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

by Parish, James Robert

  On May 11, 1999, a viewing for Plato’s family was held in Oklahoma City. (Her relatives would later allege that Robert Menchaca, who said he had become Dana’s manager, showed up at the funeral parlor with a camera to take pictures of his dead girlfriend and sell them to the media.) At another memorial service conducted on May 23, 1999, at an amphitheater in Los Angeles’s Topanga Canyon, there were 120 attendees, including Diffrent Strokes costars Todd Bridges and Gary Coleman. Dana’s ex-husband, Lanny Lambert, told the assembled mourners, “She is in a better place. She suffered, and I’m happy she’s not suffering.”

  In the days after the memorial service, Lambert and Tyler took a boat out to scatter Dana’s ashes on the Pacific Ocean, as she had requested. It was a fitting end for the unhappy actress, once an ambitious young girl who had loved butterflies, rainbows, and sunsets.

  Freddie Prinze

  [Freddie Preutzel]

  June 22, 1954–January 29, 1977

  Today, mention the name Freddie Prinze and most people will think of the six-foot, one-inch, twentysomething hottie who has starred in I Know What You Did Last Summer (1997), She’s All That (1999), and Head over Heels (2001). Wrong! That is Freddie Jr., the son of the original and unique Freddie Prinze, whose career flame burned brightly in the 1970s.

  Freddie Prinze, the young star of Chico and the Man, in the mid-1970s.

  Courtesy of JC Archives

  For two and a half years, Freddie Sr. was the enormously popular star of TV’s hit comedy Chico and the Man. At age 22, he had risen above the New York slums and a crummy childhood to become a show-business phenomenon. Beneath the surface, however, he was under tremendous pressure. Freddie was always insecure, and his meteoric rise to fame only intensified his vulnerability. His 15-month-old marriage had fallen apart. He had a substance-abuse problem and a recurring death wish. Finally, unable to take it any longer, the sparkling performer shot himself. It was the end of the short-lived star who, according to Entertainment Weekly, embodied “the cheeky ebullience of youth.”

  Freddie was born in New York City in 1954, the son of a Puerto Rican mother and a Jewish—Hungarian father. (He would later joke that his mixed parentage made him a “Hungar-ican.”) He grew up in the tough Spanish ghetto area of Washington Heights. Because he was fat as a child, his mother sent him to dance school, which certainly did not endear him to the neighborhood kids. After being mugged, Freddie switched from dance school to karate.

  Like his hybrid heritage, much of Freddie’s childhood was a pull in different directions. He attended a Lutheran elementary school, but went to Catholic mass on Sundays. As a youngster he was fantasy-prone; as a teenager he became addicted to drugs. (He often sold marijuana to earn extra cash.) With his gift for imitations and comic scoffing, he was naturally drawn to attend New York’s famous High School for the Performing Arts. After leaving there in 1973, he performed with the New York City Street Theatre, singing and dancing in Bye Bye Birdie and West Side Story.

  But it was comedy in which Freddie truly excelled. He haunted Manhattan’s Improv Club, eager to be part of their new-talent nights. Eventually, he was seen performing there and was booked on Jack Paar’s television talk show. That success led Johnny Carson to sign him for several appearances on The Tonight Show.

  Producer Jimmie Komack noticed Freddie on Carson’s program and signed him to costar with veteran Jack Albertson in Chico and the Man. The new TV sitcom was set in the East Los Angeles barrio, its plotline exploring the theme of two people from contrasting backgrounds coming to respect one another. The network series debuted in September 1974 and was well-received. Perhaps only Prinze saw the bitter ironies of a Hungarian-Puerto Rican playing a Chicano, and that a year earlier he had been nearly broke but was now a well-paid star.

  After his first TV season, Prinze (who wrote his own material) took his comedy act on the road and made his debut stand-up album, Lookin’ Good. In Jackson Hole, Wyoming, he fell in love with travel agent Katherine Cochran. They were married in Las Vegas in October 1975; their child, Freddie Jr., was born on March 8, 1976. Besides his Chico duties in 1976, Freddie Sr. appeared on several TV specials and made a dramatic appearance in a made-for-TV movie, The Million Dollar Rip-Off.

  In the fall of 1976, Freddie began the third season of Chico. By now, he was an occasional guest host on The Tonight Show and frequently performed in Las Vegas clubs. He was the idol of every kid who wanted to make it big in show business. Freddie moved his parents to a house in North Hollywood, California. He had a brand-new multimillion-dollar contract with NBC and another agreement to perform at Caesar’s Palace in Las Vegas. In January 1977, he performed at President Jimmy Carter’s Inaugural Ball, at the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C.

  In Freddie’s personal life, however, everything had started to come apart. He was sued successfully by his former manager for breaking a business contract. His wife initiated divorce proceedings, and Freddie began to date a variety of women. Then he was arrested for driving under the influence of drugs. He relied on psychotherapy, liquor, cocaine, and quaaludes, but nothing seemed to put his chaotic existence back into order. He told his pals, “Life isn’t worth living.”

  Freddie would shock them by pulling out an unloaded .357 Magnum revolver, pointing it at his temple, and squeezing the trigger. (He had first attempted suicide at 17, when he and a girlfriend split up.)

  On Wednesday, January 26, 1977, his secretary, Carol Novak, was with the hyperactive Prinze when he was served with a restraining order from his soon-to-be exspouse. Crazed at the thought of being separated from his 10-month-old son, Freddie phoned his attorneys in a highly erratic frame of mind. He drew out his gun and, after toying with it, charged into a nearby room shouting, “I’m gonna do it!” The gun went off, but the bullet went into a wall.

  The next day, Prinze buzzed through an assortment of activities, including a session with his psychiatrist. Early on the morning of January 28, Freddie’s manager, Marvin “Dusty” Snyder, responded to a frantic call from the actor, rushing over at 3:00 A.M. to his extended-stay hotel apartment at 865-75 Comstock Avenue in Westwood. As Snyder walked in, Prinze was standing with the phone in one hand and his gun in the other. Snyder tried to reason with his client, but to no avail. A frantic Freddie called his mother, then his lawyer, and next his estranged wife. When he finally hung up, he sat down on the sofa and then, suddenly, raised the weapon to his head. Before the manager could stop him, Freddie shot himself. A suicide note was found in the suite. It stated:

  * * *

  I must end it. There’s no hope left. I’ll be at peace. No one had anything to do with this. My decision totally.

  Freddie Prinze

  * * *

  He was rushed to UCLA Medical Center where, already brain dead, his body lingered on for a few more hours. Prinze died at 1:00 P.M. on Saturday, January 29. He was buried in the Court of Remembrance at Forest Lawn Cemetery in Hollywood Hills, California, after services at the Old North Church there. Among the celebrity pallbearers were his good friends Tony Orlando and Paul Williams. Costar Jack Albertson and producer Jimmie Komack were among those who read eulogies. Freddie’s crypt contains a plaque that reads, “We love you. Psalm 23.”

  As for Chico and the Man, it continued through the rest of the 1976-77 season without Freddie. For its final season on the air, (1977-78), a new youngster (Gabriel Melgar) was added to the cast as a foil for veteran entertainer Jack Albertson.

  Perhaps it was Albertson who said it best about Freddie: “He was a strange boy. He was a barrel of laughs. A real good kid, but at 22 he may have run into problems he just couldn’t handle.” On the other hand, his bereaved mother told reporters, “If anyone killed him, it was Hollywood and all the things that made him show off. . . . What’s my boy got? Just a grave and people who say he killed himself. He wouldn’t do that to me.” Prinze’s self-made fortune had been blown on drugs and booze, but in 1981 and 1982, Prinze’s widow and son received nearly a million dollars in settlements of vario
us malpractice suits against the late performer’s psychiatrist (for allowing him access to the death weapon) and doctor (for overprescribing quaaludes). In January 1983, a jury agreed with the contention of Prinze’s mother: that Freddie, at the time of his death, was acting under the influence of drugs, and had only been playing a prank with the gun when it went off. As a result of the verdict, the family received the proceeds of a $200,000 life-insurance policy.

  Years later, Freddie Jr. would say, “If people would only think of his gift instead of his death, I would love it. I have this album of his stand-up, Lookin’ Good, and no matter how upset I was, anytime, ever, the second I played it he could make me laugh. He was so sharp and spontaneous, so fast!”

  George Sanders

  July 3, 1906–April 25, 1972

  Urbane and cynical in life, Academy Award-winning actor George Sanders wanted his death to be the same way. His suicide note read:

  * * *

  Dear World,

  I am leaving because I am bored. I feel I have lived long enough. I am leaving you with your worries in this sweet cesspool-good luck.

  Love, George

  * * *

  Sanders was born in 1906 to British parents in St. Petersburg, Russia. His father was a rope manufacturer and his mother was a famous horticulturist. (George had an older brother, who would eventually become actor Tom Conway, and a sister, Margaret.) During the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917, the family left Russia for England, where George attended Brighton College and the Manchester Technical School. After that, he sailed for South America, where he worked in the Argentine tobacco industry. He refused, however, to take the business seriously, preferring to develop his reputation as a young rake.

  Debonair George Sanders, the star of Death of a Scoundrel (1956).

  Courtesy of JC Archives

  Back in England, a producer heard George’s impressive singing at a party and hired him for a musical revue called Ballyhoo (1933). This job led to radio dramas, cabaret work, and more stage jobs (typically as an understudy). In 1934, George made his screen debut in Love, Life and Laughter. By 1936, he was under contract to a British film company. When that studio burned to the ground, Twentieth Century-Fox took over its assets, including its contract players. Fox’s chief, Darryl F. Zanuck, brought Sanders to Hollywood for the role of a haughty, cold-hearted lord in Lloyds of London (1936, starring Tyrone Power).

  The six-foot, three-inch Sanders soon specialized in playing good-looking, cultured cads. He quipped to the press, “I find it so pleasant to be unpleasant.” Moviegoers enjoyed him as Simon Templar, the debonair sleuth in the ongoing movie series The Saint (1939-41). But for the high-toned Sanders, it was “the nadir of my career.” He wasn’t much happier when RKO Studios switched him in 1941 to the role of a similar detective in The Falcon. After four episodes, he relinquished the series to his brother, Tom, in 1942; it became known as The Falcon’s Brother.

  Meanwhile, in October 1940, the sophisticated, iconoclastic actor had married actress Elsie Poole, known professionally as Susan Larson. For his own peculiar reasons, the wedding was not made public until 1942. (Once, when asked why he hadn’t brought Susan to a party, he responded, “Oh, I can’t bring her. She bores people.”) The mismatched couple divorced in 1948.

  Sanders was very busy in the 1940s, often playing conquest-hungry Nazis in World War II thrillers or fops in costume pictures. In 1949, he married actress Zsa Zsa Gabor in Las Vegas. Sanders remarked of their years in her Beverly Hills mansion, “I lived there as a sort of paying guest.” After their 1954 divorce, Zsa Zsa said that the trouble with their marriage had been that they both loved the same person—George Sanders.

  Sanders’s screen career peaked when he won an Oscar as the dapper, vicious theater critic in All About Eve (1950). He chose not to replace opera star Ezio Pinza on Broadway in South Pacific, but did demonstrate his excellent singing voice opposite Ethel Merman in the screen musical Call Me Madam (1953). In 1959, he married Benita Hume, the widow of actor Ronald Colman; they would remain together until her death in 1967. On TV, Sanders had hosted an anthology series in 1957, although his best role was as a supercilious guest villain, Mr. Freeze, on TV’s Batman show in 1966.

  His last major screen role was as an aged drag queen in the spy thriller The Kremlin Letter (1970). After that, Sanders decided that it was time for him to retire. That same year, he wed Zsa Zsa Gabor’s much-married/divorced older sister, Magda. Magda’s mother, Jolie, thought that “he just wanted to get back in the family. He missed me. I always liked George . . .” Several weeks later, George and Magda divorced.

  Thereafter, Sanders’s health declined. He began to suffer greatly from depression, something he had been treated for, on and off, for years. Sanders entered into another romantic relationship, most notable because the lady in question made him do foolish things like disposing of his beloved house in Majorca. After visiting his sister Margaret in England in April 1972, George—looking exceedingly ill and apparently on the verge of a nervous breakdown—departed for Barcelona. On April 23, he registered at a hotel in the seaside resort of Castelldelfels, 10 miles south of Barcelona. He drank heavily that day and the next. When he retired for bed on the night of April 24, he left a request to be called early the next morning. When the staff could not contact him at the requested time, the manager investigated. He found Sanders dead; the actor had taken an overdose of Nembutal and washed it down with vodka. Among George’s effects, besides his suicide message, was a note to his sister:

  * * *

  Dearest Margoolinka,

  Don’t be sad. I have only anticipated the inevitable by a few years.

  * * *

  Dreading the horror of growing sicker, older, and poorer, the cultured George Sanders had created his own exit scene and played it perfectly.

  Romy Schneider

  [Rosemarie Albach-Retty]

  September 23, 1938–May 29, 1982

  As a teenage actress, she was known as the “Shirley Temple of German movies.” As an adult, she was a talented, beautiful star of the international cinema, making her Hollywood debut opposite Jack Lemmon in Good Neighbor Sam (1964). But in the late 1970s, a series of catastrophes turned everything sour for Romy Schneider. When she died suddenly in 1982, the media initially concluded that she had killed herself. Later reports, however, insisted that it was a heart attack that had ended her life.

  Romy was born into a theatrical family in 1938. Her father, Wolf Albach-Retty, was a well-known Austrian actor; her mother was Magda Schneider, the famous German singing star of many films. At 14, Romy (a contraction of Rosemarie) made her screen debut in one of her parents’ pictures. Throughout the 1950s she was particularly popular in a series of saccharine movies that featured her as “Sissi” (Empress Elizabeth of Austria). Romy changed her screen image in 1962 by starring in a segment of Luchino Visconti’s Boccaccio ’70, and in Orson Welles’s The Trial. She played a whore in the American-made The Victors (1963) and showed a comic touch in What’s New, Pussycat (1965), with Peter O’Toole and Peter Sellers.

  Previously involved with actor Alain Delon, Romy married West German actor and director Harry Meyen-Haubenstock in 1966. The next year their son, David, was born. Most of Romy’s filmmaking in the 1970s was accomplished in France. For 1975’s L’ Important c’est d’aimer (The Most Important Thing Is Love), she won France’s equivalent of the Academy Award for Best Actress. She received the same award for 1978’s L’histoire simple (Simple Story). By this time, Schneider was divorced from Meyen-Haubenstock. In 1975, she married photographer Daniel Biasini. Their daughter, Sarah, was born in 1978.

  In 1979, Romy’s misfortunes began. She and Biasini divorced, and soon afterward, her ex-husband Harry committed suicide. Only a few weeks later, Romy underwent surgery for the removal of a kidney. In July 1981, her 14-year-old son died when he impaled himself accidentally on a wrought-iron fence. Romy went into a deep despondency, particularly over the death of her boy. However, she continued to make movi
es; 1982’s La Passante du Sans-Souci (The Passerby) would prove to be her last. Based on Joseph Kessel’s novel of the same name, the movie dealt with a mother who is grieving for her dead son. It had been postponed several times because of the tragedies in Romy’s life. The picture was dedicated to her late son and his father.

  By 1982, Romy had contracts to make three new movies. But on May 29, 1982, while La Passante du Sans-Souci was enjoying a popular release, the 43-year-old actress was found dead in her Paris apartment. The Public Prosecutor’s office reported that she had “apparently . . . suffered some kind of cardiac arrest.” Other, less official, sources preferred the more dramatic theory that Romy had killed herself, unable to cope with life’s sadness. (Initial news headlines had it that the actress had died from an overdose of barbiturates.)

  On June 2, 1982, Romy was buried in the village of Boissy-Sans-Avoir (outside of Paris), where she had recently purchased a home and a cemetery plot. Among the three hundred people who attended the private service (held at a local fourteenth century church) were film directors Claude Berri and Roman Polanski, actors Jean-Claude Brialy and Michel Piccoli, and Monique Lang, the wife of the French culture minister. To this day, the real truth of Romy’s death has never been revealed.

  David Strickland

  October 14, 1969–March 22, 1999

  There is a famous opera by Ruggiero Leoncavallo, I Pagliaci (written in 1892), that tells the classic story of a clown who is laughing on the outside and crying on the inside. That could well have described the good-looking actor David Strickland who hung himself at age 29 when he decided that life was too much to bear.