The 1970s were filled with tragic
and strange deaths of Oscar winners and nominees and other actors who just
barely missed the mark starting with the suicide of Chester Morris who played
the beloved character “Boston Blackie” in a series of 1940 B-movie detective
films. Morris started acting at age 15, by 1929 he was nominated, at the second
Oscars, for best actor in the film Alibi but lost out to Warner Baxter. He had
a long, productive and successful life including a 30-year marriage to
socialite Lillian Kenton Barker.
In mid-1968, Morris’s health
began to decline. A checkup showed he had stomach cancer but despite that he
continued to work, joining the stage production of The Caine Mutiny Court
Martial at the Bucks County Playhouse in New Hope, Pennsylvania. On
September 11, 1970, Lee R. Yopp, the show’s producer and director of Caine, was
scheduled to have lunch with Morris. When Morris didn’t show, Yopp went to the
actor's hotel room and found him lying on the floor, dead from an overdosed on
barbiturates.
George Sanders won best
supporting actor for his outstanding work in the 1950 film
All About Eve (1950) Sanders was born in Saint Petersburg, in the Russian
Empire. There was always talk that he was the illegitimate son of a prince of
the House of Oldenburg and a Russian noblewoman of the Czar’s court, married to
a sister of the Czar. Aside from acting, Sanders was a talented novelist and
accomplished recording talent. In the late 1960s, Sanders began to show signs
of dementia and suffered a minor stroke. Depression followed made worse by a
divorce from his third and last wife, Magda Gabor, the elder sister of his
second wife Zsa Zsa Gabor. The marriage to Magda lasted 32 days.
(Zsa Zsa Gabor had her own
interesting marital matters at the time. He sixth husband, Jack Ryan owned the
16,000-foot Bel-Air mansion of Warner Baxter, the first actor to win the Academy
Award in 1928. Baxter, by the way, also invented a traffic light switch for
emergency vehicle drivers to change traffic light signals. Jack Ryan, who
designed the first Barbie Doll and the Hot Wheels cars bought the site and
lived there 1963-1977. Ryan, who enjoyed cocaine, installed 144 phone lines in the
house which rang to the sounds of chirping birds. He also held a party there
every other day that included the occasional orgy, circus acts and hookers.
Ryan enjoyed inviting women over to the house, luring them into a room with
rose petals on the floor, which led to Ryan lying in a coffin masturbating.)
On April 23, 1972, Sanders
checked into a hotel near Barcelona where he swallowed an enormous overdose of
barbiturate Nembutal, although the actual cause of death was a heart attack
brought on by the overdose. He left behind three suicide note, the last one
read “Dear World, I am leaving because I am bored. I feel I have lived long
enough. I am leaving you with your worries in this sweet cesspool. Good luck.
George Sanders.”
Charles Boyer was the suave and
sophisticated (He spoke French, English, Italian, German, and Spanish)
Frenchman who had a fleeting moment as a romantic heartthrob and an entire
career as an outstanding actor who received four Best Actor nominations
(Conquest (1937), Algiers (1938), Gaslight (1944) and Fanny
(1961)
He was no stranger to tragedy.
His only child, Michael Charles Boyer, despondent over losing a girlfriend,
killed himself while playing Russian roulette in 1965. When his wife of 44
years and the love of his life, British actress Pat Paterson died from cancer
in 1978, two days before his own 79th birthday, the actor took his own life two
days later with an overdose of Seconal.
**********
The diminutive actress (her top
weight was 94 pounds) Maggie McNamara, a former model, had a brief but shining
career in films. In 1953 she was nominated for best actress in what was then
the edgy film, The Moon is Blue, directed by Alfred Hitchcock.
She followed The Moon is Blue
with the mainstream film Three Coins in the Fountain, in 1954. Her next
film, Prince of Players, was her last. Maggie was fragile and never
completely comfortable with her fame and suffered from mental illness and
depression throughout most of her life. She was difficult to work with, refused
to move to LA, the center of the film world and wouldn’t do publicity for any
of her work. Adding to her problems was her divorce from actor and director
David Swift, which caused her to suffer a nervous breakdown. She never
remarried.
Almost an entire decade passed
before she accepted work again, appearing in the 1962 Broadway play Step on
a Crack and 1963s Come Blow Your Horn. She made a cameo appearance
in the film The Cardinal as a favor to Otto Preminger and afterward did
mostly television.
But again, it was all too much
for her and in 1964 he dropped out of sight again and took a job as a typist
and otherwise worked as a temp to get by. She also wrote a film script at
around the same time.
Severe depression captured her
again and on February 18, 1978, McNamara, who was only 49 years old, wrote a
suicide note, took an overdose of sleeping pills and tranquilizers, laid died
on her couch and her small Manhattan apartment and died.
**********
The gentle actress Inger Stevens also took her own life by overdose on April 30,
1970, in Hollywood. Stevens was a woman beset by personnel demons. She was born
in Sweden, as Inger Stensland, the eldest of three children. Her mother
abandoned the family for another man when Stevens was 6 years old. Her father
moved to the US, remarried, landed a teaching position at Columbia, and in
1944, sent for the children who were being cared for by a nanny and then,
later, an aunt.
A few years later, Stevens ran away
from home, worked in a burlesque chorus line but was eventually found by her father
her brought her back home. After high school, she moved to Manhattan and found
odd jobs as a model, did some summer stock and television commercials.
In 1955, she married her agent,
Tony Soglio, was also her first agent. (Who Americanized her name to Stevens)
They married in 1955 but separated after only six months and divorced in 1958.
She made her first film in 1957 opposite Bing Crosby in Man on Fire. She fell
in love with Crosby, who was twice her age, but it never went anywhere because
Stevens refused to convert to Catholicism so they could marry. And so it went
for the rest of her career. She would fall for virtually every leading man she
worked with including James Mason, Anthony Quinn, (who was married) Harry
Belafonte, (who was married) Dean Martin, (Who was married) Burt Reynolds and
others.
All of these affairs ended with
her being dropped which left her empty and depressed. On New Year's Day, in her
first suicide attempt, she swallowed sleeping pills and ammonia which left her
with blood clots in her lungs, legs swelled up to twice their size, and
temporary blindness but she lived.
In 1963 she was handed her own
series as Katy Holstrum, the Swedish governess, in The Farmer's Daughter.
The show, a comedy, was a huge hit and earned her a Golden Globe award and Emmy
nomination.
Her career went well even after
the series ended. Aaron Spelling chose her to co-star in a new TV series, The
Most Deadly Game, which would premiere in the fall of 1970. Filming was to
start immediately.
She was wealthy and famous, but
depression took its toll. Hollywood left her cold and unfulfilled "A
career can't put its arms around you," she said "You end up like
Grand Central Station with people just coming and going. And there you are,
left alone."
At about 7:30 pm on April 29,
1970, Stevens had an argument with her boyfriend, actor Burt Reynolds and
Reynolds stormed out of the house. At about 11 pm Stevens called her personal
assistant, Chris Bone, talked about the argument with Reynolds and mentioned
that she had drunk two glasses of wine. She ended the conversation by saying
she was going to take a sleeping pill and go to bed.
The next morning Stevens friend,
Lola McNally, found her lying on the kitchen floor almost unconscious. She was
able to open her eyes but couldn’t not speak. Stevens died before the ambulance
could reach the hospital. The cause of death was suicide by acute barbiturate
poisoning. She had taken twenty-five to fifty pills and it’s doubtful that the
point was anything but suicide.
It wasn’t until after death that
the world learned that Stevens had been married since 1961 to an
African-American actor named Ike Jones. Even in the 1970s interracial marriages
were tricky and hers could have stalled her career, so she kept it a secret
to protect her career. However,
the were estranged at the time of her death.
A month after her death, Jones,
supported by Stevens brother, asked to be named administrator of her estate.
His request was granted, but after the stars bills were paid, according to
Jones, there was virtually nothing left.
Stevens friend and family didn’t
believe, or perhaps refused to believe the actor killed herself. William
Patterson, a former private investigator, looked into the case and also doubted the state's version of event. Among other things there was a bottle of asthma
pills on the scene that didn’t belong to Stevens since she didn’t have asthma.
There was a cut on her chin and abrasion on the arm, indicating that she had
been manhandled. She also died with her IUD in place, which is odd. She made
half of her favorite sandwich in the kitchen. His theory is that someone close
to Inger Stevens came to the house and forced her to swallow enough pills to
kill herself.
Ike Jones
**********
Katherine Victoria Walsh was an actress best known for her performance as Lulu
in Jack Nicholson's 1967 film, The Trip 1967. She also had a bit role in
the film, The Chase and otherwise had made the rounds on various TV
shows. In 1969 she married Baron Piers Patrick Francis von Westenholz, but the
marriage was annulled the following year. On October 8, 1970, the 23-year-old
Walsh was found dead in her apartment in fashionable Kensington, in London
England. A coroners court returned an open verdict in her death, meaning they
didn’t know, or couldn’t explain why she died. However, a British court
official made a remark off the record that the cause of death alcohol and
barbiturate poisoning, but that it wasn’t possible to establish whether the
death was suicide or accidental. To this day, the English government has never
revealed any other facts in the case.
