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

by Parish, James Robert

  Exotic film legend Maria Montez in the late 1940s.

  Courtesy of JC Archives

  Soon tiring of being a foreigner on the sidelines in Manhattan society, Maria arranged a screen test and signed with Universal Pictures at $150 a week. She chose her surname in honor of the nineteenth-century Spanish dancer Lola Montez. Maria was quickly put to work in bit roles, which showcased her striking beauty while avoiding her heavily accented speaking voice.

  Fully attuned to promoting herself, Maria readily participated in the ritual of having publicity photographs taken. At five feet, seven inches, with auburn hair and flashing brown eyes, this very exciting Gemini made an eye-catching subject. By the time of her seventh movie, South of Tahiti (1941), Maria was quickly becoming Universal’s answer to the saronged Paramount star Dorothy Lamour. With Arabian Nights (1942), Montez became a star, although still not that much of an actress. She and leading man Jon Hall teamed together in several other sensual sand sagas. For some viewers, her dual roles in Cobra Woman (1944) are the peak of high camp; for all her fans, the movie is marvelous escapist fare. Such entries made her a big favorite with moviegoers, especially servicemen overseas in World War II combat zones.

  In October 1942, Maria met the six-foot-tall, blond, blue-eyed French actor Jean-Pierre Aumont. According to Montez, “I fall in love with him—boom.” They married on July 13, 1943. Their daughter Maria Christina was born on Valentine’s Day in 1946. (She would later become an actress, under the name of Tina Marquand.) By 1947, the increasingly demanding Maria had outstayed her welcome at Universal; that year’s Pirates of Monterey ended her contract. Maria and Jean-Pierre next costarred in Siren of Atlantis, but it was a costly mistake for all concerned. Begun in 1947, the United Artists’ cinematic “epic” wasn’t released until August 1949, and proved to be an all-around jumble.

  The Aumonts moved to France, living in a house six miles from the heart of Paris. Jean-Pierre’s brother, Francois Villiers, directed the couple in the French-made Hans le Marin (1949). Following several pictures done in Italy (including one that reteamed her with her husband), and her stage debut in Paris in January 1951, Maria settled in at home. She complained of chest pains and joked, “I’d better watch that because it might end up playing me a dirty trick.”

  On September 6, 1951, the couple dined at a chic Paris restaurant with two of Maria’s sisters, Adita and Teresita, who were their houseguests. The following day, as was her custom, Maria took her midmorning bath, soaking in a mixture of extremely hot water and reducing salts to help her sweat off weight. When she failed to come downstairs, Adita rushed up and pounded on the bathroom door. There was no response from Montez, so Adita opened the door. She found Maria submerged in the steaming water up to her forehead. The two hysterical sisters carried Maria to her bedroom and called a doctor. Firefighters arrived to perform artificial respiration. After three hours of trying to revive her, Maria was declared dead, a victim of a heart seizure. When Aumont came home from his film set, he was told the bad news and collapsed.

  A Roman Catholic funeral was held for Maria in the local church, Saint Pierre de Chaillot, on September 11. It was not until mid-February of the following year that Aumont, while sorting through papers in their garage, discovered her will. The bulk of Maria’s $200,000 estate was left to Jean-Pierre and to their young daughter, with provisions made for her sisters.

  Unlike that of most of her contemporaries, Maria Montez’s popularity has not vanished into extinction. Her colorful legend continues, enflamed by her extravagant, kitschy performances, which continue to delight and amuse new generations of movie buffs.

  Warner Oland

  [Jonah Werner Olund]

  October 3, 1880–August 5, 1938

  Only in America’s film capital could a Swede become celebrated for playing a Chinese detective on-screen. Such was the case with Warner Oland, who from 1931 to 1937 portrayed the “inscrutable” Charlie Chan, a goateed sleuth with a passion for cute philosophical sayings and a penchant for spawning offspring. Oland mysteriously “disappeared” in 1938, never to be seen again in Hollywood; he had unfortunately died during a secret odyssey back to his Scandinavian homeland.

  Oland was born to Swedish-Russian parents in Umea, Vesterbotten, Sweden in 1880. There was another brother, Carl. When Werner was 13, his family moved to a farm in Connecticut. He attended high school, and then Curry’s Dramatic School, in Boston. Using the name Warner Oland, he made his official stage debut in a tiny role in The Christian (1898); he then toured in Shakespearean repertory theater around the United States. He was noticed by the exotic Alla Nazimova and hired to join her company, which was performing several Henrik Ibsen dramas on Broadway in the fall of 1907. Oland married actress Edith Shearn in 1908. His fortunes varied from production to production as he began staging his own theatrical ventures, often from his own translations of foreign classics.

  The very erudite Oland had been making occasional forays into motion pictures since 1909, and by 1915, he was a frequent player in the burgeoning medium. In the popular movie serial starring Irene Castle, Patria (1916), he portrayed a reprehensible Asian villain, relying on his Slavic/Mongolian genes to give the illusion of being Asian. But he wasn’t stereotyped in such roles, as he also played the Jewish-cantor father of Al Jolson in the part-talkie The Jazz Singer (1927).

  It was his starring performance as the sinister Fu Manchu in three action dramas (1929-31) that set the stage for Oland to be cast in a new role—as Charlie Chan, the famed Honolulu sleuth—in Fox’s Charlie Chan Carries On (1931). Over the next few years, Warner would make 15 additional installments of the series; after Charlie Chan in London (1934), he was abetted by Keye Luke as his bumbling, well-meaning number-one son, Lee. During these years, Oland also had nonserial screen roles, such as Shanghai Express (1932), Bulldog Drummond Strikes Back (1934), and The Werewolf of London (1935). Moviegoers, however, had grown accustomed to him in the Chan series. Always eager to learn more about his craft and his celluloid characterizations, Warner traveled to China and learned to speak some Chinese so he could authentically deliver native lines in his movies.

  Warner Oland (as Charlie Chan) interrogates suspects Gloria Roy, Arthur Edmund Carewe, and Ivan (Dusty) Miller in Charlie Chan’s Secret (1936).

  Courtesy of JC Archives

  Distinguished as Warner Oland was, he had one vice. He was an alcoholic who increasingly embarked on heavy drinking binges. Finally, his wife could no longer cope, and in the fall of 1937, she filed for separate maintenance, planning on suing for divorce. That same year, during the making of Charlie Chan at the Ringside, the well-liked Oland left the set one day and never returned. (The studio eventually used some of the non-Oland footage in Mr. Moio’s Gamble, released in 1938.) There was much speculation over the star’s strange disappearance. Despite rumors that he had been sighted here or there, it was not until 1938 that the true story emerged.

  In increasingly poor physical and mental health due to his escalating drinking problem, Oland had quietly sailed for Italy, hoping to recover his strength. Eventually, he made his way to Sweden, where he stayed with his mother. Oland planned to return to Hollywood to star in Charlie Chan in Honolulu (1938) and was negotiating a reconciliation with his wife. But fate intervened in the form of bronchial pneumonia, and on the afternoon of August 5, 1938, Oland died at the age of 57.

  When Oland passed away, he owned extensive real estate, including a thousand acres on an island near Mazatlán, Mexico, as well as a Massachusetts farm. As for his beloved detective, Charlie Chan, Twentieth Century-Fox promptly cast another non-Chinese performer—Missouri-born Sidney Toler—to replace Oland in the ongoing popular film series.

  Anthony Perkins

  April 4, 1932–September 12, 1992

  Most performers wait their entire careers—usually in vain—hoping for that special “role of a lifetime” to establish them as a major star in their profession. Early in his film career, the lanky Anthony Perkins, who had made a specialty of p
laying gawky, mumbling Jimmy Stewart-esque leading men, achieved that professional dream. He was chosen by Alfred Hitchcock to star as the mother-fixated, homicidal Norman Bates in the classic thriller Psycho (1960). It was the magic role that established Tony as an international star, and elevated Norman Bates to the on-screen pantheon of human monsters.

  However, the vividness of Tony’s sharply etched performance also led the film industry to typecast Perkins forever after as the cinema’s premier neurotic. As such, he was stuck in the rut of playing tormented (even deranged) characters who were continually at odds with themselves and the world. While fully aware that Hollywood’s early pigeonholing of him had overshadowed his true acting abilities, Perkins acknowledged late in life: “Without Psycho, who’s to say if I would have endured?”

  As events in Perkins’s own life would prove, there were several amazing parallels between the real-life actor and Psycho’s mad Norman Bates. These resemblances once again demonstrate that art often does imitate life—it was no idle whim that led the astute Alfred Hitchcock to hire Tony for Psycho.

  Anthony Perkins was born in New York City in 1932, the only child of Osgood and Janet (Rane) Perkins. His father was an eminent stage and film actor who was frequently away on theater tours or making movies in Hollywood. As such, Tony became extremely devoted to his mother. Perkins would say later, “I became abnormally close to my mother and when my father came home, I was jealous.... I loved him, but I also wanted him to be dead so I could have her all to myself.” When Tony was five, his 45-year-old father died of a heart attack. The son confessed years later, “I was horrified. I assumed that my wanting him to be dead had actually killed him.”

  Equally damaging to Tony’s psyche was his widowed mother’s suffocating love, which often veered toward incest. “She was constantly touching and caressing me. . . . She controlled everything about my life, including my thoughts and feelings. . . .”

  Tony and Mrs. Perkins (who never remarried) moved later from Manhattan to Brookline, Massachusetts, where she supervised the Boston Stage Door Canteen during World War II. A lonely youth, Perkins sought escape in acting. He said later about this decision, “There was nothing about me I wanted to be. But I felt happy being somebody else.”

  Tony began his professional career at age 14 in 1946, playing a summer-stock part in Junior Miss in Brattleboro, Vermont. After graduating from private school in Cambridge, Massachusetts, he attended Rollins College in Winter Park, Florida, later transferring to Columbia University. Meanwhile, he worked in summer stock and on television. He made his screen debut in The Actress (1953) as the young suitor of Jean Simmons. Shortly before he was to graduate from Columbia in 1954, Perkins left college to make his Broadway debut in Tea and Sympathy. He took over for John Kerr as the mother-devoted college student bewildered by his homosexual tendencies. (The stage part had tremendous similarities to Tony’s offstage life, since he was coping with his own inclinations toward men.)

  As a result of Tea and Sympathy, Perkins was much in demand in Hollywood. He played Gary Cooper’s son in Friendly Persuasion (1956), receiving an Oscar nomination for Best Supporting Actor. This led to Fear Strikes Out (1957); Tony was cast as baseball player Jim Piersall, whose father-fixation leads to a nervous breakdown. That same year, the movie star returned to Broadway for the drama Look Homeward, Angel, in which his character must break free of a grasping, materialistic mother.

  Being a closeted gay man in the highly homophobic 1950s and 1960s created trying situations for Tony, who feared the professional damage that being outed would cause him. Frequently on the sets of his pictures, his sexy leading ladies—including Sophia Loren in Desire Under the Elms (1958), Jane Fonda in Tall Story (1960), Ingrid Bergman in Goodbye Again (1961), and Brigitte Bardot in A Ravishing Idiot (1964)—attempted to seduce their handsome, unmarried costar. He made every excuse possible to escape these heterosexual seductions. On the other hand, he would acknowledge later that he was equally unhappy about his clandestine gay experiences.

  In 1960, dissatisfied with his screen assignments, Perkins returned to the New York stage in the short-lived Frank Loesser musical Greenwillow. But next came the enormously successful Psycho. Said Perkins, “For about 10 years after I made the movie, Norman [Bates] dominated my life.... If someone approached me, I could be pretty sure it was a question about Psycho—even years later. I resented it, I really did.”

  During the 1960s, Perkins made his home in Paris, and most of his pictures were shot abroad. He returned to the United States occasionally, once to appear in a Neil Simon Broadway comedy (The Star-Spangled Girl, 1966), and another time to star in Hollywood as the highly disturbed arsonist in Pretty Poison. In 1970 he vetoed a starring role in a Stephen Sondheim musical, Company, because the lead character (as conceived originally) was sexually ambivalent.

  In 1971, Perkins underwent aversion therapy to rid himself of his homosexuality. Bolstered by his sexual “reorientation,” Perkins began filming The Life and Times of Judge Roy Bean (1972), playing a shifty-eyed preacher. On the movie set, the 39-year-old actor had his first heterosexual experience, reportedly with costar Victoria Principal.

  In the early 1970s Perkins had seen a picture of photographer Berry Berenson (the sister of actress and model Marisa Berenson) in Vogue magazine. Tony and Berry (16 years his junior) met at a party in New York City, and by 1973 they had become lovers. When she became pregnant, they chose to wed on August 9, 1973, on Cape Cod. He later conceded that one of the several benefits of his marriage was that it made him “not nearly so grasping and ambitious. Not so paranoid. Not so fearful.” Their first child, Osgood, was born in 1974, and two years later came their second son, Elvis. Apparently satisfied with domesticity, Perkins told the press, “I’ve dropped all my ambitious characteristics. I turn down work that will take me away from home.”

  Anthony Perkins at a 1991 movie-industry screening.

  © 1991 by Albert L. Ortega

  After 20 years in the movies, Perkins’s screen career had stagnated badly. By now he could sleepwalk through the assignments he was given. It was telling of Tony’s career rut that in 1983 he returned to the role of Norman Bates in Psycho II (with his son Osgood playing the young Norman). The sequel was a thin echo of its predecessor. Then came Psycho III (1986), in which he not only reprised his role as the “reformed” psychopath, but directed the unappetizing proceedings. Although Tony refused to participate in the low-grade made-for-TV sequel (Bates Motel, 1987), he was in the made-for-cable movie Psycho IV: The Beginning (1990).

  A new offscreen trauma occurred in 1990 when Perkins was hospitalized for a temporary facial palsy. Unknown to him, someone tested his blood for the HIV virus and leaked the results to a supermarket tabloid paper. Ironically, Tony first learned that he was HIV-positive by reading about it in the scandal newspaper. New blood tests confirmed the published results. But fearful that he’d never work again in Hollywood if he admitted he had AIDS, Tony denied to everyone except his close family that he had the dreaded disease. (To date, no one has publicly revealed how the actor contracted AIDS.)

  Anxious to provide financially for his wife and sons, the ailing Perkins embarked on a strenuous career path, going on tour to give talks about his lengthy movie career and making pictures abroad. In what would be the last two years of his life, Tony devoted much time to working with the AIDS organization Project Angel Food (a charitable organization founded by Marianne Williamson, Perkins’s spiritual advisor). In between screen projects, he coped privately with his ravaging disease. To avoid public awareness of his plight, he was forced to check into hospitals for treatment under assumed names. (Berry Berenson would later reflect bitterly about this closeted situation: “You think that this man has spent his entire life giving people so much pleasure in show business and this is his reward. He can’t even be himself at the end.”)

  In mid-1992, Tony was set to direct a play called Together, which was to have a pre-Broadway tryout in Chicago. But his physical condition s
uddenly worsened. By July 1992, Tony could no longer hide his terminal illness from the media or friends, particularly as he now weighed a frail 120 pounds. When sent home from Los Angeles’s Midway Hospital, he admitted, “I have finally accepted the fact that I’m dying.”

  In the final weeks, pals such as Mike Nichols, Richard Benjamin, Paula Prentiss, and Roddy McDowall paid painful farewells to Perkins at his Hollywood Hills home (on the 2800 block of Seattle Drive). Fashion photographer Paul Jasmin, a longtime friend (and the individual who provided the voice of Norman Bates’s mother in Psycho), would share memories of the dying star: “Those last few days we tried to go up and show him all that love he gave us. . . . Berry was with him every moment. She slept in a little bed she set up by Tony’s sickbed, and she’d go lay her head on his shoulder and just lie next to him. When he got his strength up, his friends came in and they shared experiences. The boys called their friends and told them that their father was dying of HIV, and they came to be with him also.”

  Of the final ordeal, Berry has said, “He was in and out of a coma. On his last day [September 12, 1992], he woke up only once. His eyes opened and he looked to me holding his hand and at his beloved sons sitting at the foot of his bed.... He tried to talk but he was so weak his voice wasn’t even a whisper. We could see his lips move as he breathed, ‘I love you.’ Then he closed his eyes and went back to sleep. He died a few hours later.”

  In the months following his death, Perkins could be seen constantly in posthumous media appearances. On October 14, 1992, the cable channel American Movie Classics aired Tony’s final interview, in which he evaluated the ups and downs of his career. Later in the month, his new made-for-TV movie, In the Deep Woods, was shown. His final feature film, A Demon in My View, in which he played—surprise, surprise—a former serial killer, was released on home video at the end of October 1992.