Unscripted: Hollywood Back-Stories Vol. 1

UNSCRIPTED

HOLLYWOOD BACK-STORIES

VOL. 1

BY

E.J. FLEMING

Hall Hill Press

2012

Library of Congress Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

Fleming, E.J., 1954-

Unscripted – Hollywood Back-Stories, Vol. 1 / by E.J. Fleming

p. cm. 10

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-615-68494-9

1. Motion picture actors and actresses – California – Los Angeles – Biography

2. Motion picture actors and actresses – California – Los Angeles – Death.

Copyright © 2012 E.J. Fleming.

Smashwords Edition

All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying or recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, with permission in writing from the publisher.

Hall Hill Press

For Barb, as usual.

ALSO BY E.J. FLEMING

Tread Softly: Bullying and the Death of Phoebe Prince (Amazon, 2012)

Paul Bern: The Life and Famous Death of the MGM Director and Husband of Harlow (2009, McFarland & Co.)

Wallace Reid: The Life and Death of a Hollywood Idol (2007, McFarland)

Carole Landis: A Tragic Life in Hollywood (2005, McFarland)

The Fixers: Eddie Mannix, Howard Strickling, and the MGM Publicity Machine (2005, McFarland)

The Movieland Directory: Nearly 30,000 Address of Celebrity Homes, Film Locations, and Historical Sites in the Los Angeles Area, 1900-Present (2004, McFarland)

Hollywood Death and Scandal Sites: Sixteen Driving Tours With Directions and the Full Story (2000, McFarland)

CONTENTS

Introduction

Chapter 1 – History

Chapter 2 – Hollywood

Chapter 3 – Behind the Marque

Chapter 4 – Stardom

Chapter 5 – Known, Unknown, & Forgotten

Chapter 6 – Location, Location, Location

Chapter 7 – Personalities

Chapter 8 – Curses

Chapter 9 – Casablanca

Chapter 10 – Behind the Curtain

Curtains

Bibliography

Endnotes

INTRODUCTION

Over the years, Hollywood has become a mythical place. When people think Hollywood, they think movies. But it’s more than simply the birthplace of the movies. It’s more than Star Maps, movie star mansions, or taking a Rolls Royce or Lamborghini to the grocery store or to drop the kids at day care.

Hollywood has always been about the people. And their stories.

There are scores of famous Hollywood stories from the first 100 years that are well-known the world over. Chaplin stories. The Fatty Arbuckle scandal. William Desmond Taylor’s murder. Greta Garbo’s women. Rock Hudson’s men. Marilyn and the Kennedy’s.

And the stories keep coming. O.J. The ever more bizarre Tom Cruise. The white trash sisters whose name I’m loath to put in print. Nobody, it seems, either can or wants to keep a secret. About anything.

But as fascinating as the blockbuster stories are, more interesting are the smaller ones. The unknown tales. The forgotten stars. The back-stories.

I collected these stories during 25+ years researching other books. Each is fascinating in its own way and each an illustration of what’s so wonderful about Hollywood, and what’s so terrible.

As usual, I received help from everywhere along the road that made the work possible. First, I offer my never-ending appreciation to the staff at the Herrick Library at the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts & Science Special Collections for their perpetually nice treatment and help.

A special thank you to Pat Mefferd for her stories and pictures of Fred Kennedy and Melissa Herron for her help on that story; Liz Spencer for her family pictures and background on Chaplin’s Goliath Eric Campbell; and, Michael Christopher Goodman Herron for his Ace Hudkins background. Some of their stories are included here and the rest will be the basis for an upcoming book about the incredible Hollywood stuntmen and women. And thanks also to Jerry Bowman at the Northwest Carriage Museum for his Gone With the Wind stories.

I’m particularly thankful for the ongoing help and support from my Hollywood friends, particularly the incredibly interesting Scott Michaels, owner of Dearly Departed Tours (www.dearlydeparted.com – do not go to Hollywood without going along on one of Scott’s fascinating tours). Also, my pal Lindsay Blake of www.iamnotastalker.com fame, and my talented writer friends Darrell Rooney, Michelle Vogel, Lisa Burks, and Jessica Park, who first suggested this strategy and offered advice and counsel. Thank you one and all for your unwavering support and friendship.

Lastly, nothing happens without Barb, Abby, Ted, and Colin. There’s no real thanks word that works.

Barrington

August, 2012

CHAPTER 1 – HISTORY

#1 AN INDUSTRY BORN ON A BET

The technological development of movies took 150 years, beginning when Dutchman Christiaen Huygens’ lantern projector used a candle to light etched glass transparencies through a simple lens in 1659, showing the first image on a screen. Those images began to move in the 1826 thaumatrope that quickly rotated a card with photographs on either side, creating the illusion of the two images as one, like a bird and a cage.[1]

But it wasn’t until the 1834 Phenakistiscope – similar to children’s’ flip books today, that movies were born.[2]

Photographs had been around since 1826 but it wasn’t some forward-thinking photographer or dedicated scientist who managed to capture motion on film as well. The idea actually had its birth in 1872, when California Governor Leland Stanford hired Eadweard Muybridge to prove photographically that a galloping horse lifts all four hoofs off the ground simultaneously.

Stanford was also a horse breeder and that question was a popular topic during the period and it was said that Stanford had wagered $25,000 – over $500,000 today – that the hoofs were all off the ground at some point.

Muybridge was a renowned landscape photographer known for his work in the Yosemite Valley and among the Tlingit people in Alaska who had been commissioned by the U.S. Army to chronicle government’s war against the Native American Modoc tribe in 1872. It was Muybridge who unlocked the secret to motion photography, working for Stanford.

At a San Francisco-area horse track, Muybridge lined up 24 cameras along a fence, each with a string attached to a camera shutter and when the horse ran past and tripped the shutters, one of the 24 closely-spaced pictures proved Stanford’s contention. One of the pictures showed all four of the horse’s legs were off the ground for an instant, Stanford had won his bet.

Perhaps surprisingly, Muybridge did not immediately recognize what he had with his sequence of photographs. It wasn’t until 1878 when, at Stanford’s urging he expanded his research into faster shutter speeds and development time that he re-produced the earlier experiment and noticed that combining the pictures resulted in a moving picture. Motion on film. For the first time.

The first moving picture, which Muybridge entitled The Horse in Motion, came about because of a – perhaps apocryphal – bet.

#2 EADWEARD MUYBRIDGE – INNOVATOR & KILLER

After finishing his work for Stanford, Eadweard Muybridge spent the rest of his life perfecting his motion photography. He spent the 1880’s at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia producing over 100,000 movies of animals and humans in motion and lecturing across the world about his invention, remembered as the first real visionary in the field of motion photography.

Muybridge wasn’t always a photographer, though. In his native England he’d been a book agent and bookseller, coming to the U.S. in 1855 and opening a bookstore in San Francisco. By 1860 it was among the most successful in the city; a trip that year back to England to purchase books inexplicably led him to photography.

In July, 1860, Muybridge was traveling by stagecoach through central Texas on his way to meet a boat in New York when the driver fell and the horses panicked and sped down the trail. The runaway coach crashed over hill and, disintegrating, rolled over several times. All six passengers were seriously injured, and one killed.[3]

Muybridge suffered serious head injuries and was taken on a bumpy 150-mile ride to Fort Smith, Arkansas hospital where he remained for over three months suffering from double vision, impaired taste and smell, confused thinking, and a myriad other symptoms. He spent another year in New York City before being able to sail for England.

Muybridge’s brain injuries severely altered his personality. He was completely different after the accident. Once a genial, quite gentleman, he became unstable, unpleasant at times, and highly erratic. This more emotional demeanor and all manner of eccentric behavior lasted the rest of his life.

Continuing his recuperation in England, his doctor suggested changing his vocation to reduce stress and suggested photography as an alternative. Muybridge dove into the field, learning the various techniques and securing patents for several related inventions.[4] It was likely a side-effect of his symptoms that led to his wonderfully creative photography.

He returned to the U.S. in 1867 not as a bookseller, but as a photographer, and over the next decade earned a reputation as one of the finest photographers in the world. His 1877 work for Leland Stanford cemented that status but an event three years previous suggested his brain injuries more than simply altered his personality.

In 1872, Muybridge had married Flora Stone, a 21-year-old divorcee half his age and two years later was given several letters to his wife from Major George Harry Larkyns, a San Francisco raconteur and drama critic known for his womanizing. It appeared Larkyns was having an affair with Flora, and worse, that Larkyns might have fathered their newborn child.

On October 17, 1874, Muybridge travelled into the Napa Valley and found Larkyns at a hotel in Calistoga. He walked up to Larkyns, said, Good evening, Major, my name is Muybridge and here’s the answer to the letter you sent my wife, and shot him through the heart. Larkyns died shortly after and Muybridge was arrested, put in the Napa jail, and charged with murder.

His lawyers argued an insanity defense, claiming the severe head injuries suffered in the stagecoach crash led to the shooting. Even though the jurors – 14 grizzled Californians perhaps agreeing with Muybridge’s frontier justice – dismissed the insanity defense, they acquitted him by completely disregarding the judge’s instructions. They called Muybridge’s actions justifiable homicide.

He was a free man. Governor Stanford paid for his lawyers.

#3 THOMAS EDISON, THIEF

Muybridge’s breakthrough did not immediately result in movies though a series of events starting with him finally coalesced in the late 1880’s. Muybridge unveiled his Zoopraxiscope in 1880, a lantern projecting light through a rotating disc holding artist’s renderings of his photographic sequences used during his lectures.

In 1881-82, American inventor George Eastman, who was already selling dry plates for photography, began experimenting with new types of film with an employee, William Walker. At the same time, French physiologist Étienne-Jules Marey developed a chronophotographic gun, a camera shaped like a rifle that took twelve successive images a second.

Eastman and Hannibal Goodwin each invented a celluloid base photographic film in 1885 and in 1888, Louis Aimé Augustin Le Prince developed a paper film for motion pictures. A year later Eastman refined that into a celluloid base photographic film. Movies could now be made.

Almost from that moment, the race was on. Within a few years film-makers had to churn out thousands of movies a year just trying to keep up with the insatiable demand for the captivating new wonder.

Inventor Thomas Edison was fascinated by the new contrivance and had begun meeting with Eadweard Muybridge as early 1888 to discuss the then-bizarre idea of adding sound – using his recently-developed phonograph – to infant moving pictures. Nothing came of it at the time, but he was determined to be a player in the new industry, one he was certain would explode, and decided to make films.

A low-level Edison employee and a movie bug, William K.L. Dickson, was credited with patenting a Kinetograph, an early device for making motion pictures, and Edison patented a Kinetoscope, a free-standing wooden box with an eyepiece that let viewers watch a short movie.

Edison stuck Dickson in a darkened New Jersey bungalow with a movable roof that was his first movie studio. Dubbed Black Maria, it was there Dickson and Edison began making films, their first effort of Edison’s friend Fred Ott sneezing.[5] Edison’s ten-second films were offered on his Kinetoscope for 1¢ a viewing.

Innovations followed, fast and furious. Thomas Armat’s 1895 Vitascope projected a series of backlit still pictures onto a wall fast enough to simulate movement and showcased Edison’s films. Now, groups of viewers could watch movies.

French inventors Louis and Auguste Lumière patented the first real projector and camera, the Lumière Cinematrographe. Their first presentation, on December 28, 1895, was a 20-second film of employees leaving their Factory.[6] Lumière films of a steam engine chugging toward the camera before swerving away or a cowboy firing a gun at the viewers made viewers dive to the floor and scream in fear.

Opening on April 20, 1896, Koster & Bial’s Music Hall in New York was the first movie theater, offering Edison films like surf breaking on a beach, a comic boxing exhibition, two young women dancing, or circus performer Sandow simply lifting weights. For months, thousands lined up daily to marvel at the 30-second films.[7]

The industry quite literally exploded and within a year, dozens of movie studios were operating in and around New York. Edison made films in the Bronx, Biograph was in a converted brownstone at 11 East 14th Street, American Vitagraph on the roof of the Morse Building in Manhattan,[8] and still others operated in the wilds of Fort Lee, New Jersey.

Filming technology developed in fits and starts during that period, often by accident. Technical improvements were often unplanned. When Frenchman Georges Méliès’ camera jammed and caused the object to disappear in 1901, it led to effects like the fade-in and -out, dissolve, and even animation. Films became longer, by the early 1900’s from 750 to 1000 feet long and lasted 8 to 10 minutes.

People became actors simply by walking into a studio. Most came from vaudeville circuits and a few from the legitimate stage, and Minta Durfee later remembered, stage actors would all quit and everybody just meandered over to the (movie studios)…[9] Most of the early movie players were not talented stage performers and their inexperience and exaggerated pantomime ended up on film.[10]

Thomas Edison is revered as the most successful and brilliant inventor in history. Indeed he held 1,093 U.S. patents and hundreds internationally and is credited for his work on the incandescent light bulb, the phonograph, the alkaline storage battery, and a forerunner of the motion picture projector.

His prolific output was increased by his drinking wine coca during marathon research sessions. Popular at the time, the drink was a medicinal tonic made from coca leaves, the same type of coca from which cocaine is extracted.

But, far from his legacy as a kindly, brilliant, innovator, Thomas Edison was enigmatic and ruthless, a businessman without ethics. He routinely stole the ideas of others, took full credit for the work even if he only added slightly to the research, and was reputed to have stolen hundreds of ideas directly from the U.S. Patent Office.

He was famously disdainful of anyone whose brilliance might outshine his own and used an innate ability to manipulate and intimidate others to further his reputation. He is somehow revered for his comment, Hell, there are no rules here; we’re trying to accomplish something.

His Menlo Park research facility was something of a think-tank but more closely resembled a sweat shop, from which Edison took credit for his employees’ work and discoveries. His entre into the movie business was the result of one such theft.

In 1890, English inventor William Friese-Green designed a moving picture process and sent Edison the plans thinking they were protected by patents and wishing to work with Edison. Edison promptly stole the research and built the Kinetograph patented by his employee Dickson. Edison’s own Kinetoscope came directly from Friese-Green’s research as well.

It was actually Dickson who was the driving force behind Edison’s foray into the movies. Edison himself was initially disinterested in offering films in a theatre setting, preferring to develop his nickelodeon device.[11] He’d made the same mistake with his phonograph, woefully misjudging the market development; in the case of movies he didn’t believe people wanted to sit in large groups to see images onscreen.

True to form, Edison believed the movies were his own idea and obsessively tried to put a personal strangle-hold on the new industry during the early years. Wanting to wrangle every penny from his stolen inventions, in 1908 he merged the Edison, Biograph, Vitagraph, Essanay, Lubin, Selig, Kalem, Méliès and Pathé studios and formed the Motion Pictures Patents Company (MPPC).

Edison’s primary partner was Eastman Kodak. Edison’s monopoly was known as The Trust, and it obtained 16 patents for cameras and projectors and an exclusive arrangement from Eastman Kodak for raw film. He controlled the new industry. It was officially illegal to distribute or even show any films without permission of the MPPC, and the MPPC had the rights to every film and camera in the market.[12]

Interestingly, Edison initially formed the MPPC to stop his one-time employee Dickson, who’d broken from Edison and formed the Biograph Film Company. Edison had put the patent for the stolen Kinetograph is Dickson’s name – likely to insulate himself from legal problems – so Dickson held a powerful card to play.

Edison was forced to negotiate with Dickson; the result was the