TV Superman's Real-Life Fall from 'Hollywoodland': Who Killed George Reeves?
By Scott Huver, Hollywood.com Staff
|
Friday, February 02, 2007
George Reeves |
In the wee hours of June 16, 1959, a Los Angeles police sedan is parked outside a modest two-story home at 1576 Benedict Canyon Drive, a dark, densely foliaged road that meanders up the rustic canyons just outside the city limits of glittery, glamorous Beverly Hills. Upstairs, two detectives surveyed the gruesome display in the master bedroom, where a tall, thickly built 45-year-old man lies sprawled nude across his bed, a bullet hole burned into his temple and a .30-calber German Luger pistol on the floor at his feet. The bed sheets are soaked with blood, spreading crimson beneath the body like a red cape. It was a grimly ironic image, for the dead man was, in life, best known for wearing a red cape on television. His name was George Reeves, but millions of children across the world knew him as Superman.
Hollywood.com's Mysteries and Scandals Video: George Reeves
It has been said that the assassination of President John F. Kennedy marked the loss of innocence of 20th Century America, but for many Baby Boomers the entry into the darker world of adulthood came when they learned the next day that the man who they believed was the greatest superhero of all had taken his own life.
But if the suicide of Superman was unthinkable to his pint-sized fans, it was ever harder to accept by those who knew and loved the real man inside the costume. A big, likable lug with a winning grin, a wry gleam in his eye and a wickedly self-deprecating sense of humor, George Reeves had known more than his share of bad breaks in Hollywood: The promising start to his film career that began with a role as one of the Tarleton Twins in the legendary 1939 epic Gone With the Wind had been derailed when he was called to serve in World War II, and when he returned even a part in the Oscar-grabbing From Here to Eternity had filed to ignite much new heat.
So he took a role on that brand-new medium, television, as the star of The Adventures of Superman to pay the bills and keep his name in the spotlight, not realizing that the part was even larger than life than he was. Reeves donned Superman’s suit so convincingly, so majestically—despite the otherwise chintzy trappings of the show—it transformed him, and the audience of children that adored him would never want to see him as anything else. Neither, it seemed, would the powers-that-be that ran Hollywood. Had the mantle of the Man of Steel ultimately been too much for even the warm, charming and seemingly lighthearted George Reeves to bear?
Questions quickly arose in the wake of his death: Reeves was just days away from marrying his sweetheart, and things were looking promising—stable, at least—career-wise, with a surprise order for more Superman episodes and opportunities to move behind the camera as a director. Why had he given into despair now? The investigation only turned up more curious facts: Most of the people in his home that night were relative strangers; more than one bullet hole had been discovered in his bedroom; his body displayed hard-to-explain bruises; his pistol had been oiled, revealing no fingerprints; atypical of suicides, there was no note, and it was committed with people in the house; and the examination of his body had been cursory at best, washed and embalmed before a formal autopsy could be performed, thus no gunpowder residue was later found on Reeves’ hand to conclusively prove he pulled the trigger himself.
Suddenly, the press was buzzing with the notion that rather than a suicidal, washed-up actor, George Reeves may have in fact been a murder victim. And just as abruptly, the investigation was closed. To Hollywood in 1959, Superman was really the famous one; now Reeves would have to settle for being merely notorious. But as his legion of underage admirers grew to adulthood, they continued remembered Reeves fondly. And, instilled with Superman’s credo for “Truth, Justice and the American Way,” many of them began to poke and prod at the official “suicide” story, developing convincing scenarios that indicated foul play, not frustrated dreams of fame.
“I’ve probably spent half my adult life working on a book about Reeves,” said actor Jim Beaver. Best known as one of the ensemble of actors on HBO’s hard-edged Western series Deadwood, Beaver has long been compiling information about the actor’s life and curious demise, as his childhood fascination with the series slowly morphed into a nagging compulsion to determine what actually lead to the death of its star.
“As a kid it was quite an impactful show, but even more so was the impact of his death,” said Beaver. “It was such a startling thing for most of the Baby Boomers in this country, and I grew older and more interested in Hollywood history, this case kept coming back to me as something that hadn’t been adequately explored, and the more I explored it, the more I realized how many myths and falsehoods and inaccuracies were part of the common knowledge about George Reeves.”
The noir-seeped film Hollywoodland arrives on DVD February 5th. Starring Adrien Brody, Diane Lane and Ben Affleck as Reeves, the film dramatizes the shadowy mysteries surrounding the actor’s demise (Interviews). But as artfully crafted as it is, the film aspires to be neither a biopic nor a documentary. Hollywood.com takes a look at the prevailing theories and discovers a tangled web of intrigue that would have given even a superman pause.
Robin Tunney stars in Hollywoodland |
Suspect #1: Leonore Lemmon
Anyone taking an even cursory look at the details of the night of Reeves’ death looking for foul play has to begin by focusing on those inside the actor’s home on the evening in question to identify a prime suspect.
Present were Carol Van Ronkel, the lovely, much-younger wife of Rip Van Ronkel, a Hollywood screenwriter in Reeves’ circle who’d visited the house earlier in the night with his wife but was in absentia in the wee hours; Bill Bliss, a man Reeves just met who lived nearby who’d popped in earlier with the Van Ronkels and stopped again later when he saw that the home’s customary “come-over-and-party” signal—a still-lit front door light—was still on; and Bobby Condon, a writer researching a biography on Reeves’ pal and sparring partner, famed boxer Archie Moore, and, some claim, carrying on a secret dalliance with Carol Van Ronkel. Barring a spur-of-the-moment accident or an alcohol-soaked argument that got out of hand, the guests at the late-night party only casually or barely knew Reeves and carried no discernible ill will towards him, and thus no motive for homicide.
That leaves the only other person in the house under the microscope: The actor’s fiancé Leonore Lemmon, whom he was supposed to wed in mere days. Reeves may have been amused that his girl’s initials, L.L., mirrored those of Superman’s paramour Lois Lane. But since the TV show never featured the villainous Lex Luthor, it may have been lost on the actor that Leonore also shared a monogram with the Man of Steel’s worst enemy.
Lemmon was a notorious jet-setting party girl with a past that filled the New York gossip columns with her exploits. The daughter of a Broadway ticket broker, she had been named the illicit third party in a high society divorce and later wed and unwed at will, including a penniless member of the wealthy Vanderbilt family, before she was in her mid-twenties. The tempestuous “Lem,” as she was known, met Reeves in the fall of 1958 while he was in New York on a promotional tour, and immediately bedded the television hero. He was soon enraptured and Lemmon followed him home to Los Angeles (a city she loathed), where he broke off his long-term relationship with a rich and prominent Hollywood society matron.
She quickly upended Reeves’ life (though he seemed to delight in it): The family-style barbeques he routinely hosted for friends morphed into excessive all-night debauches that included few of his now-alienated pals but several of her less-than-savory chums. He caved to her every demand, spent wildly on her, and her glittery star-filled past seemed to rekindle his urgent need for “legitimate” Hollywood status. Offering to marry her and planning an ill-conceived a boxing exhibition tour with Archie Moore to keep his cash flowing, Lem was a wild ride for Reeves, but one he seemed insistent on seeing it through to the end. And the end was nearer than anyone suspected.
According to the version of events Lemmon gave the police on that night, after a day of hard drinking at home and on the club circuit, she and Reeves had retired to bed at midnight, but she later roused herself, turned on the outdoor party light and soon found the guests on the doorstep (Bliss, at least; Van Ronkel and Condon may have already been there together in the guest bedroom) looking for a few more nightcaps, and she let them in. Irritated by the revelry, Reeves came downstairs and snapped at them, but then apologized and joined them until about 1:20 a.m., when he retreated to the master bedroom on the second floor.
“He’s going to shoot himself,” the others present claimed Leonore offhandedly remarked, and moments later a gunshot was heard upstairs. Bliss raced to the master bedroom and discovered Reeves sprawled out on his bed, covered in blood.
This was the story Lemmon would stick to for the duration of the investigation, until her influential attorney and ex-lover, Jimmy Hoffa’s lawyer Edward Bennett Williams, apparently pulled strings and within the week (after being caught breaking into Reeves’ sealed house to raid it of travelers’ checks and scotch) she spirited away to New York, then Europe, never providing testimony to the grand jury investigating the case, and never to return to Los Angeles.
Theorists looking askance at Lemmon suggest that, prompted by the booze, late hour and intrusive parties, an irritable Reeves got into a heated argument with his headstrong and fiery fiancé that resulted in a physical struggle, with his Luger in the middle, and in either a crime of passion or a horrific accident, the gun went off and Reeves dropped dead. Such a scenario could explain many of the mysteries that have surrounded the case, including the bruises discovered on Reeves’ body, the fact that several other bullet holes were apparent in the bedroom, and the absence of gunpowder residue on Reeves’ gun hand.
In her later years, Lemmon—whose casualness with the truth was legendary—would often offer wildly different and contradictory variations of the events of that night, depending on how much attention she was craving and, more significantly, how much alcohol she consumed.
She alternately exposed the Bobby Condon-Carol Van Ronkel affair (something the police do seem to have covered up after Rip Van Ronkel arrived on the scene to retrieve his wife, to spare the couple’s privacy), denied that Reeves argued with anyone, cast Bill Bliss as an unknown and sinister character who lied about her predicting Reeves’ death in the seconds preceding it (Bliss appears to simply have been looking for a midnight cocktail in the wrong place at the wrong time), and said that once Reeves’ body was discovered other people were called to house well before the police were notified, and—though even at her drunkest she was almost always kind and sympathetic in her assessments of her former flame—even suggested that Reeves may have been planning to kill her before offing himself.
Faced with her near endless string of revisions, misinformation, exaggeration and inebriated ramblings, it’s virtually impossible to sift the truth from Lemmon’s lies. “When I was shooting the scene where I shot him, I was sure that Leonore shot him,” said Robin Tunney, who plays Lemmon in the film. “But how else can you play the scene?”
Photo(s) by Hollywood.com Staff- © 2006- Hollywood.com Staff- All Rights Reserved
Photo(s) by Special to Hollywood.com- © 2006- Focus Features- All Rights Reserved