The Most Tragic Town

Writer Cyril Connolly's famous quote, "Whom the gods wish to destroy they first call promising," could have been minted particularly for Hollywood. Film stars, who inevitably seem so immoderately blessed, turn out with uncommon frequency to lead nightmarish lives. And sometimes, their glory was eventually matched by extreme suffering.

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A SHORT, UNHAPPY EXISTENCE

Rudolph Valentino, the screen's first male sex symbol, achieved a level of popularity almost unimaginable today. In the wake of box-office sensations like The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse and The Sheik, thousands of fan letters poured in weekly. The walls surrounding his mansion, Falcon Lair on Bella Drive in Beverly Hills, weren't high enough to keep out his admirers, so the star added floodlights, guards and dogs to deter trespassers. But Valentino was a pioneer not only in screen stardom, but in the disastrous contradictions that stardom brings into stars' lives. Offscreen, the Italian immigrant who'd risen from gigolo to sexual icon was shy and devoted to his family. He would have preferred to play funny on-screen rather than portraying one seething Romeo after another. But the studios wanted only more of what had started the hysteria over Valentino to begin with. The press, meanwhile, turned on the sex symbol, relentlessly criticizing his screen image, even accusing him of bringing on "the effeminization of the American male." The stress took a toll on the actor's health, and while promoting the 1926 film The Son of the Sheik in New York City, he was rushed to the hospital with a perforated ulcer. Acute peritonitis set in and within days Valentino died. He was only 31. One hundred thousand fans stormed Valentino's funeral at the Church of the Good Shepherd of Beverly Hills on N. Bedford Drive to say their good-byes.

A HARD-KNOCK LIFE

In the '20s, Clara Bow became the screen's first female sex symbol. She was dubbed "the It Girl" for her Jazz Baby vitality in the box-office sensations Mantrap and It. For two years Paramount kept her working nonstop. The pace of her work and her offscreen life-- she was sexually uninhibited in both realms--would have burnt anyone out, but Bow was emotionally fragile to begin with. She'd been born unwanted in a Brooklyn tenement and endured a hellish childhood with her mentally ill mother. (When Bow entered a beauty contest, her mother chased her with a butcher knife, vowing to kill her daughter rather than see her "go Hollywood.") Bow succeeded in Hollywood despite these origins, but they hampered her nonetheless. She was shunned by her colleagues, perhaps because of her unapologetic attitude toward sex. Her career began to skid in the '30s when talkies came around--her Brooklyn accent didn't come off well. Then, in 1931, a former secretary dragged her name through the mud in court, accusing her of having sex with the USC football team and scores of film stars. Bow was known to have had wild parties at her Bedford Drive house in Beverly Hills, but not that wild. Even so, the public turned against her. She later married cowboy star Rex Bell and retreated to Nevada. She had two sons, but her instability continued--she drank excessively and suffered breakdowns. No comeback materialized, and at age 58, Bow died in a Los Angeles apartment--said to have spent her final moments watching one of her movies on television.

DEATH, DIVORCE & MORE DEATH

Blonde Hollywood superstars who meet tragic ends are a Hollywood cliché by now, but Jean Harlow was the screen's original platinum blonde bombshell whose own life became ground zero. Though she was, a curvy beauty who had a wicked way with innuendo in '30s films, Harlow was mostly unloved offscreen. Eager to be free of her ambitious mother, who'd left her father to pursue a show business career, Harlow was only 16 when she married a young businessman and moved with him to Beverly Hills. Even then her mother goaded her to go after film work. She ended up being handpicked by Howard Hughes to star in his epic Hell's Angels. Her marriage collapsed, but she began an ascent to stardom in smashes like Platinum Blonde. In 1932, she married studio executive Paul Bern, a man twice her age, and two months later, at age 21, she was a widow. While she'd been filming the steamy Red Dust with Clark Gable, Bern had committed suicide and been found nude in their palatial home on Easton Drive in Beverly Hills. He'd left an ambiguous note that was interpreted by many to suggest he'd been sexually impotent. That scandal did nothing to hurt Harlow's box office. But her mother, who'd remarried and followed Jean to Hollywood, was busy squandering her money. Harlow herself remarried, this time to cine-matographer Harold Rosson, but this union lasted just eight months. With family, financial and emotional uproar the norm, Harlow was still a megastar. But in 1937, just as she was about to marry the debonair actor William Powell, Harlow was stricken with uremic poisoning and kidney failure. Within days she died. She was only 26.

IMMEASURABLE TORTURE

Frances Farmer had gone to Hollywood to become a star and she seemed about to become one when Paramount locked her into a seven-year contract in 1936. But she was as headstrong as she was beautiful, and she made such things as her disdain for Hollywood and her leftist politics known. When a series of her films tanked, she received bad press (she was branded by right-wing journalists as a Communist), and as her romances--with playwright Clifford Odets and actor Leif Erickson--soured, she began to unravel. She became more unstable when she got hooked on the amphetamines she took to keep her weight down. In 1942, after being stopped for drunk driving, Farmer became so belligerent that she was carted off to jail, and at the hearing, she so furiously berated the court that she was placed in the custody of a psychiatrist. That was the beginning of the end. She refused to cooperate with the psychiatrist and was transferred to a sanitarium. When she escaped, she was imprisoned in a Washington State hospital where she underwent further psychiatric "care" that included hydrotherapy--being lowered into a tub of icy water for six hours. Therein followed a horrific series of mental hospital experiences which, as she later described in her autobiography, included being "raped by orderlies, gnawed on by rats, poisoned by tainted food...chained in padded cells, strapped to straitjackets...." She emerged in 1950, a shadow of her former self, and spent much of the rest of her life taking odd jobs and doing small, entertainment-related gigs. She died of cancer at the age of 56.

LOSS, LIES & ILLNESS

In the '40s, 20th Century Fox studio boss Darryl F. Zanuck called her "the most beautiful woman in movie history," and he had plenty of support in that opinion. Gene Tierney had angular cheekbones, a sleepwalker's gaze and a sensual overbite. Having come from a background of privilege, she hardly had to work at conveying the aristocratic polish required of her in Heaven Can Wait, Laura, The Razor's Edge and The Ghost and Mrs. Muir. She was unpretentious and beloved by many. But the birth of a much-desired daughter proved an event of such distress that Tierney's whole life was thrown off-kilter. In the early '40s, she and husband Oleg Cassini, a handsome movie costume designer, decided to have a baby. While pregnant, she insisted on fulfilling a grueling schedule of personal appearances to help build wartime morale. At one of them, she was unwittingly exposed to German measles. That exposure caused severe retardation in the baby she gave birth to a few months later, and the child ended up having to be institutionalized for life. It wasn't till several years later that a fan told Tierney how she'd escaped quarantine from German measles specifically to bestow a kiss on "her favorite star" that night, but Tierney was still devastated with guilt by her daughter's infirmities. Depression and additional emotional instability stemming from her husband's infidelity plagued Tierney and landed her repeatedly in psychiatric hospitals, where she underwent electroshock therapy. The difficulties continued. After separating from Cassini she began a turbulent love life (which included affairs with then-Senator John F. Kennedy, Clark Gable and Aly Khan). In 1957, with deepening psychological problems, she was again hospitalized after a neighbor saw her perched on the ledge of a building about to leap. Tierney eventually found contentment with Texas millionaire W. Howard Lee. She worked occasionally in film and television, and she wrote frankly about her struggles in her 1979 autobiography Self-Portrait. She was 70 when she died from emphysema in 1991.

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