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

by Parish, James Robert

  In 1943, at the height of World War II, Abbott and Costello were at their career zenith. After completing a successful warbond selling tour, Lou became ill. His ailment was diagnosed as rheumatic fever. Lou was confined to bed for several months, putting their next picture on hold and causing Abbott to suspend their weekly radio show (he struggled for a few weeks as a solo act). Then, on November 4, 1943, tragedy struck. Two days before the first birthday of Costello’s third child, Lou Jr., the infant fell into the family’s swimming pool and drowned. Later, Lou and Bud raised funds to establish the Lou Costello Jr. Youth Foundation for Underprivileged Children.

  Costello eventually returned to work. But their new movies proved less successful, and the off-camera tensions between the two escalated. (On one occasion, Lou poured a bottle of beer over Bud’s head and cracked, “Now you look as wet as you act!”) The duo broke up in 1945, but managed to patch up their professional differences and go on to new box-office success with Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein (1948).

  As moviegoers found new screen favorites—especially Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis—the veteran comics moved over to television successfully, debuting in the new medium in January 1951 on the Colgate Comedy Hour. As with their movies, the team was initially very popular, but overexposure and repeating the same routines diminished their popularity. By 1956, both their television and movie careers had seemingly sputtered to a finish. The pair starred in a Las Vegas stage revue; Abbott’s recurrent drinking problem was evident during the unsuccessful engagement. When the team split apart—permanently—shortly thereafter, Costello said that he intended to go it alone in show business: “I worried about Bud for 20 years.” Costello’s solo appearances, however, were not professionally reassuring.

  On February 26, 1959, Lou suffered a heart attack and was rushed to Doctors’ Hospital in Beverly Hills. Family and friends were in constant attendance, but Abbott did not visit his teammate. Costello’s health continued to decline and he was offered last rites, but refused the ritual.

  On March 3, 1959, Costello was feeling better, and persuaded his longtime manager, Eddie Sherman, to go out and buy him a strawberry ice cream soda. Sherman did so, and when he returned to the hospital room, he and Costello talked about future plans. After finishing the drink, Lou remarked, “That’s the best ice cream soda I ever tasted,” and then died of another heart attack.

  At the time of Costello’s death, his expartner Bud was suing him for $222,000 regarding their joint TV series, a sum that Abbott felt was due to him. When he learned of Lou’s passing, Abbott said, “Why didn’t someone tell me he was sick?” Bud was among many Hollywood celebrities—including Ronald Reagan, Red Skelton, and Danny Thomas—attending the requiem mass for Lou at the family’s North Hollywood church. Costello was buried at Calvary Cemetery in Los Angeles, in a crypt near his son, Lou Jr. In December of that same year, Lou’s grieving wife Anne (whom he had wed in 1934) died of a heart attack. Meanwhile, Lou’s final picture (The 30-Foot Bride of Candy Rock) had been released posthumously and quickly disappeared from theaters.

  Shortly before he expired, Lou had settled a long-standing tax problem with the Internal Revenue Service. His former partner Bud, however, was plagued by back taxes until his own death 15 years later. As manager Eddie Sherman would recall of his high-earning, high-spending clients, “They thought it would never stop. They spent it all each year, forgetting that they had a partner, Uncle Sam.”

  Joan Crawford

  [Lucille Fay LeSueur]

  March 23, 1904–May 10, 1977

  She was a rotten mother according to daughter Christina’s book, Mommie Dearest, but she was a consummate movie star. Once she had invented herself for the silver screen, she allowed that fabrication to rule her everyday life. She was compulsive on-screen and off, but her magnetic strength made her fascinating to watch at any point in her lengthy movie career. Throughout life, the four-times-married actress was as voracious about men as she became about consuming vodka. Her death was listed as a heart attack, but friends insisted that she was dying of cancer, and that, weary from suffering, she had orchestrated her own ending. Seemingly her death, as her life had been, was arranged efficiently and according to her own timetable. It was the Joan Crawford way. It was the only way.

  Lucille Fay was born in San Antonio, Texas, in 1904 (various sources list 1905, 1906, and 1908) to a French-Canadian laborer, Thomas LeSueur, and a Scandinavian-Irish woman, Anna Bell (Johnson). An earlier child named Daisy had died in infancy, and there was a brother named Hal. Early in Lucille’s life, Thomas abandoned his family, and her mother remarried a man named Henry Cassin. The household relocated to Lawton, Oklahoma, and Lucille (known as Billie) became Billie Cassin. After a brush with the law, Cassin moved his family to Kansas City, but his wife left him soon afterward. Billie endured a painful childhood, shunted from school to school and from one fleabag hotel room to another. By age 11, she was at a private school, Rockingham Academy, working as a kitchen drudge to pay her board and tuition—anything to get away from her overbearing mother and tyrannical brother.

  By 1922, Billie was enrolled at Stephens College in Columbia, Missouri, again working her way through school, and feeling too dumb to remain. She quit and went back to Kansas City, where she became a shopgirl and then was hired for the chorus of a traveling show. When the production folded, Billie went to Detroit (where rumor has it that she was arrested on prostitution charges, although no record of such an offense has ever been found), and then on to Chicago.

  Going from Chicago nightclub dancer to Broadway chorus girl took a year, but by 1924, the still-pudgy Lucille was on Broadway in The Passing Show of 1924, earning $35 weekly. By the start of the next year, she had finagled a screen test and been signed to a contract by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer at $75 a week. After a few brief appearances in Hollywood pictures, she gained a new name—Joan Crawford—as the result of a studio publicity contest. Her career was now officially launched, and she made her first major mark playing a vivacious flapper in the silent Our Dancing Daughters (1928). Always anxious to improve herself, Joan married actor Douglas Fairbanks Jr. in 1929, not only because he was young and handsome, but also because he was the son of Hollywood’s unofficial king, Douglas Fairbanks Sr., and the stepson of its queen, Mary Pickford.

  In the early 1930s, Joan altered her screen image to suit the new times, excelling in rags-to-riches romances like Possessed (1931) and Chained (1934). Her offscreen romance with her also-married costar Clark Gable would flicker on and off for many years, but it would never end in marriage. Crawford and Fairbanks divorced in 1933. Two years later, she married the polished Franchot Tone, a Broadway actor who was then under MGM contract. That mismatched union lasted four years, although they remained friends after their 1939 divorce. In 1938, Joan was actually labeled box-office poison by movie-theater owners but bounced back in a succession of strong film roles: The Women (1939), Susan and God (1940), and A Woman’s Face (1941). Meanwhile, in 1940, she adopted a three-month-old child, first called Joan Jr. and then named Christina. In mid-1942, she wed the unremarkable actor Phillip Terry, and, that same year, the impossible happened: after 18 years with MGM, the studio let Crawford go.

  Joan Crawford promotes the nursery service for war-industry workers sponsored by the American Women’s Voluntary Services during World War II.

  Courtesy of JC Archives

  If glamorous MGM had no further use for Joan, then Warner Bros., the hard-boiled film factory, did—as a threat to reigning studio queen Bette Davis. Nevertheless, it took more than two years for Crawford to find the proper vehicle at Warner Bros. Joan abandoned her famed shoulder-pad outfits (custom-made by the fashion designer Adrian) for a simpler look and won an Oscar for her high dramatics in Mildred Pierce (1945). The following year she and Terry divorced, and Crawford changed the name of their adopted son from Phillip Jr. to Christopher. In 1947, Joan adopted two other girls, Cynthia and Cathy, whom she labeled twins even though they were born a month apart. Crawfor
d remained with Warner Bros. until the early 1950s. Then, cut loose, she made a successful thriller (Sudden Fear, 1952) at RKO, earning her a third and final Oscar nomination.

  In May 1955, Joan married the dynamic Pepsi-Cola president Alfred N. Steele, and launched a new career for herself as a high-powered corporate goodwill ambassador. She thought Alfred would be her life’s mate, but he died of a heart attack in 1959 at age 57. With few screen parts being offered to her, the aging actress worked hard as a Pepsi executive.

  Some reviewers called her comeback movie the triumph of two old has-beens, but Whatever Happened to Baby Jane? (1962) was proof that two veteran stars (Crawford and Bette Davis) could work cinema magic. The twisted horror story of a uniquely Hollywood nightmare was a surprise hit at the box office. It gave a new forcefulness to Joan’s remaining moviemaking years in the ’60s, which included such movies as Strait-Jacket (1964) and Berserk! (1967).

  By the mid-1970s, Joan, alienated from her children, was living a subdued lifestyle alone in New York City, having been forced out of her Pepsi promotional post. She had become a Christian Scientist and had stopped drinking. Joan maintained a small circle of friends, but withdrew from public appearances. She told a gossip-columnist intimate, “I don’t have to go out anymore. I don’t have to be on display. I’ve served my time as the public Joan Crawford. Now for the first time in her life, Joan Crawford is doing exactly as she pleases.” No longer dying her graying hair brown, she spent much of her time watching TV soap operas and bewailing the fact that Hollywood had forgotten her.

  The last months of Crawford’s life are full of fact, fiction, and lots of legend. In early 1977, she injured her back while housecleaning (one of her favorite pastimes). In February 1977, she began giving away personal effects, items which she insisted she would “no longer need.” By that May, Joan had become very ill, had lost a good deal of weight, and needed the constant attention of a physician and a daily nurse. She spent Mother’s Day (May 8) bedridden. The next day she gave her beloved Shih Tzu dog to friends who lived in the country, asking them to care for it. According to a close associate, Joan arose early on Tuesday, May 10, and asked her maid and another helper if they had eaten breakfast. She was about to have her usual wake-up meal of tea and graham crackers. As the cup of tea was placed on her night table, she quietly passed away. It was about 10:00 A.M. Friends later commented that on this day, Joan was extremely well-dressed, suggesting that she knew the end had arrived. (One rumor has it that Joan also made sure to inform her lawyer beforehand.)

  Many people wondered why no autopsy was performed on Crawford—who had been a superstar, after all—to clear up the matter of her death. The local assistant medical examiner explained, “I didn’t think the circumstances called for one. There was nothing in my evaluation to lead me to suspect in any way.... I do know the location of the body, in her own bed, and she appeared to be well looked after. There was no disarray, no disorder. . . . The replies to all the questions I asked made me feel the cause of death was natural.”

  According to Joan’s final wishes, she was cremated (some insisted the rush was to hide the cause of her death). Her ashes were interred in an urn next to Alfred Steele’s in the Ferncliff Cemetery in Hartsdale, New York. Memorial services were conducted in New York (on Friday the 13th) at the Frank E. Campbell Funeral Home in Manhattan. Three of her four children (Cathy, Christina, and Christopher) attended the simple ceremony, at which Joan’s Christian Science practitioner read Bible selections. A far more elaborate memorial service was held on May 17, 1977, at All Souls Unitarian Church in New York City. More than 1,500 people attended the occasion, which was officiated by Reverend Dr. Walter Donald Kring. He read Joan’s favorite essay, “Desiderata,” by Max Ehrman. Eulogies were delivered by Joan’s former costars Geraldine Brooks and Cliff Robertson. Pearl Bailey sang “He’ll Understand.” Daughters Christina and Cindy attended the service; son Christopher and daughter Cathy did not. Yet another tribute service was held in Beverly Hills.

  Joan’s will, made much of in Christina’s book and movie of the same name, Mommie Dearest (1981), stated: “It is my intention to make no provision herein for my son Christopher or my daughter Christina, for reasons which are well known to them.” Crawford left $77,500 each in trust funds for Cathy and Cynthia. Christopher and Christina contested the will and settled for a total of $55,000. As part of the compromise, a plaster bust of Joan (inscribed “To Christina”) was given to her eldest daughter.

  In mid-1993, Joan’s Mildred Pierce Academy Award was sold at auction for a whopping $68,500. In 1998, Crawford’s outspoken daughter, Christina, by now the operator of a bed-and-breakfast business in Idaho, published a 20th-anniversary updated version of her highly controversial Mommie Dearest. Promoting the tell-all book, Christina insisted, “I have no regrets about telling my story. It put the focus on child abuse for the first time. . . . It’s helped many people.”

  Brad Davis

  November 6, 1949–September 8, 1991

  When actor Brad Davis passed away on September 8, 1991, the industry was shocked that he had died so young, at age 41, and that the cause of death was AIDS-related complications. (Allegedly he contracted the deadly virus from a dirty needle used for drug taking.) For six years, he had kept his illness a deep secret from everyone except his wife and his doctors, so that he would not be blacklisted in the entertainment business and could continue acting. (Davis had even refused early treatment for the disease, fearing industry gossip; he also dropped many of his friends, worried they might suspect the truth of his physical condition.) In a book proposal written shortly before his “sudden” death and published in a Los Angeles newspaper two days after it occurred, Brad described Hollywood’s double standard. It was an industry “that gives umpteen benefits and charity affairs with proceeds going to [AIDS] research. But in actual fact, if an actor is even rumored to have HIV, he gets no support on an individual basis. He does not work.” Keeping his lethal disease in the closet, Davis got acting jobs almost to the end. Not since Rock Hudson’s death from AIDS in 1985 had the movie business—and the world at large—been so focused (albeit temporarily) on the epidemic disease.

  Davis was born in Tallahassee, Florida. Growing up, he acted in high school plays. When he won a talent contest for music, he relocated to Atlanta, Georgia. Later, Brad studied in New York at the Academy of Dramatic Arts and made his off-Broadway debut in Crystal and Fox (1973). In subsequent seasons, he was in such productions as The Elusive Angel and Entertaining Mr. Sloane, and, years later, appeared in Los Angeles in The Normal Heart, as the lover of a man dying from AIDS. (That play’s author, Larry Kramer, would eulogize Davis: “He brought fury and overwhelming love to the role of Ned. He was also one of the first straight actors with the guts to play gay roles.”)

  Brad Davis, the star of Midnight Express (1978).

  Courtesy of JC Archives

  In 1974–75, Brad spent ten months in the TV soap opera How to Survive a Marriage, which showcased his sensual good looks (albeit not those of a traditional tall, handsome leading man). After other TV productions, he made his feature-film debut in the highly acclaimed Midnight Express (1978). For his powerful performance as an American drug smuggler jailed in a horrific Turkish prison, Davis won a Golden Globe Award. His acting career should have zoomed upward, but instead, it stalled. This was due mostly to his drug and alcohol dependency, and as he later admitted, the sudden fame that had swelled his ego and caused him to make wrong career decisions. Nevertheless, he was impressive in the few roles he could obtain, especially in Chariots of Fire (1981). Davis gave charged performances as the attorney general in Robert Kennedy and His Times (1985) and as a racist in Chiefs (1985), both of them television miniseries. In TV’s The Caine Mutiny Court-Martial (1988), Brad shone as the overwhelmed, twisted Captain Queeg. He was in the movie comedy Rosalie Goes Shopping (1989) and played opposite Jill Clayburgh in Unspeakable Acts (1990). His last work was in Hangfire (1991) and in the cable-TV movie A Habitation o
f Dragons (1992), which was completed in June 1991.

  Not that long before the end, Davis decided to go public with his plight, but then became too weakened physically to do so. Instead, he chose to spend his remaining days quietly at home with his family. He died in September 1991, ending his life by assisted suicide (an overdose of pills from a still-anonymous friend). He was then living in Studio City, California, with his longtime spouse, casting agent Susan Bluestein, and their daughter Alexandra (born in 1983).

  The funeral service was private and quiet, but the memorial tribute was anything but. Amid tremendous media coverage, it was held on September 20, 1991, at Hollywood’s James A. Doolittle Theatre, with some 250 people in attendance. Coworkers and industry figures not only reminisced about Brad’s rich career, but spoke directly about the AIDS phobia that was rampant in the entertainment industry. His widow later stated that she was being open about Brad’s illness because “he didn’t want to be one more person who said he died of something else. . . . He didn’t want to be one more faceless person.”

  Six years later Susan’s book, After Midnight: The Life and Death of Brad Davis— which she said fulfilled her promise to Brad to write his story—was published. Among the revelations was that Brad had overcome childhood mother-son incest (his mother’s way of getting back at her alcoholic spouse), survived in his first years in New York City as a street hustler (which led to a nervous breakdown), and overcame his addiction to alcohol and drugs, if not to sex, by joining 12-step programs in 1981.

  Sammy Davis Jr.

  December 8, 1925–May 16, 1990

  In 1989, when his new autobiography, Why Me?, was published, the previously high-living, fast-spending Sammy Davis Jr. confided, “The guy from 25 years ago doesn’t exist anymore. The guy from 10 years ago doesn’t exist anymore. And I hope 10 years from now, I’ll be able to say that this guy doesn’t exist anymore. He’s a better being, a more caring person.” Soon thereafter, “Mr. Bojangles,” a heavy-duty cigarette smoker, was diagnosed with throat cancer. Show-business friends rallied with a lavish benefit special that was telecast in early 1990, but by then Davis’s disease had grown to fatal proportions.