TCM is showing Peg Entwistle’s only movie, Thirteen Women, on Tues., Oct. 3, at 6:45 p.m. Eastern Time. It’s a bizarre movie in its own right: Myrna Loy, still in her foreign villainess phase, murdering a bunch of old schoolmates who, really, have it coming.
And it’s the only chance to see Peg: she plays Hazel, who’s one of the two women coming to see their friend on the flying trapeze at the circus (and you know that’s not going to end well). I’d love to write a book about Peg someday, if I could find enough info on her . . . You have to admire a suicide that brilliant.
There’s no way we’ll ever know for sure, of sourse, but I wonder about her choice of the HOLLYWOOD(LAND) sign as a means of egress.
Was it truly her intent to make a ham-fisted statement of herself as a victim of Hollywood, or was it, like the Golden Gate Bridge or the Empire State Building, an attraction to those suffering severe depression? People in that deep level are in such pain that their reasoning skills are little better than pets who wander away from home to find some quiet bush to die under - and that big, famous landmark draws them to it.
Or was it simply a handy method, given what was available of 1932 Los Angeles? My dad recalls never seing a gas stove in LA back then, perhaps due to the earthquake hazzard to gas mains. Also in LA, Alan Ladd’s mother killed herself by eating rat poison, a much worse way to go than falling.
But then, maybe it’s just that people are funny some ways.
Peg remains the only person to ever jump off the HOLLYWOODLAND sign, so I have to hand it to her. As I mentioned in another thread, if you’re going to jump off a giant letter, H is really your best bet. You get to rest halfway up, and you might roll off an O.
We really don’t know why she killed herself: it might not just have been career troubles, as we know virtually nothing of her private life. Was she ill? A closeted lesbian? In love with a married man? A depressive from way back? We just don’t know, which is why I’ve always felt the “failed actress” story was too simplistic. And that story about her receiving an offer for a role the day after she died? To quote the SDMB, “cite?”
Anyway, try to catch the movie: it’s great campy fun in itself, and the only chance to see poor Peg in action.
I hope I dind’t come off as snarky above. As a serious historian, Eve would know more than most of us today the deperation that one would face in 1932 with 3 strikes: 1: a woman in what was then very much a man’s world; 2: having job skills in the unstable and marginal field of show business, and 3: trying to survive the Great Depression, before FDR was elected and began setting up social safety nets.
As a kid in LA, my dad also recalled seeing people chasing rabbits in vacant lots. (You never saw the Our Gang[ kids looking for food in garbage cans, but that was morel likely than putting on a show in the old barn) His mom was scraping by as a bit player & chorus girl, and he also remembers nights when he had to stay out in the street while the landlord came over so she could “pay the rent.” And although we read of the generosity of Lon Chaney Sr and Buster Keaton toward down-and-outers, for the most part show-folk were not very nice people. Again, no offense toward Eve or her profession, but some of the old vaudvillians hanging on the edges of Hollywood, whom she might well treasure to interview today, were people my dad & other boys were warned from ever being caught alone by.
All in all, not a good time or place to have one’s serotonin levels go out of whack.
Unfortunately, the title – the only possible title – is spoken for.
For the most part, nobody scratching and stooping to fend off starvation in a dystopian environment is “very nice people.” The 1932 Hollywoodland screenplay could be very, very dark indeed. Think Chinatown without the moral center Jake Gittes provides. Perhaps with a nice overlay of happy, richly orchestrated pop music by Jimmie Grier or Phil Harris, just for glaring contrast.
I love this movie. I’m a huge Myrna Loy fan. Mostly her later, “sophisticated” roles, but especially because of those it’s such a hoot to see her earlier movies, when she was typecast as an “Oriental” vixen. That will always crack me up: that the dry, droll, sophisticated lady of the Thin Man movies and The Best Years of Our Lives was once typecast as The Yellow Menace in Satin.
(Plus this movie is based on a novel by a writer that Eve recommended to me, Tiffany Thayer. The copy I found is beautifully bound in faux gold, with gorgeous woodcut illustrations.)
Watched the first 15 minutes, just to see poor Peg (I’ve seen the movie several times). She had a lovely voice, great bone structure (her nose kind of juts out, but in a distinctive, attractive way), and did very well with the little they gave her to do.
Ironic, in her one scene, she had to watch in horror as someone falls to her death!
I watched this too, on TCM, and agree that what she left us on celluliod (digitalization?) deserves to be a virtue unto itself, but, persuing the personal aspect: I took her last address at her uncle’s house and plugged it into Google Maps, then tilted the perspective to show as best as possible how the HOLLYWOODLAND sign would have appeared/beckoned to her from up the street.
Depression servng as both a spiritual and geograpical valley - and look what from her perspective was the highest point in sight - and imagine how it must have represented to her a summit of destructon.
Yes, let’s do that screenplay; with the last line a paraphrase of Melville’s Bartleyby the Scrivener “Oh Peg; Oh Humanity!”
