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

by Parish, James Robert

  On the plus side, Anne Macdonald’s 1992 book Feminine Ingenuity finally acknowledged publicly that back in 1941, Lamarr had invented a sophisticated and unique anti-jamming device to foil Nazi radar during World War II. She and her partner, the composer George Antheil, patriotically took their patented device to the War Department, which rejected its use. Years later, when the patent expired, a big corporation adapted the Lamarr-Antheil invention, which finally saw use on U.S. ships during the Cuban blockade of 1962. Variations of Hedy’s device are still utilized today to speed satellite communications around the globe. A disgruntled Lamarr told the press in 1992: “Never a letter, never a thank you, never money. I guess they just take and forget about a person.” In March 1997, she was awarded a prize for “blazing new trails on the electronic frontier” at the Computers, Freedom, and Privacy Conference in San Francisco. One of her sons, Anthony Loder, accepted the award on Hedy’s behalf. The reclusive Lamarr provided an audio message of thanks to the attendees.

  By the mid-1990s, Hedy had become almost completely cut off from the world. Her failing eyesight became even worse, and she was unable to get around easily. She hardly ever went out, not wishing the public to see what time had done to her movie-star looks. Reportedly, she had few friends and rarely saw any of her children.

  On January 19, 2000, Hedy (by then a great-grandmother) passed away in her sleep. Contrary to rumors, she did not die destitute. She left an estate worth more than $3 million to her daughter Denise (a cosmetics salesperson in Seattle, Washington) and her son Anthony, who lives in Los Angeles. Her adopted child James—who was estranged from Hedy—was not mentioned in the will. In late 2000, James, a 60-year-old retired policeman in southern California, brought action against his mother’s estate, claiming he and his parent had reconciled before her death and alleging that he was her natural son.

  Not long before Lamarr’s death, Vanity Fair magazine published a page of the onetime femme fatales responses to questions they had recently asked her. She displayed a wit the public saw too little of during her heyday. When asked what she would change if she could alter one thing about herself, she quipped, “My nail polish.” And her response to what situations cause her to lie, she said, “When I am tired of standing.” But she could be serious. Her biggest dislike was snobbery; her greatest achievement was “having been a parent.” When asked what her life’s motto was, the glamour girl responded, “Do not take things too seriously.”

  Thus spoke the legendary Hedy Lamarr, who Hollywood never took seriously enough.

  Florence Lawrence

  January 2, 1886–December 27, 1938

  How indicative of Hollywood that its very first movie star—from the pioneering silent days—would end her days neglected by everyone. Feeling totally rejected by the industry she helped to bolster, she killed herself by eating ant paste.

  Florence Lawrence was born in 1886 in Hamilton, Ontario, where her mother, Charlotte A. Bridgewood (whose professional name was Lotta Lawrence), managed a traveling stock company and was raising her two boys on her own. At the age of three, Florence made an impromptu stage debut, singing “Down in a Shady Dell.” Thereafter, billed as “Baby Florence, the Child Wonder,” she insisted on being part of her mother’s productions.

  By the summer of 1906, Florence and her mother were in New York City seeking Broadway work. Stage parts proved elusive, but Florence (and her parent) were hired—because the young talent could ride a horse—by the Edison Company for a one-reeler silent picture, Daniel Boone; or, Pioneer Days in America (1907). This job led to work at the Vitagraph Company, where the main actress was Florence Turner. (In those early moviemaking days executives avoided promoting players by name, worrying that they would then demand huge raises. Thus Turner was known merely as “the Vitagraph Girl.”) Being ambitious, Florence Lawrence soon left Vitagraph by convincing D. W. Griffith to hire her at Biograph, where she became known as “the Biograph Girl.” In 1908, she married the actor-director Harry Salter.

  Even though she was a popular, hardworking screen player, Biograph refused to meet Florence’s requested salary and fired her in 1909. Thinking audiences would accept a substitute, they cast another performer as their new “Biograph Girl.” Moviegoers, however, observed the difference and wrote strong letters of protest to the studio. Biograph did not rehire Lawrence, but Carl Laemmle’s Independent Motion Picture Company (IMP) jumped at the chance. Florence became the “IMP Girl.”

  In February 1910, newspaper stories (of unknown origin) insisted that the former Biograph Girl had died in a St. Louis streetcar accident. Laemmle shrewdly had Florence arrive in that city by train; crowds quickly recognized her and swamped the actress. The event proved that she was indeed a recognizable personality, worshipped by her large coterie of fans.

  Lawrence made dozens of short movies for IMP in 1910. By 1912, she and Salter had a deal with Carl Laemmle to create their own company, with studios based at Fort Lee, New Jersey. Florence used the sizeable profits resulting from this venture to buy a 50-acre estate in Westwood, New Jersey.

  While filming Pawns of Destiny (1915), Lawrence was burned coming down a staircase during a tricky fire scene. When she returned to the set a month later, she had facial scars, a back problem that would become chronic, and badly frayed nerves. Nevertheless, Florence completed her studio contract, then collapsed. She soon divorced Salter, whom she blamed for forcing her to do the dangerous stunt in the first place.

  Exhausted by these various stresses, Florence remained away from filmmaking for two years. In 1916, she made her first long feature, but the strain was too much. She had a relapse and was bedridden, suffering from complete paralysis, for four months.

  In 1921 Lawrence married a car salesman, Charles B. Woodring, and attempted a screen comeback. However, the industry had greatly changed during her “retirement.” She went to Hollywood for the first time, having always worked in pictures in other parts of the country, but her vehicle, The Unfoldment (1922), went unnoticed by the public. Frantic for screen work by the mid-1920s, Florence had her nose shortened, hoping to incite a fresh career; she continued to receive only small roles. She next operated a beauty-supply business in the late 1920s, but this too failed. She and Woodring divorced in 1931 and the next year, she wed Henry Bolton. That union ended five months later after he physically abused her.

  In 1936, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer made the gesture of hiring one-time stars for bit roles (at $75 per week). This created a lot of publicity for the studio. Among the veterans hired was Florence, who by now was reduced to sharing a small West Hollywood apartment on Westbourne Avenue with two female acquaintances.

  On December 27, 1938, convinced the public had long forgotten her, Florence did not appear at the studio for her afternoon call. Instead, at her apartment, she combined cough syrup with ant paste and drank the lethal mixture. Her screams led to an ambulance being summoned and she was rushed to a Beverly Hills hospital. She soon died there.

  Ironically, the first movie star the public knew by name was buried at Hollywood Memorial Park in an unmarked grave.

  Fortunately for moviegoers, the trailblazing Miss Lawrence has been rediscovered in recent years. First she was the subject of a full-length 1999 biography by Kelly R. Brown. Then, in mid-2000, came The Biograph Girl, a novel by William J. Mann. This novel explored the fictional premise that Lawrence had not died in 1938 and was still alive, living in a nursing home in Buffalo, New York. Also in mid-2000, the Silent Movie Theatre in Los Angeles held a two-day retrospective of Florence Lawrence’s work, showing 10 of her short subjects made for D. W. Griffith.

  Mary Pickford

  [Gladys Marie Smith]

  April 9, 1893–May 29, 1979

  In the early twentieth century, Canadian-born Mary Pickford became “America’s Sweetheart,” a smiling “good girl” with golden-brown curls. The petite miss (barely five feet tall) reigned supreme in an age when the movie industry was primitive, naive, and optimistic. As it gradually became more hardened a
nd cynical in the 1930s and beyond, Mary slowly retired into obscurity at her legendary estate, Pickfair, in Beverly Hills. When she passed away, a frail and detached woman of 86, her death reminded the world of the bygone era when she and her partners at United Artists Pictures—Charlie Chaplin, Douglas Fairbanks Sr. (her second husband), and D. W. Griffith—had so dominated the American motion-picture business.

  Mary Pickford was born Gladys Smith in Toronto, Canada, in 1893, the oldest of three children of an Englishman named John Charles Smith and his Irish wife, Charlotte (Hennessey) Smith. When Mary was four, her father died; her mother had to run a penny-candy concession stand and take in sewing to make ends meet. Because money was so short, Gladys had only six or seven months of formal schooling as a youngster. At age five she made her stage debut, with her sister Lottie, in The Silver King at the Toronto Opera House. Realizing that there was money to be made in show business, Charlotte Smith became an overnight stage mother and supervised her daughter’s career up until her death in 1928.

  Between 1901 and 1906, Gladys (billed as “Baby Gladys Smith”) and her family were on the road, touring with American theater companies. Soon the family’s sights were set on Broadway. Charlotte negotiated an audition for Gladys with the austere stage impresario David Belasco. He cast her in The Warrens of Virginia (1907) and gave her the stage name of Mary Pickford.

  While with the show in Chicago, Mary saw her first movie, but never thought she would have to stoop to working in the “flickers.” Needing work in 1909, however, she went to American Mutoscope and Biograph Company on Manhattan’s East 14th Street, where the esteemed director D. W. Griffith hired her at $5 a day. She took any part offered. Before long, she was earning $175 a week—a very high salary in those days.

  By 1913, Mary was making features for Paramount Company-Famous Players. It was for Tess of the Storm Country (1914) that she was publicized as “America’s Sweetheart.” She reached a professional peak with Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm and The Poor Little Rich Girl, both issued in 1917, and both showcasing the quite adult Mary as a youngster. Meanwhile, while employed at the Biograph Studio, she had met actor Owen Moore; they were married in 1911. Her career soon outshone his.

  Always astute about the financial side of moviemaking, in 1919 Mary formed United Artists Pictures with Douglas Fairbanks Sr., Charlie Chaplin, and D. W. Griffith. It was a trailblazing concept at the time for actors and directors to be in charge of a studio. The following year, she divorced Moore and on March 30, 1920, married Fairbanks, the screen swashbuckler and comedian. Contrary to their initial fears, the legal union of Douglas and Mary only served to enhance their fame. When they toured in the United States and abroad, fans mobbed them everywhere. Fairbanks built Pickford a splendid 50-room mansion overlooking a 15-acre estate in Beverly Hills. When it was finished, Pickfair became the prized destination for visiting celebrities from all over the world.

  Although Mary attempted to break out of her typical screen persona with costume dramas such as Dorothy Vernon of Haddon Hall (1924), the public demanded that Mary continue to play the waif. She obliged for a while. She and Fairbanks made only one feature together, the talkie The Taming of the Shrew (1929).

  Mary won an Oscar for Coquette (1929) and made a few more feature films, but after Secrets (1933), she retired, insisting, “I wanted to stop before I was asked to stop.” (There were several aborted comeback efforts, but it was always another actress who finally played the part because Mary backed out of the project or someone more appropriate became available.) With their careers faltering, Mary and Douglas both sought consolation elsewhere. Douglas fell in love with British musical-comedy actress Sylvia Hawkes, who was then married to Lord Anthony Ashley. After a round-robin of divorces, Fairbanks married Sylvia. (He would die in 1939.) In June 1937, Mary wed Charles “Buddy” Rogers, 11 years younger and a foot taller than the petite movie star. He had costarred with her in My Best Gal (1927). In the 1940s they adopted two children, Ronald and Roxanne.

  As time passed, Mary withdrew more and more from the movie colony that she had once ruled into a private world of alcoholism and bittersweet memories. After a 1965 trip abroad, she literally took to her bed, insisting that she had worked since she was five years old and now wanted a very long rest. Her husband became the major buffer between her and reality, constantly apologizing for, explaining away, and bringing messages to the outside world from “dear Mary.” Infrequently, she would roam the mighty halls of Pickfair at night. Certain house rules completed the surreal environment. When guests came by, they could speak to Mary only through a house phone. Newspapers brought to her had every potentially disturbing article clipped out. Her daily diet reportedly consisted largely of almost a quart of whiskey.

  In early 1976, the nearly forgotten Mary was persuaded to accept a special Academy Award “in recognition of her unique contributions to the film industry and the development of film as an artistic medium.” For the March 29, 1976, Oscar show, Mary’s segment was pre-taped at Pickfair. Mary, with wig slightly askew, accepted her statuette and murmured a few words. The highly publicized event proved to be scary rather than the intended affectionate nod to an industry pioneer.

  Mary Pickford and her husband, Buddy Rogers, pose at the stables of their palatial Beverly Hills home, Pickfair, in the 1940s.

  Courtesy of JC Archives

  In her remaining years, Mary grew more sickly and distant, finding escape in drink and the Bible. Pickford finally died of a stroke on May 29, 1979, at Santa Monica Hospital. She left an estate estimated to be worth $50 million. Much of it went to her charity, the Mary Pickford Foundation, which supported various aspects of the picture industry. She is buried at Forest Lawn Memorial Park in Glendale, California, in an outdoor garden near the Mystery of Life section. Her mother, brother, and sister are buried there as well.

  Two years after Mary’s death, Rogers married Beverly Ricondo, a real-estate agent he had known for a long time. Rogers would pass away on April 21, 1999. Pickfair was eventually purchased by Pia Zadora and her then-husband, Meshulam Riklis, for $7 million. The original main house was torn down to make way for a new showcase home. No sooner had construction been completed—after six years—than the couple divorced. The past was gone, making way for a new future.

  Martha Raye

  [Margaret Teresa Yvonne Reed]

  August 27, 1916–October 19, 1994

  Over the decades, this raucous entertainer played in vaudeville and starred in movies, on radio and TV, and at nightclubs. Funmeister Milton Berle once ranked her as one of the four funniest women in the world. Within the entertainment industry and to the public, she was lovingly known as Miss Big Mouth because of her expressive way of mugging. But Martha Raye was far more than “just” a brash, exuberant, and always expert clown. She had a marvelous singing voice, a shapely figure, and legs that rivaled those of the more famous Marlene Dietrich. On the downside, Maggie (as friends called her) had very bad luck in choosing her mates, and often turned to drink to escape her problems. And ironically, in some people’s minds the worst mistake Raye ever made was giving her time, love, and devotion to entertain (and nurse) the troops on the front lines during the Vietnam War. For her selflessness, she received the designation of honorary Marine Lieutenant Colonel and was officially allowed to wear the Green Beret symbol. Yet this branded her as a hawk on the home front. In politically liberal Hollywood, Martha was passed over repeatedly for work because of her Vietnam War activities.

  The future star was born in a charity hospital in Butte, Montana, in 1916. Her Irish-born parents, Pete and Peggy, were minor vaudeville singers who were struggling through a Midwestern tour at the time. Within a few years, little Margaret (the first of three children) was part of the act. She grew up on the road, and always claimed that she picked her stage name of Martha Raye out of a phone book.

  Martha was on Broadway in the short-lived revue Calling All Stars (1934) before turning to club work. Playing in Los Angeles, she was spotted by film direc
tor Norman Taurog, who cast her in a Bing Crosby vehicle (Rhythm on the Range, 1936) that he was currently directing. On camera she sang “Mr. Paganini,” which would become her trademark number. With her vocals and slapstick work (including a hilarious drunk routine), Martha made a big hit with moviegoers in this Western comedy, and she was signed to a Paramount Pictures contract. During the next five years she cavorted through numerous popular vehicles, often teamed with Bob Hope. In 1940, deemed “overexposed” by the studio that had tossed her into film after film, she was let go.

  Martha Raye and her pet, Blanca, greet the public.

  © 1991 by Albert L. Ortega

  In the early 1940s Martha bounced around from studio to studio and worked freelance. During World War II, she went on a North African USO tour along with Kay Francis, Mitzi Mayfair, and Carole Landis. Long after the others returned to Hollywood, Martha stayed on to entertain and often nurse the soldiers. Her rewards included an honorary captainship and yellow fever, which she contracted somewhere along the way. In 1947, the lofty Charles Chaplin hired Martha as one of his leading ladies for Monsieur Verdoux. She received strong reviews, but the public was put off by the black comedy itself.

  When not making films, Raye headlined in clubs, did TV (her well-received Martha Raye Show was on the air from 1953 to 1956), and got married and divorced. Her first trip to the altar was with Paramount Pictures makeup artist Buddy Westmore in 1938; they divorced months later. That same year, she wed composer and arranger David Rose, but by 1941 they had parted. A far happier, if very complex relationship, was her 1942 marriage to the expert dancer Nick Condos (of the Condos Brothers). Their child Melodye was born in 1943. Even after they divorced in 1953, Condos would remain her business manager. In 1954, Martha tied the knot with dancer Edward Begley. In 1956 they divorced; that same year, she took an almost-fatal overdose of sleeping pills. After she began dating her bodyguard Robert O’Shea, his wife sued Martha for alienating the affections of her husband. The suit was settled out of court and Raye and O’Shea became man and wife in 1958. That marriage lasted just four years.