Hollywood's Hard-Luck Ladies

23 Actresses Who Suffered Early Deaths, Accidents, Missteps, Illnesses and Tragedies 
By Laura Wagner
McFarland & Company, Inc. Jefferson NC. 2020.
ISBN (e-book) 978-1-4766-3833-1

I'm tempted to say I enjoyed this book. But these women had such sad lives that one is left feeling mildly depressed by the litany of "early deaths, accidents, missteps" and all that other stuff listed in the title. It aggravated my pandemic-induced blues. 

But I did find it interesting. It rips the lid off the Hollywood studio system of the 1930s, 1940s and 1950s. In those days, an actor's success was defined by obtaining a contract to make films with a particular studio - MGM, RKO, Warners Brothers, etc. But those who were able to get a contract found their careers virtually held hostage by the decisions of powerful studio bosses. 

We can't blame the studios for all the hard luck described in these pages, though. Many of these ladies created their own problems. Particularly sad are the ones with mental illnesses such as bipolar disorder, who had no access to the medications available today. 

The book itself is nicely put together: amply illustrated with photos, well written and well researched, with nearly 70 pages of references to sources used. Many of those sources are newspaper stories from the days when these women were still in the public eye. A surprising number were written by gossip columnists of the day. One wonders how much trust can be placed in the accuracy of gossip columnists’ writings, but perhaps there wasn’t much other material to use. 

I was drawn to this book when researching the actress Patricia Dane, who gets a 14-page treatment herein. Her bawdy behavior is virtually unmatched by any of the other women in the book, but her life didn’t turn out as badly as most of them. She lived until age 77. She wasn’t drug-addicted, mentally ill, married multiple times, left paralyzed by a horrible accident, killed by a drug overdose or treated badly by a succession of abusive boyfriends - at least, as Wagner tells the story. Depressing or not, this is fascinating stuff.

N.B. Read the Wikipedia article about Patricia Dane here.