The legend of Peg Entwistle, the Welsh-born actress who jumped off the Hollywood sign

As Netflix airs a new show inspired by Welsh actress Peg Entwistle, David Owens investigates the enduring legacy of the unhappy star, whose tragic story has haunted Hollywood for decades …

In the unlikely setting of a row of terraced houses in Port Talbot, a Hollywood legend was born.

This is not a story about Anthony Hopkins, Richard Burton or Michael Sheen the trio of Welsh titans who have the region to thank for putting them on the path to immortality. It’s a completely different story.

In the shadow of the steelworks, at number five Broad Street, in the city center, a young girl was leaving on a transatlantic voyage that would unexpectedly end in Hollywood.

It must have been a life ended at a young age, a tragic tale that would be immortalized in the annals of Tinseltown.

This is the story of Peg Entwistle, the actress forever included in Hollywood folklore after having jumped to his death from the H in the Hollywood sign.

Reaching in fame the fame that had escaped him in life, his enduring legend is now the basis of the new Netflix Hollywood series. The series, which airs this month, follows a group of aspiring Tinseltown Golden Age actors and filmmakers as they try to succeed in the film industry, no matter what the cost. .

The show focuses on the production of a film based on the life of Pegs. Its almost 88 years since his death on September 16, 1932, but his is a story that continues to fascinate.

The fact that she was born in Wales has as much to do with the circumstances as with geography. How it moved from the industrial heart of South Wales to the heart of the film industry has as much to do with family ties as it does with talent.

Although residing in London, Pegs ‘mother and father, Robert and Emily, had come to Wales to visit Emilys’ parents, John and Caroline Stevenson, especially so that Caroline could act as a midwife. John Stevenson, was a metallurgist who exercised and studied his scientific profession from his home for the burning furnace of the Port Talbots steelworks, the emblem of fire which acts as the emblematic beacon of the city.

Thus on February 5, 1908, Millicent Lilian Entwistle, the future theater actress known as Peg Entwistle, made her debut.

Shortly after birth, when the mother and child were able to travel, Robert and Emily returned home to 53 Comeragh Road in West Kensington.

It was always likely that Peg would find her future at the theater, since she came from a family of actors.

According to Pegs biographer James Zeruk Jr, the author of Peg Entwistle And The Hollywood Sign Suicide: A Biography, his father Robert Entwistle and uncle Charles Entwistle were both immersed in the world of theater.

Although his father was able to keep his wife and child comfortable with minor roles and certain sets, it was Uncle Pegs Charles who excelled in show business and who later had the most influence on his scenic aspirations, says James.

However, two years after Pegs was born in 1910, the storm hit the Entwistle house.

It has always been reported that Pegs’ mother Emily died when Peg was two, but she didn’t have it, says James, who is the world’s greatest authority on the Welsh actress, after spending seven years researching his book, which has seen a huge recovery in sales since the Netflix series aired.

What happened was that Robert divorced after Pegs’ mother had an affair.

Pegs ‘father filed for divorce and was taken into custody based on testimony from witnesses claiming that Pegs’ mother was sleeping with other men.

Fortunately, Pegs’ father had a support network around him to help care for the little girl.

As a single father with a two-year-old child, Roberts’ life could easily have become a jumble of complications and worry, but there was a lot of maternal help from his sisters, Rosina and Lilian, and the wives of his brothers, Henry and Ernest. said James.

And there was Emilys’ sister, Laura Seaton. Pegs Aunt Laura remained a close friend of the Entwistle family. Robert regularly allowed him to take Peg on numerous trips to Wales, probably so the little girl could see her mother, but certainly so that she could visit her maternal grandparents.

When Robert went on tour as an actor, he often left Peg with Emilys’ parents. Emily was allowed to visit the child but not to take her out of the house.

However, the family was soon to leave the United Kingdom as America arrived. Pegs Uncle Charles had worked in Broadway theater in New York for the theater manager Charles Frohman.

In the United States, Charles Entwistle had fallen in love with an American actress named Bertha Jane Ross known as Jane.

On a trip to the UK to visit Peg and Robert, Charles and his new love had dinner with Charles Frohman, who was on the same liner bound for Europe to check on his theatrical assets and buy new plays. At their dinner, the impresario had promised that he would offer a job to Pegs’ father on Broadway. For Robert, it was an offer too good to be refused. And so it was that in 1913, five-year-old Peg and his father left for a new life in the United States.

Peg immediately loved his new American aunt, especially when Jane said she had a horse and promised to give riding lessons to the excited five-year-old. Robert was interviewed and hired by Frohman several days later.

The following year, in 1914, after a swirling love affair, Pegs’ father married his brother’s sister, Lauretta Ross. Brothers Robert and Charles were married to sisters Jane and Lauretta. And now Peg, six, had a new mother-in-law.

Peg immediately loved Aunt Janes’ sister Lauretta Ross, says James. The adored mother and wife brought stability, love and warmth to the Entwistle home.

She and her father eventually settled in New York, where Robert performed in Broadway plays and Peg began his theatrical education.

Peg persuaded her father to give her his small collection of scripts, which she loved to memorize and then recite to family and friends in mixed meetings, says the author. Peg really enjoyed pretending to be the star and as a director, she got a big kick by assigning roles to the people around her.

Her father and stepmother Lauretta had two sons, Milton and Robert, two half-brothers to Peg.

With a wife and children to feed, Pegs’ father lost confidence in the theater’s ability to provide a stable income. This prompted Robert to step down from the scene and opened a unique stationery store at 25 East 54th Street in a lucrative corner of Manhattans Swanky Madison Avenue, which provided the luxury gift shop with an endless flow of customers. rich.

When Peg turned 10, she was enrolled at St Agnes Academy, a parish school for girls. It was also the start of her stage career, when she played the title role, at the age of 12, in a school production by Peter Pan.

Life was good for the family, which had provided young Peg with such warmth, love and support. However, a double tragedy was to strike in the space of 18 months.

On April 2, 1921, Pegs Lauretta’s mother-in-law died, aged 35, of meningitis. Teenage Peg had become extremely close to Lauretta during their eight years together for all intents and purposes, the woman was her mother.

There was more tragedy for the girl. The following year, when she was 14 years old, her father was hit by a limousine during a breakout in November 1922. Although he survived, he died of a brain hemorrhage a month later. late, the week before Christmas. He was 48 years old.

In his will, Robert said he didn’t want Pegs’ mother to regain parental rights, says James. The will indicates that her biological mother, Emily, was still alive, but not where she lived when Robert died.

Peg was devastated by the loss of her mother-in-law, Lauretta. They had become inseparable. Peg had studied hard to be an actress and in her mind her dream died with Lauretta because now she should be the mother of her little brothers, Milton and Bobby.

When her father died so soon after, Peg was upset for obvious reasons, but even more so when she loved New York and was unsure of what was going to happen to her and her brothers. She didn’t want to go back to the UK.

When Robert wrote his will on his dying bed in New York, he specifically instructed the attorneys present that Peg should not be handed over to Emily, but to the care of his brother Charles and his wife, Jane.

After the death of his father and mother-in-law, Peg and his two half-brothers left to live with their uncles Charles and aunt Jane in Los Angeles.

It was there that she enthusiastically witnessed the erection of the Hollywoodland sign in 1923 (it would not appear in its abbreviated Hollywood form until 1949) on Mount Lee in the Hollywood Hills. His family’s home on Beachwood Drive, Hollywood, was located just below the iconic sign.

Originally built to announce the name of a new subdivision in the hills above the Hollywood district of Los Angeles, each letter was 9.1 m wide and 15.2 m high.

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The entire panel was dotted with approximately 4,000 light bulbs. Peg was fascinated by the sign from the start. She would love to see this iconic structure flash in segments HOLLY, WOOD and LAND light up individually, then the whole sign.

For the teenage girl who had played in her blood, being at the heart of the film industry only exacerbated her desire to succeed in her chosen profession on both coasts of the United States.

Peg refused to attend public schools there and they hired a tutor from the University of California who came to the house, says James. Peg was also enrolled in a theater school in Hollywood. By that time, she had memorized about 200 pieces. It was inevitable that she would become an actress.

According to her biographer, Peg – who took her stage name from the Broadway play Peg O ‘My Heart, which starred actress Laurette Taylor whom she greatly admired – was a talent for natural acting.

It was a wonder. As a little girl, she expertly imitated the great women of the scene at the time, Billie Burke, Maude Adams, Ethel Barrymore, Laurette Taylor, said James. His whole family supported his aspirations. But it was her uncle Charles, whom she called Enty, who really opened the door for him when he introduced her to his boss, the great Walter Hampden, who was among the first on Broadway’s A list.

Uncle Charles quickly helped acting student Peg play a leading role in his Broadway production of Hamlet. From this role, Peg began a successful stage career, playing Hedvig at the age of 17 in a production of Henrik Ibsens The Wild Duck in 1925, in an acclaimed performance which will inspire the future legend of Hollywood cinema Bette Davis, who was in the audience for one of the performances, to start playing.

It was 1926 when they were both 17, says James. Bette was in the front seats with her mom Ruthie. Bette had a revelation. In her memoirs, Bette says: When I saw her for the first time, my heart almost stopped. She looked like me, when the little wild duck [Peg] shot myself in the chest, I died with it, a whole new world opened up to me, I was delighted with the performance of Miss Entwistles !. Bette said to her mother, one day I will play Hedvig!

Three years later, Bette actually played Hedvig, and in the same theater. Bette remembered in the locker room that she hoped to be able to do for someone in the audience what Peg had done for her.

With his considerable acting skills visible to many, Peg quickly began to cultivate a reputation for himself on Broadway, appearing in several hit plays, including the success of 1927 Tommy, who ran for 232 performances.

The same year, at 19, Peg married his colleague Robert Keith. It must have been an unhappy match in all respects, their marriage ended in 1929 after learning that Robert had previously been married and had a six-year-old son, future actor Brian Keith.

In addition, according to James book, throughout their two-year marriage, Peg had to free Robert from his financial and legal problems due to drinking and driving and failure to pay child support. Robert also allegedly physically abused Peg and left her in a precarious mental state, which she argued when filing for divorce.

Peg met Robert Keith as she became famous playing Tommy on Broadway. They were at a party hosted by actors George and Eleanor Meeker, says James. He invited her out and introduced her to his mother. They lived at the end [actor Rudolph] Valentinos Penthouse, which Keith rented. On a second date, they fled. She had only known him for a few days.

Peg was smart, but naive, he adds. She thought she and Robert Keith would become one of those great couples of theaters or movie stars. He was an alcoholic and abused her. He soaked it for all his money and never paid it back. He was cruel and mean and she still allowed him for two years until she filed for divorce.

The author says that the abuse of the relationship was one of the factors that contributed to the troubled state of mind that ultimately brought her to the top of the Hollywood sign.

Yes. It upset her in every way. She was often publicly humiliated. She was afraid, was fragile and stopped eating. There was gossip, whispers, people rejected her, all because of him. He was one of the rungs of this ladder at the top of the panel.

Her marriage had failed, but professionally she still excelled. Peg has been acclaimed for her comedic and good-hearted performances across the country, but she aspired to more complicated and dramatic roles. During the Great Depression, Peg was in Los Angeles with his uncle and family and won new praise for his theatrical role in Romney Brents The Mad Hopes.

She was quickly cast in her first Hollywood film role at RKO Thirteen Women, a psychological thriller described as the first female ensemble film produced by legendary film mogul David O Selznick. In the film, Peg played the supporting role of Hazel Cousins, a woman who kills her husband and goes to jail. It was to be his one and only role in cinema.

Peg was invited to come to Los Angeles when she was in New York to play with Billie Burke and Humphrey Bogart in a Broadway essay before a play called The Mad Hopes, which was written by a friend of Pegs and Theater Guild co-star Romney Brent, says James.

The play was a huge success and Billie and Peg agreed to play Broadway in the coming season. But then Billie was drawn to studio head David O Selznick at RKO Studios in Hollywood to star with John Barrymore in A Bill Of Divorce. Peg still planned to appear in New York production. Then Selznick sent George Cukor, his best director, a memo: I hear a lot about a girl named Peggy Entwistle, who appears downtown with Billie Burke. I suggest you research it for A Bill Of Divorce.

Cukor called Peg and they brought her for a test. It was almost sealed that Peg would co-play with Billie and Barrymore in this film, but for some reason, they brought in a completely unknown girl who only appeared in three plays and never in a film Katharine Hepburn.

Katharine therefore got the role. That made her a star, of course, and Peg was sent to make thirteen women. Still, not a bad concert given that he played with the queen of RKO, Irene Dunne, and Myrna Loy and Ricardo Cortez.

However, the subject of the film was to prove too controversial for many.

Thirteen women was one of the studio’s three biggest budgets and looked very promising, says James. But Pegs’ role as a married woman who became a lesbian and murdered her husband after a date with her lover was too much for the box office and therefore the story of Pegs was cut off after the film ended. This is why it looks like a cameo today, with only a few lines of it. The original print lasted almost two hours and Peg was the centerpiece for the first 22 minutes. It devastated her.

Meanwhile, with all the work at RKO as they prepared her to become a star, she withdrew from Broadway’s contract for The Mad Hopes. So they blacklisted her and Peg was punished.

James says that the young actress had become hypnotized by the whole of Hollywood cinema.

She is suddenly in it [film magazine] Photoplay, do screen tests, talk to Hollywood callers at RKO. She became a deer in their headlights and simply convinced herself that everything was fine, that the producer on Broadway would understand.

All these hopes, all these dreams, all these ambitions that the Welsh-born actress had crashed into the hills above her house.

Losing both parents at an early age, the breakdown of her marriage, the Broadway blacklist, and the cut-out scenes from her film debut all contributed to the escalating desperation the actress felt at the time.

Her cousin, who was 19 and with Peg on the day of her death, told me that Peg thought her work in Thirteen Women was the best she had ever done, says James. It had crushed her, so she would certainly have thought of that before she jumped.

But there were many steps on this scale. She had read in the newspaper that day that [her ex-husband] Robert and his new wife have just sold a play and they live big in San Francisco. She was penniless and owed her about $ 250,000 in today’s economy. She was evicted from her luxury apartment in New York and the company owned all of her clothes, jewelry, furniture, etc. until payment of rent. She reached out to Broadway for work, but was swept away.

On the evening of September 16, 1932, Peg left the family home in Beachwood Canyon and told his uncle that she was going to the pharmacy and to see friends. Two days later, a woman was hiking near the Hollywoodland sign and found a woman’s purse, jacket and shoe.

Inside the bag was a suicide note that said, I’m scared, I’m a coward. I’m sorry for everything. If I had done it a long time ago, it would have saved a lot of pain. PE.

Reporting the death to the police and leaving Pegs’ personal belongings, the police visited the panel and found the body of Pegs in a ravine under the panel. The suicide was reported in the newspapers without confirmation of his identity, but his note was also published, prompting Uncle Pegs to suspect that it was his niece considering his two-day absence. He then identified Pegs’ body, confirming his death. She was only 24 years old.

The investigation showed that she probably climbed Mount Lee to the Hollywoodland sign and then, using a working ladder, Peg climbed to the top of the H in the sign. She was killed by several fractures of the pelvis.

Pegs’ biographer thinks the ultimate reason Peg committed suicide was the rejection of Broadway, the place she cherished above all else, who conspired to throw her into a state of mental anguish.

More than anything, he couldn’t go back to Broadway, he says. Peg could have stayed in Hollywood to be a bit of a gamer or an extra until something broke either in the studios or in the circle of Broadway producers forgiving him for disrespecting them as a whole. But it was not his style. Peg was not designed to be a girl at the table in a movie or play and she would never think of finding a job in a dinner with hash for $ 5 a day when she could play a waitress at the screen or Broadway for $ 5,000 a week.

But the film was not his goal. Never was. Remember, if Peg Entwistle had wanted to be a movie star, she would have stayed in Hollywood. She lived on the street from most studios, had connections, talent and appearance. But the stage was his vocation and the biggest stage for a person was Broadway, and it was his first true love.

Everything else was a factor, but being blacklisted from Broadway was the reason you are removing all the other curtains in your life.

She was just overwhelmed by all the pitfalls that came so close to each other. We will never know everything that happened in his last days and hours of conversations, meetings and the like. But we know enough to be sure that the dreams of these young girls crumble around her like a house of cards.

Part of that was his own fact. Her ego helped fuel a number of bad decisions, which blacklisted her at the same time as her film career crashed before she could really take off.

Pegs’ death was widely publicized at the time and was cremated in Hollywood before his ashes were sent for burial alongside his father.

The story was about to take another bittersweet turn when, according to Pegs Milton’s brother, a letter from RKO Pictures arrived at the Pegs house in Hollywood a few days after his funeral.

The studio wanted her to come for a movie, but her uncle angrily destroyed the letter, says James. Apparently, the letter was sent the Friday before he died and his uncle was furious because the studio had his phone number and he thought that if they had called the house, Peg would not have committed suicide.

Figure of a lost era and lost dreams, the legend and the legacy of Peg Entwistles have crossed the years. In the decades since his disappearance, numerous paranormal sightings have been reported of a blonde woman dressed in 1930s style clothing who appears to be walking around in a daze around the sign, while references to Peg have appeared in the arts, literature and pop culture since his death.

In addition to the new Netflix series, the story of Pegs played a role in the music video for Lana Del Rey 2017’s song Lust For Life, in which Lana climbed the Hollywood sign before falling.

In the song, Lana sings, climbs the H of the Hollywood sign, yeah. In these stolen moments, the world is mine.

When I ask James if he thinks that the ghost of Pegs haunts the Hollywood sign is only fanciful marketing by Hollywood tour guides or if he believes that there is truth, he laughs before answering: The of them! There was enough [sightings] reported by otherwise respected people, so something looks strange up there.

I am sometimes asked to go to the panel with ghost hunters and mediums on the anniversary of the death of Pegs. I will never do that because I don’t want to turn her life into a show.

Of course, tour guides have to keep them coming back, so I know they used to energize the angle of the ghost story. But not anymore. Since the book came out, there seems to be a more respectful and thoughtful version of Peg presented to tourists. It was my hope from the start. Less fantasy, more Peg.

What is certain is that the legacy of Peg Entwistles will continue to live, as long as the Hollywood sign survives, at least.

Pegs ‘fame has been around since Los Angeles’ first title screamed Girl Ends Life In Hollywood Mountain Leap, says James.

She was always amazed and wondered when people were visiting the sign. Sometimes I take one of the minibuses on the Hollywood tour and just shut up to listen to what people are saying about it. These are almost always beautiful things.

But, for me, the ultimate irony lies in the way she saw the sign come into being and die from it. She had an unparalleled fascination, said her uncle. As if there was something alive and they communicated.

The sign was believed to have been removed years earlier and almost fell off after his death, but there was still a memory of Peg hovering over it and therefore one thing or another seemed to be interfering. Over the years and decades, the sign has fallen out of order and has been restored and then decayed again until it is as we see it today. The third generation. When this new panel was built, ironically Bette Davis had the honor of pressing a button to reveal it.

Donc, vraiment, on pourrait dire que ce n’est pas Peg qui, dans la mort, a atteint la renommée qu’elle désirait tant dans la vie, mais que sa mort a transformé ce panneau d’affichage immobilier temporaire en l’un des monuments les plus célèbres de la terre.

“Maintenant, c’est ironique.

Peg Entwistle And The Hollywood Sign Suicide: A Biography de James Zeruk Jr est disponible sur Kindle via Amazon.

Hollywood est maintenant disponible sur Netflix.

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