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.
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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