A friend who’s majoring in business asked me to provide him a few names for a paper he’s writing on millionaires who become paupers. I thought of a few off the top of my head, such as M.C. Hammer, Willie Nelson, Burt Reynolds, Mickey Rooney (twice), Sherman Hemsley, Anita Bryant (legendary for screwing over creditors, incidentally) and Dorothy Hamill are a few “formerly rich and famous” folk who’ve had to file bankruptcy protection due to lavish living (Hammer, Rooney), bad business advice (Nelson, Hamill [she lost her fortune by buying the Ice Capades]), or both (Reynolds, Hemsley). Who are some other famous people who’ve gone from riches to majorly in the red accounts?
I don’t think they ever declared bankruptcy, but such stars as Stan Laurel and Bud Abbott were living lower middle-class lifestyles at the time of their deaths.
Among more contemporary celebs, Billy Joel seems to have made AND lost several forunes in his career.
I think Joel’s frequent stage partner Elton John also teeters on the brink of financia disaster due to lavish living, but he’s staved it off so far. (I remember a few years ago he borrowed $40 MILLION to pay off his credit cards; it was great news to me to know that I don’t hold the record.)l
I don’t know if he was ever what you call rich, but I believe one of the reasons Robert Crumb moved to France was that he owed bookoo bucks to the IRS and couldn’t pay them.
And isn’t Michael Jackson in deep financial doodoo even as we speak?
Kim Basinger declared bankruptcy a few years back. Whether or not she was broke is debatable (Hollywood accounting could teach Enron a thing or two).
Sammy Davis, Jr.
O.J. Simpson
World Heavyweight Champion Leon Spinks. He is a part time janitor now. He’s a regular patron of the Unemployment line. I never liked him as a boxer but his life now is just sad and quite a shame. A shame not to him but to all of his blood sucking managers and entourage that bled him dry and left him broke. Mohammed Ali would suffered the same fate had not his current wife taken care of their finances.
Abbot and Costello were rich enuf to have bought and owned Universal Studios back when it was in financial trouble but instead chose to help it recover. The govt took ALL of their riches later for income taxes and Universal Studios watched it happen without so much as a helping hand.
Robert Blake is living in a modest dwelling after all of his TV success.
Sorry, I don’t know his name… but one of the Darren’s from Bewitched, who died from cancer (I think)
Again, Arnold (I think) from different Strokes.
oh oh oh… the group TLC. bad contracts.
The Original Darren of “Bewitched” was Dick York. He was a great character actor but was never a “big” celebrity. I dont think he ever got really rich.
One of my favourites, Redd Foxx.
Mark Twain made & lost several fortunes, & had to “hop it” to make it back, too.
A few silent movie stars wound up flat broke: Mae Murray, Florence Lawrence, Lew Tellegen, Nita Naldi, Art Accord, Ann Pennington, Lillian Lorraine . . .
How about those kids from Diff’rent Strokes, if they qualify as big enough celebrities. Also, hasn’t Barry Manilow had troubles?
Well, he’ll be living at the state’s expense soon enough…
Ulysses S. Grant, General, US Army ret. & onetime President of the United States, died broke.
The only thing that saved his family from ruin was the autobiography Mark Twain help him write just before his death.
Later, presidents got pensions.
I’ve read about some of them; they’re sad stories. Fatty Arbuckle’s ex-wife went from living in a mansion in Santa Monica and driving Rolls-Royces to renting the screened in porch of a house in central LA. (Of course Fatty’s fortune was first destroyed by the rape case, then by talkies, the IRS, and the Depression.)
Tellegen at least deserved it- he was a prick. He skimmed a fortune off Sarah Bernhardt (who was also constantly going broke) as a gigolo on one of her acting tours, then bragged about it in his autobiography.
Gloria Swanson died very comfortable but nothing like Norma Desmond; her estate was worth just over $1 million in 1980, which was less than she made tax-free during a single year in the 1920s. She blamed Joseph Kennedy for her losses, though to what extent she was right I don’t know. (Her screw’n’tell autobiography rivals Timothy Leary’s for self-exoneration.)
I believe Doris Day was bankrupted by her embezzling husband. When he died in 1968 she was discovered to be deep in debt. She then made a comeback as a TV star and became rich again.
Poor Florence Lawrence was the first “star” of motion pictures–the first to have her name advertised to bring in the customers (c1909). By 1938, she was flat broke, living in an L.A. boarding house and lucky to get a few extra roles in movies. She was suffering from some kind of bone disease and couldn’t afford doctors, so she killed herself by eating ant poison.
Both Nita Naldi and Ann Pennington wound up living in squalid Times Square hotels; Mae Murray–one of the biggest stars of the 1920s–slept on Central Park benches in the 1930s, and wound up in the Motion Picture Country Home.
Debbie Reynolds went broke once due to a husband and then much more recently due to investing the whole shooting match in a casino that went belly up. Her son made some comment to the effect of “I’d feel worse for her if she weren’t still able to make $50,000 per week on the road”, so broke to her isn’t I suppose broke to most people.
An interesting thing about Twain: the story’s often told (it was to me by a lit professor in undergrad) that he insisted on hitting the road playing several engagements per week for more than a decade because he was too honorable to declare bankruptcy. I later read some biographies of him and the truth is the opposite: he was ALL about declaring bankruptcy, but his wife and daughters wouldn’t hear of it. How well he recouped can be told, however, by the fact at the time of his death he owned a very nice townhouse in Manhattan as well as Stormfield, the house in the photograph at this site:
Interesting story (if only to me) of what happened to Twain’s money: his daughter inherited his literary estate which generated millions before her death in the 1960s. When she died, the income from the $2 million trust fund made by his royalties was divided between her second husband, Jacques Samoussoud, and her daughter, Nina Gabrilowitsch (who went by Nina Clemens in her completely unsuccessful bid for movie stardom) with the provision that upon the death of Samoussoud the entire amount would belong to Nina. When Nina died in 1966 (a suicide) it ended Twain’s direct line and, since she died intestate, her share of the estate went to her stepfather who died soon after. From that time, licensing of Twain’s image and the money from his estate went to Samoussoud’s cousins, whom he barely knew, a family of White Russian refugees living in France who claimed never to have heard of Mark Twain or Huckleberry Finn. Kind of an odd basis for a family fortune (well, my great-grand-uncle was married to the daughter of this American dude who used to be a riverboat pilot…)
Descendents of Twain’s brother Orion challenged the succession of the money, but it was dismissed from court since any member of the family who had actually known Twain was long dead and it was impossible to say what Twain would have wanted. (In fact, in a hearing on copyrights he once said that he wanted to provide for his daughters but his grandchildren could fend for themselves as far as he was concerned.)