The Mammoth Book of Hollywood Scandals (22 page)

This was almost a foretelling of how her marriage would work out, and it was not long before it came to an abrupt end after a particularly abusive episode at a party. Thelma filed for divorce from DiCicco and shortly after entered into a business (and rumoured personal) partnership with old friend Roland West. He was in a troubled marriage to movie star Jewel Carmen, and some say that it was rumours of his relationship with Thelma that led to the couple becoming estranged. In truth, however, the marriage had been on the rocks for some time, though Roland seemed to be keener to end it than his wife. Jewel did not give up on her husband easily, and stayed off and on in their home, just minutes from where West decided to open a beach-side establishment called the Sidewalk Café, with Thelma Todd.

The café was a big success and Thelma enjoyed working there herself, serving customers and occasionally cooking food. She had always enjoyed entertaining and she took to the job like a duck to water, greeting friends and making sure that everyone had a fantastic time. However, one thing that did not go down well with the actress was when gangsters showed an interest in the restaurant. Members of the Mafia had long since ruled many of the establishments in Hollywood and it was not long before they were in the Sidewalk Café, planning to open a gambling establishment in the rooms upstairs. “Over my dead body,” Thelma is rumoured to have told them.

In 1935 – the last year of her life – Thelma began receiving threatening notes from someone calling himself “The Ace”. The letters demanded money and threatened death and destruction of the café, but even after the accused note-writers had been arrested, the letters still kept coming. Thelma was concerned for her own life and when she was told that a mysterious man had walked into the restaurant, demanding her address, she was even more terrified.

A break-in at her Hollywood home followed, prompting Thelma to move into an apartment above the Sidewalk Café, where her neighbour and sometime room-mate was business partner Roland West. The arrangement of living and working at the café worked for a time, until the discovery that prowlers had been spotted on the terrace outside her bedroom did little to quell Thelma’s fears. As a result of the episode, bars were placed on the windows and she no longer answered her telephone.

On 14 December 1935, twenty-nine-year-old Thelma Todd was guest at a nightclub party given by actress Ida Lupino, though she went on her own as Roland West decided to remain at the café in order to entertain guests. He had warned Thelma that the door would be locked if she was not home by 2 a.m., but not being one to comply with demands, the actress carried on partying until past her curfew. Guests commented later that she seemed very happy and in good spirits despite an encounter with her ex-husband Pat DiCicco, who turned up at the nightclub with another woman.

Finally, Thelma was exhausted and left the party in order to travel home in the care of her chauffeur, Ernest Peters. He dropped the actress at the front of the Sidewalk Café and watched her walk towards the apartment. As it so happens, this turned out to be the last confirmed sighting of Thelma Todd alive.

Although there were many doors through which one could gain access to the sprawling Sidewalk Café, Thelma had a key to only one door, which as luck would have it just happened to be the one Roland West had locked and dead-bolted from the inside. He later said that he just had not realized that Thelma did not have a key to any other door, and that he presumed she would come in by another entrance. According to West he had no idea his girlfriend could not gain access to her home; he told the coroner that he awoke in the middle of the night, heard running water and assumed that Thelma was in the building. He was wrong.

So what happened to Thelma when she couldn’t enter her home? Well, all we know for sure is that on Monday, 16 December, her housekeeper went to the garage located 127 steps away from the café, and found her employer dead in the front seat of her car. This was obviously a grisly discovery for the woman, but what could have possibly happened in order for the vibrant young Thelma Todd to end up in the garage in the first place?

One theory put forward by Roland West is that when Thelma realized she was locked out of her home, she decided to walk up to her garage rather than wake him to let her in. Once there, she turned on the engine of her Lincoln in order to keep warm, not knowing the dangers of inhalation of the car’s fumes, which engulfed the garage causing Thelma to expire quickly afterwards. This seems reasonable, if not a little too straightforward.

Another theory is that Thelma had seen enough of Roland West and his demanding ways, and was scared of the gambling plans for her restaurant. She decided to take her own life in the garage by turning on the engine and slowly waiting for death to come. This theory is a little unbelievable, however, especially since no note was ever found and, aside from a few down moments at the party, she was in relatively good spirits that evening and greatly looking forward to Christmas. She was also an exceptionally strong person who had never shown any suicidal tendencies before that night so the idea of her deciding to commit suicide after partying the night away quite happily seems a little off-the-wall.

Yet another story is that the actress was kidnapped from outside the building by gangsters, furious that she had threatened to pull the plug on the gambling plans for her restaurant. This version of events has several other stories attached to it, however, including one outlandish rumour that the gangsters drove Thelma around Los Angeles for an entire day, before killing her and dumping the body in the front seat of her garaged car, in order for it to look like a suicide . . . This all seems rather far-fetched: if the Mafia did indeed kidnap the actress (which could very well have happened), they would not have had any interest in taking her on a sightseeing tour of the city, and instead would have been more likely to kill her straight away and dispose of the body as quickly as they could.

All we know for sure is that once Thelma’s maid Mae Whitehead discovered the body, she immediately drove to the Sidewalk Café to raise the alarm and awaken Roland West who was sleeping upstairs. She then went to pick up Thelma’s mother, who rushed to the garage in order to see her daughter’s body for herself. She was asked by reporters how she thought Thelma had died, and her response shocked them. “She was murdered,” she exclaimed, though days later she notably retracted her claim and said the whole thing must have been caused by Thelma’s weak heart.

The hunt was on for answers to this questionable death, and everyone dived for cover. In court Roland West swore he had not seen his lover since before she left for the party; Pat DiCicco said he had not seen her since the party; friend Mrs Wallace Ford claimed to have received a call from Thelma the day after the party; while Roland’s wife Jewel Carmen went one better and swore she had actually seen the actress driving round town hours after the approximate time of death.

From all four corners, people were coming out to claim their sightings of the blonde actress, and the only people who remained quiet were the gangsters who were rumoured to have been taking over the café. Of course, the likelihood of them ever being called to testify was zero, since the 1930s Mafia were notorious for having moles and contacts throughout the Los Angeles Police Department. With that in mind, the coroner’s investigation into the death of Thelma Todd was wrapped up quickly and without a firm conclusion. No one ever came forward publicly to announce an involvement with Thelma’s death, and all the characters involved got on with their lives. Roland West stayed at the Sidewalk Café though his directing career was over; Jewel Carmen declared that Thelma Todd had been her best friend, though few believed her; and ex-husband Pat DiCicco went on to have a violent and shortlived marriage to Gloria Vanderbilt.

But what of Thelma? Well, her body was cremated and her ashes taken back to her native Lawrence, though it is said that she does not yet rest in peace. Indeed, it has been rumoured that her ghost has appeared various times on the stairs and hallways of her famed Sidewalk Café, frustrated that even now, nearly eighty years later, her untimely death has never been solved . . .

It was 12 March 1936 when forty-seven-year-old Violet Wells Norton sat down to write another letter to film star Clark Gable, after several other letters had been ignored. She was not the only one to be writing to Gable that year; indeed, his fan mail was through the roof and about to get even bigger over the next few years with the release of blockbuster
Gone with the Wind
. However, Norton’s letter was no ordinary piece of fan mail, but instead an attempt to obtain money for the care of her teenage daughter, Gwendolyn.

According to Norton, Gable was the father of her daughter, the result of a relationship they had enjoyed in 1920s England when Gable was supposedly living in Essex under the name of Frank Billings. The frankly unbelievable story went that Norton had hired Billings as a tutor for her son, fell hopelessly in love with the man and ended up conceiving her daughter as a result. Norton claimed that so in love were she and Billings, that despite not being married, they had the baby anyway, though four months after the birth he left her heartbroken when he fled first to London and then to the United States.

In fairness to Billings, the man had offered to take Norton with him on his travels, but unfortunately for her, he refused to take her four other children along for the ride. The two split up; she never heard from him again and several years later decided to marry Herbert Norton and settle down to a new, simple life in Winnipeg. However, this peaceful existence all changed during a family trip to the cinema to see the Clark Gable picture,
It Happened One Night
.

As Norton sat in the darkened cinema, she became somewhat agitated and surprised. The reason? Well, it would seem that the man on the screen bore a striking resemblance to Billings, and so the woman immediately put two and two together and decided that her ex-lover had thrown in his career as a teacher, changed his name to Gable (or Gables as she constantly referred to him) and made it big as a film star.

For Clark Gable (and anyone else for that matter) the very idea was preposterous; he had never been to England and in 1922 and 1923, when the relationship was said to have taken place, he had been working as a tie salesman and lumberjack in Oregon. With this in mind, he decided to ignore this and other letters from the obviously mistaken woman and get on with his life.

“I did not consider them worthy of serious action,” he later told reporters, a decision which would seem logical given the circumstances.

While others would forgive Gable for his lack of concern for the letters, being ignored by the famous film star was not something that pleased the already volatile Mrs Norton. She decided that if she was going to be taken seriously she would need to write to others, too, so she took out her pen and once again sat down, this time writing to columnists such as Walter Winchell and Jimmy Fidler, along with radio commentators and – for reasons known only to herself – the actress Mae West. The obsession quickly got out of control and her whole existence seemed to revolve around proving that Clark Gable and Frank Billings were one and the same person. So much so, in fact, that in November 1934, when it became clear that Violet would not give up her quest, her exasperated husband packed his bags and moved out of the family home.

Even this shock did nothing to deter Norton, however, and instead she continued her letters, enlisting her daughter to help, and even sending some notes to Gable’s home. He later told Pete Martin in the
Saturday Evening Post:
“She asked if she could see me about a personal matter. I didn’t know her. In fact, I had never heard of her.” Once again the actor ignored the letters, but they kept arriving anyway, with the woman becoming more and more concerned that she was being mistreated once again by “Frank Billings”.

Finally, when every letter went unanswered, both Violet and her daughter decided to travel to Hollywood from their home in Canada in order to confront Clark Gable in person. The trip was said to be financed by private detective Jack L. Smith and Winnipeg landlord Frank James Keenan, though it was ultimately fruitless and Violet Norton did not get anywhere near the actor, much to her chagrin. “As affairs go, the one described was a long-distance project,” Gable told Pete Martin. “I decided she was nuts and forgot about it.”

But while Gable himself was happy to continue ignoring the persistent letters and visits, his studio and the American authorities were not. After receiving a letter from the Director of Administration Services in Canada, officials were convinced that Gable’s admirer needed serious help. Events were put in motion and Norton was charged with mail fraud in January 1937, while Keenan and Smith were accused of scheming with her to obtain money from Clark Gable.

Reporters were thrilled to hear the outrageous stories being pointed in Gable’s direction and were anxious to hear what the actor had to say about the matter. He did not disappoint: talking to newspapers was never his biggest concern, but he did open up over what he considered to be a fabricated and preposterous story.

“Now that the authorities have decided to prosecute,” he said, “I can only offer my fullest cooperation.” Suffering from flu, he nevertheless was still able to declare his distaste for the whole episode, branding it ridiculous, and adding, “I have never been in England; never heard of this woman except through notes written to me and turned over to the authorities.”

In spite of Gable’s pleas that he had never met the woman, he was warned by the US Assistant District Attorney that the burden of responsibility fell on him – not her – to prove that he had never been to England, particularly in the years Norton was accusing him of being there. Not only that, but he would also have to show his exact whereabouts at the very time the child was being conceived. This was not an easy task, especially since Gable had been pretty much a free agent during the early 1920s, and had been working many jobs to make ends meet. But determined not to be beaten by the mysterious woman, Gable went through his archives and began to pull out things he deemed relevant, such as old theatre programmes and pay cheques from the Silverton Lumber Company where he had worked for a time. His attorney handed them all over the District Attorney’s office, who readied the evidence for the case.