by Jackie Ganiy
By 1964, some of her old spirit returned. She rekindled her friendship with Earl Mills, and went to a spa in Mexico to try and get healthy again. While touring with her nightclub act, she twisted her ankle, and couldn’t work. On the afternoon of September 8, 1965, Mills came to drive her to have a cast put on her ankle. He discovered his “Angel Face” lying nude on the bathroom floor, dead for hours.
The coroner’s report listed the cause of death as a rare embolism that occurred when fragments of bone marrow left her fractured ankle and lodged in her lungs and brain. Interestingly, the toxicology report painted a different story. Accidental overdose of the anti-depressant Tofranil was listed as the cause of death. Whatever the cause, beautiful Dorothy Dandridge was gone at forty-two. When Mills searched the apartment, he found a note that read, “In case of my death, Don’t remove anything I have on—scarf, gown, or underwear. Cremate me right away. If I have anything—money, furniture, get it to my mother Ruby Dandridge. She will know what to do.” Right to the end, it seems Dorothy was unable to completely break the cord.
She said, “If I were white, I’d rule the world.” She was probably right.
Police carry Dorothy’s body away from the El Palacio Apartments in Los Angeles.
Tom Neal
Neal and Ann Savage in Detour
A bad relationship will ruin your life and few knew this better than actor, Tom Neal. Born in 1914 in Evanston, Illinois, he became the quintessential jock at Northwestern University, serving on the Boxing team where he scored a record forty-two wins. Moving on to Harvard, he earned a law degree. He was smart, good-looking, ambitious, and came from a supportive, wealthy family. He could have had a very successful law practice, but Tom had stars in his eyes, or rather, the lights of a Broadway stage.
Tom worked in a handful of plays before making the leap to Hollywood in the late 30s. Once MGM had him on contract, they shuffled him around from one mediocre B movie to the next. In 1941, he starred with Frances Gifford in the fifteen-series serial, Jungle Girl, and in 1945, his career peaked with the film noir classic, Detour, costarring Ann Savage. Tom garnered the best reviews of his career for his portrayal of doomed piano player, Al Roberts, and hoped the praise would bring a serious career boost, but it didn’t happen. Fascinated by the Black Dahlia murder, Tom claimed to have inside information on it from a private detective hired by the family. He tried to secure funding for a film project where he would costar as a hard-boiled detective who falls for the murder victim as he works her case, but failed. Too bad. It would have made for a great movie. Oh wait, wasn’t that called Laura?
Neal and Barbara Payton
By the 1950s, still relegated to B movies, he grew increasingly frustrated. In 1951, he met the woman who would help him destroy his career for good, film noir blonde bombshell, Barbara Payton. He fell hard for Payton, and they had a passionate affair. The only problem was, she was already engaged to a major star, Franchot Tone. When Tone found out, he went straight to Barbara’s home and confronted the lovers (rumor has it he caught them in the act).
Confronting Tom was probably not Tone’s best idea, considering Neal’s extensive background as a champion amateur boxer with forty-one knockouts to his credit. Tone and Neal got into a brawl right there, in front of Barbara’s Beverly Hills house. Tom punched Tone so hard he was literally knocked back twelve feet. Tom pounced on Tone, pummeling his head and face with his fists repeatedly. When Barbara tried to pull him off, he slugged her in the eye. Needless to say, Tone came away the loser physically, with a broken nose, shattered cheekbone and bruised brain. He was in a coma for eighteen hours, and required plastic surgery to fix his once-perfect features. It would be Neal and Payton who would be the losers in the long run, however.
The tabloids lapped this up, siding, of course, with the legitimate fiancé, vilifying Tom as a home wrecker. Public outcry and sympathy for Tone drove Payton away from Tom, and back to her fiancé, and they married two weeks later. The marriage lasted exactly fifty-three days, most of which she spent cheating on Tone with Neal. The impact to Tone’s career was not serious, but Payton and Neal were officially blackballed from Hollywood. Unable to make a living in films, they capitalized on their notoriety in a series of plays, such as The Postman Always Rings Twice. Their marriage lasted four years, until Barbara chose booze over Tom, and they divorced in 1957.
Neal had to resort to gardening to pay the bills. He married a second time, to Patricia Fenton, and fathered a son. Unfortunately, she died tragically from cancer the following year. By all accounts, Tom considered her the love of his life. His landscaping venture failed, and he filed for bankruptcy. In 1961, he married a third time, to a twenty-five-year-old receptionist named Gail Bennett. Wedded bliss, however, was not to be.
On the evening of April 1, 1965, Tom entered a restaurant in the mountain village of Idyllwild, near Palm Springs, and told the owner that he killed his wife in her sleep. Police were called to the home, where they found Gail’s body lying on the couch, dead from a .45 caliber gunshot wound behind her right ear. Neal was indicted for murder, and a public defender appointed to defend him. The public defender never showed up to meet his client. He later claimed this was a strategy to force Tom’s former Hollywood friends to come to his aid. Seems it worked. Mickey Rooney, Blake Edwards and even his archenemy, Franchot Tone, all helped raise money for his defense.
It was revealed at the trial that the couple had been separated for months, and Gail was planning to file divorce papers. A mysterious mens wallet and suit were discovered in Gail’s bedroom closet that the defense argued did not belong to Neal. It turned out they belonged to a salesman who was renting the spare bedroom. What they were doing in Gail’s closet was never fully explained. Hmm. Tom took the stand and said the whole thing had been in self-defense, and started when Gail pulled the gun on him first. He claims he went for the weapon and a struggle ensued. Somehow she ended up getting shot in the back of the head, while lying on the couch, in a position as if she were taking a nap. That sounds logical.
Follow-up testimony revealed that Gail had been terrified that Tom would kill her once he found out she was filing for divorce, and complained that he had threatened her with a .45 caliber gun in November. Barbara Payton came to the trial, and she and Neal would often wave at each other like middle-schoolers in study hall.
After the trial ended, they never saw each other again. Unbelievably, the jury bought the defense version, and Tom was convicted only of involuntary manslaughter. His lawyer was elated, and went around saying that, with time served, and in consideration of his clean record, his client could be out by Christmas. The sentencing judge disagreed. “The fact that the jury brought only a verdict of involuntary manslaughter is as big a break as Mr. Neal deserves.” he said. Tom Neal, B movie star, with over 180 films to his credit, was sentenced to ten to fifteen in state prison.
On December 7, 1971, having served six years of his sentence, he was released on parole. He moved back to the town that had turned its back on him, and died there of heart failure exactly eight months later, on August 7, 1972. He was fifty-eight. In a creepy twist, Tom Neal Jr., a dead ringer for his father, starred in the 1992 remake of Detour.
Tom Neal seemed to have everything going for him but it was just an illusion. As he so prophetically pointed out, through the words of a screenwriter, in his only major film, Detour, “Fate or some mysterious force can put the finger on you or me for no reason at all.” Indeed it can, but there is usually also a clear and unblinking reason, and in Tom’s case, it seems to have been an issue with violence along with an inability to admit to his own mistakes. Oh yeah, and getting involved with the wrong woman.
Montgomery Clift
Kevin McCarthy, known to those who love cult horror classics as the shrill Dr. Miles J. Bennell from the movie, Invasion of the Body Snatchers, was navigating his way down a treacherous stretch of winding road in Coldwater Canyon, when he noticed the headlights behind him had disappeared. McCarthy became concerned
, because he had been guiding an inebriated Montgomery Clift, who was unused to driving, down the hill as a precaution. He whipped his car around, and went to look for Monty. A horrific sight met him around the second bend. Monty had lost control of his '56 Chevy, careened down a hill, and plowed into a tree. The car was totaled, and Monty lay unconscious, his face nearly torn off, in the crumpled driver’s seat. It’s been said that this was the start of beautiful, gifted Montgomery Clift’s slide into total self-destruction. In truth, he had been trying to kill himself for years, in what famously was labeled “the longest suicide in Hollywood”.
Montgomery Clift in 1948
He was born in Omaha, Nebraska, to an eclectic, middle class family. His father, William Brooks Clift, was vice president of a bank, and his mother, Sunny, believed she had aristocratic blood, though she was adopted and couldn’t actually prove this. She raised her children with this belief, however, and groomed them for their eventual acceptance into high society (think Amanda in The Glass Menagerie). They were privately tutored, and schooled in French, German, and Italian. Monty’s childhood years were spent lounging in extravagant Victorian mansions, and traveling with his mother and siblings across Europe, while his father toiled away at work, trying to keep up with Sunny’s spending sprees.
Monty was bitten by the acting bug at fifteen, and spent the next ten years performing on stage, honing his craft. He earned a reputation for being an extremely competent actor during this time, making his transition to films effortless. During these years, he entered a bizarre relationship with former Broadway star (and infamous bisexual) Libby Holman, who would exert a tremendous amount of influence over his early career choices. This relationship was supposedly Monty’s last heterosexual liaison.He had the Midas touch upon arriving in Hollywood, skipping the hard knocks and toil that beset most actors fresh from the Broadway stage. Stunning good looks may have been a factor. He walked right into a costarring role in the big-budget western, Red River, with Hollywood legend John Wayne and directed by Howard Hawks. A riveting debut performance, he held his own alongside Wayne. Rumors flew that Clift was in an offscreen romance with costar, John Ireland, which caused palpable onscreen tension. True or not, the rumor added new depths to the gun exchange scene.
Clift was next cast as a fortune-hunting, would-be gigolo, opposite Olivia de Havilland’s rich and lonely plain Jane in The Heiress. Only Monty’s third film role, he nonetheless felt he knew better than veteran Olivia, or the experienced director, Billy Wyler. Becoming a perfectionist, he insisted that he knew what the movie really needed. This bred animosity on the set, alienating him from cast, crew, and Wyler, who considered him an impudent, disrespectful upstart who hadn’t paid the dues to justify his hotshot demeanor. Clift hated the film, and hated his performance in it, leaving the premiere early in disgust. Still, The Heiress was a huge at the box office, and it seemed Monty could do no wrong. A legion of rabid female fans swelled, waiting breathlessly for his next movie, and bombarded de Havilland with hate mail for scorning their darling boy in the final scene of The Heiress. He seemed poised for greatness, and indeed, his best work was ahead of him.
After Heiress, at the behest of mentor Holman, he turned down a plum role as a down-and-out screenwriter opposite Gloria Swanson’s faded silent movie goddess in Sunset Boulevard. The part was written with Clift in mind, but he chose instead to play opposite Elizabeth Taylor in A Place in the Sun, the film adaptation of the Theodore Dreiser novel, An American Tragedy. Elizabeth and Monty would develop a lifelong friendship, and the sight of the two of them together was almost too much for people to take. Taylor was barely nineteen, nearing the full bloom of her incredible physical perfection, and Monty was male beauty personified. To say they lit up the screen with sexual excitement would be a profound understatement. For her part, Elizabeth fell in love with Monty, though she knew he was homosexual. Monty loved her as well, as deeply as he was capable of loving a person in a non-sexual way. They would remain close for the rest of Monty’s life.
A Place in the Sun was a huge success. Brando was so moved by Monty’s gut-wrenching performance in the final scene that he voted for Clift to win the Academy Award for Best Actor instead of his own work in A Streetcar Named Desire. Of course, Monty voted for Brando, and both lost to Bogart in African Queen. A Place in the Sun became a Hollywood classic. Charlie Chaplin said that it was “the greatest movie made about America.” Taylor and Clift are considered by many to have been the most beautiful onscreen couple to this day.
Monty turned down the lead in High Noon, instead making his first commercial failure, I Confess. Director Alfred Hitchcock, usually the master of suspense, seemed more interested in trashing Catholicism and its most cherished values than making a good picture. I Confess was neither his, nor Monty’s, finest moment, and it bombed.
Monty’s next movie, the war epic From Here to Eternity, was the apex of his success. Eternity was a gritty war drama, devoid of the glory and glamour most war films of that era conveyed,focusing instead on themes of alienation and heartbreak. Monty threw himself completely into the tragic Private Prewitt, an army bugler, who is relentlessly harassed and tormented by a sadistic commanding officer, and beaten nearly to death. Weak and wounded, he dutifully crawled out of bed to join his regiment in defending Pearl Harbor against the Japanese attack, but is shot to death by a friendly sentry. Monty learned to play the bugle, even though the bugling was dubbed, to be sure his lips moved correctly. That scene where he played “Taps”, as tears streamed down his face, is held up as one of his finest screen moments. He received a second Academy Award nomination for Best Actor, but again lost to a lesser actor in a less impressive performance—in this case, William Holden in Stalag 17.
It became clear that while the Hollywood gods appreciated Clift’s talents an actor, his refusal to play ball with their subtle rules regarding social behavior and etiquette displeased them. He did not attend their parties, or stroke their massive egos on command, and they steadily shut him out. He, Brando and Dean represented a new and daring kind of performer, a kind that had a disquieting effect on the status quo. Of his outsider reputation, Clift said, “Look, I’m not odd. I’m just trying to be an actor, not a movie star, an actor.” It’s hard to believe that just ten years later, Montgomery Clift would be unemployable.
By this time, Monty was already drinking heavily and taking prescription drugs. On the advice of Holman, he turned down East of Eden, which Dean happily snapped up, to star in an underwhelming, overly ambitious period piece about the Civil War called Raintree County. He was again paired with the gorgeous Elizabeth Taylor, a little plumper, but no less stunning.
On the evening of May 12, 1956, Monty was invited to a dinner party at Taylor’s home. Her marriage to Michael Wilding was crumbling, and the couple considered him a neutral third party. Monty initially did not want to go, as he usually shunned these types of gatherings, but Elizabeth would not take no for an answer. The party was dull, and the tension between Wilding and Taylor was palpable. Monty had taken a handful of Seconal before he ever got to the gathering, and drank throughout the evening. When Kevin McCarthy got up to leave, Monty also decided to call it a night, and the two started down the dangerous hill together. McCarthy admitted that he was speeding to avoid any possible attempt by Monty to ram the back of his car as a practical joke. Monty must have desperately tried to keep up, but he failed to negotiate one of the hairpin turns, and his car went off the road, slamming into a tree. When McCarthy saw what had happened, he drove back up the hill to alert Taylor, who then ran screaming down the hillside to where the wreckage was. She climbed in through the back window, into the front seat, and cradled Monty’s bloody pulp of a head in her designer silk-draped lap. He began choking, and she reached into his mouth and pulled out two of his teeth, thus clearing his airway. He had a broken nose, a fractured jaw and extreme trauma to the soft tissue of his face and upper lip, which was torn away so badly that his upper jaw line was visible through the gaping hole.
Clift’s mangled Chevy
Months of grueling surgeries followed. The producers of Raintree County were in complete meltdown mode. If Clift didn’t recover enough to return to the set, the entire film would have to be shelved. Amazingly, Monty did return to finish the picture two months later, but he was not the same. The accident caused scarring on the right side of his face, creating a hardness to his once milky, perfect visage, and a slight deformity of his lip. He had become self-conscious and halting in his mannerisms, and seemed uncomfortable in his own skin. It is jarring to watch when pre- and post-accident scenes occur consecutively in the film.
Despite the mediocre script and negative publicity, the film did surprisingly well at the box office. Never underestimate the morbid curiosity of the public, who flocked to theaters to see the mid-film changes in Clift’s appearance and demeanor. Raintree turned a nice profit.
Monty became increasingly dependent on narcotics, to ease the chronic pain he suffered after the accident. While he had always been a pharmacist’s best friend, he became seriously dependent after 1956, spiraling down into a haze of addiction and mental instability. In addition to his physical problems, he suffered from profound insecurities, and an overwhelming sense of guilt over his homosexuality, which was still considered a deviant mental illness back then. He crumbled and aged at an astonishing rate, due in part to an undiagnosed hypothyroid condition, as wells as physical and mental stresses.