The Mammoth Book of Hollywood Scandals (21 page)

Unfortunately, by this time Lou’s bed was not the only thing going up in smoke. His career was almost burned out too. He had appeared in no movies between 1927 and 1929 (though he did direct
No Other Woman
in 1928), and reporters hurtfully started referring to him as “One of the great lovers of stage and screen . . . ten years ago”. He wasn’t ready to let go, however, and had plastic surgery to rid himself of under-eye bags and wrinkles. He also acquired a new wife, an actress called Eve Casanova who had played opposite him on vaudeville circuits in the late 1920s.

Unfortunately the next years were not happy ones. He appeared in only a handful of movies and, by 1934, Lou was broke and upset. Refusing to believe he was washed up, the actor moved to California, leaving his wife in New York in the hope that he could revive his career with the Fox picture,
Caravane
.

For a time things began to look bright again, but it was not to be, when Lou shockingly discovered he was ill with cancer. The devastated actor was operated on, though doctors at the time assured him there was absolutely no hope of a full recovery. Quickly his weight plummeted from 180 to 150 pounds and though Tellegen managed to recover enough strength to gain a small part in
Together We Live
, he was in a lot of pain and knew the end was in sight.

On 13 October 1934, the
Los Angeles Times
reported seeing the usually expertly groomed Lou with a beard and flowing hair, talking to his friend, the actor Willard Mack. That was one of his last public appearances and he spent the rest of the month depressed and in ill-health at 1844 North Vine Street, the home of friend Mrs Jack P. Cudahy. During that time he confessed to Dr C. L. Cooper that he thought he might be losing his mind. “I don’t think he was,” Dr Cooper said. “At least he seemed perfectly sane to me.” In spite of that, Tellegen was “brooding deeply” over the fact that he was no longer the star he once was and told the doctor that despite everything, he still wanted to be an actor and a star. The doctor, however, had bad news for Tellegen and told him that even if he could find another job, it was physically impossible for him to work as his body just was not up to it. Tellegen was understandably devastated.

On 29 October 1934, the depression that had haunted Lou-Tellegen for many years finally became too much to bear. He was unable to work; his marriage was practically over; and the cancer that was invading his body was quickly ravaging him. Still, life went on as normal in the Cudahy home, and Mrs Eugene Coffee, the maid at the house, knocked on his door to ask if she could prepare breakfast for him. Tellegen turned her down; he did not require any food that morning, which Mrs Coffee found to be so disturbing that she decided to tell her boss immediately.

Rushing to Mrs Cudahy, the maid reported that Tellegen had refused to eat and what’s more seemed extremely morose. The lady of the house took this information as suspicious and told her maid that she would take a look into Mr Tellegen’s room immediately, eager to find out what was wrong with her boarder.

Meanwhile, Tellegen remained in the privacy of his quarters, dressed only in a bathrobe. His scrapbooks spread around him, he took one last look at the reports documenting his career on stage and screen, before carefully shaving his face and combing his hair. Who knows what was going on in his mind at that moment, but one thing’s for sure: it wasn’t anything positive. Once he had made himself look presentable, it was time for his last big role, and one that would go down in history: Death.

The once fabulous actor picked up a pair of sharp scissors and quietly but deliberately plunged them into his chest. Was it a spur-of-the-moment decision or one he had thought through for some time? We’ll never know. One thing we do know, however, was that Tellegen did not kill himself with just one fatal blow; instead he stabbed himself an incredible seven times before finally collapsing on the floor.

Outside his bedroom door, an oblivious Mrs Cudahy was asking him if he might like some soup. She received what she considered to be a weak reply, and so summoned her butler, William Wynn, who soon arrived at her side. Apprehensively they opened the door together and found something so shocking that it would be a sight they would remember for the rest of their lives. There was Tellegen on the floor of the room, blood gushing from his chest, while he – quite disturbingly – was still alive but remaining completely silent. The two rushed to the actor’s side and made frantic attempts to stifle the blood while calling for a doctor, but it was too late; Lou-Tellegen quietly and calmly slipped away on the floor of the bathroom, his scrapbooks and mementos of a once great life sitting just feet away.

When told of the suicide by reporters, Tellegen’s ex-wife Geraldine Farrar snapped, “Why should that interest me? It doesn’t interest me in the least!” and slammed the telephone down. Meanwhile his current wife, Eve Casanova, received a wire asking what to do with Tellegen’s remains but she had no intention of helping out. “Contact my cousin in Los Angeles,” she said, though no such cousin was ever found and Tellegen’s body remained unclaimed in the mortuary.

Officials got back in touch with Casanova in the hope that she would claim the body herself but despite declaring that she was “horribly, horribly shocked”, she still would not budge. Instead of taking a flight out to California, she told reporters that she would not be able to go to the funeral as she was about to start rehearsals for a play called
A-Hunting We Will Go
. “I know Lou would want me to stay here and stick it out,” she told reporters gathered at her front door, though no one could say they honestly believed her.

Finally, when all other avenues were blocked, friends of Tellegen, such as Mrs Cudahy, Norman Kerry and Willard Mack, vowed to give him the funeral he deserved and made the arrangements themselves. On the day itself, scores of fans stood outside the chapel, while Lou’s colleagues and associates came together to act as pall-bearers.

Tellegen’s first wife, the jilted Countess Jeanne de Brouckère, did not attend, though she did tell reporters that if she had known of Lou’s illness she would have been only too glad to help. Meanwhile, third wife Isabel Dilworth (now remarried and called Countess Danneskiold) arrived on the arm of her current husband.

“He had scores of deep and intimate friends who would have been glad to help had they known of his illness,” she said, before adding that if she had known of his pain and despair, she too would have most certainly rushed to his aid.

But at the end of the day, in spite of the renewed interest from several ex-wives and dozens of fans, Lou’s passing was a sad and very lonely affair. At the conclusion of the funeral, the body of the former matinee idol was simply cremated and his ashes were scattered quietly into the blue depths of the Pacific Ocean.

“I hate people who are not natural, I hate people who are stuck up, and I hate hypocrites. Aside from that I get along with everybody,” so said outspoken Thelma Todd at the tender age of just nineteen. A rebel in the days when it was pretty much unheard of, Thelma Todd was nobody’s fool and definitely no dumb blonde.

“I think I must have a brunette personality,” she once said, before declaring that she always believed blondes to be soft and pliable, ready to cling to the nearest male for support and protection. “They’re just waiting to be taken care of and very sweet and easy to live with because they are so amiable,” she said, before admitting that none of those qualities could possibly belong to her. She believed herself to be a fighter who had made her way in the world alone; she knew how to stand up for herself and woe betide anyone who said otherwise.

“You see, I’m not a real blonde inside or I’d be steadfast under any circumstances. No brunette was ever a doormat,” she admitted.

A doormat she most certainly was not, as attested by her on-off boyfriend Roland West during the inquest into her death: “You could not keep Miss Todd out of any place if she wanted to get in,” he said. And yet in the early hours of 15 December 1935, Thelma was kept out of her apartment after West dead-bolted the door from the inside, rendering her Yale key useless. This action was just the beginning of a series of events that led to Thelma Todd being found dead in her car approximately thirty hours later.

Born in Lawrence, Massachusetts, on 29 July 1906, Thelma Alice Todd was the daughter of John Shaw Todd and his wife Alice Elizabeth Todd. John was Irish, while Alice came from Canada, and together they raised their two children at 502 Andover Street in Lawrence. When Thelma’s older brother was killed in a freak farming accident, John Todd was devastated and Thelma decided to make up to him for the absence of a son. She played with boys, was boisterous and daring, and planned to be an engineer when she grew up. One neighbour later remembered that the seven-year-old girl could often be seen riding a boy’s bicycle through the streets, and never wore frills or lace, even though it seemed that every other female did so at the time. Little Thelma Todd was very definitely a tomboy, and while other girls were playing dolls and houses, she instead preferred to play on the boy’s baseball team, hike, swim and climb trees.

Exceptionally pretty and always willing to go along with whatever the boys were playing at the time, it was no surprise that, as she grew up, Thelma became one of the most popular girls in town. However, while others were obsessing on how beautiful she had become, Thelma herself was completely unconcerned with her looks and freely admitted that she would “kill a man who started to ‘neck’ with me”.

Thelma trained to be a school teacher in Lawrence, and for a laugh decided to enter a beauty pageant to find “Miss Massachusetts”. She won and was invited to tour the East Coast Paramount Studios, where she was introduced to producer Jesse L. Lasky. He dazzled her with his plans to start a Paramount Pictures School on the East Coast and promised that if the school went ahead, he would contact her.

Shortly after the contest, sure enough, Jesse Lasky was back in touch to say that his Paramount Pictures School was now in operation and Thelma was immediately enrolled. While there she learnt her craft, took part in a photo story for an East Coast newspaper and encountered her first “scandal” when a fellow student, Robert Andrews, fell madly in love with her and printed the news of their “engagement” all over a New York newspaper. Since Andrews had forgotten to tell Thelma that they were engaged, she gave him a stern talking-to and he quickly dropped out of the actress’s affections.

Although the reason she was initially invited to the studio was because of the beauty pageant, Thelma was always adamant that it was not as a result of the contest that she was later signed by the studio. In a 1931 interview, Thelma told reporter Alice L. Tildesley that the beauty pageant had nothing to do with her eventual rise to fame: “I never heard of a beauty-contest winner getting very far in any other line. I didn’t crash the movie gate by way of a contest, because I was already under contract when I won my title. The fact that I was Miss Massachusetts had nothing to do with it.”

Thelma’s career quickly started to hot up, but just as she was enjoying success, her father suddenly passed away. He was buried on her birthday, and just two days later Thelma was rushed to hospital where her appendix was removed. It was another two months before she was strong enough to resume her film career, and she found herself travelling to Hollywood for the first time, working for Paramount Pictures, home of Rudolph Valentino, Pola Negri, Gloria Swanson and Clara Bow.

Returning to good health, Thelma continued her journey into film and carved out a successful career playing in comedies at the Hal Roach Studios and Paramount, working with the likes of Charley Chase, the Marx Brothers and Laurel and Hardy. She was a huge success, but as with many comedic players, she harboured dreams of becoming a serious actress too, so after making the transition from silent movies to talkies easily, she decided to try her hand at drama, starring alongside Chester Morris in Roland West’s movie
Corsair
.

To shed her screwball comedy image, director West suggested that she change her name to Alison Lloyd, which she did, though only on a temporary basis, much to her director’s disappointment. Strangely, it would seem that Roland West was so obsessed with her being called Alison that when she died he even put his flowers in that name, instead of her real name of Thelma, which she had gone back to long before she passed away. Sadly, the actress’s venture into drama was not successful and
Corsair
was not the box-office favourite she hoped it would be. She went back to comedies, though remained a friend, business partner and sometime lover of Roland West until the end of her life.

Thelma was loved by everyone at the studio, and while she never reached the dizzy heights of Jean Harlow, Carole Lombard or Clara Bow, she certainly held her own. Thelma was a pioneer and an organizer; while filming in Lake Placid, New York, she decided that rather than sit and twiddle her thumbs between takes, she would organize skiing parties, bobsled trips and other adventures, forcing the cast to go along with her ideas just for something to do. She loved to laugh and joke, so much so in fact that when her co-star Patsy Kelly found out she had died, she did not believe it. “I thought it was one of her jokes”, she said.

Thelma became linked to various men including the English actor Ronald Colman and Academy Award nominee Richard Dix. However, it was a man by the name of Pat DiCicco (originally Pasquale DeCicco) who captured her heart, and the two eloped in 1932 before settling in Hollywood together. However, the marriage was not a happy one, and was said to be filled with violence and emotional abuse. DiCicco was frequently described as everything from a sportsman to a theatrical agent, but in truth he was a lackey for gangsters such as Lucky Luciano, and her relationship with DiCicco became Thelma’s first introduction to the seedier side of Hollywood.

Several years before her marriage, Thelma gave her views on matrimony, saying that she felt when people married too young, they were so intent on being in love that they often refused to look at each other in a truthful way, expecting far too much from one another. “They won’t take account of her quick temper or his extravagance, his indolence or her excitability,” she said, before going on to describe how men and women seem to be so in awe of a great and thrilling romance that the awakening from such rose-tinted slumber was inevitably not such a great experience.