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

by Parish, James Robert

  In the late 1950s, Clark made December-May romantic comedies such as Teacher’s Pet (1958), opposite Doris Day. Then Gable found the meaty screen role he had been searching for: the aging wrangler who corrals wild mustangs in The Misfits. It was a prestige production, with a script by the famous playwright Arthur Miller, direction by veteran John Huston, and a cast that included Marilyn Monroe and Montgomery Clift. The out-of-shape Gable was so enthusiastic about the assignment and his $800,000 salary that he embarked on a crash diet. By the time shooting began, the six-foot, one-inch megastar had slimmed down from 230 to 195 pounds.

  Filming on location in the brutal Nevada heat proved to be a nightmare for all concerned. The terribly insecure Monroe was feuding with Miller, her playwright husband, and was even more exasperating than usual on the set. Anxious to prove he was still a virile leading man, Gable insisted on doing many of his own stunts. In the scorching heat, he allowed himself to be dragged through the dust by a wild horse. The grueling scene (which required several retakes) left him bloodied, rope-burned, and bruised. In mid-October, he returned to Hollywood for two additional weeks of filming. When the movie was finished at last, Clark told a business associate, “Christ, I’m glad this picture’s finished! She [Monroe] damn near gave me a heart attack.”

  Two days later, on November 6, 1960, while changing a tractor tire, Gable suffered what he thought were stomach pains. His wife, Kay, rushed him from their Encino, California, ranch to Hollywood Presbyterian Hospital for emergency treatment. Medical tests revealed that he had suffered a mild coronary thrombosis. He was hospitalized, with the pregnant Kay moving into his private suite to be near him, and he seemed to be recovering. President Dwight D. Eisenhower, himself a heart-attack survivor, sent Gable a telegram: “Be a good boy, Clark, and do as the doctors tell you to do.” But on November 16, 1960, at about 11:00 P.M., as he was flipping through a magazine, Clark’s head nodded back. He had died from a second heart attack.

  With the U.S. Air Force participating in his Hollywood funeral, Gable was buried at Forest Lawn Memorial Park in Glendale, California. With his wife’s approval, he was laid to rest in a crypt next to that of Carole Lombard in the Great Mausoleum. His will left everything to Kay, with the exception of a house in North Hollywood that he bequeathed to his ex-wife Josephine Dillon (who died in 1971). Five months later—on March 20, 1961—Kay gave birth to Gable’s only child, a boy named John Clark Gable. Kay herself would die of a heart attack in 1983, and John would grow up to become a race-car driver and sometime screen actor.

  Clark Gable’s last words on-screen in The Misfits had been: “Just head for the big star straight on. The highways under it take us right home.”

  Greta Garbo

  [Greta Lovisa Gustafsson]

  September 18, 1905–April 15, 1990

  Just as with other twentieth-century icons like Marilyn Monroe, James Dean, Judy Garland, and Elvis Presley, interest in Greta Garbo never seems to wane—even decades after her last feature film. Her legend remains today as enigmatic and enticing as it was in her heyday during the late 1920s and early 1930s in gilt-edged Hollywood. The complex nature she displayed was not merely a publicity artifice created for the silver screen. She was, and will always remain, hard to fathom by ordinary standards—even as new revelations appear in various books and documentaries discussing assorted aspects of her bisexuality, interests, politics, personality, and mental health (she suffered either from bouts of depression or mild schizophrenia).

  The saddest part of Garbo’s intriguing saga is how she increasingly became a victim of her own oversized legend: the eternal goddess who wanted—demanded—to be alone. In actuality, she wished to be left alone, which was something entirely different. (In 1946, she told reporters: “I haven’t been elusive. Being in the newspapers is awfully silly to me. Anyone who does a job properly has a right to privacy.”) And to make this celebrated individual more complicated, there was a side to her personality, even in the last years, demanding that she shape and preserve her image for the ages.

  Greta was born in Stockholm, Sweden, in 1905. Her father, Karl Alfred, was a laborer and frequently unemployed. He became very ill when Greta was 13; she left school to tend to him, but he died the next year. Her first paying work was soaping men’s faces in a barbershop. Later, she worked for the PUB department store, doing an advertising short subject for them in 1921. This led eventually to her auditioning for and winning a scholarship to the Royal Stockholm Theater School. The well-known director Mauritz Stiller hired Greta to play the ingenue in his movie The Atonement of Gosta Berling (1923). In 1925, she appeared in G. W. Pabst’s Die Freudlosse Gasse (The Street of Sorrow). At the time, MGM mogul Louis B. Mayer was in Europe on a talent hunt. He wanted to sign Mauritz Stiller to come to Hollywood and direct features for him, but the latter would only accept the deal if Greta was also given a studio contract. To please Stiller, Garbo was hired at a $350-weekly salary.

  Greta Garbo in a contemplative mood in the 1930s.

  Courtesy of JC Archives

  When she arrived in Hollywood, plump and frizzy-haired, MGM was unsure what to do with her. After slimming down, the five-foot, seven-inch actress, who now weighed 129 pounds, was assigned to play a Spanish peasant in the silent film The Torrent (1926). Stiller was assigned to direct her next film, The Temptress (1926), but was removed due to studio politics and later returned to Sweden, where he died in 1928. (During the production of The Temptress, Garbo’s 23-year-old sister Alva died, but Greta wasn’t allowed to take time off to return home for the funeral.)

  Audiences responded mightily to Garbo in her next feature, Flesh and the Devil (1927), which costarred the dashing John Gilbert. For many, it was a revelation to see a woman on camera being as passionate as a man could be. Now much in demand, Greta bullied the studio with threats of returning to Sweden if she didn’t get a $5,000-a-week salary (plus other demands) instead of her contractual $600 per week. Her terms were met by MGM and she joined Gilbert for Love (1927), a popular version of Leo Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina.

  Off camera, Garbo and Gilbert had a tempestuous love affair, although each was more enticed by the notion of being in love and confirming their screen image as great lovers. Several times John asked Greta to marry him, only for the Swedish sphinx to change her mind at the last minute. On one such occasion in May 1929, Gilbert rebounded by hastening to Las Vegas to wed actress Ina Claire (though that union was short-lived).

  Hollywood had made the transition to sound films in the late 1920s, but MGM was fearful of presenting Garbo to the world with her still-thick Scandinavian accent. Finally, in 1930 she made the sound film Anna Christie, and the studio could brag, “Garbo talks!” Everyone was suitably impressed and her career continued with a mix of hokum (Mata Hari, 1931), elegance (Grand Hotel, 1932), and regal drama (Queen Christina, 1933). The latter featured her former lover, John Gilbert, who had fallen on hard times in the talkie era. By then he had divorced Ina Claire and married the young and beautiful actress Virginia Bruce.

  Meanwhile, the elusive Garbo, who refused to conform to Hollywood’s—or anyone else’s—standards, preferred to spend her time away from the studio with her great friend Mercedes de Acosta, with whom she had an on-and-off affair (as did Marlene Dietrich, Greta’s great movie rival). Garbo’s other intimates included Salka Viertel, a screenwriter, and her Queen Christina director and sometime lover, Rouben Mamoulian. Never one to care particularly about possessions or staying put, Greta would live in 11 successive houses during the 16 years she spent in Hollywood.

  By 1935, Garbo was earning $250,000 per film. She turned in two of her finest performances during this year: Anna Karenina and Camille (released 1936). But after the expensive Conquest (1938) failed to break even at the box office, the studio reassessed her value to them. Deciding that audiences were tired of her gloomy story lines, they presented her in a bright comedy, Ninotchka (1939). It succeeded, so the studio released Two-Faced Woman (1941), a would-be comedy that sought to demyst
ify the Garbo image. It was unpopular at the box office and offended Greta’s legion of fans, who didn’t care for the “new” Garbo. She and MGM ended their association.

  Now that she was free of film commitments, Garbo’s popularity suffered—especially since (unlike other Hollywood notables) she refused to participate in wartime fund-raising. But to do so would have gone against the actress’s very reserved nature. (She did donate—and this was her only contribution—$5,000 to the Finnish War Relief Fund.) Because of the times and the adverse publicity, she kept a lower-than-usual profile during the World War II years. Only years later, in 1976, was it revealed that Garbo had assisted England during wartime by identifying high-level Nazi sympathizers in Stockholm, and providing introductions and carrying communications for British agents.

  What was supposed to be a temporary vacation from movies turned into permanent retirement. In the late 1940s and early 1950s, several studios attempted to engineer Greta’s comeback. She was offered—but eventually declined—the lead in I Remember Mama (1948), and almost accepted the title role in My Cousin Rachel (1952).

  Still reclusive, although occasionally glimpsed with the elite of international society, Garbo abandoned Hollywood. She chose to divide her time between the French Riviera, Switzerland, and a seven-room apartment on New York’s Upper East Side. She became a naturalized American citizen in 1951. In 1954, the famed actress, who never won an Academy Award, was given an honorary Oscar “for her unforgettable screen performances.”

  No longer an active film star, Garbo rejoiced in the supposed anonymity of going about incognito on the streets of Manhattan, donning simple outfits, large hats, and big shoes and wearing hardly any makeup. But her profile was so famous that she was always recognized. One of her intimates during this exile period was the British photographer and designer Cecil Beaton, a social climber who lost favor with Garbo when he published his diaries detailing his intimate relationship with her. Then there was the well-to-do George Schlee (who became Garbo’s financial advisor and admirer) and his wife Valentina, a designer. Greta created a bizarre threesome of interlocking relationships and jealousies with this couple, a situation that was exacerbated because they all lived at the same New York City address. Schlee died in 1964, and Garbo and Valentina spent the next 25 years avoiding each other, although they only lived four floors apart at 450 East 52nd Street. Abroad, Garbo frequently hobnobbed with jet-setters such as Aristotle Onassis and the Rothschild family.

  In her last years, the enigmatic, aloof Garbo remained mostly in Manhattan, spending many days watching TV game shows (especially The Hollywood Squares) and window-shopping. One of her frequent walking partners was Raymond Daum, the son of a Los Angeles contractor who had built movie sets for Paramount Pictures during the silent era. Raymond met Garbo (or “G.G.,” as he and others called her) in 1963. For the next 20 years, until he moved to Austin, Texas, they would stroll about the city three times a week, always at her command.

  In the late 1980s, Garbo’s kidneys began to fail and she had to abandon her walks through Manhattan. She became closer to her few remaining relatives, especially to her niece Gray, the daughter of her late brother Sven (who had emigrated to the United States years before). She also had a devoted assistant, Clare Kojer, for more than 20 years at the end of her life. Garbo now had to undergo periodic dialysis treatment at New York Hospital; these treatments came to rule her existence.

  On Wednesday, April 11, 1990, Garbo spent seven hours at New York Hospital, but was then sent home. That Friday, she went back for her regular treatment, but did not return home. She died at New York Hospital on Sunday, April 15, with her niece at her bedside. (In keeping with her longtime obsession for privacy, even the star’s death remained a secret from the media for several hours.) Two days later, private funeral services were conducted at the Frank E. Campbell Funeral Home in Manhattan.

  At Garbo’s wish, her body was cremated. The location of her ashes remained secret because her family was fearful of unwanted publicity. Thus she wasn’t buried in the family plot in Sweden. Her niece Gray Reisfield of Passaic, New Jersey, inherited an estimated $55 million from Garbo, which included an extensive art collection and real estate in New York City and Beverly Hills. When the late star’s personal effects were auctioned off at an estate sale, they generated more than $19 million.

  In one of her final interviews, the still-enigmatic legend said, “There are many things in your heart you can never tell to another person. They are you, your private joys and sorrows, and you can never tell them. You cheapen yourself, the inside of yourself, when you tell them.”

  John Garfield

  [Jacob “Julius” Garfinkle]

  March 4, 1913–May 21, 1952

  For years, John Garfield played society’s victim, the hard-fisted antihero with a massive chip on his shoulder. Garfield’s real life ultimately took a page from his own movies by making him “fate’s whipping boy.” He ended his life thrashed roundly by the Establishment.

  He was born Jacob Garfinkle in 1913 to a Russian-immigrant couple. His early childhood was spent in poverty on New York City’s Lower East Side and then in the tenement district of Brooklyn’s Brownsville. The principal of the Bronx junior high school that “Julie” (as Julius was called) later attended diverted him from juvenile delinquency by encouraging the teenage troublemaker to try amateur boxing, and later to sample dramatics and debating. Jacob dropped out of high school in 1929 to study acting at the American Laboratory Theater. He was briefly on Broadway that same year, and in 1930 he entered, but didn’t win, a Golden Gloves boxing tournament. In 1932 Jacob played in the stage production Counsellor-at-Law, both on tour and in New York. Later, he hitchhiked to the West Coast, where he was a migrant farm worker for a while. He made his screen debut in an unbilled bit part in the musical Footlight Parade (1933).

  Mrs. John Garfield (wearing dark glasses) with her nine-year-old son, David, as Rabbi Louis I. Newman recites a prayer for the late actor John Garfield at Westchester Hills Cemetery in New York in May 1952.

  Courtesy of Photofest

  By 1934, Jacob Garfield (his new surname) was apprenticing with the Group Theater in New York and married to his school-days sweetheart, Roberta Seidman. (They would have three children: Katharine, who died of strep throat in 1945; David Patton, who became an actor under the name John Garfield Jr.; and Julie, who became an actress.) After playing the lead on Broadway in Having Wonderful Time (1937), he looked forward to starring in Golden Boy, but playwright Clifford Odets instead cast him in a supporting role. Much annoyed, Garfield turned to the movie business.

  Warner Bros, signed him to a contract, and he changed his first name to “John.” As John Garfield, he made a strong impression as a contemptuous young loner in 1938’s Four Daughters; it earned him his first Oscar nomination. John’s impact in this picture was so great that it gave rise to a new breed of Hollywood screen hero—vulnerable but tough. After several more pictures, John tried Broadway again in Heavenly Express (1940). A faulty heart kept him out of World War II duty, but he joined with Bette Davis in forming the Hollywood Canteen and frequently entertained the troops overseas.

  In the postwar period, Garfield enjoyed some of his best screen roles: The Postman Always Rings Twice (1946, with Lana Turner) and Humoresque (1946, with Joan Crawford). He was Oscar-nominated again for Body and Soul (1947), in which he was well cast as the middle-aged boxing champ who has lost his optimism. Garfield continued to alternate between films and stage, but unbeknownst to him, his career had already peaked.

  In 1951, he was among many suspects who testified as a “cooperative witness” in front of the House Committee on Un-American Activities during the anti-Communist witch hunt. He insisted, “I am no Red . . . I am no pink . . . I am no fellow traveler.” While cleared of any overt charges, Garfield was still unofficially blacklisted in the entertainment industry. His last feature film was the low-budget He Ran All the Way (1951), and his final Broadway appearance was in a nine-week rev
ival of Golden Boy (1952)—in the title role he had so coveted years before. Desperate for work, he was planning a summer stock tour of a new drama, The Fragile Fox, which he hoped to bring to Broadway in the fall of 1952.

  By 1952, Garfield and his wife were separated. He had suffered several minor heart attacks (in 1944, 1947, and 1950). Garfield also had a long record of romancing his movie costars and other women, but despite the warnings of physicians, he kept to his own regimen, which included heavy drinking, strenuous games of tennis, and active sex. Moreover, he was under great stress from worrying about his failing career.

  On the night of May 20, 1952, Garfield visited a friend named Iris Whitney at her Gramercy Park apartment in New York City. Later, she stated that he had become ill that evening, so she permitted him to stay in her bedroom while she slept in the living room. When she could not wake him on the morning of May 21, she phoned her physician, who pronounced the 39-year-old actor dead at 9:00 A.M. The medical examiner’s autopsy stated that John had died of cardiac arrest and there was “nothing suspicious.” The unofficial tale, however, has always been that John died in the midst of sexual activity. Later, one Hollywood wit suggested that Garfield’s epitaph should have read, “Died in the saddle.”

  Betty Grable

  [Elizabeth Ruth Grable]