Fame is Poison.

The American obsession with celebrity has always been lethal.

Florence Lawrence, star of Not Like Other Girls. circa 1908. Courtesy of the Wisconsin Center for Film and Theater Research.

Early in my Hollywood years, I was invited to the home of a former ingenue. The lady of the house had recently left, ushered out permanently by pneumonia, combined with prescription drug intoxication, and, curiously, iron deficiency anemia. At the time, the coroner’s ruling was not yet filed, warming speculation that percolates to this day. It was one of those deaths that people have a difficult time accepting as accidental, which it was, more or less. When it comes to money, fame, and trouble, the general disposition of the media is that there are no accidents. Narratives of tragic stars are organized around the principle of inevitable, propulsive tragedy — cut to the flashy car, spinning out of control and headed for the Mulholland guardrail. 

At the time, I was an editor at a widely circulated publication that was, essentially, the official magazine of the doomed celebrity. Hollywood’s hold on the imagination may collapse, taking show business weeklies with it, but the appetite for such tales is seemingly inexhaustible. Whenever somebody very famous died, we had a story, predictably headlined Gone too Soon (or, if we wanted a stronger inference of dissolute behavior, Too Much too Soon). From the inside, this did not feel like ghoulish work. It’s hard not to love writing about the famously deceased, because no matter how squalid the last chapter, there is poetry in the exercise. We would tell the tale of the bright young thing who came to Hollywood on some variation of a nickel and a dream, sketching out their Icarus-like ascent before coming, inevitably, to the “demons,” that transformed a shimmery zenith into a plunge at terminal velocity. 

“Demons” is a handy word when the toxicology report isn’t in before deadline, and in such tributes, a history of suicidal ideation or heroin addiction was typically enveloped in a euphemistic cloud of darkness. The point was to hail the passage of another blithe spirit too fragile for a callous world, not to go into gruesome detail about the contents of a stomach pump. Those who knew the victim best typically wanted to participate in this final act of myth-making, and the subjects could not complain. I often wanted to advise publicists that the very best way to get flattering coverage was to arrange for their clients to die young. 

In this case, the widower of the late actress began to phone me (and a great many others) after her demise, rather hastily to be judged in good taste, even for Los Angeles. Those who knew the actress were divided into two camps: A larger one who believed the husband to be a pernicious, even lethal, influence on a fragile wife, and a smaller one that included the husband and the dead woman’s mother. The word Svengali was being liberally tossed around by the former camp, who felt the husband had alienated her from trusted advisers, derailing a life that once dazzled with promise. The husband’s backstory helped make their case, as it was chockablock with lawsuits, evictions, credit card con allegations, and even the threat of deportation. His major accomplishment seemed to be having written, directed and produced a B movie. In short, he was a typical show business type.

Before she was rushed to Cedars, the actress, her husband, and her mother had sequestered themselves in a house high up in the hills. This arrangement may strike people from the rest of America, where mothers tend to keep apart from adult children, as unorthodox, but the hermetic bond between many famous daughters and their mothers is a perennial feature of Hollywood. In any event, the son-in-law felt he was being vilified and wanted to explain his side of things in an interview and photo shoot in the spot where the actress had spent her final hours. Moral complexities aside, this was a get, and a get should not be refused.

I could have handed off the piece to another staffer, but something about it was dangerously irresistible. By that time I’d covered scores of overdoses, crashes, and 5150 psychiatric holds, all of which seemed to stitch into one cosmic cautionary tale, stretching back to the dawn of the industry, the story of somebody lovely being spat into a furnace. At the time, I was reading about Florence Lawrence, a forgotten figure sometimes described as the first movie star. Lawrence had been raised by an actress mother, with whom she was intensely close; she began in Vaudeville as “Baby Flo, the Child Wonder. ” As a young woman, she was discovered by the fledgling film industry, and signed to Biograph Studios. Early silent movie actors were not billed, so she was identified only as the Biograph Girl. Nonetheless, something undeniable beamed from Lawrence’s every pore, and audiences demanded to know her. With the help of cinema pioneer Carl Laemmle, she became Hollywood’s original household name, making hundreds of movies and forming her own production company. 

Lawrence was a trailblazer in other ways, in that her life was a heartbreaking mess. She married several times, once to a husband who beat her savagely; she was horribly injured on a film set, and the studio refused to pay for her medical care; a series of bad business decisions and the Depression left her penniless. By the late 1930s, she was a nobody with nothing, eking by on bit parts, living in a shared bungalow in West Hollywood. Diagnosed with a rare disease that reportedly left her afflicted with depression and (curiously) anemia, Lawrence died by suicide after ingesting ant poison and was given a pauper’s funeral. For decades, her grave in the Hollywood Forever Cemetery was unmarked, until a good Samaritan paid for a memorial stone. 

On a blazingly bright day, I drove up from the strip, close to where Lawrence had ended her life, to the heights above Sunset, where another actress had made her exit. There was delusion in this, but I felt a higher purpose in the expedition. I believed there was something in helping the bereft build a word monument to someone who had been loved by them and many strangers. What is the real truth of anybody’s life and death? I wanted to try and tease those essences out, and arrest them in beautiful permanence. A real woman, not a projection, who had lived and breathed among us for 32 fleeting years, was dead. Nobody knew exactly how or why, though there was broad consensus that inviting strangers to the scene immediately after was a dodgy move. Still, I was asked to go, perhaps needed to go, and so I went. 

What I’m sure a TMZ tour bus guide called “the death house,” has since been torn down, replaced by a modernist spaceship endemic to the area. At the time of my visit, it existed as an identikit Italian villa, pinched into a narrow lot, hard against a scrubby hillside in a transient neighborhood for interchangeable hustlers. Britney Spears was said to have occupied the place at one point, but it was hardly real estate legitimate types would stay in for long. The idea that somebody would die in suspicious circumstances under its tiled roof struck me as entirely unsurprising—the hills of Los Angeles are sprinkled with such houses. 

I stepped out of hard sunlight into an entryway as dark as a tomb, greeted by the husband, still in his bathrobe at a late hour, and a portrait of the actress on an accent table by the spiral staircase. His face was unshaved, his hair unwashed, his puffy skin white verging on green. He spoke in a slurry English accent, and immediately volunteered the obvious, which was that his best hours were well north of midnight. He was not attractive, but there was a sideways charm in his willingness to milk scandal for attention, to say things that, had they been scripted (perhaps they were), would invite a snort of disbelief. “Hollywood killed my darling,” he might say, and you would wait for him to shoot you a groggy wink. He was a bit of a scoundrel, but the great allure of scoundrels is their willingness to play the scene. 

He led me upstairs, as if he were Mrs. Danvers holding a candelabra, into the living room. There, another likeness of the actress loomed over the fireplace. On the coffee table, there was an open album of vanity photographs of the wife shot by him: In some, she was gotten up as harlequin clown, in others, she was Odette from Swan Lake, and in quite a few, she bent herself into shapes meant to evoke doomed ’60s icon Edie Sedgwick. Sedgwick, a particular obsession of the husband, was a little too on the nose given the situation. He led me into the master bedroom suite, crammed with garment trolleys hung with loaned clothes. In the middle of the hoard was the rumpled family bed, where the husband said he and his wife spent much of their time, sometimes joined by her mother, watching old movies flicker in the dark. We went into the bathroom where she had collapsed and met several hundred swag bags’ worth of beauty products, spilling over every inch of vanity space, onto the ledge of a sunken tub, and consuming the floor of the shower. Not for the last time, I thought: This is a very unwholesome business. 

I spent the day in that bleak, disordered house, pressing the husband for details. Did the lost actress have a drug problem, an eating disorder, actual demons that could be pinned down from the fluttery ether and given a diagnosis? I received little riddles and odes in reply. He was strange, but also very engaging, and I did not doubt his fascination with his late wife, a woman who had dated handsome actors and powerful agents and yet somehow settled on a podgy rascal with a muddy C.V. and an obsession with ballerinas. He was about 40, but looked much older, and dramatically hinted that a chronic heart condition meant that he could, at any moment, join her. 

At some point, the dead woman’s mother surfaced, foggy with grief, her mascara running. We went into the kitchen, and as the sun set as she spoke, voice husky with pain, about the irresistible spark she had seen in her child. It had powered mother and daughter from a small town in New Jersey to the Oakwood Apartments in the Valley, for the first of many pilot seasons. It had won the daughter roles in big movies and critical praise. The actress had left the world in her thirties, but the mother spoke of her as if she were still in tender childhood. How could she not? She had lost her darling baby. And nobody could deny that incandescent talent, those wide eyes that could hold an audience and convince them that the actress was precisely what she could never be—a typical American girl. 

I drove twisting roads home in darkness, back to the sharply lit grid below. Not long after the story came out, the husband phoned, voice thick as gruel. He sounded like he was on something, or many things, but in my narrow experience, that was the way he sounded. At this point, he had been everywhere defending his reputation, but that wasn’t the reason for the call. He was working on a pictorial celebration of the Ballet Russe, could I help him promote it? I wasn’t sure if he was after press or a plane ticket to Monaco. I tried to ask him how he and the woman’s mother were doing, but he was focused on his new hustle. I’m sure I was maddening in that blithe L.A. way, praising an off-kilter pitch while passing on it. This was a dance he knew. We parted cordially. 

A couple of days later, he was dead. The coroner gave the cause of death as pneumonia, combined with drug intoxication, and iron deficiency anemia. This was the symmetrical death the husband would have scripted, though it was also ruled accidental. I’d come to know him in a small way, this odd man people labeled a grifter, even a killer, and had discovered him to be overwhelmingly sad. There was scandal-mongering about toxic mold in the house and arsenic poisoning, but it came to nothing. The dead woman’s mother bore it all, as mothers tend to do. All these years later, her suffering on the day we met can still make me flinch.

I don’t know why the actress and her husband died. Nobody really does, no matter what they claim. Imposing storylines on senseless tragedy has been a going enterprise long before Hollywood. I suppose it is possible to grow up famous and well-adjusted, because there are indeed such people. Demons don’t just come for those whose names we know. Still, when these stories are told, about Florence Lawrence, Britney Spears, Demi Lovato, and on and on, it seems obvious that fame is a special kind of poison, particularly for the young. 

We are a society that prizes being seen above all else, but I have come to believe that the unheralded superpower of human beings is the ability to become invisible, one of many faces in the crowd. To lose anonymity is to invite a kind of madness in. For some people, driven by damage or talent or a combination of both, it cannot be any other way. They must be seen, and in being seen they gain the world, and lose everything.