Don Simpson: Hollywood Death

That is the perfect setup for a quick crosscutting sequence where we could have a lot of fun. The principle is this: we go from some of the most illustrious, gorgeous on-screen deaths straight to the morbid, lurid deaths of movie people in real life, the sort of deaths that movies don't do. The range is unlimited, and you can ask around to get some favorite death scenes. But here's an outline just to give you an idea:

First: Bonnie and Clyde, with Beatty and Dunaway just ripped to bits in unison by the fusillade that is their one uncompromised orgasm. Remember their bodies heaving and twitching while they're coming to pieces'? Then: Jean Seberg in the backseat of her sealed Renault in a Paris suburb, where she'd been for nine days--in September!

Or try this one: James Cagney in White Heat, on top of the oil tank, shout-ing in his mania. "Made it Ma, top of the world!" and going out in one stunning explosion of fire and light. Then: John Garfield, dying in the prolonged but not tedious process of humping a young woman. We don't need to name her, but you have to picture the hard-on that will never wilt and the sheer delicacy of extrication. So long as the wording is tasteful. I think we can convey the comic mishap that death can be. It is a few moments before the woman realizes he is dead and not just happy.

Or how about this? John Travolta in Pulp Fiction, coming out of the John with Modesty Blaise in his hand and seeing Bruce Willis standing there with the gun. What's going to happen? Willis's Pop Tarts pop in the toaster, and it's as if the noise of them fires the gun. Travolta goes back into the shower with red sauce all over his shirt and the unbelievable saintly look on his face. Cut to: Ramon Novarro, nearly 70, found in his own Hollywood Hills home, naked on his bed, battered extensively, his wrists and ankles tied with electric cord, and on the mirror, the message, "Us girls are better than fag-its." The killers were brothers, male hustlers, looking for money. They were themselves so bloodied in the murder that they abandoned their own clothes and put on some of Ramon's.

Here's my last example: William Holden's Joe Gillis in Sunset Boulevard, walking out of Norma Desmond's life, but reclaimed by her imperious bullets and pitching forward into her pool, still doomed to tell her story. And then we cut to this: William Holden's William Holden, dead four or five days in a pool of blood on the floor of an apartment in an Ocean Avenue. Santa Monica building in which Holden had been part owner for many years and where he often went to be alone. The actor had fallen down drunk and hit his head on a table. He'd tried to stop the bleeding with tissue, but had passed out, and never recovered to tell the story.

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Here we cut to the glum figure of Humphrey Bogart in a sodden tan trench coat standing apart from the glossy black umbrellas at a little graveyard near Rapallo. This is the opening of The Barefoot Contessa, We are at the funeral of the great and lately late star, Maria d'Amata (Ava Gardner}. The rather larger than life white stone statue of Maria that stands above her new grave is so finished you can believe the publicity machine had it ready while she was alive, just in case. (In the story, the statue is the adoring tribute of Maria's unfortunately impotent husband, and like much funerary alabaster, it is on the virginal, or untried, side.) The Barefoot Contessa tells us the story of Maria d'Amata by having Bogart, Maria's writer/director, shift our attention from one person to another among those gathered at Maria's grave site. Moviemakers have always loved funeral scenes just as much as the Hollywood community has loved the real thing. After all, funerals are Hollywood's most hallowed parties, where the cocktails are called mortality, posterity and history.

Now we move into a rapid-fire survey of your big-time industry funerals.

When Valentino died, in August 1926, he lay in state at Frank E. Campbell's Funeral Home in Manhattan. Over 100,000 people filed past to see him, on his back, eyes closed, hair slicked down, in the single bed of a bronze coffin on a raised catafalque. There was a railing and a low, cushioned ledge where familiars could pray for a few moments. The floral tribute included one arrangement of 4,000 scarlet roses sent by Pola Negri, who had announced--amid swooning attacks--that she and Rudy had been set to be married. The funeral was attended by many stars and celebrities. One newspaper actually managed a photograph of Valentino being greeted in heaven by Caruso. Paramount-- Rudy's studio--yielded to the public pressure to keep his pictures playing. For in the very old days of the quaint picture business there had been a notion that a deceased star's films should be withdrawn--out of respect for death!

When Irving Thalberg, the boy wonder executive at MGM, died in September 1936, it seemed destined. He had always had poor health, yet he had worked so hard; he was the pioneer of self-destruction in the cause of better pictures. MGM was closed the day of the funeral: all its stars were expected to attend. Other studios observed a five-minute pause as the service began at the temple on Wilshire Boulevard. A message was read from FDR. Grace Moore sang the 23rd Psalm. Rabbi Edgar Magnin--the burier of all the lofty dead--ended his oration with these words: "The love of Norma Shearer and Irving Thalberg was a love greater than that in the greatest motion picture I have ever seen-- Romeo and Juliet." (One of Thalberg's last productions, with his wife, the 36-year-old Shearer, as Juliet.) The floral tributes included a throne of gardenias from Louis B. Mayer--Thalberg's boss, his friend, his "father," and his rival. Above the throne there was a cage that held a live white dove. Insiders remarked that L.B. had thrown away the key; death had imprisoned Irving--and liberated Mr. Mayer.

Jean Harlow's death, in June 1937, was among the least pretty. She had uremia and kidney failure and her body became a bloated horror. But her funeral, at Forest Lawn Memorial Park, was as much of a sweetener as possible. The studio stars were there, and there was a sense that this was, for the public, the first great Hollywood funeral. (Valentino had been buried in New York. Thalberg was "only" an executive.) There was $15,000-worth of lilies of the valley and gardenias to cover the coffin. MGM makeup people--Jean's confidantes on pictures-- helped the morticians make her lovely anew. She wore a wig--she had been shaved in the hospital--and the famous pink silk negligee she had worn in Saratoga, the picture left unfinished at her death. MGM didn't waste time. They found a camera-double and a voice-double, shot some more scenes, and still had Saratoga in theaters by July 23rd. It proved to be Harlow's biggest-grossing picture.

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