HOLLYWOOD CONFIDENTIAL

BRUCE McCALL imagines a Hollywood when scandals were really scandalous♪say, the year 1937♪and magazines such as Fan Fever and Filmthrob could get the inside scoop on the “suicide” of Clive Mountebank or the night when the cops discovered Darla Demure’s testicle collection

The Secret History

CORNA DE VOID

Corna kept something like half a dozen cabana boys, five gardeners, a rotating lifeguard crew, and a few chauffeurs up at Swandive, the mansion Clive Mountebank had bought her. Then Clive was found floating facedown in the pool, his legs tied together and his "suicide note" stuffed in his mouth. That cabana boy never could explain why the cops found him in her bed. Corna was just one of those stars who could do no wrong in the eyes of her fans. During the trial, when she and the D.A. announced their engagement, the judge offered to be best man. Call it a travesty of justice—and some did—but we'd put it down to the sheer damned magic of star power.

SWANDA SWEET

More people saw her in Little Miss Curlylocks than glimpsed the total eclipse of the sun. Then, in '24, Screen Sins broke the story that Swanda chained her ma to the kitchen sink when she had visitors— to hide her white-trash background. As was later revealed, she was still turning tricks at the time Mutual Kineodeon started paying her a million a picture. (It was said she also stole commissary flatware, and didn't wash.) What happened? Her next release, Little Miss Ringlets, netted higher than the gross national product of Mexico. A mop-topped little juggernaut, Swanda. But then, in early '26, the week Little Miss Goldenhair premiered, Filmthrob printed that candid photo of Swanda, bald as a doorknob. It was all over for her in a week.

CASHDOWN

Reymundo Castanet gave Cashdown to Nita Olay as a wedding gift, but she ran off with Royce Cloverfield before the foundation was poured. Hudson Harmon became the first occupant—sadly, he was barely there long enough to write his "Take care of my ball gowns" note. His famous pagan funeral was what caused the fire. Then Buddy Bangalore and Loona Vox moved in and doubled Cashdown's size. Enter the naked-chariot-race rumors and reports of late-night gunplay. Buddy lost the place to Esme de Trance in a card game, but the ever questing Esme promptly took Evangeline orders. She was all set to give Cashdown to the church for use as a convent, but then she discovered the opium den in the cellar and changed her mind. No sooner was Esme evicted than Lance Planet and Daisy Quail took over the mansion and promptly razed half of it, an accident which triggered their divorce. By the 40s the place was a Cadillac dealership. Some mags prattled on about a "Curse of Cashdown," but it wasn't a single curse. The curses were serial, and they were myriad.

RICKY DIX JR

Ricky tries Westerns after growing out of juvenile roles, but no dice. Tumbleweed allergy. Ricky drifts—from pest control to necktie painting to selling reefer and worse. He hooks Nola Boles on horse and blackmails her into making him her personal manager, but shoots most of the money into his arm. Then, one strung-out night—December 7, 1941 — he needs cash for a buy, and Nola's not at her apartment. Her pal Salome, the Million-Dollar Mermaid, is. Poor Salome's too high to find her handbag, so Ricky pitches her off the balcony in a rage. Nobody buys his alibi (that Japanese agents had barged in and did it to demoralize America). To kill time on death row, Ricky tries his hand at screenplays, and damned if he doesn't come up snake eyes—he's a natural. Sells everything he writes till the appeals run out. The guy is sitting on millions in story sales the night he does the hot squat. The Screenwriters Guild stood vigil outside. Only in Hollywood!

TRIXIE LA DARE

This issue of Screen-Glo never reached the newsstands, but not for the reasons you'd probably surmise. Trixie La Dare's "nymphomania" was Hollywood's oldest cover-up story. The studio had planted it years before to spice up the image of this asexual creature whose only lusts were cribbage and needlepoint. Goons in the hire of H. H. Glotz, head of Cosmodeon Pictures, grabbed and pulped every copy at the printer's because inside, on the "Hollywood After Supper" page, there was a photo of Glotz's nephew Sonny with some chorines and three ranking L.A. mobsters. But that wasn't it, either. Behind their banquette you could see a few of those framed caricatures so popular in clubs back then. One was of old H.H.'s mistress, that little hoyden over at Mogultone. He hated the way she was drawn. Silly, sure, but the power, the vanity, the control of a studio head in those days—was there ever a more perfect example?

BUDDY SHAFTO AND DARLA DEMURE

What is known is that Buddy came home that terrible night and wiped his bloody hands all over the miniature poodles so there'd be no stained towels for the cops to find. Darla hid the hacksaws under her pillow and left her testicle collection out on the coffee table. In brief, there was blind mad panic. The cops had them nailed three minutes after they broke into the house. Why did they do it? Well, it came out that Mogultone wasn't renewing Buddy's contract. Darla, the famous ball-buster, started using the fact to publicly ridicule Buddy's manliness. So he needed to make a gesture—and he got carried away. Ironically, Hollywood always called their place "the enchanted cottage," because the town had billed Buddy and Darla as its happiest couple. They asked if they could hold hands in the gas chamber. So maybe they were.

ROD PHILCO

Rod's career had faded by the late 30s, along with his looks. But he became a poster boy for Hollywood's patriotism during World War II after the press started trumpeting the fact that he'd volunteered for the army way back in 1939. He had, too, but it speaks volumes about the slackness of Hollywood reporting that nobody— nobody—followed up the story to find out that the army he'd volunteered for was the Wehrmacht. Rod's career, and his reign as head of Hollywood's bondage colony, abruptly ended after Lascivia Love's stupid U.S.O. radio interview in 1945. (Tinseltown trivia: Reefer Madness was inspired by Lascivia.) They found poor Rod the next morning all trussed up in the crotch of a tree on the old De Rigueur estate in Holmby Hills; three different people confessed. PhotoScreen listed the crime as one of Hollywood's All-Time Most Baffling Moral Trespasses and, considering everything, properly so!

THOSE NAUGHTY, NAUGHTY NITESPOTS

The February 1937 cover of Reel Romance. Clockwise from dead body: Rod Philco, Navita Meringue, Hoyle Bogus, and Nita Olay compare alibis at Sig Zigler's Hobbledehoy on La Cienega after the world premiere of Make Mine Mayhem. Zigler's breezy way with their didoes endeared him to the stars. Just across the street at Roly's, Inca de Montezuma and her retinue were once ejected en masse for talking with their mouths full. A far cry from the day when Hollywood nightspots were scandal's tawdry nexus. It was at Aesop's Turkish Garden, in 1929, that Rex Redwood mounted a table and raped himself—right straight out of pictures, as things transpired. Not that the restaurateurs were blameless. Chick Arbogast of the old Charbo's, on Doheny, would seat satyrs and nymphos together, on purpose. Adolf Twee and his new boyfriend unfailingly got Adolf's old boyfriend as their waiter. The club owners would always say that this wasn't Indianapolis, that picture people lived with a heightened sense of life and, in dining out, they had expectations of something more than a meal. If so, they almost always got it.

THE FAN’S-EYE VIEW

How times have changed since this Fan Fever feature ran, in December 1938. The Golden Age of Hollywood Scandals is over now—and good riddance, some may say. But if it was an age of raw debauchery and biblical sin, it is also notable in our cynical age that old-time Hollywood fans, come bludgeonings, dismemberments, or dope-addled double suicides, were always more than willing to give the stars the benefit of the doubt, indeed to wink at their high jinks and boo the killjoys with their handcuffs and writs. To be there for them through thick and thin. And, from their example, to realize that something in some ways more precious than lives and limbs has been lost along the way, probably forever. In other words, L.A.'s bulls are playing a mug's game that can end only in heartbreak for your silver-screen favorites.

FAN FEVER QUESTION OF THE MONTH:

When Will L.A.’s Killjoy Coppers Give Movieland Fun-Lovers a Break ?

Snoopy coppers turn Dela LeTray and Knox Carruthers’s purely domestic dispute into a tabloid frenzy.

"Sure it went off eight times," Mola van Panda tells the cops. " I'd never cleaned a gun before.” To no avail, of course!

Bebe had been gainingweight, so Ranee cut some off. Should he pay with his life for going a tad too far?