Nothing in the document you linked from The Smoking Gun indicates that Marilyn Monroe died nearly broke. She owned a home in the exclusive Brentwood section of Los Angeles. Her total estate was estimated at between $819,176 and $1.6 million (depending on the source). With inflation, that’s equivalent to between $4.7 million and $9.3 million today.
There’s always Samuel Insull. He helped found GE, and was instrumental in several Chicago utility and transportation companies that are still in operation today. However, the Great Depression caught him with a lot of debt and his entire empire crashed. He left the country and a lot of very angry stockholders behind screaming “fraud” (modern anaysis indicates that it was primarily just bad judgment). He died of a heart attack in a Paris Metro station. Most accounts indicate he was penniless at the time, though it’s possible that rumor arose because someone stole his wallet after he collapsed; he did have a small pension. Still it was nothing like the millions he had at his peak.
The document I linked from the Smoking Gun showed about $765,000 in assets and $830,000 in debt. That sure looks broke to me. In addition she only had $6,813 in actual cash.
Your pauper article links to the Smoking Gun for her estate but doesn’t say where it got the estimated worth.
And under bankruptcy law, annuities and retirement plans can not be attached , which is the origin of the California law, i would guess. Though it was for wrongful death, it was still “only” a tort. And there are serious public policy arguments for protecting a person’s retirement funds from civil action.
That is why most celebs will never be truly poor if they are honest enough to plan for absolute failure.
Buy enough guaranteed annuties that provide annual funds sufficient to “survive” and the super rich can rest easy knowing they’ll always be able to live in the top 1% if somehow they fall out of the top .001%!
(And doesn’t OJ live in Palm Beach, FL? I remember his KEEN analysis of the 2000 Florida Recount- including his take on the butterfly ballot and his humorous comments comparing the contested ballots being filmed in the Ryder truck going to the capitol).
That was Emmanuel Lewis.
Not sure how to do the smacking-one’s-forehead emoticon, put you get the picture.
When Ernie Kovacs died, his widow, Edie Adams, discovered he had left her awash in gambling debts and back taxes. She hit the road, doing everything from nightclub dates to cigar commercials and eventually paid the government and all the creditors in full.
adam yax wrote:
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This was 1970 during the Nixon presidency, and Crumb was a very visible figure in what’s loosely known as the “counterculture.” See the Abbie Hoffman biopic Steal This Movie to see how politically suspect figures of that era were dogged into the ground.
How was it resolved? I’m not sure, since this wasn’t covered in the movie Crumb or in any of the several Comics Journal interviews with him I’ve read. But Crumb did involve himself in some money-making ventures in the early 70s (Album covers, some ill-advised Ralph Bakshi movies) and I would presume that the money from these went to pay his tax “debt.”
Huh - thanks for having the Straight Dope, Krokodil.
Now, howinhell can the IRS tax you on income you COULD have made? Using their logic, I should owe billions.
Other sports figures who’ve gone bankrupt were Johnny Unitas (Baltimore Colts quarterback) and Jack Clark (1st basemen for St. Louis Cardinals, San Francisco Giants and other teams). Unitas played before the big money player receive today, but Clark received plenty of big money during his recent and lengthy career and still managed to blow it all.
:dubious: You got a cite for that?
*I know I’m probably the only one that cares about this, but someone’s gotta keep you folks honest on tax stuff around here . . .
Oops, I read the rest of the thread after posting the above, and see it was discussed, but still no one provided a cite for it. If I get bored at work tomorrow I may nose around on Lexis for a case or something.
Suffice it to say, however, there’s no way the IRS could try to collect tax on income that someone should have (or could have) made. It just can’t happen; it’d be unconstitutional even (because money one could have made simply cannot be “income” within the meaning of the 16th Amendment).
Chuck Negron was the druggie Three Dog Night member in question. He also claims to have hocked his gold records for drug money during this period.
Jerry Lee Lewis reportedly now makes his residence in Ireland because of tax problems in the US and the tax-exempt status Ireland grants some writers, artists, and performers.
Country singers Dotty West and Johnny Lee both went broke.
He also worked at a model train store in Denver during the late 80’s/early 90’s. It was/is one of his hobbies. He lived in a reasonable house in Highlands Ranch at the time…
-Tcat
I don’t know anything about the state of Veronica Lake’s finances at the time of her death, but at the time she was living in Vermont, so she was rich even if she didn’t have a dime.
Actually, given the state of Vermont’s tax policies, she wouldn’t have a dime even if she were as rich as Bill Gates…
Christy McNichol was sweeping floors at a hair salon, working her way up to become a stylist.
TaxGuy,
My citation–mentioned in a later post–was the movie Crumb, a documentary about Crumb’s life and work. My copy is out on loan, so I can’t give you a minute and second, but there was a part where he was at a comics convention/seminar, giving a slide show about his career highlights. When he got to the “Keep On Truckin’” poster, he briefly recounted his IRS nightmare. If it seems odd today that the US Government would sic the IRS on people perceived as political dissidents… it sure seemed a lot likelier 30-35 years ago.
A trip to http://www.comic-art.com/bios-1/crumb001.htm says he was hit with a $30K tax bill in 1976 and had to move to Paris to live while paying it off (This throws off my timeline; his movie deals and album covers were several years earlier, and while he lives in France today and has since the early 90s, he definitely lived in northern California throughout the 80s).