FURTHER READING: Once A Wicked Lady: A Biography Of Margaret Lockwood – Hilton Tims (London: W.H. Allen, 1989)
Josh Logan
Born October 5, 1908
Died July 12, 1988
Theatre film director. Born in Texarkana, Texas, Joshua Lockwood Logan III didn’t make many films, preferring the stage, but the ones he did tended to be notable for some reason. He studied under Stanislavski and his first movie was I Met My Love Again (1938) but there then followed a 17-year hiatus during which time he worked in the theatre before he got his second cinematic opportunity. He worked on Picnic (1955) and Mister Roberts (1955) before being assigned to direct Marilyn Monroe as the fading bar room singer Cherie in Bus Stop (1956). He rated Marilyn highly: “When I tell people Marilyn Monroe may be one of the finest dramatic talents of our time, they laugh in my face. But I believe it. I believe it to such an extent that I would like to direct her in every picture she wants me for, every story she can dig up.” Marilyn received the best reviews in her career for the film and Logan is one of the few directors who never criticised the star. “Monroe is as near genius as any actress I ever knew … She is the most completely realised actress since Garbo. Watch her work. In any film. How rarely she has to use words. How much she does with her eyes, her lips, with slight, almost accidental gestures … Monroe is pure cinema.” Next Logan worked on Sayonara (1957), for which he was nominated for an Oscar, the Rodgers and Hammerstein musical South Pacific (1958), for which Logan had wanted Elizabeth Taylor instead of Mitzi Gaynor but Taylor failed an audition before Rodgers and Hammerstein, Tall Story (1960), which he also produced, Ensign Pulver (1964), the sequel to Mister Roberts, which he also produced, Camelot (1967) and Lerner & Loewe’s musical Paint Your Wagon (1969).
CAUSE: He died aged 79 in New York from Supranuclear Palsy.
Carole Lombard
(JANE ALICE PETERS)
Born October 6, 1908
Died January 16, 1942
‘The Profane Angel’. Much loved in Hollywood for her generosity, raucous personality, practical jokes and foul mouth, Carole Lombard’s early death shattered all her many friends. Fed up with men making advances, she had her two brothers teach her every swearword they knew. She once said, “I’ve lived by a man’s code designed to fit a man’s world, yet at the same time I never forget that a woman’s first job is to choose the right shade of lipstick.” She once told Harry Cohn that she would do his “shitty little picture but fucking you isn’t part of the deal.” Born in Fort Wayne, Indiana, her parents divorced when she was eight and her mother took her and her two brothers west to California. Four years later, the tomboy Carole was playing baseball in the street with the neighbourhood boys when she was spotted by film director, Allan Dwan. He cast her in A Perfect Crime (1921) and the acting bug caught her, although it would be three more years before she appeared before the cameras again. She went back to school and excelled in track and field athletics. When Carole was 15 she left school and joined a theatre troupe. In October 1924 she was screen-tested by Fox and offered a contract. Her first role was as Sybil Estabrook in Hearts And Spurs (1925). In October of the following year she was involved in a car crash that left her face needing 14 stitches and badly scarred. When she recovered she found herself sacked by Fox. Determined to continue as an actress, she was signed by Mack Sennett and then Pathé director Paul Stei in 1929 and stayed for a year. She signed for Paramount in June 1930. She appeared in High Voltage (1929) as Billie Davis, Big News (1929) as Margaret Banks, Fast And Loose (1930) as Alice O’Neil, The Arizona Kid (1930) as Virginia Hoyt, Safety In Numbers (1930) as Pauline, Up Pops The Devil (1931) as Anne Merrick, It Pays To Advertise (1931) as Mary Grayson and I Take This Woman (1931) as Kay Dowling. She was cast opposite William Powell in Man Of The World (1931) as Mary Kendall and, on June 26 of that year, married him. It was a week after Clark Gable had married Rhea Langham. The union didn’t work and they divorced in August 1933, but remained on good terms despite him not paying her alimony. She was romanced by Russ Columbo until his early death on September 14, 1934. Privately, Carole told friends that he was the great love of her life. She filmed No Man Of Her Own (1932) with Clark Gable. It would be the only time they appeared on film together. She signed for Paramount Studios, becoming one of their most popular stars. Probably her best performance came in Twentieth Century (1934) as Lily Garland (Mildred Plotka) showing her comedic potential opposite John Barrymore. She went on to appear in Now And Forever (1934) as Toni Carstairs, We’re Not Dressing (1934) as Doris Worthington, Bolero as Helen Hathaway, The Gay Bride (1934) as Mary Magiz, Rumba as Diana Harrison, Hands Across The Table (1935) as Regi Allen, The Princess Comes Across (1936) as Princess Olga, Love Before Breakfast as Kay Colby and My Man Godfrey (1936) as Irene Bullock, for which she received her only Oscar nomination, True Confession (1937) as Helen Bartlett, Swing High, Swing Low as Maggie King, Nothing Sacred (1937) as Hazel Flagg, Fools For Scandal (1938) as Kay Winters, In Name Only (1939) as Julie Eden, Made For Each Other (1939) as Jane Mason, Vigil In The Night (1940) as Anne Lee, They Knew What They Wanted (1940) as Amy Peters, Mr & Mrs Smith (1941) as Ann Krausheimer Smith and the posthumously released To Be Or Not To Be (1942) as Maria Tura playing opposite Jack Benny. She had legally changed her name to Carole Lombard in 1936, having previously been billed as Carol Lombard until a back room boy misspelled her name. She later said: “I think that ‘e’ made the whole fucking difference.” On March 29, 1939, she married Clark Gable. They nicknamed each other Ma and Pa and lived an idyllic life far away from Hollywood glamour on a 20-acre ranch in the San Fernando Valley. She wore falsies in some films to enhance her figure and was wont to shout at the make-up people, “Okay, bring me my breasts.” Her co-star George Raft discovered she wasn’t a natural blonde when one day she stripped off in front of him and began applying peroxide to her pubes. “Relax, Georgie,” she told him, “I’m just making my collar and cuffs match.”
CAUSE: Following America’s belated entry into World War II Carole did her bit for the war effort and travelled to Indiana for a war bond rally. On January 16, 1942, having raised over $2 million, she was set to return home, but couldn’t decide whether to fly or let the train take the strain. She tossed a coin and decided to fly. Her mother, Elizabeth Knight Peters, had never been on an aeroplane and was frightened of the journey. She had also been warned that 16 was an unlucky number. The plane, TWA Flight #3, took off at 4am with Carole, a nervous Mrs Peters and Carole’s publicity man Otto Winkler. The journey was due to take 17 hours. When they stopped off at Albuquerque, New Mexico, to refuel, several passengers were asked to give up their seats so military personnel could be accommodated. Carole used her charms for her, her mother and publicist to be allowed to stay on board. Permission was granted. Following another stop-off in Las Vegas the plane began to climb, but not quickly enough, and 30 miles south-west of Vegas it crashed into Table Rock Mountain, 730ft below the summit. The plane split in two and all 22 people aboard perished. It took two days for rescuers to retrieve the corpses. The front section in which Carole had been sitting was compressed into a block about 10ft long. A few wisps of her blonde hair fluttered in the wreckage. Carole was 33. On January 21, 1942, her remains were buried in the Great Mausoleum, Sanctuary of Trust, at Forest Lawn Memorial-Parks, 1712 South Glendale Avenue, Glendale, California 91209. Eighteen years later, Clark Gable would be laid to rest beside her.
FURTHER READING: Gable & Lombard– Warren G. Harris (London: Corgi, 1977).
Jack Lord
(JOHN JOSEPH PATRICK RYAN)
Born December 30, 1920
Died January 21, 1998
Humourless leading man. Born in New York, unlike many actors 6́ 2˝ Jack Lord did not embrace publicity despite being the star of a top-rated television show for 12 years and appearing in numerous films. Even his birth date is in doubt. According to his network he was born on December 30, 1930, yet it is also claimed he was a war hero (who spent 16 hours in a lifeboat after his boat was sunk of
f East Africa in 1944) making that date highly improbable if not downright impossible. The American Library of Congress lists his birthday as 1922, yet he supposedly graduated from John Adams High School in 1938, making his year of birth the one given above. However, when he died some claimed he was in his early eighties. Lord also supposedly married Ann Willard in 1942 and divorced her in 1947, again making 1930 impossible for the year of his birth. Or he may have married the daughter of an Argentine diplomat who left him shortly after the honeymoon when she discovered she was pregnant. He supposedly had a son by this marriage who died aged 13 in 1950 in an accident. After a career in the merchant navy, he made his film début in Project X (1949) as John Bates and went on to appear in The Tattooed Stranger (1950) as Detective Deke Del Vecchio, Cry Murder (1950) as Tommy Warren, The Court-Martial Of Billy Mitchell (1955) as Commander Zach Lansdowne, Williamsburg: The Story Of A Patriot (1956) as John Fry, God’s Little Acre (1958) as Buck, The Hangman (1959) as Johnny Bishop and Dr No (1962) as Felix Leiter, Bond’s CIA colleague. He was booked to reprise the role in Goldfinger (1964) until producer Cubby Broccoli dropped him, fearing he would overshadow Bond. Jack Lord was offered the part of Captain Kirk in Star Trek but creator Gene Roddenberry withdrew the offer when Lord asked to co-produce the series and own a percentage of the show. He also turned down the role of Napoleon Solo in The Man From U.N.C.L.E. On September 20, 1968, the pilot of a new CBS cop show set in the beautiful surroundings of the Pacific hit the air under the title Hawaii Five-O. Lord found his niche playing the tough head of the fictional state police Five-O and became known for the catch-phrase “Book ’em, Danno!” As the show grew in popularity, so did Lord’s ego. Moving to Honolulu permanently he fancied himself an important local figure. He was not close to co-star James MacArthur, who played McGarrett’s sidekick Danno Williams, and in the last season was positively furious with newcomer Sharon Farrell who played Detective Lori Wilson. Sharon preferred not to wear a bra and the sight of her bouncing breasts as she ran was not one that Lord felt was appropriate for a policewoman. She left the show after ten episodes. The show ran for 279 episodes until April 5, 1980. It was claimed that Lord was a talented painter with several of his works exhibited world-wide. However, following his death, a ‘friend’ alleged he would send unsolicited work to museums who, chary of paying for the costs of returning the paintings, stored them in their basements unhung. Supposedly, the porn star Traci Lords changed her name from Nora Kuzma in honour of Jack Lord. Jack Lord solved hundreds of mysteries on Hawaii Five-O but left innumerable riddles about his own life. There is only one thing of which we can be certain: he brought pleasure to millions.
CAUSE: Jack Lord’s final years were not especially happy ones. Around 1994 he began to suffer from Alzheimer’s disease and was cared for by his devoted wife, Marie Denarde, whom he married around 1954. He died of heart failure at his Honolulu home at around 8pm with Marie holding his hand.
FURTHER READING: Booking Hawaii Five-O– Karen Rhodes (Jefferson: McFarland, 1997).
Peter Lorre
(LáSZLó LöWENSTEIN)
Born June 26, 1904
Died March 23, 1964
‘The Walking Overcoat’. Born in Rozsahegy, Hungary, to the wealthy businessman Alois Löwenstein and his wife Elvira, from the age of four Lorre was raised in Vienna. He left home aged 17 to become an actor and after working in a bank for a while ended up in Berlin playing sexually dysfunctional men. He came to world-wide fame in Fritz Lang’s story of child murderer Hans Beckert in M (1931). Offers from Hollywood poured in, but 5́ 5˝ Lorre spurned them all. He did not want to be typecast as a villain, nor was he overly interested in the financial rewards Hollywood had to offer. As the Nazis consolidated their power the Jewish Lorre moved to Paris and then London where, in the spring of 1934, he married Celia Lovsky (d. 1979) at Westminster Registry Office. Alfred Hitchcock cast him in The Man Who Knew Too Much (1934) as Abbott before Lorre finally moved to Hollywood, where he signed for Columbia. At first the studio could not find a workable property for him and he was loaned to MGM, where he excelled as the sexually frustrated plastic surgeon Dr Gogol in Mad Love (1935). Lorre shaved his head for the role and, with expert lighting, seemed very frightening. Columbia had him back to star as Raskolnikov in Josef von Sternberg’s Crime And Punishment (1935). He went back to England to make Crack-Up (1936) as Colonel Gimpy for Alfred Hitchcock. Clearly having by now forgotten his early desire not to be typecast, he accepted the role of the Japanese detective Kentaro Moto in a series of B pictures: Think Fast, Mr Moto (1937), Thank You, Mr Moto (1937), Mysterious Mr Moto (1938), Mr Moto Takes A Chance (1938), Mr Moto’s Gamble (1938), Mr Moto Takes A Vacation (1939), Mr Moto In Danger Island (1939) and Mr Moto’s Last Warning (1939). It was in 1941 that he teamed up with Sydney Greenstreet for the first of eight films. Lorre played Joel Cairo to Greenstreet’s Kasper Buttman in The Maltese Falcon (1941) and the two actors were reunited in Casablanca (1942) in which Lorre played Ugarte. During the Second World War Lorre played a variety of characters – heroes, Nazis, Japanese villains and horror characters. He appeared in: The Cross Of Lorraine (1943) as Sergeant Berger, The Constant Nymph (1943) as Fritz Bercovi, Background To Danger (1943) as Nikolai Zaloshoff, The Mask Of Dimitrios (1944) as Cornelius Latimer Leyden, Arsenic And Old Lace (1944) as Dr Einstein, Hotel Berlin (1945) as Johannes Koenig and Confidential Agent (1945) as Contreras. On March 13 of that year he was divorced and 73 days later married Karen Verne (b. Berlin, Germany, 1918, as Ingeborg Catharine Marie Rose Klinckerfuss, d. Hollywood, California, December 23, 1967). The marriage was to last almost five years before the couple was divorced. After the war he appeared in The Beast With Five Fingers (1946) as Hilary Cummins, Black Angel (1946) as Marko, My Favorite Brunette (1947) as Kismet, Quicksand (1950) as Nick and went back to West Germany to write, directed and star in Der Verlorene (1951), then back to the States for Beat The Devil (1954) as O’Hara, 20,000 Leagues Under The Sea (1954) as Conseil, Around The World In 80 Days (1956), The Story Of Mankind (1957) as Nero, Hell Ship Mutiny (1957) as Commissioner Lamoret, The Buster Keaton Story (1957) as Kurt Bergner, Silk Stockings (1957) as Brankov, Scent Of Mystery (1960) as Smiley, Voyage To The Bottom Of The Sea (1961) as Commodore Lucius Emery, Five Weeks In A Balloon (1962) as Ahmed, The Raven (1963) as Dr Adolphus Bedlo, The Comedy Of Terrors (1963) as Felix Gillie, Muscle Beach Party (1964) as Mr Strangdour and The Patsy (1964) as Morgan Heywood. Following his second divorce he married Annemarie Brenning on July 21, 1950, by whom he had a daughter, Catharine. They separated in October 1962 and were due to have a divorce hearing on the day of his death. Lorre did not take his work too seriously. “Once I had a terrible fight with Jack Warner, who asked me what I thought of a picture I had done with Humphrey Bogart. I told him I didn’t go to see it. Mr Warner was furious. I said that I only get paid for making pictures. If he wanted me to see them, he’d have to pay me extra.” Lorre attended the funeral of his fellow horror star Bela Lugosi accompanied by Vincent Price. Lugosi was buried in his Dracula cape and Lorre whispered to Price: “Do you think we should drive a stake through his heart just in case?”
CAUSE: Lorre died of a stroke aged 59 in Los Angeles, California. He was buried in Niche 5, T.1, Corridor C of the Cathedral Mausoleum of Hollywood Memorial Park, 6000 Santa Monica Boulevard, Hollywood, California 90038.
Linda Lovelace
(LINDA SUSAN BOREMAN)
Born January 10, 1949
Died April 22, 2002
Deep Throater Linda Lovelace’s is a strange story. In 1972 she became world famous because of a pornographic film about a woman whose clitoris was located at the back of her throat instead of the usual place. The only way she could achieve orgasm was by fellatio or “deep throat”. Then she turned her back on the world of porn, claimed that she had been abused by her then husband, Chuck Traynor, and campaigned against pornography. Then, not long before her death, she posed in a glamour magazine and appeared at several sex festivals where she sold autographed pictures. Linda
Boreman was born in the Bronx, New York, the daughter of a retired policeman and a waitress. She was educated at Catholic schools. By her account Boreman’s father was henpecked and did nothing to stop his wife’s abusive treatment of her children. “He could tiptoe through an earthquake and pretend it wasn’t happening,” she later said. Mrs Boreman was subject to uncontrollable rages, during which she regularly beat her children. Linda was hit, usually with a belt or whatever her mother had handy, from the time she was four on the slightest pretext. Linda supposedly had sex early and when she was 19 gave birth to a son who was put up for adoption. Then Linda’s life changed again when she met an older man named Chuck Traynor in 1970 when she was living with her parents in Florida and recovering from a car accident. He had a drugs charge outstanding against him and had tried to make a living as a pimp. Traynor worked as a production manager on Deep Throat and he sensibly married Lovelace to insure himself against her giving testimony against him in court. People queued around the block to see the film and allegedly even Jackie Kennedy Onassis went to see it. Deep Throat, which took two weeks to make and cost a few thousand dollars, grossed $600 million at the box office to become the first smash hit of its genre. Linda Lovelace made $1,250, most of which Traynor kept. Her star rose. In 1973 she introduced Elton John on stage in Los Angeles. On May 29, 1974, she arrived in Britain. On June 18 she went to Ascot and wore an entirely diaphanous tiny, teeny minidress. Asked to explain her appeal she said, “From what I’ve heard, it’s the fact that Deep Throat was a ‘comedy’, and because it was on the big screen. Gerard Damiano thought it was the fact that I had that sweet, innocent look. I didn’t have bleached blonde hair, I wasn’t chewing bubble gum and counting the cracks in the ceiling. As far as what I was doing, I just thought everybody else did that. I didn’t know any better. For me, it was cool, because, after being with Mr Traynor and being forced into prostitution, if I did that I felt like I wasn’t being abused sexually.” A series of books followed purporting to tell Linda Lovelace’s story. One of them, Inside Linda Lovelace, was prosecuted for obscenity in Britain in 1976 and found not guilty on January 28. In 1980 Linda Lovelace published another autobiography but this one, Ordeal, was not a litany of lust like her others but the tale of how she was abused and forced to make Deep Throat. “When you see the movie Deep Throat,” she told an interviewer that year, “you are watching me being raped. It is a crime that movie is still showing; there was a gun to my head the entire time.” She claimed that she was forced into sex sessions with a number of men whom Traynor introduced to her. Many of these encounters were filmed. She became a user of painkillers to numb the physical and emotional pain. She had, she alleged, even been forced to have sex with a dog. (A 1969 film supposedly exists called Dog Fucker that features Linda having congress with an alsatian.) Men queued up to have sex with her and she slept with a number of Hollywood celebrities including Sammy Davis, Jr. In 1975 she left Traynor for David Winters, who produced her Linda Lovelace For President (1976), opposite the former Monkee Mickey Dolenz, an abysmal sex comedy which saw her on the campaign trail following a cross-country bus route mapped out in the shape of a penis. Traynor and Lovelace were divorced. She said, “After I got away from Traynor, it was a lot more fun because I wasn’t being sexually abused. I was walking around with transparent clothes on. I didn’t think looking sexy was a terrible thing. I met a lot of people and had a lot of fun at that point.” Linda Lovelace appeared on chatshows, filmed a shoe advertisement and the inevitable Deep Throat II (1973) and posed for Playboy magazine; for a while she even moved into Hugh Hefner’s infamous Hollywood mansion. Traynor took up with Marilyn Chambers, another porn star. In 1974 Linda Lovelace married Larry Marchiano, a plumber and TV repairman, by whom she had a son, Dominic, born in 1977, and a daughter, Lindsay, born in 1980. She began a campaign against porn, touring universities and colleges and testified at government and church commissions on the effects of pornography. She was befriended by feminists and the legal scholar Catharine MacKinnon while anti-censorship groups coined the term “Linda Syndrome,” referring to porn stars that seek acceptance from society by disavowing their past. In 1996 she and Marchiano were divorced but her health began to suffer and she had huge medical bills. Among other complaints, she had a liver transplant in 1987 after contracting hepatitis C from a blood transfusion. It may well have been the cost of her medical treatment that caused Linda Lovelace’s volte face. She posed in lingerie for magazines and appeared at sex festivals, her criticisms of pornography apparently a thing of the past. When Playboy compiled its list of the world’s 100 sexiest women in 1988, Linda Lovelace was voted number 34, just ahead of Madonna. Interviewed in 1997, Lovelace claimed she had no regrets about her past. “I’m not ashamed or sad about it. I look in the mirror and I look the happiest I’ve ever looked in my entire life.”
Fade to Black: A Book of Movie Obituaries Page 114
