Another Dead Gay Guy, Part Two: Hollywood Murder Triangle

Eighty years ago this past week, death stalked through Hollywood, taking three lives. It’s not a famous murder case, but one that captured my attention while I was researching the Mary McElroy case last weekend. Perhaps it’s best to start at the beginning:

Once upon a time, in 1927, a young man named Paul Vare was brought out to Hollywood from Billings, Montana, by evangelist Aimee Semple McPherson. Some time after that, he was adopted by one Ada E. Wharton, a bedridden widow. By the mid-thirties, Paul Wharton’s talents were in demand from several prominent Los Angeles residents. Under the name Paul Ivar, he dressed famous clotheshorses like Jean Harlow, Aileen Pringle, Carmen Consedine (daughter of Alexander Pantages) and Constance Bennett (he designed the bridesmaid gowns for Bennett’s marriage to Henri de la Falaise, a Gloria Swanson ex).

Then, on the evening of April 25, 1935, Paul Ivar had a little dinner party with his chauffeur and secretary, thirty-five-year-old William Howard, and one (or possibly two) other men. He was still sharing a fashionable apartment with his foster mother. At some point in the evening, Paul brought Ada some dinner and then returned to his guests. Eventually, Ada heard somebody leave the main room outside, then three or four shots rang out, followed by the sound of her foster son groaning and slumping on the floor. Frantically, she crawled out of bed into the front hallway of the apartment, where she found Paul bleeding and clutching a telephone. As he expired in her arms, a man she had never seen before rushed in and stopped dead in his tracks. He was tall and blond, probably dressed in a gray suit and gray hat. Mrs. Wharton pleaded for help but the man disappeared into the kitchen and was never seen again. William Howard had also vanished.

Across town, a thirty-nine-year-old UCLA law professor named Henry E. Bolte was coming home from a dinner for his law class, noticed a stranger near the entrance to his apartment but paid no attention to him. Bolte walked to his apartment and practically had his key in the door when the stranger pulled a gun and shot at him three times, wounding him twice. Bolte’s wife, Virginia, opened the door to find her husband lying in a pool of his own blood, still alive but in critical condition. Investigators hurried from the sight of Paul Ivar’s death to Bolte’s apartment. William Howard was found nearby; he had shot himself in the head.

Two seemingly unconnected murders were now linked, and the connections that emerged over the next few days came out in the press in code words and suggestive phrasing. The news stories on April 26 described the tall blond “Mystery Man” sought by police for questioning.

Two men and two women, one reportedly dressed like a man, were questioned by the police. Meanwhile more facts about Paul Ivar emerged. He had struggled with an addiction to narcotics (but had been cured by Aimee Semple McPherson). At the time of his death, he was on probation for the theft of an $800 diamond ring belonging to a Mrs. Ray Wolfe of Bevely Hills. He and his crowd were described in coded terms by the newspapers: "pale," "strange," "exotic." Quothe Captain William Bright, head of the LA Sheriff's homicide division, in the Palm Beach Post: "They were strange men who led strange lives." Social politeness of the day meant that he and other law enforcement officials wouldn't comment on the possible motive, once financial disputes had been ruled out; readers who were "in the know" would have guessed in half a second that something lavender was afoot.

Actress and notorious clotheshorse Aileen Pringle, in an "exclusive" interview with the same publication, elaborated on her professional relationship with the designer: “He was exceptionally talented, and his designs were simply lovely. They were a little – well, a little bizarre. But good. Before he finished them, he told me he needed some new clothes for himself, and asked if he could use my charge account at a store. He said he could check off our bills to each other in that way. When my statement came back from the store, I found he had bought, not clothes, but several hundred dollars worth of perfumes, atomizers, cosmetics and similar things. I asked him about them, and he told me, ‘well, I use them.’”

Pringle went on to explain that “he had had a fight with Constance Bennett when she discovered he was Chinese.” I have not found any other information articles that suggest he was Chinese, and the one photo I did find didn’t hint that he was anything other than Caucasian. She allows one last revelation: “He occasionally appeared at my home… with curious, feminine-looking men.”

Aileen Pringle ought to have known something about 'bizarre - but good' fashions. Nine years earlier, she was being dressed by Erte. I'll leave the story there for now. Next month, the conclusion, more fun facts, and the identity of the big blond Mystery Man.

Another Dead Gay Guy, Part One: I Feel Like an Asshole

I want to warn you in advance: This post is going to have a rather long set-up.

Whenever I have a big assignment or a midterm or, in the case of this past weekend, both looming ahead of me, I tend to do a LOT of procrastinating. Things get done one way or another, but not before lots of time has been spent checking email, checking social networking sights, footnoting articles on Wikipedia, and so on. This particular story actually starts with me reading IMDB trivia for the movie Kansas City. That in tern lead me to do a number of searches on Mary McElroy, the young woman on whos kidnapping the movie was based. (The kabillion-footnote Wikipedia article Mary McElroy (kidnapping victim) was written in the next few hours by yours truly.)

While reading scanned, highlight-sensitive newspaper articles from 1935, I found (I believe it was in the Miami Daily News) a somewhat scattered, confusing article about a Hollywood dress designer’s murder, one of three connected deaths. A bed-ridden spinster, a tall blond mystery man and Jean Harlow were all connected to the case.

Obviously, this was too good to be ignored. I went ahead and probably lost a good couple hours scanning for articles and coming up with a surprising amount of info that still seemed to have some missing pieces. What I found was tantalizing; I ate it up like the true crime vampire that I’ve always been. (I hope to follow up this post – hence the ‘Part One’ in the title – soon.) Then I checked facebook.

And I was stopped cold. Checking in on a few people from high school (they rarely come up in my news feed – something I don’t know how to change) I happened to search an acquaintance, not a close friend, but somebody from my past who I knew for a brief period and was friendly with. When I found him again on the site a year or so ago I was totally envious of him: he had a great job as a designer, lots of time and money to spend on trips to exotic places where Spanish is the primary language, a shockingly handsome boyfriend, a six pack you could bounce quarters on.

He was dead. His wall was covered with “we love you,” “RIP,” “we’ll miss you,” etc. I was shocked. It seemed so unreal. I’ve lost classmates before but this moment proved that each loss is just as sad and unnerving. There was no word as to the circumstances of his death on his page, so I did a quick google search: His death was everywhere. I don’t want to go into the details, and I only have what’s been printed and posted and forwarded and editorialized. I don’t really feel that I have the right to either. The absolutely appalling comments on NY Daily News’ site are bad enough.

It struck me, as I went from one page to the other, trying to get more details about Ale’s death that there must be somebody else out there doing the same thing, but not for the same reason. Just a few minutes before I had been devouring the details of a seventy-five year old murder case without feeling any sympathy for the victims in the case. There had to be another me out there, at the same moment, doing the same thing with this case. I felt like an asshole. Serves me right.

I want to close with my memories of Ale. He was two years ahead of me at Paly. He was closeted at the time, and I don’t begrudge him for that, knowing his circle. He still seemed to be himself, very intelligent and witty, with an appreciation for the finer things (Peter Greenaway comes to mind first). We knew each other briefly outside of high school, when he came to a couple of youth group support meetings. We had a mutual friend, my neighbor Katie, who had some classes with him and graduated the same year. I’m sure I still have his business card in a drawer somewhere. As much as he would have hated growing old, we clearly lost him too soon.

(12.3.1983 - 4.13.2010)

End of the Month Round-Up

So, here are a couple of fun experiences I had this past (couple of months).

First of all, I actually got to meet somebody who has my dream job. I got to meet Andrea Kalas for thirty minutes at Paramount. She was very cordial and had a lot of helpful, encouraging advice. After all, one of her first major projects. I'm forever indebted to Tom, who spurred the Bessie Love post from last month, for putting me in touch with her.

Secondly, I've had a few production gigs, some of which actually paid, but all of them were good experiences. I've had some shitty, shitty PA jobs before, so I ought to know. There are some in the future, unpaid for the most part, but it makes school bearable.

Right now, I am on Spring Break, and last night I went to see Ran at the Stanford Theater with my dad and my brother. Now, I'm one of those people who needs to see a Kurosawa movie in the theater, and not only because that's the only way to see them. I'm have a bad case of that very modern disease, the ADD, and it makes watching anything on DVD a bit difficult. With nobody to watch you (and judge you), you find yourself folding laundry, checking your email or rushing back and forth from the kitchen to microwave a burrito while the movie plays. If the movie has subtitled, its even more of a problem; half the plot goes missing, characters become indistinguishable, you get the drift. So I always welcome to opportunity to see anything in the theater that I know isn't going to completely captivate me.

(That's not to say that Ran isn't a captivating, powerful film. It is. It's a strong story (you know, King Lear) and beautifully told. The lush greens and brilliant reds really make you appreciate the look of projected film. I'd never seen Ran before, and I'm glad that this was my introduction to it.)

The Stanford Theater and me go way back. I saw my first silent movie, Safety Last, there when I was seven (that's a story for another day). I saw many of my favorites there for the first time: Errol Flynn's Robin Hood, the silent Ben Hur, These Three, The Man Who Laughs. In high school I went all the time, sometimes with a friend but usually alone; I liked to do things by myself at the time anyway.

Flash forward five or six years to now, and I am very much a changed man. I strongly dislike going to movies alone. I haven't gone to see a conventional movie on my own since 2007 (Aranofsky's The Fountain - which I liked). This past month, however, I've had a bit of regression to my past life as a chubby, virginal, be-acned seventeen-year-old in the form of screenings at the Silent Theater down on Santa Monica and Melrose in Hollywood. I was most excited to find out that they were screening a Tod Browning silent from 1926, The Mystic with Aileen Pringle, because, as it just so happens, me and The Mystic go way back.

Flashback to 1996. I'm 11, I'm in sixth grade, and I'm going through a phase where I want to be a fashion designer. After haunting every fashion section of the local library for at least a week, I come away with an awareness of the artist Erte, and his amazing body of work that spanned over fifty years. I was enthralled by his extravagance, his use of detail, his willingness to show bare breasts and, most notably, his time spent in the mid-1920's as a couturier-in-residence at Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. He designed sets and costumes for the likes of Marion Davies, Carmel Myers (his favorite), Norma Shearer and the exquisite above-mentioned Miss Pringle. Among the illustrations in the two books of his that the Palo Alto Library System holds are both costume sketches and tantalizing set stills from The Mystic. I remember staring at those photos and wondering if I would ever actually see the movie itself. It seems so long ago and so far away.

Well, I got my chance. I want to actually write a review, but that can be done another time. The issue at hand is regressing back to high school. I say this only because I went alone and wished that I hadn't. I made a sheepish attempt to invite a couple of people at the last minute. I didn't expect any sort of big crowd to show up, but when I got there, there was a line out the door. I was worried that I wouldn't get in. Nobody resembled the crowd I expected. Almost everyone in attendance was young, slim, clearly well adjusted and not at all crotchety. They all had dates.

At first I felt encroached-upon. All I wanted to do was slink into a quiet screening of some obscure movie, have my box of candy all to myself, and then slink back out. It was exactly the kind of experience I could have at the Stanford way back then, with the cavernous auditorium barely an eighth full. For some inexplicable reason I felt angry at everyone there. Then I caught myself; I was being stupid. I should have rejoyced, as I do now, that so many people had an interest in this movie. I should have been happy for The Mystic that I almost had to fight my in to see it.

Then there was the fact that I was alone. I felt so weird and naked there, being one of the few people with no date, no entourage. I look back on the situation and I realize that, generally, I don't often expect my friends to have any interest in these events. This is silly, of course. Case in point, I met up with some friends right after (a last minute thing) and they said "Oh, that sounds like so much fun. You should have told us." I don't doubt that I have cool friends, but I forget that we have as much in common as we do.

My resolution for April: Do a better job of inviting people to stuff.

Special Shout Out: To Bessie with Love

This blog is sort of an eleventh-hour act on my part. I have been entrusted, by another silent film enthusiast, with the education of a mutual friend. What education, you ask? Well, those of us in the silent film geek ghost army (we have meetings and everything) love nothing more than to quiz each other on the vaguest and least relevant silent film-related topics we can think of. Then we silently judge that person when they get dates of birth wrong, when they forget that Colleen Moore’s real name was Kathleen Morrison, or when they can’t name the ugly Talmadge sister (it was Natalie, loosers!).

In this case, however, the topic is might be vague, but she is certainly not irrelevant. Even now, she has a following, though she is one of many who, it’s safe to say, are woefully neglected. I am speaking, of course, about the actress Miss Bessie Love. I’ll try to do justice to this talented beauty, because I’m a true friend. And friends don’t let friends go through life without teaching them, in blog post form, about Bessie Love. This one is for you, Kev.


To start of, Bessie was not her real name; she was born Juanita Horton in 1896, the daughter of a rancher in Midland, Texas. A daughter of the west, she started working as an actress in 1916 out of necessity. She appeared in several movies at the Fine Arts studio in Los Angeles, including the 1916 epic Intolerance: Love's Struggle Through the Ages (the movie with the elephant pillars). D.W. Griffith, the director of Intolerance, is usually thought of as the person who came up with Bessie's stage name.

Breakthrough roles came very quickly; she was cast opposite William S. Hart and Douglas Fairbanks in 1916 films. One year later, she was playing lead roles in feature films for Vitagraph and Pathé. In 1922, the Western Association of Motion Picture Advertisers selected Bessie and twelve other young actresses as the WAMPAS Baby Stars. She was still a major player all through the twenties, playing a bootlegger’s girlfriend in Those Who Dance (1924) and Broadway diva in The Matinee Idol (1928, an early Frank Capra endeavor).

The coming of sound derailed a lot of careers, but it earned Bessie Love an Oscar nomination in 1929. The movie was The Broadway Melody, which is still widely thought of as the first true movie musical. She worked steadily in sound films from 1929 to 1932-ish. (at left: Bessie and Anita Page in The Broadway Melody)

Perhaps because of marriage, her career dropped off after the early 1930’s, but for the next several decades of her life, Bessie continued to take the occasional role in film or on television, mostly in England, where she lived for most of her 'post-Hollywood' life. Her notable roles at the end of her career were in Warren Beatty’s epic Reds (1981), as well as Ragtime (also 1981) and the sexy vampire movie The Hunger (1983). She died in London in April of 1986.

Bessie was a Virgo. She was once married to Howard Hawkes’ brother William, which also made her a cousin in law of Carole Lombard. had terrific face, with big expressive eyes and a long nose. Standing approximately five feet, she was petit and doll-like even into her later years.

One more fun fact about Bessie: She wrote a play in 1958 called The Homecoming.

Below is a clip from Hollywood Revue of 1929. To say she's the best part of the movie is an understatement, as you can probably tell. I like this clip because I feel like it shows off her personality and her abundant talent. Thank you dudfilmscorporation for the clip.

Three Great Ladies, One Great Movie

One of the best recent broadcasts on TCM the other night was a gem called Comet Over Broadway, a drama about a woman who's dream of being an actress breaks her life, then catapults her to success, then holds her to some hasty words from years before that she knows she can't go back on. The reason for the broadcast has to do with its leading lady, Kay Francis, who is no longer with us but who turned 105 this past Wednesday.

Watching this movie, I was moved by its story, which was involving and well told. Perhaps the biggest treat in a viewing of the film is the discovery (for me) of three wonderful, woefully-neglected actresses: Francis, Minna Gombell and Sybil Jason. It's also a great showcase for the talents of a man best known for his dance arrangements: Busby Berkeley. Even some die-hard 42nd Street fans don't remember that Berkeley directed several non-musicals between 1933 and 1951. Few of his non-musical ventures were A Pictures. This one clearly falls into the "programmer" category. Yet it's so much better than that. Spoilers ahead.

Kay plays a small-town shopkeeper named Even, married and with a baby, who has vague dreams about acting and a side gig in community theater. When a famous Broadway actor (Ian Keith) comes to town, Eve attracts his attention and she goes to meet him at his hotel room for 'acting lessons.' Her husband (John Litel, nobody famous, but a great actor) gets wind of this and, in the brawl that ensues from confronting the illicit pair, the actor is knocked down a slope and into a ravine (spoiler coming), and fatally hits his head. Eve's husband is brought to trial for the accident and charged with manslaughter. Eve is racked with guilt, particularly when her lawyer explains to her that it was her own foolish ambition that brought this tragedy upon her. As her husband goes into the big house, she pledges to do everything she can to get him out, and once he is out, she'll be there waiting for him.

Snagging a burlesque gig, Eve goes on the road with her baby daughter, Jackie. On the train, the troupe's leading lady Tim (Gombell) takes Kay and the child under her wing. Eve gets pressured by various men to leave the kid with somebody else and focus on her career, and after holding out for a long time, she decides it would be best to leave Jackie under Tim's care. Tim, who had years ago lost her only child to what sounds like SIDS, is elated; she's become very attached to the child herself. Eve travels to country and makes it to New York city, where she meets a handsome British producer, Bert (Ian Hunter), who casts her right away in a production. She is driven away, however, by the show's jealous leading lady (Leona Miracle). Despondent, Eve sales to England on a whim.

Several years pass, and Eve has become the most talked about stage actress in Britain. She sends for Tim and Jackie, now 8 or 9 and being played by the fantastic, utterly adorable Jason. Initially happy to see them, Eve is crestfallen when she realizes that Jackie has grown up under the impression that Tim is her mother, a misunderstanding Tim failed to correct. Reluctantly, Eve goes along with it.

When they return to New York, Eve reconnects with Bert; there is still the same sexual chemistry between them and, now that Eve is a big name, he can be the one to mount her American debut. At the same time, she finds out that her husband's case can be overturned, but only for several thousand dollars that she doesn't have. She agrees to work with Bert if he can loan her the money, which he does.

The play is a huge success, and Eve is forced to accept the fact that she is in love with Bert. In a long and tearful conversation, she tells him the whole story, and why they can never be together. Bert is reluctant to accept this; surely, her husband will understand that, after all this time... Eve agrees. She goes to meet her husband at the prison. He is so happy to see her, she can't bring herself to tell him that she loves someone else. In the final scene, we see Eve walking with Jackie back to the prison, to her fate, with nonetheless a bright and prosperous future ahead, and with her dreams of success achieved. It is then that Jackie calls her "Mommy." The circle of Eve's trials is complete.

Like its three stunning leading ladies, Comet Over Broadway is long overdue for rediscovery.

More Letty Fashion Madness

Here is a still from Letty Lynton, that obscure, celestial beauty that is the highly suppressed Joan Crawford multi-national-extramarital-affair-a-thon from 1932.


I'm not entirely sure how I feel about this get up, but it looks like Miss Le Sueur wasn't having much fun. When you consider how hot those sets could get under all those Kleig light (not to mention how heavy fur coats are), it's no wonder. Still, it's the kind of bold statement a 1930's would make (or die from heat exhaustion trying). (Need to retrace my steps and find the link. Will post when I locate it.)

Here's another picture of Joan in the same outfit. This time she isn't being Little Miss Mopey Face.


And just for kicks, here's another Adrian creation Joan wore in this film. If the beatnik vultures from The Jungle Book needed to be sexy, they could probably use this picture as a reference.

I feel greatly remiss for not having discovered this sooner, but there is a fantastic Joan Crawford website where you can find out just about everything you could want to know about even her most obscure movies. There's a great Letty Lynton page too.

The Toy Wife

Last Tuesday, Austrian-born actress Luise Rainer turned 100. To celebrate, TCM spent that day airing a selection of her films, and I recorded most of them. I still need to watch The Great Zeigfeld and The Good Earth, but last night, I snuggled under the covers and took a gander at a film about which I knew nothing. The title alone intrigued me: The Toy Wife.

Luise, with her Austrian accent, plays the daughter of a Louisiana plantation owner; the fact that she has spent all of her cognisant life in a French boarding school excuses the difference between her accent and the polished Hollywood accents of her father, her older sister and all the other white people in the movie. At the opening of the story, the Brigard family returns to New Orleans, still under French rule, and settle back into their gorgeous plantation house, slaves and all (more on that in a minute). We learn quickly that Luise is not only the baby in the family, she's the most annoying and least likable. The character's name is technically Gilberte, already a bad sign, but everyone calls her by her nickname, 'Frou Frou.'

The naive Luise falls for a handsome lawyer named Georges, and they marry. Since Georges is played by Melvyn Douglas, the attraction is understandable. Georges still carries a bit of a torch for the older Brigard sister, Louise (Barbara O'Neil) and Frou Frou still feels some attraction for a younger bad-boy, Andre (Robert Young). Louise movies in with Georges and Frou Frou to help her sister become a better wife and mother, but finds herself doing all the work. Georges finds that his attraction to the other adult in the house more easily justified, and even more so when his flighty wife elopes with Andre. And so follows all the backstabbing and fighting over children that one would expect from a movie like this.

Between the gleaming foyers and glittering gowns you'd expect characters named Alexis or Krystle to show up randomly and pull on each others' hair pieces, but the real shocking element that sets The Toy Wife apart from other films, even Gone with the Wind, is the treatment of the slave characters. This HAS to be the reason that so few people have seen this film, the reason it's not on DVD. This movie has more speaking parts for black actors than any other film of 1938 as far as I can tell (except maybe for Gods Step Children). Most of them have names and at least basic differentiated personality traits, but they still have bad grammar and names like Brutus and Pompey.

The character played by Theresa Harris presents the most brain-exploding example. She smilingly introduces herself as 'Pick;' because she has no given name, everyone just calls her an abbreviated version of the pejorative 'Pickaninny.' This occurs when Frou Frou is getting acquainted will all the female slaves in the house, and Harris goes down on her knee to say "I wishes I could be your own pa'ticular darkie."

"You do, do you?" answers the benevolent Frou Frou. "Well then you shall be. But if you're going to belong to me you'll have to wear shoes and stockings."

Theresa Harris is an actress that I truly love. I've probably seen her in a dozen movies, and she always plays a maid, but she never lets the absurd dialog get the better of her. Every 'you is' gets treated with perfect diction, and it highlights just how beneath her such characters were. It's as if she's winking to the African American members of the audience, assuring them "It's ok, I know this sucks, but we'll get through it."

Allegedly, this was one of several projects given to Rainer as punishment for her difficult behavior. A reviewer on the IMDb calls it a B-Movie. With its amazing costumes (by the incomparable Orry-Kelly) and detailed set decoration, this period piece doesn't look at all like a B-movie. The direction by Richard Thorpe is too mannered for an already slow screenplay, which has neither economic passage of time or witty dialogue. A long movie, with an irritating lead character, equals a disappointment in my book. Rainer comes off as a capable actress who's doing the best she can with a problematic role. By all accounts she hated this movie.

One consolation remains: One can live through racism, hoop-skirts and winning two consecutive Oscars, and still live to be 100. Happy belated birthday, Luise Rainer. I'm sure I'll like you better as Anna Held.