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

by Parish, James Robert

  Suzan Ball

  February 3, 1933–August 5, 1955

  When Suzan Ball arrived in Hollywood as a Universal-International would-be starlet, she was promoted as “The New Cinderella Girl of 1952.” In the next four years, she costarred in several studio features and had a very promising career. But at age 22, unfortunately, she died of cancer.

  Suzan was born near Buffalo, New York. She was not only a descendant of Massachusetts Pilgrim leader John Alden, but she was also a second cousin of screen and TV legend Lucille Ball. Her family moved briefly to Miami, Florida, in 1938, but later returned to Buffalo. In 1947, they relocated to North Hollywood, California, where Suzan went to high school. She was an avid choral-club performer and hoped to become a professional singer. She finagled an appearance on Richard Arlen’s Hollywood Opportunity, a local TV show, which led to her joining Mel Baker’s Orchestra for the next three years. When her parents moved north to Santa Maria, Suzan remained in Los Angeles. She won a job as a harem girl in the low-budget Aladdin and His Lamp (1952).

  Through an acquaintance, actress Mary Castle, Suzan got an audition with Universal and was signed to a studio contract in October 1951. She had a bit part in Gregory Peck’s The World in His Arms and then a starring role on-screen as a blackmailing dance-hall gal in the Western Untamed Frontier (1952). Suzan had a brief romance with that movie’s male lead, Scott Brady.

  During the filming of City Beneath the Sea (1953), Suzan fell deeply in love with the older actor Anthony Quinn. She relentlessly pursued the married (but womanizing) actor, but their well-publicized romance lasted only a year. During that time, they costarred in East of Sumatra (1953), in which Suzan’s character was to perform an exotic dance on-screen. Wanting to impress Quinn, she insisted that she did not need her dance double, Julie Newmar, for the scene. Suzan did the intricate steps herself. Halfway through, she misjudged a step, falling to the cement floor on her right knee. It hurt a great deal, but she soon forgot about it. Later, when she was back east on a personal appearance tour, she banged the same knee again in a minor auto mishap.

  By now, Suzan had broken off her romance with Quinn and was dating fellow contract player Richard Long. While she was making her next picture, War Arrow (1953), Suzan’s physician informed her that she had developed a tumor in her right leg. Off camera, she relied on crutches to get around, but otherwise refused to take the throbbing pain seriously. She tried new doctors, but each of them told her that unless a miracle occurred her leg would soon have to be amputated. She and Long (they now planned to marry) refused to accept the diagnosis. After the accident-prone Suzan slipped at home and broke her leg, she was operated on. Even though surgeons thought they had removed all the cancerous tumors, the malignancy continued to spread. Soon, the leg had to be amputated.

  On April 11, 1954, Suzan and Richard were wed in Santa Barbara. She walked down the aisle using her new artificial limb. The next month, the couple worked together on an episode of Lux Video Theatre. Suzan played a wheelchair-bound victim who is able to walk by the end of the show. Director George Sherman, who had worked with Suzan in War Arrow, cast her opposite Victor Mature in Chief Crazy Horse (1955). When the studio wanted to substitute Susan Cabot in the role, Sherman insisted that Ball be retained: “She doesn’t act with her legs, she acts with her face, with her mind, with her spirit.”

  Despite the physical pain, Suzan continued her career, going on a nightclub tour with Long to Palm Springs and Phoenix. While rehearsing an episode of the TV show Climax, she collapsed and was rushed to the hospital. The cancer had spread to her lungs. Soon Suzan was constantly—and heavily—sedated, and her personality changed drastically. Her distraught husband fell into a brief relationship with Suzan’s fulltime nurse, Kay Biddle.

  On the evening of August 5, 1955, as Richard sat by his dying wife, she awoke, murmured “Tony,” in reference to her former lover Anthony Quinn, and passed away. Funeral services were conducted at Forest Lawn Memorial Park in Glendale, California. Pallbearers and ushers at the funeral included actors John Agar and Hugh O’Brian. Nearly 20 years later, Long, who had gone on to marry the actress Mara Corday, died of a heart attack on December 21, 1974.

  Louise Beavers

  March 8, 1902–October 26, 1962

  Minority performers have usually had a very difficult time getting ahead in the motion-picture industry, especially in the first several decades of the twentieth century. Louise Beavers worked her way up from the bottom rung of studio jobs to become a respected character star. Even when stuck with a stereotypical role as a domestic, she always rose to the challenge. She gave dimension to her cardboard characters and provided her costars a real person with whom to trade dialogue on-screen.

  Louise was born in Cincinnati, Ohio, in 1902. When she was 11, the family moved to California, where she graduated from Pasadena High School. Her mother was a voice teacher and trained Louise from an early age. Her relatives hoped that Louise would go into concert performance, but she fooled them by joining an all-female minstrel show. She had occasional vaudeville jobs and briefly tried nursing, but found her daily tasks too depressing. She also worked as a dressing room attendant for a celebrity photographer, and this later got her hired as the maid to Leatrice Joy, one of Paramount Pictures’ top stars in the 1920s. When not helping her employer, Louise also found work as a movie extra.

  Louise made her first real impression on audiences as the cook in Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1927). After she was cast as Mammy Julia in Coquette (1929, starring Mary Pickford), the squarely built Louise was never without movie work. She was momentarily sidetracked when the chic screen star Lilyan Tashman asked her to be a personal maid. Before long, however, Louise returned to her true love—acting. In the early 1930s Beavers made a dozen films a year, working hard to shine. She displayed a marvelous comic timing while sparring with saucy Mae West in She Done Him Wrong (1933).

  Louise’s golden moment in motion pictures came with Imitation of Life (1934), in which she and Claudette Colbert play lifelong friends who help each other to raise their daughters. It was the first major Hollywood movie to humanize a black individual (and allow him or her so much screen time). Beavers should have received an Academy Award nomination for her performance, but the bigotry of the day ensured that she did not. With her newfound success, she went on a personal appearance tour: doing a scene from Imitation of Life, singing songs, and dancing. She was always well-received by audiences.

  But then it was back to the grind of playing more on-camera maids. Louise’s favorite such part was as Bing Crosby’s wise housekeeper in Holiday Inn (1942), in which she sang “Abraham” with the famed crooner. She added zest to Cary Grant’s Mr. Blandings Builds His Dream House (1948) and offered a touching performance as the baseball player’s mama in The Jackie Robinson Story (1950).

  Ben Carter and Louise Beavers in Young America (1942).

  Courtesy of JC Archives

  Beulah had been a popular radio series starring Hattie McDaniel, the actress who had won a Best Supporting Oscar for playing Scarlett O’Hara’s “Mammy” in Gone with the Wind (1939). For the TV version in 1950, Ethel Waters starred first, and then McDaniel took over. As of April 29, 1952, however, it was Louise who delivered the famous catchphrase, “Somebody bawl for Beulah?” In February 1957 she made her real stage debut in Praise House, which opened in San Francisco. She was the psalm-singing Mammy, but neither the role nor the play offered her much opportunity to shine. So it was back to being a cook and maid onscreen.

  After years of dealing with diabetes, Louise (who was five feet, four inches tall and now weighed 190 pounds) entered a Los Angeles hospital. She died of a heart attack on October 26, 1962, survived by LeRoy Moore, her husband of many years. She had recently finished a club engagement in Las Vegas with Mae West, a lifelong pal. Louise was buried at the Evergreen Cemetery in Los Angeles.

  On February 17, 1976, Louise Beavers was posthumously inducted into the Black Filmmakers Hall of Fame in ceremonies held at the Paramount T
heatre in Oakland, California. It was a belated tribute for an admirable talent whom the film industry of the time refused to allow to shine in the limelight, but whom it could not hold down.

  Amanda Blake

  [Beverly Louise Neill]

  February 20, 1929–August 16, 1989

  In 1963, the New York Times declared her character “the only woman on nighttime television who is her own woman, successful in her own right, and who doesn’t bask in the reflection of some man.” The praise was directed to Amanda Blake, who from 1955 to 1974 played Miss Kitty Russell, the worldlywise proprietress of Dodge City’s not-so-proper Longbranch Saloon on the popular TV Western series Gunsmoke.

  Born in Buffalo, New York, Amanda began her acting career in a school play at the age of seven. After performing in theater stock and radio, she was signed to an MGM contract in 1949. But her secondary roles in studio films—Duchess of Idaho (1950), Lili (1953), The Glass Slipper (1955)—were far from stellar. In 1955 she was already performing on television when she auditioned for the role of self-sufficient Miss Kitty. Amanda soon joined James Arness (Marshall Matt Dillon), Milburn Stone (Dr. Galen Adams), and Dennis Weaver (Chester Goode) for Gunsmoke, which was to become one of TV’s most enduring weekly properties. In 1959 Amanda was nominated for an Emmy for Best Supporting Actress (Continuing Character) in a Dramatic Series.

  By 1974, Blake, who had already been married four times, was living in Phoenix, Arizona (where the devout animal-rights activist kept 10 rare cheetahs, a lion, and a bird sanctuary), and commuting to Hollywood for the show. Finally, she said, “God, if I have to put that damn bustle and those curls on one more time, I’m gonna snap.” Withdrawing from the series (which lasted one more season), she reasoned, “Nineteen years is a hell of a long time for someone to be stuck behind a bar.” (She would, however, return for a TV movie reunion: Gunsmoke: Return to Dodge, in 1987.)

  Thereafter, Amanda was seen mostly on game shows and as a TV series guest star. In 1977, the once-heavy smoker underwent surgery for cancer of the tongue. As a result, Amanda was forced to learn to talk anew and became an avid American Cancer Society spokesperson.

  In 1984, President Ronald Reagan presented Amanda with the annual Courage Award of the American Cancer Society. That same year, in April, she married for the fifth and final time. Her new spouse was Mark Spaeth, a Texas real-estate developer and Austin city councilman. Unknown to Amanda, the bisexual Spaeth had been diagnosed with HIV two months before their marriage; he soon developed full-blown AIDS. She and Spaeth divorced and Amanda moved back to Los Angeles from Austin, Texas, where they had briefly resided. (Spaeth died in 1985.)

  In 1987 Amanda herself was diagnosed with HIV. To keep the tragic news from the media, she moved to a ranch near Sacramento, California, that was owned by Pat Derby (the animal trainer from Gunsmoke). During 1988, she suffered a severe case of pneumonia, began losing weight, and experienced constant pain. In July of 1989, the now-bitter, greatly suffering Amanda was admitted to Mercy General Hospital in Sacramento. She used her given name of Beverly Neill.

  Amanda Blake passed away on August 16, 1989, at 7:15 P.M., with her dog Butterfly at her side. The press was informed that her death was the result of her long battle with cancer. Only belatedly, after a reporter came upon the actual facts of the case, was AIDS revealed as the true cause of Amanda’s death. Friends were asked to make donations to the Amanda Blake Memorial Fund, which benefited the Performing Animals Welfare Society (PAWS). In late November of 1991, memorabilia from her estate was auctioned off in North Hollywood, California, with proceeds going to PAWS.

  A scene from The Glass Slipper (1955) with Elsa Lanchester, Amanda Blake, Lisa Daniels, and Leslie Caron.

  Courtesy of JC Archives

  William Boyd

  June 5, 1895–September 12, 1972

  For many decades’ worth of film lovers, William Boyd will forever be associated with his beloved character, the Western cowboy hero Hopalong Cassidy. In Boyd’s long-lasting sagebrush series, which came after years in the cinema as a handsome leading man, Boyd was the gallant cowboy—sporting distinguished white hair and a black outfit—who always rode to the rescue in the nick of time astride his faithful horse Topper. He became a role model for generations of admirers, and even now is immortalized on various Internet websites. On-screen, Hoppy was the type of guy who didn’t swear, drink, or smoke. He rarely kissed his screen heroine. He never killed the villains; instead, he smartly captured them. Boyd’s alter ego became so famous that at times, he joked, he felt he had lost his own identity.

  Andy Clyde, William Boyd, and Rand Brooks prepare for action in Silent Conflict (1948), the 61st entry in the Hopalong Cassidy Western film series.

  Courtesy of JC Archives

  William Lawrence Boyd was born in Hendrysburg, Ohio, in 1895, the son of a laborer. The family moved to Oklahoma when he was 10; William’s parents died while he was still in his teens. When William had to quit school to find work, he discarded his dream of becoming an engineer. Thereafter, he plodded through an assortment of odd jobs ranging from oil rigger to lumberjack, and even orange picking. He wanted to enlist in World War I, but a heart ailment disqualified him from military service. By then, William had found his way to Hollywood, where he was doing walk-ons in silent movies. He won a bit part in Cecil B. DeMille’s Old Wives for New (1918), which led to increasingly larger parts in other DeMille screen extravaganzas, including the Biblical epic King of Kings (1927). By now, the dedicated actor had made his mark as a handsome leading man with distinctive, prematurely silver hair. Boyd’s salary escalated and he lived lavishly, buying mansions and yachts. He managed to make the transition to talkies successfully, as a contract leading man for Pathé (which later became RKO Radio Pictures).

  Bill was as much the playboy offscreen as on. He married actress Ruth Miller in 1921; they divorced in 1924. In January 1926, he wed actress Elinor Fair, with whom he costarred in The Volga Boatman (1926). He and Elinor divorced in 1929. When that decree became final, Boyd married actress Dorothy Sebastian, his leading lady in His First Command (1929).

  When bad luck hit in late 1933, Boyd’s world all but collapsed. Another (less famous) actor named William Boyd was arrested during a wild party and booked on possession of illegal whiskey and gambling equipment. In several newspaper accounts of the incident, it was suggested that a sex orgy had been in progress. By mistake, a photo of the better-known Bill Boyd was printed with the story, instead of the likeness of the scandal’s real object. As a result, Bill’s career immediately disintegrated. He lost his money and became a heavy drinker. Turned loose by RKO, he was reduced to making a few inconsequential poverty-row pictures.

  Finally, Boyd got a much-needed break. The veteran movie producer Harry “Pop” Sherman was about to film (for Paramount Pictures) a batch of budget Westerns based on Clarence E. Mulford’s popular Hop-a-long Cassidy novels. Initially, Sherman intended to use character actor James Gleason (or even budding debonair British actor David Niven) in the title role, and thought of casting Bill as the major villain. Bill, however, convinced Sherman to give him the lead. Part of the deal between producer and star included a promise by the actor that he would end his boozing and abandon his wild ways.

  No one anticipated that the first entry, Hop-a-long Cassidy (1935), would be so well received. After its release, there was little attempt to conform the screen hero to Mulford’s original character (a crusty individual who had a limp, hence his nickname Hop-a-long). As refashioned by Boyd, Hopalong (as he was now called) became a moral and temperate cowman who treated women gallantly and bad guys roughly. He always rode the trails with two sidekicks (initially Jimmy Ellison and George “Gabby” Hayes).

  Action audiences especially liked the Hoppy Westerns because there were no plot delays for bothersome song interludes, unlike the movies of contemporaries such as Gene Autry. In the early entries, a stunt double was used to perform Boyd’s riding scenes in the long shots. Boyd, who initially detested horses, prac
ticed his riding skills and eventually became a decent rider, although never a true horseman. After divorcing Dorothy Sebastian in 1936, Boyd was married for the fourth and final time to actress Grace Bradley on June 5, 1937.

  Between 1935 and 1948, 66 Cassidy movies were made. Pop Sherman produced the first 54, and Boyd supervised the last dozen on his own. In 1948, Boyd was smart enough to see the future in television. He hocked all his assets to acquire full rights to the Hopalong films and character. The Hoppy movies were popular programming in the early days of TV, and Boyd became a multimillionaire from the merchandising tie-ins and the new half-hour entries he produced in 1951–52. In 1952, as a favor to his longtime mentor, Cecil B. DeMille, he made a guest appearance in the latter’s circus epic, The Greatest Show on Earth. It would be his last movie appearance.

  Bill sold off his interest in the Hopalong property in the late 1950s at a huge profit. He made occasional guest appearances after that, but always insisted that youngsters not be charged to see him. He donated generously to children’s hospitals, once saying, “The way I figure it, if it weren’t for the kids, I’d be a bum today.” During the last decade of his life, he and his wife lived quietly in California, spending summers in Dana Point and winters in Palm Desert. By now, Bill had developed Parkinson’s disease and remained in seclusion, wanting his fans to remember him as he had been. After he had a cancerous tumor removed from a lymph gland, he refused to be photographed.