The Mammoth Book of Hollywood Scandals (6 page)

Norman Selby was born in Moscow, Indiana, on 13 October 1872, and went on to become an American world champion boxer. Winning no less than eighty-one times with fifty-five knockouts, he became a legendary middleweight fighter before turning his attention to acting, appearing in a variety of films during the early days of Hollywood.

However, his life out of the ring was far more colourful than the one he had in it, and Selby became something of a joke in the newspapers with his serial marriages. By 1920 he had been married seven times to five different women and was about to marry Carmen Browder (aka Dagmar Dahlgren), which would make it eight times. The newspapers tagged him the “Undisputed marrying champion of America”, although he himself was adamant that his latest adventure would be the last time down the aisle. “I’ve been at it since 1895,” he told reporters. “I feel entitled to retire from active marrying, although of course, I shall always retain an interest in the game.” His reason for divorcing was, he joked, because he kept forgetting his wedding anniversary.

He married Browder on 19 April 1920 and by 5 September that year she had filed for divorce. According to the twenty-year-old dancer, her forty-seven-year-old husband had treated her with extreme cruelty; was abusive and violent; and had stayed out all night just three days after the wedding. During divorce proceedings, Browder’s friend Frances Le Berthon said she had seen scars on the dancer’s body; a result, she said, of spurning Selby’s “excessive love-making”. The disturbing story was that the two had lived as man and wife for just two weeks before Browder woke one night to find Selby forcing himself on to her. When she refused he threw his wife out of bed and hit her.

When Browder told the court that she believed Selby when he told her he wanted a “real girl he could love”, Judge Jackson could not believe his ears. After seven previous marriages, did she not suspect there must be something wrong with him? “No I did not,” replied Browder.

“Do you still believe he wanted a real girl to love?” he asked, to which Browder – not surprisingly – shook her head and said a simple, “No.” The judge then granted the decree, but not before expressing his doubts about the serial marriage habit of Selby: “This man will get another wife if I grant the decree. This girl might as well act as a buffer for the rest of the community,” he told the court.

He was almost right. In September 1922 Selby announced his intention to marry twenty-four-year-old Jacqueline MacDowell, who travelled to Los Angeles specifically to marry the “undisputed male vamp” as the newspapers were now calling him. After much hilarity while being turned down for a marriage licence due to the absence of the bride-to-be, the two were eventually granted permission to marry and posed happily for cameramen. Fortunately for MacDowell, however, she discovered Selby had been seeing another woman just days before the wedding, freeing her from a union almost certain to fail.

He spent the next few years in and out of the newspapers, filing for bankruptcy and having several brushes with the law, including being investigated by police for firing a gun in the bathroom of his apartment on South Carondelet Street, Los Angeles. However, in August 1924 his scandalous life came to a head when he became the prime suspect in the murder of his married girlfriend, Teresa Mors.

Living as Mr and Mrs Shields, Norman and Teresa stayed together in an apartment at 2819 Leeward Avenue, where Selby told friends that he loved his girlfriend more than he had ever loved any woman before. However, the affair was not a quiet one, and although Mors was in the process of divorcing her husband, there were numerous fights about an antique shop they both shared.

The relationship between Mors and Selby was volatile. Mors’ friend Ann Schapp, who owned the shop next door to the antique store, tried to persuade Teresa to leave the violent boxer on more than one occasion. However, this did not prove to be a sensible thing to do, as on one particular evening Selby approached Schapp and insulted her. It became clear to both Schapp and her husband that Selby somehow knew all about their talks with Mors about leaving the relationship, and they opted to be on their guard from that point on.

On 12 August, things took a disastrous turn when Teresa Mors was found shot dead in her and Selby’s apartment. Determined not to be blamed for the death, Selby insisted that he had wanted to marry the woman and that he would never be happy without her. He told police that they had been for a drive and then returned home, where Mors became downhearted over trouble with the antique shop. According to Selby, she suddenly declared she was going to end it all, grabbed a knife and tried stabbing herself with it. When that did not work she took out a revolver, and despite his attempts to stop her, she committed suicide right there in front of him. Quite bizarrely, Selby then said he covered her with a blanket, washed up the dishes and headed out to kill Albert Mors, Teresa’s estranged husband.

In a violent rage, Selby reached Mr Mors’ home, where he was told by the maid that he was not in residence that evening. He left, travelled around hotels in a vain attempt at finding him, and then in the early morning went to the antiques shop to confront his rival. But Mr Mors was not present at the store, and instead Selby encountered a shop full of customers and staff; robbed them all and forced some of the men to remove their trousers so that they could not escape. One gentleman who tried to leave was shot by Shelby, before he turned his attention to Mr and Mrs Schapp, the couple who owned the shop next door.

Police questioned why he would do such a thing as hold up a shop full of customers and then shoot the neighbours, while Selby tried to convince them that it was all done to avenge his girlfriend’s death. “My lights went out when I saw Teresa dead at my feet,” he said. Police descended on his apartment, where they found the place in utter disarray; a copy of his will was on the table, along with liquor bottles. It did not take them long to decide that Selby had been the one to kill his girlfriend. They also believed he had left the will on the table as he intended to kill himself after he had shot Teresa’s estranged husband, Mr Mors. “If I had caught him at home I would have killed him and then killed myself,” he admitted to officers.

“There is no doubt in our minds that McCoy killed [Teresa] Mors,” stated police. There were some doubts in the jury’s minds, however, and after seeing Selby demonstrate a dramatic re-enactment of his girlfriend’s last moments, as well as a surprise appearance by ex-wife Dagmar Dahlgren, they remained split between first degree murder and acquittal.

Finally, Selby was convicted of manslaughter and stayed in prison until 1932. When he left, he spoke to reporters. “I’m through with the prize ring, the matrimonial ring, and the ring of ice in glasses,” he told them, before leaving for Michigan and a job with the Ford Motor Company.

He was not quite finished with women, however, as he married Sue Cobb Cowley in 1937. Unfortunately the new start he had hoped for in Michigan was never a peaceful one and eventually, on 18 April 1940, he decided to end his life in the Hotel Tuller in Detroit. Before taking a fatal overdose, he sat down to write a short note: “To all my dear friends, I wish you the best of luck. I’m sorry I could not endure this world’s madness.” He then signed it with the simple words, “My very best to you all, Norman Selby.”

While it is always sad when someone dies young, no matter who they are, the tale of Lucille Ricksen is particularly distressing, especially as at the time of her death she had barely reached puberty. However, she had been acting as an adult for some years prior to her passing. Hollywood is a land of make-believe – of fairy tales and glamour – but for Lucille Ricksen it was the stuff of nightmares, and it ultimately broke up her family and cost her life.

Born as Ingeborg Ericksen in Chicago, Illinois, on 22 August, her actual birth year is something of a mystery, but is most likely 1910. Almost from the day she was born, Lucille (as she became known) was working in the industry, first as a baby model and then, aged five, as an actress. Rather disturbingly, however, while some of the photographs she posed for were “cute” and show the smiling Lucille sporting ringlets in her hair, others are slightly less appealing. For instance, in one photograph of the child aged about five, she is seen posing provocatively next to a window, a lace scarf being the only thing covering her tiny body. How or why this disturbing photograph was ever taken is something of a mystery but it certainly shows the shape of things to come as she got older and moved into her movie career.

By the time the child was eight years old, the pressures of running Lucille’s career and a home were becoming extremely tiring for her mother, also called Ingeborg. Normally one would expect that if the child’s career was getting in the way of family life, the mother would perhaps scale down the amount of work she had, but not Ingeborg. She was one of the first real showbiz mothers, and instead of taking her daughter away from the camera, she decided that the best thing to do would be to divorce her husband, leave Chicago and move herself and her two children to the bright lights of Hollywood where she planned for Lucille to be more successful and even busier than ever before.

It is not known if Lucille was happy with this situation, but we do know that once in the city, the young girl’s career took off in a big way. Her name was changed to Lucille Ricksen and she was chosen by producer Samuel Goldwyn to appear in a series of comedy shorts with titles such as
Edgar’s Hamlet, Edgar Camps Out
and
Edgar, the Explorer
. These films ran from 1920 to 1921 before there then came the chance not only to act in a feature, but also to work alongside her brother Marshall when she was cast in
The Old Nest
, a film based on a story written by Rupert Hughes, the uncle of Howard Hughes.

Lucille impressed everyone with whom she worked. She had the opportunity of not only working with Rupert again several years later, but also becoming extremely good friends too. She was also a hit with movie fans and would often tour the country, chatting to children, appearing in theatres and attending celebrity events. The child seemed to enjoy the attention and the work, and as a result recorded her news meticulously in her scrapbook whenever she had a spare moment. She was living a lovely, fairytale dream; yes, she was busy and her childhood was not like that of other children, but she was having fun with it anyway. For a while . . .

As Lucille turned twelve, her work on camera began to change and the studio altered her image from that of a cutiepie, ringlet-wearing kid to a sophisticated adult player, before casting her in films such as
Human Wreckage
(1923), a film about drug addiction, as well as allowing her to play the “sweetheart” role in
The Judgment of the Storm
(1923). In February 1923, the
Covington Republic
newspaper called Lucille “The youngest leading lady on the screen”, and described her as having big brown eyes and a wealth of blonde hair. They even printed her real age – twelve – but this would not last for long. In an attempt to make it more acceptable that she was now being offered grown-up roles, the studio had to make her a fully fledged “woman” and, before she knew it, they were saying that she was sixteen years old, when in actual fact she was still four years younger.

Disturbingly, the studio did not seem to see anything wrong with this, and would often cast her as the “devoted but excessively jealous young wife” alongside much older stars. In one particular film she was even cast as a young woman who is beaten up and generally abused by her bully of a husband; while on the cover of
Picture Play
magazine, she appeared wearing a large hat, with her bare shoulder, arm and some of her back visible. The wrong signals were clearly being given out and with so many fully fledged adult actresses and models around there was, of course, absolutely no need to use a child in a grown-up role. The reason the studio insisted on doing so remains a mystery, and it is equally concerning that it appears that at no time did her mother step in and tell the studios that Lucille was far too young for such dramatic roles.

The leap from child actress to adult at the age of just twelve very definitely had a lasting effect on Lucille Ricksen and it is clear that the types of parts being given to her only succeeded in priming the vulnerable young girl for all manner of disturbing real-life situations. It is interesting to note that at this point in time, Lucille stopped carefully cutting out and lovingly presenting her newspaper clippings, and now began tearing the pages out and just throwing them into the scrapbooks. Something had changed both on and off the camera, and for young Lucille Ricksen the glamour had ceased and her life would never be the same again.

If anyone had the least bit of concern for the child actress, nobody seems to have come forward to say so, and the adult roles and scripts continued to arrive at her door. Tragically the young girl seemed to develop a succession of crushes on her co-stars during this time, which – it has been said – were possibly even reciprocated, although the actors in question knew that Lucille was not yet past the age of consent. A case in point is an announcement in the pages of
Billboard
which said that Lucille had married actor Sydney Chaplin in the autumn of 1923. This seems absurd considering her age and there is no absolute proof that it happened, especially considering that no official comment was ever made about the “marriage” and, after the announcement, there was never any mention of it again.

Still,
Billboard
must have had some reason to believe that the thirteen-year-old actress was marrying thirty-eight-year-old Chaplin. The two must surely have been close enough for people to think they could have been an item, and Lucille herself once told an interviewer that while working together, they had a “perfectly screaming time”.

By the time 1924 arrived, the child actress was being put into one film after another, and working long, hard hours at the studio. After completing no fewer than ten films in seven months, she was absolutely exhausted and in desperate need of a rest, but still Hollywood called and insisted she work. Sadly, this was the beginning of the end for Lucille Ricksen, whose young body could handle no more of the gruelling schedule that had been thrust upon her since almost the day she was born. As a result of exhaustion, the poor girl collapsed and was confined to bed at home, where her concerned mother kept a vigil and vowed to keep the studio and newspapers away from her daughter until she was better. It was too little, too late, however, and her condition just got worse and worse. The story of her breakdown was eventually leaked and it fell to her doctor, J. F. McKitrick, to announce exactly what he believed to be wrong with the child: