Tragic Hollywood, Beautiful, Glamorous And Dead Read online

  Tragic Hollywood

  Beautiful, Glamorous, Dead.

  Jackie Valinda Ganiy

  Contents

  Title

  Norma Says

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Acknowledgments

  Foreword

  Introduction

  Silenced Forever

  Rudolph Valentino

  Florence Lawrence

  Martha Mansfield

  Wallace Reid

  Marie Prevost

  Olive Thomas

  Thomas Ince

  Alma Rubens

  The Beautiful and the Doomed

  Natalie Wood

  Judy Tyler

  Heath Ledger

  Suzan Ball

  Vivien Leigh

  Clara Bow

  The Forgotten and the Forsaken

  Yvette Vickers

  Linda Darnell

  D.W. Griffith

  Charlie Chaplin

  Dorothy Dandridge

  Tom Neal

  Montgomery Clift

  Live Fast Die Young

  James Dean

  River Phoenix

  Errol Flynn

  Chris Farley

  Barbara La Marr

  By Their Own Hand

  Freddie Prinze

  Peg Entwistle

  Marie McDonald

  Margaux Hemingway

  Lupe Vélez

  Jean Seberg

  Dana Plato

  Tragic Blondes

  Jayne Mansfield

  Sharon Tate

  Jean Harlow

  Dorothy Stratten

  Barbara Payton

  Marilyn Monroe

  Hauntingly Tragic

  The Paul Bern/Jay Sebring/Sharon Tate House

  Superman Just Won’t Die - George Reeves’ Ghost

  The Ghost of Marilyn Monroe

  Heath Ledger’s Visit From Beyond

  Pickfair and the Haunting that Led to a Demolishment

  Ozzie Nelson’s Still at Home

  Lucille Ball and Roxbury Drive

  Errol Flynn Still Sailing

  Phantoms at the Phantom of the Opera Set

  Jayne Mansfield and The Haunting of the Pink Palace

  Peg Entwistle and the Haunting of the Hollywood Sign

  Haunted Hollywood Forever

  The Tate Murder House and the Haunting of a Neighborhood

  Conclusion

  Select Bibliography & Credits

  “This is my life! It always will be! There’s nothing else. Just us, and the cameras, and those wonderful people out there in the dark...”

  Norma Desmond, Sunset Boulevard

  TRAGIC HOLLYWOOD: BEAUTIFUL, GLAMOROUS, DEAD

  Third Edition. Copyright © 2013, 2014, 2015, 2016 by Jackie Ganiy.

  Published in the United States of America 2016.

  All rights reserved. All photographs sourced from public domain or the author’s private collection except where noted. This book, in whole or in part, may not be reproduced in any manner without the written permission of the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review, or article, or in the case of content already in the public domain or used by license, for which the copyright and/or license for reuse remains intact.

  Contact Jackie Ganiy at [email protected]

  Constructed by David Hayden.

  Dedicated to the Facebook fans of Tragic Hollywood Beautiful, Glamorous and Dead.

  And to all lovers of old Hollywood everywhere.

  Acknowledgments

  Without the unwavering support, help, and enthusiastic encouragement of my family—my wonderful children and their long-suffering father—for my labor of love, it would have never been completed, and the world would be left wanting!

  Without the incessant prodding and nagging of the fans on Facebook, I would never have even begun this project. It was them daring me to do it that finally got me to do it. Thanks to all of you!

  Foreword

  I have always been fascinated with the movies. As a skinny little kid, living in a dead-end town in central California with limited entertainment options, I would sit in front of our fifteen-inch RCA television screen and watch old movies on the “cable” channel out of sheer boredom. At least that’s how it started out. Gradually, I began to get into these films. I noticed that the women seemed more beautiful than anyone I’d ever seen in real life, and more beautiful than the current movie stars that filled the screens of my local theater. I noticed that the men were classier than the ones I encountered in my little town, or even in the big city to the south. The women and men were beautifully dressed, perfectly coiffed and, well, just so darn classy! They inhabited beautiful worlds where homes were perfect, and there was no ugliness on the public streets. Dinner was often mixed with a full swing orchestra and a marble dance floor. Women ran the simplest of errands dripping in fur and jewelry, always wearing some poof of a hat, perched ever so delicately atop their immaculate hairdos. In my world, women walked around in polyester pants and cotton blouses, not swing dresses and pumps. Men wore slacks and golf shirts, not elegant, tailored suits and Derbies.

  Soon, I was hooked on old Hollywood glamour. I began looking for information about some of those people with whom I had grown familiar while watching all those old movies. I have no words to adequately describe my abject shock and disappointment when I looked into many of the old stars biographies only to discover how miserable their real lives were, and how tragically so many of them ended up. I realized that it was all just an illusion—a really good illusion—but still just an illusion...sort of like Disneyland. That world, the world of beauty and glamour, had never really existed, except on celluloid. This was worse than finding out there was no Easter Bunny for me. I still remember weeping over Vivien Leigh’s biography, and never being able to watch her in Gone with the Wind with the same simple, innocent joy afterwards. This is still true for me today.

  Far from dampening my interest in old Hollywood, however, I was more ensorcelled than ever. I had always been a weird kid, drawn to the darker side of life more than most. I preferred Twilight Zone to Bugs Bunny, and I loved a good ghost story. I obsessed over tragic stars and their sad stories. I would regularly entertain my friends and family with gruesome details of a particular star’s life, while they tried to watch a movie with that star in it. This didn’t win me any favors. I didn’t care. Somehow, I felt empowered that I knew almost as much about these people as my parents, who had been the peers of many of these icons, and whose lives had paralleled theirs.

  What my mother had dismissed as a passing fancy turned into a lifelong passion, which brings us to the present, and this book. I began this journey over a year ago, when I decided to create a page on Facebook dedicated to all things tragic of Hollywood. I had seen a few similar pages, but none of them contained the depth of knowledge and the level of commitment I felt I could give to such a page. So I just did it. After I put the page up, I noticed that I was getting attention rapidly. Within days, I had several hundred “fans”. Within weeks, I had almost a thousand. I was having a wonderful time adding stories to my page, organizing each story into a photo album category, and honoring a star on their “deathiversary” nearly every day. A few people mentioned that I should write a book. I laughed the suggestion off, until I realized they were serious. “Why not?” I thought. “I could write this book with one hand tied behind my back!”

  I knew from experience that most of the books on this subject that were already out there were dry, lifeless text books that never really went into any depth as to why a star crashed and burned. They were boring to read—an unpardonable sin
for a book based on entertainment. Of course, the single exception to this rule was the infamous Hollywood Babylon, by Kenneth Anger. Oh yes, this book was juicy, fun, salacious and wicked. I lapped every bit of it up, licked the pages and begged for more! But I was young. The older I got, the more nastiness came out about Hollywood Babylon. Much of what Anger had written turned out to be either very exaggerated, or just plain wrong. Some of the information stained a star’s reputation for decades, such as the decapitation story about Jayne Mansfield, and the horrible story of the dog making a meal out of poor Marie Prevost’s corpse. None of this was true. Why make stuff up anyway? The real stories are tragic and bizarre enough! There really is no need to fabricate or exaggerate the tragedy of the lives of these piteous souls, who lived and died under the hot lights and unforgiving glare of public scrutiny.

  This book is meant for pleasure and historical research. I have done my best to assure that what is published is factual and accurate. It disputes many previous assumptions, and attempts to shed new light on old controversies. Many of the stars that are featured herein are well-known. The memory of some of them has been swept away by time. All of them lived fascinating lives, and all of them died tragic, untimely deaths. May they rest in peace, and may the essence of their beauty be what lingers in our memories and our hearts.

  Jackie Ganiy

  Introduction

  Everyone loves a good story. This love crosses cultural barriers, religious differences and ethnic boundaries. Once upon a time there was a magical place located in the Southern California desert of Los Angeles. The people who inhabited this place understood this fundamental truth, and sought to yoke its power for profit. The place was Hollywood, and the people who lived there created great fictional stories, both on and off the silver screen. Yet the stories of what really happened have a power to shock and fascinate beyond simple hype and mindless publicity. These real stories haunt us, swelling the ranks of the dark side of our collective cultural consciousness.

  We are those in the dark: the fans, the curious, the silent observers of the glamorous and/or beautiful and/or doomed. These stories serve to remind us that all is not as it seems in these shimmering make-believe worlds of illusion. Scratch the surface, and an ugliness is revealed that, rather than causing us to turn away, draws us in deeper into the spell that is fame, stardom and beauty. These are the stories of those stars that shone brightly and briefly, then left a legacy of macabre mystery behind when their lights were extinguished. Read on...if you have the stomach and heart for a hardcore, glamor-free look at tragic Hollywood, and its piteous occupants.

  Section I

  Silenced Forever

  Tragedies of the Silver Screen

  Long before there was such a thing as CGI, before there existed a thing called Hollywood, and before most of the studios we take for granted today were founded, there was another place. This place existed on delicate, nitrite reels of flickering, silent images. On these images were faces: Garbo, Gilbert, Swanson...the pioneers of the modern film industry. They are all gone, as are most of their films, but their incredible lives and work are still remembered by those who are true lovers of the craft and magic of film.

  These sirens of the silver screen were no shrinking violets either. The term “heroin baby” was coined in the '20s to describe some of the most prominent leading ladies of the day. In spite of prohibition, or because of it, the booze owed freely and profusely, and many were miserable alcoholics. Promiscuity was a way of life, especially among the “Hollywood crowd”, and life was one wild party after another.

  Until it wasn’t.

  Rudolph Valentino

  Has there ever been a sex god of the silver screen that titillated and stimulated the female imagination more than the “Latin lover”? Much has been written to suggest that he was not what his work on the screen implied. They wrote that he was bisexual, effeminate, and dominated by lesbian women, some who sought only to emasculate him, both personally and professionally. Whispers teased that the reigning god of sex never actually had sex.

  He was born in Castellaneta, Italy in 1895, to a domineering mother who spoiled and coddled him. His first experience in entertainment came after he arrived in New York in 1913, where he was on the street until he took a job as a ‘taxi dancer’ in a chic nightclub called Maxim’s. He got involved with Blanca de Saulles—a Chilean socialite who was not very happily married to socially prominent businessman, John de Saulles. Instead of minding his own business, Valentino testified against Mr. de Saulles at the couple’s divorce hearing, which landed him in jail for a few days. Seems John de Saulles didn’t take kindly to this “gigolo’s” interference in his marriage, and used his political connections to have Valentino arrested on trumped-up vice charges. This scandal was well-publicized, and as a result, Valentino could not get work. To make matters worse, Mr. de Saulles also soon found himself at the wrong end of his ex-wife’s gun, when she shot him dead over a custody dispute. Valentino fled New York to avoid becoming even further ensnared in scandal. In Hollywood he played bit parts, but caught the eye of screenwriter, June Mathis. She insisted he play the Latin Lover in the epic film, The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. He did, and it made him a star, and no wonder! His tango dancing scene with Beatrice Dominguez is—even by modern standards—one of the most openly erotic scenes ever filmed. Around this time, he got into a bizarre relationship with actress, Jean Acker, who was a known lesbian to everyone but Valentino. She thought they were getting married as a cover for their homosexual lifestyles, and he thought she really loved him. The night they were wed, she locked him out of her hotel room. Valentino continued to send love letters to Acker for quite some time, until someone clued him in on her preferences, at which point he moved on.

  Valentino in A Sainted Devil(1924)

  Whether he actually was bisexual is still debatable, but the rumors of his bisexuality were both commonplace and widespread. In 1926, the Chicago Tribune famously painted him a “Pink Powder Puff” and “Painted Pansy”, and the rumormill pegged he and screen icon, Ramon Novarro, as lovers. In his infamous book, Hollywood Babylon, Kenneth Anger claimed Rudy gave Novarro an “art deco dildo”, whatever that is. Novarro publicly stated he barely knew Rudy, and had enough romances with women to allay suspicions that he was gay (though still possibly bi), while his flamboyant gestures and dress may have been more down to his Italian heritage than sexual preference. 1920s America had strict rules on what proper masculine behavior was. Valentino, the hottest male sex symbol of the time, often colored outside those lines, to the delight of women everywhere.

  His meteoric rise in films continued with Camille, The Sheik, and Blood and Sand. He ran off with actress Natacha Rambova, marrying her in Mexico, seeming to forget that he was already married to Jean Acker. Returning to the states, he was immediately arrested for bigamy, and spent several hours in jail, until Mathis with others bailed him out. The charges were dropped.

  Much was said of his marriage to Rambova: how she gave him a slave bracelet to show him who was boss. She enjoyed many public lesbian and heterosexual affairs, and some saw theirs as purely a “lavender” marriage; never to be consummated at all. It’s amusing to speculate as to what went on behind their bedroom door. Extremely possessive, she controlled nearly all aspects of his life and career, and alienated him from the studio as well as his friends. Her unfortunate picks for his film projects resulted in the worst films of his career, including A Sainted Devil, Cobra and Monsieur Beaucaire—all flops that further drove masculinity from the public’s perception of Rudy.

  Eventually, the marriage fell apart. Rambova had a fling with a cameraman on the set of one of her films, and fled to New York, eventually obtaining a divorce in France. Despondent, Rudy bought the now famous Bel Air mansion, Falcon’s Lair, in an unsuccessful attempt impress her and win her back. Depressed, and verging on suicidal, he turned for solace to screen femme fatale, Pola Negri, who was also known to take both male and female lovers. He signed with the newl
y-formed United Artists, and starred in two very successful films, The Eagle and The Son of the Sheik. It was 1926, and things were looking up for Rudy. Sadly, these good times were not to last.

  Valentino had been suffering from severe stomach pains for several days, but had refused to go to a doctor. On Monday, August 16, while conducting a publicity tour for The Son of the Sheik, he collapsed in his New York hotel room, and was admitted to the hospital with a bleeding ulcer. They determined that his appendix had ruptured as well, spilling its toxins into his bloodstream, and causing an acute infection. In these days before antibiotics, little could be done to stem infections other than to hope the body was strong enough to survive the attack. He was operated on for the perforated ulcer, and given a good prognosis. Then he developed peritonitis, followed by pleuritis of the lungs, and his body began to fail. His doctors did not tell him he was dying, so Valentino chatted happily with them about the future, and where he planned to recuperate once released. He fell into a coma, from which he never woke. He passed away on August 23, 1926, at the age of thirty-one.

  Normally, the story would end there, but this is Valentino. He was so popular, his death so sudden and unexpected, that the world went a bit nuts for a few days during his two (yes, two!) elaborate funerals. An estimated one hundred thousand people lined the streets of New York on August 24, to get a glimpse of his coffin. Fans broke windows, and vandalized property, in order to “pay their last respects.” An all-day riot ensued, and one hundred mounted Police were called in to restore order. To top it off was the sublime performance of Pola Negri, swathed head to toe in black crape, swooning over his coffin multiple times, always in front of cameras. After this show of shows, his body was sent west on a train to Hollywood, where another, more dignified and controlled, final goodbye was arranged. Who could have guessed the ceremony in Tinseltown would be the more subdued of them? Rudy died without having made any burial arrangements, so June Mathis offered a spot in her family crypt in the ornate Cathedral Mausoleum at Hollywood Memorial Park Cemetery (now known as Hollywood Forever Cemetery). This arrangement was intended to be temporary, but June died the following year, and was buried next to Rudy, where the two remain in sweet repose to this day.