by Jackie Ganiy
In the recent biography about Lupe, Lupe Vélez: The life and Career Of Hollywood’s Mexican Spitfire, author Michelle Vogel dug up a little-known memoir published by former Beverly Hills chief of police Clinton H. Anderson. Anderson was the first man on the scene of Lupe’s suicide. He states in his memoir, Beverly Hills Is My Beat, published in 1960, that Lupe was found dead in her bed. As Michelle reminds her readers, seventy-five Seconals is a debilitating, lethal dose that would have knocked the petite Vélez comatose in minutes. Michelle also puts forth the theory that Lupe was actually pregnant by Gary Cooper, who was married to someone else, and in any case, done with Lupe, so she knew her options were limited. Its hard to believe her last act on this earth would be to destroy the reputation and career of an innocent man in order to protect Coopers’ reputation, but then who really knows what she was thinking? Abortion is a sin, but suicide is a...lesser one? She doesn’t want to “kill” her baby, but she’s okay with taking both thier lives instead of just the one? Sounds like she wasn’t really thinking at all.
It’s sad that Lupe Vélez has now slipped into the shadows of obscurity, remembered for her horrific death, when she is remembered at all. It’s safe to assume that if Anger had not mentioned her in Hollywood Babylon, her name would have passed even further into oblivion. Lupe Vélez is a good example of how fame, or infamy, is truly a mixed blessing.
Lupe Vélez at her funeral
Jean Seberg
The beautiful teenager with the ponytail and the tight-fitting, yet professional suit demurely resisted looking directly at the man standing behind the camera questioning her. Smiling nervously, she answered: “My name is Jean Seberg.” “Where are you from?” he asked. “From Marshalltown, Iowa.” “When were you born?” “November 13, 1938.” “That makes you what age?” At this, the girl’s eyes search upwards as she leans forward. “Seventeen...and eleven months.” She is breathtakingly beautiful and charming, both in her innocence, and in her freshman attempt at sophistication. She would later become an overnight sensation, and sadly, the target of a vile character assassination campaign by an arm of the US government. This is the story of Jean Seberg, and what the FBI did to clean-cut, all-American Midwestern girls in its frenzy to keep America “safe from dangerous leftist influences.”
Jean was like something sent from central casting; a corn-fed beauty straight from the heartland of the country who wanted to be an actress. She was almost too pretty to be “the girl next door”, and that wasn’t just publicist hype. Her father was a pharmacist, and her mother. a school teacher. It doesn’t get much more Americana than that. She grew up in a Lutheran family, wore white gloves with pearl buttons, attended church every Sunday, and appeared in school plays. Like a million other pretty girls, she dreamed of being discovered, being plucked from the masses and set aside for stardom. Unlike a million other girls, Jean’s dreams came true.
Her drama teacher, Carol Dodd Hollingsworth, along with a wealthy entrepreneur named J. William Fisher, realized her talent and potential. They wrote to director Otto Preminger about Jean. He was conducting a nationwide search for an unknown actress to star in his new film, Saint Joan, based on the stage play by George Bernard Shaw. Apparently, her small town connections won her a coveted reading in front of Preminger, and off Jean went to Chicago. Preminger was enchanted by Seberg’s innocence and natural, spontaneous acting style. He brought her out to Los Angeles for a screen test, and cast her as the martyred French heroine shortly thereafter.
This girl was just seventeen, had only acted in high school plays and now was the star of a major Hollywood film. Otto, a notorious taskmaster, put the entire responsibility of the film’s success on her young shoulders. Plus, it was fucking Joan of Arc, a role that laid waste to far more established actresses. He was very cruel to her on set, yelling at her in front of the crew, and she often broke into tears. In the climactic burn-at-the-stake scene, Jean’s costume really caught fire, giving her mild burns and a fear of redoing the scene. The cameras captured that genuine trepidation, and that fear made it into the final cut. In his biography of Jean, David Richards wrote that Otto took Jean’s sincerity and “stomped it into the ground”, often requiring her to perform twenty takes or more for the most trivial of scenes.
Unsurprisingly, the picture bombed. It didn’t just bomb; it really bombed, as in a Heaven’s Gate-style disastrous fail. Critics panned Jean’s performance as woefully amateurish and uneven. The New York Times wrote: “Miss Seberg, who emerged the winner in a well-publicized international search to play the soldier/saint, is, for all her evident sincerity, callow and unconvincing in a long, difficult and complex part.” Otto got his share as well, with critics calling his directorial style of distant camera angles and impossibly long, uncut scenes indulgent and lacking intimacy.
Even so, Otto cast Jean again in his next film, Bonjour Tristesse, based on the novel by Francoise Sagan. Some say he was obsessed with making Jean a star and controlling the trajectory of her career. Gee, were he and Alfred Hitchcock comparing notes? Once again, Otto was abusive during filming, often threatening to replace her with Audrey Hepburn. Despite stellar costars, David Niven and Debra Kerr, this film flopped as well, with critics again dissing Jean’s performance. The New York Times suggested she be sent back to that small town high school stage, and the New York Herald Tribune said she was horribly miscast as a French nymphet. This last failure virtually ended her mainstream Hollywood career. Too bad the same could not be said of Preminger. When she commented on Otto years later, Jean said, “He was the most charming dinner guest, and the most sadistic director.”
She married millionaire, Francois Moreuil, while filming Bonjour Tristesse. The relationship was not a happy one. She chose to marry in Marshalltown, and the hometown crowd sensed a distinct pretentious hardness in the demeanor of their golden girl, a quality that had not been there when she left them, two years prior. Meanwhile, Otto hastily sold her contract to Paramount. “Preminger got rid of me like a used Kleenex.” Jean remarked. Paramount cast her in The Mouse that Roared, which did fairly well with the artsy set. She sought to hone her acting chops, and applied to the Actors Studio, but they didn’t even bother saying no.
Things started looking up for Jean when her husband introduced her to avant-garde French director, Jean-Luc Godard, who then had Paramount loan her to him for his film: Breathless. Breathless was not a mainstream, Hollywood cookie-cutter movie, but it brought Jean worldwide acclaim for her largely improvised performance. It was one of the first of a film movement known as French New Wave cinema, a style that was lampooned often, usually filmed in sharp black and white, featuring emotive characters talking in metaphors, angst-ridden and depressed, against stark backgrounds. Jean wore her hair in her now-famous pixie style, which became all the rage, even turning up on Audrey Hepburn.
Riding the wave, Jean returned to Hollywood, making Let No Man Write My Epitaph. It bombed, and Jean returned to France. In 1963, she married novelist, Romain Gary and had a son with him: Alexander Diego Gary. After making several French art films, Jean returned to the States to make Lilith, opposite Warren Beatty. This one was way ahead of its time. Think Girl, Interrupted, only more shocking. A female mental patient with nymphomania and schizophrenia becomes the obsession of an occupational therapist, who goes mad over her. Lilith was too artsy and non-conformist to win at the box office but Jean garnered the best reviews of her career. The Washington Post commended her for her “beautiful grasp and projection of the role.” Today, the movie is considered director Robert Rossen’s masterpiece, and it remained Jean’s favorite, as well as the one she was most proud of.
Jean set about making herself a star of international appeal and renown, starring in a series of foreign films as the hapless wife, nymphomaniac, jewel thief, and spy. She did a mundane film for Universal called Moment to Moment, which failed at the box office, due mostly to bad direction and script. Pendulum, with George Peppard—did better—explored abuse of government power, a subject that k
eenly interested Jean. How ironic that she, herself, would fall victim to such abuse in just a few short years. She costarred in big-budget, musical-western, Paint Your Wagon, which was panned by critics, but did okay in theaters. Rumors of a passionate affair with Clint Eastwood on set circulated. In 1970, she costarred in Airport, winning praise for her lovesick airline agent who pined for Burt Lancaster.
By Airport, her marriage to Gary had disintegrated. They divorced that year, but not before a rumor hit the press that Jean was pregnant by a well-known, Black Panther activist. Years later, it came out that this rumor was concocted by order of J. Edgar Hoover himself, to punish Jean for her financial contributions to the Black Panther Party and other “leftist” organizations. Under the Freedom Of Information Act, the shameful and sinister machinations of the FBI against Jean Seberg and others was laid bare for all to see. The FBI, using the Counter Intelligence Program, or COINTELPRO, conducted a vile smear campaign against Seberg based solely on Hoover’s assumption that she must be sleeping with one of the Black Panthers, why else would she be donating to their organization. What? That’s right. Hoover, in his twisted, dirty mind, could not wrap his brain around the fact that a beautiful, blonde Midwestern girl from Iowa could possibly support civil rights simply because she...supported civil rights! According to him, she must surely be somehow corrupted and compromised by a godless, biracial relationship that tainted her judgment, like a sexy black anti-American Satan. I did not just make that up. The stated goal of this operation was the “neutralization of Seberg” and “to cause her embarrassment and harm her image with the public, all while taking the usual precautions to avoid identification of the Bureau.”
Los Angeles Times gossipist Joyce Haber published a piece about Jean on May 19, 1970, after receiving a “tip from a reliable source”: “Let us call her Miss A...She is beautiful and she is blonde...Recently she burst forth as the star of a multimillion-dollar musical. Topic A is the baby Miss A is expecting. Papa’s said to be a rather prominent Black Panther.” Newsweek immediately reprinted it the following week with the added bonus of identifying “Miss A” as Jean Seberg, and the national distribution of this lie was assured. One part of the story was true. Jean was six months pregnant, but with her husband’s child. Distraught, she took a massive overdose of pills, and was found unconscious on a beach on the island of Majorca, where she lived with Gary. He committed her to a Swiss mental hospital, where she miscarried two months later. The child, a girl they named Nina Hart Gary, weighed only four pounds, and was clearly white. Jean put the fetus in a glass coffin, and took it home to Marshalltown. She wanted everyone to see that it had all been a dirty lie, and it killed her baby girl. Gary claimed that Jean attempted suicide every year on the anniversary of the miscarriage. She would succeed, eventually.
The FBI’s bag of dirty tricks didn't begin or end with mere bad publicity. Files released after Jean’s death prove that they had her under surveillance—both in Switzerland and France—for years, and tapped her phone often. Jean was aware she was being stalked and monitored, and the stress weighed on her emotionally and psychologically, eventually driving her over the edge.
She and Gary sued Newsweek, as well as other publications, finally receiving a little over $10,000. They clearly didn’t have the right lawyers. They went their separate ways, and Jean began a free fall from sober reality and into the dark realm of depression, barbiturates and alcohol. She had an affair with a Mexican gaucho while filming Macho Callahan. In Kill, the director was her ex-husband, Romain Gary, who remained in her life. Critics hated both films, and noted Jean’s less than stellar appearance; how ill and tired she looked. In 1972, she married director Dennis Berry. Jean spent the rest of the '70s acting in French and Italian films, appearing only once in an American production, Mousy, with Kirk Douglas.
In her last years, Jean’s social drinking became chronic alcoholism. Her marriage to Berry fell apart, and she went into steep decline. She bounced aimlessly from affair to affair, while Romain Gary watched helplessly, unable to stop the love of his life from destroying herself. At the time of her death, she was living in Paris with an Algerian boyfriend. She left the apartment on August 30, 1979, and was not seen alive again. It was the anniversary of her daughter’s death. Jean took two bottles with her; one filled with water, the other with barbiturates. She was found ten days later, naked and decomposing beneath a blanket in the back seat of her Renault. She clutched a note, addressed to her sixteen-year-old son, Diego, which read: “Forgive me. I can no longer live in a world that beats the weak, puts down the blacks and women and massacres the infants. Understand me. I know that you can and you know that I love you. Be Strong. Your mother who loves you, Jean.”
Days after Jean’s body was discovered, FBI bureau chief William Webster held a news conference in which he confessed the FBI’s crimes against an innocent, fragile woman, which contributed substantially to her eventual demise. “The days when the FBI used derogatory information to combat advocates of unpopular causes have long since passed. Those days are gone forever.” Thank Gawd Almighty for that, however this was no consolation for those who loved Jean, or Jean herself. Romain Gary tried to carry on, but the specter of his tragic love, a woman he could never truly let go of, haunted him until his own suicide, in 1980. Jean’s son, Diego, was left an orphan under the shadow of both his parents’ tragic fates. He eventually married, and lives an ordinary life, working in a bookstore in Spain. God bless him. Jean would have appreciated that. She is barely remembered today, other than for her failed first attempt at pleasing the world, in Saint Joan. Oh, and also for being one of the more famous people that the US government managed to unjustly kill in the name of patriotism. It’s really a toss up, who had the more tragic life, Saint Joan, or the sad little girl who portrayed her.
At least Joan of Arc was canonized.
Jean Seberg’s grave in Montparnasse Cemetery, Paris.
Dana Plato
Get this girl out of here! She’s a has-been and a druggie!” the man with the thick Brooklyn accent hissed into the phone. “She just needs to admit that she’s a ex-druggie, ex-con lesbian with mental health problems!” The girl at whom those comments were directed responded with polite restraint. “How do you know this, sir?” There was no answer. The host of the radio show chimed in, “That’s a little rough, don’t you think?”
It was The Howard Stern show. Stern had built a career out of humiliating semi-celebrities on the air for laughs. On this day, his guest was Dana Plato, the freckle-faced girl from Diff’rent Strokes, who had suffered a spectacular and very public fall from grace after she outgrew her childish appeal.
A few minutes later, another caller chimed in with more hurtful things to say. “You’re loaded! You’re lying! Why don’t you get a urine sample from her?!” The drum beat for getting a urine sample from Dana began in the studio, with Howard leading the charge. They even plucked a strand of hair from her head, for testing later. Dana struggled to tolerate all of these indignities with good humor, but underneath her forced indifference there was a rising tide of darker emotion. She did not break down when caller after caller hurled unnecessarily cruel judgments at her, but she wept openly when two listeners offered kind reassurance and words of understanding. “I just want to tell you that I’m recovering and I believe everything you’re saying. I understand,” the young male caller told her. “Thank you sir.” She said quietly, as she cried.
“Wow, you’re really hurting, aren’t you?” said Stern, as if this notion had just occurred to him. “I’m just tired.” Dana said, choking back tears. “You’re tired of it all?” he asked. “I’m just tired of it all. I’m tired of having to defend my character over and over and over again.” She said, her voice cracking. “Did you ever consider suicide?” Stern asked. “Oh hell no!” she immediately answered. “I have a beautiful boy, so no. I’m okay in my skin. I’m okay with who I am, you know?” Earlier in the interview she had asserted, “My life is good. I’ve never been happier.�
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The next day, she was dead of a drug overdose. She was thirty-four.
It’s easy to dismiss Dana Plato as yet another child star who couldn’t adjust to the loss of stardom that came with adulthood, and self-destructed. It’s less easy to look seriously at the issues of teenage addiction, and how the entertainment industry casually disregards child stars, then acts surprised when they become dysfunctional adults. Dana’s fate was due in part to her own choices, but the culpability of the industry—which has a nasty habit of creating self-destructive, shattered people then walking away—is under-explored.
Dana was born to an unwed teenage mother on November 7, 1964. She was adopted by Dean and Kay Plato the following August. Kay had big plans for her new daughter and as soon as Dana could walk and talk, Kay took her to audition for commercials and television shows. By the age of seven, she had been in over a hundred commercials for brands such as KFC and Dole. She also showed promise as figure skater,and spent long hours practicing at the skating rink. She had bit parts in films such as Return To Boggy Creek and Beyond The Bermuda Triangle. Dana said Kay forced her to turn down the role of Regan in The Exorcist, as well as that of the child prostitute in Pretty Baby, because the two roles were not suited to her clean-cut image. She was training to try out for the U.S Olympic figure skating team and tried out for The Gong Show, where she was spotted by Al Burton, and offered a costarring role on his new sitcom, Diff’rent Strokes.