SOME CAME RUNNING: The Siren Song of Fame
“Fame is a vapor, popularity an accident, and riches take wings. Only one thing endures, and that is character.” — Horace Greeley
By Gregory N. Joseph
FAME COMES to people in a multitide of ways. Sometimes it’s wanted, sometimes it most assuredly is not. Invariably, people who are famous, whether they’re movie stars who obsessively sought fame or “average” people suddenly thrust into the limelight, find it isn’t at all what they had imagined, often tragically so. The mantra of the famous, no matter who they are and how they attained a notoriety others only dream about, can be summed up in an adage too often ignored: Be careful what you wish for.
The people you will meet here run the gamut of those who have experienced fame in an egregious, especially outsized way.
They range from the quintessential “movie star’s child,” Christina Crawford — praised by some for revealing alleged child abuse by her famous adoptive parent the Golden Age star Joan Crawford but attacked by others for supposedly lying and sullying her mother’s reputation and legacy— to the soft-spoken career Navy man, Commander Lloyd “Pete” Bucher, skipper of the U.S. Navy intelligence ship the U.S.S Pueblo that was captured by the North Koreans on Jan. 23, 1968, in the Sea of Japan, lionized by some for ensuring the survival of his crew but vilified by others for allowing the vessel to be attacked and seized without firing a shot.
Crawford surely knew her claims would draw headlines, while fame was the furthest thing from Bucher’s mind and it nearly destroyed him, from his standpoint as bad as the brutality to which he had been subjected in captivity.
In between the two extremes there are people like the then-25-year-old San Diego daredevil Steven Lewis, who, so he could appear on the 1980–89 ABC-television series “That’s Incredible!” — a so-called “reality”-based show featuring individuals attempting all sorts of stunts, many extraordinarily dangerous, to put it mildly — unsuccessfully tried to jump over two sports cars speeding toward him at 100 miles per hour and wound up in a hospital bed instead.
Then there is Jane Barbe, famous — and unknown — at the same time, as an unbiquitous “voice of time” on the telephone; Vernon E. Craig, a Cleveland cheese maker also know as “Komar the Firewalker”; Janey Jimenez, a Deputy U.S. Marshal who guarded Patty Hearst and became a media star; Igor Cassini, fashion designer Oleg Cassini’s brother, once famous and powerful as the New York-based syndicated columnist “Cholly Knickerbocker,” who lost everything; Jack Jacobs, a one-time successful writer during the Golden Age of television, who, by the late 1980s, couldn’t so much as find an agent who would represent him; Dorothy Miller (stage name Dorothy Morris), a former MGM supporting actress in the movie’s gilded age who wound up helping handicapped actors; William Carroll, a man who, in 1967, found slides in his desk that he had not looked at since 1945 — of Marilyn Monroe when she was Norma Jeane Dougherty; Pauline Perry Millan, a retired 100-year-old lyric soprano who was friends with Cecil B. DeMille and had met President William Howard Taft; Richard Franklin Pryor Jr. — actor-comedian Richard Pryor’s son, then an apprentice seaman in the U.S. Navy, “made available” for interviews; and Ralph Hodges, who danced as the 12-year-old George M. Cohan in the classic 1942 movie “Yankee Doodle Dandy” and wound up working behind the camera at a San Diego TV station.
When people think about the corrosive elements of fame, at least as far as motion pictures go, they often think of Joan Crawford, an Oscar-winning Golden Age star who, before her death in May of 1977, was so sought after that 60 pairs of her false eyelashes from the glory days sold for $325, a collection of still photographs from the films “Above Suspicion” and “A Woman’s Face” fetched $375, and her monogrammed stationery brought $100.
Then, in 1978, came a book called “Mommie Dearest” written by Crawford’s adopted daughter Christina, alleging a frightening, bizarre, abusive side of the actress that was so horrible and vivid that it became the standard against which all child abuse is measured.
In December of 1979, I met Christina and her husband, David Koontz, for a long interview at the newspaper where I worked as they toured the country promoting the book when it came out in paperback. I went into the meeting determined to play the Devil’s advocate and not to be used as a publicity shill by Christina, then 40 years old, and her husband.
Then came the interview.
“Everything I say about my mother in the book is absolutely the truth,” said Christina, a blue-eyed blonde whose very inner spirit seemed to have been made of a collection of emotional scar tissue. “I have my own records, my mother’s letters, and things I wrote from the time I was little, plus sources I checked and rechecked. Everything in my book can be corroborated. I didn’t make it up or imagine a bit of it.”
Christina told of how her mother beat her, locked her in closets, tied her up in the shower, and strapped Christina’s brother, Christopher, who was also adopted, into bed so he could not go to the toilet and have a drink of water without permission.
But I had to know: Was it really true that Joan Crawford, as punishment for tearing a bit of wallpaper off her bedroom wall, shredded Christina’s favorite yellow dress and further humiliated her by making her wear it? Could it have really been that the actress, so unhappy with Christina’s cleaning job on her dressing room flew into a rage and beat the then-seven-year-old girl over the head so hard with a can of cleanser that it burst?
Yes, yes, yes. All true, Christina and her husband, who was growing increasingly edgy, repeated. All true.
Finally, her husband interrupted his wife and turned to me.
“Look, I can tell you for a fact that it happened,” he said. “When I was going with Christina, everybody in Hollywood knew the stories, everything. A newsman told me how he and other journalists, maybe a half-dozen of them, were gathered at a restaurant for a special Christmas layout and her mother years ago.
“Well, Christina and the other kids were fussing like all kids do, when, the newsman told me, Christina’s mother lost her temper. She got up — and you know how she punished Christina? She slammed the child’s hand in a door. I said to the newsman, ‘Why the hell didn’t you or anybody do anything?’ Why didn’t you write anything? How can you sit there and tell me that?’
“He answered that Joan Crawford was so powerful, nobody could do anything about it. No one would dare. He just said he had never seen anything like it, that he got up from the table, went into the men’s room and threw up.”
I believed Christina Crawford then. Still do. And, no matter her motivation, I admired her courage. In stepping forward with what had happened went a long way in advancing the cause of preventing child abuse. It also made Christina a controversial lightening rod — and instantly famous.
Lloyd Bucher, who was born in Pocatello, Idaho, had a particularly hardscrabble upbringing, which makes his story all the more heartbreaking.
Given up by his birth mother, he was orphaned when his adoptive mother died of cancer. Raised by his father, grandparents and other family members, he passed through a series of Catholic orphanages, finally winding up in the iconic Father Flanagan’s Boys Town in Nebraska after writing a letter to Flanagan, and surprisingly, receiving a reply and eventually, acceptance there. He considered it his real home.
Following his release from North Korean captivity, Bucher — who had entered the service during World War II — faced a Navy court of inquiry. A court martial was recommended, but Secretary of the Navy John H. Chafee intervened on his behalf and no action was taken. Bucher, who argued that he placed the lives of his men over a ship that could be replaced, was not found guilty of any indiscretions and was able to continue his career in the rank of commander. In 1989, 21 years after the Pueblo incident, the U.S. government finally recognized the crew’s sacrifice and awarded then prisoner-of-war medals.
Bucher was still famous, or infamous, the day in March 1980 when I interviewed him and his wife, Rose, at their comfortably modest home in the rural community of Poway outside San Diego. He had gained a fame that he didn’t seek, and hated. But once again, his name had become news — at the time we spoke, American hostages were being held in Iran. The word “hostages” made everyone remember Bucher from 12 years before.
Although at the time the hostages in Tehran were still in bondage and there appeared little hope for their immediate release, Bucher chose to focus on the difficult psychological readjustments they might have to face once their freedom would finally be attained. In fact, he said that perhaps the roughest aspect of their readjustment might be how effectively the hostages could cope with the sudden thrust or fame and recognition that they never sought or mentally prepared for but nonetheless were confronted with.
Bucher also said the flip side of instant fame could pose a serious threat to any crisis survivor’s emotional well-being — how to leave the limelight and return to a routine way of life once public interest in the catastrophe — and the person — waned.
In Bucher’s case, he had a mere 20 minutes to adapt to the initial, and brutal, realities of his unwanted and new-found celebrity. Since the Pueblo incident, as it was dubbed, was one of the earliest international crises of its kind, U.S. officials provided virtually no debriefing or psychological re-entry period for him and his crew, he said.
“They had me change directly fom my prison uniform into navy coveralls,” said Bucher, then 51 years old. “A guy from the U.S. State department came in and talked to me, just wanted to know if the ship had been in international waters. I said yes, and they said they knew it.
“Then he asked me if I wouldn’t mind speaking to ‘a few reporters.’ I said, ‘Fine,’ and right away — it couldn’t have been more than 20 minutes or so since our release — some of us from our crew were taken and propped up on a stage in front of 400 newsmen from all over the world.
“It was terrifying. Almost as terrifying as the captivity itself. It seemed like 400 flashbulbs were going off at the same time. Everybody was yelling at us all at once. All I could do was go through the same drill I had used when I was being interrogated by the North Korens. It was the only way I could make it through.”
Bucher, who left the Navy in 1973 after 28 years in the service, felt his career might really have ended on that fateful January day in 1968.
“Hell, let’s face it,” he said in the deep, briny voice of a man of the sea, “to find yourself suddenly on the cover of Time, Newsweek, every damn newspaper in the country — to have your life investigated and picked over by experts — is like somebody hits you in the head with a baseball bat. You feel naked as hell.”
Bucher died in 2004 at the age of 76. Unfortunately, the humiliations he had weathered in life didn’t end there. His funeral preparation was included on a tacky cable realty-TV series, “Family Plots,” which focused on the behind-the-scenes machinations of a funeral business located near his home in Poway. He is buried at the Fort Rosecrans National Cemetery in San Diego.
As for Bucher’s ship, the U.S.S. Pueblo, the North Koreans still have the vessel and display it as a tourist attraction. No American military operations have been staged to retrieve it, and the ship is still officially carried as “in commission” in the Naval Vessel Register.
Janey Jimenez never wanted to be famous, either. But by the time she was 24, in 1977, she was. She was sworn in as the only female U.S. Deputy Marshal in San Francisco just two hours before being assigned to guard heiress-turned fugitive Patty Hearst. That was on Sept. 29, 1975, and by the time she left Hearst’s side the following March 20, the two had logged some 350 hours together.
Jimenez, one of six children born to a struggling working-class Mexican-American family in Van Nuys, Calif., was just a year older than hearst when the assignment came.
She wasn’ ready for it.
With her attractive appearanvce and charismatic countenance, Jimenez was inundated with marriage proposals, offers to pose nude, and deals from publishers to write a book about the “real” Patty Hearst.
Jimenez resigned from the marshal’s office in July of 1977 to take advantage of “an incredible offer” from Marvin Glass and Associates of Chicago to write a “Janey and Patty” book. That book, “My Prisoner,” was published in October of that year.
When I met her to discuss the book, Hearst and her life, Jimenez was a straightforward, vulnerable young woman on the edge. Gone were the trademark gold-streaked pompadour, glamorous form-fitting suits, and every-present handbag.
She was thinner now. Her loose white pantsuit tumbled over her gaunt frame like tinsel on a Christmas tree. She described sitting in a Beverly Hills hotel suite a few days before, crying. Overcome by fatigue and anxiety, she found herself telephoning a “stronger” friend for advice: Patty Hearst (who at the time was free on bond). The icy media favorite of just two years before had vanished and was nowhere to be found.
“I can relate to Patty now about how she feels, about people not believing what you way,” Jimenez explained. “Do you know how that gets to you? I wouldn’t go through all of this again. What I’ve experienced is nothing that someone at age 24 could go through. It’s unbelievable.
“I’ve seen what society does to someone, and it’s sad. Why can’t they just say, ‘There goes another human being’?”
Steven Lewis, when I talked to him in October of 1980, was in a hospital bed in Los Angeles. He wanted fame in the worst way — enough to risk his life for. In fact, that’s why he was in a hospital.
In July of that year, the then-25-year-old daredevil, performing for the “That’s Incredible!” TV-series cameras, had attempted to jump over two sports cars speeding toward him at 100 miles per hour in a stunt staged in Phoenix.
His left foot pierced the windshield of the lead car.
But he was an optimist, and a seeker of fame. Four months earlier, he had jumped over a car in San Diego traveling at 70 miles an hour.
“I would like to try another stunt where the car comes straight at me, and I hit a ramp and jump over it with my motorcycle,” he said. “I’m still negotiating with the ‘That’s Incredible!’ people.”
Asked why he performed such life-threatening stunts, and why they should be shown on television, successful or not, Lewis responded: “I’m a professional. This is what I do. And stunts like mine are why this show is one of the top-rated in the country. People watch it.”
(I called a number of sponsors of the show; officials wouldn’t comment but promised to have executives call back. Only one, from Hallmark Cards, did — and vowed never to allow a commercial spot on the program again.)
I fell out of touch with Lewis and never did get to talk to a fellow “That’s Incredible!” fame-seeker, a stunt man named Stan Kruml, who tried to walk through a fiery, 150-foot tunnel of chicken wire and burlap with only a flame-retardant suit for protection. Kruml emerged from the inferno, his suit on fire — and his fingers burned to stubs.
Fire didn’t bother Vernon Craig, a portly, affable man who dubbed himself “Komar the Firewalker.” But that’s because he “only” walked over a shallow pit of eucalyptus wood and charcoal, as he did the night I observed him in the Mission Beach section of San Diego as the prime attraction of a five-day festival of something called the Foundation for Esoteric Studies.
Craig/Komar feverishly slurped Coke and chain-smoked Camels as a pre-walk ritual, stomping around the put like an angry father awaiting his father after a late date.
As he did, a spokesman for the “foundation” carried a half-empty six-pack of Coke around the periphery of the pit, dutifully searching for signs from the star of the show that more of the apparently nerves-calming soft drink was needed. (So intense was the Ohio Fakir’s proclivity for the beverage that he sought out Coke, wanting to know if the beverage giant wanted to use him for an ad; “Nothing ever came of it,” he said. “I don’t know why.”)
Finally, he was ready. Slowly, he walked toward the pit, stalking. Then, suddenly, he walked through it. Silence. The crowd gaped. What to do, or say? Nobody knew the proper etiquette for having watched a firewalker strut his stuff up close and personal.
Komar fixed that. “You may applaud,” he told the onlookers. And they did.
“You know, Craig/Komar told me later, “my daughter says I'm weird, really weird.”
Richard Franklin Pryor Jr. did nothing to become famous except be born: His father was actor-comedian Richard Pryor.
Pryor Jr. was 19, had his father’s face, and was an apprentice seaman stationed at the Naval training Center in San Diego.
By the time I interviewed him in January of 1982, he was having to fend off reporters who were wondering what was happening with Pryor Sr., who admitted to having taken drugs but apparently swore them off after a much-publicized accident in June of 1980 left him critically injured.
Truth be told, it was the accident that interested the press as much or more than the polite, introspective young man who found himself defending his own abstinence from drugs.
Young Pryor explained he had never bought any of his father’s often brilliant but always obscenity-laced comedy albums, nor, he said, did he ever intend to.
“It’s not the language so much, really,” he said quitely. “It’s just that I look at him differently than he is on the albums. You see, he’s my Dad.”
Jane Barbe and Pat Trumbell also were famous. People heard their voices every day. Literally millions of times. But nobody knew who they were: the “time of day ladies” callers dialed on the telephone to check the time.
I was able to reach Jane.
She said she didn’t feel like a celebrity at all, even though she had “talked” to about 20 million people a day in 800 cities throughout the United States and in Canada, Australia, Hong Kong, Saudi Arabia, the Bahamas and some parts of South America.
During a stock-market crisis occurring in the Reagan administration years, it was Barbe’s recording that informed panicky callers to the New York Stock Exchange that they couldn’t get through because all the lines were busy.
When I spoke to her, Barbe, who wouldn’t give her age but admitted to having two children in their 20s, described herself as an actress and voiceover specialist who had done radio and TV-commercial work in and around her home in Atlanta. She said that she had stopped making on-camera appearances a half-dozen years before because of an eye problem that was aggravated by bright lights.
She explained that her phone replies were made by recording all the numbers twice, once with an “up” inflection and again with a “down” inflection, with the whole thing being digitally recorded and organized by a computer.
Barbe said she didn’t feel famous and didn’t particularly want to be. But she was. And sometimes she was confronted by her well-known alter ago.
“A few years go, every time I tried to dial my daughter at college, I got me on the phone instead, saying the circuits were full — it’s just as frustrating for me as it is for anyone else.”
One of the most unforgettable instances of fame forgotten, or fame unneeded, came in the person of a former supporting film actress named Dorothy Miller.
Under the stage name Dorothy Morris, she worked at MGM during Hollywood’s Golden Age in movies like “Cry Havoc” and “Our Vines Have Tender Grapes,” when the studio was the most respected filmmaking factory in the world boasting “more stars than there are in the heavens” with the likes of Clark Gable and Spencer Tracy.
She gave up acting in the 1940s to raise two sons and returned to the screen part-time in the 1960s. Her last theatrical release before I spoke to her in 1987 was in the critically acclaimed 1966 film, “Seconds.” She had moved to Carlsbad, Calif., with her sister, Carren March Doll, a dancer who was a stand-in for Judy Garland in the movie classic “The Wizard of Oz.”
Years removed from Hollywood, Miller had a sincere and humble goal: to help give disabled performers the chance to act.
“(Actor) Herbert Marshall had a wooden leg that the audience never saw. And I grew up when Franklin Roosevelt was president and in a wheelchair and nobody ever talked about that either. But not now. These things come out of the closet.
“I want to see disabled people up on the screen if they’ve got the talent to do the job. There can be a lot of talent contained in bodies that don’t happen to have the stamp ‘perfect’ on them.”
To make her point, Miller produced a play for the local Performing Arts Theater of the Handicapped. I was there as a journalist, paid to write about it. She was there because she wanted to be, and it had nothing to do with the fame she once had. She used that former fame as a useful tool to help others.
Another courageous figure from a Hollywood golden era, this of TV — an emigre from the likes of such storied and respected fare as “Playhouse 90,” “Alcoa-Goodyear Theatre,” “Dragnet” and “Have Gun, Will Travel” — was retired writer Jack Jacobs. When I interviewed him in 1989, he was retired and still going strong, but in a different venue.
A native of Washington, D.C., he initially dreamed of becoming a playwright, studying the craft at Yale after World War II under the GI Bill of Rights. But he gave eventually went into television instead.
When we talked, TV was going through a youth movement both on the screen and behind the scenes, and there was no place for the Jack Jacobses of the world.
But he refused to complain. “The business has been good to me,” he said, admitting that at that point he couldn’t even find an agent.
No matter. He still used his gift to entertain and inspire, writing and adapting plays at the Leisure Billage Oceans Hills retirement community where he was living with his wife, Helen.
He had had a taste of fame, and found he no longer needed it.
William Carroll didn’t know anything about lost fame. He had never had it. But he had a brush with it, and for the longest time, didn’t realize it.
In 1967, Carroll, an unassuming man residing in a bush-shrouded house perched atop a hill in San Marcos, Calif., rediscovered some old slides and photographs that he had not seen since 1945, the year he shot them for camera-store displays.
For the first time, he realized who the fledgling, brown-haired 19-year-old model in his pictures was: Norma Jeane Dougherty, still several years away from being transformed into Hollywood’s greatest sex symbol, one of the 20th century’s most iconic cultural figures, Marilyn Monroe.
Even upon making his discovery, Carroll — who, incredibly, claimed never to have seen a Monroe film — didn’t fathom the value of the shots and misplaced them for another four years.
It was not until reading about the sale of other early Monroe photos at Christie’s auction house in London in the summer of 1987 that it occurred to him his photos might be worth something.
A few weeks after my interview with him, Christie’s East of New York was scheduled to auction his Monroe collection— 96 color slides and seven black-and-white photos and negatives — starting at $500 a picture.
I don’t know how much Bill Carroll made from the auction. He wasn’t interested in fame for himself, or frankly at all. It didn’t impress him.
But he still ferociously guarded conversations that he had had with his subject, whom he remembered simply as a young, innocent girl who was careful to protect her reputation and privacy.
They apparently had something in common.
He noticed her wedding ring and they began talking about their private lives. She was still married to James E. Dougherty; she had quit school at 16 to marry him. The union would be over by the following year. Carroll had just gone through a painful divorce, and was sympathetic.
But what was said between him and the future Marilyn Monroe will never be known — he wouldn’t divulge the content of their chat, even then years later (Monroe died in 1962 at age 36), just that it related to their respective marital issues.
“What I remember about her problems are her personal affairs,” Carroll said in an uncharacteristic surge of irritation. “What she said to me was private, and will stay that way.”
For someone who had no need for fame or taking credit, few could match Ralph Hodges.
The next time you see James Cagney’s Oscar-winning performance as George M. Cohan in the 1942 film “Yankee Doddle Dandy,” that’s Hodges as the 12-year-old Cohan. He was also an “Our Gang” kid, appeared in “National Velvet” with Elizabeth Taylor and Mickey Rooney,” danced with Fred Astaire at the beginning of “Holiday Inn” (that’s Hodges with the harmonica), was Superboy in the 15-episode “Superman” film series with Kirk Allen, and was a Munchkin in “The Wizard of Oz.”
Hodges left acting in 1950 after appearing in 50 films because it occurred to him, he said, “that to be really successful (in film acting), you have to care about nothing but yourself.”
When I interviewed Hodges in October of 1988, he was in charge of commercial video production at a television station in San Diego. He and his wife, Diane, had just written, produced and directed a 30-minute documentary for the Los Angeles-based International Medical Corps in an effort to recruit medical help for the treatment of Afghan refugess in Pakistan.
Class.
Igor Cassini had class, too, and above all, fame. A lot of it. He held on to the former but lost the latter in stupendous fashion.
When I interviewed him in August of 1983, Igor, the brother of Oleg Cassini, who himself gained fame as Jacqueline Kennedy’s favorite designer, was publicizing his first novel, “Pay the Price.”
The book, not so coincidentally, concerned itself with wealth, fame and power, and the corrupting influence each can have on lives, careers and the human spirit.
Twenty years before, Igor was saying, he was famous and powerful as “Cholly Knickerbocker,” a New York-based gossip columnist syndicated daily in 100 cities across the United States. He had paid tipsters from London to Rio de Janeiro. He coined the terms “jet set” and upper claws.” He ran with the Kennedys, wrote firsthand about the Rockefellers and Fords and Vanderbilts, golfed with CIA director Allen Dulles and comedian Bob Hope, and married Charlene Wrightsman, the daughter of oilman Charles B. Wrightsman, a Palm Beach neighbor of Kennedy patriarch Joseph P. Kennedy.
Then Igor Cassini lost it all. The beautiful young wife to an overdose of barbiturates, his newspaper job, his public relations firm — and ultimately, his power, prestige — and fame.
“I paid the price,” he said, noting that his book was a kind of Roman a clef echoing the kind of political and international intrigue that he believed led to his own downfall. “The book is fictional but is patterned after people I knew and things I knew. What happen to me can happen to anyone who gets too close to power. It can destroy you. One knows this, but one goes on. It is part of the risk, part of the excitement.”
And finally, there was Pauline Perry Milan, who was about to celebrate her 100th birthday when we talked in March of 1982. She had been around fame for a very long time. And it didn’t impress her.
A one-time lyric soprano who remembered having her picture on the cover of The New York Star in 1911, she recalled inventor Thomas Alvah Edison as “a nice, white-haired, somewhat deaf old man” who would tap his toe as she performed. Cecil B. DeMille was a family friend, “a posturing, likable, but very self-satisfied sort who could act but had to talk his way through songs” (he would go on to become one of Hollywood’s most legendary and influential producer-directors, especially known for his big-screen epics that are still used as yardsticks of cinematic overkill). And then there were her meetings with William Howard Taft, the country’s 27th chief executive, “the big, fat president,” and actress Mary Pickford, America’s Sweetheart in silent films, “a sweet little lady, somewhat easier to deal with than her sister, who always came on the movie set with their mother.” Pickford’s husband at the time, Douglas Fairbanks, the screen’s quintessential swashbuckler of the era and perhaps of all time, had sat behind Millan at East Denver High School.
Millan, who played “The Merry Widow” in the first U.S. production of the operetta three-quarters of a century before, was the oldest of six children born to a Clyde, Kansas, real estate broker and his wife. All of the children became involved in show business.
Her brother, Harry Perry, then 95 and the only other surviving child at the time, had been a leading cinematographer in Hollywood — he was the chief aerial photographer on Howard Hughes’ famous 1930 film “Hell’s Angels,” a World War I tale that also launched the career of screen siren Jean Harlow, who met an untimely death not that many years later and was, in her own way, a victim of the very fame she had fought so hard to attain.
Millan knew that too.
Fame. Admired from afar, obsessed over by many, achieved by a few, thrust upon others. All too often more interloper than welcome guest, but always a vivid reminder to be careful what you wish for.
