by Jackie Ganiy
In 1940, both Vivien and Larry were free to marry, so they did. After being prevented from working together in several films, they were finally cast in That Hamilton Woman, which was a moderate success. During the war, Vivien entertained troops in North Africa, and developed a persistent cough there. Later, she was diagnosed with tuberculosis; the disease that lead to her early death. Her episodes of mental illness occurred more frequently, making it difficult for her to work regularly. In 1944, she miscarried after falling on stage, sinking further into the darkness. Her moods began to fall into a pattern. She would be very hyperactive, then violently angry, and have to be physically restrained. This would go on for days and/or weeks, and afterwards she would return to normal, and claim no memory of the incident.
During this time, she gave what is considered the best performance of her career—as Blanche Dubois; the tragic, faded southern belle struggling against insanity, in the Tennessee Williams classic, A Streetcar Named Desire. Director Elia Kazan said of her ability, “She would have crawled over ground glass if she thought it would help her performance.” Vivien said of her role, “The year I spent as Blanche Dubois tipped me into madness.” Some would say that ship had already sailed. She won a second Academy Award.
In 1953, she began a grueling, torturous location shoot in Ceylon(now Sri Lanka) for the film, Elephant Walk, for which she was ill-prepared. She quickly fell apart, becoming completely delusional on the set, and had to be flown back to England, to the care of her husband. It was around this time that David Niven famously remarked that Vivien was “quite, quite mad.”
In the ensuing years, Vivien swung between periods of lucidity and mental delirium. When she was well, she appeared on the London stage in several productions, but those moments grew fewer and fewer. In 1960, her marriage to Olivier was over, and she turned to actor Jack Merivale for solace, apparently with Olivier’s blessing. Olivier had become emotionally exhausted, and just couldn’t do it anymore, but he remained extremely close to Vivien. For her part, Vivien confided to a friend that she would rather live a short life with Olivier, than a long one without him.
Though Vivien seemed to perk up in the early '60s, it was just a mirage. She earned her first Tony award for the play Tovarich, and turned in stellar performances in two films, Ship of Fools and The Roman Spring of Mrs. Stone. In May of '67, however, her old nemesis, tuberculosis, came calling. Suffering a serious relapse that year, doctors ordered strict bed rest at home (as she refused to be hospitalized), and she was to refrain from smoking, drinking and socializing. Vivien didn’t listen. She never did.
On July 7, she watched tennis in bed with Merivale, before he left to perform in a play that evening. She had seen several of her old friends in the preceding days, and was still chain smoking. When Merivale phoned from the theater to check on her, she seemed tired, but content. When he returned at 11:00 PM, he looked in on her, and she was sleeping peacefully; her cat, Poo Jones, resting at her side. He went into the kitchen to prepare a late night snack. When he checked on Vivien again, he found her lying on the floor halfway to the bathroom—still warm—but very dead. Her lungs had filled with fluid, and she had suffocated. She was fifty-three.
Blanche Dubois, in A Streetcar Named Desire, said “Oh look! We have created enchantment!” She could have been referring to Vivien Leigh. She was everything a movie star should be: lovely beyond belief, and possessed of a rare quality which transcended the screen, and touched audiences in a way rarely experienced today. She was as talented and unique as she was flawed and doomed. It seems she was just too special for this world.
Clara Bow
Before the mega shoulder-padded vixens of the '40s, and the bodacious, full-figured '50s goddesses, was the flapper of the '20s. She was a thoroughly modern girl, with a slim figure, shockingly short (bobbed) hair, and a flat chest. She wore her dresses far shorter than was “decent”, and she was not shy about her vices, which included smoking, drinking and cavorting with multiple members of the opposite sex. F. Scott Fitzgerald, who helped create the phenomenon, referred to her as “lovely, expensive and about 19.” Of course, Hollywood recognized the appeal of this type of woman immediately, and set about finding her very embodiment, which they did, in Clara Bow.
Clara was bright, sweet and perky, which is hard to account for given her miserable, impoverished upbringing in the slums of Brooklyn. She was born in 1905, a time when the infant mortality rate for the poor was eighty percent. Her grandfather went completely insane after regularly beating her grandmother for decades. Her mother, Sarah, had epilepsy and severe bipolar disorder, or schizophrenia, depending on who you choose to believe. It fell to Clara to take care of her mother during the many violent, psychotic episodes. Sarah was a pathetic shadow of a woman, who had once been a lovely thing with delicate features and big dreams; things that stark poverty and mental illness had erased. One day in 1920, Sarah attacked Clara with a knife. Frightened and fed up, Clara locked her in a charity hospital, where she died three years later. This ugly childhood would haunt poor Clara for the rest of her life, and no amount of fame or accolades would be able to wash away the trauma that was buried deep inside her psyche.
Bow struggled, working in small pictures at first, but won critical acclaim and recognition in the film, Down to the Sea in Ships. Critics praised the newcomer with copious accolades. Variety wrote, “Clara lingers in the eye long after the picture has gone.” Louella Parsons said, “She hasn’t any secrets from the world. She trusts everyone. She is almost too good to be true. I only wish some reformer who believes the screen contaminates all who associate with it could see this child. Still, on second thought, it might not be safe. Clara uses a dangerous pair of eyes.” Shortly after this, she performed the typical flapper dance, mostly nude, atop a table, in a film called Enemies of Women. She was not credited in the role, which probably saved her career.
She was soon playing small, but memorable, roles in Maytime and Black Oxen. It was in Black Oxen where the first face-off occurred between flapper types: Bow’s “horrid flapper” versus Colleen Moore’s more demure, dreamy take on the archetype. The dueling flappers duked it out in a series of films, until Moore withdrew from the contest, and moved on to other roles, proclaiming “No more flappers. They have served their purpose.” Now the field was Bow’s for the taking, and she did not hesitate. She starred in one exploitation picture after another over the next several years; charlestoning, vamping and gleefully swinging her way toward immortality as the screen’s purest example of uninhibited, unbounded sexuality.
She pulled a fair amount of offscreen mischief as well, gaining a reputation as a “party girl” and a drunk. She got engaged, and disengaged, as often as the day becomes night, and apparently really liked the boys in the USC football team. Bow said of her reputation, “All this time I was ‘running wild’ I guess, in the sense of trying to have a good time. Maybe this was a good thing because a lot of that excitement, that joy of life, got onto the screen.”
Around this time, a rather scandalous book was published called “IT” and other Stories. The author was Elinor Glyn, who is best described as the first modern romance novelist, and the book had a huge impact on popular culture in the '20s. In the book, Glyn wrote, “To have ‘it’ the fortunate possessor must have that strange magnetism that attracts both sexes. In the animal world ‘it’ demonstrates in tigers and cats—both animals being fascinating and mysterious and quite unbiddable.” When the movie based on the novel, It, was released with Clara in the starring role, a catch phrase was born. Forever after, she would be known as the “It” Girl. She was definitely “It”.
Clara was at the top of her game; the most popular star in Hollywood. Yet the Hollywood elite thought she was crude and unpolished, and shunned her. Her thick Brooklyn accent, accompanied by salacious stories of her less than tactful behavior, caused the “in” crowd to pretend she wasn’t there. Clara, ever the non-conformist, refused to bend to the hypocritical standards demanded of her by these peo
ple, whom she called “frightful snobs”, and who no doubt did worse in secret, safe inside their gated homes.
Unfortunately, by the late '20s, Clara had begun to show signs of exhaustion, as well as some mental instability. She signed with Paramount Pictures, and made several memorable films including Wings, the first film to win an Oscar for Best Picture. By October of 1929, however, she was burned out and exhausted. Despite this, she transitioned to talkies effortlessly, in such films as The Wild Party (how appropriate), and Dangerous Curves. In 1931, a vicious series of articles ran in The Coast Reporter that attacked Clara as a wanton woman, who had sex in public, and engaged in threesomes with prostitutes and animals at the same time. This was devastating stuff at a time when the fascist, self-appointed censorship monster, the Hays office, had begun to dig its claws into freedom of expression in movies. The days of glorifying wickedness and shamelessness were fast coming to an end. The public went along with it, and just like that, Clara Bow, the first flapper, America’s “It” girl, was finished.
Clara didn’t seem to care. She married genuine cowboy and western star, Rex Bell, settling with him on his sprawling Nevada ranch. She had two sons, who would grow up to beg her to return to making movies,and in 1932, she gave in and made her last two films: Call Her Savage and Hoop-la. She began a slow decline into madness afterward. Alone on her Nevada ranch, she attempted suicide while her husband was away running for the US House of Representatives. Becoming a paranoid recluse, she refused to leave the house, and was terrified of letting her husband and children out of her sight. Moving into a “rest hospital” in 1949, supposedly to treat her chronic insomnia, she was given several old school shock treatments. Who knew electrocution was a cure for insomnia? Doctors said she displayed delusional, bizarre behavior, and they diagnosed her as schizophrenic. Bow told them they were full of shit, and left. She lived the rest of her days in a modest home in Culver City, away from her family, and died alone there, save for a professional nurse, in 1965. She was sixty.
Clara was just about everybody’s naughty, secret desire: men and women alike. Yet there was a doe-eyed innocence about her that makes details of her life seem all the more poignant. There would be many imitators, but never again would there be another “It” Girl.
Section III
The Forgotten and the Forsaken
The Grand Theater, Chicago, shortly before being razed.
Once you make it in Hollywood, you have it made. Until you don’t, which is what happened to so many stars throughout the years. Some were unable to adapt to the technological changes that the passing of time always brought. Others allowed their personal demons to consume them, pulling them down the rabbit hole to cold oblivion, and still others were simply discarded like last year’s fashion, coldly consigned to the back of the closet in favor of the latest style. After all, it’s called show business for a reason.
Yvette Vickers
* * *
Few people who saw the 1958 horror B movie classic, Attack of the 50 Foot Woman, could forget leggy blonde actress, Yvette Vickers. She was the perfect foil to the star, Allison Hayes, as the femme fatale who openly slept with the protagonist’s alcoholic husband. Adolescent males everywhere drooled all over themselves.
She was an intelligent girl, who studied at UCLA majoring in journalism, and took an acting class on a whim. She loved the attention she received while pretending to be someone else, and decided to change her major. Soon, she said, “The heck with it!” and dropped out of college altogether to pursue an acting career. Getting her start in commercials, she was the White Rain Girl for White Rain shampoo. She eventually snared the role that would make her a cult movie icon, that of Honey Parker in Attack of the 50 Foot Woman. Despite its low budget and high camp, the movie was a big hit with the drive-in theater crowd, and continued to entertain subsequent generations late at night on cable television. Attack of the Giant Leeches, her only other costarring role, was as well-received. Yvette quickly capitalized on this exposure, posing nude in 1959 for the controversial new men’s magazine, Playboy, a move which may have contributed to her stunning career decline. This was, after all, the age of Ozzie And Harriet, when America still frowned upon such displays of relaxed morality. Interestingly, her centerfold shoot was photographed by Russ Meyer, who would go on to reign as king of the B horror film directors during the '70s.
After her Playboy stint, she dropped out of sight. The movie offers dried up, and her ascent to mainstream film success became a descent into the world of fringe, has-been celebrity status, where living off of thirty-year-old royalties was the norm, and film convention appearances were a rare ego boost to look forward to. She began to drink...a lot. Paranoia set in, and she gradually barricaded herself inside her modest Benedict Canyon home, behind mountains of garbage. Yvette had become that sad creature upon whom reality TV has recently shone an unforgiving spotlight: the hoarder. Her public appearances grew fewer, and her self-imposed isolation, fueled by alcohol and mental illness, grew deeper. She gained a tremendous amount of weight, and behaved erratically. She felt that people were stalking her. Cars innocently parked on her street seemed to be stalkers. Even those closest to seemed to be after her, and her defenses thickened. It’s a shame that Yvette did not have anyone in her life who cared enough to get her the help she needed. Perhaps if they had, she could have escaped her grisly fate.
On the morning of April 27, 2010, having not seen Yvette in over a year, her neighbor, Susan Savage, thought something was wrong. She saw cobwebs in Yvette’s mailbox, her yard was overgrown and neglected, and through the windows she saw lights lit, and garbage piled almost to the ceiling. The house itself was practically falling down, with a fruit picker out back set up to support a section of its frame. She broke in through the front door, and found what was left of Yvette in an upstairs bedroom next to a running electric heater. She had been dead for a very long time, and her state of decay was staggering. Her body was essentially mummified, her skin black and brown and leather-like. Colonies of insects had taken up residence and were enjoying life inside her body. In all likelihood, she was partially melted into the floor, as this is common for bodies in such an advanced state of decomposition. There was no trace of the golden-haired beauty who once graced the pages of Playboy and pranced across the screen stealing husbands, leaving outraged wives and broken hearts in her wake. Indeed, it was hard to recognize a human form in those remains at all.
The coroner, who shockingly was not shocked, claimed several of these types of deaths crossed his path every year, and estimated that Yvette died about a year earlier from a heart attack brought on by coronary disease. A year earlier! How does someone, once so well-known, lie dead in her home for a year without anyone noticing? Savage was clearly distraught. “We’ve all been crying about this. No one should be left alone like that,” she said.
No. No one should be left alone like that; especially not someone who had been a beautiful star. Once, Yvette was a dream of pure desire, a wicked fantasy creature fueling millions of adolescent fantasies, yet when she died, a year went by before anyone even noticed. It’s hard to imagine a harder, longer, lonelier fall than that.
Linda Darnell
Few remember beautiful Linda Darnell today, but one look at her alabaster face, framed by that improbably thick black hair, was enough to bring GIs to their knees during WWII. She was a screen goddess, who came down off her pedestal to dance the night away with lovesick soldiers, at the famous celebrity-filled club for enlisted men, The Hollywood Canteen. She had the face of an angel, and the sensitive nature of a child. From childhood on, she was tormented by a recurring nightmare of being trapped in a blazing inferno, and she was terrified of fire her entire life. That she could project such a graceful and alluring presence onscreen while experiencing such inner turmoil is surprising. Moreover, in a world of candles, pilot lights and campfires, on the set and off of it, the courage necessary to venture out from home would be great. Yet sadly, Linda was not quite tough enough for
Hollywood.
Born Monetta Eloyse Darnell in Dallas, Texas, in 1923, to a postal clerk and his wife, she was the fourth child in a household that already was home to three, and would sprout two more after her. Her mother Pearl’s own dreams of stardom had been buried under the hard facts of a rough life, so she sought to live them vicariously through her daughter. She had Monetta modeling at eleven, as well as entering and winning local talent contests, both while representing Monetta as being several years older than she actually was. In 1937, she won the “Gateway to Hollywood”contest, and with it a contract at RKO Radio Pictures. RKO signed her, yet felt she was too young to use just yet, so they kept her on the bench. Pearl grew more impatient with each passing day.
In 1938, Twentieth Century Fox came to town, on an open call for talent, and Pearl got Monetta a tryout. The scouts loved her, and wanted to get her signed, but they had to pry her out of her existing contract with RKO. They sprang her from that dead-end contact, signed her, and set her on a schedule of classes and preparation to ready her for her first role. Pearl’s pursuit of her daughter’s fame was relentless, even when at the expense of her other children. It was all about to pay off in a big way.
Monetta became Linda, and at last made her debut in the 1939 film, Hotel for Women. At only fifteen years of age, this role made her the youngest leading lady in Hollywood history at the time, but no one knew it. The studio had been told she was seventeen by Pearl (true to form), and they in turn led everyone else to believe she was nineteen. Her real age was revealed a few years later. Her real age aside, she certainly was a vision, with that flowing raven hair, dark sultry eyes, and a radiant innocence that seemed to permeate, even transcend, her sexual allure.