Today’s Belligerent Yet Truly Morbid Fact!
The fates of former child stars always make good media copy when they are dreadful, far juicier than reports on the few who adjust reasonably well to adulthood, like Shirley Temple or Ron Howard. One of the most tragic victims of the Hollywood studio system was talented young Bobby Driscoll. As a youngster, the industry could not get enough of him. But when he became a gawky young adult, the system cruelly shoved him aside. He was unable to cope with such bitter rejection and escaped into drug addiction, which eventually killed him.
Driscoll was born in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, in 1937, and moved with his parents to California in 1943. A Los Angeles barber whose own boy was already in motion pictures urged Mrs. Driscoll to have little Bobby try his luck in the movies. She took him to MGM, where the pixie-faced Bobby was soon hired for a role in Margaret O’Brien’s Lost Angel (1943). By the time he was six, the cooperative Bobby was making $500 a week, remarkable money in those times—especially for a youngster. By 1946 he was being touted as “the greatest child find since Jackie Cooper played Skippy [in 1931].”
Driscoll was the first human actor Walt Disney put under contract. He and the equally young Luana Patten were paired in Song of the South (1946) and So Dear to My Heart (1948), billed as the “sweetheart team.” When asked what he intended to do with his weekly earnings, Bobby said, “I’m going to save my money and go to college, then become a G-man.” His biggest success was in the thriller The Window (1949); he was given a special Oscar as the year’s outstanding juvenile performer. Also for the Disney studio, he played Jim Hawkins in Treasure Island (1950) and provided the model and voice for the animated Peter Pan (1953).
By 1954, Bobby was in that awkward teenager stage, gangly and acne-faced. Finding screen jobs scarce, he performed a few TV guest appearances. Away from work, he did not fit in with his peers. “I really feared people,” he admitted later. “I tried desperately to be one of the gang. When they rejected me, I fought back, became belligerent and cocky and was afraid all the time.” He first tried marijuana when he was 16, then turned to harsher drugs, finally becoming a heroin addict. He was arrested in 1956 on a narcotics charge and on suspicion of being a drug pusher. Bobby then tried to straighten out his life, and even landed a new film role. The project, however, was a trashy study of juvenile delinquents called The Party Crashers (1958), featuring another Hollywood has-been, Frances Farmer, who was also failing to make a successful comeback.
Abandoning acting for the time being, Driscoll took odd jobs, but he either quit or got fired from every one. He married a woman named Marjorie, had a son, and was determined that his kid would never have to endure what he was undergoing. But when his wife divorced him, Bobby reverted to drugs. He was jailed as an addict in 1959, and in 1961 he was apprehended while robbing an animal clinic. He was incarcerated at Chino Penitentiary for drug addiction and remained there for more than a year. When he was paroled, he worked as a carpenter and then drifted to New York. His mother would remember, “None of the studios in New York would hire him because he had once been on drugs.”
Bobby’s last months must have been desperate ones indeed. He died penniless in an abandoned Greenwich Village tenement. His body was later discovered by two children playing there on March 30, 1968. Two empty beer bottles were found by the corpse and there were needle marks on his arms. Since no one knew who he was, he was buried in a pauper’s grave. The causes of death were listed as a heart attack and hardening of the arteries. Later that year, when Bobby’s father himself was dying, his mother tried again to find Bobby. She had no success, and she went to the FBI for assistance. Time passed, and finally, she heard from an L.A. County agency that her son was officially dead. He had been traced through his fingerprints to that unknown corpse who had been buried back in Manhattan.
Nobody could write a better epitaph to this wasted life than the victim himself. At one point in his tormented adult existence, he observed, “I was carried on a satin cushion and then dropped into the garbage can.” [That should be on his gravestone! – DeSpair]
Culled from: The Hollywood Book of Death
Vintage Photos Du Jour!
A Student’s Dream
Photographer: A. A. Robinson, 1906
Robinson made a series of 8″ x 10″ photographs depicting students on the dissecting table surrounded by cadavers and/or skeletons. The photographs were popular images of their time and were sold to students throughout the United States. The images graphically represent one of photography’s theoretical concepts—that of “magical substitution.” Magical substitution is the phenomenon when the viewers place themselves in the depicted scene. It is one source of empathy, as one contemplates even fleetingly what it would mean to be in that situation.
Culled from: Stiffs, Skulls & Skeletons
Garretdom: Parisian Edition
Many years ago, a fascinating collection of scrapbooks containing newspaper articles from the 1880’s/90’s appeared on eBay. The scrapbooks were obviously compiled by a kindred soul, as all of the articles were Grim, and were meticulously pasted into old textbooks. I tried to purchase the collection from the lucky soul who found them at an auction, but he quickly realized what he had and started selling them on eBay where they went for astronomical amounts. I was able to talk him into making copies of the books for me before he sold them off, and I’ve been slowly using them for my vintage newspaper Garretdom collection over the years. I decided to start sharing them on a daily basis. So without further adieu, here is one of the entries saved by our 19th century kindred soul:
What a Wicked City Paris Is.
PARIS, Sept. 27.—The city continues to furnish a singularly large number of murders and suicides. At one of the hotels yesterday the cook shot and fatally wounded his mistress and then attempted suicide, because the woman had made him jealous. A hairdresser shot and mortally hurt his mistress, because she had tired of their relationship and resolved to reform. A workman having his week’s pay in his pocket, and feeling hilarious met a pretty female organ grinder, and asked her to play him a waltz so that he might dance for her amusement while she played for his. The woman’s male companion instantly became incensed at the request of the happy-minded workman, and shot him dead.
Culled from the collection of The Comtesse DeSpair
1886 Morbid Scrapbook