Stars Gone Broke

With the massive amounts of money actors earn for sometimes just showing up, it's easy to see how they'd blow through it -- easy come, easy go. But all the way through it? Several have.

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Early last September, the entertainment press reported in small postscripts here and there that an actor named Troy Donahue had died at age 65 of a heart attack. Even before 9/11 turned everyone's attention to the same big tragedy, most people didn't register the small tragedy of a Hollywood has-been passing on. But for those who noted the event, one detail in particular stood out and stuck in the mind--that Donahue had died with next to nothing in the way of material wealth to his name. How does someone who's ever been as big a star as Troy Donahue was in the late '50s and early '60s, when he made A Summer Place and Parrish on the big screen and did "Surfside 6" on TV, squander all that good fortune and end up worse off than most ordinary 65-year-olds?

There's uncomfortable fascination in the situation of stars--people who've hit the ultimate lottery in terms of winning adoration, privilege, opportunity and money--who fall back into the same mundane financial vulnerability that animates the masses. The circumstances of these personal disasters are almost enthralling, though not always in expected ways. Troy Donahue, for example, never really had much money to lose, it turns out. He was a contract player for Warner Bros, on a fairly modest salary and hadn't had much chance to sock it away before the studio dropped his contract in 1966. He did lose what little he had. He'd never been comfortable acting, and with his clean, blond looks suddenly out of style, he fell off the radar, stumbled through substance abuse problems, and even went homeless for a while. At the end of his life, though, Donahue wasn't some hard-luck tale of a star-gone-dim. Money was a problem, but he had 20 years of sobriety under his belt he was loved by good friends and a fiancée, and he was probably as happy a; most people, including any number of stars whose bank accounts are full-up.

It's because we think of stardom as some magical ascension from which then is no graceful way down that stars who fail even to salvage cash on their descent inspire queasy curiosity. How do they live with the knowledge that they have blown more good fortune than most other people will ever know? As it happens, far bigger stars than Troy Donahue have suffered bigger losses than his and have kept on going with greater and lesser grace.

One of the most seductively beautiful icons in the history of film, Louise Brooks, went from obscurity to world fame and back to obscurity in a cycle as short as Troy Donahue's, but the odyssey of her life was very different. Brooks was a smoldering, lens-grabbing sexual outlaw who rose through Ziegfeld's Follies in New York and hit Hollywood just at the end of the silent film era, for which she was a perfect, dark goddess. She became a star because her screen presence simply demanded it, and for a while she carried on like one. With the director husband she impulsively married, she lived in glamour up in Laurel Canyon and threw parties attended by mogul/studio-prince Irving Thalberg, his star/wife Norma Shearer and all other glitterati worth knowing. She drank, spent money and sought sexual entertainment not only as if there were no tomorrow, but as if to ensure there would be no tomorrow. It has always been possible to drink, spend and sleep around to positive effect in Hollywood, but Brooks did that only accidentally. She didn't like Hollywood any more than she liked any other situation that hampered her inclination to do whatever she wanted. And unlike other beautiful actresses who excelled in willfulness, Brooks never wanted stardom enough to apply her impressive intelligence toward developing the shrewdness that Hollywood success requires. Just as she was on the verge of moving to Hollywood's highest reaches, she walked out of contract negotiations with Paramount and went off to Germany to make movies with G.W. Pabst.

Brooks is a legend today precisely because of the films she made with Pabst, most importantly Pandora's Box. But great as her performance in that film is considered today, it was panned on both sides of the Atlantic when it was released. Brooks might have overcome that if she'd agreed to help loop in sound on the silent film she'd made for Paramount so that it could be released as a talkie, but, preferring to pay back studio head B.P. Schulberg for insulting her in contract talks, she refused. Schulberg, forced to hire someone else and fake it, badly, spread the word that Brooks's voice was no good, leaving her to the fate of all silent stars with ineffectual voices, though there was nothing actually wrong with hers. And that was pretty much all there was to Louise Brooks's glamorous stardom. Within a few years she'd descended to a succession of dancing acts, gone through another marriage and several affairs with short-lived sugar daddies, become penniless, and gone back to Wichita to teach dance and raise eyebrows. Brooks would have taken stardom back in an instant at any point in the long life that continued from there. But in a way that neatly punctures the gaseous myth of stardom, she ended up redeemed in an altogether stranger destiny than Hollywood could have provided. Well into middle age, she turned for help to a lover from years ago, William S. Paley, who'd become head of the media empire CBS. Paley knew that Brooks, no longer an exceptional beauty, had always been an exceptional person. He put her on a secret stipend and encouraged her to write, whereupon she became a late-blooming, incredible writer. Everything her highly verbal, intensely opinionated brain had observed in Hollywood now became her subject. Between her own writing and the growing cult that her work with Pabst had inspired, Brooks lived her final years as a film legend.

The great comic actor and director Buster Keaton, a contemporary of Louise Brooks, followed an arc slightly different from Brooks's, but one that left him to be similarly rediscovered late in life and raised to film legend status. Keaton hit his peak of success in the mid '20s and shifted from a relatively modest lifestyle into high gear. He was married to the high-maintenance Natalie Talmadge, one of the three "Talmadge girls," who, with their mother Peg, held forth over the social whirl of the early film business. Natalie didn't act, but she lived like the divas her two acting sisters, Norma and Constance, were. This was the era of the first gargantuan Beverly Hills estates (John Barrymore's had a skeet range and a private zoo) and Keaton hired an architect to design an Italianate villa on land up behind the Beverly Hills Hotel that made him a neighbor of Charlie Chaplin, Harold Lloyd, Tom Mix and Marion Davies. The finished crescent-shaped mansion included a black-and-white marble tango floor, gold-plated bathroom fixtures, a salon with painted murals, the de rigueur screening room, etc., all set on grounds that featured three tennis courts, an aviary, elaborate servants quarters, bathhouses and a brook stocked with trout. The Keaton estate became the site of famous Sunday barbecues that often went right through Sunday night, with Hollywood's most glamorous party crowd drinking and dancing.

In financial matters, Keaton had always trusted his sister-in-law Norma's husband, Joe Schenck, an independent mogul whose studio housed Buster Keaton Productions. Under these arrangements he never saw the money that his peers Chaplin and Lloyd made (and kept), but he did well and had creative freedom. That changed when, under the influence of Joe and his brother Nick, Keaton signed on at MGM--the biggest and wealthiest studio--in 1928. Over the next four years, his dream world evaporated. He was forced to surrender creative control of his own work, his marriage dissolved and he lost his villa in a ruinous divorce settlement, and his drinking problem became full-blown alcoholism. MGM canceled his contract in 1932 and all those who'd enjoyed his bashes at the villa kept their distance. He remarried badly to a nurse who opened the Mrs. Buster Keaton Beauty Parlor, then cleaned out his bank account and left. At his lowest point, he was taken to a psychiatric hospital in a straitjacket.

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