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

by Parish, James Robert

  Courtesy of JC Archives

  When Monty appeared with Elizabeth Taylor in the prestigious A Place in the Sun (1951), the two began a lifelong friendship. His favorite screen assignment following this was that of the trumpet-playing boxer in From Here to Eternity (1953). He turned down On the Waterfront (1954), which won Marlon Brando an Oscar. Instead, he returned to Broadway in a revival of The Seagull, hoping to please his drama coach, Mira Rostova, on whom he had become overly dependent. The show’s failure, plus his loss of the Best Actor Oscar to William Holden in the March 1954 Academy Awards sweepstakes, filled the frightened actor with increasing self-doubt. For nearly two years thereafter, he rejected movies and stage work, agonizing over each bad decision. He hated the movie colony—calling Los Angeles “Vomit, California”—and spent much of his time at his New York City brownstone.

  Finally, desperate for income, he agreed to costar with Elizabeth Taylor in Raintree County (1957), a costumed epic of the Old South. Shooting began on April 2, 1956. On Saturday, May 12, Clift attended a small gathering hosted by Taylor at her Benedict Canyon home in Los Angeles. After dinner, a drug-addled Clift left the party and, shortly thereafter, smashed his rented car into a power pole. It was Elizabeth who, upon reaching the crash scene, pulled two dislodged teeth from Monty’s throat. Her action saved his life. Clift’s nose was broken, his jaw shattered, and the rest of his face was a bloody mess. After painful reconstructive surgery, Clift returned to filming in late July.

  Though he continued making movies, his ego was more frail than ever over his lost looks. As a result, his substance dependencies deepened. He did a variation of his From Here to Eternity part in the World War II combat drama The Young Lions (1958) and was mothered by older costar Myrna Loy in Lonelyhearts (1959). He and Taylor reunited for Suddenly, Last Summer (1959). Clift was in the jinxed The Misfits (1961), which was the final movie for both of his costars, Marilyn Monroe and Clark Gable. In his next feature, it was a strange twist to have Monty the perennial therapy patient portray the father of psychiatry in Freud (1962). His behavior was so disruptive on the set that a lawsuit was filed against him.

  With his industry reputation nearly destroyed by his unprofessional behavior and failing health, he went without work for four years. He resurfaced in a Cold War mess called The Defector (1966)—released after his death—in which he looked dreadfully pained and old. Over the years, friends, lovers, and acquaintances had come and gone, but Liz Taylor remained faithful. It was Liz who convinced industry investors to cast Monty opposite her in Reflections in a Golden Eye (1967), although he never got to play the part.

  On the night of July 22, 1966, Clift was in residence at his New York townhouse on East 61st Street. A friend who was caring for him asked if he wanted to watch The Misfits on TV. Clift answered, “Absolutely not!” Those were his last words. The next morning, he was found dead—nude—on his bed. The official cause of death was a massive heart attack, although it was drugs that had helped to do him in. (In his Manhattan townhouse he had a huge customized closet/medicine cabinet to store his large drug stash.) After private funeral services at St. James’s Church in New York City, Monty was buried in a small Quaker cemetery in Brooklyn. Ironically, “Sunny” Clift would live until 1988, three months shy of her one hundredth birthday; she outlived both her sons.

  It had been a long and painful trail from Omaha to that final resting place in Brooklyn. For those around Montgomery Clift, however, the inevitable finale was never in doubt. The question had always only been “When?” As actor Kevin McCarthy, a longtime friend of Clift, summed up for a 1998 television biography of Clift: “He had the gift, the talent, but it all went to hell.”

  Bobby Driscoll

  March 3, 1937–March 1968

  The fates of former child stars always make good media copy when they are dreadful; far juicier than reports on the few who adjust reasonably well to adulthood, like Shirley Temple or Ron Howard. One of the most tragic victims of the Hollywood studio system was talented young Bobby Driscoll. As a youngster, the industry could not get enough of him. But when he became a gawky young adult, the system cruelly shoved him aside. He was unable to cope with such bitter rejection and escaped into drug addiction, which eventually killed him.

  Driscoll was born in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, in 1937, and moved with his parents to California in 1943. A Los Angeles barber whose own boy was already in motion pictures urged Mrs. Driscoll to have little Bobby try his luck in the movies. She took him to MGM, where the pixie-faced Bobby was soon hired for a role in Margaret O’Brien’s Lost Angel (1943). By the time he was six, the cooperative Bobby was making $500 a week, remarkable money in those times—especially for a youngster. By 1946 he was being touted as “the greatest child find since Jackie Cooper played Skippy [in 1931].”

  Driscoll was the first human actor Walt Disney put under contract. He and the equally young Luana Patten were paired in Song of the South (1946) and So Dear to My Heart (1948), billed as the “sweetheart team.” When asked what he intended to do with his weekly earnings, Bobby said, “I’m going to save my money and go to college, then become a G-man.” His biggest success was in the thriller The Window (1949); he was given a special Oscar as the year’s outstanding juvenile performer. Also for the Disney studio, he played Jim Hawkins in Treasure Island (1950) and provided the model and voice for the animated Peter Pan (1953).

  By 1954, Bobby was in that awkward teenager stage, gangly and acne-faced. Finding screen jobs scarce, he performed a few TV guest appearances. Away from work, he did not fit in with his peers. “I really feared people,” he admitted later. “I tried desperately to be one of the gang. When they rejected me, I fought back, became belligerent and cocky and was afraid all the time.” He first tried marijuana when he was 16, then turned to harsher drugs, finally becoming a heroin addict. He was arrested in 1956 on a narcotics charge and on suspicion of being a drug pusher. Bobby then tried to straighten out his life and even landed a new film role. The project, however, was a trashy study of juvenile delinquents called The Party Crashers (1958), featuring another Hollywood hasbeen, Frances Farmer, who was also failing to make a successful comeback.

  Young Bobby Driscoll being pursued by Paul Stewart in The Window (1949).

  Courtesy of JC Archives

  Abandoning acting for the time being, Driscoll took odd jobs, but he either quit or got fired from every one. He married a woman named Marjorie, had a son, and was determined that his kid would never have to endure what he was undergoing. But when his wife divorced him, Bobby reverted to drugs. He was jailed as an addict in 1959, and in 1961 he was apprehended while robbing an animal clinic. He was incarcerated at Chino Penitentiary for drug addiction and remained there for more than a year. When he was paroled, he worked as a carpenter and then drifted to New York. His mother would remember, “None of the studios in New York would hire him because he had once been on drugs.”

  Bobby’s last months must have been desperate ones indeed. He died penniless in an abandoned Greenwich Village tenement. His body was later discovered by two children playing there on March 30, 1968. Two empty beer bottles were found by the corpse and there were needle marks on his arms. Since no one knew who he was, he was buried in a pauper’s grave. The causes of death were listed as a heart attack and hardening of the arteries. Later that year, when Bobby’s father was himself dying, his mother tried again to find Bobby. She had no success, and she went to the FBI for assistance. Time passed, and finally, she heard from an L.A. County agency that her son was officially dead. He had been traced through his fingerprints to that unknown corpse who had been buried back in Manhattan.

  Nobody could write a better epitaph to this wasted life than the victim himself. At one point in his tormented adult existence, he observed, “I was carried on a satin cushion and then dropped into the garbage can.”

  Chris Farley

  February 15, 1964–December 18, 1997

  In the mid-1990s, two of Hollywood’s favorite heavyset comedians
died. John Candy, who specialized in playing the bumbling do-gooder, died at the age of 44 from a massive heart attack. In contrast, Chris Farley, the practitioner of crude and often shameless humor, was a victim of drug and alcohol abuse. The out-of-control funnyman was only 33 years old when he succumbed to an overdose in 1997. Obviously, Farley had not learned any lessons from the fast-paced life and early death of one of his major heroes, the comic actor John Belushi.

  Christopher Crosby Farley was born in 1964 in Madison, Wisconsin, the son of Thomas (a successful contractor) and Mary Anne Farley. He was the third of five children in this devoutly Catholic family. (Chris’s younger brother Kevin would also become a comedian, later starring in the MTV series 2Gether.) Even as a youngster Chris had a weight problem (as did his dad, who eventually weighed six hundred pounds). From an early age, Farley was a cutup, having learned the skill of making people laugh before they could insult him. His comedic bent, however, did not impress the nuns at Edgewood Grade School. He entered Edgewood High School in 1978, and was soon a linesman on the Crusaders’ football squad. By the time he was an upper-classman, he had become a fun-loving party guy who wanted to be in the middle of the action. Although he was not a driven academic, his grades were good enough to get him into Marquette University in nearby Milwaukee. At this Jesuit school, he majored in theater and communications. Although some of his classmates saw him as the stereotypical good-natured oaf, Chris was also very religious, thoughtful, and deep.

  In the spring of 1986 Farley graduated from the Marquette College of Speech. He worked with Marquette’s Art Improv Theater Group that summer. By 1987 he had relocated to Chicago, where he became part of the ImprovOlympic Theatre, which was the training ground for the esteemed Second City Troupe. Many of Chris’s idols (including Bill Murray and John Belushi) had worked there. Ambitious and impatient, Farley looked for any shortcut that would get him onstage. His in-your-face approach soon made him a favorite with audiences, and by the fall of 1988 he was a member of the Second City Troupe. As hungry for life as for success, his party-animal appetites grew increasingly bigger.

  When talent scouts from TV’s Saturday Night Live came to visit Second City, Farley was one of the players they wanted for the weekly television outing. In the fall of 1990, Chris joined the ensemble cast. Even in his first season on the air, Farley made his presence known, creating several gross, often sweaty characterizations—his trademark was dropping his pants at a moment’s notice. Off camera, the comedian, who was soon earning a six-figure salary, started chasing hookers and escalating his regimen of substance abuse. This led Lorne Michaels, the creator and producer of SNL, to tell his wayward big-sized comic to get into drug rehab—or else. Farley spent three months in recovery and then returned to the show. Despite his self-destructive behavior, he found the motivation to attend mass at Saint Malachy’s Church and to work in its volunteer program helping senior citizens.

  Chris Farley demonstrating a point. © 1994 by Albert L. Ortega

  When Chris’s behavior at SNL grew erratic once again, Lome Michaels prepared for the inevitable face-off. Farley’s pal and fellow comedian, Tom Arnold, intervened, and Chris decided to enter the Exodus Recovery Center in Los Angeles. By the time Farley left there, he seemingly had his drug problem under control, but not his addictions to food and sex. In a moment of self-analysis during this period, Chris likened the pressure of being on a weekly live TV show to that of being shot out of a cannon.

  In 1992, Chris made his feature film debut, playing a security guard in Wayne’s World. He followed this with Coneheads (1993), another movie offshoot of an SNL skit, and then with roles in Wayne’s World 2 (1993) and Airheads (1994). During this period, Chris kept his drug addiction in check and continued to build professionally on his array of maniacal television characters. In one well-publicized moment, Farley took his act to Washington, D.C., where he went to Capitol Hill to do his burlesque of Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich.

  By the end of the 1994–95 SNL season, 31-year-old Farley had grown restless with the TV series. He left after that season to focus on moviemaking in Hollywood. For the lowbrow comedy Tommy Boy (1995), in which the bulky, five-foot, eight-inch Farley costarred with the short, wispy comedian David Spade, Chris was paid $2 million. (It grossed $32 million at the box office.) Veteran actor Brian Dennehy, who played Farley’s dad in the crude comedy, would say later that Farley “consumed too much of everything, including life.”

  Though his film career was on an upward track, Chris often confided to his drug counselor that he felt lost in Los Angeles. To fill the void, he turned (again) to alcohol and drugs, and continued his sex and food binges. (He sometimes mushroomed up to 350 pounds.) He seemed unable to take anything seriously, not even his ballooning weight. But he was devoted to helping St. Monica’s Church in Santa Monica, and in the summer of 1997 he participated in a cook-off fund-raiser there to benefit disadvantaged children. During this period, he often sought advice from Father Michael Rocha at St. Monica’s, hoping that prayers would get him through the mess his life had become.

  Meanwhile, Farley and Spade reunited for Black Sheep (1996). By the time of Beverly Hills Ninja (1997), Chris was earning $6 million a film. In 1997, between stays at an Atlanta rehab clinic, he appeared at the Aspen Comedy Festival in Colorado. After completing Almost Heroes in 1997 for director Christopher Guest, Farley returned to New York at the end of October to host Saturday Night Live. One source reported that Chris was in such bad shape during the week of rehearsal that an oxygen tank was kept offstage in case the drunken comedian required medical help.

  Chris then returned to Chicago, where he made yet another effort to go into substance abuse treatment. By the end of the month, however, he had left the recovery center and gone back to his old ways. The next month found him engulfed in epic binges with all his addictions. He knew he was due to start a new picture soon and that he had to get clean and sober, but the three-hundred-pound star seemingly lacked the willpower to pull himself together.

  On Thursday, December 11, 1997, Chris was seen guzzling down beers at the Lodge, a popular Chicago club. His partying continued over the weekend, but he managed to go to 7:00 P.M. mass on Sunday at St. Michael’s Church. After the mass, he had an enormous dinner at the Cheesecake Factory, located in the basement of the John Hancock Building on the Magnificent Mile (Chris lived on the 60th floor of the skyscraper). Later, Farley made his usual rounds of trendy local pubs and then went back to his apartment, where he reportedly snorted cocaine till dawn.

  After sleeping most of Monday the 15th, he was ready to go on the prowl alone again. In the predawn hours of Tuesday he decided to add a woman to his efforts. He phoned a call girl who came by, but allegedly, she only did an intimate dance for him and left. That evening Chris went club-hopping again. By 1:30 A.M. on Wednesday he was happily drunk at one of his favorite after-hours spots. When he left a few hours later, he took a group of strippers and others with him to party at an acquaintance’s home in trendy Lincoln Park.

  Later on in the early dawn, he arranged to meet an exotic dancer, and they continued to snort cocaine, smoke heroin, and chug down hard liquor. After hours of this, he and his newfound companion drove to her apartment outside the city. On the way, they stocked up on junk food and alcohol at a convenience store, and Chris arranged for a drug delivery at her place. Hours later, he phoned for a limousine to take him and his date to his apartment, where they arrived about 10:00 P.M. Once there, Farley did more cocaine and drank vodka, all the while chatting on about his life.

  About 3:00 A.M. on Thursday the 18th, after many hours of partying, the exotic dancer was tired and wanted to go home. Chris begged her not to leave him and then passed out on the floor. She thought he was just being funny and had collapsed on purpose to sleep it off. She even took a picture of the prone comedian, thinking she would show it to him later. Then she went home in the limousine. About 2:00 P.M. that afternoon Chris, clad only in his pajama bottoms, was found by his brother John.
As the investigation proved, Farley had been dead for a few hours already. When found, a bloodtinged fluid was leaking from the dead comedian’s nose and a white liquid substance from his mouth. During the search of the apartment, an array of open liquor bottles was found on the kitchen counter and the bedroom and bathroom contained a hodgepodge of bagged white powder, Prozac, and other antidepressants.

  When news of Chris’s death—a few months short of his 34th birthday—first circulated, there were rumors that the cause of death was suicide or a heart attack. In actuality, it was from a massive overdose of cocaine and morphine. According to the medical examiner, a narrowing of the arteries that supply blood to the heart muscle was a contributing factor to the star’s death.

  On December 23, 1997, a private funeral and wake was held at Our Lady Queen of Peace Catholic Church in Madison, Wisconsin. Chris’s burial took place at a local cemetery that afternoon. The family had to employ security to keep the curious public away. Among the attendees were old and new cast members of SNL.

  On January 12, 1998, a public memorial service for Chris was held at St. Monica’s Church in California. Father Rocha led the proceedings. A celebrity crowd listened while Farley’s brother John read a version of “A Clown’s Prayer.” Tom Arnold delivered the eulogy, in which he said, “I believe Chris is in a better place, a place full of love and no fears, a place where he can love himself. So, so long Chris; we’ll miss your laugh, and your blue eyes, and most of all, we’ll miss your humanity.”

  Chris Farley’s final feature film was Almost Heroes, which costarred Matthew Perry; it opened in mid-1998. (Chris also had an uncredited bit part in 1998’s Dirty Work.) Just as with John Candy’s last movie, Farley’s posthumously released finale was a bust. Said the Los Angeles Times of the debacle, “The film is as misguided as its protagonists,” and that “In his last movie, Farley wasn’t attempting to stretch himself; his fans will get what they expect.” One of Farley’s unrealized dream projects was to star in a movie about the life of the tragicomic screen actor Roscoe “Fatty” Arbuckle (1887–1933). He felt such a movie biography might give his screen career a new dimension and gain him recognition as a serious performer.