The Most Tragic Town

HIS MISTAKE WAS GROWING UP

Bobby Driscoll was seven years old in 1944 when he appeared in his first movie. Walt Disney signed him to a long-term personal contract two years later and he became a critical and box-office favorite in the live-action hits Song of the South, S_o Dear to My Heart, Treasure Island_ and as the voice of the hero of Disney's Peter Pan. For his one big role on loan from Disney in the 1949 suspense thriller The Window, Driscoll won a special Oscar. But by age 14, the changes in his body and voice were beginning to end his usefulness to Hollywood. He had committed the unpardonable sin of turning into a teenager, and by the time he was 16, Disney had dropped him. A year later, Driscoll got married, and though the couple went on to have three children, Driscoll grew depressed as work evaporated and he turned to alcohol and drugs. In 1958, looking haggard and depressed, he turned up in the low-budget juvenile delinquent exploitation movie The Party Crashers (which also featured another Hollywood casualty, Frances Farmer) before moving to New York, where, upon failing to find stage work, he vanished from the public's view. Driscoll's life then became a nightmarish cycle of petty crime, jails and hospitals. In 1969, a corpse that had been found a year earlier in a derelict New York City tenement was identified as Bobby Driscoll's. He'd died at age 31.

A LIFE RUINED BY THE BOTTLE

William Holden was discovered while working in L.A.'s backyard--at the Pasadena Playhouse. His golden-boy looks made him a natural star on the big screen in the '40s. But it took director Billy Wilder's perceptive casting of Holden in the 1950 masterpiece Sunset Blvd. to simultaneously turn him into an A-list star and reveal his darker complexities. In many hits over the next two decades, Holden reigned as a star women adored and men admired, but he was all along plagued by inner demons. Those close to Holden could deal with his various idiosyncrasies, but his increasingly serious alcoholism was more problematic. He could only get through shooting the sexy dance scene with Kim Novak in Picnic by getting dead drunk. On any number of films he was found passed out stone cold drunk by crew members. Holden's drinking ravaged his looks and his abusive behavior alienated many of his staunchest friends, including, eventually, the actress Stefanie Powers, his longtime companion. To his public, though, he appeared to be an active, caring man who, after all, bought and operated an animal sanctuary in Africa and spoke out against poaching. Perhaps because he seemed so heroic on-screen, it was scarcely believable to most people when it was reported in 1981 that he'd been found dead at age 63 in his L.A. apartment after tripping on a rug, gashing his head on the edge of a table and bleeding to death. He'd been too drunk to call for help.

A STRING OF BROKEN HEARTS

"If I were white, I could capture the world," Dorothy Dandridge once said. Ravishingly gorgeous and greatly talented, she almost did, anyway. But the difficulties she faced because of her race were compounded by the problems any person can face, and the combination brought her down. Like Gene Tierney, Dandridge gave birth to a retarded daughter whose condition became an endless source of distress to her. Married to Harold Nicholas, one half of the renowned dance team The Nicholas Brothers, Dandridge had slowed down a successful career to have her child, but she got little support from her husband and, in 1949, sought a divorce. In need of money, she revived her nightclub career and became a sold-out attraction at the best clubs in the United States (where she wasn't allowed to use the same entrances or rest rooms as her audiences). Dandridge was remarkably tough in the face of difficult odds, and she was rewarded for that when she won the first Best Actress Oscar nomination ever given to a black actress for her performance in 1954's Carmen Jones. But there was an emotional toll for her efforts. Offscreen, she had been carrying on an affair with that film's tyrannical director, Otto Preminger, who refused to leave his wife for her. And, despite her obvious talent, it was a long five years before she got another major film, Preminger's Porgy and Bess. Perhaps too much energy had been required to get her there, for she seemed to lose her moorings. She married a white, gold-digging batterer who mismanaged her career, lost a fortune on an oil investment scam and began drinking. And when she could no longer pay her daughter's caretaker and was forced to place her in a state-run institution, she was distraught. In 1963, she declared bankruptcy, lost her home and never got back on track again. She would call friends at all hours to vent her troubles. In 1965, a friend who'd grown concerned about her forced his way into her apartment on Fountain Avenue in West Hollywood and found her dead on the bathroom floor, nude except for a scarf tied around her head. The death was later ascribed to an overdose of Tofranil, her prescribed antidepressant. A note was discovered: "In case of my death--to whomever discovers it--don't remove anything I have on: scarf, gown or underwear. Cremate me right away. If I have anything, money, furniture, give it to my mother Ruby Dandridge. She will know what to do. Dorothy Dandridge." She was 41.

HOLLYWOOD'S BIGGEST HORROR

When Sharon Tate burst onto the scene in the '60s, she was one of the most ravishing girls Hollywood had seen in ages. By the time she died in 1969, she was in the early stages of what might have been a long career, and she was still more famous as director Roman Polanski's wife than as an actress. Polanski fell for Tate and cast her in his The Fearless Vampire Killers. Together, Tate and Polanski became one of the hippest couples in Hollywood, and in 1968 they married. The following year she was pregnant, and she and Polanski took over the lease of a house on Cielo Drive in Beverly Hills that was being rented by record producer (and son of Doris Day) Terry Melcher and Candice Bergen, his girlfriend. Both Tate and Polanski soon went off to Europe on film assignments, and when Tate completed hers, she returned to California to prepare for the baby's birth. Problems with his film kept Polanski in London. With the baby due, the director planned to return to be with his wife during the second week of August, but he hadn't come back by August 9th, which turned out to be the last day of Tate's life. Tate had friends at the house--hairdresser Jay Sebring, coffee heiress Abigail Folger and her boyfriend, producer Wojtek Frykowski (and Steven Parent, a college student who was visiting the estate's caretaker)-- when it was invaded by followers of the psychotic Charles Manson, who'd ordered them to murder everyone there in vicious knife attacks. Manson's reasons for choosing Polanski's house had nothing to do with the director at all--it was Melcher whom Manson knew. But the slaughter of the 26-year-old Tate, her unborn child and four others may not have had all that much to do with Melcher, either. Manson felt Melcher had double-crossed him on a promise to publish his songs, but his larger scheme to spread terror had a method and madness of its own involving Manson's acid-induced grandiosity. Tate was an innocent bystander in a ghoulish drama that marked the darkest excess of the psychedelic era. Today there are those who remember her from the cult classic The Valley of the Dolls, but most people know her only as the starlet wife who was murdered by the Manson gang.

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