Zora Neale Hurston died in a welfare hotel in Florida. At one point she was working as a maid for a family that was quite surprised when she took off to accept a major literary award. I think a part of her condition was mental illness, however.
Bella Lugosi
Joe Louis
Kim Basinger
Lorraine Bracco
John Connally (Gov of Texas, shot in the car with JFK and Presidential candidate)
Jimmy Carter was shocked at his finances upon leaving Office (not bankrupt & not his fault, but I think he was worth circa 10% of what he thought he was)
I was surprised some years ago when he stated that he had to write books and go on speaking tours as a financial necessity. I suppose you just assume that all ex-presidents are loaded. The Nobel Peace Prize (over $1 million) probably helped quite a bit, though.
I used to live close to his house in Plains. He is probably the only president to live less than one mile from a trailer park and to actually push his own buggy through the local Super-WalMart.
Louise Brooks went from being a pretty big star and presumably making a pretty big star’s salary to working a counter at Macy’s (and according to at least one biography, working as an escort). IIRC she made a decent recovery through writing and also received a stipend from a former lover/admirer.
Some more sad stories:
Dorothy Dandridge
Veronica Lake
and someone mentioned the “Arnold” character from “Different Strokes” - real name is Gary Coleman.
and Kimberly was portrayed by Dana Plato who died May, 1999.
Stephen Foster, John Howard Payne, and just about every American popular composer prior to the establishment of ASCAP died penniless. This was because people played their music without paying them.
In other areas, heavyweight champ Joe Louis.
Iggy Pop spent a good portion of the mid 1970s (after the Stooges but before his solo career) homeless. He supported himself to some extent with odd jobs, but also slept in other people’s cars and at one point was taken in by a bunch of prostitutes who felt sorry for him. He eventually checked himself into a mental hospital.
After he cleaned up and got his head together he went to Berlin with David Bowie and recorded his first two solo albums, The Idiot and Lust for Life. He seems to have managed a comfortable income ever since, primarily thanks to a steady touring schedule. However, in the mid-1980s he did hit a bad patch and wound up having to sell off his nicer furniture and nearly had to declare bankruptcy. Luckily, David Bowie had a huge hit with “China Girl” in 1984, and since that was one of the songs they’d written together back in Berlin (original version is on The Idiot), Iggy got half the songwriting royalties. That was more than enough to put him back into the black.
Gary Coleman was working as a security guard at a So Cal mall/store (Fox Hills) in 1998.
Oh, I’ll use any excuse to mention The Coreys (Haim and Feldman, that is). Haim was living with his mommy up until a few years ago and Feldman must have been desperate to go on The Surreal Life with fellow has-beens Hammer and Gary Coleman.
IIRC, Thomas “Hollywood” Henderson might qualify. Former Dallas Cowboy football player that went broke, due to drugs and the like. And the only made it back via hitting the lotto.
Gah! I thought only us ‘always have been poor’ people should get a shot at something like that!! 
The fates are screwin’ us, I tell ya!
pugluvr wrote:
Not exactly. Circa 1970, the IRS went after Crumb, claiming he owed taxes on the money he would have made if he’d properly copyrighted the "Keep On Truckin’ " image, which turned up pitated on posters, t-shirts, truck mud flaps, etc. This put him in a cascading nightmare with the taxman for years to come, but was settled long before he moved to France.
Basically, a French collector bought Crumb’s original sketchbooks for a small fortune. He and his wife Aline thought it would be nice to retire to the south of France with the money, and did. Oddly enough, he’s as prolific an artist now as he ever was and is in a French musette band, Les Primitifs du Futur. Their album World Musette is awesome and recommended.
Pretty much all the Little Rascals went broke. The kid who played Tracy Partridge works in a shoe store. Maybe child actors should be a whole separate category. Carole Channing’s ex-husband apparently swindled her blind.
Another thread led me to this:
Quiet Riot singer Kevin DuBrow has been arrested for failing to pay off a concert goer who sued him five years ago, but the veteran metal rocker is pleading poverty.
According to the Charlotte Observer, DuBrow, 43, told a judge in Charlotte, NC, that he hasn’t had a royalty check since 1987, he lives with his mother, and he can’t even afford a car – he borrows hers. Although he once boasted an income of $500,000 a year, he no longer owns any property and owes $54,000 in back taxes. He claims to have only made between $18,000 and $25,000 last year from a brief stint as a Las Vegas disc jockey and scattered Quiet Riot club tours that pay him just $200 to $250 a show.
From this story
Peter Frampton lost the money he made in the 70s first due to crooked managers, then later in the stock market in the 1980s.
He came back to some degree, touring the oldies circuit, probably some music licensing for commercials and movies. But he hosted an informercial for some teach yourself guitar at home tape series a few years ago, so he must still need the bucks.
Evel Kneivel blew all his money in wild living and spending. I saw him on a show say that he once heard Garth Brooks say that he (Garth) had made more money than he could spend in his lifetime. Evel’s comment, “Hey Garth, write me a check. I’ll show you how.”
Danny Bonaduce claims to have lived in his car for a time after he blew his Partridge Family money on drugs.
Writer Gerald Kersh ([II]Night And The City*) died broke after his controversial views caused magazine and book publishers to turn against him and he could no longer get published like he did before.
Jackie Coogan, probably the first “child star” of motion pictures, made a small fortune and his parents very conveniently squandered it. He ended up as Uncle Fester in the original Addams Family TV series.
http://www.thesmokinggun.com/monroe/mmestate1.shtml
Marilyn Monroe died pretty much broke.
O.J. Simpson is hardly destitute. He gets around $26,000 per month (not sure if that’s after tax or not) from his NFL pension. Because of some loophole in California law, it’s all his and it can’t be touched to pay off his wrongful death lawsuit.
Granted, $26K per month isn’t much by Beverly Hills standards, but OJ will never have to work another day in his life and he continues to live quite comfortably.
Can’t say that I’d call President Carter broke. He gets more in pension each year than most of us will ever make in a year.
Toni Braxton filed bankruptcy a few years back.
HeyHomie: I did not know that. That’s a huge amount of money, really. What an insult to the victims’ families that he gets to keep it all. Hope they still cut him dead (so to speak) on the golf course.
Did the IRS win this? Is this SOP for the IRS? I can’t imagine that they could impose, what would amount to, punitive damages on somebody who got bad legal advice.
I don’t know that Charlie Parker was ever a millionaire, but he sure was famous. “The most influential jazz musician in the world” is how they put it on biography.com. By '53 he “was beset by sporadic employment, debt, and failing physical and mental health.” He died in 1955 at the age of 34.
One of the guys from Three Dog Night (Danny Hutton? Chuck Negron?) blew it all (and that’s a lot) on cocaine and was sleeping on a scummy mattress in a burned out building when he realized he needed to make some lifestyle changes.
If your friend is writing a business paper, he should look into the bankruptcy of Braniff International Airways. In short: Harding L. Lawrence took it from nothing to the 11th largest airline in the US. He was convinced that deregulation could never work, so he added tons of crappy routes in the belief that when regulation was reinstated, he would be guaranteed a profit on each one. Braniff declared bankruptcy in 1982, buried under $1 billion in debt. I don’t know how his personal fortune fared, but that had to hurt.