Invisible Themepark

Author: Lee Wallender

Death Behind Flagstone: Tom Neal, Palm Springs, and Studio City

Tom Neal was a middling movie actor from the late 1930s to the 1950s who was more known for his off-screen escapades than for his acting. Neal’s best role was in the curious film-noir, Detour. It’s non-copyrighted; check it out.

As a young man, Neal was an amateur boxer with a good string of wins.

Then, Neal was involved with actress Barbara Payton, herself a hard-luck case who was a hottie for all of three seconds before descending into alcoholism, madness, and violence.

Payton was engaged to actor Franchot Tone, then had an affair with Neal. Neal and Tone rivaled for Payton, and Neal ended up severely beating Tone.

But Neal’s best-known off-screen violence happened on April 1, 1965, at 2481 N Cardillo Ave, Palm Springs, CA, where he shot his wife, Gail Bennet, in the back of the head as she napped on a bed.

1965: Tom Neal House, 2481 N Cardillo Ave, Palm Springs, CA

Tom Neal House in 2020: 2481 N Cardillo Ave, Palm Springs, CA

After essentially executing his wife, Neal drove up to the Tyrol Haus Restaurant, about an hour’s away above Palm Springs in Idyllwood.

Tom Neal, 1952 and 1971

After legal machinations, Neal was sentenced to 1-to-15 years and served only 6 years.

Released in 1971 and sporting a Bobby Troup haircut, Neal as a gardener in Palm Springs for a short period. Before long, he came to be living in Studio City, circumstances unknown, with his 15 year-old son, Tom Neal, Jr.

Valley New (Van Nuys) 1958 Ad for 12020 Hoffman Studio City

And that’s curious. Neal’s apartment, at 12020 Hoffman St, Studio City, CA 91604, borders CBS Studio Center. Even though Tom Neal was the least employable actor in Hollywood, having just come out of prison and his looks very much gone, why would he choose to live in a studio-centric apartment building such as this one?

In 1972, Tom Neal died here. After years of hard living, his body gave up. Behind all of that mid-century modern flagstone, in the Ray-Gene Apartments, two stories, 26 units, built in 1956. It seems a fitting death, period-perfect, very Tarantino and Once Upon a Time in Hollywood.

12020 Hoffman Studio City

April 18, 2020
Farny: Mysterious Drop-Dead Death of Bette Davis’ Husband

An overactive imagination could come up with a scenario where Bette Davis kills her second husband, Arthur Farnsworth. After all, pick any Bette Davis movie at random, and she’s probably killing someone. Just the other night, I caught a very random Bette Davis movie: a weird 1964 late-late-film noir called Dead Ringer where Bette Davis kills Bette Davis (she plays two parts: twin sisters). Did she kill her husband, Arthur Farnsworth? That was a persistent urban legend, and here’s why.

Arthur Farnsworth

Today, you can walk past the Frolic Room on 6249 Hollywood Boulevard and admire its Art Deco facade, without knowing one item of trivia that happened below your feet. The Hollywood Walk of Fame star for Connie Stevens is there. Apparently, too, the L.A. Metro Rail, the subway, runs directly underneath that spot. Every piece of ground has its history.

Here, too, Bette Davis’ husband mysteriously dropped dead one day in 1943. Nothing obviously homicidal happened, no shooting, no stabbing, not even a heart attack. This reportedly otherwise healthy man in his 30s simply dropped dead on the sidewalk and no one ever could determine why.

Bette and Farny

By 1943, Bette Davis was already an established movie and stage actress, playing roles as varied as a “vixen and a tragedienne,” as described by the Los Angeles Times. Unlike so many other movie actors and actresses of the day, she married outside of the industry: Arthur Farnsworth.

Born on December 15, 1908, in Proctor, Vermont, Farnsworth was a high school friend of Davis and working as the assistant manager at a ski lodge Peckett’s On Sugar Hill in the White Mountains of New Hampshire when he met her.

On one of Davis’ vacations to her cottage, Butternut, in Sugar Hill, New Hampshire, Davis and Farnsworth rekindled their friendship and turned it into a marriage in 1940. Farnsworth was often reported at that time as being a former commercial airlines pilot affiliated with the aeronautical branch of the Minneapolis-Honeywell Co.

Pantages Theater, 1943

Pantages Theater, 2019

A Stop in Hollywood

At the time, Davis and Farnsworth were living at 1705 Rancho Avenue, Glendale, in a $50,000 house on the banks of the Los Angeles River that Davis called Riverbottom.

Some reports state that, on that day, Farnsworth first went to Burbank, then came back to Hollywood.

Why was Farnsworth here in the first place?

Farnsworth may have caught a show at the Pantages. On Monday, the Pantages was showing Mr. Lucky, with Cary Grant and Laraine Day. He might have caught a late matinee to see that picture.

Regent Liquors may have been his destination, but proprietor Dave Freedman did not mention Farnsworth visiting the store; only that as Farnsworth “passed his store” Farnsworth emitted a muffled scream.

Regent Liquor Store, Hollywood Blvd., 1949

The fall happened on the afternoon of August 23, 1943. After a muffled scream, Farny fell backward and struck his head on the pavement. He fell into a coma and was dead by 6:30 p.m. August 25.

He never regained consciousness. The base of his skull was fractured and he suffered several hemorrhages and a high fever as he lay in the hospital.

April 17, 2020
Bell Telephone Company Pittsburgh Office Snack Bar, 1960

June, 1960: The world is alive. From Architectural Forum, we hear of a snack bar.

The 1,600 employees in the Bell Telephone Company’s brand new Pittsburgh office building can point with pride to their new lounge and snack bar. It’s truly one of the interior “showplaces.” Two Natco products were used extensively to help create this modern center of color, texture and design: (1) Natco roman brick with Wave-Tex finish, and (2) Natco ceramic glazed Vitritile. But modernity is only one of the important qualities of Natco structural clay tile building products. They’re also the most functional building products available. Take Vitritile, for example. Ceramic glazed Vitritile comes in a variety of pleasing, non-fading colors. It’s easy to install and maintain. It’s fireproof, sanitary and will never lose its “brand new” look…

Today, this building, at 201 Stanwix St. Pittsburgh PA, 2020, is an apartment building:

Polished, classic space to make your urban home! With sleek stainless steel appliances, granite countertops, and hardwood floors, among other high-end touches throughout, we’ve laid a modern framework for you to impart your unique, personal style.

201 Stanwix St. Pittsburgh PA, 2020

February 15, 2020
How Waiting in Line Is the Purest Form of Democracy

Nobody likes waiting in line. You’re waiting in line at the DMV, for concert tickets, movie tickets, at the theme park. In non-First World societies or in First World societies that experience temporary collapse, waiting in line takes the form of breadlines, food lines, lines for assistance.

Yet the alternative is worse: a mob rush for resources in which the strongest get the most, the less-strong get less, and the weakest end up with nothing.

Brussels Breadline Post World War II

Waiting in line is pure democracy. You don’t have to be strong or aggressive or violent. You don’t need smarts or savvy. You don’t need connections to powerful people.

You can buy into this form of democracy by doing only one thing: showing up. You can gain an advantage in only one legitimate way: showing up earlier than the person in front of you.

Bill Gates in Line at Dick’s Drive-In, Seattle

In a conversation with Dave Rubin, Heather MacDonald says that

the rule of law is the essence of a civilization we lose that and you get third world anarchy with everybody trying to game the system. You know, queueing is a thing of beauty. We take it for granted but for people to be able to quietly wait in line and wait their place, as opposed to trying to, you know, get to the top and just muscle everybody else out

February 13, 2020
Hong Kong Bank of China as Giant Protest Sign

As some of us sit around in the burgs and hamlets of the United States, knitting our fingers and wondering about the shape that China’s “invasion” of the U.S. will take, need we look any further than Hong Kong? In 1997, Hong Kong’s sovereignty was transferred to China, and the “one country, two systems” principle that helped everyone feel better about the hand-off has been diminishing ever since. While Hong Kong is still a freer type of China than Mainland China, those freedoms are winnowing away.

Bank of China Hong Kong Branch, February 2020

Changes subtlely happen. Nick Frisch writes in The New Yorker that

interference and intimidation have become more common. Phone calls from Beijing operatives to Hong Kong officials and journalists are now routine. Chinese security agents have disappeared dissidents from the city’s streets. In 2015, several men who published salacious books about the Party leadership were kidnapped, and later…[confessed] to subversion.

Three decades before the hand-off, the Hong Kong branch of the Bank of China, at no.2A Des Voeux Road Central, Central, Hong Kong, became a giant protest sign. In true globo form, we find three countries’ cultures jammed together into one view: the U.S. Hilton hotel corporation, the Bank of China, and English cricket (in the other image) being played

Explains LIFE magazine, October 13, 1967:

Possibly Red China’s proudest monument outside its borders is the Hong Kong branch of the Bank of China, which towers over the neighboring British Hong Kong and Shanghai Bank (right). Last week, to celebrate the 18th anniversary of the Communist take-over, the Chinese bank got a festoon of posters with the predictable slogans: “Long life to the Chinese People’s Republic,” and “Raise the Red flag of Mao’s thought and march forward courageously.” On the same day, however, the Communists once again began supplying water to the British colony, the Hong Kong stock market hit a two-year high and a cricket game proceeded in leisurely fashion opposite the Red bank.

February 13, 2020