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

by Parish, James Robert

  Wanting to keep Alias Smith and Jones going, Universal replaced Peter in his role with actor Roger Davis (who had already been doing narration on the program), but the show folded in early 1973. Ironically, the acting work of which Peter was most proud—playing Squire Talbot in The Scarecrow—was telecast on Hollywood TV Theatre on January 10, 1972, several days after Peter’s death.

  Peg Entwistle

  [Lillian Millicent Entwistle]

  July 1, 1908–September 18, 1932

  No study of Tinseltown heartbreak would be complete without some reference to the blond, blue-eyed Peg Entwistle, who earned a permanent place in movie trivia the hard way. She was the former Broadway actress who became so depressed when screen success eluded her that she jumped to her death from the five-stories-high “Hollywoodland” sign on Mount Lee. (The “land” portion of the sign was removed in 1945, leaving the now-iconic “Hollywood.”)

  Lillian Millicent Entwistle, known as Peg, was born in London, England, in 1908. When she was still a child her mother died, and Mr. Entwistle and his daughter moved to New York City. He soon remarried and had two sons, Robert and Milton. When the father was run over by a truck on Park Avenue, the two boys were sent to Los Angeles to live with their Uncle Harold. Peg remained behind in Manhattan to pursue her acting career. At age 17, she made her stage debut with a Boston repertory company, and soon was working on Broadway in prestigious Theater Guild productions.

  Peg married actor Robert Keith (10 years her senior) in 1927, but shortly discovered that he not only had been married previously but also had a six-year-old son, Brian (who later became a film and TV actor). In the process of divorcing Robert, she generously paid his back alimony to keep him out of jail. In need of work, Peg continued in her stage efforts. She costarred with Dorothy Gish in Getting Married (1931) and with Laurette Taylor in Alice-Sit-By-the-Fire (1932). The Depression, however, hit the New York theater scene hard, and the out-of-work Peg decided to try the movies.

  She arrived in Los Angeles in April 1932, and after a stay at the Hollywood Studio Club (a rooming hotel for women), moved in with her Uncle Harold to save money. His modest bungalow was at 2428 Beachwood Canyon Drive in Hollywood, not far from the “Hollywoodland” sign, which had been erected in 1923 to promote a new (and ultimately unsuccessful) five-hundred-acre real-estate development. Peg found stage work with Billie Burke in The Mad Hopes, but the play folded after a brief run. Dejected after this latest setback, Peg became elated when RKO signed her for a small picture role in a murder mystery, Thirteen Women (1932), starring Irene Dunne. In August of that year, the movie was previewed. But the critics’ reaction to the thriller was so poor that the studio held back general release so it could re-edit the film (it would not be released officially until after Peg’s death). Meanwhile, Peg’s studio option was dropped, leaving her extremely despondent.

  Her uncle later recalled that Peg tried desperately to raise the train fare to return to New York, but could not get a loan. After dinner on September 18, 1932, wearing a dress that stage actress Effie Shannon had lent her, she left the Beachwood Canyon house. She told her uncle that she was going to the local Hollywoodland drugstore. Instead, she walked up the nearby road that led to the big electric-light sign. Reaching the towering letters, she stopped beneath the “H.” Peg removed her coat and placed it neatly next to her purse. Then she slowly climbed up the electrician’s ladder on the 50-foot-high “H.” Partway up, one of her shoes fell off. Finally reaching the top of the giant letter, Peg jumped from it and plunged to her death.

  The famous Hollywood sign. In 1932, despondent actress Peg Entwistle ended her life by climbing to the top of the “H” and jumping to her death.

  Courtesy of Photofest

  Several days later, a female hiker came across her coat and purse and left them at the door of the local police station. A note was found inside the purse; it read:

  * * *

  I am afraid I am a coward. I am sorry for everything. If I had done this a long time ago, it would have saved a lot of pain.

  P.E.

  * * *

  This evidence led authorities to Peg’s body, but they could not identify the young woman’s corpse. When news of the suicide by “P.E.” made the headlines, Harold Entwistle—distraught about the vanished Peg—read the account and hastened to the morgue. After identifying the victim as Peg, he told the press, “Although she never confided her grief to me, I was somehow aware that she was suffering intense mental anguish. . . . It is a great shock to me that she gave up the fight as she did.” Ironically, a letter posted the day before Peg died soon arrived at Uncle Harold’s. It was from the Beverly Hills Playhouse, offering the actress the lead in their next production—the story of a young woman who commits suicide.

  Richard Farnsworth

  September 1, 1920–October 6, 2000

  After over 60 years in films, Richard Farnsworth had been Oscar-nominated twice, first for Comes a Horseman (1978) and then for The Straight Story (1999). For the latter, a tale of an Iowa senior citizen who drives a lawnmower all the way to Wisconsin to see his dying brother, Farnsworth became the oldest performer ever to be nominated for an Academy Award in the Best Actor category. The weathered talent with the wistful blue eyes and bushy moustache was an icon among independent filmmakers, famous for his durability, his honest acting, and his hatred of movie dialogue that utilized curse words. But everything came to an end for Farnsworth in October 2000, when he committed suicide with a gunshot to the head.

  Born in Los Angeles, Richard was an uninterested student who quit his schooling during the Great Depression to help support his widowed mother. He had learned to ride when he was 10, and at the age of 15 he went to work as a stable boy at a local polo barn. In 1937, Farnsworth made his screen debut in an uncredited bit part in the Marx Brothers’ comedy A Day at the Races. He also did stunts (as a steeplechase rider) for the movie. A stuntman’s daily pay was more than the five dollars per week that Richard was then earning as a stable boy. The next year, when he was cast as one of the many Mongolian horseback riders who paraded through Gary Cooper’s The Adventures of Marco Polo (1938), Farnsworth finally abandoned stable work for the big screen.

  When not doing stunt work in movies, the lanky, six-foot-tall Richard could be found on the rodeo circuit. After fighting in the service during World War II, he returned to Hollywood and his stuntman’s career. In 1947, he got married. Farnsworth and his wife, Maggie, would have two children, Melissa in 1949 and Richard Jr. in 1950. Among Farnsworth’s movie contributions in these decades were Red River (1948, doubling for Montgomery Clift), The Wild One (1954, doing some of Marlon Brando’s stunts), Cecil B. DeMille’s The Ten Commandments (1956, driving chariots), and Stanley Kubrick’s Spartacus (1960, he was Kirk Douglas’s double). He was also James Garner’s double in Duel at Diablo (1966) and Paul Newman’s in Pocket Money (1972). Richard also participated in several TV series over the years, including Adventures of Wild Bill Hickok, Wanted: Dead or Alive, Bonanza, and The Big Valley. In 1961, he was one of the cofounders of the Stuntman’s Association.

  In the late 1970s, after he’d retired from stunt work, Farnsworth’s wife Maggie convinced her shy spouse to try some on-camera speaking roles. To the amazement of many, he was Oscar-nominated for one of these early big-screen entries, the Western Comes a Horseman (1978, starring Jane Fonda). After that, Richard, who had now been working in Hollywood for over four decades, was much in demand to play no-nonsense, plain-speaking characters. He might appear in a typical sagebrush tale (1981s The Legend of the Lone Ranger) or as the congenial unmarried elderly brother in the TV miniseries Anne of Green Gables (1985). In 1985, Farnsworth’s wife passed away.

  When filmmaker David Lynch offered Richard the script to The Straight Story, the down-home actor was immediately attracted to the role of the plain-spoken old codger. At the time Farnsworth made the physically demanding picture, people knew that he was suffering from a bum hip, but he made no mention that he had actually
been fighting very painful prostate cancer (which eventually spread to his bones) for a few years already.

  In 2000, the 79-year-old Richard, who now was hobbling and had to use a cane, underwent surgery for the cancer. He recuperated at his 40-acre ranch near Lincoln, New Mexico, which he shared with his fiancée of 11 years, Jewel Van Valin, a 45-year-old flight attendant. Belatedly, it was made public that the operation had left the very private and proud actor partially paralyzed and unable to walk. Despite being wheelchair-bound, he still made it to the local racetrack on occasion, and once went to Santa Fe to accept an award from the governor of New Mexico. The feisty Farnsworth was even considering tackling a role in an upcoming Charlton Heston picture, The Last Man’s Club, about World War II vets.

  As the weeks went on, however, Richard’s pain from the spreading cancer gradually became unbearable. He told an old pal, “It’s been a nice ride, but this old world’s gotten too heavy for me.” Finally, on October 6, 2000, the stoic Farnsworth took out his .38 revolver and ended his misery by shooting himself in the head. His fiancée, Jewel, was in the next room at the time. She immediately knew what had happened. Unable to go into the bedroom, she went to her neighbors for help, and they called the police.

  Farnsworth is survived by his two children (his son Richard—better known as Diamond —is also a stuntman) and three grandchildren.

  Jon Hall

  [Charles Hall Locher]

  February 23, 1913–December 13, 1979

  Throughout their shared history, Hollywood and moviegoers have always been fond of cinema love teams from Janet Gaynor and Charles Farrell to Jeanette MacDonald and Nelson Eddy, and more recently, Julia Roberts and Richard Gere. Along the way, people flocked to see Maria Montez and Jon Hall. Together, the exotic, beautiful Maria and the handsome, muscular Jon paraded through several magnificently absurd and vivid celluloid romps, including Arabian Nights (1942), Cobra Woman (1944), and Sudan (1945). These escapist pictures were the high point of both stars’ careers. Montez would die of a heart attack in her bathtub in 1951; Hall would take his own life in 1979.

  Charles Hall Locher’s father was a Swissborn skating champ turned character actor, Felix Locher; his mother was Tahitian. Charles was born in 1913 in Fresno, California, because his mother’s train happened to be stopped there when she went into labor. He spent part of his childhood in Tahiti and then was educated in England and Switzerland. By 1935, Charles, now six feet, two inches tall, had appeared onstage and made his screen debut in Hollywood. Later, changing his name to Lloyd Crane, he performed in Mind Your Own Business (1936) and The Girl from Scotland Yard (1937). Samuel Goldwyn cast him in The Hurricane (1937), a spectacle that featured him as a Polynesian in love with native beauty Dorothy Lamour. A proficient swimmer, the athletic newcomer did his own aquatic stunts in the tropical epic. His new screen name, Jon Hall, came from his middle name, which reflected the surname of a relative (Norman Hall) who had coauthored the novel on which the epic was based. Jon was promoted as “Goldwyn’s Gift to Women.”

  After The Hurricane, Hall was away from the screen for three years and off on his own adventures. He returned in Kit Carson (1940). He signed a contract with Universal Pictures in the early 1940s, and made his mark there in six Technicolor fantasies with the beguiling Maria Montez. Off camera, he was married to vocalist and actress Frances Langford from 1939 to 1955.

  In the early 1950s, Jon moved to television, starring in the very popular adventure series Ramar of the Jungle (1952–54). Then, since his waist had thickened, he abandoned acting, becoming involved in firms that sold lucrative underwater photography equipment. Jon also married and divorced ex-actress Raquel Torres—twice. Finally, he both directed and starred in The Beach Girls and the Monster (1965). It would prove to be his final film. Looking back on his movie career, Hall said, “I never liked acting. I don’t like to be told what to do and what to say and how to say it. . . as a profession, it’s a bore.”

  Former film star Jon Hall poses in the 1970s with a publicity shot of himself from Ramar of the Jungle, a TV series made two decades earlier.

  Courtesy of JC Archives

  For the final decade of his life, Hall kept a low profile. When Dino De Laurentiis produced an elaborate (but vapid) remake of The Hurricane (1979), Jon was among the celebrities persuaded to attend the Los Angeles premiere. The once-robust movie star appeared extremely gaunt and unhealthy—he was suffering from bladder cancer.

  On December 13, 1979, Hall’s married sister returned to her North Hollywood home, where Jon was staying. She found that Hall had shot himself in the head with a single bullet that morning (later estimated at 7:00 A.M.). He had been bedridden for several months, in agony from his terminal disease, and had tired of being a burden to himself and others.

  Rusty Hamer

  [Russell Craig Hamer]

  February 15, 1947–January 18, 1990

  There is always a price to pay for fame and success, especially when it happens too early in life. This is especially true of child stars in the cutthroat entertainment field.

  The relatively short, unhappy life of Russell Craig Hamer began in 1947 in Tenafly, New Jersey. He was the third son of parents who were involved in local theater. His father, a salesman with the Manhattan Shirt Company, was transferred to the West Coast in 1951. Once the family was settled in Los Angeles, Rusty’s acting career began when he was cast in a stage production of On Borrowed Time. Then his parents escorted him to an open audition call for a youngster to play Danny Thomas’s son in a forthcoming TV comedy series. Thomas was impressed with the boy and hired him from among five hundred applicants. After seeing the curly-haired Rusty perform in the stage play, the comic told the young actor, “I picked you because you were so cute. And now I find out you’re a great little actor, too.”

  Make Room for Daddy (a.k.a. The Danny Thomas Show) debuted in September 1953 and became a hit series, lasting through 1964. On the surface, it appeared that Rusty was enjoying a marvelous life. Actually, it was far from that. Rusty’s dad died when the boy was six, and as a TV-series regular, he now became the family’s financial mainstay. All of this weighed heavily on the child. His education was a mixture of on-the-set tutoring and brief stays at a Roman Catholic school, where his classmates refused to accept the small celebrity as one of their peers.

  After The Danny Thomas Show ended, Hamer found it difficult to obtain other acting assignments, especially since he had gained a lot of weight after puberty. When Rusty turned 21, he learned that much of his trust fund had evaporated after being invested in risky stocks. In the late 1960s he got married, but the union ended in divorce after a year.

  In 1970, Danny Thomas, who had been Rusty’s surrogate dad and regarded him as “the best boy actor I ever saw in my life,” came to Rusty’s career rescue. Thomas was in the process of reassembling several of the cast members from the original series for a new spinoff, Make Room for Granddaddy, whose plotline had Hamer’s character now 23 years old and married. Unfortunately, that show lasted just one season. Thereafter, Rusty never earned more than $10,000 a year, working in Los Angeles for a messenger service and filling other temporary jobs.

  Unable to deal with living in the town that had rejected him, the disillusioned and soured Hamer moved to DeRidder, Louisiana, 40 miles north of Lake Charles. He occasionally helped out at his brother John’s restaurant; at other times he worked offshore for Exxon, and sometimes he found employment delivering newspapers. It was a sad existence for the former child star, and there was no respite in sight.

  On January 18, 1990, John came to Rusty’s trailer and found him dead. The ex-actor had shot himself in the head with a .357 Magnum revolver. Rusty’s brother told the media, “He hasn’t really been happy since his early 20s. But he didn’t show any signs of this happening. It was just all of a sudden.”

  Jon-Erik Hexum

  November 5, 1957–October 18, 1984

  In the entertainment industry, it is not only actresses who must contend with bei
ng “just another pretty face.” A lot of male actors are locked into a rigid mold by their outstanding good looks; they begin to lose their identities because no one will look beyond their marketable exteriors. Jon-Erik Hexum was one such victim.

  Jon-Erik was born in Tenafly, New Jersey, in 1957, the second son of Norwegian immigrants. When he was seven, his parents divorced. His father left the state—and their lives—two years later. His mother, Greta, worked as a secretary by day and as a waitress at night to support her children. Even as a youngster, Jon-Erik was stagestruck and commuted to New York for dance and music lessons. He could play the piano, organ, and violin; in his church band, he was the drum major.

  After attending Case Western Reserve University in Ohio for a few semesters, he transferred to Michigan State University. There, Hexum majored in biomedical engineering, worked as an off-campus disc jockey, and played an assortment of sports, including football. This led to an unwanted reunion with his dad. Jon-Erik had not seen his father, Thor, since he was nine, but then Thor saw his son on a televised gridiron game and got in touch. Jon-Erik told him, “You blew it, guy. Go to hell.”

  After graduation, Jon-Erik returned to the East Coast, determined to have a career in show business. He worked nights in various restaurants so he could audition during the days. The only acting role he could obtain was in a stock version of The Unsinkable Molly Brown in Auburn, New York.