Fade to Black: A Book of Movie Obituaries Page 16

  CAUSE: Astaire died of pneumonia aged 88 in Century City Hospital, Los Angeles, ten days after he was admitted (under the name Fred Giles) with respiratory problems. Astaire’s will, written on January 16, 1986, directed that there be no memorial service. He is buried, with sister Adèle and first wife Phyllis, in Oakwood Memorial Park, 22601 Lassen, Chatsworth, California 91311.

  FURTHER READING: Astaire: The Man, The Dancer – Bob Thomas (New York: St Martin’s Press, 1984); Astaire: The Biography – Tim Satchell (London: Arrow, 1988).

  Gertrude Astor

  Born November 9, 1887

  Died November 9, 1977

  Blonde bombshell. Born in Lakeland, Ohio, Gertrude Astor was the first actress to sign a contract with Universal in 1915. She worked with Harry Langdon, Gloria Swanson, Laurel & Hardy and Hal Roach. Her films included: Laughing Ladies (1925), Stagestruck (1925) with Swanson, Tell ’Em Nothing (1926), Oh! What A Man! (1927), The Cat And The Canary (1927), Come Clean (1931) with Laurel & Hardy, Misbehaving Husbands (1940), Around The World In 80 Days (1956) and The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962). She often portrayed gold-diggers and socialites. Off-screen she was regarded as one of Hollywood’s best-dressed citizens.

  CAUSE: She died on her 90th birthday of a stroke.

  Mary Astor

  (LUCILLE VASCONELLES LANGHANKE)

  Born May 3, 1906

  Died September 25, 1987

  Purple diarist. Born in Quincy, Illinois, the only child of Otto Langhanke, an ambitious (ambitious for his daughter, anyway) German immigrant father and Helen Vasconelles, his American-Portuguese wife, Mary Astor is probably better known for her scandalous private life than for any films she made. She was a beauty queen as a 14-year-old teenager and made her film début in The Scarecrow (1920). Despite failing a screen test for D.W. Griffith, the 5́ 6˝ Astor went on to appear in over 120 films, even though she hated Hollywood. “I was never totally involved in movies. I was making my father’s dream come true,” she once admitted. Her final appearance was in Robert Aldrich’s Hush … Hush, Sweet Charlotte (1964) playing Mrs Jewel Mayhew. Her big break came playing Lady Margery Alvanley opposite her lover John Barrymore’s Beau Brummel (1924) for which she was paid $1,100 a week; Barrymore took her virginity when she was 17. She also played Adriana della Varnese opposite him in Don Juan (1926) and appeared in The Rough Riders (1927) as Dolly and Dressed To Kill (1928) as Jeanne. On February 23, 1928, she married Kenneth Neil Hawks (b. Goschen, Indiana, August 12, 1898), brother of director Howard. He was killed in a plane crash at Point Vincente, California, on January 2, 1930. “My marriage to Ken Hawks had rainbows around it,” she later lamented. “He had values that have become extinct.” She subsequently flung herself into her work, appearing in Ladies Love Brutes (1930) as Mimi Howell, Those We Love (1932) as May Ballard and Red Dust (1932) as Barbara Willis, a refined married lady who is entranced by mean, moody Dennis Carson (Clark Gable). On March 20, 1934, she was sued for support by her parents but the judgement went against them on May 1. She turned down an RKO contract and starred in I Am A Thief (1935) as Odette Mauclair, Trapped By Television (1936) as Bobby Blake, Dodsworth (1936) as Edith Cortright, plus And So They Were Married (1936) as Edith Farnham. Following Kenneth Hawks’ death she went under the care of Dr Franklyn Thorpe (b. Denver, Colorado, June 29, 1892, d. Los Angeles, California February 12, 1977) and they were married on June 29, 1931, in Yuma, Arizona. Their daughter, Marylyn Haoli, was born in Honolulu, Hawaii, on June 15, 1932. In 1933 Astor travelled to New York on holiday and met writer George S. Kaufman. Astor was possessed of a fearsome sexual appetite but so was the weedy-looking Kaufman and they began an affair that continued after Astor returned to the West Coast. On April 12, 1935, Thorpe was granted a divorce from his wife and sued for custody of their daughter. Astor countersued on July 15, and discovered that her diary (normally kept in her underwear drawer) was missing. The court case made for lurid newspaper reading (even though the judge excluded the diary from evidence, Thorpe’s lawyers leaked selected excerpts to the press) when it was revealed the diary contained explicit passages detailing Astor and Kaufman’s lovemaking. One entry read: “… remarkable staying power … We played kneesies during the first two acts, my hand wasn’t in my own lap during the third … It’s been years since I felt up a man in public, but I just got carried away … His powers of recuperation are amazing, and we made love all night … we shared our fourth climax at dawn … Was any woman ever happier? It seems that George is just hard all the time … I don’t see how he does it, he is perfect … he tore out of his pajamas and I was never undressed by someone so fast in my life … Ah, desert night – with George’s body plunging into mine, naked under the stars.” The child’s nurse reported that she had seen Dr Thorpe in bed with a starlet who wore only red toenail polish and also that three Busby Berkeley babes had slept in his bed. Where was the doctor at this time, asked the lawyer. “He was right in there in his bed, too,” the nurse responded. The judge awarded the house to Astor and ordered that the daughter spend six months with each parent. He further ordered that the diary be burned. The scandal did not affect Astor’s career (only her health caused by her alcoholism and a suicide attempt) and she went on to star in There’s Always A Woman (1938) as Lola Fraser, The Great Lie (1941) as Sandra Kovac (for which Astor won a Best Supporting Actress Academy Award) and gave a sterling performance opposite Humphrey Bogart in The Maltese Falcon (1941) as Brigid O’Shaughnessy. Four years earlier, on February 18, 1937, again in Yuma, Arizona, she had married for the third time to Manuel Martinez de Campo (who changed his name to Michael Field; b. Mexico City, November 14, 1913, d. London, February 16, 1969), seven years her junior. Their son, Anthony Paul, was born on June 5, 1939. The couple was divorced on December 14, 1942. As she grew older, Astor played maternal roles during a seven-year contract at MGM. She played Judy Garland’s mother (Mrs Anna Smith) in Meet Me In St Louis (1944) and the mother of Elizabeth Taylor, June Allyson, Margaret O’Brien and Janet Leigh (Marmee March) in Little Women (1949). She became even more disillusioned with Hollywood over time, and found her vocation instead as a writer, producing five novels. On December 24, 1945, she married Chicagoan stockbroker Thomas Wheelock but that marriage was no more successful than her previous attempts at matrimony and they divorced in 1955.

  CAUSE: She suffered a stroke in the Eighties and was in poor health for some time before her death, aged 81, at the Motion Picture Country Home, 23450 Calabasas Road, Woodland Hills, California, from a heart attack. She was buried in plot N-L 523-5 of Holy Cross Cemetery, 5835 West Slauson Avenue, Culver City, California 90230.

  Lionel Atwill

  Born March 1, 1885

  Died April 22, 1946

  ‘Pinky’. Lionel Alfred William Atwill was born in Croydon, Surrey, educated at Mercer’s School in London and began his professional career on October 31, 1904, taking a small role in The Walls Of Jericho at the Garrick Theatre, moving to Broadway in the Twenties. In 1913 he married the actress Phyllis Relph by whom he had a son, John Anthony Atwill (who joined the RAF and was killed in action in 1941), but they divorced in 1919. Four years earlier, in 1915, he had toured America with Lillie Langtry who had been the mistress of King Edward VII when he was Prince of Wales. Atwill stayed on after the tour and appeared with Billie Burke (Mrs Florenz Ziegfeld) in The Lodger, a play about Jack the Ripper, in New York. He made his film début in Eve’s Daughter (1918) playing Courtenay Urquhart. It was to be the start of a long career in which he played mainly villains including the fiendish Professor James Moriarty, Holmes’ nemesis, in Sherlock Holmes And The Secret Weapon (1942). Atwill had previously appeared as James Mortimer in The Hound Of The Baskervilles (1939), Basil Rathbone’s first outing as the legendary sleuth, and also appeared with Rathbone in Captain Blood (1935) as Colonel Bishop, Son Of Frankenstein (see below) and The Sun Never Sets (1939) as Dr Hugo Zurof. Atwill’s forte was horror and he appeared in several films within that genre including: The Vampire Bat (1933) as Dr Otto von Niemann, a f
ilm that was the biggest hit for Majestic Studios, in which Atwill starred opposite Fay Wray, The Sphinx (1933) as Jerome Breen, Murders In The Zoo (1933) as jealous zookeeper Eric Gorman who sews his wife’s lover’s mouth shut and leaves him to starve to death in the jungle before throwing another victim into the crocodile pit; Mark Of The Vampire (1935) as Inspector Neumann in MGM’s version of the Dracula story; with Lionel Barrymore in Son Of Frankenstein (1939) as Inspector Krogh in which Boris Karloff played the monster for the last time; The Ghost Of Frankenstein (1942) as Dr Theodor Bohmer, Frankenstein Meets The Wolf Man (1943) as the mayor of Vasaria; Universal’s first all-star ‘monsterfest’ House Of Frankenstein (1944) as Inspector Arnz in which Boris Karloff played the mad scientist, John Carradine played Dracula and Lon Chaney, Jr as the Wolfman, and House Of Dracula (1945) as Inspector Holtz, the last outing for Universal’s monsters. Of his cinematic appearance, Atwill once said, “One side of my face is gentle and kind, incapable of anything but love of my fellow man. The other profile is cruel and predatory and evil, incapable of anything but lusts and dark passions. It all depends which side of my face is turned to you – or the camera. It all depends on which side faces the moon at the ebb of the tide.” His eyes were described as “Satanic neons” in Warner’s Doctor X (1932) in which he played Dr Jerry Xavier. Atwill played Ivan Igor, a mad sculptor who murders people and then displays them in his own collection in Mystery Of The Wax Museum (1933). One of the earliest colour films, it is, oddly, often shown on television in black and white. In 1920 Atwill married again, this time to another actress Poppy Wyndham (b. 1893 as the Hon. Elsie Mackay, d. March 14, 1928 when her aeroplane crashed into the sea). Shortly before her death, Atwill and private detectives that he had hired discovered her in flagrante at 59 West 68th Street, New York, with Atwill’s protégé Max Montesole. Atwill filed for divorce. In 1930 he married Henrietta Louise Cromwell Brook MacArthur, who had been the first wife of the decorated soldier General Douglas MacArthur. Atwill and his third wife divorced on June 18, 1943. His other films included: For Sale (1918), The Marriage Price (1919) as Kenneth Gordon, The Eternal Mother (1920) as Howard Hollister, The Highest Bidder (1921) as Lester, Silent Witness (1932) as the perjurer Sir Austin Howard, I Am A Fugitive From A Chain Gang (1932) and 20,000 Years In Sing Sing (1932) both as the off-screen narrator of the trailer, The Secret Of Madame Blanche (1933) as Aubrey St John, The Song Of Songs (1933) as Baron von Merzbach, Secret Of The Blue Room (1933) as Robert von Helldorf, The Solitaire Man as Inspector Wallace, Nana as Colonel Andre Muffat, Beggars In Ermine (1934) as John ‘Flint’ Dawson a.k.a. John Daniels, Stamboul Quest (1934) as Herr Von Sturm, One More River (1934) as Brough, The Age Of Innocence (1934) as Julius Beaufort, The Firebird (1934) as John Pointer, The Man Who Reclaimed His Head (1934) as Henry Dumont, The Devil Is A Woman (1935) as Captain Don Pasqual ‘Pasqualito’ Costelar, The Murder Man (1935) as Captain Cole, Rendezvous (1935) as Major William Brennan, Lady Of Secrets (1936) as Mr Whittaker, Till We Meet Again (1936) as Ludwig, Absolute Quiet (1936) as Gerald ‘G.A.’ Axton, The High Command (1936) as Major General Sir John Sangye, VC, the prosecutor in The Road Back (1937), The Last Train From Madrid (1937) as Colonel Vigo, Lancer Spy (1937) as Colonel Fenwick, The Wrong Road (1937) as Mike Roberts, The Great Garrick (1937) as Monsieur Beaumarchais, Three Comrades (1938) as Franz Breuer, The Great Waltz as Count Anton Hohenfried, The Gorilla (1939) as Walter Stevens, The Three Musketeers (1939) as De Rochefort, Johnny Apollo (1940) as Jim McLaughlin, Mr Moto Takes A Vacation (1939) as Professor Hildebrand, The Secret Of Dr Kildare as Paul Messenger, Balalaika (1939) as Professor Marakov, The Mad Empress (1939) as Bazaine, Charlie Chan In Panama (1940) as Cliveden Compton, Girl In 313 (1940) as Russell Woodruff, Charlie Chan’s Murder Cruise (1940) as Dr Suderman, The Great Profile (1940) as Dr Bruce, Boom Town (1940) as Mr Harry Compton, Man Made Monster (1941) as Dr Paul Rigas, The Mad Doctor Of Market Street (1942) as Dr Ralph Benson posing as Graham, To Be Or Not To Be (1942) as Rawitch, The Strange Case Of Doctor Rx (1942) as Dr Fish, Junior G-Men Of The Air (1942) as the Baron, Pardon My Sarong (1942) as Dr Varnoff, Cairo (1942) as the German, Night Monster (1942) as Dr King, Captain America (1944) as Dr Cyrus Maldor, Lady In The Death House (1944) as Finch, Raiders Of Ghost City (1944) as Erich von Rugen, Secrets Of Scotland Yard (1944) as Waterlow, Fog Island (1945) as Alec Ritchfield, Crime, Inc. (1945) as Pat Coyle and Genius At Work (1946) as the murderer Latimer Marsh/The Cobra. Atwill was seen as the epitome of the cultured Englishman in Hollywood – he often spent his pay packets buying Old Masters. However, he had a darker side. James Whale, the director, had found a house in Pacific Palisades that he thought would be suitable for Atwill and his society wife, a descendant of Oliver Cromwell. And so it proved. The marriage to all outward appearances was a happy one. The couple often enjoyed threesomes with both men and women but eventually Mrs Atwill grew tired of the sex games and in 1939 she left her husband, moving to Washington, D.C. where she hosted a radio programme. Meanwhile, free from marital shackles, Atwill hosted orgies at his house at 13515 d’Este Drive, on the edge of the Santa Monica canyon. He did insist that his guests had regular check-ups to ensure that they were free of venereal disease. In December 1940, Atwill threw a Christmas party that would bring his sexual edifice crashing to the ground. Atwill dressed as Father Christmas to greet his guests and planned everything down to the last detail, well almost everything – he should have checked his guest list with rather more care. The orgy was due to start at a given signal – a note on the piano played by a blind pianist who would then play The Blue Danube – after dinner. One of the guests was a 16-year-old from Hibbing, Minnesota, known only as Sylvia who was pregnant but had had great plans for stardom. The music began to play and guests’ clothes began to come off. After the event Sylvia wrote to her parents in Hibbing and requested a large sum of money. Her father was suspicious and called the police. Social services picked up Sylvia and told a Grand Jury in 1941 that during the orgy two adult entertainment films had been shown at Atwill’s – The Plumber And The Girl and The Daisy Chain. Atwill denied not only showing the films but also owning anything of that genre. The jury chose to believe the suave actor rather than the pregnant teen. Sylvia went back to Minnesota and was never heard from again. A year later, one of the other guests fell on hard times and decided that he had saved Atwill. While on a chain gang for writing rubber cheques he wrote to the Grand Jury offering to tell the full story of the orgy and the films. Atwill was recalled to the stand but on advice from his learned friends refused to testify. After talking to a friendly judge Atwill returned to court and admitted that he did own some pornographic films but they had been rented for a friend in the Royal Canadian Mounted Police and that he (Atwill) had never seen them and was out playing tennis when they were shown. The 1942 jury did not believe him and he was indicted on a charge of perjury. On August 12, he was charged on a second count of perjury. At the trial in September, Atwill confessed that he had lied but only to save the reputations of his friends. On October 15, 1942, he was sentenced to five years probation and ordered to visit the LAPD Vice Department weekly. The sentence meant that Atwill did not work for seven months as studios were reluctant to hire someone in breach of the Hays Code. On April 23, 1943, Atwill went to the judge who had sentenced him and pleaded for mercy which the judge was happy to agree to. Atwill still found Hollywood work impossible to come by and moved to New York where he hoped to revive his career on the Great White Way. It was a forlorn hope and he returned to Hollywood. But there he was ignored by the major studios and ended working in bit parts and for small companies. It was an ignominious end to a glorious career.

  CAUSE: On July 7, 1944 Atwill married Mary Paula Pritter by whom he had a son, Lionel Anthony Guile. Atwill died of pneumonia in Pacific Palisades six months after the birth of his son while making Lost City Of The Jungle (1946) in which he played Sir Eric Hazarias. His scenes were completed by a double. Atwill was cremated and his ashes interred in the Chapel of the Pines Cemetery, 1605 Sout
h Catalina, Los Angeles, California.

  Maxine Audley

  (MAXINE HECHT)

  Born April 29, 1923

  Died July 23, 1992

  Dark-haired beauty. Born in London, the daughter of Henry Julius Hecht and the opera singer Katharine Arkandy, Maxine Audley was trained at the Tamara Daykharhanova Stage School in New York and London’s Mask Theatre School. She made her stage début at the Open Air Theatre in A Midsummer Night’s Dream on July 27, 1940. From 1940 until 1942 she appeared in rep and then from 1943 until 1945 was engaged in war work. Three years later, she made her first film Anna Karenina (1948) and went on to appear in The Pleasure Garden (1952) as Lady Ennui, The Sleeping Tiger (1954) as Carol, The Barretts Of Wimpole Street (1957) as Arabel, The Prince And The Showgirl (1957) as Lady Sunningdale, A King In New York (1957) as Queen Irene, Dunkirk (1958) as Diana Foreman, The Vikings (1958) as Enid, Our Man In Havana (1959) as Teresa, Bluebeard’s Ten Honeymoons (1960) as Cynthia, Peeping Tom (1960) as Mrs Stephens, Hell Is A City (1960) as Julia Martineau, The Trials Of Oscar Wilde (1960) as Ada Leverson, Petticoat Pirates (1961) as the superintendent, The Man At The Carlton Tower (1961) as Lydia Daney, Ein Toter Secht Seinen Mörder (1962) as Marion Fane, Ricochet (1963) as Yvonne Phipps, A Jolly Bad Fellow (1964) as Clarinda Bowles-Ottery, Never Mention Murder (1964) as Liz Teasdale, The Battle Of The Villa Fiorita (1965) as Charmian, The Agony And The Ecstasy (1965), Payment In Kind (1967), Here We Go Round The Mulberry Bush (1967) as Mrs Beauchamp, House Of Cards as Matilde Rosier, Sinful Davey as the Duchess of Argyll, Frankenstein Must Be Destroyed (1969) as Ella Brandt, The Looking Glass War (1969) as Mrs LeClerc and Running Scared (1972) as Mrs Betancourt. Her final acting job on television was playing Mrs Marlow, the suspect’s mother, in Prime Suspect (1991), and on Radio 4 reading Elinor Glyn’s novel Three Weeks (1992). Four times married, her first husband was Leonard Cassini, her second was Andrew Broughton, her third was Frederick Granville and her fourth Leo Maguire. All the marriages except the last ended in divorce.