Invisible Themepark

Category: This Happened Here

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

    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

  • 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.

  • Hi, 1587 35th Avenue, San Francisco, Meet the JFK Assassination

    The Belasco Theater in New York at 111 West 44th Street was built over a century ago for Broadway theater impresario David Belasco. The Belasco is still there and thriving. Anyone who loves Broadway theater has undoubtedly been to the Belasco Theater at one point or another.

    The Belasco name would, strangely enough, surface during the John F. Kennedy assassination via Jack Ruby, the killer of Lee Harvey Oswald.

    David Belasco was born in San Francisco. He eventually left San Francisco but other Belascos remained, and in the 1930s, a grand-daughter named Virginia Marian Belasco was living in what is now called the Rousseaus’ Boulevard Tract Landmark District.

    Encompassing about two-blocks in the Sunset District, Rousseaus’ today is a block of 93 Storybook-style single-family homes constructed by the Marian Realty Company (one of the brothers was named Oliver Marian Rousseau), most of which are still in prime condition.

    In 1936, a young Virginia Belasco met a young Jacob Rubenstein at a dance at the San Francisco Jewish Community Center. It’s not clear if they had any romantic attachment, but they certainly did maintain a friendship. In a 1963 psychiatric evaluation of Rubenstein, Rubenstein’s sister said, “There was a sort of crazy admiration for years between them.” Belasco was said to be “wealthy” and she never married.

    On December 2, 1963, Virginia Belasco was interviewed at her 1587 35th Avenue, San Francisco residence by FBI agents. The subject? The assassination of John F. Kennedy, just a couple of weeks prior.

    The subject: Jacob Rubenstein, aka Jack Ruby, the man who killed Lee Harvey Oswald.

     

     

  • Everything In Me Exploded: 1830 Verdugo Vista Dr., Glendale, CA

    Paul Wright

    Few homes from the 1930s still exist in such exquisite state as the one located at 1830 Verdugo Vista Dr., Glendale, California.  Yet it does, in perfect California Spanish-Mediterranean style.

    On November 9, 1937, Paul Wright, aviation manager at the Union Air Terminal, found his wife, Evelyn Wright, locked in steamy sexual embrace with his best friend Paul Kimmel.  They were seated on a piano bench in the living room.

    Evelyn Wright
    John Kimmel

    From the Los Angeles Times, February 2, 1938:

    Shuttering, clutching at his throat, covering and uncovering his haggard face with clenched hands, Paul Wright today told the jury trying him for life of a revolting scene in the living room of his home that he said caused him to slay his wife Evelyn and his friend John Kimmel.

    “I saw them [____] in awful positions [____] on the piano bench,” the airport executive testified.  “Then Evelyn arose to a sitting position. She put her arms around Kimmel. He put his arms around her. They kissed each other.”

    Wright was almost screaming his words when he told of the shootings.

    “The next thing I knew I was standing there with a gun in my hand and they were on the floor. There was blood…  blood, and she was moaning.”  Wright burst into hysterical sobbing.

    Much of Wright’s testimony was unprintable. Almost as he completed the sordid story the state began cross-examination. Under questioning of his counsel, Jerry Geisler, Wright had been asked to tell what happened after he woke from a nap.

    “I was awakened by sound. I didn’t know what it was. I thought it was something that sounded like the piano, and it startled me. I got up and went to the door of the bedroom and saw the lights were on now. Johnny was sitting at the piano. I could only see the upper part of his face and head. He was looking down. I could not see Evelyn and I wondered where she was. I thought she was on the davenport. I went in and looked and did not see her there and then I thought maybe she was in the kitchen. Then I turned… Then I turned…  then I saw…”  Wright’s voice broke in a near shout.  “Evelyn was on the piano bench by Johnny.”

    Then he told of the resulting scene that, he said, drove him to the slaying.  “She came to a sitting position when I came into the room. She put her arms around his neck and he put his arms around her neck and they kissed. They kissed. They kissed each other. Then everything in me exploded.”

      

     

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