Dark History of Hollywood: A Century of Greed, Corruption and Scandal behind the Movies (Dark Histories)

by Kieron Connolly

  LANA’S HAWAII 500

  LANA TURNER’S MARRIAGE to bandleader Artie Shaw lasted three months in 1939–40 before she threw him out. However, by then she was pregnant. For this, Louis B. Mayer was ready to fire her from MGM, but Eddie Mannix persuaded him against it and instead arranged an abortion for Turner, disguised as a ‘publicity tour’ to Hawaii. Mannix then deducted the $500 cost of the Hawaii trip from Turner’s wages.

  If the suicide story is to be believed, Bern’s ‘abject humiliation’ refers to his inability to perform sexually. But that doesn’t explain everything. Although this line of enquiry wasn’t pursued, a veiled woman – possibly Bern’s real wife Dorothy Millette – had been seen arriving at the house the previous evening and an argument had followed. Bern’s brother quickly began protesting that he didn’t believe the suicide story, but once he’d seen Strickling he calmed down. Had he been bought off? Harlow never made any comment about the circumstances of Bern’s death. A week later, Dorothy Millette jumped off a ferry in San Francisco Bay.

  The coroner ruled a verdict of suicide, but many didn’t believe the story. Even Samuel Marx, MGM’s senior story editor at the time of Bern’s death, later wrote a book arguing that Dorothy Millette, a wronged, troubled wife, had pulled the trigger. As screenwriter Budd Schulberg said: ‘The studio heads were running a whole little world … they could cover up a murder.’

  To Please Men

  To young women, moving to Hollywood offered the hope of fame and a career in motion pictures, but if it didn’t work out, Tinseltown must have seemed merely tawdry. While the girls might reasonably have thought that being signed up by a studio was the beginning of their movie careers, studios actually kept a group of young women on hand just for the entertainment of film exhibitors and visiting dignitaries. If these girls ever received any acting work, it was as extras. After six months, their contracts were seldom renewed. Hollywood had had its fun and moved on. To the studio there were plenty of pretty girls around trying to make it in Hollywood. They could refresh the crop.

  When Joan Fontaine was about 18, she was asked to join some exhibitors on location. ‘My mother went with me and sat at my table,’ she said, ‘and all of them came around and said, “Get rid of her.”’ Her mother soon ushered her off to bed, where, during the night, Fontaine ignored knocks at her door. Summoned the following day to see the studio head of publicity, Fontaine was reprimanded for being ungracious towards the businessmen. When her mother later complained to the studio, Fontaine wasn’t asked to meet any businessmen again.

  The Party Favour

  Joan Fontaine got away, but dancer Patricia Douglas was less fortunate. When the 20-year-old responded to an MGM casting call in 1937, she thought it was for the usual chorus line work. Along with 120 other dancers and women who’d answered advertisements for ‘MGM party hostesses’, she was dressed in a cowboy hat, short suedette skirt and black boots, and bussed off to a remote studio property.

  In fact, she hadn’t been hired for a film, but to be part of the entertainment for MGM’s three-day convention for salesmen. Promised a Wild West show ‘stag affair’, the salesmen considered the room of comely cowgirls as a ‘party favour’. Although the early evening included appearances from Laurel & Hardy, later the event became increasingly debauched. ‘The party was the worst, the wildest, and the rottenest I have ever seen,’ said Henry Schulte, a waiter, in a later affidavit. ‘The men’s attitude was very rough. They were running their hands over the girls’ bodies.’

  When the 20-year-old responded to an MGM casting call in 1937, she thought it was for the usual chorus line work.

  Throughout the evening, David Ross, a salesman from Chicago, pursued Patricia Douglas. Later, he and another salesman pinned her down, pouring champagne and scotch into her mouth. When she escaped outside, Ross followed her and forced her into the back seat of a car, where, she claimed, he raped her. A parking attendant, Clement Soth, heard screams and saw her staggering towards him as Ross ran away.

  Douglas was taken to Culver City Community Hospital, which, directly across from MGM, kept close ties to the studio. But before the doctor examined her, she was given a cold-water douche. ‘It’s no surprise he didn’t find anything,’ she said years later. ‘The douche had removed all evidence.’ No crime scene report was made, despite the police being aware of the rape allegation.

  Douglas swore a complaint against Ross at the Los Angeles County district attorney’s office. The DA, though, was Buron Fitts, who was very close with MGM’s Louis B. Mayer. Hearing nothing from Fitts, Douglas engaged lawyer William J.F. Brown, who took her case on a pro bono basis. When Fitts also ignored Brown, Douglas went to the Los Angeles Examiner, which ran her story, although it didn’t name the studio.

  Sent by her studio, RKO, to meet some lecherous exhibitors on location, a young Joan Fontaine took her mother to deter them. She was later reprimanded by the studio for her unfriendliness.

  Barbara Stanwyck with Robert Taylor in Venice in the 1950s. When she discovered his affair with Lana Turner, Stanwyck slit her wrists, but MGM quickly told the Press that she’d cut herself opening a window.

  STANWYCK’S SUICIDE ATTEMPT

  WHEN BARBARA STANWYCK slit her wrists because her actor husband Robert Taylor was having an affair with Lana Turner, Taylor first called Strickling, before taking Stanwyck to hospital. That way, when reports began to spread from the hospital, Strickling could have the story ready that Stanwyck had cut her wrists closing a window. When Turner herself attempted suicide in 1952, Strickling put out the story that she’d cut herself when she slipped in the shower.

  Ross’s lawyer had been provided by MGM. ‘Look at her,’ he said, pointing at Patricia Douglas in court. ‘Who would want her?’

  At this point, the studio did respond, although perhaps not as one might expect. It hired the Pinkerton Detective Agency to track down all the girls who’d been at the party to make sure they toed the line. Statements were taken defending the party as ‘clean fun’ and describing Douglas as a lush, even though she’d been a teetotal virgin up until the night of the Wild West show.

  When Douglas had no problem identifying Ross in photographs, Fitts was forced to convene a grand jury to determine if charges should be brought. At the hearing, only two of the girls would speak up in defence of Douglas, and Ross’s lawyer, provided by MGM and a partner of Mayer’s personal attorney, took a very mean line. ‘Look at her,’ he said, pointing to Patricia Douglas. ‘Who would want her?’ Worse, Clement Soth, the parking attendant who’d seen Ross running away from Douglas, now claimed that Ross wasn’t the man. Years later Soth’s daughters confirmed that MGM had offered him ‘any job he wanted’ if he perjured himself. Soth joined the MGM ‘family’ as a driver, remaining there for the rest of his working life.

  The grand jury didn’t indict David Ross, but Douglas didn’t give up, pursuing the matter through two further courts. However, when Brown, her lawyer, vowed to challenge Buron Fitts in the next election to be DA, a conflict of interest was thrown up. Brown didn’t stand a chance of winning the election if he was in litigation with MGM, which was LA County’s biggest employer. Around this time, Brown stopped appearing at Douglas’s court hearings. Was he paid off by MGM? Or did he just realize that Douglas’s case was an obstacle in his ambition to gain public office? Either way, with lawyers not attending Douglas’s hearings, the case was dismissed. And Brown went on to lose against Fitts in the DA elections.

  In handling the Patricia Douglas case, both MGM and the DA’s office had begun by doing as little as possible, apparently in the hope that she’d just go away. Then, when forced into action, MGM had gone to a great deal of effort to defend itself. The Wild West party scandal was front-page news at the time, but it quickly faded from Hollywood histories, only resurfacing when author David Stenn investigated Douglas’s story for Vanity Fair magazine in 2003. Speaking for the first time about the rape that year, Douglas said: ‘It absolutely ruined my life.’

  Blackballe
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  Patricia Douglas had been a nobody in the studio’s eyes before the rape allegation, but even established names had their run-ins. One evening in a restaurant, Louis B. Mayer made a pass at Esther Ralston, who had been a star in the silent era and was under contract at MGM. She politely rebuffed him and thought nothing more of it. But the following morning she was summoned to his office. ‘You think you’re pretty smart, don’t you?’ Mayer said, surprising her. ‘Well, I’ll blackball you. You’ll never get another picture in any studio in town.’

  Actually, Mayer didn’t blackball her, but Ralston knew then that her career at MGM was over. Mayer took no further interest in her career, loaning her out to Universal for 13 films in a row. MGM received a commission each week from Universal for Ralston, while Universal paid her weekly income. Relegated to smaller roles, she made her final film in 1940, aged 38, before retiring from cinema. It hadn’t paid to reject the head of the studio’s advances.

  Married but Looking

  The studios had such control over their stars’ lives that it became second nature to consult them on matters unrelated to their work. When Ava Gardner accepted Mickey Rooney’s marriage proposal, his first response was: ‘Great. Who are we going to break the news to first – Ma or Uncle L.B. [Mayer]?’ They tossed a coin for it. Ma won.

  Mayer, however, wasn’t happy when he heard the news. Rooney, at 21, was still playing wholesome teenage roles in the Andy Hardy films and Mayer wanted him to remain single and available in the eyes of his young fans. Mayer even tried to dissuade Rooney from marrying Gardner, but, failing in that, he settled for a policy of damage limitation and quickly began organizing a quiet wedding out of town and away from the Press. Not consulting the couple on whether the wedding arrangements were any of MGM’s business, an MGM publicist even accompanied them on their honeymoon.

  While Ava Gardner had imagined MGM organizing a lavish Beverly Hills spectacle for her wedding to its biggest star, the studio didn’t want to upset Mickey Rooney’s teenage girl fans. Instead, it arranged a quiet ceremony in a tiny town 120 miles outside LA.

  APPEASING NAZI GERMANY

  EVEN WHEN IT came to Nazi Germany, the Hollywood studios were open for business, revealed Ben Urwand in his 2013 book The Collaboration: Hollywood’s Pact with Hitler. In 1933, screenwriter Herman J. Mankiewicz offered a topical script about the treatment of Jews in Nazi Germany around Hollywood, but he couldn’t find a backer. Regarding the project, Louis B. Mayer said: ‘We have terrific income in Germany … as far as I am concerned, this picture will never be made.’ It wasn’t just that Hollywood feared certain films being unpopular in Germany. According to a pre-Nazi amendment to the German film regulations, if a studio released an anti-German film anywhere in the world, all films from that studio could be banned in Germany. As the Nazi government became more extreme, it took the amendment increasingly seriously, while the studios took the German market seriously, too.

  As a wider consequence of this amendment, the studios consulted Georg Gyssling, the German Consul in LA from 1933 and a Nazi Party member, allowing him to list the cuts that he wanted made to a film before it was distributed. If Gyssling (pictured with Leni Riefenstahl, best known for her Nazi propaganda documentaries) felt there was criticism of modern Germany in a film, such as German anti-Semitism or militarism, the studios usually bowed to his wishes and made the relevant cuts. For as long as the studios cared about the German market, a Nazi Party member in LA was censoring Hollywood films.

  Many of the studio heads were Jewish, but they were businessmen first, pitching their films to as wide an audience as possible. As Columbia Pictures head Harry Cohn said: ‘Around this studio, the only Jews we put into pictures play Indians!’ Nor were the studios interested in issues-based films – as Harry Warner famously said: ‘We should leave messages to Western Union.’

  Not that the moguls were insensitive to anti-Semitism. When they’d first arrived in Los Angeles, Jews had been barred from the country clubs and had set up their own, Hillcrest – where they had the last laugh when oil was discovered beneath the greens in 1950. They weren’t inactive either: Carl Laemmle, the German-born Jewish head of Universal, helped almost 300 German Jews escape persecution and find passage to America.

  As the Nazi Government demanded greater and greater cuts from American films (or simply banned them altogether) in the later 1930s, the Hollywood studios began to pull out of Germany – it was no longer worth their trouble. And with MGM and Fox producing anti-Nazi films in 1940, the last two US studios were finally expelled from Germany.

  Because of Rooney’s philandering, however, their marriage was soon in trouble. ‘He’d screw anything that moved,’ said Gardner. The breaking point came at a nightclub where Rooney produced his little black book of girls, and, in front of Gardner, began reading out what each girl was particularly good at in bed. Gardner left him, MGM persuading her not to sue for divorce on the grounds of adultery but simply incompatibility: there’d be less bad press that way. Perhaps it was unrelated, but at the same time Gardner’s contract was renewed and she was given a rise.

  Who Killed Superman?

  A fatal shooting, a wealthy, older Hollywood woman and her younger lover seeking escape – that’s 1950’s Sunset Boulevard, isn’t it? It is, but nine years later life imitated art. And for all the scandals that Eddie Mannix had been drawn into, this one concerned him personally.

  By the late 1930s, Mannix was living apart from his first wife Bernice. She was preparing to divorce him, accusing him of cruelty, of beating her severely enough to break her back and of committing adultery with Toni Lanier, a former Ziegfeld Follies dancer. Mannix could afford his wife’s hefty alimony, but could he afford Toni’s spending needs on top of that? It’s claimed that, in November 1937, through organized crime contacts, Mannix had Bernice’s car run off the road, killing her before she could file her divorce papers. After that, Mannix set up home with Toni and, although they never formally married, she became known as ‘Mrs Mannix’. By 1951, Mannix was in his late fifties and had heart trouble. He openly had a Japanese mistress, and didn’t object when Toni, in her mid-forties, began seeing actor George Reeves, ten years her junior. The four of them even dined out together.

  The breaking point came at a nightclub where Rooney produced his little black book of girls, and, in front of Gardner, began reading out what each girl was particularly good at in bed.

  Just as Bernice Maddix’s car had been run off the road, Reeves’s car was nearly pushed into a ravine and his brakes were cut.

  Despite an earlier role in Gone with the Wind, Reeves had struggled throughout the 1940s. With Toni, though, things began to brighten. He let her buy him a house, and the same year – perhaps with help from Mannix – Reeves was cast as Superman in the television serial The Adventures of Superman. For Reeves, children’s television was definitely a step down, but the show became a hit, making him rich and famous.

  Toni had assumed that she and Reeves would marry after Mannix had died, although he’d now survived several heart attacks. But, over the years, as Reeves’s star rose, the balance in his relationship with Toni changed. He now had fans and admirers. In 1958, after seven years with Toni, he began an affair with Leonore Lemmon, a 38-year-old party girl. Breaking off the relationship with Toni, Reeves was soon engaged to Lemmon.

  Given that Eddie Mannix was a powerful man whose first wife had died in suspicious circumstances and who had beaten up previous girlfriends, but who’d accepted Reeves’s relationship with Toni, it might have seemed reckless for Reeves to discard Toni so casually. Would Mannix allow his wife to be humiliated and hurt like that? Perhaps not. Strange things began to happen to Reeves. Just as Bernice Mannix’s car had been run off the road, Reeves’s car was nearly pushed into a ravine. On another occasion, his brakes had been cut and he’d crashed, his body being thrown through the windscreen. While a heartbroken Toni was trying to win him back, Reeves’s relationship with Lemmon was falling apart as she maintained a status
of constant partying. Then one night in his bedroom in June 1959, while Leonore Lemmon and guests held a party downstairs, Reeves shot himself.

  George Reeves and Lucille Ball photographed during his guest appearance on I Love Lucy in 1957. Playing Superman on TV had brought Reeves fame and wealth, but some said that he was depressed, feeling shackled to the role.

  Leonore Lemmon, Reeves’s fiancée, leaving his house after his death on 16 June 1959. As the actor had gone to bed the previous night, she was said to have commented: ‘He’s going up there to kill himself.’

  Or did he? Although the death was declared a suicide, evidence suggested that the gun that killed him had been at some distance, rather than pressed to his head. There were two other bullet holes in the floor of his bedroom, too. Would a suicide have missed that badly? And there were bruises on him, indicating that there’d been a struggle.

  Only after a 45-minute delay had the police been called. Lemmon and her guests all gave the same, drunken, story. When they’d heard the gunshot, Bill Bliss, who neither Reeves nor Lemmon knew, had been sent upstairs to investigate and had returned shouting ‘My friend is dead!’ The police didn’t take any fingerprints and interviewed all the witnesses together, rather than separating them.

  BUSBY BERKELEY’S SHARP MOVES

  ONE NIGHT IN 1935, choreographer Busby Berkeley was driving home from a party along the Pacific Coast Highway when he veered across the road and crashed into two oncoming cars. Three people were killed, and two more were seriously injured (one later died), while Berkeley escaped with cuts and bruises. Berkeley called Whitey Hendry, head of MGM’s head of security, and Hendry called Jerry Giesler. At the court hearing, in what would seem to be a piece of theatre, Berkeley was wheeled in wrapped in bandages. Giesler’s defence was that Berkeley’s tyre had burst and he’d lost control of the car. But Berkeley had a reputation as a drinker, and, although he’d denied drinking that night, witnesses at the crash scene said that he’d been speeding and that he smelt of alcohol. After the first two juries were divided and mistrials were called, the third jury acquitted Berkeley. He returned to work and MGM later paid out $100,000 in civil damages to the families of those killed and injured. If Berkeley hadn’t been a celebrity with a top lawyer, would he have been acquitted?