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

by Parish, James Robert

  Once she recovered, Edwina understandably never returned to the entertainment profession (although she continued to receive fan mail for almost 60 years). She devoted most of her energy to working for a Mormon temple in Hollywood. She married Rienold Fehberg in 1969, who died in 1984. When she died at the Medallion Convalescent Hospital in Long Beach in May 1991, she was survived by her brother, a sister (Betty Benson), and two stepdaughters (Judy and Dixie). A private funeral service was held on May 22, 1991.

  With her death, the decades-old mystery of the elusive Edwina Booth, the radiant star of Trader Horn, was solved at last.

  Clara Bow

  August 25, 1905–September 27, 1965

  This petite, vivacious redhead with bobbed hair, cupid’s lips, and the oh-so-playful pout was the essence of the Roaring Twenties—the “It Girl” herself, the “Brooklyn Bonfire.” Most of all, she was the energetic jazz baby who symbolized a madcap era in American history. Yet, later in life, she admitted sadly to a friend about her years of fame, “It wasn’t ever like I thought it was going to be. It was always a disappointment to me.”

  Clara Bow, the “It Girl,” in a 1920s pose.

  Courtesy of JC Archives

  Clara had a very unpleasant and impoverished childhood in Brooklyn, New York, moving with her family from one slum building to another. Her mother, Sarah, who suffered from epilepsy and had periodic episodes of promiscuity, had lost two previous daughters in childbirth. The ordeals had permanently damaged Mrs. Bow’s physical and mental health. Once, when Bow was a teenager with dreams of becoming a movie star, she awoke to find her mother hunched over her with a butcher knife in their tenement apartment, ranting, “You’d be better off dead than an actress!” Clara claimed she never slept a full night through thereafter.

  As for her worthless father, Robert, he was an unemployed waiter at the time of her birth and soon abandoned the family, although he later returned. When Clara was still a youngster, he began sexually abusing her. Pathetically, Clara was so desperate for paternal love that despite his treatment of her—and his later financial leeching off her—she remained loyal to him. (Throughout the years, Clara generally supported her father and often provided him with a place in her household to live. He would die in 1959.)

  In 1921, Clara borrowed a dime from her dad to enter a movie-magazine contest and won a screen test. She made her screen debut in Beyond the Rainbow (1922), although most of her scenes ended up on the cutting-room floor. (After she became famous, the sequences were restored and the picture reissued, to capitalize on Clara’s fame.) In 1923—the same year her mother died in a state mental hospital—producer B. P. Schulberg (who charmed Clara and used her financially and sexually) brought her to Hollywood to make pictures. Many of her early efforts were forgettable, but she made an impression playing a spirited flapper in The Plastic Age (1925).

  By the time of It (1927), Schulberg was entrenched at Paramount Pictures and Clara was a top star at the box office. It was the pinnacle of her movie career; she was the idol of shopgirls and the fantasy of men around the world. Studio chief Adolph Zukor would recall later that she “was exactly the same off the screen as on. She danced even when her feet were not moving. Some part of her was in motion in all her waking moments—if only her great rolling eyes.”

  Clara’s popularity rose with the World War I epic Wings (1927), in which she played a live-wire Red Cross worker. She made her talkie debut in The Wild Party (1929) and the critics forgave her Brooklynese speaking voice. She was earning good money—over $2,800 a week—but she had no business sense, and failed either to invest her earnings or to demand the higher salary she could have easily gotten from Paramount. Meanwhile, whenever the pressure got too severe, she had a nervous breakdown.

  Over the years, those in the industry were well aware of Clara’s free-living, freespending habits. She had affairs with a succession of her leading men, including Gary Cooper, Eddie Cantor, Gilbert Roland, and Harry Richman, as well as other nonactors, including playboy director Victor Fleming. Al Jolson even joked on radio about Clara “sleeping catercornered in bed.” The studio did its best to downplay her gambling binges, her passionate indiscretions, and her abortions in Mexico. But then all hell broke loose, and all the studio’s efforts were for nothing.

  On January 13, 1931, Clara charged Daisy De Voe, her former secretary (who had been a studio hairdresser previously), with criminal counts of embezzlement (of several thousands of dollars) and blackmail. Going on the offensive, the brassy Daisy told the world—in detail—about the wild life that her former employer was enjoying. When the notorious trial ended, Daisy received a relatively minor sentence and served only a year in prison; Clara’s public reputation had been all but destroyed. A still bewildered Clara asked the presiding judge, “My best friend, Daisy was. Why did she have to do me like that?”

  The trauma of this major scandal caused the unstable Clara to suffer several nervous breakdowns, and she was ordered by her physicians to recuperate at a sanatorium. Meanwhile, the studio dropped her contract. New film deals were “pending,” but instead Clara married cowboy actor Rex Bell in Las Vegas and the couple moved to his ranch in Spotlight, Nevada. Throughout this period, Clara, who was never slim, gained and lost weight. She made a brief comeback attempt with an excellent performance in Call Her Savage (1932) and another in Hoopla (1933). By this time, however, moviegoers had found new screen idols, and Clara was considered passé.

  Bow lapsed into private life. She and Rex had two children, Rex Jr. and George. At times Clara, who was five feet, three-and-a-half inches tall, saw her weight mushroom to nearly two hundred pounds. After Bell retired from moviemaking, they opened a Hollywood restaurant, but that enterprise failed. Later, they sold the ranch in Spotlight and moved to Las Vegas, where Bell ran a Western apparel store. Clara was in the entertainment limelight for the last time in 1947, when she was the mystery voice on Ralph Edwards’s Truth or Consequences radio quiz show. In 1954, Bell became the lieutenant governor of Nevada; he was reelected in 1958. Clara’s mental health remained precarious, and she hated being in the limelight that her husband’s political career demanded of her. (Because of this, she and Bell separated and lived apart.)

  In the mid-1950s, Bow was hospitalized in the Los Angeles area, where she now lived. She later retreated to a modest Culver City bungalow with a live-in nurse companion. Although she and Bell now rarely saw one another, they never divorced. He died in July 1962 of a heart attack while seeking the governorship of Nevada. Clara emerged from her seclusion to attend his funeral at Forest Lawn Memorial Park in Glendale, California.

  By 1965, Clara was living the barren life of a recluse. In a wistful moment, she told the still-intrigued press, “We had individuality. We did as we pleased. We stayed up late. We dressed the way we wanted. Today, stars are sensible and end up with better health. But we had more fun.”

  Shortly before midnight on September 26, 1965, while watching a vintage movie on TV, Clara died of a heart attack at her Culver City bungalow. She was buried at Forest Lawn Memorial Park in a vault next to her husband’s. At the service, Ralph Edwards read from Kahlil Gibran’s book The Prophet. Among those who paid their final respects to Clara were old pals like Jack Oakie, Richard Arlen, Harry Richman, and (Slapsie) Maxie Rosenbloom.

  Whitney Bolton of the New York Morning Telegraph offered a fitting final tribute to Clara: “She had fright in her, this girl. She had defiance that was a flower of fright. She had a kind of jaunty air of telling you that she didn’t care what happened, she could handle it.” Bolton also recollected that he had encountered Bow on the Paramount lot in the late 1920s. He had asked her, “Miss Bow, when you add it all up, what is ‘It’?”

  Clara thought for a moment and replied, “I ain’t real sure.”

  D. W. Griffith

  [David (Lewelyn) Wark Griffith]

  January 22, 1875–July 23, 1948

  It is truly ironic that one of the pioneers of American filmmaking died in semi-obscurity,
long ignored and forgotten by the motion-picture industry he had helped to found.

  D. W. Griffith was born in La Grange, Kentucky, in 1875. At age 16, he went to work as a newspaper reporter, and later turned to acting. When a play (A Fool and a Girl) he had scripted failed, he transferred to the new medium of silent “moving pictures” in New York City, first as an actor, and then, in 1908, as a director.

  As Griffith grew to understand the medium, he experimented with innovative techniques like fade-outs, rapid cutting, and close-ups. He used these techniques in his several milestone films, which included two major spectacles: The Birth of a Nation (1915) and Intolerance (1916). He developed or fostered the careers of many talents, among them Mary Pickford, Lillian Gish, and Richard Barthelmess. In 1919, he joined with Pickford, Douglas Fairbanks, and Charlie Chaplin to form United Artists Pictures. He made his last great pictures in the 1920s: Way Down East (1920), Orphans of the Storm (1922), America (1924), and Isn’t Life Wonderful? (1924). But then everything turned sour for him. He had to abandon his film studio and go to work for other moviemakers to pay off his heavy debts. Losing his creative control signaled his ultimate downfall.

  Hollywood’s switch to talkies in the late 1920s accelerated Griffith’s further decline, as did his refusal to keep up with changing public tastes and industry techniques. His first all-talking movie, Abraham Lincoln (1930), was considered stilted and old-fashioned; his study of alcohol abuse, The Struggle (1931), was dismissed as simplistic and full of archaic Victorian sentimentality. By 1933, down on his luck, the penniless former trailblazer had to sell his interest in United Artists, the studio he had helped to found. In 1935, he received a special Academy Award for his “distinguished creative achievements as director and producer.” But it was an empty gesture; the demoralized director needed work, not a trophy.

  Filmmaking pioneer D. W. Griffith.

  Courtesy of JC Archives

  Griffith became Hollywood’s forgotten man. He went back to New York, hoping to find someone to produce plays he had written. No one volunteered. Returning to California, he supervised a few crowd scenes for the Clark Gable vehicle San Francisco (1936) and did similar “supervisory” chores on One Million B.C. (1940).

  Ignored by the movie business he had helped to build, the proud director with the hawk-nosed profile became more alcoholic, embittered, and lonely. He was a pathetic sight walking along Hollywood Boulevard, forcing a jaunty gait and swinging his cane as if carefree, stopping to tell any willing listener about his former glory days. Long divorced from his first wife, actress Linda Avidson (whom he continued to support in a very comfortable style), in 1936 he wed Evelyn Marjorie Baldwin, a very young actress. But that marriage ended in divorce in November 1947, attributed by his spouse to his heavy drinking and reckless behavior.

  In 1948, Griffith was living alone at the once-classy Hollywood Knickerbocker Hotel at 1714 Ivar Street. During the morning of July 23, Griffith was in his small room when he suffered a cerebral hemorrhage. He managed to reach the lobby, where he asked for assistance, and then collapsed beneath the lobby’s chandelier. He died later that morning at Temple Hospital without regaining consciousness.

  When it was too late to help, three hundred of Hollywood’s elite turned out for a lavish memorial tribute to D. W. Griffith. His longtime coworker, director and actor Donald Crisp, eulogized bitterly: “It was the fate of David Wark Griffith to have a success unknown in the entertainment world until his day, and to suffer the agonies which only a success of that magnitude can engender when it is past.”

  Griffith’s body was taken back to Kentucky for burial at the Mount Tabor Cemetery in La Grange. The master film innovator left a relatively meager estate of less than $25,000, besides a few motion-picture properties.

  The prophetic Griffith remarked once, “Movies are written in sand: applauded today, forgotten tomorrow.” He might have added, so are the geniuses who founded the American film industry.

  Hedy Lamarr

  [Hedwig Eva Mari Kiesler]

  November 9, 1913–January 19, 2000

  If ever there was a truly great screen beauty, it was Hedy Lamarr. At five feet, six inches, weighing 120 pounds, and with dark brown hair and piercing blue eyes, she was the epitome of the movie goddess. Imported from her native Austria in 1938 by MGM, Hedy had already made a name for herself in the shocking 1933 European release, Extase (Ecstasy), in which she cavorted through a nude scene at a swimming hole. The sheer daring of that highly risque (for its time) performance paved the way for Lamarr’s later international fame.

  On the downside, the furor over Extase would haunt Hedy for the rest of her long life, as did her breathtaking looks. Billed and stereotyped by Hollywood as “the most beautiful woman in the world,” her screen assignments usually called for her to pout and look bored on camera. Few ever got to know the real Hedy, a woman angered by the repetitiveness of her screen career and frustrated by her six marriages and divorces. Beneath the surface, Hedy was a self-willed, highly intelligent person who wanted to expand beyond the confines of her sexpot image. But that recognition only came belatedly in her final years—by which time she had long withdrawn from the limelight.

  Hedy was born in 1913 in Vienna, the daughter of a Jewish banker. As a teenager, she longed for self-expression and turned to show business as an outlet. She got a role in the 1930 film Geld auf der Strasse. By 1931 she had moved to Berlin, where she had stage roles and made two additional movies. It was in the 1933 Czech entry Syphonie der Liebe—better known as Extase— that she ran naked through the woods and splashed in a small lake. The daring scenes intrigued the filmgoing public, but not viewers in Germany; Adolf Hitler’s Third Reich banned the picture because Hedy was Jewish.

  It was also in 1933 that she wed Fritz Mandl, a very wealthy—and much older—Austrian munitions manufacturer. He attempted to buy and destroy all copies of the racy Extase, without success. Soon tiring of being a trophy wife and upset by her husband’s politics, Hedy divorced Mandl in 1937 and settled in London, away from Hitler’s advancing armies. There she was introduced to MGM studio czar Louis B. Mayer. During the course of a transatlantic voyage to New York City, he offered the gorgeous actress a seven-year contract. Now renamed Hedy Lamarr (after the beautiful American actress Barbara La Marr, who had died young from a drug overdose in 1926), her Hollywood debut was made on loan to another studio. Algiers (1938, costarring Charles Boyer) was a big hit, and it cemented Hedy’s standing as a screen siren.

  Hedy Lamarr, the star of Dishonored Lady (1947).

  Courtesy of JC Archives

  In 1939, Hedy married screenwriter Gene Markey, who was between movie-star wives (married earlier to Joan Bennett, he would later wed Myrna Loy). That union lasted just 14 months. In 1941, the year she appeared in Come Live with Me and H. M. Pulham, Esq., she adopted a baby boy named James.

  Tortilla Flat (1942) presented Lamarr opposite Spencer Tracy in a high-class production, but another 1942 release, White Cargo, ridiculously cast her as a sleazy temptress and signaled the end of MGM’s interest in her. By now, the studio was convinced Hedy was too exotic and too wooden to become a great actress, and focused its attention on their contract star Lana Turner, the “Sweater Girl.” In 1943, Hedy wed her third husband, actor John Loder. They would have two children, Denise and Anthony.

  By the time Lamarr’s MGM contract ended, she was earning $7,500 a week. She formed her own production company and played the femme fatale in the middling Strange Woman (1946) and Dishonored Lady (1947), the latter featuring her then-husband. By July 1947, however, she and Loder had split. Thereafter, her career was in the doldrums until Cecil B. DeMille cast her in the box-office bonanza Samson and Delilah (1949) as the famed Biblical temptress who snips Victor Mature’s locks. In contrast, a terrible role in the Western Copper Canyon (1950) and another as the straight woman to Bob Hope in the comedic My Favorite Spy (1951) just about ended her Hollywood career.

  In 1951 Hedy married nightclub owner Ernest Stau
ffer, but that union fell apart in less than a year. Her fifth marriage was to Texas oil baron Howard Lee. She made a few unremarkable pictures overseas and returned to Hollywood for The Female Animal (1957). Two years later, she and Lee divorced. Her sixth and final wedding ceremony was with Los Angeles attorney Lewis W. Boies Jr. in 1963; the marriage lasted only two years.

  Picture Mommy Dead (1966), a low-budget shocker, was to have featured Lamarr in a comeback performance, but the studio replaced her with Zsa Zsa Gabor. The week before the cast substitution, Hedy had been arrested on a shoplifting charge. The ex-movie star spent five hours in detention before being released. Although the charges were dropped, Hollywood was shocked and wrote her off. Badly in need of funds, Hedy agreed to do her (ghost-written) autobiography, but later had a change of heart and tried to halt its publication, suing her collaborators on the book for misrepresenting her life. She lost the case and in 1966, Ecstasy and Me, a lurid account of her life and relationships, arrived in stores; it was considered outrageous for its day.

  After the late 1960s, Lamarr more or less dropped out of the news. Then, in 1991, she was accused of shoplifting $21 worth of merchandise from a drugstore near her home in Altamonte Springs, a suburb of Orlando, Florida. She claimed that she was innocent and it was all a mistake, based on her absent-mindedness and poor eyesight (she was legally blind at the time). The charges were dropped eventually, but the damage had been done. The supermarket tabloids depicted Hedy as destitute, and the messy episode caused the ex-celebrity to retreat further into seclusion.