).

  When the studio terminated her contract, Jayne gratefully grabbed the lead in a Broadway sex comedy called Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter? that others had rejected. The show was popular and Jayne made the most of every opportunity for publicity. Meanwhile, she met Hungarian-born muscleman Mickey Hargitay, who left Mae West’s act to join Jayne’s entourage. Twentieth Century-Fox had long made a specialty of attractive blond stars (Alice Faye, Betty Grable, Marilyn Monroe); they signed up Mansfield as another threat to the troublesome Miss Monroe. Jayne’s first movie there, the satirical The Girl Can’t Help It (1956), was one of her best. The screen version of her Broadway hit was next (1957), followed by John Steinbeck’s The Wayward Bus (1957), which stretched Jayne’s talents, if not her wardrobe, to the very limits. On January 13, 1958, Mansfield and Hargitay married. They would have three children: Miklos Jr., Zoltan, and Mariska.

  Eager to keep working, the statuesque Jayne played Las Vegas venues, trading on her dumb-blond comedy appeal. Fox transplanted her to England for The Sheriff of Fractured Jaw (1958) and she remained there for two more dull quickies. In Italy, she and Mickey costarred in The Loves of Hercules (1960). Obsessed with grabbing attention at any price, Jayne made her pink, Spanish-style Beverly Hills mansion at 10100 Sunset Boulevard a media delight, with its heart-shaped bed and pool. But her exhibitionistic sex life cost Mansfield her studio contract (it ended in 1962) and her marriage (Mickey divorced her in 1964). Meanwhile, she made the sleazy sexploitation movie Promises, Promises (1963) and posed nude again for Playboy. By now, her excessive publicity stunts seemed labored and not much fun. She made several mediocre quickie movies in Europe and then wed director Matt Cimber in 1964. Their son, Anthony, was born in 1965. Depressed over her downsliding career, Jayne turned increasingly to alcohol. In addition, there were many headlines over her tug-of-war contest with Hargitay for custody of their children.

  Taking Cimber’s bad advice, Jayne rejected the role of Ginger (later accepted by actress Tina Louise) on the TV series Gilligan’s Island (1964–67). Instead, she made bottom-of-the-barrel movies and had an occasional cameo in a respectable production.

  In 1966, Cimber divorced the bloated, heavy-drinking Jayne. Next, she became romantically attached to a San Francisco attorney, Samuel S. Brody. Jayne’s tour of sleazy clubs in Sweden, England, and Ireland was a fiasco. She gained more notice for her drunken brawls with Brody and for being named in a messy divorce suit by Brody’s ailing wife. Returning to California, Jayne (who had become fascinated with the Church of Satan) received additional bad publicity when her sixteen-year-old daughter, Jayne Marie, was placed in protective custody because her mother and Brody were accused of mistreating her.

  The car crash that killed actress Jayne Mansfield in June 1967 near New Orleans.

  Courtesy of APA/Archive Phot
os

  In early 1967, Jayne toured Vietnam to entertain the troops. In June of that year, she left for a club engagement (as a substitute for her friend Mamie Van Doren) in Biloxi, Mississippi. She was joined by Brody and her three middle children. After performing at Gus Stevens’s Supper Club in Biloxi, she left at about 2:30 A.M. on June 29, 1967, for New Orleans, to be interviewed the next day on a local TV show. The hardtop Buick car was driven by Ron Harrison (a college student who worked for Stevens) and the passengers were Mansfield, Brody, Miklos, Zoltan, Mariska, and four Chihuahua dogs. Some 20 miles before reaching New Orleans on windy U.S. Highway 90, the speeding car careened into the back of a trailer truck. This truck had halted behind a city vehicle, which was spraying the swamps with an anti-mosquito insecticide. The crash was so severe that the impact sheared off the car’s top. Harrison, Jayne, and Brody were killed immediately, their bodies thrown onto the highway. The three bewildered children who were sleeping in the back seat received only minor bruises. In the accident, Jayne’s blond wig was thrown onto the dashboard, giving rise to the lurid rumor that she had been scalped in the collision.

  After a Beverly Hills memorial service, Jayne’s body was shipped to Pen Argyl, Pennsylvania, for burial in the family plot. At the Fairview Cemetery there, a weeping Hargitay threw himself on her pink-rose-covered coffin. Twenty years after her death, a pink memorial marker for Jayne was installed at the then-Hollywood Memorial Park in Los Angeles by her devoted fan club. It reads “We live to love you more each day.”

  Much of Jayne’s reported $500,000 estate evaporated in lawyers’ fees and creditors’ bills, and her five children ended up receiving less than $2,000 each from the will. One of her offspring, Mariska, has gone on to a successful television career, costarring in the series Law and Order: Special Victims Unit (1999-present).

  Audie Murphy

  June 20, 1924–May 28, 1971

  Before he reached the age of 21, Audie Murphy had already become the most decorated American GI of World War II. He returned to the United States in great triumph. His life thereafter—as a cowboy-movie star—was an anticlimax. His career spiraled downward until one day, the small aircraft on which he was a passenger crashed into the side of a Virginia mountain. It was a horrendous finale for the American hero credited with killing 240 enemy soldiers in combat. What price glory!

  Audie Murphy was born in 1924 in Farmersville, Texas—the heart of cotton country. He was the third son of 12 children (only 9 of whom survived to adulthood). The family later moved to Celeste, Texas, where Mr. Murphy worked for a time in the Works Progress Administration, but the Murphy clan still had a tough time during the Depression years.

  As a child, Audie, who hated schooling and never got beyond the fifth grade, perfected his shooting skills killing jackrabbits for the family’s dinner. When he was a youngster, his father deserted the family, and his beloved mother died when Audie was 16. Years later Murphy reflected, “She died taking something of me with her. It seems I’ve been searching for it ever since.”

  With his family scattered and wanting to serve his country, the skinny, baby-faced Audie enlisted in the army (having earlier been rejected by the marines and the paratroopers). After basic training in Texas and Maryland, he was shipped to North Africa, landing at Casablanca in February 1943. Before the European theater of war was played out, the dedicated Audie had been promoted to First Lieutenant and had been part of seven major battle thrusts in North Africa and Europe. He received the Congressional Medal of Honor in January 1945 for his extraordinary heroism and bravery in action earlier in eastern France. Among the more than two dozen medals he won were the Distinguished Service Cross, the Bronze Star, the Legion of Merit, and the Silver Star with an Oak Leaf Cluster. Of the 235 men in his original army company, Murphy was one of two who survived to the end of the war. (His chief injury during his time in combat was a severe injury to his hip; nine inches of dead flesh eventually had to be removed from the area.) As America’s most decorated soldier, he was featured in a Life magazine cover story (July 16, 1945).

  The publicity from this well-circulated article was tremendous. Back in the United States, the freckle-faced Audie was the focus of many parades, banquets, and celebrations. Among those who observed the hoopla was veteran actor James Cagney, who suggested that good-looking Murphy should visit Hollywood and maybe get into the movie business. Audie had been thinking of reenlisting in the service or becoming a veterinarian, but accepted Cagney’s encouragement of a possible Hollywood career.

  Audie Murphy ready for gunplay in Ride a Crooked Trail (1958).

  Courtesy of JC Archives

  Once in Los Angeles, Audie went to acting school, which was helpful for ridding him of some of his strong Texas accent. Usually broke, he sometimes slept in a gym owned by a pal. His first movie was a small role in Alan Ladd’s Beyond Glory (1948); his first lead was in Bad Boy (1949). In February 1949, he married petite Wanda Hendrix, who had made a mark as a teenage movie actress, but whose career was already sliding. The couple costarred in a Western (Sierra, 1950). They divorced in April 1950; she charged him with mental cruelty. (Among Murphy’s postwar psychological symptoms were terrible nightmares and paranoia. He often slept with a loaded gun under his pillow and once, in an argument with Wanda, placed the charged weapon in her mouth. These were all signs of post-traumatic stress disorder.) In 1950, Audie was signed to a Universal-International Pictures contract at $100,000 a year and began his on-the-job training in a string of B-movie Westerns. The studio exploited Murphy’s war record and in 1955 made a screen adaptation of his bestselling (ghostwritten) autobiography, To Hell and Back. Then it was back to “horse operas,” leading a disillusioned Murphy to observe: “Yeah, the face is the same—and so is the dialogue. Only the horses are changed. Some of them get old and have to be retired.” Meanwhile, in April 1951, Audie wed a former flight attendant, Pamela Archer, and they had two sons: Terry, born in 1952, and James, in 1954.

  As his movie career faded, Audie, looking strained on camera, tried TV. His 1961 cowboy detective series, Whispering Smith, was off the air in four months. The financial losses from the series forced him to liquidate his San Fernando Valley ranch. Universal kept him on contract, but in much lower-budget movies as the market for Westerns diminished. By 1965, Audie was no longer working for the studio, and he and his wife separated (they never divorced). With increasing financial problems (including back taxes owed to the IRS) the still-naive Audie discovered hard truths about his industry friends: “When word gets around you’re washed up, no one will touch you with a 10-foot pole. They’re afraid you’ll ask them for a job. Or a loan.”

  By the late 1960s, the fast-aging Audie had drug and drinking problems and owed a great deal of money because of his gambling habit. He had several brushes with the law, but assault charges against assorted individuals were always dropped. In 1969, he found backers for a new picture, A Time for Dying, in which he had a cameo. It was scheduled for release in the summer of 1971. Because he owed over $360,000 to creditors and to the federal government, Audie, stressed and near-suicidal, accepted a job as spokesperson with Modular Management, a Georgia-based company that built prefabricated homes and motels. Meanwhile, the FBI, knowing of Murphy’s gambling involvement, had used him as a decoy to trap certain Chicago underworld figures. Additionally, Murphy had tics to a New Orleans gangster who was attempting to have ex-Teamster president Jimmy Hoffa paroled from prison. Audie was now a liaison between the underworld and the U.S. government—an uncomfortable position.

  On May 28, 1971, Audie, Modular’s president Claude Crosby, and three other company executives left Atlanta on a chartered, bluc-and-white twin-engine Aero Commander plane. Twelve miles north of Roanoke, during a thunderstorm, the pilot lost his way; sometime after 11:40 A.M., the plane smashed into the side of Brushy Mountain. Due to the bad weather, it was not until three days later that the burned plane and the six bodies could be located in the remote, wooded area.

  Few Hollywood fig
ures attended the memorial services for Audie Murphy on June 4, 1971, at the Church of the Hills in Forest Lawn Memorial Park in Hollywood Hills, California. Among the gathering of six hundred were his ex-wife Wanda Hendrix and several army buddies. After the service, his body was flown to Virginia and buried on June 7 at Arlington National Cemetery with full military honors. Murphy’s grave is located not far from that of the Unknown Soldier.

  Ironically, at the time of his death, film director Don Siegel was considering Audie for the role of the psychopathic killer opposite Clint Eastwood in Dirty Harry (1971), a key assignment that might have pushed the trouble-prone Murphy into a comeback phase of his languishing movie career.

  Rick (Ricky) Nelson

  [Eric Hilliard Nelson]

  May 8, 1940–December 31, 1985

  Rick (Ricky) Nelson was born into a very well-known show-business clan and spent much of his life as an entertainer. His professional accomplishments ranged from being a rambunctious teenage heartthrob to a hit rock recording star; he ended up a middle-aged family man who performed continually on the concert circuit (including at restaurants and fairs). When he perished in a plane crash in late 1985, he joined a galaxy of other recording notables who had died in air fatalities.