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

by Parish, James Robert

  Peter Lawford and Sammy Davis Jr. contemplate a tough situation in Salt & Pepper (1968).

  Courtesy of JC Archives

  On May 16, 1990, after too many months of severe suffering, Sammy Davis Jr., the consummate entertainer, passed away. The service—one of the best-attended celebrity funerals in recent times—was held in the Hall of Liberty’ at Forest Lawn Memorial Park in Hollywood Hills, California. Rabbi Allen Freehling conducted the nondenominational service, with Reverend Jesse Jackson delivering the eulogy. Among the honorary pallbearers were Bill Cosby, Michael Jackson, Dean Martin, and Frank Sinatra. Notables attending the memorial included Gregory Hines, Liza Minnelli, Dionne Warwick, Burt Reynolds, Angie Dickinson, Carroll O’Connor, and Little Richard. After the service, Davis’s bronze casket was taken to Forest Lawn Memorial Park in Glendale, where the “world’s greatest entertainer” was buried in the family plot next to his father and his adopted uncle, Will Mastin.

  For the multitalented Sammy Davis Jr., who had spent so much of his life struggling uphill in the white-dominated entertainment industry, the battle was over. For his family, it was just beginning.

  The lantern-jawed, diminutive Davis was born in New York’s Harlem neighborhood in 1925. Both parents were in show business, working at the time in Will Mastin’s troupe. When Sammy Jr. was two and a half, his parents split up and he remained with his dad. He soon joined his father in Mastin’s vaudeville act. Later, Sammy, his dad, and “Uncle” Will formed the Will Mastin Trio.

  Sammy’s two years (1943–45) in World War II military service taught him anew how to cope with racial bigotry. After the war, the revived Will Mastin Trio broke several racial barriers on the cabaret circuit, but they always had to fight discrimination.

  By 1954, Sammy had become the focal point of the act, with his flashy dancing, singing, impressions, and the several instruments he played. He even had his own recording contract. Then, on November 19, 1954, at 8:00 A.M. he almost died in a car accident; he did lose his left eye. It was at this point that, encouraged by his Jewish pals Eddie Cantor and Jeff Chandler, Sammy converted to Judaism. Upon recovery from the accident, Sammy focused totally on his career—always working, always giving 100 percent. He became a member of Frank Sinatra’s Rat Pack, and starred on Broadway in Mr. Wonderful (1956), Golden Boy (1964), and Stop the World, I Want to Get Off (1978). His boundless energy led him to make several films, ranging from musicals (Porgy and Bess, 1959; Sweet Charity, 1968) to gangster drama (Johnny Cool, 1963) to comedic junk (One More Time, 1970). He headlined three TV variety shows (1966, 1973, 1975–77). He was everywhere!

  The hard-living Sammy’s married life was a merry-go-round. He wed singer Loray White in early 1958; they divorced 15 months later. Much was made of his interracial marriage to Scandinavian actress May Britt on November 13, 1960. Their daughter, Tracey, was born in 1961, and they adopted two sons, Mark and Jeff. By late 1968, the couple had divorced, and May was given custody of their children. In mid-1970, dancer Altovise Gore became the third and final Mrs. Davis.

  Having gone through several political phases, Sammy eventually dropped a lot of his glitter and glitz to display a newfound social consciousness. In 1986 the new, toned-down Sammy performed in concert at the Hollywood Bowl, and teamed with Frank Sinatra and Liza Minnelli in a world tour. In 1988, his father died and Sammy underwent hip surgery. Several months before Davis himself passed away, he and Altovise adopted a 13-year-old son, Manny.

  When Sammy’s will was filed, there were assets of $2 million in real estate and another $2 million in personal property, as well as insurance polices totaling nearly $6 million. But his debts were also huge; he owed well over $5.7 million in federal taxes, which dated back to IRS tax disallowances in 1972. The financial mess led to a great deal of squabbling between the estate’s executors and various beneficiaries. In September 1991, as part of the probate sale, Davis’s 22-room Beverly Hills mansion (once worth $4.25 million) was put on the depressed real-estate market for $2.72 million. Later that month, at a prestigious Los Angeles auction house, much of the memorabilia Sammy had acquired over a crowded lifetime was sold off, with items such as his gold record, “The Candy Man,” going for $10,000. About eight hundred people attended the sale, which brought in $439,000. Finally, in the spring of 1997, Altovise Davis and the IRS reached an undisclosed agreement regarding the tax liabilities still pending against the entertainer’s estate.

  If Sammy could have predicted the financial chaos his death would generate, one wonders if he would ever have said in later years, “You have to be able to look back at your life and say, ‘Yeah, that was fun.’ The only person 1 ever hurt was myself and even that I did to the minimum. If you can do that and you’re still functioning, you’re the luckiest person in the world.”

  Marlene Dietrich

  [Maria Magdalena Dietrich]

  December 27, 1901–May 6, 1992

  “I know that I, myself, could never see Marlene [Dietrich] without her moving me and making me happy. If that’s what makes her mysterious, it’s a beautiful mystery.”

  —ERNEST HEMINGWAY

  Aside from the psychotically determined Joan Crawford, no movie legend of Hollywood’s fabulous Golden Age worked harder to retain her glamorous allure than Marlene Dietrich. Illusion was the essential ingredient of the celebrated Marlene, and she craftily maintained her facade of exotic beauty well into her 70s. Bursting upon the international film scene with The Blue Angel (1930), she spent the next half-century reshaping her public image to suit the changing times. Throughout the years, she performed successfully in all types of media: film, radio, recordings, and stage.

  But there was much more to the shrewd, complex Dietrich than her public facade suggested. She understood herself far better than her adoring fans ever fathomed her. Once, after a retrospective showing of her feature films at New York City’s Museum of Modern Art, she told the enthralled audience: “I don’t ask whom you are applauding—the legend, the performer, or me. I personally liked the legend. Not that it was easy to live with, but I liked it.” On another occasion, she confided to her Beverly Hills neighbor, actor Van Johnson: “I’m a hausfrau, a cook—not that sequined clown you see on the stage.” A highly intelligent realist and humanist, she acknowledged frequently that her arduous years of entertaining Allied troops during World War II was “the only important thing I’ve done.”

  Another of Marlene’s intriguing facets was her long-standing reputation as a temptress. Over the years, Dietrich—who lived apart from her accommodating spouse of many years—boasted such lovers as actors Maurice Chevalier, Douglas Fairbanks Jr., George Raft, Jean Gabin, and Yul Brynner, as well as novelist Erich Maria Remarque. She also had sexual liaisons with Edith Piaf, Edward R. Murrow, General George Patton, John F. Kennedy, and Joe DiMaggio. For the charismatic actress, however, it was the attention of the celebrated, the powerful, and the intellectual that sated her appetite, not merely her own sexual gratification.

  Having devoted many years to orchestrating the myths surrounding her life, it is characteristic of the hedonistic Marlene that, when advancing years forced her to abandon show business in the late 1970s, she would embark with gusto on a final phase of her life—seclusion. As with everything else she did, Marlene undertook her new role with unswerving determination. Once she left public life, she remained sequestered in her relatively compact Paris apartment, unlike her longtime movie rival Greta Garbo, who ventured out into the Manhattan streets until near the end of her life in 1990.

  In complete retirement, Dietrich permitted only a chosen few to visit her in her last dozen years. She was determined that the world should remember her as the sophisticated, seductive actress Marlene Dietrich, not as a frail old woman. The ruse obviously worked, as Dietrich today continues to be the inspiration for stage musicals abroad and on Broadway, cabaret act recreations, and even a very expensive—by German standards—celebrity screen biography, Marlene (2000), starring Katja Flint.

  Maria Magdalena Dietri
ch was born on December 27, 1901, in Schoneberg, Germany, a suburb of Berlin. She was the second daughter of Prussian policeman Louis Erich Otto Dietrich and Wilhelmina Elisabeth Josephine Felsing. Maria’s father died when she was nine, and his widow was soon remarried to Edouard von Losch, an officer in the German army. Throughout her highly disciplined childhood, it was her mother (Maria called her “the good General”) who exerted the most influence upon her younger daughter. She was always exhorting the girl to “do something” with her life.

  From an early age, Maria was fascinated with motion pictures and wanted to become an actress. As a teenager, she took violin lessons and at age 16, had her first affair—with her much older music teacher. In the post-World War I era, Berlin was disrupted by riots and revolution. Therefore, Maria went to Weimar in 1919 to study violin at the Konservatorium. But a wrist injury ended her musical ambitions and she turned to acting. By 1921 she was studying drama in Berlin and earning minor roles in stage dramas and revues. Still enchanted with movies, Maria, who had altered her first name to Marlene, haunted the film studios seeking acting assignments. One of her earliest screen parts was in Die Tragodie der Liebe (1923), starring Emil Jannings. She was given a small role by assistant director Rudolf Sieber, who had become entranced with the plump, vivacious young actress.

  On May 17, 1924, Marlene married Sieber (four years her senior) in Berlin. The following January, their only child, Maria, was born. But marriage and motherhood did not change Dietrich, who already had a reputation as a bisexual jazz baby. In 1927, she was in the Berlin cast of the American musical Broadway, starring Willi Forst (with whom she had an affair). Forst introduced her to the city’s young intelligentsia, including future film director Billy Wilder and novelist Erich Maria Remarque.

  Marlene was appearing in a musical revue, Two Bow Ties (1929), when Hollywood director Josef von Sternberg arrived in Berlin to film Der Blaue Engel (The Blue Angel). Von Sternberg saw Dietrich perform onstage and cast her as the decadent cabaret singer who ruins a middle-aged professor (played by Emil Jannings). The night the movie premiered in Berlin to acclaim, Dietrich, buoyed by a Paramount Pictures contract, left for Hollywood. Both her husband and young daughter remained in Berlin.

  Marlene Dietrich in one of her typical 1930s glamour poses.

  Courtesy of JC Archives

  Paramount envisioned Dietrich as the rival to MGM’s Greta Garbo and immediately Americanized their much-touted foreign contractee. By the time she appeared in her first American-made feature, Morocco (1930), Dietrich had created the exotic image that was to remain her trademark for the next several decades. With her Svengali-like director, von Sternberg, Marlene made four other features, which ranged from the deliciously ridiculous (Shanghai Express, 1932) to the completely dreary (The Devil Is a Woman, 1935).

  During her first year in Hollywood, Marlene maintained a bachelor’s life. But in the spring of 1931, she brought her daughter Maria to Hollywood, telling the press that her six-year-old girl was just four. As for her absent husband, Rudi, he moved to Paris in 1932 to be with Tamara Matul, a Russian dancer. (Rudi and Tamara would remain together till her death in 1968.) When von Sternberg’s wife, Riza, divorced her husband later in 1931, Paramount had to pay her off because she had filed charges of libel and alienation of affection against Dietrich. Meanwhile, Marlene had an assortment of affairs. Some of her more famous lovers during this time were lesbian socialite and author Mercedes de Acosta and former silent-film star John Gilbert (just before his death in 1935). Both of these people had been former lovers of Dietrich’s great competitor, Greta Garbo.

  By the mid-1930s, Dietrich had broken her ties with von Sternberg. She refused Adolf Hitler’s blandishments to return to Germany and star in movies for the Third Reich. Instead, she appeared to advantage with ex-lover Gary Cooper in Desire (1936). After the tiresome Angel (1937), however, Paramount and Marlene called it quits.

  Always the survivor, Dietrich made a stunning comeback as a saleable Hollywood commodity in Universal’s comic Western Destry Rides Again (1939). The new Marlene was an earthy saloon chanteuse who could get rough and dirty. She spent the early 1940s making a series of raucous romantic entries, often teamed with John Wayne—a good example is The Spoilers (1942).

  Marlene had become an American citizen in 1938. When the United States entered World War II, she became one of Hollywood’s most active entertainers for the war effort. She worked tirelessly at the Hollywood Canteen, participated in war-bond drives, made radio broadcasts in assorted languages for the government to air in Europe, and made recordings (including “Lili Marlene”) in German, which were dropped behind enemy lines. She entertained for the USO both in the United States and in Europe, selling $100,000 worth of her jewelry to finance her expedition. For lifting the spirits of Allied fighting men during World War II, she later received the U.S. Defense Department’s Medal of Freedom. (One of Marlene’s grandsons, J. David Riva, coproduced a documentary, Her Own Song [2001], which dealt with Dietrich’s tireless contributions on behalf of the Allies in World War II.)

  After the war, Marlene went to France, where she and her on-again, off-again lover, French film star Jean Gabin, costarred in Martin Roumagnac (1946). After several other, lesser films, Dietrich accepted that her days as a leading lady in movies were nearly finished. By now, her daughter Maria had found happiness with a second husband, William Riva, who was fostering her acting career. In 1948 Maria had her first child, which led the ever-enterprising Marlene to create a new persona for herself as “The World’s Most Glamorous Grandmother.”

  In the early 1950s, Dietrich starred in a radio series, Cafe Istanbul, and made recordings and a minor movie (Rancho Notorious, 1952). More importantly, she turned to cabaret performing throughout the world, proving to be a sensation in her provocative see-through shimmering gowns and singing in her inimitable throaty voice. In 1957 she enjoyed a dramatic success on-screen in the courtroom thriller Witness for the Prosecution. Her last sizeable screen assignment was in the all-star Judgment at Nuremberg (1961). In 1962, when daughter Maria quit acting and moved to Europe with her husband and four children, Marlene purchased a Paris apartment for herself.

  Throughout the 1960s and early 1970s, Marlene continued her one-woman show, bringing the stylized production to Broadway in 1967. In the eyes of the public, Marlene was defying the laws of nature by maintaining her glamorous beauty well into her 70s. (She kept secret her facelifts and junkets to Switzerland for youth-rejuvenation treatments. Also, the public was never made aware of the elaborate undergarments she wore beneath her “form-fitting” gowns to retain the semblance of a seductive figure, or that she pulled her hair into a painfully tight bun beneath her wig to give her face a youthful appearance.) As the 1960s progressed, Marlene suffered increasingly from hardening of the arteries, which made standing for long periods (as required by her show) an agonizing ordeal. She also became increasingly deaf; this caused her to often sing flat because she could not hear the orchestra properly.

  Marlene continued undaunted through the early 1970s, receiving five thousand dollars a performance. In 1972, however, she began suffering a series of mishaps. She fell onstage, partly because it was hard to move in the confining flesh-colored sheath she wore beneath her magnificent dress. It was the first of several falls; the others would require skin grafts. Finally, after breaking her hip, a steel ball was inserted into Marlene’s hip socket and a bar riveted through the bone of her upper thigh. In her final appearance on a British stage, in 1975, she had to leave the stage in mid-performance due to excruciating pain in her bad leg. Months later, her cabaret career ended in Sydney, Australia, where she was hospitalized for months after another fall.

  Dietrich played a Prussian madam in David Bowie’s Just a Gigolo (1979) because her brief scenes could be shot at a makeshift studio a few blocks from her apartment. She earned $250,000 for two days of work. It was to be her final on-camera appearance.

  Thereafter, Marlene became a recluse in her high-rise
apartment at 12 Avenue Montaigne, across the street from the Plaza Athenee Hotel. She refused to deal with the media. When enterprising reporters left notes at her door begging for an audience, she would leave typed notes that Marlene Dietrich no longer lived in Paris. Often, when longtime friends came to France, they would call the star, coaxing her to allow them to visit. Occasionally she would relent and agree, but usually at the last minute she would phone, pretending to be her own maid, and insist that the actress had left town.

  Actor Maximilian Schell, Dietrich’s Judgment at Nuremberg costar, had become so fascinated with the legendary actress that he produced a documentary of her career. Marlene allowed him to interview her at her apartment on the condition that she was only asked to provide occasional off-camera commentary. In the highly regarded result, Marlene (1984), Dietrich refused to acknowledge any fact or chronological event that contradicted her carefully engineered mythology.

  Since Marlene declined to go out in public, her fans had to settle for second-hand information. It leaked out that the superstar maintained a very simple regimen. She would typically awake at 5:30 A.M. and blow her police whistle to let her live-in secretary know she wished for her cup of Earl Grey tea. According to the helper, “At 6:00 A.M., the Scotch would be going down. . . . It was impossible saying no. . . . Anyway, she had two bottles under her bed. She was brilliant until 10:00 A.M., then zonk—she’d collapse....” The star spent much of her waking hours reading or watching TV news programs. (She hated her old movies on TV, insisting “They were terrible, terrible kitsch.”)