Or rather, there are perhaps three jigsaws with not enough pieces to complete any of them. Īs with the many theories that swirl around the unsolved murder of Elizabeth Short - the tortured and mutilated Black Dahlia - there are too many contradictory pieces to assemble a single coherent jigsaw puzzle of Reeves' death/murder. Reeves was a has-been seeking a comeback, so there is piquancy to the choice of Ben Affleck, a movie star with a career in crisis, to play the stumbling superhero. Unlike Brian De Palma's superficially similar The Black Dahlia, set a decade earlier than Hollywoodland, Coulter's movie has a remarkably confi dent feel for Los Angeles of the 1950s as a living era and a vivid locale. Hollywoodland, a new film directed by Allen Coulter, attempts to unravel the many skeins of suspicion and uncertainty surrounding Reeves' death, and does a good job of sketching in the three or four principal theories. The case has never been reopened, but the doubts have never been satisfactorily laid to rest. But among the dead man's friends there were many who called it murder, and there was no shortage of suspects or motives. The news papers were in a frenzy for a week, then dropped the story flat. In the windowless upstairs bedroom, Reeves lay naked on the bed in a pool of blood, a gun between his feet, a shell casing beneath his corpse, a bullet in his brain and a thick spray of his gore stretching up the wall to the slanted ceiling.Īn open-and-shut case of suicide, said the LA police and the coroner, before closing the investigation with what some considered indecent haste. And here his body was found, in the early morning of June 16 1959, while his fiancee, Leonore Lemmon, reputedly a headline-hungry gold digger, sat downstairs with a house guest called Robert Condon and two neighbours, all of them stupefied with drink when the cops arrived. It was bought for Reeves in 1950 by his longtime lover Toni Mannix, who was married to the powerful MGM studio enforcer Eddie Mannix. Number 1579 Benedict Canyon Drive was similarly small-scale, a modest house, just three rooms downstairs and a bedroom and bathroom in the attic. And up on secluded Beverly Crest Drive, Rock Hudson for decades enjoyed his exclusively gay off-screen private life, hosting allmale Sunday parties around his pool, until Aids caught hold of him and he was forced to endure his last few days on earth beneath the thunderous churning blades of news helicopters circling overhead.Ĭompared with these giants, George Reeves was pretty small beer, a cardboard star in the upstart new medium of television. In the mid-1990s, Heidi Fleiss ran her string of escorts from a well-concealed house some way to the north. Within a mile is Cielo Drive, where Charles Manson's robots massacred Sharon Tate and friends in August 1969. The canyon's denizens have included Rudolph Valentino, Mary Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks, Marion Davies, Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton, and Pia Zadora. The house where Reeves died stands a short distance up Benedict Canyon Drive, in the dense hills and narrow, meandering lanes north of Sunset Boulevard. To a generation of children raised on his exploits, leaping tall buildings and out running speeding bullets, the notion that Superman should have killed himself was inconceivable - and perhaps it was. Before any of the baby-boom martyrs - Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, Marilyn Monroe, Elvis - there was George Reeves, TV's first Superman, dead by his own hand in June 1959.
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