Tragic Hollywood, Beautiful, Glamorous And Dead Read online

  Over the next decade, she went from costar in such films as Star Dust and The Daytime Wife, to starring roles in big-budget Technicolor projects like Forever Amber, Blood and Sand and The Mark of Zorro. She was one of the highest paid stars of the time, and her beauty was exceptional, rivaling even the most beautiful actresses around. Life called her the most physically perfect girl in Hollywood. Look magazine voted her one of the most beautiful women in films, alongside Gene Tierney, Ingrid Bergman and Hedy Lamarr. Linda herself described this period as being “like a fairytale. I stepped into a fabulous land where overnight I was a movie star.” She lived an enviable life, costarred with legends such as Tyrone Power, Lillian Gish and Henry Fonda, and lived in a lavish mansion in Bel Air. She married a much older man, cameraman J. Peverell Marley, who taught her how to drink and be difficult. Unfortunately, her meteoric rise would only be surpassed by her even more rapid descent into obscurity, and in just ten years, Linda found herself a living characterization of that saddest of Hollywood clichés—the has-been.

  Her decline began when her mentor, Darryl Zanuck, lost interest in her. He promoted others over her, leaving her inferior parts. By 1952, her contract with Fox expired, and Linda could not find good paying roles. She had started drinking while still on top, as a way of coping with the emptiness of her private life. As her career sank, her drinking increased, as did her weight. “Suppose you were earning $4,000 or $5,000 a week for years. Suddenly you were fired, and no one will hire you at any figure remotely comparable to your previous salary.” she said later. She was washed up at twenty-nine. By thirty-nine, she had lost her mansion, a second marriage, and her father. Her once-tireless mother wasted away in an expensive nursing home. To pay the bills, she worked small stage productions and nightclubs. Exhausted, and probably ill with liver disease, she sank deeper into the bottle.

  In April of 1965, after two grueling months on the road with a theater group, Linda went to Glenview, Illinois, to see her friend Jeanne Curtis and breathe. She was weak and frail, but still had her famous spunk. On the night of April 8, Linda, Jeanne and Jeanne’s teen daughter, Patty, had just watched one of Linda’s earliest films, Star Dust, on television. Linda was in great spirits, laughing and giggling throughout the movie, and even getting a bit nostalgic. Star Dust, ironically, borrowed heavily from Linda’s early experiences in Hollywood, showcasing her when she was as yet untouched by the ugly disillusionment that would later be etched onto her beautiful face.

  After the movie, two full ashtrays were dumped into the kitchen sink, and all three women went upstairs to go to bed. Sometime before dawn, a fire broke out downstairs, trapping the women upstairs. Panicked, Jeanne shoved her daughter out of one of the bedroom windows, and squeezed herself out. She reached out her hand to help Linda out of the window, but there was no hand to meet hers. She screamed for Linda, but heard nothing, so she went back into the smoke-filled bedroom to try and find her. The smoke and heat beat her back before she was able to take a step, and she retreated back through the window and onto the roof.

  A comedy of errors that would have made Buster Keaton proud, and a Keystone audience roar with laughter, if it weren’t so horrible, then ensued. The fire had completely engulfed the home by the time the fire department arrived on the scene. Jeanne was hanging onto the windowsill, and screaming that there was still a lady inside, but the firemen thought she said baby, and when they entered the house, they were crawling on their hands and knees, looking for an infant. There was general pandemonium in the streets, as people rushed around in all directions, trying to figure out what to do. Meanwhile, a neighbor saw a chilling scene right out of movie. He had gone over to help, and noticed the figure of a woman in a living room window, standing right in the middle of the inferno, silhouetted against the flames. As he smashed the window with a snow shovel, oxygen swept in, and the resulting fireball engulfed the figure.

  They found Linda on the living room floor, barely conscious. She had been too terrified to climb out of the second story window and jump from the roof. Instead, she walked down the stairs and straight into the inferno, covered in just a few blankets. She was trying to make it to the front door, but became disoriented, then collapsed in the living room. They rushed her to the hospital, cussing and screaming all the way. She had no intention of dying, and was even quoted as saying, “Who says I’m going to die! I’m not going to die!” But she was burned over 90% of her body, and succumbed to her injuries the following afternoon. She was forty-one. Rumors sprung up that Linda, in drunken carelessness, dropped a lit cigarette in a chair, causing the fire. There is no proof of this, and the true cause of the fire was never determined.

  Linda was a sweet, gentle girl who found out that the fairytale life of being movie star has a dark side—slide just a little to the left of perfection, and suddenly you’re performing way off Broadway, and wondering how it all went so wrong. Don’t forget that she did accomplish her mother’s dream, and faced down her lifelong nightmare, nearly surviving it. She was down, but not broken, all the way to the end.

  D.W. Griffith

  The Knickerbocker Hotel in Hollywood, circa 1938.

  On any given night, during the '40s, the lone shadow of a man could be seen hunched over the gleaming, paneled bar of the glamorous Knickerbocker Hotel, quietly sipping his drink, or bending the ear of a nearby stranger, until indifference led to familiar isolation once again. This once great and powerful Hollywood player was living out his life in obscurity, alone and forgotten. The strangers he spoke with would probably not believe that they were talking to the person who held the title: “The Man Who Invented Hollywood”. They would be stunned to learn that this man was one of the greatest pioneers, and most influential directors, in the history of film. He also carried the dubious title of “The Greatest Racist in Show Business”, a stigma that would follow him to his early grave. His name was D.W. Griffith, and his importance to modern film cannot be overstated.

  He was born in Kentucky, on a plantation, ten years after the end of the civil war. His family was impoverished, having lost everything during the war, and struggled to eke out a living on the farm. With the death of his father, a former colonel in the Confederate army, the family moved off the farm and into the city of Louisville, where their situation went from bad to worse.

  Eventually, Griffith began acting as an extra in several small theater productions as a way to escape his desperate poverty. This led to an early interest in show business, and he moved to New York to further his career. Before long, he landed small roles in the new medium of movies. He was soon writing them as well, a talent that ultimately led to the Biograph Film Company hiring him to direct. Over the next few years, he directed more than four hundred short films for the company, but he had also become aware of a new way of telling stories in film: the feature. He had spent his early years at Biograph inventing, or perfecting, many of the techniques that later became intrinsic parts of the language of film, such as intercutting scenes to raise tension, and could see the potential of the longer format.

  However, Biograph did not share his vision, and he made only one feature for them before taking his actors and crew to California, to form a third of what would later be known as The Triangle Film Corporation. His first project was a film version of a post-Civil War novel, The Clansman by Thomas Dixon. The novel had been made into a play, and was very popular in the South, as it fed beliefs that blacks were not only inferior, but also dangerously clever, and capable of great evil; a contradiction that did not seem to trouble the droves who bought the book and saw the play. An audience was already primed for the story when Griffith set out to make a film that would change the industry forever: Birth of a Nation.

  Promising to be a sweeping epic on an unseen scale, it boasted thousands of extras, elaborate special effects, hundreds of stunts, and buckets of drama: in short, something for everyone...as long as you weren’t black. It was the civil war with a sledgehammer skew favoring the confederate point of view, portraying freed
slaves as wild animals out to steal the virtue of white women and the rightful place of the white race. The Klan were “white knights”, saving women and society from the ruin inflicted by the evil scourge set by the Union Army upon their gentle, beautiful, white world.

  Birth of a Nation was a masterpiece of filmmaking, using such innovative techniques such as color tinting, moving camera, and the long panning shot. It was one of the first films to use multiple interwoven plots and storylines. It was over three hours long, three times as long as a one reel, and it was a stunning success, smashing all box office records and holding its position as the most profitable film of all time for the twenty-five years. It took Gone with the Wind to steal its spot. D.W. Griffith had just directed the first blockbuster.

  There was just one problem. It was a huge, gaudy, bald-faced, shameless lie. The old South was shown in all its magnolia-scented, mimosa-soaked magnificence, with contented slaves enjoying their lives of servitude to gentle masters who patted them on the head, and made sure they were well cared for. The ungrateful wretches repaid this kindness by taking their new found freedom and marauding through the streets like dogs, leering at white women, and staging corrupt elections in order to seize power, for the sole purpose of getting drunk inside the voting chamber and passing interracial marriage laws. Enter the boys in white, perched on hooded steeds, ready to save the day! The bullshit was piled so high in this movie that it would take decades to clean up.

  The Ku Klux Klan was, prior to the release of this movie, an organization that had essentially died out, after being declared a terrorist group in 1870. After the film was released, however, a renewed Klan was born again, fired up over both the movie, and the public’s positive fervor over the role the Klan played in it. They saw Birth of a Nation as the most effective recruiting tool they had ever had! Millions of new members swelled their ranks, bringing this once-dead organization to back to life with a vengeance, to wreak havoc and terror again for decades to come.

  The set of Intolerance

  African-Americans had a different view of the film, and riots broke out in Boston and Philadelphia when it premiered. The NAACP tried to ban it in several cities, staging organized protests wherever it opened, to no avail. White America was still firmly in charge, and white America loved this movie.

  Griffith, not one to rest on his laurels, launched right into his next big epic. It would be at an even more colossal scale than Birth of a Nation. Titled Intolerance, the concept was so complex, so ambitious, that many in the industry doubted both Griffith’s judgment and the project’s commercial viability. The doubters did not trouble the great and powerful Griffith, who proceeded to commit to film the most spectacular example of movie making in the field’s short history. Intolerance portrayed the historical oppression of the poor and downtrodden at the hands of brutal kings and modern capitalists, through the eyes of four protagonists in four distinct time periods. These periods were ancient Babylon, 15th century France, ancient Judea during the time of Christ, and present-day America. Astonishingly, these stories were not told in chronological order, but in parallel, each building to a dramatic climax alongside the rest, and slowly building tension leading to that crescendo of emotional resonance. It was like four great films in one! Production costs were through the roof. The magnificent ancient Babylonian scene alone, with its massive columns and three thousand extras, was the most elaborate and expensive scene yet filmed, remaining so for two decades.

  The impact of Intolerance was not nearly as dramatic as that of Birth of a Nation. The pacifist theme was popular in pre-WWI America, but quickly became dated as the country geared up for war with Germany, a year later. In addition to the huge production costs associated with the film, Griffith spent millions more on an elaborate road show that accompanied the movie wherever it premiered, plunging the project even further into debt. The film began to hemorrhage money, and eventually failed at the box office. Still, Intolerance is considered by many to be the greatest silent film ever made. In 2007, The American Film Institute ranked it 49th of the 100 best movies of all time. David Kehr, film critic for The Chicago Reader, wrote “One of the great breakthroughs. The Ulysses of the cinema—and a powerful, moving experience in its own right.” Jon Fortgang wrote in his review for Film4, “...It’s still the most spectacular undertaking in film ever seen”

  In 1920, Griffith co-founded United Artists, along with Charlie Chaplin, Mary Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks, and continued to direct films. However, by the mid-'20s, tastes had changed, and Hollywood grew increasingly tired of Griffith’s outdated approach, and his lavish, expensive productions. It would not be long before he found himself shut out of the business he had almost singlehandedly created. The once-great director retired to the elegant Knickerbocker Hotel, and spent his days drinking and jauntily walking down Hollywood Blvd., swinging his cane and reliving his glory days with anyone who would stand still long enough to hear his stories. Much of the time, he could be found hunched over the Knickerbocker bar, soaking his sorrows in booze, until he staggered back to his hotel room, all alone. He was a silly old drunk, ridiculous with his hat and cane, a gaudy relic from a past that no one cared to remember anymore.

  On the afternoon of July 23, 1948, Griffith was walking under the great chandelier in the lobby of the Knickerbocker, when he suddenly fell to the floor, unconscious. He had suffered a massive cerebral hemorrhage, and was dead before he reached the hospital. He was seventy-three.

  A memorial service was held in his honor at the Hollywood Masonic Temple, but few in the industry bothered to come. Still, there were some left who remembered the genius he once was. Charles Chaplin referred to Griffith as “The teacher of us all!” Orson Wells put it best when he said, “I have never really hated Hollywood except for its treatment of D.W. Griffith. No town, no industry, no profession, no art form owes so much to a single man.” He was laid to rest in a modest grave, in his home state of Kentucky, a long way from Hollywood, the town he helped to invent.

  Charlie Chaplin

  The image of the Little Tramp, with his baggy pants and swinging cane, sauntering jauntily down a dirt road, is as endearing today as when Chaplin first committed the character to film, nearly a century ago. Chaplin overcame a soul-crushing childhood that would even stretch the imagination of a Dickens reader. He would become the most famous actor in history. He could take his pain and with it, paint a masterpiece in celluloid, unparalleled in its influence on modern films. How did America and Hollywood honor this? At the first hint of scandal, Hollywood and the US shut him out. He was forced to flee in fear and disgrace, back to his native England, never to return.

  In 1889, Charlie was born both into poverty and South London, to parents who eked out a living performing in the gritty music halls in favor with the working class folk then. His mother, Hannah, was promiscuous, and gave birth to an illegitimate son, Sydney John, four years prior to Charlie. Chaplin said many times that he was not entirely sure the man presented to him as his father, whose name he bore, was his biological sire.

  A young Charlie Chaplin photographed by a carnival worker

  Chaplin’s parents split up when he was only two. Hannah tried to make ends meet by sewing and scrubbing floors, with no help from her husband. Her career as a music hall singer faded with her voice. One night she was booed offstage by the crowd, as five-year-old Charlie watched from the wings. Desperate, the theater manager shoved the little boy onstage, and told him to sing. Terrified, he stammered out a song that delighted the crowd, and was pelted with pennies. The debut of Charlie Chaplin was a success!

  Life at home went from bad to worse for young Charlie. The crush of poverty, chronic malnutrition, and bouts of syphilis took their toll on his mother, and she went insane. Charlie and Sydney were sent to The Central London District School for Paupers when Charlie was just seven. This “school” was actually a brutal sweatshop for waifs, where the brothers toiled for two years. Hannah took the boys back briefly, but gave them up again to anothe
r wretched workhouse. Meanwhile, Charles Chaplin Senior drank himself to death by cirrhosis of the liver in 1900, at thirty-eight. Hannah—in and out of institutions for five years—went permanently insane in 1905, and stayed locked up for the rest of her life. Thirteen-year-old Charlie fended for himself, until Sydney returned from the Navy.

  Through all of it, Charlie never forgot the night he set foot on a smoky stage, and conjured song for a rowdy, inebriated crowd that pelted him with pennies. He returned to the music halls, and soon was cast in a London stage production of Sherlock Holmes. His professional acting career was launched.

  He later won national recognition for the comedy routines he performed with the Fred Karno players. When the Karno troupe played New York in 1910, Charlie was a featured player. It wasn’t long until he was noticed by the New York Motion Picture Company, the producers of popular Keystone slapstick comedies, and he was invited to audition. Charlie was soon working for Keystone in the fledgling industry that had only just begun to change the world.

  Chaplin and Jackie Coogan in The Kid

  Chaplin in The Little Tramp

  Initially, Charlie was put off by the gag-centric physical comedy comprising most of the Keystone shorts at the time. He felt they lacked subtlety and innocence, gaining laughs at the expense of beauty and deeper, subtler emotions. His second film for Keystone debuted the character that would forever shadow his life—The Little Tramp. Charlie described, years later, how he designed the character’s costume: “I wanted everything to be a contradiction; the pants baggy, the coat tight, the hat small, the shoes large.” He went on to say that he did not understand the character, until he put on the costume, and then became the tramp.