“HISTORY has been written in whispers. This is the whisper told most often.” So the narrator of
The Cat’s Meow sets the scene for the Roaring Twenties murder mystery
. The victim was the silent movie producer Thomas Ince. Legend has it that Ince was shot dead by the media baron William Randolph Hearst aboard his luxury yacht in 1924, having been mistaken for fellow guest Charlie Chaplin. Hearst believed he was sleeping with his mistress, the actress Marion Davies.
The reported cause of death was a heart attack or acute indigestion. But Ince’s swift cremation and a perfunctory district attorney’s investigation that involved only one of the ship’s guests, a Hearst physician, fuelled lingering suspicions of foul play.
Peter Bogdanovich’s film about the killing continues Hollywood’s fascination with its unsolved deaths.
Recent films include Paul Schrader’s Auto Focus, about the demise of Sixties sitcom star Bob Crane, and Wonderland, with burnt-out Seventies porn star John Holmes (Val Kilmer) caught up with the multiple slayings of drug dealers. There are plenty more Hollywood murder mysteries that refuse to die. Who shot the dashing director William Desmond Taylor in 1922? The fact that the actresses Mary Miles Minter and Mabel Normand had visited Taylor on the night of his death was enough to end their careers.
Paul Bern, the producer husband of Jean Harlow, left a cryptic suicide note in 1932 but the studio cops were on the scene before the police. Was Bern really killed by Harlow or was it his unstable common-law wife? Did Lana Turner’s 14-year-old daughter stab her mother’s abusive gangster boyfriend in 1958, or could Turner have been wielding the knife that killed Johnny Stompanato? Was Marilyn Monroe really killed by her one-time lover, the Mob boss Sam Giancana, in a bid to implicate her former beaux, John F. and Robert Kennedy?
It’s no surprise that organised crime features so often in Hollywood’s murder scandals. By the late 1920s the Mobsters had a secure foothold in Los Angeles. Frank Nitti almost caused a turf war with Lucky Luciano over Hollywood’s nightclub rackets. But no one messed with Luciano, as his mistress, the spirited comedy actress Thelma Todd, may have discovered in 1935. Was her death from carbon monoxide poisoning in her car an accident or a Mob hit after she refused to let Luciano use her popular beach café as a venue for illegal gambling?
Early Hollywood’s true-crime mysteries tend to endure because it’s nearly impossible to ferret out the truth from the morass of corruption and cover-up that used to occur in Los Angeles. Politicians were on the take, racketeers had free reign and motion picture studio executives controlled the press and routinely covered up the dalliances and excesses of their biggest stars.
And it’s this marriage of crime, power and celebrity that draws film-makers, reinforcing the view of Hollywood as a world of movers and shakers desperate for a piece of the Hollywood Dream. In The Cat’s Meow, a financially strapped Ince hopes to forge a partnership with Hearst’s Cosmopolitan Studios, while the fledgeling gossip columnist Louella Parsons schemes to leave her job in Hearst’s New York offices for a post on the West Coast. Perhaps Ince would have succeeded if he had followed Don Corleone’s deal-clincher in The Godfather: sending a horse’s head to the studio boss so that the Don’s crooner relative, Frank Sinatra (sorry, Johnny Fontane), secured a film deal.
As Warren Beatty showed in Bugsy, the starstruck gangster Bugsy Siegel, who once ran the screen extras’ union, saw himself as a movie star. Well, if the former booze trucker George Raft could use his Mob connections to become a screen tough guy for Warner Bros, why not? Tarnished Tinseltown is brilliantly evoked in the Fifties-set LA Confidential, with Danny DeVito as the slimy scandal-sheet editor for whom everything is “off the record, on the QT and very hush-hush”. The film is based on the novel by James Ellroy, whose other bestseller in his “LA Quartet”, The Black Dahlia, grew out of the nightmares he had as a child about an in-famous 1947 case that had similarities to the unsolved murder of his own mother.
The 22-year-old would-be actress Elizabeth Short was killed and mutilated in LA in 1947. Her murder plunged the city into three months of hysteria, during which 500 “confessions” were taken and even vampires and werewolves were suspected. The mystery has inspired numerous books and films, including True Confessions, with Robert De Niro’s homicide cop and Robert Duvall’s priest taking us into the moral quagmire of 1940s LA. One of the more far-fetched scenarios came from Mary Pacios, an old friend of Short’s, who accused Orson Welles of the crime, claiming that the actor-director was mentally unstable. She also claimed that he liked to saw women in half during his magic act and before the murder had designed a set for The Lady from Shanghai featuring mutilated corpses that resembled Short’s body.
Welles himself fell foul of William Randolph Hearst’s anger after Welles’s Hearst- inspired Citizen Kane turned Marion Davies, by all accounts a lively, charming silent-movie star, into a shrill, talentless gold-digger called Susan Alexander. Kirsten Dunst in The Cat’s Meow offers a more accurate portrayal of Davies and her genuinely loving relationship with Hearst.
Yet the film cannot resist the rumours that surround Ince’s death. Suspicion intensified when Chaplin denied being on the boat and Hearst’s newspapers claimed that Ince had taken ill while at Hearst’s estate in California. While the Hearst biographer David Nasaw agrees that a cover-up did take place, he believes that it was instigated to hide illegal drinking, not murder.
Bogdanovich, the film’s director, is himself no stranger to personal tragedy magnified by the Hollywood spotlight. The murder of the Playboy Playmate Dorothy Stratten, his then girlfriend, by her estranged husband inspired two TV movies and the Bob Fosse film Star 80.
But Bogdanovich, the Seventies young blood of The Last Picture Show whose career crashed, now seems to be carving out a niche as a maker of Hollywood puzzles; his most recent film is the TV movie The Mystery of Natalie Wood. Her drowning in 1981, while apparently trying to board a small dinghy late one alcohol-soaked night off Catalina Island, still has Hollywood tongues wagging.
As the film historian Richard Schickel points out, all the rumours and conspiracy theories that circulate around Los Angeles simply highlight that Hollywood’s past is essentially an oral history full of conjecture. “Besides,” he says, “there’s something about real frogs in imaginary gardens that’s kind of mythic and entertaining.”
That’s why the unsolved crimes that the LAPD calls “cold cases” will continue to be hot properties in Hollywood.
MORE UNSOLVED MYSTERIES
Virginia Rappe
Comedian “Fatty” Arbuckle was acquitted three times of the actress’s 1921 murder. It left his career in ruins.
George Reeves
Did TV’s Superman commit suicide in 1958 or did a cuckolded studio executive hire a hitman in revenge?
Nick Adams
If the actor (Pillow Talk) truly died in 1968 of a drug overdose powerful enough to kill him instantly, why was no means of ingesting the drug found near the body?
Sal Mineo
Did the criminal Lionel Williams kill the actor (Rebel without a Cause) in a botched robbery in 1976, as he bragged to cellmates but later recanted? What about a witness seeing a long-haired blond Caucasian man fleeing the scene?
