Tragic Hollywood, Beautiful, Glamorous And Dead Read online

  We’re not done yet.

  Shortly after the burial, a woman dressed entirely in black, a black veil covering her face, was spotted visiting Rudy’s grave. She quietly left one red rose and departed without having said a word to anyone. Soon, this became a yearly ritual, the woman turned up on the anniversary of the great screen idol’s death, her face completely shrouded in a black veil, leaving a single red rose at the tomb, then casually walking away. The press got wind of this, and cameras were dutifully set up to film the mysterious “lady in black” every year. She was filmed many times (nobody is really sure that it was always the same person), and questions were hurled at the figure by curious reporters and onlookers alike, while she maintained her stoic silence, simply leaving her rose, and walking away. Her identity (or identities) remains a mystery to this day.

  Now we’re done.

  Valentino in his coffin

  Florence Lawrence

  Florence Lawrence’s epitaph, as etched on her grave at the Hollywood Forever cemetery, reads “Florence Lawrence, ‘The Biograph Girl’, The First Movie Star.” Who was she, and how did she earn that prestigious title?

  Florence had been toiling away in subpar, one-reel affairs for a studio known as the Vitagraph Company, when she was noticed by a young actor named Henry Solter in 1908. He introduced her to D.W. Griffith of Biograph Pictures. She signed with Biograph, and married Solter that same year.

  She went on to make sixty films for the studio, most of them directed by Griffith, the most prestigious director at the time. This was early twentieth century filmmaking however, and studios had made the unconscionable decision not to credit actors on screen, as they felt this would create “celebrities” out of mere performers, leading them to demand higher salaries.

  Oh, the studios. Gotta admire them for trying.

  Florence was extremely popular, but was known simply as “The Biograph Girl.” She was well-compensated and seemed content, until a little German studio boss approached her with a wild scheme, and an offer she simply couldn’t refuse.

  Mr. Carl Laemmle was the head of Independent Motion Picture Company of America, or IMP for short. IMP would later form part of what is today known as Universal Pictures. To lure Lawrence away from Biograph, he offered her and Solter the leads in his next film, The Broken Oath, as well as their own names up on the marquee. This was unprecedented, and the couple jumped at the chance. Laemmle had one condition, though: he was going to stage the first “publicity stunt” on record, and he wanted his two new stars to participate. While the film was still in production, Laemmle sent out a fake notice which reported that Lawrence had been killed in a streetcar accident. The press lapped it up. “Biograph girl dead!” screamed the headlines, affording the film gobs of free publicity, and raising Lawrence’s profile. A few days later, Laemmle sent out another press release stating “We Nail A Lie,”which refuted the “scandalous“ claim, and quoted Lawrence as saying she was very much alive, and would soon be making a public appearance to promote her new film, The Broken Oath. Genius. When Lawrence and Solter appeared together in St. Louis, Missouri, a near-riot ensued, assuring the film’s success, and guaranteeing that she would go down in history as the first film actress to achieve name recognition with the public. In other words, she really was the first star.

  Lawrence was unbelievably popular during this time. The press chased her everywhere she went, and she was quickly mobbed by adoring fans wherever she appeared in public. She supposedly received so much mail that her postman suffered a nervous collapse lugging the letters to her door every day. She also raced cars competitively, and was rumored to be the inventor of the first turning signal for cars.

  Lawrence and her husband founded a production company of their own, Victor Film Company, and made several successful films under that name. In 1912, Lawrence declared her intention to retire, but was persuaded to make Pawn’s Destiny for Universal, who acquired Victor Film Company in 1914. She was severely injured during filming, when a fire got out of control, burning her, and causing her to fall and injure her back. She was incapacitated for months. When she did return, she soon suffered a mental collapse. Several months later, the press awaited her when she pulled into the Universal lot in a massive, luxury automobile to make her comeback. She looked frail and depleted, yet she smiled and charmed her way through the interview, leaving them all with the impression that the movie business was a wonderful thing so long as stars like Florence Lawrence were around.

  Sadly, her glory days were behind her, and a slow and painful decline was ahead. She divorced Solter after her accident, blaming him for making her do her own stunts. After two nervous breakdowns, she was unable to regain the leading lady stature she had once enjoyed. By the mid-1920s, she was hardly working at all, and when the stock market collapsed in 1929, she was wiped out financially. That same year, her beloved mother passed away, and she sank deeper into despair. Despite her finances, she paid for an elaborate burial for her mother which included a sculpted bust for the tomb. In 1933, she married Henry Bolton, a drunk who beat her the entire five-month span of the marriage. She also suffered from painful bone marrow disorder, myelofibrosis.

  On the evening of December 27, 1938, Lawrence, in great pain, carefully set mementos of her former stardom around her, laid down, and swallowed ant paste. She was discovered the following day, alive, but in agony. She was rushed to the hospital, but died that afternoon. She was fifty-two.

  Florence’s real death garnered far less publicity than her faked death had, and she was buried at Hollywood Forever in an unmarked grave, a thousand yards from the elaborate tomb of her mother. Decades later, Roddy McDowall, then serving on The National Film Preservation Board, paid for the current marker and engraving, which finally restored some measure of recognition to this long-forgotten woman: Florence Lawrence, the screen’s first movie star.

  Martha Mansfield

  Few stories of sudden, horrific, senseless death can rival that of lovely actress, Martha Mansfield. Mansfield was a stunning, seasoned performer in musical comedies, who had worked as a Ziegfeld Follies girl before migrating to Hollywood, and into the new medium of motion pictures. After years of playing secondary roles, she was finally cast in a movie that offered her a chance to work opposite the most famous actor of the day, John Barrymore. The movie was Doctor Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, and even though she did not garner the second lead, she did score a juicier role with more screen time. Martha thought this was her big break, but it proved to be an anomaly, and she went right back to secondary parts in B pictures.

  In 1923, she won a costarring role in big-budget western, The Warrens of Virginia, and felt optimism about her future. Sadly, instead of being the start of big things for her, this was her final appearance before the cameras.

  On the morning of November 30, filming was underway on location in San Antonio, Texas. The crew was on a break between scenes, when one of them lit his cigarette with a match, carelessly tossing it away. The match fell into the heavy, pure-cotton folds of Martha’s hoopskirt costume, and smoldered there. Oblivious, she left the set, and got into her car. As she sat down and closed the door, her dress burst into flames, trapping her in an inferno of fiery fabric. Her costar, Wilfred Lytell, rushed in to put the flames out with his own coat, as did her chauffeur, but when the smoke cleared, Martha had severe burns over most of her body, save for her beautiful face. She was rushed to the hospital, but died the next day, at twenty-four years of age. It is hard to imagine a more gruesome way to die on a movie set, and the tragedy of such a young and promising actress, whose life was so carelessly cut short, haunted the industry for many years.

  Martha Mansfield

  Wallace Reid

  If ever there was a face that epitomized the tragedy wrought by the heartlessness of Hollywood studios, and their reckless worship of the bottom line, it would be that of good-natured megastar, Wallace Reid. Reid was the quintessential movie star; tall, dark, handsome, with laughing eyes, and an accommodating dispositio
n. Born into the theater with a stage actress mother, and a father who both an acted in and wrote for films, he was also a skilled musician and outdoorsman. Reid preferred life behind the camera, and he wanted to be a cameraman and director when he arrived in Hollywood, but his good looks proved irresistible to casting directors, and he soon found himself working as an actor in several feature films, including Birth of a Nation.

  Working as an actor he met Dorothy Davenport, a young actress, and soon married her. Not long after, he signed with Famous Players-Lasky (later Paramount Pictures), and began a frantic work schedule that would be his downfall. He had already made more than a hundred films—and given up on his dreams of working behind the camera—when he began working on several daredevil racing films for his new studio. He became a superstar in such films as Excuse My Dust, The Roaring Road and Double Speed—the Fast and Furious films of the day. He rarely took a day off.

  It was suggested that he was having trouble keeping up with his relentless work schedule, and was offered a “pick me up” in the form of morphine. Other versions of the story say he became addicted to the drug after a back injury he suffered when a train he rode derailed while filming The Valley of the Giants in Oregon. An onsite physician prescribed daily doses of morphine to keep Reid working. By the time he returned to Hollywood, he was a dope fiend, and it wasn’t long before the press began spreading it around. His clean-cut image was tarnished, and he began to drink.

  Still, the studio kept pushing him to make racing films at that same inhuman pace, and the ever-obliging star complied. By the start of production for his last film, Thirty Days, he could barely function, and was committed to a sanatorium in a desperate attempt to regain control over both addictions. He was often confined to a padded cell, and restrained with a straight jacket. His weight dropped to a mere one-hundred-twenty pounds, down from one-hundred-seventy, and in that weakened state, he was defenseless against the influenza that followed. He died there, wrapped in Dorothy’s arms, on January 18, 1923. He was thirty-two.

  Dorothy went after Reid’s friends, blaming them for leading him down the primrose path into substance abuse. She gave the studio a list with names, and referred to those listed as “The Bohemians,”. She worked to ruin their careers, yet she never laid blame where she should have: at the doorstep of Famous Players-Lasky. She also produced and starred in a nice little anti-drug propaganda film called Human Wreckage, ironically herself in the process exploiting the young and overworked actress, Lucille Ricksen, who would later die from tuberculosis at only fourteen, a mere two years after Reid.

  It is unfathomable how much control studios had over their stars during the era of silent film, willing and able to work them nearly to death in pursuit of the almighty dollar. Wallace Reid was a tragic casualty of this heartless system. He was just too nice for Hollywood.

  Marie Prevost

  She was a winner that became the doggie’s dinner. She never meant that much to me, Poor Marie.

  Nick Lowe

  The chorus to this Nick Lowe song is sadly how the beautiful Marie Prevost is remembered by most people today. She is a profound example of the terrible fall from grace so many suffered when sound replaced the silence in film. Marie was barely seventeen when she signed with Mack Sennett’s Keystone Studios as one of his original Bathing Beauties in 1915. She had worked as a secretary in the law firm representing the studio, and was discovered while running an errand to the set. That sounds like something right out of a fairytale—and for a while, it was.

  Marie quickly rose to stardom, starting with eight comedies for Keystone, then in feature films for Warner Brothers, such as The Beautiful and the Damned and The Marriage Circle. She fell in love with a co-star on the set of The Beautiful and the Damned—Kenneth Harlan—and the studio arranged for them to be married on the set as a publicity stunt, to the delight of their fans. Problem was, Marie had neglected to get a divorce from her first husband, Sonny Gerke; a marriage she kept secret for years. When The Daily Mirror got wind of this wee hiccup, they ran a headline stating that Prevost would be a bigamist if she went through with the marriage. Needless to say, Jack Warner was not happy. In the end, she got the divorce, married Harlan, and went on to receive high praise for her performance in The Beautiful and the Damned. She and Harlan were Hollywood’s golden couple for a brief, few years.

  In 1926, a sequence of events mortally wounded her career. Her beloved mother, Hughlina Bickford, died in an car accident, devastating Marie, then Warner Brothers elected not renew Marie and her husband’s contracts. Unable to cope with the loss of her last surviving parent, and hurt by the studio’s unexpected rejection, she turned to alcohol for solace. Her marriage died the next year as she sank deeper into depression. A brief dalliance with Howard Hughes only made things worse, and her part in his film, The Racket (1928), was her final starring role.

  The final nail in her coffin was talking pictures. Marie’s nasal voice wasn't a good fit for them, and as they got bigger, her roles got smaller, when she got work at all. She binged on food, gained a huge amount of weight, and her drinking got worse. By 1934—her career over—she hung on by a thread, in her small apartment off Vine Street in Hollywood.

  She starved herself in an effort to reclaim some of her golden glamorous leading lady rep, but her drinking negated it. The combination of booze and a starvation diet is a dangerous one, as Marie found out. On January 23, after having listened for two days to the incessant barking of her dachshund, Maxie, neighbors called the apartment manager, who sent someone to check on Marie. Her body was found inside, face down in her bed, and somewhat decomposed. Several empty liquor bottles were found in the apartment, as well as an IOU made out to Joan Crawford. Kenneth Anger, in his book, Hollywood Babylon, famously claimed her dog had partially eaten her remains out of hunger, but the truth is that he was merely nipping at his mistress in a futile attempt to rouse her, which left marks on her fragile, decomposed skin. Her death certificate states she died of heart failure brought on by acute alcoholism, likely compounded by poor nutrition. She was thirty-eight.

  Marie’s funeral was held at Hollywood Memorial Park Cemetery (later known as Hollywood Forever), and attended by some of the period’s biggest stars. Joan Crawford footed the bill, as it was revealed that Marie died with less than $300 in the bank. It would have been nice if Warner Brothers had sprung for it, considering how much money she made them in her prime, but hey, business is business.

  Marie in her prime.

  One good thing did come out of this sad story. The industry, shocked by Marie’s lack of resources after having been such a big star, founded a home for aging actors. On Mulholland Drive in Woodland Hills, and called The Motion Picture and Television Country House and Hospital, this facility still stands today, providing an invaluable service to the aging actors of the entertainment industry, the vast majority of which are not mega-millionaires, but independent contractors with no health coverage or retirement benefits. In the end, Marie would have been proud to be the inspiration for such an amazing organization. It has often been said that there is no crueler business than show business, and the sad, short life of Marie Prevost reaffirms this truth.

  Marie Prevost lies dead in her apartment. The marks on her legs and arms are from her dog napping at her in an attempt to wake her

  Olive Thomas

  Olive and her beloved Pekingese

  Long before Elizabeth Taylor, another violet-eyed, raven-haired beauty flitted across the silver screen, if only briefly, enchanting everyone who saw her. Her name was Olive Thomas, believed by many to be the most beautiful creature ever to grace films. Mary Pickford described her thus: “The girl had the loveliest violet blue eyes I have ever seen. They were fringed with long, dark lashes that seemed darker because of the translucent pallor of her skin.”

  Olive—or Ollie as her friends affectionately called her—began life in depressing, industrialized Pittsburg. Her father died when she was just a child, and she was forced to go to work at age
fourteen to help support her family. She married Bernard Thomas when she was sixteen (probably to escape her miserable life), but the marriage was unhappy, and she separated from him two years later, moving to New York. While working in a department store in Harlem, she entered a contest for “The Most Beautiful Girl In New York” and won. This beauty title led to several prestigious modeling jobs for such well-known magazines as Vogue and The Saturday Evening Post. She also began posing nude for several illustrators and artists of the day, apparently little troubled by the strict moral code of contemporary society. She caught the attention of Florenz Ziegfeld, who immediately put her in his notorious Midnight Frolics show; a dubious affair, staged after-hours on the rooftop garden of the New Amsterdam Theater. The Frolics were nothing like Ziegfeld’s famous Follies. The audience for the Frolics were usually wealthy men who paid a lot of money to see very young girls prance around in almost nothing. Ah, the scandalous turn-of-the-century!