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

by Parish, James Robert

  When Paramount let Veronica go in 1948, her career took a nosedive. De Toth, her now estranged husband, got her the secondary lead in Slattery’s Hurricane (1949), a picture he directed for Twentieth Century-Fox. In 1951, with her movie career moribund, she and De Toth declared bankruptcy. They separated in June 1951 and were divorced a year later. With no movie roles available, the exsiren left Hollywood for New York.

  Lake set up headquarters in a rundown Greenwich Village apartment, her children in tow. She did TV (the roles were few and far between) and toured in plays. In 1955 she wed rugged songwriter Joseph McCarthy, who was better at drinking liquor than at running a household full of children. (Her offspring were constantly being shunted back and forth between her home and her exhusbands’ places on the West Coast.) She and McCarthy divorced in 1959.

  Veronica Lake in her post peek-a-boo hairdo period (the late 1940s).

  Courtesy of JC Archives

  An accidental fall in 1960 put Veronica’s stage career on halt for many months. When she recovered, she moved to the Martha Washington Hotel for Women, on East 29th Street in New York City. A reporter found her working as a barmaid there and the discovery made headlines worldwide, with accompanying photos of the now-bloated, strained-looking Lake.

  The ensuing publicity allowed Veronica to find work at a Baltimore TV station hosting a Late Show movie program. In the summer of 1963, she was cast as a fading movie queen in an off-Broadway revival of Best Foot Forward. Her once-wonderful looks were gone, but her energy was impressive. In April 1965, Lake made headlines again when she was arrested for drunkenness in Galveston, Texas (where she had gone to visit a current boyfriend). After this beau died, she moved to Miami, where she did stock theater. Veronica was paid $10,000 to do a Canadian movie (Footsteps in the Snow, 1966), which saw only limited release. The Florida-made Flesh Feast, her final screen work, was a mess of a horror movie that was not unleashed on an unsuspecting public until 1970.

  In 1969, Lake went to England to promote Veronica, her just published autobiography (published first in Britain), and stayed to do a stage comedy, Madame Chairman, which failed to make it to the West End. She remained in England to pursue further stage-work. But she was back in the United States by 1971, promoting the American publication of her memoirs.

  By the spring of 1972, Veronica had returned to Florida, now accompanied by Robert Carlton-Munro, a retired British sea captain, whom she married that June. They went back to England. Before long, however, the two were fighting regardless of whether they were drunk or sober, and Veronica came back to America alone.

  In late June of 1973, Veronica visited friends in Burlington, Vermont. By then, the years of drinking had taken their final toll. She was hospitalized on June 26 for acute hepatitis, and on July 7, 1973, she died at age 53. Her son Michael, then a construction worker in Hawaii, heard of her death over the radio. He borrowed money to fly to Vermont, where he arranged for Veronica to be cremated as she had requested. A small memorial service was held in New York at the Universal Chapel on East 52nd Street. None of her one-time Hollywood associates paid their respects at the services, and neither did her other children or ex-husbands. Her ashes were scattered at sea near the Virgin Islands, a locale she and a past boyfriend had enjoyed very much.

  Once, while reminiscing on her movie career, Veronica said, “I wasn’t a sex symbol, I was a sex zombie.” She admitted, “I was never psychologically meant to be a picture star—I left to save my life.”

  Barbara La Marr

  [Reatha Watson]

  July 28, 1896–January 30, 1926

  Barbara La Marr’s beauty was breathtaking. Petite and dark-haired, she was such a gorgeous young woman that a Los Angeles judge declared her “too beautiful for her own good” and warned the performer to abandon the temptations of Hollywood and return home. A few years later, she left life—a victim of drug and alcohol abuse.

  She was born in 1896, in either North Yakima, Washington, or Richmond, Virginia. At one month of age, she was adopted by the Watsons. Mr. Watson was in the newspaper business, and he and his family moved around the state of Washington. Little Reatha made her stage debut in 1904 in Tacoma, playing Little Eva in Uncle Tom’s Cabin. When Reatha was 13, Mrs. Watson took her to Los Angeles, hoping the pretty and physically mature teenager could break into the movies. When an encounter with a lecherous film director ended that possibility for the moment, Reatha turned to performing an exotic dance in a stage act.

  Reatha was arrested when the police raided a Los Angeles theater where she was dancing. She was only 14. Although she had broken no laws, the judge advised her to return to her parents’ care. When she was 16, she visited Yuma, Arizona, where she met a ranch hand named Jack Lytell and quickly married him. A few months later, he died. In June of 1914, now using the professional name of Barbara La Marr, she made another try at show business in Los Angeles. She soon wed Lawrence Converse, a young Los Angeles attorney. Unfortunately, he was already married and had three children. When the authorities learned this, he was detained on a bigamy charge, but three days later he died during surgery for a blood clot on his brain. Her third husband (1916–17) was dancer Phil Ainsworth. In 1918, she wed vaudeville comic Ben Deely.

  By 1920, Barbara La Marr Deely was already a part of the burgeoning movie industry. She had written several screenplays and had acted in Metro’s Harriet and the Piper (1920). In April 1921 she and Deely separated and were later divorced (the decree had not yet become final at the time of her next marriage, and Deely would sue her because of this in 1923). Meanwhile, she had come to the attention of the swashbuckling actor Douglas Fairbanks, who had her cast in The Nut (1920) and then as Milady de Winter in The Three Musketeers (1921). By 1923 Barbara was a well-paid Metro player. While making Souls for Sale (1923), she sprained her ankle and was administered morphine to ease the pain so she could continue filming. This, unfortunately, meant the beginning of her drug addiction. Early in 1923 she adopted a baby boy, whom she named Marvin Carville La Marr (but whom she nicknamed Sonny). That May she married her fifth husband, Western-movie actor Jack Daugherty, but they soon separated.

  Vehicles like Thy Name Is Woman (1924) made the exotic-featured Barbara a top screen personality. By then, however, she had three major problems. First, Metro executive Paul Bern (who would later marry Jean Harlow and die mysteriously in 1932) had become obsessed with La Marr. Second, Barbara had become addicted to morphine and booze. Finally, her free-loving spirit was leading her into numerous indiscreet romantic escapades. Studio head Louis B. Mayer canceled her contract and she went over to First National Pictures to make what proved to be her final three features.

  Barbara La Marr, the exotic star of The Eternal City (1923).

  Courtesy of JC Archives

  In her last months, Barbara was unable to cope with her excessive lifestyle. Suffering from morphine and alcohol addiction and the aftermath of a nervous breakdown, as well as tuberculosis, she sought refuge at her home (which Paul Bern had purchased for her) in Altadena near Los Angeles. The ever-loyal, still obsessed Bern, whom she had refused to marry, was one of the few faithful admirers left in her last days. When she passed away on January 30, 1926, the official reason was given as anorexia; the unofficial cause was a drug overdose. After a very well-attended funeral, she was buried in the Cathedral Mausoleum in Hollywood Memorial Park. Her marker reads: “With God in the joy and beauty of youth.” Barbara’s estate included a Los Angeles home and a Malibu beach house. Her son was adopted by La Marr’s good friend, actress ZaSu Pitts, and her husband, Thomas Gallery.

  With too much zest for life, “The Girl Who Was Too Beautiful” proved to be a victim of her own exceptional mystique.

  Bela Lugosi

  [Bela Ferenc Dezso Blasko]

  October 20, 1882–August 16, 1956

  Sometimes a star becomes so identified with a role that it is difficult to separate where the character leaves off and the actor begins. In the case of Hungarian-born Bela Lugosi, the fusion
was almost complete. So much of his American show-business career was tied to playing that bizarre vampire aristocrat from Transylvania—Count Dracula—that he often lost track of his own identity in the ghoulish process. One of his escapes from the netherworld of screen vampirism was drugs; this dependency contributed greatly to the pathetic torment of his final years.

  Bela was born in Lugos, a little Hungarian town in Transylvania, in 1882, the youngest of five children in a well-to-do family (his father was a bank executive). A restless youngster, Bela left home at age 12, toiling in mines and factories to earn his daily bread. In his late teens, he sought satisfaction in acting, studying at the Academy of Theatrical Art in Budapest. He made his stage debut in 1900. Two years later he became a member of the Hungarian National Actors’ Company. During this period he acquired his professional surname, taking the name of the town where he was born and adding an “i” at the end to give it a flourish. From 1913 to 1919 Bela acted with the National Theatre in Budapest, gaining acclaim as a matinee idol and winning the admiration and favors of many female admirers—he would continue to attract women for several decades. To earn extra money, he made movies under the alias of Arisztid Olt, not wanting to dilute his growing stage reputation.

  In 1917, Bela married Ilona Szmik, a banker’s daughter. Because of the rising tide of Communism in his homeland, Bela fled to Germany in 1920, getting work there onstage and in movies (including 1920’s Der Januskopf, a variation on Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde). While he was residing in Germany, his wife divorced him. Two years later, Bela came to New York, where he produced and starred in several Hungarian-language plays. Meanwhile, he wed Austrian actress Ilona Montagh de Nagybanyhegyes, but their marriage was short-lived. In 1923, he made his Broadway debut as an Apache dancer in The Red Poppy and his U.S. film debut as a German spy in The Silent Command. Having already appeared onstage in The Werewolf (1924), it was a relatively easy transition for the Hungarian actor to star on Broadway in Dracula (1927). The production was a smash success, both in New York and on the road. While Lugosi was performing as the cultured vampire in Los Angeles, MGM hired him to play the police inspector in their thriller The Thirteenth Chair (1929). Meanwhile, he was among the many admirers who romanced Hollywood’s “It Girl,” Clara Bow. In mid-1929, Bela married for a third time. His new bride was Beatrice Woodruff, a San Francisco widow. The union lasted only four days.

  A serious pose from horror film star Bela Lugosi.

  Courtesy of JC Archives

  When Universal Pictures purchased the screen rights to Dracula in 1930, they intended to borrow MGM’s Lon Chaney for the title role. But Chaney was dying of cancer by then and the studio finally hired Bela to re-create his stage performance, although they compensated him poorly for the part. After the movie was released in early 1931 to great acclaim, the middle-aged actor with the heavy accent found himself much in demand in Hollywood. Without knowing it, he had reached his career peak. Universal suggested he play the lead in Frankenstein (1931), but after doing a makeup test, he decided against the part because it would hide his great profile and allow him no on-camera dialogue beyond grunts. Bela had visions of being a grand luminary of the American cinema and didn’t think Frankenstein would help realize that goal. It proved to be the wrong decision when Frankenstein made a star out of Bela’s substitute, Boris Karloff.

  Bela’s assignments in the remainder of the 1930s were a mixture of starring roles in low-budget features and supporting parts in major productions. He returned to Broadway for the musical mystery Murder at the Vanities (1933) and that same year married his secretary, Lillian Arch. (Their son, Bela Jr., would be born in 1938.)

  Back in Hollywood, Bela was teamed with his genre rival, Boris Karloff, in The Black Cat (1934), the first of their six joint movie appearances. His career and finances had reached a low ebb when Universal hired him to be the deformed Ygor in Son of Frankenstein (1939), which again featured Boris Karloff as the rampaging monster. Lugosi jumped from picture to picture, heedless of their quality or showcasing potential.

  By the 1940s Bela had become a fixture in B movies, occasionally leaping back to major studio projects. Because his heavy accent limited the range of characters he could play, he was typically cast as a mad scientist or a deranged criminal. Ironically, 12 years after he rejected the Frankenstein lead, he played the monster in Frankenstein Meets the Wolfman (1943), costarring with the studio’s latest horror king, Lon Chaney Jr. In the satirical Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein (1948), Lugosi showed up as his old self—Count Dracula.

  The 1950s were a cruel period for the aged and increasingly infirm Lugosi. Most filmmakers in Hollywood had either forgotten him or thought of the eccentric old man as a campy joke. Because of painful leg problems (stemming from an injury when he was in the military service during World War I), Bela had become a drug addict. To revive his bank account and his self-esteem, he toured in a Dracula stage revival throughout the British Isles and made the English film Old Mother Riley Meets the Vampire (1952). Back in the United States in 1953, his fourth wife divorced him, claiming he was overly possessive and extremely jealous. The split-up separated him from his son. Lugosi’s career limped along; one high point was his popular club act, which played Las Vegas in 1954 and was terminated after several performances only because of his declining health.

  Determined to beat his long-standing addiction and perhaps regain the affection of his ex-wife Lillian, the gaunt, frail Lugosi had himself committed to the Metropolitan State Hospital in Norwalk, California. Later, he would write of the withdrawal horrors he underwent during the treatment. He was released after 90 days and announced that he was now cured. One of the many fans who had written Lugosi during his highly publicized hospital stay was Hope Lininger. On August 25, 1955, 20 days after he checked out of the hospital, Hope and Bela were married; Lugosi’s fifth wife was more than 30 years his junior. Given this age gap, and Mrs. Lugosi’s discovery that her husband was not the romantic figure of her childhood moviegoing days, the relationship was not a happy one.

  Anxious for professional employment and recognition of any kind, Bela joined several other genre relics (John Carradine, Lon Chaney Jr., and Basil Rathbone) for The Black Sleep (1956). By now, as a result of his long-standing addictions, he had great difficulty remembering his lines. In June of 1956 he was onstage for three performances in The Devil’s Paradise, an exploitative antidrug drama done on the cheap in Los Angeles. He had just started production on the excruciatingly awful Plan Nine from Outer Space when his health deteriorated even further. On August 16, 1956, while his wife was out shopping for groceries, Bela passed away from a heart attack while seated in his favorite chair. Ironically, at the time of his death, the next movie Lugosi was to appear in was The Final Curtain. He was clutching a copy of the script when he expired.

  As he had requested, Bela was buried in his Dracula trademark black cape and tuxedo. For the small gathering who attended the services, it was a strange yet eerily familiar sight to see the open coffin with a Dracula-dressed and made-up Lugosi lying inside. (Rumor has it that as the hearse left the mortuary parking lot, the driver lost control and the vehicle “drove itself” along Hollywood Boulevard to Vine—Bela’s favorite walking path in his last years—before returning to its preset route.) He was buried at Holy Cross Cemetery in Los Angeles, where his marker was inscribed: “Bela Lugosi. 1882–1956. Beloved Father.” During his long acting career he had earned more than $500,000, but his only asset at death was a vacant lot worth less than $2,000. Drugs and poor career choices in his post-peak years had robbed him of any legacy for his beloved son.

  The abysmal Plan Nine from Outer Space, with the few minutes of Lugosi’s footage incorporated into its incredibly illogical narrative, was released finally in 1959, a golden turkey by anyone’s estimation. It was a sad finale for the once-illustrious Transylvanian count. Fortunately, 35 years later, director Tim Burton hired veteran actor Martin Landau to portray Lugosi in Ed Wood (1994). It was a superior scree
n production that detailed the working relationship between the screen’s favorite Dracula and the enthusiastic (if untalented) low-budget film director Ed Wood (played astutely by Johnny Depp). For his remarkable performance, Landau won an Academy Award as Best Supporting Actor. The film and the award did a great deal to put Lugosi back in the spotlight of mainstream cinema history. Of course, among horror film aficionados, the great Bela has never been forgotten.

  River Phoenix

  August 23, 1970–October 31, 1993

  Over the decades, many Hollywood notables have destroyed and/or ended their lives through substance abuse—Wallace Reid, Barbara La Marr, John Belushi, and Chris Farley, to name a few. By now the entertainment industry and the public should almost be accustomed to such untimely exits. But in the case of the gifted actor River Phoenix, we were not. Several people close to the star in his last years were aware of the transformation that cynicism and addiction had made in his once gentle, perceptive soul. Nevertheless, River’s sad and public finale was tough to accept. Not only did the blond, blue-eyed actor give extremely talented performances before things got out of control, but with his very expressive face, he had the potential of becoming a Hollywood great.

  River was born in a log-cabin commune on a mint farm in Madras, Oregon. His father, John, had been a carpenter, and his mother, Arlyn, a secretary from the Bronx. The hippie couple had met in California in 1968 when they were both working there as itinerant fruit pickers. River’s first name was derived from the “river of life” in Herman Hesse’s novel Siddhartha. By the time River was two, his parents were members of the Children of God, a radical counterculture sect. The family (which would grow to include River’s siblings Joaquin, Summer, Rain, and Liberty) spent a few years in South America, where John was the cult’s Archbishop of Venezuela. In 1977, they abandoned the Children of God and moved to central Florida, where they changed their surname to Phoenix. During this difficult period the family endured rough financial times; sometimes River and Rain would sing songs on the street for money.