20 Hollywood Scandals Studios Desperately Tried To Bury

Howard Strickling, MGM’s publicity chief, was at Lana Turner’s Beverly Hills house before the police had even finished drafting their report. On April 4, 1958, Turner’s 14-year-old daughter, Cheryl Crane, stabbed her mother’s boyfriend, Johnny Stompanato, a mob enforcer who had been threatening her, during a violent confrontation. Strickling and Turner’s defense attorney, Jerry Giesler, were there first, and they influenced what the press published. The coroner’s inquest concluded it was justifiable homicide. And Turner’s career continued almost uninterrupted; she would appear in Imitation of Life the following year.

At MGM, Judy Garland was their teenage star of The Wizard of Oz. Doctors at the studio gave her amphetamines to keep her thin and give her energy, then barbiturates to get her to sleep through endless hours of filming. That began in the late 1930s. She had a secret abortion at age 19 after marrying bandleader David Rose in 1941, as the studio and her mother worked together to avoid bad publicity. Another was rumored while she was involved with the actor Tyrone Power. For much of her life, Garland struggled with her drug dependency.

When the gossip rag Confidential tracked down proof that Rock Hudson was seeing other men in 1955, Universal and Hudson’s agent, Henry Willson, traded in potentially explosive material on two other contract players to bury the Hudson story. Willson also set up a marriage between Hudson and his secretary, Phyllis Gates. Studio publicists promoted Gates’ story in fan mags, and she always insisted they wed for love. Studio biographers call it an arranged deal.

In 1935, Loretta Young, then a 22-year-old Fox star, got pregnant with the baby of her married co-star, Clark Gable. She went into hiding, claiming she was ill or traveling, and gave birth to a daughter, Judy Lewis. Young placed the baby in an orphanage for over a year before staging her own “adoption” of the child, a story studio publicists fed to columnists. Lewis eventually revealed the truth, and Young privately told her family that the 1935 incident was non-consensual.

Joan Barry was a 23-year-old actress who sued 54-year-old Charlie Chaplin, who ran his own studio, for paternity in 1943. Tests revealed that the baby had blood type B, Barry had blood type A, and Chaplin had blood type O. Blood evidence wasn’t binding on California juries, however, so while Chaplin was found not guilty of a related federal charge under the Mann Act, he was ordered to pay child support. The scandal was spun in the press by Chaplin’s publicists as political persecution.

When Roscoe “Fatty” Arbuckle, Paramount’s biggest silent comedy star, was arrested for the death of actress Virginia Rappe, who died after attending a 1921 party in San Francisco, Paramount pulled three completed films from release. After two earlier trials ended in hung juries, Arbuckle was acquitted of manslaughter in his third trial, on April 12, 1922. The jury apologized in writing. Paramount and rival studios blacklisted him anyway. They even helped establish a new industry censorship office to ease widespread national outrage.

In 1942, Errol Flynn, then the biggest action star at Warner Bros., was indicted on three counts of statutory rape involving two teenagers, Betty Hansen and Peggy Satterlee. Warner Bros. dispatched publicity men and private investigators to examine the girls’ backgrounds, fed unflattering information about them to friendly columnists, and portrayed them in the press as two lying adolescents. Flynn was acquitted of all three charges on February 9, 1943, by which time the smear campaign against his teenage accusers had already run its course.

In late 1957, Sammy Davis Jr., a Black singer and actor, was dating Columbia’s biggest box office draw, Kim Novak. Studio head Harry Cohn panicked when he heard about the couple and feared his theaters would be boycotted. He contacted mob figures, including gangster John Roselli, to threaten Davis with violence unless he ended the affair and married a Black woman immediately. On January 10, 1958, Davis paid dancer Loray White $10,000 to stage a fake marriage to put a stop to his relationship with Novak.

Ingrid Bergman was a Swedish star working in Hollywood, having an affair with Italian director Roberto Rossellini while shooting Stromboli in 1949. When she got pregnant, a US senator denounced her from the floor of the Senate, declaring that she was “a horrible example of womanhood.” The studio that held US distribution rights to the film, RKO, re-edited it without the director’s approval and took care of the press surrounding the birth. It wasn’t enough. She stayed in self-imposed exile in Europe for seven years before making another film in America.

Born Lucille LeSueur, Joan Crawford was the subject of rumors in the early 1930s about a pornographic film that she had made as a young adult. MGM bosses Louis B. Mayer and Eddie Mannix hired detectives to locate the prints and reportedly purchased the original negative for somewhere between $10,000 and $100,000 to ensure it would never be shown. No copy has survived. Whatever it contained, MGM guaranteed that it would never be seen again.

In September 1932, MGM producer Paul Bern was found shot dead at his Beverly Hills home two months after marrying the studio’s new sex symbol, Jean Harlow. After household staff alerted the studio before the police, Louis B. Mayer, along with production chief Irving Thalberg and studio fixers Eddie Mannix and Howard Strickling, spent hours controlling the crime scene, removing a cryptic note Bern had left behind, and pushing a narrative of suicide. He is officially listed as having taken his own life, but some historians continue to argue otherwise.

In 1948, Robert Mitchum, then a rising RKO actor, was caught in a Los Angeles Police Department marijuana sting and charged with possession. Normally, such an offense would have been grounds for dismissal under the morals clauses in all studio contracts. But Howard Hughes, owner of RKO, would not let go of Mitchum. He hired lawyers to defend him and had the RKO publicity department portray Mitchum as an honest actor caught in a police trap. Meanwhile, the studio pushed its backlog of films into theaters as Mitchum spent 50 days in jail in 1949. The star’s image and box-office appeal only intensified after his arrest.

On February 2, 1922, director William Desmond Taylor was discovered shot to death in his Los Angeles bungalow. But before police arrived, Charles Eyton, general manager of the studio producing Taylor’s movies, ransacked the house and confiscated personal correspondence to shield studio starlets Mabel Normand and Mary Miles Minter from suspicion. He then surrendered only a few of these papers to the authorities. His unauthorized search compromised the crime scene, and the case has never been officially solved.

In November of 1924, producer Thomas Ince fell fatally ill while aboard newspaper baron William Randolph Hearst’s yacht, with Hearst’s mistress, Marion Davies, a guest on board. Speculation surfaced, however, that Hearst had actually shot Ince. Early newspaper editions describing a shooting were recalled, Hearst’s own newspapers refrained from mentioning the incident, and Ince’s body was cremated without an official autopsy. One doctor was interviewed by the county prosecutor, who then closed the case, citing death caused by heart failure due to indigestion.

In 1930, Clara Bow, Paramount’s biggest star, filed embezzlement charges against her secretary, Daisy DeVoe. During the trial in January 1931, DeVoe talked openly about Bow’s gambling debts, extramarital affairs, and personal demons. Tabloids were quick to report every salacious detail. Although Paramount attempted to control the flow of information by limiting Bow’s ability to talk to reporters, and even sought to control the courtroom proceedings themselves, the pressure ultimately led to a breakdown. Paramount terminated Bow’s contract and had her committed to a private sanitarium. She retired from films in 1933.

MGM actress Mary Nolan had an affair with Eddie Mannix, the studio’s general manager, and he assaulted her in 1930, sending her to a hospital where she spent six months recovering from multiple surgeries. MGM used its clout with the local cops and the hospital staff to make sure no report was ever filed. And when Nolan later tried to get out of her contract and get some money, the studio bought her out and effectively blacklisted her from the industry. Nolan ended up destitute and addicted to drugs, and she died in 1948.

In May of 1937, 20-year-old dancer Patricia Douglas was lured to an MGM party at the Hal Roach Ranch, not the main studio lot. There, a salesman called David Ross plied her with liquor and sexually assaulted her. Douglas brought charges against Ross, but fixer Eddie Mannix had private eyes tailing the young woman and bribing witnesses, which led to the collapse of the prosecution. Meanwhile, a media campaign depicted Douglas as unstable. The matter remained hidden for decades until a biographer began combing through studio records.

On December 13, 1951, producer Walter Wanger, who was married to actress Joan Bennett, shot her agent Jennings Lang twice in a Beverly Hills parking lot because he suspected they were having an affair. Wanger’s publicists tried to spin the incident in press releases as a mental breakdown due to financial pressure from Wanger’s recent box-office bomb. Lang went on to become an executive at Universal. Wanger did four months on a prison farm, and Bennett’s film career never rebounded.

Paramount’s top leading man, Wallace Reid, was in a train crash while making a film in Oregon in 1919, and the studio doctors prescribed him morphine to ease his pain, which led to an addiction. When he returned to work, the studio doctors continued to prescribe him drugs to ensure he could keep working and not delay production. It wasn’t until he collapsed on the Paramount set that his addiction was discovered. He died in a sanitarium several years later, at age 31. His widow later launched anti-drug film campaigns.

In 1943, Gene Tierney, a pregnant 20th Century Fox star, contracted German measles after a fan broke out of quarantine in order to see her at the Hollywood Canteen, a Los Angeles club where stars performed for servicemen during World War II. Her daughter Daria was born deaf, blind and severely disabled. Fox told the press that Tierney had simply been ill with a routine ailment in order not to jeopardize the studio’s wartime image. Tierney herself went on to spend many years in psychiatric hospitals, as she recounted in her autobiography.

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