Sam Goes to Hollywood

The silver-screen ingenue's quarter-life crisis

In any given film class, students of early Hollywood history learn the big players, from studio heads to kings and queens of the screen—Selznick, Zanuck, Mayer, Goldwyn, Pickford—in hopes of understanding and even conquering the inscrutable film business despite (because of?) jaded common-knowledge murmurings about “nepo babies” monopolizing coveted perches from creative to corporate. Those of us who largely stand aside yet delight in the darkness that has loomed over “The Industry” since its inception often find our attention drawn to lesser-known names associated with the tragedies of careers cut short and promising lives lost in the turning gears of the “dream factory.” The magic and melancholy of Hollywood is a century-old meme, warning of a city half-heartedly hiding a dazzling monster that demands the lifeblood of idealistic youth. In the languidly upbeat classic “Do You Know the Way to San Jose,” Dionne Warwick sings:

L.A. is a great big freeway
Put a hundred down and buy a car
In a week, maybe two, they'll make you a star
Weeks turn into years. How quick they pass
And all the stars that never were
Are parking cars and pumping gas

Los Angeles’ enduring image as a city of shattered dreams has been well-earned over the decades, spawning a stereotype of the starry-eyed youth seeking fame who winds up working a menial job in perpetuity, never landing their breakout role or making a meaningful mark on Tinseltown. But that is, perhaps surprisingly, among the best outcomes Hollywood hopefuls can expect in a trade tinged with the ever-present specter of premature death. Sadly, these pernicious perils and vices have existed from the beginning, much as it might be tempting to blame Hollywoodland tragedies on individual bad actors (no pun intended) or more broadly on the intensification of the entertainment industry via the technological boom of the 20th and early 21st centuries that saw screens shrink from movie-house projections to living room sets to cellphones turned sideways. In the industry’s vaudeville era from the late 19th century to the early 20th, performance lacked much of the luster and prestige people perceive today; denigrated as “mass entertainment,” touring variety shows drew in working-class viewers eager to punctuate their lives’ drudgery with novelties like magic acts, bawdy burlesque and slapstick comedy.  Peripatetic stage entertainers and “carnies” (today most recognizable from their leering, sleazy portrayals in media displays of carnivals, circuses and “freakshows”) occupied a similar space in the public consciousness. From the beginning to the end of the 20th century, the pop-cultural conception of entertainment, especially that which emanated from Hollywood, evolved from lowbrow pleasure to awe at the perception of the delicious heights of fame, celebrity—and storytelling. As stardom ascended from the gutter to Mount Olympus (not the neighborhood in the Hollywood Hills near Laurel Canyon, but its namesake, the home of the pantheon of Greek gods), increasing amounts of money and attention brought polish to the now-massive entertainment industry, but the biz never truly shed its gritty sideshow essence.

Stories like “Whatever Happened to Baby Jane” and “Sunset Boulevard” rest on a trope of the utter devastation of women “losing their looks”—aging—in Hollywood. These women were once beset by admirers, eager photogs, glitzy invites and other trappings of stardom, but that merry-go-round spun slower and slower each year before creaking to a halt. With heavy, dusty velvet curtains drawn, they molder in once-grand manses tucked into LA’s glittering sprawl, examining crepey skin in sterling-silver hand mirrors and watching their connections to the outer world wane in tandem with their sanity. But another macabre perversion of Hollywood’s (already sexist if not sinister in itself) feminine ideal lies in the true tales of youth cut short, fruit or flowers plucked and devoured or left to decay.

Olive Thomas, born Oliva Duffy to working-class parents in Pennsylvania (her father died in the first decade of the 1900s in a then-commonplace steel mill accident), was a proto-starlet who met a puzzling—but ultimately quintessentially Hollywood—demise when she was at the height of her fame and star power. After winning a “Most Beautiful Woman in New York City” contest in 1914, Thomas modeled for fine artists, skittered across the stage in the Ziegfeld Follies (where she dallied with Florenz Ziegfeld, married and 27 years her senior) and starred in silent films. She went on to marry Hollywood royalty in Jack Pickford (brother of silent star Mary, who with her equally famous husband Douglas Fairbanks built a Beverly Hills estate called “Pickfair”) after a meet-cute on the Santa Monica Pier, but their days as the age’s turbulent “It Couple” were numbered. On a late, drunken night during a trip to Paris in 1920, a bleary-eyed Thomas sought relief in a medicine cabinet. While today’s “one pill can kill” is fentanyl, for Thomas it was mercury bichloride. The long-since-retired topical medication landed Thomas, who at 25 was at her zenith of beauty and star power, in a hospital where it briefly seemed she would overcome. However, she succumbed to the poison days later, slipping into oblivion as the Roaring ‘20s dawned, seven years before “talkies” took the screen. Pondering modern comparisons to this bewildering death: a celebrity in the zeitgeist guzzling antifreeze under the impression that it was Gatorade. 

Peg Entwistle was another young woman caught in the crosshairs of Old Hollywood; she made less of a sensational splash than the fascinatingly erratic Thomas but was noted for her stage and screen acting ability, attracting enduring admiration from the likes of Bette Davis. Unlike Thomas’, her death in 1932 was not accidental: After leaving a brief, solemn suicide note—“I am afraid, I am a coward. I am sorry for everything. If I had done this a long time ago, it would have saved a lot of pain”—the Welsh actress climbed the service ladder that ran up the rear side of the H in the Hollywood Sign (then “Hollywoodland”) and dove to her death (two days later, her body was found—on my birthday, Sept. 18). She was just 24 and had been living with her uncle on Beachwood Drive in the Hollywood Hills (both of her parents had passed away tragically in her teen years, and the trauma of an abusive marriage in the public eye left deep wounds). I wonder about her thoughts as she ascended, determined, reaching and grasping and stepping on each rung, pushing and pulling herself ever upward. Were her thoughts a blaring, ruminative spiral, or was she stoically reassured by an imminent, reliable end to pain? How long did she linger at the top, and did she survey the basin of broken dreams she was about to bid adieu to? What—if any—thoughts came to her in the final plunging instant of her life, after jumping and before impact? Regret, relief, disbelief? And in my curiosity I see and feel the universal, vile voyeurism that sells clicks and glossy gossip rags with provocative headlines that promise “EXCLUSIVE!” access to celebrity misfortunes from divorce to dismemberment. In the dark: a face illuminated by the cold light of a computer screen projecting images of suicides, shootings, inexplicable and random acts of violence and their gory leavings. The pretense of “Why?” long since abandoned in favor of slack-jawed staring and stories with no contrived moral, ending nor beginning—simply “there you have it,” in all its matter-of-fact, Dadaist absurdity. It is better this way, and if it isn’t, it doesn’t matter, anyhow.

Death whispers in our ears in the course of our lives and beckons us to behold those who there is now no earthly trace of—people we knew and didn’t know, who died younger than us and/or in scintillating circumstances. We can tell a story of faded glamour, a whiff of something dreadful on the damask drapes, a beautiful corpse and a half-formed question hanging in the air. But the subtle differences that bejewel our foundational commonalities resist the tying up with a pretty bow that a sweeping conclusion would necessitate. From Thomas and Entwistle to more contemporary entertainers gone too soon, a common thread is intensity—of beauty, talent, despair and desolation, of creativity and calamity, all preexisting in doomed players and stoked by the bellows of an industry endlessly fascinated and enriched by extremity.