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

by Parish, James Robert

  In August 1949, Russell and Madison finally married. She claimed to be deliriously happy, but then in 1950 Paramount ended her contract. Her one freelancing film (Air Cadet, 1951) was a marginal entry. Gail became increasingly moody and stepped up the drinking, thus losing several potential movie assignments.

  In 1953, Mexican singer-dancer Esperanza sued John Wayne for divorce and named Gail—then separated from Guy Madison—as the home wrecker. The “Duke” insisted the allegations were untrue. Nevertheless, the traumatic situation led to Russell being institutionalized in Seattle, Washington, for psychiatric treatment. She had hardly been released when she was arrested for drunk driving. The next year, she and Madison divorced; he insisted she “cared nothing for their home or marriage.” John Wayne came to her rescue again, casting a mature-looking Gail in a Western (Seven Men from Now, 1956) that he was producing. Others tried to find work for her, but the jobs never seemed to work out for the drifting actress.

  Gail developed a strong relationship with singer Dorothy Shay that lasted two years. Shay tried to straighten out her special friend, but Russell was too self-destructive to pull out of her escalating problems. In 1957, while inebriated, Russell drove her car through the window of a Los Angeles coffee shop, for which she was put on three years’ probation. She did some low-budget pictures in the late 1950s and had an occasional TV assignment, but casting directors felt she was too unreliable. When she was signed for an episode of Manhunt, the former star told the press, “My morale is high. All you need is a little sunshine and a pat on the back now and then.”

  But her morale didn’t remain that way for long, as no further work offers came. On August 27, 1961, Gail was found dead in her modest Brentwood apartment at 1436 South Bentley Avenue. The place was littered with empty vodka bottles. One neighbor stated she had last seen Russell four days earlier when she had begged for a drink. Thereafter, Gail had locked herself in her apartment and refused to come out, despite the pleading of neighbors. Eventually, the police were notified and they broke into Russell’s place. The autopsy confirmed that Gail Russell had died of liver disease brought on by alcohol abuse, as well as complications from malnutrition. She had not lived to reach her 40th birthday.

  In Obscurity

  Hillside Memorial Park in Los Angeles, California © 2001 by Albert L,. Ortega

  Jean Arthur

  [Gladys Georgiana Greene]

  October 17, 1901–June 19, 1991

  On-screen, Jean Arthur, with her infectious laughter and a husky adolescent voice that would crack in mid-sentence, projected a pleasing mix of vulnerability and buoyant forthrightness. Off camera, however, she was extremely independent, unusually private, and quite eccentric. Frank Capra, who directed her in several 1930s big-screen comedy classics, observed, “Never have 1 seen a performer plagued with such a chronic case of stage jitters. . . . When the cameras stopped she’d run to her dressing room, lock herself in—and cry.” When asked in 1966 why she had abandoned Hollywood, Jean snapped, “I hated the place—not the work, but the lack of privacy, those terrible, prying fan magazine writers and all the surrounding exploitation.”

  Born in Plattsburg, New York, Jean moved with her family frequently during her childhood (her father, a commercial artist, kept going from job to job). By the early 1920s she was a model in New York City; this job led to a screen audition with Fox Films in Hollywood. After a few days starring in The Temple of Venus (1923), however, she was replaced. Jean said later, “That is where and why I developed the most beautiful inferiority complex you’ve ever seen.”

  Nevertheless, she persisted in the movies. In 1928 Jean signed a contract with Paramount Pictures and married photographer Julian Anker. The union, however, was annulled after one day. In 1929, she appeared in her first all-talking picture, the Philo Vance whodunit The Canary Murder Case. But in 1931, after getting 14 unremarkable screen assignments in a row at Paramount, the disheartened Arthur returned to Manhattan. In 1932 she made her Broadway debut in Foreign Affairs and married Frank Ross Jr., a young actor with whom she had teamed on-screen in Young Eagles (1930).

  Back in Hollywood, Jean joined Columbia Pictures, but it was not until The Whole Town’s Talking (1935), opposite Edward G. Robinson, that she made a real impact, displaying a light comic touch that would blossom in subsequent years. In the late 1930s, she was paired with Gary Cooper in Mr. Deeds Goes to Town (1936) and The Plainsman (1937), with Cary Grant in Only Angels Have Wings (1939), and with Jimmy Stewart in You Can’t Take It with You (1938) and Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (1939). Despite these high-caliber entries, Jean didn’t receive her first (and only) Academy Award nomination until The More the Merrier (1943). By then, she’d gained an industry reputation for being temperamental on the movie set and exceedingly aloof with the media.

  Eric Linden and Jean Arthur in The Past of Mary Holmes (1933).

  Courtesy of JC Archives

  Arthur allowed her Columbia Pictures contract to expire in the mid-1940s. She hoped to become a full-time independent producer, but The Devil and Miss Jones (coproduced with RKO Studios in 1943) was her only such venture. Next, Arthur planned a Broadway return, but left the comedy Born Yesterday (1946) before it debuted. (Her understudy, Judy Holliday, became a great hit in the successful production.) In 1948 the mercurial Jean returned to movies in Billy Wilder’s A Foreign Affair, in which glamorous Marlene Dietrich stole the show. The next year, Arthur divorced Frank Ross. She went back to Broadway in a 1950 revival of Peter Pan with Boris Karloff and in 1953, made her final motion picture—the classic Western Shane.

  Subsequently, Jean Arthur became even more private—if that was possible! She broke her retirement in 1963 by appearing in a college campus production of Saint Joan. She made her TV debut on a segment of the Western series Gunsmoke and was then lured by her producer-friend Ross Hunter into headlining The Jean Arthur Show, a television sitcom, which lasted just 12 episodes in 1966. Her last Broadway venture, The Freaking Out of Stephanie Blake (1967), about an old lady from Illinois who gets turned on by pot, was canceled after a few performances because of Arthur’s ill health.

  From 1968 to 1972 Jean taught drama at Vassar College and then joined the faculty at the North Carolina School of the Arts, but she eventually returned to her coastal retreat in Carmel, California. She tried the stage one more time, but shortly withdrew from First Monday in October, a comedy about Supreme Court justices that costarred Melvyn Douglas.

  Now completely retired in Carmel, Jean moved to a smaller place there facing the Pacific Ocean. She devoted herself to her pets and her garden. Occasionally, she could be seen strolling alone along the beach or making unconsciously imperious entrances into local shops.

  In the spring of 1989, Jean suffered a stroke that left her an invalid. On June 19, 1991, she died of a heart attack at Carmel Convalescent Hospital. At her request, there were no funeral services. Her ashes were scattered at sea off Point Lobos.

  Until the end, Jean remained firm about not granting interviews. When begged by a Los Angeles TV host in the mid-1980s to do a live interview for his program, the everelusive Arthur ended the matter with, “Quite frankly, I’d rather have my throat slit.”

  Agnes Ayres

  [Agnes Hinkle]

  April 4, 1896–December 25, 1940

  Fate can push an individual into stardom and just as quickly yank that stardom away. That tough truism is just as appropriate to the world of 1930s Hollywood as it is today.

  Agnes Ayres was born in 1896 in Carbondale, a small town in southern Illinois. By the time she was 16, her family was living in Chicago. One day in late 1914, a girlfriend suggested they tour the local Essanay Films studio. Agnes’s impressive profile and petite figure were noticed by a staff director. She was placed in a crowd scene of a silent feature that was currently being shot, receiving three dollars at the end of the workday. Agnes was asked to return for more assignments, and she did. By 1916 she and her mother had moved to New York City so Agnes could pursue an acting caree
r. (Agnes had married an army captain, Frank P. Schuker, during World War I, but the couple quickly separated and finally divorced in 1921.) Now single, she received her big break when Vitagraph Pictures star Alice Joyce noted a strong resemblance between herself and Agnes. Ayres was hired to play Joyce’s sister in Richard the Brazen (1917). Agnes played in 25 productions at Vitagraph before deciding to try Hollywood.

  Paramount executive producer Jesse Lasky saw Agnes on-screen in 1920 and quickly arranged an introduction. Although he was married and had children, Agnes soon became his mistress. Lasky starred her in the Civil War tale Held by the Enemy (1920), and she received good reviews for her performance. The prestigious studio director Cecil B. DeMille was persuaded to give her leading roles in The Affairs of Anatol (1921), Forbidden Fruit (1921), and the Biblical epic The Ten Commandments (1923). Agnes played opposite the very popular Wallace Reid in four features, including Clarence (1922). She became entranced with the handsome star and, despite the fact that he was married, paid long and frequent visits to him at home. Finally, Reid’s wife threatened to throw acid in the actress’s face if she returned again, which effectively ended the romantic relationship.

  Ayres’s professional peak came in Rudolph Valentino’s The Sheik (1921); she played the terrified English heiress he carries into his desert tent for nights of passion. (In the sequel, The Son of the Sheik [1926, also starring Valentino], she would play the young hero’s mother.) By 1923, her romance with Lasky had ended. Without her industry mentor, she no longer received the best scripts or the choice of the lot’s top directors. Agnes was not in trouble financially, however, because she had invested wisely in real estate. She married Mexican diplomat Manuel Reachi in mid-1924 and they had a daughter in 1925. The couple divorced in 1927.

  During the remainder of the Roaring Twenties, Agnes’s screen career declined, with her last important movie role being the second female lead in Frank Capra’s The Donovan Affair (1929). At the time she was worth over $500,000, but in the big stock market crash of October 1929 she lost everything, including her real-estate holdings. Now penniless, she played vaudeville, touring in “one-night stands.” Returning to Hollywood in the mid-1930s, the former star (who was now well into her thirties), announced, “I’m still young and I see no reason why I can’t get to the top again.” But times had changed, and the only work Agnes could get was bit roles.

  The realization that her screen career was finished greatly depressed Agnes, and she was soon committed to a sanatorium for emotional problems. In 1939 her ex-husband, Manuel Reachi—now a film producer—gained custody of their daughter. The severely despondent Agnes died of a cerebral hemorrhage on December 25, 1940, in West Hollywood, long forgotten by her once adoring public.

  Theda Bara

  [Theodosia Goodman]

  July 29, 1890–April 7, 1955

  In the silent movie A Fool There Was (1915), Theda Bara says—via title cards—“Kiss me, my fool.” The New York Dramatic Mirror raved about her, “Miss Bara misses no chance for sensuous appeal. She is a horribly fascinating woman, cruel and vicious to the core.” With this trend-setting movie, Theda became a full-fledged movie star. She was the first of a new type of leading lady to grace the screen, the “vamp”—short for vampire. The moniker suited her typical screen role: a conniving, predatory woman who drains the emotional life out of her male victims.

  Born in Cincinnati, Ohio, in 1890 (some sources say 1895), Theda was the daughter of a Jewish tailor and his Swiss wife. Upon graduating from high school, Theda moved to New York to pursue a theatrical career. With her blond hair dyed black and exotic makeup that used shades of indigo to give her a pallid complexion, the somewhat plump, five-foot, six-inch actress was cast in a version of Molnar’s The Devil (1908). She toured in The Quaker Girl with future gossip columnist Hedda Hopper in 1911, and by 1914 was back in New York, where she came to the attention of film director Frank Powell. Although she admitted later that her “mind was set emphatically against it,” she accepted movie work because of her then-uncertain finances.

  With the release of A Fool There Was, Theda’s stardom was ensured. She helped filmmaker William Fox build the fledgling Fox Film Corporation through her string of silent-screen hits—all generally variations on her innovative vamp role. The studio publicity department created an alluring background for Theda, insisting that this fabricated star was the daughter of an eastern potentate—and that her surname was an anagram for “Arab.” When she starred in Cleopatra (1917), she caused another typical Bara furor by displaying more of her shoulders than movie censors of the time thought appropriate. Late in 1917, by which time Theda and Fox Films had relocated to the West Coast, Bara announced grandly, “During the rest of my screen career, I am going to continue doing vampires as long as people sin. For I believe that humanity needs the moral lesson and it needs it in repeatedly larger doses.”

  Nevertheless, both studio and star realized that she could only repeat her vamp impersonations profitably so many times. When she was cast as the title character of Kathleen Mavourneen, however, Irish groups picketed the 1919 film for presenting a Jewish girl—the queen of vamps, no less—as an innocent Irish lass. Later that year, when Theda demanded a salary raise from $4,000 to $5,000 weekly, film mogul William Fox refused—he thought she had become passé, and besides, he already had a successor to Theda in contractee Betty Blythe.

  Former silent-film vamp Theda Bara at a Hollywood party in 1933, seated with Baron De Schaunsee (left) and Yeachel Lewis.

  Courtesy of JC Archives

  When no satisfactory movie offers were forthcoming, Theda returned to the Broadway stage in The Blue Flame (1920), a supernatural melodrama that closed after only 48 performances. The next year, in Connecticut, she married her longtime film director, the English-born Charles J. Brabin. She retired from the screen only to make an inconsequential comeback in The Unchastened Woman (1925). Her final forays into the film world were in two Hal Roach shorts in 1926. One of them, Madame Mystery, featured a heavily made-up Theda forced into satirizing her old vamp image.

  Thereafter, Theda passed her time as a Los Angeles society matron. In the 1930s she tried a few local stage comebacks. She wrote an autobiography called What Women Never Tell, but couldn’t find a publisher. She sold her life story to Columbia Pictures in the early 1950s; they never filmed it. In 1954, when she contemplated a return to the stage in East Coast summer stock, the project fell through.

  Later on in 1954, Theda was diagnosed with abdominal cancer. She entered California Lutheran Hospital on February 13, 1955. On April 7 she died, nearly forgotten by the motion-picture industry she had helped to popularize. She was buried at Forest Lawn Memorial Park in Glendale, California. Her husband died on November 3, 1957.

  Edwina Booth

  [Josephine Constance Woodruff]

  September 13, 1909–May 18, 1991

  As Nina, the sumptuous White Goddess of the African Jungle in Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer’s Trader Horn (1931), Edwina Booth gained cinema immortality. This career-making part, ironically, also proved to be her professional undoing. She made a few other motion pictures and then disappeared from the industry entirely. For decades, her whereabouts remained an intriguing mystery, arousing the interest of movie aficionados around the world. It was rumored that she had died, and her demise was actually reported on various occasions. On May 18, 1991, however, the truth was revealed at last. She had succumbed to old age in a Long Beach, California, convalescent hospital. “This time she really did die,” remarked her brother, Booth Woodruff.

  Edwina Booth and Duncan Renaldo in Trapped in Tia Juana (1932).

  Courtesy of JC Archives

  Edwina was born in 1909 in Provo, Utah, under the name Josephine Constance Woodruff. By 1928 she was in Hollywood, appearing first in Nancy Carroll’s Manhattan Cocktail (1928), and the next year in Our Modern Maidens (1929). The latter picture, starring Joan Crawford, was made at MGM. That high-class studio was embarking on a campaign to find a fresh face to play
the unusual heroine of its pending jungle epic Trader Horn. Twenty-year-old Edwina was hired for the key part. On May 1, 1929, the cast and crew of the adventure film arrived in East Africa. The production suffered seven months of nightmarish torment under horrific conditions: hostile natives, fierce animals, bizarre tropical diseases, and primitive sound equipment. By the time everyone had returned via boat to New York, MGM studio head Louis B. Mayer had screened the sent-ahead footage. He thought the project was a mess and had the cast fired. But other MGM executives convinced their second-incommand, Irving Thalberg, to salvage the sinking production. So, for nearly a year thereafter, the picture went through extensive reshoots in both Los Angeles and Mexico. It was conducted under very hush-hush conditions, since MGM feared adverse reaction if it was generally known that the resulting movie had not been entirely filmed in the African wilds. After a then-exorbitant production cost of $1,322,000, Trader Horn finally debuted in February 1931 to critical enthusiasm. It earned a sizeable profit for the time of $937,000.

  Meanwhile, Edwina Booth reteamed with her Trader Horn costar Harry Carey in two hastily assembled serials—The Vanishing Legion (1931) and The Last of the Mohicans (1932)—and made a low-budget feature, The Midnight Patrol (1932). By the time of the latter’s release, Edwina was confined to bed; it would take her more than five years to recover from the tropical maladies she had contracted while filming Trader Horn in Africa. Booth sued Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer for over a million dollars, alleging that the studio demanded she sunbathe nude on the ship’s deck on the 10-day voyage from Naples to Mombassa. Once in Africa, she claimed, they had failed to provide her with adequate protective clothing for the lengthy jungle stay. Her lawsuit charged that her array of ailments had been caused by the tropical sun and bites from unidentified jungle insects. The high-profile case was eventually settled out of court with the actress receiving an undisclosed payment.