© 2019, 2026 by Jeff Abraham and Burt Kearns

Some people regarded Joe Burrus as just another ex-con and recovering drug addict. Joe Burrus saw himself as something more—much more. “I consider myself a master of illusion and escape artist,” he said. “I believe I’m the next Houdini and greater.”

So on Halloween night in 1990, the sixty-fourth anniversary of Harry Houdini’s death, thirty-two-year-old “Amazing Joe” Burrus attempted an escape that even his hero had failed at accomplishing: being buried alive. “To me, that is what an escape artist is: to put myself in an impossible situation and get out of it,” Joe declared.

A year earlier in Salem, Oregon, Joe had escaped from a casket buried under dirt. On this night, at Blackbeard’s Family Fun Center in Fresno, California, in front of a crowd that included trick-or-treaters and his own young sons Joseph and Joshua, he’d do himself, and every other escape artist in history, one better. Amazing Joe would be handcuffed, shackled, and locked in a homemade, see-through plastic-and-glass coffin; lowered into a seven-foot-deep grave; and then covered in not only dirt but also a layer of freshly poured cement. Then he would escape from the coffin and make his way to the surface.

He’d perform this amazing escape to raise money for the Third Floor drug rehab clinic in Fresno. Joe said he saw the stunt as a metaphor for his own escape from drug addiction.

If he did manage to make the escape, Joe would actually be able to say he did Harry Houdini one better. Houdini spent years trying to master the buried-alive stunt. When he attempted the feat near Santa Ana, California, in 1915, he almost died. Houdini was buried under six feet of dirt (without a casket) and was left to dig his way out. He panicked and managed to get a hand to the surface before he called for help. He was yanked out, unconscious, by his assistants. His conclusion, as written in his diary, was “the weight of the earth is killing.” Houdini did pull off an aboveground variation of the stunt—“the Mystery of the Sphinx,” featuring a glass-fronted coffin lowered into a vault and covered in sand—just weeks before his death in Detroit.

“He wasn’t a drug addict,” Joe Burrus’s eldest son insists almost thirty years after Halloween 1990. “He was an alcoholic. The only drug he used to do was marijuana. I guess back then you were considered an addict. And he did some time in prison, and while he was there, he kind of realized, ‘I gotta do something different when I get out. I love magic. I gotta do something with this.’ And so that’s what he did.”

Joseph Burrus has vivid memories of his father. Not all of them are magical. “When I was probably five years old and my brother was three, he and my mom were going through a separation,” he tells us. “Now, they were never married, but they were going through a separation. He was a drunk, and he was abusive, so she was gonna take the kids and everything else, and he didn’t want to leave us. He ended up kidnapping us, and took us all the way to Tennessee. I remember every bit of it. I remember being on the road. I remember calling her on the phone. I remember when the police broke in and arrested him in Tennessee, and us having to stay in a foster home until my mom was able to come get us. That was basically why he was in prison, that he had kidnapped us, and he was there for a couple years. And when he got out, he said, ‘I got to change things.’”

The key to the change was magic, an art Amazing Joe had first played around with as as teen. “He loved doing magic, because he loved amazing people and seeing the look on their faces,” says Joseph. “So he did a lot of close-up magic, but he also had a lot of stage magic. And probably about five years or so before he died, he decided, ‘OK, I’ve got magic down. Now I want to get into stunts. I want to perfect that, and take my show into the big time.’ And so he did a lot of stunts. He did a stunt where he was locked into a box and the box was set on fire. And a car would come racing down the track and smash into the box—and he was the one driving the car.”

After performing the buried-alive stunt in Salem in late 1989, Joe decided to move to Fresno, where his sons and their mother now resided. “He moved back here January of 1990. He wasn’t around in my life a lot, because he was in prison, then he got out and lived in another city, so beginning in 1990, I was with him every day, and I was getting close to him and helping him plan. He pretty much had almost the entire year planning and promoting. And then when October rolled around, he was performing at one of the local pumpkin patches here. He had the coffin out there on display, and he was doing magic tricks for about a week or two before the event. And when he was out there, he would stand on the coffin to show people how strong it was.

“I think a few days before the show, the lid ended up cracking, and he didn’t have time to fix it, and he said, ‘Ah, it’ll be all right.’ And that was another factor into everything that happened.”

As showtime approached on Halloween night, more than 150 people were on hand to watch Amazing Joe’s amazing escape, which was to be videotaped, projected live on-screen, and broadcast live on radio. “We all got picked up in a limo, and then got a seat in the front row, and then the limo left, picked him up, brought him,” Joseph recalls. “The show kind of started late. I had an opportunity to go backstage and talk to him and say, ‘Hey, good luck. I love you,’ all this stuff. I chose not to, because I’ve seen my father and I’ll talk to him afterwards. My brother went back. I didn’t, and that was a huge regret on my part.”

The escape artist appeared at the burial site in a white tuxedo with a shiny purple bow tie and cummerbund, his blond mullet tied into a ponytail and his handlebar mustache pointing down toward his thick goatee, forming a simulated Vandyke beard. He looked every inch the magician—if not the escaping kind, at least one who pulls a rabbit out of a top hat. A police officer cuffed, shackled, and chained Amazing Joe’s wrists, while the escape artist provided play-by-play commentary for a bemused radio reporter holding a microphone and recorder near his face. “Through the chains, through the shackles, through the handcuffs,” Joe explained, “I’ll burrow my way through three and a half feet—” He winced in an exaggerated display of pain as the police officer tightened the cuffs and then continued, “—of dirt and get through all this before the cement hardens.”

“You realize that cement starts to harden first at the lower elevation,” the reporter warned. “So it’s going to be hard—” He gestured toward the ground.

“You mean it hardens at the lower part?” Joe looked around in feigned surprise. “I thought it starts at the top!”

“No, it hardens at the bottom!”

“No, no, no,” Joe said. “In fact, I shouldn’t even kid. This is very serious. This is no magic trick.”

The reporter had one last observation while Joe’s assistants secured his leg shackles. “You know, Houdini failed at this, and he was only using dirt.” With that, Amazing Joe climbed into the coffin. The coffin was locked, and his aides began to lower it into the seven-foot-deep grave.

Joe was about halfway down into the hole when he began knocking on the sides of the box. The assistants pulled him back to the surface. One of them was Sean Henderson, a resident of the Third Floor clinic. “He said the chain was too tight and was choking him,” Henderson would tell the Los Angeles Times. “We gave him time to slip the chain from his neck. After he got that done, he wanted the locks back on and asked us to start burying him again.”

The casket lid was locked again, and the descent once again got under way. When the casket was at the bottom of the hole, the assistants shoveled in about three feet of dirt. A cement truck backed up and poured in another three feet—seven tons—of wet cement.

“There was only supposed to be about a foot of cement at the top of the grave,” Joseph Burrus insists, “just to make it a little bit harder. And it was like three feet of cement. It was actually way too much, and I don’t know if it was an accident or if he changed it at the last minute, but I know from being with them the entire month and listening to what he was saying, there was only supposed to be a very small amount on top, just to give it that extra ‘wow factor.’”

The truck pulled away. The cement had filled the hole completely.

An assistant was raking the surface, evening it out at ground level, when in an instant, the cement sank about two feet and settled. There was an audible crack, and the sound of plastic and glass shattering. It was obvious what had occurred.

“As soon as we finished and the truck pulled away, the whole thing dropped,” Henderson said. “The cement busted the coffin. It buried him alive.”

Joseph recalls, “There was a backhoe there, and he had told every‑ body, ‘If something goes wrong, don’t come digging right away, because you’re going to end up sinking in the grave with the vibration of the truck, and it’s gonna end up crushing me more.’ And so in a few minutes of their waiting, it just seemed like it was forever. And I already knew something happened.

“So I took off. I went to go walk around the park. I ended up over at the water slide area, and I was just sitting there crying, kind of looking up and asking God, ‘Please let everything be OK.’ And I was up there for quite a while, and then I heard my name being paged over the intercom. And when I came back down, it was just a chaotic sight. I mean, there were chairs thrown everywhere. It was people crying. There was a clown there that was doing balloon animals, and he was in the corner crying. There were just police everywhere, ambulances everywhere, and they had paged me because they were trying to make us leave before they actually brought him out of the grave.

“They didn’t want to pull him out with anybody there. So they made us leave, and we went home and pretty much turned on the TV and saw the news.”

Nearly three decades after that fateful Halloween, Joseph Burrus launched a GoFundMe campaign for a memorial to Amazing Joe at the spot where he died. “The thing was, he was actually already out of the coffin,” he says with some pride. “He’d made it out, he was already pretty much on his way up when it collapsed. So he didn’t get crushed inside the coffin. He basically suffocated, because of all the weight of the dirt and cement.”

Joseph Burrus continues: “One thing that I want to also make clear, he wasn’t just a guy who was performing a wild stunt. He was dedicated to magic. What’s made it easier to talk about over the years is because he died doing what he wanted to do, and there was no other way he would

have wanted to die. And even if in his mind he knew that his trick’s not gonna work, he would have still done it, because he had already hyped it up and he had already had a crowd there, and he didn’t want to disappoint anybody.

“He had another stunt planned. He was going to jump out of an airplane with his hands tied so he couldn’t reach the ripcord. And then he was going to free himself just in time to pull the ripcord.”

You can donate to the ‘Amazing Joe’ Burrus memorial fund by clicking here.

Adapted from The Show Won’t Go On: The Most Shocking, Bizarre, and Historic Deaths of Performers Onstage, by Jeff Abraham and Burt Kearns, published by Chicago Review Press, and available in several formats at a reduced price on Amazon.com

© 1999, 2026 By Burt Kearns

The story picks up on this date in October, thirty-four years ago. We were living in Los Angeles, working on the Paramount lot in Hollywood, into our third season running Hard Copy, the nightly tabloid television series. But every so often, on a regular basis, we returned to New York City. This story, adapted from the 1999 tabloid television memoir and exposé, Tabloid Baby (“The Bible” - Maury Povich; “Undeniably authentic” – Mike Wallace), recounts what took place on one of those nights in the City.:

New York was where I’d rather stay. My bi-monthly jaunts through the concrete canyons of my glory days were comforting homecomings, like landings on Earth after weeks aboard a lonely space shuttle. The elation of arriving back there helped regain my equilibrium and offset the unsettled feeling of homelessness in a place where I’d come into my own.

Yet the deeper I fell into the isolation of Los Angeles, the more often the New York City trips turned into binges of dark release: three-to-seven-day-no-sleep-until-you’re-poured-on-the-plane Nighttown adventures that would put Stephen Daedalus to shame.

I’d planned on a trip back the third week of October with Joe Hamill. He’d been hired by John Parsons for the first season of Hard Copy, and working with us became the solid rock of the assignment desk. In the old days, he’d worked on the Channel Five assignment desk under Nicky Loiacono. Now he and Nicky work side by side, for me.

Joe’s family connections were as impressive as his credentials. He was the kid brother of the writer Pete Hamill. Another brother, Brian, was Woody Allen’s stills photographer. At the height of the Mia Farrow-Soon Yi scandal, Brian helped us arrange an “ambush” interview with Allen while he directed a movie on location in Manhattan. Rafael Abramovitz and a camera crew were instructed by Allen’s people to wait on a sidewalk so they could “confront” the director when he left his production trailer at a specified time.

This time, Joe had gotten wind of a Bob Dylan tribute concert at Madison Square Garden; we bought tickets and flew out on October 16th to attend the four-hour show, broadcast live on TV around the world. There was a procession of rock stars lined up to sing Dylan songs, from Eric Clapton to George Harrison, Neil Young to Zimmy himself, but the one who’d been getting the most attention -- the one I was waiting for --was bald little Sinead O’C’onnor.

Sinead had hogged a few headlines in the past two weeks, ever since she went and tore up a photo of the Pope (to protest child sex abuse within the Roman Catholic Church) on Saturday Night Live. Joe Pesci hosted the show the following week and provoked great applause by saying he’d like to give her a slap. That revived the story from a couple of years earlier, when Sinead had refused to perform at the Garden State Arts Center in New Jersey because every event there opened with the National Anthem. That incited Frank Sinatra to say he wanted to kick her ass.

With all those brave paisan heroes ready to swat the shaved Irish waif, the New York crowd was bound to be raucous. When Kris Kristofferson walked on stage and began his introduction of “this next artist, whose name’s become synonymous with courage and integrity,” I knew who he was talking about. As a goof, I stood up and booed. People around me joined in. When Sinead came out with her shiny head and little baby blue spacesuit, the booing intensified. Someone down on the floor unfurled an American flag. I felt like the guy who turns on his blender at the exact moment a great blackout occurs and thinks he’s the cause. Holy shit, what did I do? I stood again, applauding this time, but it was too late. Sinead soaked in the booing for more than two minutes, then cut the band, walked to the microphone and shouted the lyrics of Bob Marley’s “War” a cappella (adding her own lines about child abuse), and walked off the stage.

Wow.

Kris Kristofferson amid the boos: “Don’t let the bastards get you down.”

The St. Mark’s Bar and Grill

After the show, we headed downtown and met Jimmy Sheehan at the St. Mark’s Bar and Grill in the East Village.

“There’s an Irish bar right down the street,” Jimmy said. He was a connoisseur of taverns. “The Café Sin-é. I’ve seen Sinead O’Connor sweeping the floor there.”

“Yeah, right.”

Maureen, the St. Mark’s bartender, noticed the concert program on the bar. “How was the Dylan show?”

“It was great. Sinead O’Connor got booed off the stage.”

Maureen sneered. “Good for them. You don’t rip up the Pope’s picture, not in New York. That little squirt, she tried to come in here the other night. I wouldn’t serve her.”

“No.”

“Hey Billy!” She called to the Irish kid working as bouncer at the door. “That Sinead O’Connor. Didn’t we throw her out the other night?”

‘Aye! And Maureen, she just tried to come in a minute ago. I told her to piss off!”

“She’s probably down at the Sin-é, the little bitch.”

Joe and I locked eyes. “Watch the drinks,” I told Jim, and we were out of there.

Sinead at the Café Sin-é

The Café Sin-é was a storefront in the middle of the block. It had some wooden tables and chairs, New-Agey Celtic music on the sound system, and, standing at a small bar in the back, still wearing her little green Martian suit and talking glumly to another woman, Sinead O’Connor.

Joe and I walked up to the bar. I ordered a beer and did a mock doubletake. “Sinead O’Connor.”

She was a knobby little thing regarding me with suspicious, dismissive doe eyes.

“Miss O’Connor. We’ve just returned from the Bob Dylan show. And let me apologize on behalf of the people of New York. Those weren’t Bob Dylan fans. Those were yahoos, and I personally am ashamed.”

“Ye left your change on the bar.” There were nicks and cuts amid the faint black stubble of her shaved head.

“Miss O’Connor.” I extended my hand and she shook it, limply. “This is Joe Hamill--” I turned to Joe. His mouth was actually hanging open. “He’s an Irishman, too. We want you to know that your standing against the patriarchal Papacy and your support of women’s rights is so brave. Joe Pesci doesn’t have fans. Frank Sinatra doesn’t have fans. Dan Quayle doesn’t have fans. But you, Miss O’Connor—” I searched for words. “You are a saint. God bless you.”

She regarded me as though I were taking the piss. “Thank you.”

“Good luck,” I said, putting down my beer and heading toward the door. “Oh, yes.” I turned on my heel and pulled out the business card I’d stuck in my shirt pocket. “I work for a show called Hard Copy. We’d be proud to have you on to talk about what happened. I’ll give you all the time you want on Monday if you’ll come on and give and give your side.”

She took the card and nodded. Joe and I hit the sidewalk.

“Christ Jesus, I thought I heard it all until that,” Joe said. “I never heard such a line of bullshit in my friggin’ life.”

I hurried back to the St. Mark’s. “Joe, we got a story here.”

We pushed past the bouncer. “Didn’t I tell you?” he said.

“You sure did, mate.” I got to my bar stool, stood up on the lower rung, and called for “Excuse me. Everyone. Yo.”

Maureen lowered the volume on the jukebox from behind the bar.

“I’m a television producer. I will pay five hundred dollars to anyone who can find me a home video camera to borrow.”

There was silence.

“All right, you’re a tough crowd. One thousand dollars!”

“He’s not kidding,” Maureen said. “He’s Hard Copy!”

Suddenly there was a scramble for the house phones. Drug dealers were being pushed away from the payphones on the corner outside.

“I’ve got a Polaroid!” one man said.

“Video! We need video!” I turned to Jimmy, who worked as a cameraman for the spec crews that roamed the city at night. “Jim, you’re gonna shoot. We’ll walk into the Café Sin-é. Just roll and keep a steady shot on her face. If there’s a scuffle, go wide. But no matter what anybody says or does, just keep rolling.”

No one was coming up with a camera. I stood at the payphone and called all the local news assignment desks I had numbers for in my wallet, but it was well after one a.m. It was too late.

Someone came back with a word that Sinead O’Connor had taken a taxi into the night.

We went back to our drinks. It was just another night in the City.

Sinead O’Connor, as the world came to learn, was right about the systemic sexual abuse that was perpetrated, condoned, and covered up by the Roman Catholic Church. For a more intimate, personal recollection of time spent with the late artist, get Resident Punk, the acclaimed new autobiography by pop culture icon and historian Legs McNeil.

Working as a traffic reporter in Los Angeles has to be one of the more dangerous jobs in the city, getting more dangerous as the skies get more crowded. The deaths of traffic reporter Elina Moreno and pilot George Marciniw Tuesday evening touched a lot of people in and around L.A. Here in Hollywood and across the city we see and hear helicopters constantly. (There’s one passing by now.) We’re addicted to car chases. And the eyes in the sky relay important live information about freeways, fires, and disasters. I send my condolences to the team at NBC4, and to Robert Kovacik, the reporter who had arrived on the scene to report on the crash of an SUV into a Metro bus, only to encounter an inferno. He found out in real time that a helicopter had gone down… and that his colleagues were onboard. Kovacik is a true journo, a topnotch reporter. I worked with him in the early Nineties on the late night news show Premier Story. And back in the Eighties, when I was a newswriter and producer for News 4 New York, WNBC’s local television news team, a similar tragedy took place. It was a Wednesday afternoon in October 1986. We were less than fifteen minutes away from going on the air with Live at Five when the assignment editor heard the ESU call over the police scanner.

© 2026 by Jeff Abraham and Burt Kearns

For New Yorkers of a certain age, there are three words that bring to mind one of the most disturbing events on local radio:

“Hit the water!”

Those were the last words of New York WNBC Radio personality Jane Dornacker on October 22, 1986. The stand-up comedian turned traffic reporter was in a helicopter in the middle of a regular afternoon traffic report when the helicopter engine stopped, the blade froze and the chopper dropped horizontally.

‘’New Jersey, the outbound Lincoln Tunnel looks a lot better for you,’‘ she broadcast at 4:46 p.m. ‘’In New Jersey--” She paused. Then listeners heard,‘’Hit the water! Hit the water! Hit the water!”

The helicopter, which had been hovering over the West Side Highway along the Hudson River, did hit the water, though its tail knocked a hole in a fence on the way down. The craft’s floats broke off at impact.

Back in the studio, show host Joey Reynolds, heard Dornacker yell into her microphone. At first he thought she was kidding, but told the New York Times he was struck by the ‘’distress in her voice’’ and the fact that ‘’she went into this pause. She doesn’t ever pause. You can’t get a word in there with a crowbar. I wondered what’s the pause and a shiver went up my spine.”

Reynolds’ producer jammed in a music cartridge to play on the air.

Back in the Hudson River, the first rescuers arrived two minutes after the crash and found the helicopter on its side, under twenty feet of water. Firefighter and Rescue Squad 1 scuba diver Paul Hashagen broke a side window and pulled pilot William Pate to the surface. Then he went back and got Jane Dornacker. Neither victim was breathing.

A spokesman for St. Vincent’s Hospital in Greenwich Village said Jane Dornacker arrived ‘’in cardiac arrest with no evidence of brain activity despite all efforts of resuscitation at the scene of the accident and in the mobile intensive care unit along the way to the hospital.”

She was pronounced dead three-and-a-half hours after the crash. The cause was drowning. The thirty-year-old pilot was in critical condition, but recovered.

Jane Dornacker was forty. She’d had a very interesting life and a varied career. She’d been a standup comedian, actress (she played Nurse Murch in The Right Stuff), cabaret singer and songwriter (she co-wrote The Tubes’ songs “Don’t Touch Me There” and “Cathy’s Clone”).

The accident was her second helicopter crash of 1986. On April 18, she was in a chopper that crashed into the Hackensack River. That day, Jane Dornacker and the pilot swam to safety.

WNBC Radio personality Soupy Sales talks about Jane Dornacker the following day

***

The death of Jane Dornacker touched, but did not deter Nancy McCormick, a twenty-six-year-old traffic reporter for WKRC radio in Cincinnati. WKRC newscaster Vicky Lynn recalled said that the tragedy “kind of got to her a little, but she was a strong person, she didn’t express her fears. But it’s always a concern, any time you’re in a situation like that, I think. She did like her work an awful lot, being a traffic reporter is one of the toughest jobs there is.”

Thirty-four days after the tragedy, McCormick and pilot Dan Gould took off in heavy fog from Mays Heliport near Lunken Airport to face another rush hour. Though a chopper from rival station WKRC had taken off earlier, but returned because the fog was too thick, WKRC’s news director Richard Hunt said McCormick had radioed that the fog was not too bad and that she and the pilot were going to take off. “I fully believe she would not have gone up if she had felt unsafe,” he said. “We always allowed her the choice of going up or staying on the ground. She and the pilot always had conversations about it.” WWNK reporter Lou Ann Watkins said the station’s traffic reporter told her “the last thing he saw was the WKRC chopper flying into the fog.”

In the tradition of radio station contests, the wreckage was spotted by a radio listener who began searching on his own after he heard reports that the chopper was missing. The helicopter had crashed into a muddy hillside about two miles from the airport. In the words of one local television news reporter, “It looked like a child’s toy, smashed apart in an angry rage.” The bodies of Nancy McCormick and thirty-one-year-old Dan Gould were found on the hillside, about a hundred feet apart.

***

This story is an outtake from The Show Won’t Go On: The Most Shocking, Bizarre, and Historic Deaths of Performers Onstage, by Jeff Abraham and Burt Kearns, published by Chicago Review Press

©1999, 2026 By Burt Kearns

It’s August 1989. I am the managing editor and producer of the very popular but controversial syndicated television series A Current Affair. A product of the genius minds of some of Rupert Murdoch’s Australian newspaper and television journos, the nightly “tabloid television” show covers a side of America that the network news organizations find beneath them or can’t find at all. And that means most of America, the “flyover country,” ignored by the network news nabobs as they concentrate on the New York City -Washington corridor and occasional spots from Los Angeles. A mix of news and entertainment, A Current Affair will transform television news in the 1990s. Meanwhile, for producers, it’s an opportunity to cover all kinds of stories. No one has ever gone behind the scenes of the annual Labor Day Muscular Dystrophy Telethon. I want to. So I wrote a letter to its host, star, figurehead, and driving force, Jerry Lewis. In this excerpt from the book Tabloid Baby, Jerry Lewis calls me back.

I had a message from Jerry Lewis. I had written him a letter, asking permission to shoot behind the scenes at his Muscular Dystrophy Telethon. Jerry had called me back.

Jerry Lewis was my show business hero. His telethons were, to me, the ultimate in reality television, edge-of-your-seat psychodramas from an alternate show business universe where time stopped in the sixties and only Frank Sinatra was a bigger star than Jerry himself.

I had dozens of VHS tapes at home filled with complete 21-hour telethons from years of Labor Day weekends. Two years earlier, when my friend Kiki worked as an assistant director for the telethon from Caesars Palace in Las Vegas, I volunteered as a production assistant just so I could stay awake the entire time and hang with Jerry and Sammy and the gang.

One of the producers had assigned my first task the moment I arrived in the production trailer: fix the show rundowns that were distributed to all studio personnel. Someone had typed “Muscular Dystrophy Telethon” at the top of the sheets. Jerry had passed through the office, noticed the misprint and demanded it be corrected on every page. It was my job to white out the words “Muscular Dystrophy” and type in “Jerry Lewis.” This wasn’t the Muscular Dystrophy Telethon. It was the Jerry Lewis Telethon. I was in fucking heaven.

That Labor Day weekend, I’d witnessed many moments of reality drama: Sammy Davis Jr., days away from a hip replacement operation, hobbling on two canes and tossing them aside to rock the house at four a.m. with “The Birth of the Blues”; a uniformed chauffeur unfolding two wheelchairs from a Mercedes limousine, then opening the rear doors so two of Bobby Berosini’s orangutans could hop on; Berosini in the wings before his spot, slapping and yanking one squealing orangutan’s face, to form its mouth to say “mama” onstage.

As the telethon reached its climactic moments, I waited at the side of the stage as Jerry wept his way through “You’ll Never Walk Alone.” I had to see for myself if my man was for real or whether he dropped the emotional facade once he stepped out of camera range.

Jerry thanked the audience, walked offstage into the arms of his wife, and wept some more.

My idea to follow Jerry Lewis through the latest telethon was a long shot, but it would be great television. I dialed his home number.

“Hello.” The voice was as unmistakable as Rob Lowe’s member.

“Mr. Lewis.”

“Mr. Kearns.”

Jerry liked my idea but had a few things to clear up. “Now, in your letter, you mentioned the possibility of converting the cynics.”

“Yeah, well, you know—”

He paused, then exploded. “I FUCK THEM! After forty years, I have to prove I’m sincere? Fuck them!” He changed personalities like the Nutty Professor, then switched back again. “Now,” he said calmly, “What do you need from me?”

I explained what we wanted to follow him with a crew. “Fly-on-the wall stuff.”

“What convinced me is that you have a copy of Jerry Lewis Just Sings,” he said, naming a classic lost album he cut in the fifties. “I can’t find a copy of Jerry Lewis Just Sings.”

I told him I had four and would bring him one.

“The only thing I ask is I want fifteen minutes of airtime, not the usual three-minute story like some of these other shows have done to me.”

“Well, I can’t say -- hey, why not? Whatever you want, I’ll work it out!”

“You will have total access total cooperation from my crew.”

Jerry Lewis was true to his word. He told me to make sure our camera crew was in place when he arrived at the telethon arena (note: the telethon took place at the Cashman Center, an exhibition hall and theater near downtown Las Vegas, about six mikes from the Strip), then made a most dramatic entrance, rolling up slowly in his long Cadillac coupe with swinging jazz blasting from the car stereo. He stepped from the car wearing a football jersey, athletic shorts, and high white socks, gave a casual hello, and sauntered to the production offices, leading an army of flunkies and producers. This was right out of The Bellboy.

Jerry was a prince to us over the next four days. He loved the attention. He threw a tantrum when his freezer wasn’t stocked with Eskimo Pies. He bullied. He clowned. He was a supplicant to Sinatra in a two-way from Atlantic City. He cursed and made lewd comments about the world-famous Rangerette precision drill team from Kilgore, Texas.

“The one on this end has got a hole like a torn pocket…. like a Samsonite briefcase! Hahahahaha…” he commented for our cameras as one teen after another slammed to the floor in painful splits.

Backstage between his segments on the telethon, Jerry slurped chicken soup in his trailer, whined when one of the crippled kids wanted to come in and meet him, and even accidentally on purpose let the door swing open as he eased his chronic back pain by sucking on an oxygen mask.

Recording a two-way with Frank Sinatra in Atlantic City

We returned each night to the Flamingo Hilton on the Strip, where we’d had an editing system installed in one of the rooms and edited the show as we went along. Robin was the editor, a fan whose devotion to Jerry Lewis outstripped mine; she adored Jerry and didn’t want us to include any intimate scenes that might embarrass him. I explained that. in a way, we had to; no matter how much we loved Jerry, we weren’t responsible to him, but to the viewers. It was our job to show what really happened.

Besides, Jerry may have seemed unguarded in front of the cameras, but he was a professional. He knew when the cameras were there, and much of the time he played to them. I focused on the most intimate scenes, bleeped the curses, and showed it all, pulling together an entire verite half-hour show as a special edition of a current affair the day after the telethon. If we were 48 Hours or any other network magazine, if we were PBS, we would have won awards. We were A Current Affair. We had to settle for ratings, and they were good.

We also had to settle for the expected response from Fox chairman Barry Diller in Los Angeles. (note: Barry Diller did not like A Current Affair, or his boss Rupert Murdoch’s Australian contingent who ran the television journalism side of the new Fox Television) Days after the broadcast, he forwarded us a letter:

Dear Mr. Diller,

I am writing in reference to the rude language

used on a recent Current Affair program.

I heartily agree with the producer’s decision to

bleep out profane language uttered by Mr. Lewis, yet

I am as disheartened by the fact that the producer

felt compelled to leave in Lewis’s derogatory and

defaming remarks about God...

Jerry had uttered a “goddamn.” I’d broken a cardinal rule of tabloid television, and television in general, by letting someone say the name of the Lord our God in vain. You can get away with a “shit” or even a “fuck” in the right circumstances, but throw in one “Jesus Christ” and you’ve alienated a quarter of the country. Jesus Christ, how could I have been so stupid? Goddamn it.

Jerry was appearing onstage in Atlantic City a few weeks later. Wayne (Darwen, the legendary Australian tabloid pirate) and Robin and I drove to the dismal boardwalk and a seventeen-hundred-seat showroom in a hotel and casino called Tropworld to see him perform the exact same act he’d recorded for an eight-year-old VHS tape I’d bought at a Times Square video store. Jerry told dumb jokes, did his old typewriter routine, tossed some canes in the air, and sang some standards.

After the show, we went to the stage door to let our pal know we were in the house.

His manager Joey Stabile emerged, clearly upset. “No, you can’t see Jerry!” He was waving his arms. “Go away!” He’s so angry!”

They hated the show we did. It was worse than damning defaming God. We’d defamed Jerry.

I realized with sadness we were merely paying the price for doing our job, but Wayne was outraged because Robin looked so sad.

“Write that ungrateful bastard a letter, mate,” he said. “Tell him if he didn’t like what we aired, too fuckin’ bad! We’ve got lots more where that came from, and it rated so well that Brennan’s making us use it -- unless Jerry does something else for us.”

Wayne was right. What an ungrateful bastard. I thought of all the footage we didn’t have room for -- like Jerry’s mini-fit over his dear friend Sammy Davis Jr., who’d co-hosted the telethon from New York. As the minutes ticked toward the grand finale, word came that Sammy was refusing to perform an extra, unscheduled number.

Sammy’s wife, Altovise, was backstage with us in Vegas. She whispered to Jerry that Sammy wasn’t feeling well, something about his throat hurting. That wasn’t good enough. Jerry freaked. “What the fuck do you mean he’s not going on?”

(Ten days later, his publicist announced that Sammy had been diagnosed with throat cancer and would begin radiation therapy. Sammy Davis Jr. died on May 16, 1990.)

Wayne and I began the letter the same way we promoted the Sammy Davis interview:

Jerry… Jerry… Jerry…

Two days later, Jerry Lewis was on the phone again.

“Burt, I’m sorry. I never knew you were in Atlantic City. Tell Robin I am so sorry. I loved the show. I thought it was the best thing anyone’s done in a long time. These people who work for me, they’re FUCKED. They think they’re protecting me. I apologize. For them.”

“They had problems with the show?”

“Ah, the MDA didn’t like it because you didn’t show any kids—”

“The story was about you.”

“You’re telling me? They didn’t like the language. So what? You did a great job.”

“Well, it rated so well, our boss does want us to run more –”

“I’ll do anything for you. Look, I’m going to Europe. Call me in three weeks when I get back.”

“Hey, I found another copy of Jerry Lewis Just Sings in Soho.”

“See? See what I mean? With a fan like you, who needs these people around me?”

Jerry never did anything with us again.

©1989, 2022, 2026 By Burt Kearns

Labor Day Weekend will always be Jerry’s Weekend. It will for a great many people at least, at least a great many people I know. For us, Labor Day and Jerry Lewis go together like, well, like Jerry Lewis and France — or Jerry Lewis and people who can’t stand Jerry Lewis. In any case, for forty-four years, Jerry Lewis gave his life to and hosted the Muscular Dystrophy Association Telethon (soon to be officially the “Jerry Lewis Telethon”) from New York, from Los Angeles, and for twenty-eight years from Las Vegas, raising over the course of those years, more than two and a half billion dollars for the cause. And for some reason, he took a lot of abuse from critics for doing it.

The Jerry Lewis Telethon was an annual tribute to the kind of show business that Jerry Lewis ruled, twenty-one and a half hours of personal psychodrama, meltdowns and crying jags, lectures and pure lunatic comedy. Contemporary and even some pop stars had a place among the Borscht Belt comics and oldies acts like Cornell Gunter’s Coasters and a nonstop procession of corporate check-presenters. It was the last gasp of 20th century vaudeville, really, more outdated and incorrect as the years passed. The writing on the wall was clear in 2007, when Jerry had to apologize for calling someone “an illiterate fag” on the air – it was late in the broadcast, Jerry was fooling around, it was a gag that would’ve gotten a laugh at the Friars’ Club, but it really spelled curtains for the 20^th century. Jerry was in his eighties and in 2010, the MDA gave him the unceremonious boot. Jerry always said the Telethon was bigger than he was, but that was the end. They cut the hours the following year, kept cutting until the telethon was a television special with no-name hosts. In 2014, it was over. Jerry died in 2017, fifteen days before Labor Day. There was no vigil outside his Las Vegas mansion, a vacant lot away from Martin Luther King Boulevard and the 15 freeway, but he lives on Labor Day weekend.

So why will Labor Day Weekend always be Jerry’s Weekend? What follows should provide some answers. It’s an interview, conducted on the eve of the 1989 telethon from Las Vegas. I’d been following Jerry around with a camera crew for about a week. He was comfortable. He was sixty-three. He was surrounded by fans. His family was always close by. His second wife, SanDee (“Sam”) was there, along with his doctor. Three of his six sons showed up to show off grandkids and maybe help out. A fourth son arrived with his band to perform on the telethon in the wee hours of the morning. (The Telethon was always the one place Gary Lewis and The Playboys could play for a national audience.) Another son was somewhere out there, stalking Jerry, threatening to kill him. A security team was in the area, hoping to stop him before he did. (He didn’t. Joey Lewis died, a suicide in 2009). Jerry had recently lost another child when Sam miscarried (he and Sam would adopt Danielle, born in 1992). When we sat down for the interview, Jerry was relaxed. He knew we were fans. I’d just given him one of my copies of Jerry Lewis Just Sings. He was low key. And he talked about loyalty, revenge, cruelty, drug addiction, miscarriages — and even talked about himself in the third person. This may be the purest expression of Jerry Lewis.

You meet, what? Hundreds of kids every year, dystrophic kids?

JERRY LEWIS: Sure.

You get to know a lot of them personally. You called them on the phone today. What is it like for you to know them? And then, what does it do to you when you lose ’em?

JL: When I lose a dystrophic child, or one of my kids — which they, by the way, chose to be called. I’m rapped for that too, you know, “my kids.” They also chose “Never Walk Alone” as their theme song, and I did it for them — But when I lose one of my kids, I feel a void, and I feel like I am not doing the job. Then when I have a moment to reflect on it, I turn that into positive energy. I get angry. I get very angry.

For example, there’s a chairman of the board of an important corporation that was giving me iffy answers about a project that I wanted to work on that would enhance the research in a certain city in this country. I was allowing him to procrastinate, and I was allowing him to put me off somewhat. Then I lost little Eddie Brooks in Atlanta, Georgia. Eddie was eleven. Eleven years old. I was shattered and — and then I got angry. The day that it happened, I called this CEO. I said, “I want to see you tomorrow, and I will fly to where you are.” And he said, “Okay.” And I flew to where he was, and I walked in on him. And I said, “We’ve been batting the ping pong ball back and forth for three months. I’m leaving here one way or another. I will disrupt your company with the worst kind of gossip that you ever heard in your life, or you’re gonna become one of the greatest heroes since Patton. Now which is it gonna be?” And we talked. And I walked out of there with enough money to build a research center in a city in this country that I’m very proud of, that’s gone up with this man’s help out of anger.

Now, it doesn’t always happen that way, but that one worked.

Today, if something goes wrong, I’ll turn it into positive energy. I’ll do some kind of gag about it, make my crew member feel better about it, and the audience will never know whether I’m really having a problem or not. So it’s all positive. This way is better. Positive energy. I sound like Norman Vincent Peale, for Christ’s sake.

How long have you had this attitude? Has it always been this way for you?

JL: No, no, no, no, no, no. As you get older, you get wiser. As you get older, you look back. And I’m a born reviewer. I look at material over the years. I like to look and see the work that I’ve done. I don’t go back too far, but I do like to look at the material, and I like to look at attitudes.

I remember in 1978, I was cleaned out. I was a Percodan addict, and I was in very big trouble for a number of years. I blew the whistle on myself in People magazine, because I felt I could help other people that were in the same trouble. So I wanted to review what I looked like in ’77. Could you see it in my eyes? I was taking thirteen Percodan a day. I mean, I’m talking about heavy-duty, world-class addict. That came from prescription drugs, because I had injured my spine, a pain that I live with every day of my life. Still live with it.

When I put that tape on and looked at ’77 — (laughs) Oh, holy Christ. I didn’t even remember doing that telethon. I didn’t remember. There’s a period between ’73 and ’77 that’s black. I don’t remember making the four films that I made, the five telethons. I don’t remember the twelve weeks that I appeared at the Sahara Hotel in Las Vegas. I don’t remember the Royal Command Performance for Her Majesty and the family. I don’t remember my opening or the fifteen concerts in France. I remember nothing from ’73 to ’77. So I like to look at those years and see what that man was. How did he get on that stage? But by God, he performed. He did it. When you’re performing since you’re five years old, which is now, fifty-eight years for me, you have a know-withal and a tremendous ability to rise above stuff, which is what I was doing in that period. That’s the best editorial I can give you. I was rising above whatever the problems were, and the professionalism was carrying me.

So I looked and I looked and in reviewing as I did the material, I helped myself change a lot of that conduct, ’cause a lot of that conduct, even though I wasn’t responsible — or he, Jerry, wasn’t responsible for a lot of his actions — I sure didn’t like a lot of the stuff I saw. And whether it was the Percodan or it was Jerry’s attitude, one or the other displeased me. And I made sure to fix a lot of that, starting with (laughs) no longer being addicted. And secondly, fixing things that were really best for him the performer and the audience.

Do you have any apologies about Jerry over the years?

JL: No, not really. He never meant to hurt anybody. That I can say for him. And I can be as objective about him as anybody. I sleep with him. That’s as close as you can get. He’s been raucous. He’s been defined as a — and I’ve recognized a lot of this – he’s been rowdy, boisterous, distasteful, abrasive, caustic, abusive. Always to give someone pleasure though. Always to get a laugh. Uh, very young in a lot of cases, which is a defense that I don’t think will hold up.

He — I’m better now, but I wouldn’t apologize for anything, other than sitting down and, by design, looking to hurt somebody. Now, I know there are people like that that plan to do harm to someone, or that don’t care that they’ve done it. I can’t live with myself if I hurt somebody or if I do the wrong thing. If I’m abrasive, yes, or caustic or pushy or aggressive, the defense for a lot of that is because very often you have to include that in your menu, or you’re half a performer.

In the case of going on the air Sunday night, you can’t badger your audience, but you do have to be strong in your convictions. They’re not going to like ya if you’re a wimp, and they may not like ya if you’re too strong. So if you can find that wonderful middle somewhere, and I don’t like to police me. I don’t put up on the board: “In the third hour, Jerry will become emotional.” I get emotional when I get emotional. I cry when I cry. This audience has had forty years to scrutinize me. If I’m holding 100 to 120 million people throughout this twenty-four hours, many of this audience has grown up with me. They trust me. They believe in what I’m doing. You can’t hold an audience that long unless they do. Then the numbers on the board validify that fact.

I get letters from people sometimes that say you should have challenged that guy that wrote what he wrote. Well one year I did. I took off on the press, and I really — well, this is not the platform for it. It was wrong. I apologized after the fact, because I realized was wrong. Everything I said was right, but this is not the place for it. So that was wrong. And I’m the first one to tell you I’m wrong. You know why it’s easy for me? Because I’m gonna be the first one to tell you I’m right. Now, before you can do that, you gotta do the other. People will not take hearing from you that you’re right unless they hear from you when you’re wrong. Simple. Everybody will go with you. They’ll go with you a hundred percent.

What kind of changes do you go through emotionally and otherwise during the telethons? Staying up, that sleep deprivation period and everything else?

JL: Well, it’s a roller coaster. That’s what it is. There’s highs and there’s lows. My eyes are three-sixty. I see everything happening in the theater, whether it’s music is in place or it isn’t in place. If I see a corporate sponsor making a move towards the stage prematurely, I’m catching that. My roller coaster dips and has now taken the high ride, because he should have been in place. Now, I have to fill so the audience doesn’t know. That’s a charge or a rush I have to give myself so the audience doesn’t know there’s trouble.

I see two or three of my kids seated in wheelchairs, I might see somebody push the wheelchair to make room for a camera. That tends to upset me, watching a wheelchair getting shoved. That’s back on the roller coaster. Now I’m on the air, and I have to let the audience (laughs) know that the next performer’s gonna really entertain them, and I can’t wait to get down there to whoever it was that pushed the wheelchair to take care of that. Well, I can’t let the audience know that. They’re never gonna see it. So you’re on the roller coaster again.

Now I’m looking at the wee hours of the morning, and the tote board isn’t moving. The phones aren’t going. Now unlike other telethons, you’ll see any other telethon that goes on the air, the host goes to sleep around midnight. And they come back the next morning refreshed around ten o’clock. That’s not a telethon! I walk out there at six o’clock Sunday night, and I don’t leave that stage until twenty-two hours later. Now, I am off during the cutaway to take a shower, change tux. That happens maybe five, six times. Last year, we calculated I was off the stage — literally off the stage, showers and tux changes — thirty-nine minutes.

Is that a performer’s dream or a performer’s nightmare?

JL: Oh, it’s a nightmare. It’s an absolute nightmare. It’s the commitment you’ve made. And I believe you either do a telethon or you don’t. See, I call the others halfathons. Want to do a halfathon? Good. Start it, do three hours, go to sleep for ten hours, and come back and do six hours. That’s a halfathon.

Is it easy to fall asleep after this?

JL: No, I usually have a production meeting after we go off the air. I’ll rap with my crew for anywhere between three and four hours talking about what we can do to make it better. My next production meeting is only six weeks after the show is over. The first production meeting for the next year is like the, uh, second week in October.

And then it starts all over again.

JL: You bet. It’s the only way you can sustain. There’s a reason we’re number one, and there’s a reason why we’re able to do what we do. It’s not slick, it’s not straight cut with edit tech, commercial, sponsor, Hollywood, Vegas. Half of them are doing the things that we have created, that we have, as the originators, have stopped doing. But still, with it all, you have to do the best entertaining show you can. That’s the most important thing is to entertain the people. And inform.

Now, through all these years, there’s been one question that people always have asked. And there’s been rumors about it, and you’ve never answered it. I don’t think you’re gonna answer it now, but why do you do it? What made you start it?

JL: I just have to do it. Something personal happened to me. It had nothing to do with any of my children, none of my family were ever afflicted with this disease, which is why most people do those things. But something personal traumatized my life in 1949 and I have told people for the last forty years, the important thing is not why I do it, but that I do it. That’s the only answer I got for you.

How is the pressure building now on you as we get closer to the telethon?

JL: Well, I work well under pressure. I have always worked best under pressure. I write best when I’m on deadline. I perform best when I get to the dressing room. I gotta get into my tux and get downstairs. (laughs) I don’t know why that is but pressure has never really bothered me. Stress is a killer. Stress, I can’t handle. Now, the difference between pressure and stress, I think, at least in my own humble opinion, is pressure is what we all go through in our own respective work. Stress is when you are thrown into a working condition with incompetence and they’re not doing the job. You’re working under tremendous energy, getting the things done that must be done. And the kind of stress that comes from someone who doesn’t care, and that’s why they’re an incompetent, can give you chest pains. Chest pains is the beginning of going to the OR, where they open your chest with a Black & Decker, like I had.

Which you know about.

JL: Yeah, which I know about. So stress is what really slows me down. I had a perfect example of it today. My crew was working in the theater. There is an act that uses smoke in the act. I don’t think it’s necessary to blow everyone out of the theater in a rehearsal with that smoke, which will take us some time to clear out. And I told my crew, “Rehearse them without the smoke. They are not in their outfits. They’re not dressed in that number that they’re gonna do come showtime. What do you need the smoke for? We know there’s gonna be smoke.” The smoke has been checked. We’ve checked it technically, that the cameras will read it, lights can photograph. Well, people are coughing and choking. (laughs) They overloaded with smoke, and I could have saved them that if they just would have listened. They mean to listen, but they really think that they’re doing the right thing. Then I get stress. I have to walk in a corner, just for about two minutes, and talk myself out of the stress, and I’m okay.

You mentioned people who are incompetent leading to this stress. It seems that you’re the one who makes sure that everyone that’s working for you cares. You’re in the middle of everything. What drives you all year to do this?

JL: Well, I am part of a team. I have a marvelous director and I have a marvelous co-producer. I have to have their undying and their unrelenting loyalty in this parcel. And you don’t do that just by saying, “How do you do? I’d like you to be loyal.” You do that over a period of ten, twelve years. And I’ve had that good fortune of having these people for ten and twelve and twenty and twenty-five and thirty years. I’ve got them to the point where they understand that I care deeply and desperately about what we’re doing. I can’t expect them to care as I do, but what I do expect of them is to just give it a shot. Try to open up enough so that you give me your talent while you care about giving me your talent. But when I see a technician look at his watch and yawn, that’s a virus. That’s contagious. That runs through the crew. Now, most crew members are very proud people. They’re very, very proud of their creative output. When there’s a member of the crew that goes – (exaggerated yawn) — that’s a depressant. The crew doesn’t want to see that guy, ’cause it’s catching. Yawning is catching, anyhow. So he tells me he doesn’t want to be here. So what I do is I pay him off. I pay him for what he would’ve earned had he worked the entire program. But the important thing is to get him away from the good hard-working members of this company.

Now you don’t make friends doing that, but I have wonderful people that take care of that for me. I’ll go to (the director) and I’ll say, “Tom, this guy hasn’t done a day’s work of any consequence, plus the fact he’s injecting our wonderful crew with a virus. Let’s get rid of him.” It doesn’t happen but maybe once or twice in the entire year, but it has to be handled.

When it comes to MDA, you’ve been doing this for forty years now. Do you regret any of the career sacrifices you had to make because of this? Do you look back and wish you spent more time as a director?

JL: No. I have no, I have no regrets, really. And I don’t think that it, uh … I don’t know how I could have changed it, because the thing that I set out to do, although I didn’t know would be a lifelong experience, hasn’t limited me from doing the other work I want to do. I have been fairly active, and I’ve done a lot of things I wanted to do. I still have many things I want to do where MDA will get in the way sometimes. And I have to juggle to make it work. For example, there were two or three very important seminars that we hold around December, January that I head up. And it pumps up our staff, our field staff of some 2,000 people out there that are responsible for a lot of money that comes in Labor Day. Well, I was doing a five-part Wiseguy on CBS and I was in Vancouver shooting every day. I had to make arrangements with the Wiseguy company to be sure that I could escape to Las Vegas, Los Angeles, and Phoenix for these seminars to head them up and see that the MDA was covered, and I didn’t hurt the company and the shooting. I got back, did what I had to do. So I make those arrangements. It doesn’t always work. And then I make choices. Sometimes I’ll make the choice of the work. I would hate to pass up directing a marvelous film that I have great faith in, but there’s always a way it can be handled. You can do two things at once.

There’s been many times when I’ve put in twenty-hour days — eight hours for one project, twelve hours for another project, and you sleep sometimes in the car. You get it done.

Did you ever envision that forty years later, that your life, your career would take that turn where you would go from being known mainly as a comic to a comic actor to a director to now, Jerry Lewis –

JL: Fundraiser.

— humanitarian, fundraiser?

JL: (laughs) Yeah. No, I never thought forty years ago that, that that would happen. What I thought was that I would enlighten the public and maybe get them to help, and then it would take off. I never realized that once I made the commitment, there wasn’t anyone that’s gonna take my place. There wasn’t anyone I could turn it over to. There were times when I thought maybe that was a possibility in the early days. But you can’t. You just can’t. The responsibility is too great now.

And there are too many people that depend upon me, and there are too many people that I could tell you stories about that would blow your mind, that really are alive because they believe in what I’m doing for them. And if I were to walk away from them — I have to be careful not to place myself in such a place that it sounds like I am the Messiah. That’s not what I’m saying.

Could this telethon exist without you? Do you ever see a time when you would retire, step down, hand over the baton?

JL: Oh, I don’t think there’s anything larger than the telethon. I’m sure that it could do very well with someone else if—

Do you see that time coming?

JL: Not this weekend, no.

(laughs)

JL: I made a vow almost forty years ago that I wouldn’t quit till I beat it or till I couldn’t walk anymore. So I’m not about to walk away. There’s no reason for me to walk away from it. We are getting so close and the inroads have been so wonderful that it makes some of my fantasy thoughts of, “Hey, let a younger guy stand there for twenty-four hours, let a younger guy put in eleven months putting it together.” Those fantasies, thoughts are shattered when I get this close to airtime and recognize that the fearless leader has to be there for all the pieces to fall into place. Eh, it’s a great feeling. It’s the most selfish thing a man could do, what I do, because I get such satisfaction out of seeing the fruits of the labor, that it’s unbelievable.

With all the work you’ve done, all the good that you’ve done, all the work that you put into it, you have detractors. There’s the cynics.

JL: Sure.

What does that do to you when, when you, when you pick up something, and they say, “Oh, Jerry takes money under the table,” or —

JL: (laughs)

… “Jerry’s phony sentimentality on the air.”

JL: It hurts. It hurts, because you’re giving every ounce of truth and every ounce of energy that you have to do a good thing, and I don’t believe there is a human who can say, “That doesn’t bother me.” I don’t believe there is that human that isn’t bothered by a dissenter. The human condition is a very interesting, very, very wonderful laboratory study, the human condition. It’s a study for me, because I learn when I write comedy, the best thing in the world for me to do is to sit at a street corner and just watch the traffic for six, seven hours, and watch people waiting to cross the street. It’s a great laboratory, the human condition. And I don’t believe there’s anyone that does good work or that does something from his heart that isn’t hurt when he’s challenged or when he’s disbelieved or when he’s doubted or when someone is cynical about it or pessimistic about it.

Now, I can get five thousand letters patting me on the back and wishing me all of the wonderful things in life. In that batch of five thousand letters, I need to read just one who disbelieves me, doesn’t particularly care about what I care about, and thinks that I’m a jerk, I’m shattered by that letter. And Sam, my wife, says to me, “Please help yourself get over that letter by rereading the five thousand.” And I know she’s right, but the human condition says to me, “This is addressed to me. How do I get him?” The human condition would like everybody should think they’re terrific. You can’t. And the only way you’re really gonna get wisdom is the day you wake up and honestly say to yourself as an introspective man, “I cannot please everybody.” The day you can do that, you will have wisdom. I haven’t done it yet. So I don’t have wisdom. (laughs)

Does it get you angry?

JL: Well, you get angry when, when it’s a cheap shot. You get angry when you know damn well that the letter came from a man who is an attorney, reputable attorney, has a marvelous business in this town, and writes you a seething, pessimistic letter of that nature. And you know the reason for the letter was because you turned down going to his cocktail party. Well, now I know that that’s the reason he wrote the letter. I don’t want to go to his cocktail party. I don’t like cocktail parties. I don’t go to cocktail parties. But isn’t it interesting that it was a week later that I got this letter from him? Said nothing about a cocktail party. Said nothing about anything, but the work I do on Labor Day. He just attacked me. Well, it, I know where it’s coming from.

He told some friends, “Jerry Lewis is coming to the cocktail party.” Well, Jerry Lewis didn’t show up. But I had never agreed to show up. The invitation was sent. There was no RSVP. It was just absolutely, blatantly, that’s what it is. It still troubled me. So, I have to fix it.

You mentioned in the new Parade article that’s gonna to be coming out Sunday.

September 3rd. Sunday, yeah.

You talk about how you lost a baby this year.

JL: Mm-hmm.

What has that done to you? I mean, someone like you, you’ve done so much for kids, for children, for newborns, for pregnant women. What’d it do to you?

JL: Killed me. It took me, both Sam and myself, we were… we were on a six-week binge of just… we were as reclusive as you could ever be. She was two or two-and-a-half months gone, and we were skipping around like two children going shopping every day, buying baby clothes, and buying this and buying that and having such a wonderful time and dreaming of this excitement that was ahead of us. And it just didn’t happen. And I don’t remember ever being as disappointed or as shot down or as shattered, whether it was because I was so shattered for her, because she’s such a great lady and such a loving, caring, marvelous human being who wanted nothing more than to reproduce the man she loves. And she told me in no uncertain terms, she said, “Can we have a baby? I want a piece of you. I want just a piece of you.” I don’t know of any man in the world could be given a greater gift from someone that loves him that she gave me when she said that. And I said, “If that’s what you want, then I want it even more, so I can have a piece of you.” And, it was a lovely, lovely plan we had. But we’re, we’re still trying. And if you weren’t sitting here with me taking up my time, I could be home working on it. (laughs)

Anything you’d like to say to America the day after the telethon? Any kind of message about Jerry Lewis?

JL: No. I don’t think there’s anything that I would like to say that I wouldn’t have said last night and the night before. I could say that, for those that understand, no explanation is necessary. For those that do not understand, no explanation would suffice. So they know I love them for the help that they give me. And for those that don’t, I love them, too. They don’t, because they have reasons. And I am older and wiser now and recognize that you can’t win ’em all.

Glen Hansard, the Irish musician who starred in the in the 2007 in Once, and won the best original song Oscar for “Falling Slowly,” was killed this morning in a motorcycle crash in Dublin. He was fifty-six. Hansard started out as a busker on the streets of Dublin, and had a small role in the 1991 soul-band film The Commitments. He had hits in Ireland with his band Frames, which released seven albums between 1991 and 2006, and was known as a social activist who brought attention to homelessness. Hansard became an international star with Once. A musical version of the film opened on Broadway and won eight Tony awards, including best musical. As a solo artist, Hansard toured with Eddie Vedder and performed onstage with Bruce Springsteen. After the success of Once, he formed a duo with his Once costar, Markéta Irglová, as The Swell Season. It was on their tour of America that Hansard was witness and party to a shocking, bizarre, and historic death onstage. The story of the fan who fell to earth became the epilogue to the book I wrote with Jeff Abraham, The Show Won’t Go On. An excerpt follows.

Audience Participation

© 2019, 2026 by Jeff Abraham and Burt Kearns

Everybody wants ta get inta da act!

--Jimmy Durante

In the 2007 Irish musical film Once, Glen Hansard and Markéta Irglová portrayed two struggling musicians in Dublin, Ireland. Their characters wrote and performed songs that told the story of their romance. The pair, who performed in real life as The Swell Season, also composed the film’s score, including a number titled “Falling Slowly” that won the 2008 Academy Award® for Best Original Song. So it was somewhat ironic when, on August 19, 2010, their concert was stopped by someone who fell very quickly onto their stage.

The duo and their backing band were playing an outdoor show at the Mountain Winery in Saratoga, California. The 2200-seat amphitheater is perched high on a mountain with views across the Santa Clara Valley and is built around the facade of the original winery. The winery building is the backdrop to the stage.

It was a perfect setting for the duo’s intimate, romantic folk pop, and many of the 1,900 people in the audience recalled the night as “magical” -- magical, that is, until it turned into a horror show.

Shortly after 10 PM, the group took an intermission of sorts. Most of the musicians left the stage to the fiddler player, who performed a traditional Irish song in the balmy breeze. When the ensemble returned, Hansard sang “When Your Mind’s Made Up” from the Once soundtrack. He followed that intensity with some levity, teasing the lead guitarist about the first song he ever wrote. Hansard began to lead the audience in a sing-along, getting another big laugh when he promised to be “rocking out to the maximum.”

It was around then that some people in the amphitheater, high above the performers, noticed the figure on the roof of the winery behind and above the stage. It was a person, in dark clothing. They saw him run across the tile shingles, and then leap into sky, as if taking off from a diving board. They saw him descend rapidly and silently near the lighting rig, flip head over heels in midair, and after a forty-foot drop, smash with a loud thud onto the stage, about five feet away from Glen Hansard.

Some people assumed that the figure was a dummy. The way the body fell certainly looked as if it could have been thrown off the roof. One witness thought he was seeing a black cape or sheet falling. Some assumed a speaker or lighting rig had fallen. Some thought the jumper was part of the show, that he had something to do with Hansard’s routine with the guitarist. Others knew immediately.

Hansard rushed over to the fallen man, knelt next to him and looked toward the wings, “Quickly!” he shouted.

By then, people in the audience were already punching 911 into their cell phones. Doctors and paramedics from the audience ran to the stage and began CPR. A crew member stepped up to a microphone and asked if anyone could help identify the man. Then he asked that everyone remain seated, so as not to clog the narrow mountain roads used by the ambulance that was already on its way.

Everyone watched the doctors, EMTs, and firefighters work on the man for a good half hour. Eventually a black curtain was placed around them to block the view. A doctor who’d been in the audience declared the man dead on the stage.

The man was identified as Michael Edward Pickels. He was thirty-two, from nearby San Jose. Pickels had arrived at the show with a friend. Around 10 PM, he’d left all of his personal belongings on his seat and disappeared. A short time later, he was seen on the roof. Apparently, he’d gone around the back of the building, where it was easy to climb up.

If there was no apparent reason for his public suicide, there were at least indicators. On New Year’s Day, Pickels had gotten into a violent argument with his girlfriend. He’d tied up her hands and legs, pointed a loaded shotgun at her and threatened that he was going to kill her and himself. Somehow, the girlfriend convinced him to let her go. She ran to another house and called police, who negotiated with Pickels for ninety minutes before he gave up the gun and surrendered.

He was arrested and charged with assault with a firearm, domestic violence, and false imprisonment. The night of The Swell Season show, he was free on $150,000 bail, and facing a court appearance in October.

The morning after, The Swell Season extended its sympathies in a MySpace post:

Our hearts go out to the victim who decided to take his

own life at last night’s gig... and to his friends and family.

“We are just in shock and grief and full of bewilderment,” Howard Greynolds, the band’s manager, told the local paper. “Clearly, next year, we are going to come back to the area and do a show for a suicide prevention or something, if it turns out to be a suicide. Maybe at the Warfield (in San Francisco) or someplace -- I don’t think we’d want to go back to the Mountain Winery.”

The Swell Season played as scheduled that Friday night at the Oregon Zoo in Portland. They later promised to pay for group grief counseling sessions for hundreds of fans who witnessed the suicide.

The Mountain Winery did not offer refunds to the traumatized concertgoers, many of whom told their stories in the readers’ comments section of the San Francisco Weekly:

The ghastly image in my head still won’t let me sleep. What a horrific abrupt ending to a sublime concert... The adorable Marketa made a comment earlier in the show that she will always remember Saratoga because it was her first ever ‘costume change’ (she was cold and changed from her dress to jeans and a sweater). Now she will remember Saratoga for an entirely different reason. What a nightmare.

—

Honestly, I’m really pissed that this jerk ruined an evening for so many. This was a fantastic show up until this point, and how many of us (not to mention the bandmembrs themselves) will remember this selfish dead man when we listen to their music?

As the audience response made clear, there’s a big difference between an amateur trying to steal the spotlight, and performers who dedicate, and ultimately give, their lives to their art.

RIP Glen Hansard (1970-2026).

From The Show Won’t Go On: The Most Shocking, Bizarre, and Historic Deaths of Performers Onstage, by Jeff Abraham and Burt Kearns, published by Chicago Review Press

©2022, 2026 By Burt Kearns

Joe Friday was a fictional Los Angeles police detective, created and portrayed by Jack Webb, on radio in 1949, on television and screen in the 1950s, and revived as an NBC television series in 1967. The deadpan, dedicated detective sergeant, upholding law and order against the threat of thieves, scam artists, killers – and, in 1967, drug-pushing hippies — was a square, and the series propaganda for the LAPD. But Jack Webb was, at heart, a jazz hipster. He was Pete Kelly from the jazz crime film, Pete Kelly’s Blues. He had a collection of more than six thousand jazz albums. He was married to Julie London, and jazz was their bond. [1] With that in mind, it’s not so hard to picture Joe Friday winding down after a shift by digging Art Pepper at Shelly’s Manne-Hole on Cahuenga Boulevard, or stopping in at Donte’s on Lankershim to catch a set by the Pete Jolly Trio.

Jack Webb was also a jazz poet, a Hollywood Ferlinghetti who in 1958, a decade before William Shatner, recorded, with Billy May, a jazz album — standards, whose lyrics he recited. [2] And there’s poetry in Dragnet 1967. Jack Webb as Joe Friday narrates each episode, always beginning over an aerial shot of downtown or the skyline of Los Angeles with the words: “This is the City. Los Angeles, California (pronounced ‘Californ-ee-ya’).” A bright, Chamber of Commerce description of some positive aspects of the city follows, but in the course of a few lines suddenly turns dark, leading to the words “I carry a badge.” Eleven writers, including Webb, were credited for that 1967 season of Dragnet. Looking through the seventeen episodes, now fifty-nine years later, it still describes my city today: the poetry of Dragnet 1967:

This is the city. Los Angeles, California.
Geographically, the biggest in the world and still growing.
Every day, the population increases by almost a thousand.
It begins to get crowded.
Three million people were here ahead of them.
There are all kinds. The young. And the old.
Those who love. And those who hate.
They’re the kind who make work for me. [3]

This is the city. Los Angeles, California.
In 1920, the population was five hundred and seventy-six thousand,
six hundred and seventy-three.
Today, Los Angeles is the third-largest city in the United States.
Nearly three million people live here.
From every nation, Los Angeles draws its bloodline.
When some of that blood is spilled, I go to work. [4]

This is the city. Los Angeles, California.
It’s a city on wheels, constantly on the move.
There are three and a half million cars in Los Angeles.
Over a hundred and thirty-two miles of freeways.
The maximum speed limit is sixty-five miles an hour.
This is Central Receiving Hospital.
On an average day there are a hundred and sixty-one accidents.
Every month thirty-seven people die.
It’s a high price to pay to get somewhere in a hurry.
Especially when they never get there.
This is where their cars end up. [image of a junkyard]
What’s left of ’em.
This is where the victims end up. [image of a cemetery]
What’s left of ’em.
When they do, I go to work. [5]

This is the city. Los Angeles, California.
It’s the motion picture capital of the world.
Some come to Los Angeles to see the stars or try to become one.
Others come here and die.
When they go suddenly and with no apparent reason,
that’s when I go to work. [6]

This is the city. Los Angeles, California.
Some people claim it’s a collection of suburbs, not a city at all.
Others say that in ten years,
every city in America will look like Los Angeles does today.
One thing sure, it’s a city that’s not afraid to experiment,
where the unusual is taken for granted.
Five thousand people move to Los Angeles every month.
The Los Angeles County Art Museum.
To some, this might be an incentive to settle here.
A block away, you can look at the city and its inhabitants
the way things were ten million years ago. [image of the La Brea Tar Pits]
This is East Fifth Street, home address for dreams that never came true.
A few people believe that life owes them something
and the way to collect it is at the point of a gun.
That’s where I come in. [7]

This is the city. Los Angeles, California.
Two and one-half million people live here.
Every month, five thousand more crowd in.
Tourists spend over a billion, one hundred million dollars a year
in Southern California.
It’s a big business.
On Olvera Street, you can buy the best Mexican handcrafts
this side of Mexico City.
Anything you’re looking for, Los Angeles has it.
If it’s for sale, you can buy it.
Some people don’t bother bringing money.
They do their shopping at the point of a gun.
That’s when I come in. [8]

This is the city. Los Angeles, California.
This is Wilshire Boulevard.
Forty years ago, these were bean fields.
Now they call it ‘The Miracle Mile.’
This is MacArthur Park. It’s on Wilshire Boulevard.
For ninety cents, you can rent a boat for half an hour.
A lot of old people live around the park.
Most of them draw pensions.
You can live pretty good in Los Angeles on a pension —
if you’re careful.
When you’re old, sometimes you need good medical facilities.
The city has them.
Once in a while, somebody tries to take
what little the old have away from them.
That’s when I go to work. [9]

This is the city. Los Angeles, California.
On Spring Street, you’ll find
the Pacific Coast Stock Exchange and the big banks.
You can borrow a million dollars on a few minutes notice –
if your credit’s good enough.
The people who make or get the million-dollar loans
usually live a long way from their work.
Many of them here in Bel-Air.
Hundred-thousand-dollar homes are commonplace here.
So are half-million-dollar estates.
The good life of Bel-Air attracts some of the best lawyers,
doctors, bankers, and merchants.
It also attracts some of the best thieves.
That’s where I come in. [10]

This is the city. Los Angeles, California.
It’s a big city with a big heart and it offers a lot.
Museums, libraries, galleries, playgrounds,
beaches, valleys, and mountains.
Angelenos are proud of our new Griffith Park Zoo,
which houses animals from all over the world.
The king of beasts and his jester. The proud. And the profane.
Not all of the wolves and jackals who come to Los Angeles
are in the zoo.
A lot of them wind up in the city jail.
My job is to put ’em there. [11]

This is the city. Los Angeles, California.
It’s a fine place to enjoy life.
There are places reserved just for kids
when they’re young and feel young.
Places they go when they’re young and feel old.
Beginning the big search for something
that often doesn’t exist in the places they look for it.
They might find it here [image of a church]
or here [image of a synagogue] or maybe here [another church].
They could try looking here [ The Griffith Observatory].
Their search might end with a college degree.
One thing sure. Whatever they’re looking for
cannot be found inside a Number 5 capsule.
When they try, that’s where I come in. [12]

“…I carry a badge.”

Footnotes:

[1] Webb married the actress and singer in 1947. (“I was 15 when we had our first date,” London said. “Always took me to jazz clubs.”) They divorced in 1954. In 1959, London married Bobby Troup, the jazz pianist who wrote Route 66; in the 1970s, London and Troup starred in Emergency!, an NBC series that Webb created and produced.

[2] For the album, You’re My Girl: Romantic Reflections by Jack Webb, composer and arranger Billy May arranged and conducted orchestral versions of a dozen songs, including “Try A Little Tenderness,” “When Sunny Gets Blue,” “Nancy,” and “But Beautiful.” Jack Webb spoke the lyrics.

[3] From Episode 2: The Big Explosion. Today, Sitka, Alaska, spanning 2,870 square miles (and with a population of 10,000), is the largest United States city by area. Los Angeles, at 502 square miles, isn’t even in the Top 10. (Jacksonville, Florida, at #5, is the largest city by area in the conterminous United States – 747 square miles).

[4] From Episode 15: The Gun. Los Angeles with 3,985,520 inhabitants as of 2022, Los Angeles is now ranked as the second-largest city in the United States, behind New York City.

[5] From Episode 12: The Hit-and-Run Driver. As of 2022, there are 515 miles of freeways and expressways, 5,484,606 automobiles,123,669 motorcycles, and 1,068,213 commercial vehicles in the County of Los Angeles. In the City of Los Angeles, the total overall number of registered vehicles is 2,499,764. With the maximum speed limit remaining at sixty-five miles an hour on most California highways, there are about 164 accidents a day in Los Angeles. In 2020, there were 238 traffic deaths.

[6] From Episode 7: The Hammer. While Hollywood is the oldest national film industry, India is the world’s movie-making capital, producing three times as many films. In 2020, China became the largest box office territory.

[7] From Episode 9: The Fur Job. The U.S. Census Bureau shows that the City of Los Angeles saw a population decline of 40,000 during the pandemic, ranking fourth among the top 15 U.S. cities with the largest numeric decline from July 1, 2020 through July 1, 2021. East Fifth Street in downtown Los Angeles is part of Skid Row.

[8] From Episode 5: The Masked Bandits. Despite effects of the pandemic, visitor spending in California topped 100 billion dollars in 2021. Olvera Street in downtown Los Angeles remains an historic, and free attraction, although some complain that much of the Mexican artifacts sold in kiosks are, in fact, imported from China.

[9] From Episode 6: The Bank Examiner Swindle. According to NewsBreak, the neighborhood surrounding MacArthur Park is one of Los Angeles’ poorest, known for a high crime rate and gang activity. “On any given night, the park’s homeless population will outnumber the park rangers by a ratio of at least three to one.” The south side of the park, where the lake is located, is closed for “beautification.” There is no boat house at this time.

[10] From Episode 10: The Jade Story. The median house price in Bel-Air, California, ZIP code 90077, is now $8.2 million. In April, 2026, an estate at 11201 Chalon Road hit the market at $400 million,the most expensive home listing in the United States.

[11] From Episode 14: The Subscription Racket. The new Los Angeles Zoo, which replaced the “inadequate, ugly, poorly designed and under-financed collection of beat-up cages” of the original Griffith Park Zoo, opened in November 1966 and has had a number of notable escaped animals. In half a decade during the late 1990s and early 2000s, at least thirty-five escaped, including zebras, chimps, kangaroos and antelopes. Evelyn the gorilla broke out of her enclosure at least five times.

[12] From Episode 1: The LSD Story: Often referred to as “Blue Boy,” this was the pilot, and best remembered, episode of Dragnet 1967. Friday and Gannon refer to a call for the person dressed “painted up like an Indian” and “chewing the bark off a tree.” They find a kid with his head buried in the ground. When they pull him up, it’s revealed that one side of his face is painted blue, the other half yellow. “You’re pretty high and far out, arent’cha?” Friday tells the suspect known as “Blue Boy.” “What kind of kick are you on, son?” The episode about LSD was the first Dragnet episode to be broadcast in color.

© 2019, 2026 By Burt Kearns

From 1989 through the mid-1990s, I was a player in what became known as “tabloid television.” Working with the genre’s creator, Peter Brennan, I ran shows like A Current Affair and Hard Copy, covered the fall of the Berlin Wall, followed Jerry Lewis through one of his telethons and presented Rob Lowe’s sex tape to a national audience. The story that got me the most attention was one I came up with in 1994. It was a discovery that could have led to a different outcome in the O.J. Simpson double-murder trial, but merely wound up giving household recognition to a name that a dozen years later would become a brand and symbol of the demise of pop culture: the case of Robert Kardashian and O.J. Simpson’s Louis Vuitton garment bag.

It all went down while I was helping Brennan launch and run a late-night tabloid series called Premier Story, a low-budget, scrappy operation being tested in a limited number of markets around the country. The idea was to go up against ABC’s Nightline, with a similar format — and tabloid twist. Like Nightline, Premier Story would feature two-way interviews with our host, along with one or two taped packages, but while Ted Koppel covered topics like Sarajevo or Rwanda, Premier Story would focus on Madonna or Madame Heidi. Instead of a pompous “anchorman” with a passing resemblance to Alfred E. Neumann, our host was a young import from London. Alison Holloway, a beautiful, brainy, blonde television journalist, would be the first woman to take on the late night boys since Joan Rivers and—a decade before Simon Cowell’s television invasion—the rare U.S. television star with a British accent.

Premier Story premiered on Monday, June 6, 1994. We’d been on the air for five nights and were preparing for a second week of shows when, on the evening of Sunday, June 12, two people were murdered quite savagely in the courtyard of 875 Bundy Drive, in a quiet, upscale Los Angeles neighborhood called Brentwood. What follows is the story of the events that began in June thirty-two years ago, and how I wound up making “Kardashian” a household name; adapted from my book, TABLOID BABY, which was published in 1999:

WE GOT WORD from KCOP’s newsroom wire in the late morning. “An ex-wife of football star O.J. Simpson and an unidentified man were found murdered outside her condominium in Brentwood.”

Anita handed me the wire copy. “Hmmm,” I said. “I wonder if he beat her to death.”

Everyone in tabloid television knew that O.J. Simpson had been arrested for wife abuse some years back, but early word had it he was in Chicago at the time of the killings. We kept an eye on the story and carried on preparing our episode about Pearl Jam’s fight with Ticketmaster.

By late Monday afternoon, things had changed considerably. After Simpson returned home from Chicago, a KCOP cameraman stood atop his truck and shot over the wall of Simpson’s mansion, recording tremendous, exclusive video of the star in handcuffs. Either the cops had fucked up in a big way or O.J. Simpson was a suspect in a bigger way.

The studio crew had wrapped for the day, so we tore apart the show in the edit room, brought Alison outside to tape a new open and intros and put together a package on the murder to lead Monday night’s broadcast.

Premier Story was about to become The O.J. Simpson Show.

On Rockingham.

ALISON AND I were on Rockingham Avenue outside Simpson’s mansion the next morning, recording promos and shooting interviews and footage. The exclusive, secluded neighborhood off Sunset Boulevard in Brentwood had overnight become a media encampment. O.J. Simpson’s home, rather than the scene of the crime, had become the center of the world’s biggest story. Satellite trucks, microwave units, television crews, and reporters from around the world had taken over the neighborhood where Michelle Pfeiffer, the mayor, and many other celebrities lived in seclusion.

For Tuesday’s show we ran extensive footage of the vivid videotaped moments that had flashed by in the past two days: Simpson arriving home and being restrained; detectives taking shoes from Simpson’s house; a friend of Simpson’s houseguest, Kato Kaelin, showing up with the assumption that it was Kato who was killed with Nicole; and another little man taking a garment bag away from Simpson’s gate the morning after the murders.

Our coverage looked different from anyone else’s. We were devoting entire shows to one story and we weren’t cutting up the tape into quick little soundbites. This wasn’t the usual packaged reality; we were letting scenes roll. Premier Story had hit on a trademark style through necessity: the editing process was too slow to do a lot of cutting. We had to let tape run just to get the show on the air.

Soon, we’d be known for using a quick ten-frame burst of light called a “white flash” as a transition between scenes and interview segments. Other shows copied the innovation. We only came up with it because our editors took too long to do dissolves on the unfamiliar equipment.

By Tuesday evening, Simpson hadn’t been charged but it was apparent he was the prime suspect in the murders. The following morning, attorney Dominic Barbara, who the previous year, when Brennan and I were at A Current Affair, arranged our $500,000 interview with Joey and Mary Jo Buttafuoco, phoned in to Howard Stern’s radio show. “Mr. Simpson – and I won’t call him O.J. anymore because he’s no longer a sports hero but an accused murderer – I think we have to get used to the idea that Mr. Simpson may face the death penalty.”

We booked Dominic for a two-way interview with Alison, as one of the first of the talking-head attorneys who’d take up so much airtime as the Simpson case dragged over the next eighteen months.

Rafael Abramovitz, the irascible, genius storyteller, reporter and pal who’d joined us as producer, was energized by the story. He headed to the Mezzaluna Restaurant where Nicole had eaten her last meal, with an edge over the other journalists who took up just about every other seat. The manager was an actor he’d used in one of his Hard Copy re-enactments. He promised to give Raf an exclusive interview the following day.

July 1994 Burt Kearns in edit room with editor Jack Foster

Thursday’s show was dedicated to the victims, beginning with Nicole’s funeral, an endless procession of L.A. businessmen and their blonde trophy wives. When O.J. Simpson arrived at the church doors to be escorted inside, our camera crew was in the middle of the media crush on the other side of the iron fence. The cameraman cursed one another as they jockeyed for space, called out to Simpson, and acted altogether unfunereal.

Premier Story was the only show to run the footage with full sound, to show what it was really like being there.

The second section of the show was dedicated to Nicole’s burial. The cemetery was closed to the media, so we paid a neighbor to let us shoot from his yard, using a long lens to capture the sad scene fifty yards away. The scene played out for six minutes with minimal sound.

The show ended with similar footage of Ron Goldman’s funeral.

It was a risky style, but we found out the next morning that it had paid off. Thursday’s show outrated Nightline, Leno, and Letterman in New York. Premier Story was number one. Premier Story was on the map.

The next night, with O.J. Simpson postponing surrender with his infamous low-speed Bronco chase, even Ted Koppel got on the Simpson bandwagon that his highfalutin show had ignored all week. Of course, Ted apologized to his audience, explaining that occasionally his program had to diverge from the truly important stories to shine a light on the obsessions of the media in general.

I sat in a tape room watching the Simpson chase play out live on five different cameras on five separate monitors. This simple motorcade said so much about celebrity and race in America. That a black man could become one of America’s greatest sports heroes and most beloved advertising pitchmen, that he could earn millions of dollars, marry a California beach blonde, move into one of the richest, most conservative, and whitest neighborhoods in the country, that he could golf with presidents, believe he had “overcome” his blackness – yet wind up like Stagger Lee racing down the road with the po-lice on his back – was both unimaginable and totally American.

When Simpson’s alleged suicide note was read live on television by his friend Robert Kardashian, I was moved that he’d be enough of a man to take the blame and kill himself. As the Bronco rolled past cheering fans, I was touched. It was obvious these people were not applauding his crime, but in effect were saying goodbye to a fallen hero and encouraging him not to take his life. By the time Al Cowlings piloted the Bronco back to the Rockingham estate, I was certain O.J. Simpson would be shot dead by police on national television.

I held a thick yellow pad to take screening notes for a special live version of the show. As Simpson was apprehended peacefully, I pried the pad out of my mouth. I’d bitten straight through.

PREMIER STORY had been on the air five weeks when the Simpson pretrial hearing ended on July 8th. Along with all the evidence revealed in the televised proceedings, many of the faces we couldn’t put names to in the hours after the murders were identified and developed into important characters.

None was more intriguing than Robert Kardashian, O.J. Simpson’s close friend and business partner. Kardashian read Simpson’s supposed suicide note the day of the Bronco chase and later reactivated his law license to help in his friend’s defense.

We had video from the morning after the murders showing Kardashian waiting at the mansion gate for Simpson to arrive home from Chicago. When Simpson got out of the car and was led onto his property by police, Kardashian remained planted outside. A woman who’d accompanied Simpson from the airport walked over to Kardashian with a stuffed garment bag. She and Kardashian embraced. She put her head on his shoulder. It looked as though they were crying, but when I blew up the tape, it was obvious he was whispering something. His eyes scanned the scene.

When Simpson was led out to be driven to police headquarters for questioning, Kardashian took the garment bag and scooted away, unnoticed by anyone but another observant KCOP cameraman.

We’d noticed the man with the bag. We just didn’t know who he was at the time.

We promoted a story on the Kardashian tape to run the following Monday, four weeks after the murders. It would be a look back at the mysterious doings outside the mansion and the people we didn’t know then, but knew all too well now. It made for a good promo.

On Monday, July 11th, editor Jack Foster and I squeezed into the tiny airless editing closet and began work on the piece. I had him slow the tape, stop and start it, even zoom in on faces in the crowd as I tried to find a story angle to fit the promo.

“Let it run in slow motion,” I instructed him, sipping coffee as I watched little Kardashian, in his jeans and polo shirt, walk away with the suitcase.

“Can you make it slower?”

“Sure.”

Kardashian and Simpson’s secretary in plain sight

Slower. The police officers were concerned with keeping the cameras away from the car holding Simpson. Attorney Howard Weitzman seemed to make eye contact with Kardashian before calling over to the lead detective and placing an arm over his shoulder. Kardashian and the woman were on the move, walking past cops and detectives. Detective Bert Luper almost bumped into the pair walking out of the driveway.

The big Louis Vuitton garment bag – we could tell by the markings – was too heavy for the little man. He switched hands, and as he did, I noticed something.

“Roll that back.”

“You got it.”

“Real slow.” I leaned toward the screen. My eyes had to be fooling me. Kardashian moved slowly in reverse. The bag changed hands. Three tags flew up from the handle.

“Freeze it!”

Jack did. “Back a little. Thanks.”

Three tags: one said “Hertz”; the others were for American Airlines.

“Fuck me.”

“What is it?”

“Fuck me.”

Simpson, the Hertz spokesman, flew American Airlines to and from Chicago. It was O.J. Simpson’s bag; the one he brought back from Chicago; the one police were searching for. They’d never found a murder weapon or bloody clothes – or the Louis Vuitton garment bag.

Robert Kardashian was getting away with O.J. Simpson’s bag – and who knows what else.

Holy shit.

Jack, veteran of many a story, realized what we had. He whistled and smiled. “Wow.”

I got on the phone to Brennan’s office. Raf picked up.

“Is Peter there?”

“He’s on the other line.”

“You guys better come over to the edit room, like now. I’ve got something really big. A major heavy. A major fucking heavy.”

THE PICTURE WAS frozen on the screen: Hertz and American Airlines Premium Class.

“Well, fuck, you’ve solved the case, Burtie.” Brennan lit a cigarette and took a deep drag.

Raf shook his head. “Holy shit. You did it. This is fucking big. I don’t believe this.”

Louis Vuitton bag with tags for American Airlines and Hertz

The only question was the identity of the woman; the one who handed Kardashian the garment bag in the first place. She looked like Cathy Randa, Simpson’s faithful assistant of twenty years; yet she seemed a bit heavier than in the other pictures we’d seen of her.

Stephen Green, a budding filmmaker who was creating our tape library singlehandedly, pulled out a tape of Randa at the pretrial hearing. We still couldn’t tell.

“Push in on the side of her head.”

Jack blew up the courtroom video. She was wearing the same earrings in court that she wore the morning after the murders.

Everything was falling into place. Cathy Randa had come from the airport with Simpson. When Officer Thompson grabbed Simpson and took his shoulder bag, she was able to carry out the garment bag, unmolested.

It looked like we had ourselves a conspiracy.

“Let’s get hold of the cops.” Raf was pumped up. He called the LAPD detectives and Bert Luper was in our office within the hour. Our camera crew videotaped as he and his fellow detectives watched the tape and shook their heads. “That’s the bag we’re looking for, all right.”

It had been four weeks since O.J. Simpson arrived home from Chicago, four long weeks since the day Robert Kardashian took the bag, and five weeks since our show had made its debut.

I wrote a piece for Raf to read. He added the section about the detectives and tracked the story before he went off to makeup so he could talk about the discovery with Alison on the set:

Watching the tape in slow motion rang the bell for senior producer Burt Kearns. He called me up to the editing room. He showed me what he had spotted. It all looked strange – too strange to be just anyone’s bag. Strange enough to find out if the cops investigating the case were interested in this piece of video. Bert Luper and his partner were at the O.J. mansion the morning that Kardashian walked off with the bag. Bert Luper was in Chicago looking for the murder weapon.

What we didn’t know was that he was after this very garment bag. They screened the tape, and it was all too clear what this bag meant to them. That it was the “V” bag they had been looking for. The designer garment bag that left with O.J. for Chicago. A bag they believed contained evidence in the case. A bag that was on the scene in plain view; which turned out to be the perfect place to have it go unnoticed.

“You’ve done it, mate. You’ve made your bones,” Raf said in all seriousness. “I had the Robert Chambers tape and the Amy Fisher tape; now you have this. You’re up there with us now. This was your baptism.”

“So, what do we do next?” I asked. “With the bag story, I mean.”

“We wait,” said Brennan.

“We should have Raf go after Kardashian.”

“No,” Brennan said. “This is going to blow the case wide open. Let’s let it settle and see what everyone does with it first.”

“We don’t even know if Simpson did it,” I said.

“He did it,” Raf said.

“Hey, I admire Kardashian,” I said. “He’s the best friend a man could ever hope to have. Without question, he went over the line for his friend.”

“Now we know why he renewed his legal license,” Raf said. “So he can’t be forced to testify.”

“I feel bad ratting him out.”

Brennan lit a cigarette. “Let’s just see what happens next.”

Kardashian walks away with the bag

What happened next was even more astounding. It seemed everyone else in town tried to take credit for the discovery.

I couldn’t believe it. This wasn’t a story that people were fighting for; it wasn’t in the air – nobody was poring over old videotape looking for clues. This Kardashian bag story came out of Premier Story’s edit room, and if we hadn’t run out of stories to promote, Kardashian would have gotten away with it.

Even worse, this cowardly theft of historical credit actually began in our own building. The KCOP news team was upset we didn’t notify them of our scoop in advance or mention it was their cameraman who shot Kardashian with the bag. The next morning, they sent a reporter to interview us about the discovery, but ran a segment that night that didn’t mention Premier Story at all.

It was small-town, small-time bullshit, but nothing compared to the gall of KCBS. They not only ran the bag story without mentioning Premier Story, but they had Associated Press run a story around the country that gave a KCBS reporter credit for nailing Kardashian with the bag.

One of the more blatant credit-takers was Harvey Levin, a chunky attorney-turned-reporter who played a nasty-tempered Geraldo with an adenoidal voice. Levin went on the air a couple of days later with a scoop of his own.

“Sometimes it pays to go back and study the old footage to see what we missed the first time around,” he said, as if it were his idea. “That’s what we did…”

Levin’s scoop was tape of Marcia Clark leading a search of Simpson’s mansion. According to the “time code”– the hour and minutes displayed on the video — she was snooping around the property an hour before a search warrant was issued. If true, the result could be devastating to the prosecution, barring important evidence and removing Marcia Clark from the Simpson case.

The next day, KCBS made Harvey Levin apologize over and over again. He said he was wrong, claiming the time code on the tape referred not to 9:45 a.m., but 9:45 p.m., the time the tape was fed from a remote truck outside Simpson’s mansion. Being that the time code for 9:45 p.m. would have read 21:45, it’s more likely that KCBS or Levin reached some agreement with prosecutors not to blow their case so early in the game.

Levin looked like a buffoon. He deserved everything he got.

“THE BAG” BECAME Premier Story’s hook. It gave us an identity and it gave Alison a memorable tagline. For weeks after the discovery, she ended each show with the line, “Where’s the bag, Mr. Kardashian?”

We hired a plane to fly over Los Angeles, from Brentwood to Hollywood to downtown L.A., trailing a banner that read “Where’s the bag, Mr. Kardashian?” Producers and reporters, even spectators, began to hound O.J.’s friend by shouting the question whenever he appeared in public.

We wanted to take the story to the next step and find the bag. Brennan got one of his private eye connections to start calling every marina along the local coast to see who rented small boats in the days following the murders.

Brennan was convinced the bag was dumped in the Pacific, and when a porn star told some reporter that her boyfriend Al Cowlings told her the murder weapon “sleeps with the fishes,” his hunch seemed to be borne out.

In the meantime, he had another idea.

“Let’s buy a Louis Vuitton bag that’s exactly like Simpson’s, let’s attach Hertz and American Airlines tags, and let’s dump it in the ocean so it washes up on the shore at Malibu.”

“Should we make it bloody?”

“No, just a bag. Let’s see what happens.”

“You can’t do that,” Raf said.

“Yeah, I guess you’re right.”

PREMIER STORY hit its stride in September, when jury selection began in downtown Los Angeles, and we began to do the show from outside the courthouse. Most of the network reporters and anchormen, and even some of our tabloid competitors, divided their time between a media room upstairs, where no cameras were allowed, and the scaffolded encampment around the corner and across the street that was dubbed “Camp O.J.”

That was typical hands-off network television. We set up in “The Pit,” at the foot of the stairs that led from the sidewalk to the metal detectors at the courthouse door. That was the gantlet Robert Kardashian had to walk each morning as he arrived with a fresh suit for his pal O.J. to wear in court, and this was where Alison planted herself in the middle of the scrum, at his side, walking along asking, “Where’s the bag, Mr. Kardashian?” and other questions about his activities and motivations. For those weeks, and through the trial, Robert Kardashian was considered to be some kind of accomplice with big secrets that led to him to reinstate his law license. With Kardashian the center of attention and of a developing mystery, his name became a household one, under our watch and because of our revelation about the Louis Vuitton garment bag.

PREMIER STORY was canceled after its initial six-month run ended in December. Though it rated higher than A Current Affair and other news shows, corporate parent Chris-Craft decided it was too costly to commit to a year-long syndication run. Besides, over the past six months, television had changed. While the tabloid shows once had stories like O.J. Simpson’s to themselves, now even the “respectable” network news had gone tabloid. O.J. Simpson was news from the Today show in the morning to Jay Leno and Ted Koppel at bedtime. In the spring of 1995, the Premier Story team was running the flailing New York City-based A Current Affair from the L.A. office, It was around that time that detectives came by to collect the Kardashian bag video and I was encouraged to buy a necktie because I might be called to testify.

I wasn’t. Some time later, the Simpson defense team produced a Louis Vuitton bag in court. It was empty, flat, and it seemed to be a different bag. Prosecutor Christopher Darden compared the bag with to one Kardashian made off with in the video. “When you look at the video, you see it was bulging,” he said, then dropped the bag, theatrically. “What was in that bag?” he asked. For his part, Kardashian claimed he’d never looked inside. O.J. Simpson was acquitted on both counts of murder on October 3, 1995.

Did I think the Louis Vuitton bag contained bloody clothes, or better yet, a murder weapon? Probably not. Actually, of course not. But since it was in the possession of O.J. Simpson in Chicago, it could have contained a fiber, a trace of DNA, something that, if he was guilty of the crime, could have connected him incontrovertibly.

Simpson and Kardashian stunned upon hearing the verdict

Robert Kardashian and O.J. Simpson never spoke again after the verdict. Kardashian became a pariah in his former social circles. He lost friends and business because of his support for Simpson. If not for the discovery of his complicity in the “the bag” scandal, he might have remained in the background. Kardashian died of esophageal cancer in 2003. He was 59. The television series Keeping Up with The Kardashians, featuring his ex-wife and their four children, debuted in October 2007. By then, the name was already part of American pop culture.

©2022, 2026 By Burt Kearns

I’d heard that something had happened to Frank Sinatra’s grave. That someone defaced the memorial to the most important musical artist of the 20th century. Attacking Sinatra? This was like taking a wrecking ball to Graceland. Reading about it was one thing. I had to see for myself.

I always make a stop at Sinatra’s final resting place whenever I travel to Palm Springs or any of the other desert cities along the Sonny Bono Memorial Highway. Palm Springs is about a hundred miles east of Los Angeles. The Desert Memorial Park in Cathedral City is about nine miles from the center of Palm Springs, three and a half miles from the former Sinatra compound in Rancho Mirage. It’s a serene oasis of green grass and shade trees amid miles of scrub and desert stretching to the San Jacinto Mountains. From whichever direction you approach, getting there is a journey through a barren purgatory of old show business, driving along or crossing streets named for people like Danny Kaye, Bing Crosby, Fred Waring, Dinah Shore, Barbara Stanwyck, Monty Hall, and, of course, Sinatra himself.

It’s sort of fitting that Sinatra’s grave, and not one of his local watering holes like Melvyn’s or Lord Fletcher’s, is where I pay my respects. Though I’d seen Sinatra perform many times, from Carnegie Hall to the Greek Theatre to the stage monitor at the Jerry Lewis Telethon in Las Vegas (and lived for a time a right and a left-hand turn from his place in Beverly Hills), the only time we actually met, or at least made eye contact, was in a cemetery.

That was in May 1990, at Forest Lawn, over the hill from Hollywood, outside the Hall of Liberty, where Sammy Davis Jr.’s memorial service was coming to a close. Sinatra and his fourth wife Barbara made a discreet exit through a side door. I, invited and on assignment, followed with a camera, and once in the daylight, a few steps behind him and setting up the money shot, called out his name — “Mr. Sinat—” and was tackled by several Forest Lawn security guards in green polyester sport jackets. As they swarmed and pushed my face into the grass, Sinatra turned his head and looked at me, through me, past me, impassive, as he stepped into his limousine. The goons held me down until the limo had rounded the corner and disappeared over the hill. Then they stood up, wiped the dirt off their hands, adjusted their jackets, and left me there.

Twin Palms

Sinatra, with homes in Beverly Hills and New York City, had been a regular in Palm Springs since 1947, when he had architect Stewart Williams design him a midcentury modern four-bedroom house on East Alejo Road in “The Movie Colony,” where other Hollywood stars like Cary Grant and Al Jolson owned homes. That place, Twin Palms, probably had some bad vibes after a while. He’d moved in with first wife, Nancy and their three kids, Frank Jr., Nancy and Tina. Frank and “Big Nancy” announced their separation on Valentine’s Day 1950. He was an unfaithful dog, currently leg-humping Ava Gardner. He married Ava weeks after the divorce in 1951, and Twin Palms was often a battleground for two stars who coupled like nitro and glycerine.

The marriage lasted officially until 1957, but by 1954, Sinatra had pulled up stakes and moved about ten miles south to a compound on Wonder Palms Road in Rancho Mirage. His career kicked up around then and his swinging lifestyle went into overdrive. Big Nancy raised the kids in Beverly Hills, and they all stayed close to their “Poppa.” That close relationship stood the many tests of time, and figures into the story of what happened to Frank Sinatra’s grave.

The helipad

“The Compound,” two-and-a half acres along the 17th fairway of the Tamarisk Golf Club, included a main residence, five guest houses and ultimately a caboose where Sinatra would keep his beloved electric train set. After Ava Gardner had enough of him, this was the place where Sinatra and pals like songwriter Jimmy Van Heusen whored it up, and where he got John F. Kennedy laid while helping get him elected president. After Kennedy’s inauguration, Sinatra screwed a “John F. Kennedy Slept Here” plaque into the wall of the bedroom where JFK had screwed hookers, installed new telephones, accommodations for the Secret Service and a helipad in the middle of the circular driveway, all in expectation that the Compound would be the new Western White House. JFK’s nasty little brother Robert, the new Attorney General, changed that tune. Sinatra’s “connections” – the Mob ones that helped put Kennedy over the top – put him on the blacklist. When JFK visited Palm Springs, he’d stay at Bing Crosby’s place. Crosby was a Republican.

When Sinatra got word, he went ballistic with bipolar rage. As legend has it, He took a sledgehammer, went out to the driveway and pounded that concrete helipad to pebbles. That image offers a nice parallel to what happened to Frank Sinatra’s grave.

The family: Nancy Jr., Frank Jr., Barbara, Frank, Dolly and Tina

The night Sinatra died

When Frank Sinatra died on May 14, 1998, he was eighty-two and had been married for twenty-one years to his fourth wife, the former Barbara Ann Blakely, a showgirl from Missouri who’d been known as Barbara Marx ever since she worked her way up the respectability food chain and snared Zeppo, the “fourth” Marx Brother, as husband number two. Frank Sinatra’s daughters Nancy and Tina didn’t mind back in 1966 when at age fifty, he married twenty-one-year-old Mia Farrow. Mia was close to their age, and fun to be around. Barbara, they hated. Maybe because Barbara wanted to be known as the only Mrs. Sinatra, while their mom Big Nancy was still holding a torch and holding down the fort for her wayward man. It didn’t help when Barbara tried to get her new hubby to adopt her adult son from her first marriage, Bobby Marx (though Zeppo never formally adopted him). “Who adopts a twenty-five-year-old man?” Tina posed the question her 2000 memoir, My Father’s Daughter. “Wouldn’t he be embarrassed? Or did he get a new name each time Barbara snared a husband?” Ouch. All relations between the Sinatra daughters and Barbara were sledgehammered the night Sinatra died. Barbara had him taken to Cedars-Sinai Medical Center—and did not inform Tina or Nancy. Tina would never forget. Never forgive.

My pal A.J. Benza knows the Sinatra family; was close to Nancy. “Nancy is sweet,” he told me. “Tina’s the tough one.”

The neighborhood

To find Frank Sinatra’s grave, you drive through the Desert Memorial gates on DeVall Drive, take a left and roll slowly along the road as it loops around through the middle of the cemetery until you find the small sign that reads “B-8.” All the gravestones are flat, lawn-level “grass markers,” so you wander a bit under the shade trees and see who else is in the neighborhood.

Hey! There’s Jimmy Van Heusen. He’s the one who introduced Sinatra to Palm Springs, who allegedly saved Sinatra’s life in 1953 after the singer slashed a wrist over Ava Gardner. Van Heusen was born Edward Chester Babcock. He took the name of the shirt brand and wrote the music for Sinatra classics like “Come Fly with Me,” “Come Dance with Me,” “Swinging on a Star,” Love and Marriage,” “(Love Is) The Tender Trap,” “High Hopes,” “Only the Lonely,” “My Kind of Town”… the list, as they say, goes on. George Jacobs, Sinatra’s longtime valet, described Van Heusen as “Sinatra’s best friend… whore wrangler… decadent womanizer, an Olympian boozer, a war hero, a daredevil pilot…role model for the swingin’ music man that Frank would become.”

Jacobs wrote in his book, Mr. S: My Life with Frank Sinatra, that “Chester the serial playboy and sex addict had succumbed to monogamy in his late 50s.” His bride, Bobbe, formerly of the singing Brox sisters, is buried beside him. Bobbe’s gravestone says she’s “Forever Singing in the Rain” (Bobbe and her sisters were among the first to introduce the song in 1929). Jimmy is “Swinging on a Star.”

Working up a row toward Sinatra, you’ll find Broadway musical composter Frederick Loewe. Among the songs that Loewe wrote with Alan Jay Lerner was “Thank Heaven for Little Girls,” that creepy number about an underage prostitute that Maurice Chevalier sang in Gigi. Loewe’s maker says “Thank heaven for Frederick Loewe, World Beloved Composer.” He’s not far from two Gabors – not the famous ones, but sister Magda and mama Jolie.

The Sinatra Row

That gets us to the Sinatra pack. Jilly Rizzo, immortalized as “Sinatra’s right-hand man” is six graves to the left of his pal. His marker notes that “He was the best.” According to George Jacobs, Jilly was “a saloon keeper… the owner of a nondescript bar in New York’s theatre district that had one unusual distinction: it served Chinese food, perhaps the worst Chinese food in New York… Mr. S thought it was magnificent, the franks and beans of the mysterious East… Jilly was a short, squat, square guy, but he was tough as nails, with a temper as quick and violent as Mr S’s.” You can see Jilly as a bartender in the Sinatra movie, The Detective. In Rancho Mirage, Jilly lived across the golf course from Sinatra. On May 5, 1992, he was all excited, cooking up Italian sausages for a big party in his backyard to celebrate his 75th birthday the following day. He expected at least eighty people, including the Sinatras, to show. A little after midnight, he got into his white Jaguar to drive to his girlfriend’s house. where he was going to spend the night. Jilly was crossing Gerald Ford Drive when his car was hit head-on by a drunk in a Mercedes. Jilly’s Jag burst into flames. The other driver got out of his car – and ran away on foot while Jilly burned up like an Italian sausage.

Down the other end of the row, three graves to Frank’s right, is Anthony Martin “Marty” Sinatra, his dad the fireman. Marty was seventy-four when his heart stopped in 1969. Alongside Marty is his wife Natalie. Frank’s mother was powerful political figure when he was growing up in Hoboken, New Jersey. Everyone knew her as “Dolly.” Her side hustle, running a backroom abortion service, led to the nickname “Hatpin Dolly.” After Marty died, Frank brought Dolly, kicking and screaming, to the desert, and brought her a big luxurious house next door to the Compound. She wanted to stay in Jersey. George Jacobs observed that “the only thing Dolly hated more than California was Barbara” – especially after her son took Barbara as his fourth wife in 1976.

In January 1977, when Sinatra invited Dolly to Las Vegas to him perform at the Circus Maximus showroom in Caesars Palace, she refused to fly on the same plane with her new daughter-in-law. So Sinatra chartered Dolly a Lear Jet. At showtime on January 6, he was worried because she hadn’t arrived. He opened with “Bad, Bad Leroy Brown” and found out after the show that the jet carrying Dolly and three others had, shortly after takeoff in Palm Springs, smashed into a mountain. She was eighty.

Frank’s Uncle Vinnie

Between Dolly’s grave and Frank lies Vincent Mazzola. Vincent who? Vincent was Frank’s uncle, a World War I veteran who’d lived with the Sinatras since the 1920s in Hoboken. Vincent was, how do you say in Italian? Citrullo. A simpleton. Not all there in the head. He died in 1973, seventy-nine, and he sleeps between Dolly and Frank, probably the way the way he did in the small flat in Hoboken.

There they were. That’s life. One big happy family, with grave markers reflecting a common theme. Marty’s read ‘BELOVED HUSBAND AND FATHER,” Dolly was “BELOVED WIFE, MOTHER, GRANDMOTHER AND GREAT GRANDMOTHER.” Frank was “BELOVED HUSBAND AND FATHER,” under the headline, “THE BEST IS YET TO COME.”

For years, that was the line-up when I’d show up, stand over Sinatra’s grave and spend a few minutes reflecting on the approaching September of my own years. Some people left Jack Daniels bottles, pennies, or dimes on the marker – Frank’s daughter Tina says she slipped ten dimes into his pocket when he was in the coffin. Sinatra always kept ten dimes in his pocket in case he needed change for a payphone. That went back to 1963, when Frank Jr. was kidnapped and Sinatra relied on payphones to contact the abductors. Tina said she also slipped something else into her dead father’s pocket: a note.

Barbara Sinatra showed up some years after I began to visit Frank Sinatra’s grave. She died in 2017. She was ninety— impressive, but Big Nancy hung in and survived her by almost a year. She died at 101. Barbara, buried to the right of Frank, joined the family tradition, listed on her marker as “BELOVED WIFE, MOTHER & GRANDMOTHER.” She also gave herself a headline above her name – and not “Gold Digger” or “Former Showgirl.” Frank may have been “The Voice,” but Barbara was “A VOICE FOR CHILDREN.” Well, certainly not Frank’s children.

“The Mystery of Frank Sinatra’s Grave”

Then came COVID. I hadn’t visited Palm Springs or Desert Memorial Park in about a year when I’d heard the rumor that something had happened to Frank Sinatra’s grave. What had happened was suddenly “The Mystery of Frank Sinatra’s Grave.” At least that was the headline almost exactly a year ago, when the story was published in Palm Springs Life. While well-placed in one of the best of the city-dedicated magazines, David Lansing’s investigative piece would have fit comfortably in Vanity Fair or GQ, and deserved to be picked up nationally. Lansing wrote that he, too, would make it a point to stop by Sinatra’s grave — only, being a resident of Palm Springs, he’d visit on his way out of town. It was in January 2001 that he saw that the familiar grave marker, the one that read “The Best Is Yet to Come,” had been replaced. Now, it read simply, “Francis Albert Sinatra, 1915-1998,” and at the center: “Sleep Warm, Poppa.” Curious, as one would be, Lansing phoned the cemetery district manager to ask why the marker had been changed, and who changed it. The manager told him she couldn’t divulge any details. “I don’t want to get in the middle of what happened,” she said, and suggested he talk to daughters Nancy and Tina Sinatra.

When Lansing followed up with a Freedom of Information request with the Cathedral City Police Department, the police provided a report that was redacted. All he wanted to find out was who changed Frank Sinatra’s gravestone, who authorized it, and when. Tina and Nancy Sinatra ignored his requests for comment. Their kids wouldn’t comment, either. When Palm Springs Life sent an official request for the public records, the cemetery district manager replied that the information was on a need-to-know basis, and they didn’t need to know.

Lansing did his research, and found the backstory of the bad blood between Barbara and Sinatra’s daughters. And then came that classic journalistic twist: the Deep Throat tipster. Lansing wrote that he received “a somewhat cryptic note from someone who has been connected to the Sinatra family for over 45 years and knows, literally, where all the bodies are buried.” The source told him that the defining incident took place over the Thanksgiving weekend 2020. In the dead of night during the holiday when families gather and give thanks, someone hopped the wall of Desert Memorial Park, found Frank Sinatra’s headstone and attacked it, chipping away at the granite, maybe with a hammer and chisel. Banging and breaking it up the way Sinatra had destroyed the helipad sixty years earlier, the perpetrator left the grass marker defaced and destroyed. But not all of it. Where it had said “Beloved husband and father,” the word “husband” had been obliterated. The flat headstone had to be replaced. That’s the story. No names. No finger-pointing. That’s all you need to know.

Frank Sinatra’s new headstone was simple. Now, as he had in life, Frank Sinatra stood out from, yet at the center of the family. Simple: name, dates, and “Sleep Warm, Poppa.” Sinatra would be remembered not as a husband and father, but simply a father. Sleep warm, Poppa. The note that Tina Sinatra had placed in her father’s casket read: “Sleep warm, Poppa – look for me.”

So there it was. Standing over Sinatra’s grave, his new grave, a few weeks ago, taking photos to replace the old ones, regarding the new flat headstone, it came to me that “Sleep Warm, Poppa” just might be a better epitaph than “The Best Is Yet to Come.” What best? One reason Sinatra’s voice and influence resonates beyond his generation and into another century is that he lived for the day. He played hard, he stayed up late. He didn’t hold back in anticipation of some best-is-yet-to-come afterlife. He had little faith in “the hereafter.” Sinatra knew it. Jimmy Van Heusen and Sammy Davis Jr. knew it. The best is now. Sleep when you’re dead. So sleep warm, pally.

© 2019, 2026 by Jeff Abraham and Burt Kearns

Of all the stories about performers who died instage, one of the most told is that of dialect comedian Harry Einstein, known for his pseudo-Greek character Nick Parkyakarkus (as in “Park yer carcass! Sit down!”). Parky, as he was called by fans and friends alike, was the father of future comedians Bob Einstein and Albert Brooks (née Albert Einstein—not necessary to explain why he changed his name to “Brooks.”). In the 1930s and ’40s, he appeared in films and on the Eddie Cantor and Al Jolson radio shows; for three seasons, he had his own radio program, Meet Me at Parky’s, in which Parkyakarkus was running a lunch counter.

In 1958, at fifty-four, Harry “Parky” Einstein was in poor health with heart and back problems, living off investments, and, with the exception of a role on the television anthology series Playhouse 90, limiting his appearances to dinners and roasts hosted by the Friars Club, the private show business club whose membership boasted top comedians and entertainers of the day.

A gala Friars Club event took place on Sunday night, November 23, 1958. Twelve hundred people packed into the International Ballroom of the Beverly Hilton hotel, paying up to $200 a plate to attend a testimonial dinner honoring Hollywood comedy power couple Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz. Art Linkletter was master of ceremonies. Along with Parky, the featured stars included Dean Martin, George Burns, Danny Thomas, George Murphy, Ed Wynn, and Milton Berle.

Parky was the only comic on the dais who didn’t have a regular gig on the tube or in clubs, and, Linkletter recalled, “on this particular night he was making his big comeback.” When it was his turn at the podium, Parky went into a routine that poked fun at the exclusivity of the Friars Club.

Audio from the big night reveals uproarious laughter from the crowd: “These two people we are honoring tonight—Danny Arnaz and Lucille Bowles—have met every requirement of our screening committee. But you must not think that the Friars Club is an easy club to get into. Quite to the contrary, it is most difficult. Before a prospective candidate is even issued an application he must first satisfy us, beyond any question of a doubt, that he is either a resident”—that gets thelaughs rolling—“or a nonresident of the state of California.” A huge wave of laughter shakes the room. “He then must be proposed by and then vouched for by at least two men . . . who are listed in the phone book.” A torrent of laughter. The Friars Club membership, he says, includes “many prominent businessmen, several fine judges, and quite a few defendants.”

Years later, Linkletter, Berle, and Friars entertainment chairman Barry Mirkin relived the evening for the Friars tribute documentary Let Me In, I Hear Laughter. “He was,” Art Linkletter recalled, “up there knocking them dead.”

“It was the most hilarious routine I have . . . ever stolen—ever heard,” said Berle. “And he actually was the hit of the show.”

“He did a monologue that lasted ten minutes [that] under normal circumstances might have lasted six minutes,” Mirkin, who’d opened the show with the Friars song “Here’s to the Friars,” remembered. “But the laughs were so great, so impossible to believe, that as a result it just stretched.”

Parky and Milton Berle at the Friars Club testimonial

“He got a standing ovation,” Berle recalled. “While he was standing up and bowing, he said, ‘Thank you, thank you,’ and they were cheering.”

As Parky made his way back to his seat, Linkletter asked the room, “How come anyone as funny as that isn’t on the air?”

Parky settled back next to Berle and said, “Yeah, how come?”

“And then suddenly he put his head over on Milton Berle’s lap and shut his eyes and apparently slumped down,” Linkletter said. “And everybody stopped laughing and applauding because he had apparently fainted—or worse.”

Parky’s wife, the actress Thelma Leeds, was sitting in the audience with Ed Wynn to her right. Moments earlier, she’d bragged to him that Parky wrote all his own material. Now, while all around her looked confused, she knew immediately what was wrong with her husband. She bolted onto the dais and reached into his pocket for the pillbox. She opened it andplucked out a nitroglycerin tablet that would increase blood flow through his coronary arteries. But when she tried to put the pill in his mouth and under his tongue, she couldn’t. His teeth were clenched tight.

Meanwhile, Wynn was shouting advice in his giggly voice: “Put his head down, put his head down!”

Berle screamed shrilly, “Is there a doctor in the house?”

Audience members, caught up in the excitement, called by name the doctors they knew would be in the room. Friars roasts and banquets were traditionally benefits for hospitals (this one benefitted a Burmese leper colony), so there was no shortage. Five top specialists jumped from their seats.

Linkletter recalled, “I said, ‘Ladies and gentlemen, we have a little medical accident here for the moment. We wonder if anyone happens to have any nitroglycerin—nitro tablets.’ Well, the surprise of my life, big producers, writers, stars came forward with vials. Apparently half the people in the room had heart problems.”

“Everybody was frozen in the room,” Mirkin added. “The drama is unbelievable because they knew what was happening. And I tried to get Lucy to unleash her fingers from the table to come back, and I couldn’t get her. I couldn’t move her hands.”

Amid the ruckus, Berle waved to singer Tony Martin. “‘Get up, stall, do something to get their mind off it. Do something—sing a song, sing a song!’ He says, ‘All right.’ Tony Martin, quickly, it wasn’t his fault—improv, ad lib—he got up and sang . . . ‘There’s No Tomorrow.’”

Said Linkletter: “There were probably a couple of sympathetic heart attacks when ‘There’s No Tomorrow’ rang out.”

Berle, George Burns, and others carried Parky’s carcass backstage.

Within seconds, one of the doctors had sterilized a pocketknife, sliced open Parky’s chest and was holding his heart in his hand, massaging it.

Another doctor yanked the cord from an electric lamp and placed the live ends against the heart muscle like a MacGyver defibrillator, shocking it into beating again.

George Burns speaks with reporters while Parky is operated on behind the doble doors at right

One of the doctors said that Parky had probably died on the dais, but the hand massage brought him back to life. The five doctors took turns massaging—and got a faint beat going from the right side of the heart. The left side only fluttered. Firemen and police arrived with plasma and a pulmotor—a device to inflate the lungs and possibly get him breathing again.

As they worked behind the curtain, the show went on—for a while. The Associated Press reported that “the off-key singing of George Burns and the audience’s laughter could be heard over the pulsations of the pulmotor.” There were several announcements that Parky would be fine, but everyone on the dais knew better. When it was his turn to address the crowd, Desi Arnaz was ashen-faced and barely audible. “This is one of the moments that Lucy and I have waited a lifetime for, but it’s meaningless. They say the show must go on. But why must it? Let’s close the show now by praying for this wonderful man backstage who made a world laugh.” He took the award that Linkletter had presented him and crammed it in his pocket.

Lucy stepped to the microphone and through her tears said, “I can say nothing.”

As the proceedings were wrapped, they cued Sammy Davis Jr. for one last number. He decided not to perform.

“And then everybody just sat there,” Mirkin said. “A few people left, but there were a thousand people in the room. Everybody wanted to know what the outcome was. Parky’s wife went up to the dais and she sat at the very end and when she saw the five doctors leave with their sleeves rolled up, very glum, she knew. And, oh God, she let out a screech.”

Dr. Alfred Goldman of City of Hope hospital pronounced Parkyakarkus dead at 1:10 am, about eighty minutes after he was stricken.

When it was over, Ed Wynn spoke to a reporter. “This is ample proof that the old saying ‘The show must go on’ is a lot of baloney,” he said. “The show doesn’t have to go on, and it does not, as you saw tonight.”

Lucille Ball, Desi Arnaz, and George Murphy at Harry Einstein’s funeral

Bob Einstein & Albert Brooks

Postscript

Harry Einstein and Thelma Leeds had three sons: Clifford, Bob, and Albert. Charles Einstein was Parky’s son with his first wife Lillian Anshen. Charles]was thirty-two when his father died. At the funeral, George Jessel who gave the eulogy asked, if there was anything he could do. “Yes, ten minutes,” Charles quipped. He was well aware that comedians turned funerals into roasts.

His half-brother Bob Einstein, who had just turned sixteen, was not. He was appalled that his father’s friends used his memorial service to try out their routines. He said it turned him off comedy for years.

Bob Einstein went on to become well-known as a comic actor, especially as the inept daredevil Super Dave Osborne and Marty Funkhauser in the television series, Curb Your Enthusiasm. He became particularly incensed when anyone suggested he take solace in knowing that his father “died doing what he loved.” More than once, he told the story of what he said when someone said just that.

Bob replied, “’My dad was fifty-four! What does your mother do?”

“She’s a housewife.”

“Okay, let’s go over to her house while she’s making eggs for breakfast and I’ll hit her over the head with a frying pan. At least she’ll have died doing what she loved.’”

Cliff Einstein, a future actor and advertising executive, was nineteen when his father died. He was at the Hilton to comfort his mother while the futile lifesaving efforts continued.

The youngest son, Albert, was eleven. “I remember helping him with his monologue the night before,” Brooks told a New York Times reporter many years later. “Anyway, he went to the banquet and when he got up, he was as funny as you could be, and they just roared. I wasn’t there, but we have a recording of it. At the Friars banquet, they never really laughed, they just banged the table, so you hear the silverware jumping up and down. And he finished to this thunderous applause and went back to the dais. And I think Art Linkletter was the host, and he said, ‘Boy Parky, do you need to be on the air again.’ And my father put his head down on the table. And that was it.

“The interesting thing to me was that he finished. He could have died in the middle. He could have done it on the way over there. But he didn’t. He finished. And he was as good as he’d ever been in his life.”

**

Albert also dealt with his father’s passing through his movies. In the 1991 comedy Defending Your Life, Brooks’s recently deceased character, Daniel Miller, finds himself in an afterlife nightclub, watching a terrible comedian. “How’d you die?” the comic asks him; Albert replies, “Onstage, like you.” Later, Meryl Streep’s character invites Daniel to leave with her. “I can’t,” he says, gesturing toward the stage. “That’s my father.”

Harry Einstein’s last TV appearance was in "No Time at All,” the twenty-third episode of the second season of Playhouse 90, broadcast on CBS television on February 13, 1958. David Swift and Charles Einstein wrote the teleplay, an adaptation of Charles Einstein's 1957 novel, No Time at All.

**

Adapted from The Show Wont’ Go On: The Most Shocking, Bizarre, and Historic Deaths of Performers Onstage, by Jeff Abraham and Burt Kearns, published by Chicago Review Press, on sale at a reduced price on Amazon.com

© 2018, 2026 By Burt Kearns & Jeff Abraham

In 1959, the flamboyant pianist and entertainer Wladziu Valentino Liberace sued The Daily Mirror, a London tabloid, for insinuating that he was a homosexual. He took the action after a Mirror columnist who called himself “Cassandra” described him as “a deadly, winking, sniggering, snuggling, chromium-plated, scent-impregnated, luminous, quivering, giggling, fruit-flavoured, mincing, ice-covered heap of mother love.” The lawsuit focused on the word “fruit,” which at the time was a term used to describe gay men.

Throughout his career, Liberace had denied he was gay. So, two years after he’d taken Confidential magazine to court over an article titled, “Why Liberace’s Theme Song Should be ‘Mad About the Boy,’” he again sued for libel. When he testified in London, Liberace committed perjury, denying that he was gay or had ever taken part in any homosexual activity. He won the case.

That same year, Zeki Müren starred in Broken Disc, his fifth motion picture. He sang to and romanced the sexy actress Belgin Durok, but there were no illusions that their romance would extend off screen. Müren and Liberace had both risen to fame in the 1950s, and achieved success in concert and films, on television and records, with a mixture of pop music, delicate handling of the classics and charming public personas. Both were showmen whose stage acts in the decades to follow would have stunning similarities.

Zeki Müren, however, never hid the fact that he was gay. Luminous, quivering, giggling, fruit-flavoured, mincing and loved by his mother, he was accepted by his fans and countrymen for who he was. He wound up having such an impact on his audience, nation and culture that after his death, he wasn’t compared to Liberace, but to someone even more barrier-breaking.

They call Zeki Müren “The David Bowie of Turkey.”

HIGH HEELS & SHORT SKIRTS

Zeki Müren was more than a performer, singer and actor. He also wrote poetry, composed more than 300 songs, painted, and designed textiles and costumes. He was born in Bursa, a large city in western Turkey, in 1931. He worked in summer theater as a boy and, in his teens, moved to Istanbul to pursue a singing career. He was 20 when he got a job singing on Turkish Radio. By then, he knew every standard and classical Turkish ballad, and soon became a fixture in every Turkish home. The joke was that when people bought radios, they asked if the radios played Zeki Müren.

Three years before Elvis had a screen test, Zeki Müren starred in his first motion picture (he would go on to make eighteen movies, most of them about a singer looking for love and fame, and breaking into song along the way). In those days, he had a fluffy pompadour and a look that seemed to deliberately channel Sal Mineo. He even had a publicity photo in which he posed with a wax figure of James Dean, Mineo’s costar in Rebel Without A Cause.

Zeki with James Dean statue.

\When he wasn’t making movies, he was packing them in to the gazinos and nightclubs of Istanbul. Decades before The Rolling Stones’ Bridges to Babylon tour, he’d designed a T-shaped stage with a catwalk that allowed him to sashay out and mingle with the audience. In those early days, Müren performed wearing a tuxedo or suit. At home, he preferred lots of makeup, high heels and short skirts.

Meanwhile, back in the States, Liberace was living with his mother and recording songs like “A Pretty Girl Is Like A Melody.”

“GOOD TURKISH”

In 1965, Zeki Müren starred in a Turkish version of Robert Anderson’s play, Tea & Sympathy. He portrayed a young man accused of being gay. It was the closest Müren ever came to a public declaration of his own sexuality, but with his coiffed hair, heavy makeup, feminine attire and public displays with male companions, there was no need to spell it out.

What does seem unusual is that Turkey, the conservative, predominantly Muslim country with a history of violence and brutality, would not only accept but celebrate a performer like Zeki Müren. Yet, when it comes to sexual freedom, the country has proven to be more liberal than supposedly enlightened Western nations. The Ottoman Empire decriminalized homosexuality in 1858. Homosexual activity was a criminal offense in the United Kingdom until 1967. It wasn’t until 2003 that the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that sodomy laws were unconstitutional.

He once performed for top government and military officials in high heels, sparkly tights and miniskirt, with peacock feathers sprouting from his ass. By then, he was known as “The Pasha of Turkish Music.”

There were more specific reasons why Zeki Müren became part of the Turkish fabric. He was a standard bearer of Turkish tradition, known to sing Ottoman classical music with perfect enunciation of the Turkish language. Parents played his records to teach their kids “good Turkish.” This also won him an older, conservative audience. Long before Teddy Pendergrass hit on the idea, he performed special afternoon shows “for women only” — in this case, conservative housewives.

Zek’s afternoon show for the wives.

There’s a colorful, cinematic anecdote that’s part of the Zeki Müren legend, about the time a mob of angry men showed up at the stage door, armed with sticks, ready to lynch Müren before he could go onstage. As the story goes, Müren didn’t run. He didn’t hide. He confronted the mob and invited them inside.

“Just have a listen to my songs,” he said. “If you still want to beat me up, you can.”

They accepted the invitation. They stayed for the show. They put away the sticks.

ZEKI, FRANK, SAMMY & MICK

Short in stature, but physically strong and long on confidence in what he could do, Müren proclaimed in the early 1960s that he wanted to teach Frank Sinatra how to sing. What few people know is that in November 1963, he traveled to Las Vegas to do just that. A November 20th memo from an executive at the Sands Hotel & Casino states:

“Mr. Muren is top entertainer from Turkey and is considered the Frank Sinatra – Dean Martin of Turkey. Other two men are special representatives of the Turkish government who are accompanying Mr. M. Please give these people red carpet treatment.”

That red carpet treatment included transportation to and from the airport, a petite suite plus one room nearby, a basket of fruit in each room and a bottle of JB Scotch in Mr. M.’s mini-suite, and comped ringside tables for the dinner show in the Copa Room and the midnight show at the Stardust. There was also a request that Sands publicist Al Freeman introduce Zeki Müren to Sammy Davis, Jr.

Zeki Müren and his entourage were set to arrive on November 21. Müren did not ask to meet Liberace. Liberace’s star was in decline at the time and he was working his way back on the supper club circuit. Liberace and his candelabras were in Pittsburgh on November 22 when he collapsed from kidney failure, apparently from inhaling dry cleaning fumes from all the freshly-cleaned costumes hanging in his dressing room. Liberace later said he was saved from death only because someone woke him up to tell him that President Kennedy had been shot in Dallas.

The Sinatra singing lesson never took place. Müren did get to tutor Mick Jagger in 1977 when Jagger spent a few days in the resort city of Bodrum, visiting “Turkish Prince” Ahmet Ertugen, boss of Atlantic Records (home to the Rolling Stones’ label). Müren sang his song “Madem derdimi sordun, dinlemeye mecbursun” (“If you don’t mind, you have to listen”) at a dinner party and he and Jagger spent time together. No one recorded what transpired between the two superstars, but we can look at what followed. The Stones’ first album recorded after Jagger’s Bodrum jaunt was Some Girls. It went to Number One and was regarded as a return to form for the band, after admittedly sucking through most of the 1970s.

BUTTERFLY

Long before Prince flirted with gender fluidity, Zeki Müren was designing his own stage costumes and giving them names like Prince of Outer Space and Purple Nights. Through the late 1960s and into the 1970s, the costumes became more and more extreme, with spangly jackets, sequined hot pants and sparkling capes. In 1970, he realized he was stepping into the unknown when he walked onstage in a costume he named Veil of Fortune: a shiny cape accompanying a glittery micro-minidress. He kept a pair of trousers backstage, in case he upset the audience. When he made his entrance, they cheered, men and women alike.

Throughout the 1970s, Müren was compared to Liberace, as the pianist had a renaissance in Las Vegas with his own glittering and winking outfits. Liberace would get laughs in star-spangled hot pants and high-heeled sneakers. Zeki Müren was Liberace in drag. He wore platform shoes higher than Elton John’s; space-age queen outfits more daring than David Bowie’s, heavier femme makeup than flash-in-the-pants Jobriath. He once performed for top government and military officials in high heels, sparkly tights and miniskirt, with peacock feathers sprouting from his ass. By then, he was known as “The Pasha of Turkish Music.” “Pasha” is the title of a high-ranking Turkish military officer. It’s also a type of butterfly.

In the 1980s, there was no stopping The Pasha. Until he stopped.

THE DEATH OF ZEKI MÜREN

Months before Liberace died in February 1987 (still proclaiming his heterosexuality and insisting he was not suffering from AIDS but anemia brought on by a watermelon diet), Müren retired to Bodrum. His health had deteriorated as well, but rather than wasting away, he had ballooned in weight. He didn’t feel beautiful. Turkey’s “Sun of Music” didn’t want his public to see him that way.

For most of the next decade, Müren remained in seclusion by the sea, at home with his male partner. He was coaxed into more than a few appearances and more albums were released, but for many, he was fading into the Turkish history he’d help preserve.

Ten years had passed when Müren was convinced to travel to the city of Iszmir, to make an appearance on Turkish television. In light of his failing health, the trip would have been out of question, if not for the nature of the appearance. This live broadcast on the TRT network was a tribute to Zeki Müren. He’d be presented with a very special award: the microphone he used in his first appearance on TRT more than forty years earlier.

The show went live on September 24, 1996. When Müren appeared on the soundstage, he was obviously unsteady and overweight. He looked like someone’s Turkish grandmother, but also looked every inch the star. His heavy makeup and pompadour bouffant were painted and sprayed to perfection. His somewhat conservative black suit shined, decked with silver piping and glittering PVC sleeve panels running from his shoulders to his cuffs.

For most of the show, Zeki Müren perched on a throne-like chair behind a table covered with a spray of autumn flowers. Just off-camera, a bank of still photographers, as many as two dozen, snapped away for the momentous occasion.

When it came time for Müren to rise from the throne and accept his award, he leaned on the arm of the beautiful young hostess, then relied on her to help him make the few steps back to his chair where, on live television, he suffered a heart attack.

It proved to be fatal.

Zeki Müren was 64. After his death on live television, it was revealed that he’d left his entire fortune to funds for education and disadvantaged soldiers. Tens of thousands of people attended his state funeral. It was the largest outpouring of grief that Turkey had seen in years. The comparisons to his contemporary Liberace were forgotten. Zeki Müren was compared to Prince and Freddie Mercury, and given the title of “Turkey’s David Bowie.”

The statue of Zki Muren outside his home in Bodrum

THE AFTERLIFE OF ZEKI MÜREN

The Liberace Museum, a display of his costumes, pianos and other memorabilia, tucked in a strip mall about two and half miles from the Las Vegas Strip, closed in 2010. The place was a victim of poor attendance and a failure to rebrand the closeted star for a new generation as “The King of Bling.” There’s been talk of displaying the collection in downtown Vegas, but that hasn’t happened yet. Most Americans have forgotten Liberace, or only know him from the grotesque HBO movie in which he was portrayed by Michael Douglas.

Thirty years after his death, Zeki Müren is a mythical hero in Turkey and a symbol of the LGBT movement. The Zeki Müren Art Museum is one of the most popular attractions in Bodrum. His grave in Bursa is protected by an iron fence because too many visitors were scooping up the soil as souvenirs. A recent exhibition in Istanbul, “Here I am, Zeki Müren,” was visited by an extraordinary 50,000 people in its first two months. The exhibit included thousands of Müren’s photos, diaries, letters, poems, paintings, films and costumes, and in one room, letters from his mother, addressed to “my one and only, darling son.”

One letter reads, “You are the world’s sweetest fruit.”

**

BURT KEARNS & JEFF ABRAHAM wrote the book, The Show Won’t Go On: The Most Shocking, Bizarre, and Historic Deaths of Performers Onstage, published by Chicago Review Press, and available at a reduced price at Amazon.com.

© 2022, 2026 By Burt Kearns

The love triangle involving young actress Barbara Payton, debonair movie star Franchot Tone, and B-movie scuffler Tom Neal was a real-life film noir, a scarlet stain spreading across the Golden Age of black-and-white Hollywood. As the beautiful blonde played off the two men against each other, flirting with marriage to both, she drove the pair to a violent confrontation outside her Hollywood home. At one thirty a.m. on September 14, 1951, the younger, stronger Neal, a former Golden Gloves boxer, viciously beat Tone to a bloody pulp.

As described in Part I, “…According to Payton and other witnesses, Franchot Tone never raised a fist. Once the two men walked out of the house, Tom Neal slugged the older man in the face with such force that Tone was lifted off his feet, flew ten feet into the air and landed on his back on the steps. Once Tone was down, the ex-pug who’d won forty-three of forty-six amateur fights continued to punch the older man in the head. When Barbara Payton ran out to stop him, Neal punched her in the face, blackening her eye, before tossing her into the bushes.”

For all three, the troubles were only beginning…

Franchot Tone, who appeared to be unconscious, had received a broken nose, fractured cheek, and a brain concussion. He was in and out of a coma for ten days. At times it was tough-and-go, and there was concern that he might not survive. Neal suffered scraped knuckles.

The Payton-Neal wedding was off. And then suddenly, the Payton-Tone wedding to Franchot Tone was back on. Outside California Hospital on September 17, wearing sunglasses to hide her blackened eye, Payton told reporters that Tone had proposed from his bed.

Seven months

“I have reconsidered this matter thoroughly. I feel that the best interests of my family, my friends and my profession dictate my discontinuing any prosecution of my application for a complaint resulting from this regrettable occurrence.” Also wearing sunglasses, Franchot Tone signed that statement in the District Attorney’s office on September 27, even though he’d previously told the D.A. that he wanted to file a felony assault complaint against Tom Neal. Ten days in the hospital, and Barbara Payton, helped change his mind. “I felt very strongly about her, too,” he told reporters. “She has been under the spotlight of an antagonistic press. I feel she has been treated very unfairly.”

Then Tone boarded the United Airlines jet at Los Angeles International Airport and flew off toward Minnesota, where he and Barbara Payton were married on September 28. Tone still had a bloodshot eye and swollen lips when the couple exchanged vows at the home of one of Payton’s aunts in Cloquet.

Tom Neal, grateful that Tone had decided to not press charges against him, said, “I wish them every happiness. As far as my plans are concerned, marriage is the farthest thing from my mind.”

The marriage lasted about seven months. It was clear that Barbara Payton had not gotten her fill of Tom Neal and that old Franchot Tone wasn’t enough man for her appetites. Tone got a divorce on May 19, 1952. What was expected to be a juicy, sizzling trial had, by newspaper accounts, “fizzled,” as both parties agreed to end things quietly, on the grounds that she often arrived home too late to cook dinner, and told him, “I want to be free to move when and where I want to.” Tone withdrew the original divorce complaint in which Tom Neal was again part of a love and sex triangle. Payton withdrew her reply that Neal was staying at her house only to protect her from Tone.

While Franchot Tone continued to work in movies, television and onstage, the scandal effectively ended Payton’s and Neal’s Hollywood careers. The pair attempted to cash in on the sordid publicity by going on the road in 1953 with a stage version of The Postman Always Rings Twice, James Cain’s pulp novel and later film noir about the murderous affair between the wife of a roadside tavern owner and a drifter. (Harold V. Cohen of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette wrote that the play lacked the passion and words of the book, the only compensation coming “late in the third act when Miss Payton climbs into a one-piece bathing suit and Mr. Neal into swimming trunks for a brief beach scene.”) They’d announced plans to marry, but split that same year.

The landscaper and the streetwalker

Tom Neal moved on. Hollywood opportunities having dried up, he tried Chicago and played in some television soap operas, before washing up in the desert in Palm Springs. He took a job as night manager at restaurant, saved up money to buy a lawnmower and gardening tools, and started a landscaping business in the heavily-landscaped city. He began studying Christian Science, found God, married a local girl, and became father to a son.

Neal’s second wife died of cancer in 1958. Four years later, he married Gail Evatt, a twenty-five-year-old brunette, in Las Vegas. After a brief honeymoon at the Tropicana Hotel and Casino, the couple returned to Palm Springs, where Neal was happy to push lawn mowers and clip shrubbery for the wealthy residents.

No such luck for Barbara Payton. She lost custody of her nine-year-old son in 1956 after allegedly exposing him to “profane language, immoral conduct, notoriety, unwholesome activities and no moral education,” and for a time was supposedly a well-paid, desirable escort. Her life continued on a roll downhill, picking up detritus and toxins and arrests for passing bad checks along the way. By the late 1950s, she was an alcohol- and drug-addicted prostitute in Hollywood, working the streets not far from the studios where she once starred.

Future writer and poet Robert Polito met Payton in 1962. He was a kid, helping out his dad, a bartender at Ye Coach & Horses, a dark, Hollywood dive version of British pub at 7617 Sunset Boulevard, midway between Fairfax and LaBrea in Hollywood. She was thirty-four, then a barfly who “oozed alcohol,” he wrote, “even before she ordered a drink.

“Her eyebrows didn’t match her brassy hair; her face displayed a perpetual sunburn, a map of veins by her nose. Her feet swelled, and she carried an old man’s pot belly that sloshed faintly when she moved. Her gowns and dresses looked more like antique costumes than clothes, creased and spotted. She must have weighed 200 pounds.”

She still had something to sell. On February 7, 1963, Payton approached a man at the bar and invited him back to her apartment, a short walk down Sunset Boulevard. She promised him sex – if he’d pay her forty dollars. The prospective john was a police officer named J.L. Lamonica. He arrested Barbara Payton on a prostitution charge. The former temptress and forgotten actress was in the headlines again.

Barbara Payton at police station after her arrest

When Payton failed to appear for trial in Judge Mario Clinco’s courtroom on March 9, her five hundred dollars bond was forfeited, and the judge issued a warrant for her arrest. The case finally came to trial in June, but was postponed when prosecutors told the judge their witness was in New York. When the case resumed on June 29, Officer Lamonica was again no-show. This time, the excuse was illness. Judge Clinco had heard enough. He dismissed the charges.

This could have been a wake-up call for Barbara Payton. That summer she actually landed another movie role – her first since 1955. It was a bit part in 4 for Texas, a comedy Western starring Frank Sinatra and Dean Martin. Ursula Andress and Anita Ekberg had the sexy blonde roles. Payton’s part was uncredited and would be her last.

The bathroom floor

Barbara Payton’s slide continued through the summer. On Monday night, September 23, she was arrested in her apartment, again on suspicion of prostitution. A vice cop said she’d made a date with him, for money. A thirty-four-year-old man named Russell Avist was in the apartment. He gave his occupation as “bootblack.” He shined shoes at Cosmo Sardo’s high-end barber shop on North Crescent Heights Boulevard near the corner of the Sunset Strip, but his principal occupation was pimp for Barbara Payton. Avist was booked on suspicion of “residing in a house of prostitution.” Payton was booked and released on two hundred and seventy-six dollars bail.

Barbara Payton didn’t arrive in Municipal Court to answer the charge on Wednesday. Judge Harold C. Shepherd ordered her bail forfeited once more and issued another bench warrant for her arrest. Bail was reset at five hundred and fifty dollars. Payton was picked up and spent the next twenty-two days in lockup before the case returned to court on October 17.

Judge Bernard S. Selber took all of five minutes to find Barbara Payton guilty of prostitution. He fined her a hundred and fifty dollars and placed her on fourteen months’ probation. Avist pleaded guilty to living in a house of prostitution. He told the court he’d been living with Payton for two years. He got ninety days.

The health of Barbara Payton, the actress described by one journo as “the softly-rounded point of a love triangle involving actors Franchot Tone and Tom Neal,” continued to worsen through ensuing years of more arrests, deeper addiction, and further degradation as a street prostitute. In February 1967, after her release from a hospital in Los Angeles, she moved in with her alcoholic parents at 1901 Titus Street in San Diego. Her parents recalled that Barbara was ill the first week of May. On May 8, they found her on the floor of their bathroom, dead. It took two days for detectives investigating the death to realize who she was. The cause was heart and liver failure. Barbara Payton was thirty-nine.

The news article about her death appeared on page one of the Los Angeles Times, alongside a report on a UCLA psychiatrist who challenged the notion that social drinking is harmless, and even possibly good for people, if done in moderation.

Shot behind the right ear

Early on the morning of Friday, April 2, 1965, attorney James Cantillon called the Palm Springs Police Department and asked that officers meet him and his client, Tom Neal, at an intersection about a block from Neal’s home at 2481 Cardillo Road. Police arrived in the modest Chino Canyon neighborhood to find the mouthpiece and Neal, who, according to the Los Angeles Times, was “wearing brown slacks and white sports shirt, with a topcoat draped over his shoulders.” Lawyer and client led the cops to the Neal house, where they encountered petite, brunette Gail Neal stretched out on an oversized red couch. She was wearing green pedal pushers and a green sweater, and was covered partially with a bed spread. A section of her head was blown off. Shot behind the right ear with a .45-caliber bullet, Gail Neal was dead. A spent cartridge was on the floor, four feet away. The murder weapon was nowhere to be found. There were no signs of a struggle.

The twenty-nine-year-old woman had been shot some time around midnight, after which Tom Neal had called attorney Cantillon, who drove in from Beverly Hills and arranged for Neal’s surrender.

Police said there were indications that the Neals had not been getting along. Gail Neal had been working the past few months as a hostess at the Palm Springs Tennis Club and living alone in the small ranch house while her husband was on an extended trip to Chicago. In fact, there were indications that the couple had been planning to divorce.

Tom Neal, fifty-one, described as “graying, but still trim and husky,” would not say if he was the one who had fired the shot, nor would he make any statement at all. He surrendered to the police officers and was booked on suspicion of murder. He was held without bail, and on Monday arraigned for first degree murder.

“Talithucumi”

On the evening of November 18, 1965, after a four-week trial and ten hours of deliberation, a jury in Indio, California returned a verdict in the Tom Neal murder trial. Prosecutors had charged that Neal shot his estranged, third wife Gail in the head while she was sleeping. They sought a conviction for first degree murder and demanded the death penalty.

Facing the gas chamber, Neal had given his version of the killing for the first time when he took the stand earlier in the month. Questioned by his attorney, Leon Rosenberg, Neal testified that he’d returned home after a ten-week trip to Chicago for a “soul baring session,” in which he and Gail discussed whether they should reunite after the separation. The pair was on the couch in the living room, he was on one knee, caressing her, and they were on the verge of making love, when he had to go and spoil it all, by saying something stupid.

Rosenberg led the narrative. “Was she resisting anything you were doing?”

“No, she wasn’t resisting,” Neal replied. “I think at that time she said, ‘I don’t know whether we should do this, Tom.’ And I said, ‘Don’t be silly, I’ve been away for ten weeks, and you’ve been fooling around with all these guys since I left, and even before I left.’”

That led to an argument. When Neal accused her of having sex with his friends, he “felt her body tense and the next thing I knew, I heard her yell at me, ‘I’ll kill you, you bastard!’ I looked up from where I was – and what I faced was the .45 automatic in her hand.”

Neal testified that he shoved the gun with both hands, and it discharged. “I couldn’t believe what I saw,” he said under oath. “I realized from looking at Gail that she had been hit along the side of the head. You’re dumbfounded in a situation like this. I prayed. I took her hand. I called her name, ‘Gail, oh, God. Gail.’ Then I said aloud, ‘There is no life, truth, intelligence, or substance in mind, all in infinity and its manifestation, for God is all in all. Spirit is immortal truth; matter is mortal error. Spirit is the real and eternal, matter is the unreal and temporal.’’”

“Did you say anything else?”

“Yes. Talithucumi, which is interpreted as ‘Fair maiden arise, for thou art whole.’ She seemed to rise up a little bit… You see your wife, who means more to you than heaven and earth, dead.”

During cross-examination, prosecutor Roland Wilson asked Neal why he didn’t call police when he realized his wife was dead. Neal said he “seemed to panic,” and didn’t think anyone would believe there was a struggle for the gun.

The pathologist who performed the autopsy later testified that Tom Neal’s version of the shooting was “unlikely.”

“Considering the direction of the wound,” he told the court, “it would require one’s wrist to be extremely flexed and the index or trigger finger would tend to pull away from the trigger.”

Never mind the science. The ten women and two men of the jury bought Tom Neal’s story. They found him guilty of involuntary manslaughter. Neal and attorney Rosenberg smiled after the verdict was read. Both expected that Neal would be given a suspended sentence and probation. They were not smiling on December 10 when Judge Hilton H. McCabe rejected Rosenberg’s plea for probation and sentenced Neal to the maximum penalty for involuntary manslaughter: one to fifteen years in prison. The California Adult Society would determine how long he’d have to serve behind bars, but it would have to be at least a year.

Dead in bed

Franchot Tone died of lung cancer on September 18, 1968, in his apartment on Manhattan’s Upper East Side. He was sixty-three and had been married three times in addition to his short marriage to Barbara Payton. All four marriages had ended in divorce. Despite his illustrious career as an actor, Tone’s “fight” with Tom Neal on September 14, 1951 was a major part of all the obituaries. A fight that Tone had engaged in six weeks after he was beaten into a coma by Neal was not mentioned. That skirmish erupted at Ciro’s nightclub on October 30. Tone, upset that gossip columnist Florabel Muir had written about him listening in on Payton’s phone calls, kicked her in the shins and spat in her face. He was fined four hundred dollars and forced to apologize.

Tom Neal was released from the California Institute for Men at Chino on December 6, 1971. He’d served six years of the one-to-fifteen-year sentence for the manslaughter shooting of his wife, Gail. Neal, now fifty-seven, told a reporter that he had a job lined up with a real estate and construction firm, but that recently, while on a pre-release furlough, he’d met up with his old Hollywood agent. “I’ve lived a lot,” he said. “I’ve got more character now than in the old days. And I’ve mellowed. When I see a fight nowadays, I walk away from it. I’d like to take up acting again.” Neal said the agent talked about filming his life story.

Tom Neal never did return to acting, nor did he get involved in an autobiographical movie project. On August 7, 1972, eight months after he was paroled from prison, a city ambulance crew was called to an address in North Hollywood. Fifteen-year-old Thomas Patrick Neal was waiting for the paramedics and led them to his father’s bedroom. Tom Neal’s body was in the bed. The medics called time of death at 7:37 A.M. Death was apparently of natural causes. Tom Neal was fifty-eight.

Tom Neal Jr. and Lea Lavish in Detour (1992)

(Tom Neal Jr. starred in his father’s role in the 1992 remake of Detour. When filming began in 1988, he was thirty-one, the same age as Tom Neal Sr. when he filmed the original picture. Tom Neal Jr. died of cancer in 2015. Like his father, he was fifty-eight.)

Barbara Payton was not the cartoonish “evil woman” of Hollywood tabloid infamy. For a well-rounded, sympathetic, and extensively researched account of her troubled life, check out John O’Dowd’s excellent biography, Kiss Tomorrow Goodbye: The Barbara Payton Story.

© 2022, 2026 By Burt Kearns

1951 was a bloody banner year in the boxing business. It counted among its major events the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre, the battle between archrival middleweights Sugar Ray Robinson and Jake LaMotta, so named because the punches landed on February 14th, and remembered because the referee finally stopped the fight in the thirteenth round before LaMotta’s head, under a merciless pounding, was separated from his spinal cord (LaMotta never went down). In Madison Square Garden in October, undefeated heavyweight Rocky Marciano wept after reluctantly pummeling his aging boyhood idol, Joe Louis, into submission, in what would be Louis’s last fight.

But neither bout had greater impact, made more headlines, or had a more sordid and sorrowful aftermath than the fight that took place in Los Angeles in the early hours of September 14, 1951, on the front steps of 1803 Courtney Avenue, when a former amateur boxer out of Chicago with a record of forty-three wins, three losses and three knockouts, scored his fourth K.O. over an older opponent who was as outmatched as Joe Louis in the Garden. The “fight” between Tom Neal and Franchot Tone was, of course, over a woman. Tone was a movie star. Neal was a B-movie dolt who looked good in trunks. The woman was Barbara Payton, a badtime, badass blonde who’d gone more rounds (in the sack, of course) than both men put together. She was twenty-three. Neal was thirty-seven. Franchot Tone was forty-six and should have known better. He’d been in this ring before.

Franchot Tone was a sophisticated gentleman born into money who chose acting and was an established stage thespian before getting into motion pictures in the early 1930s. He was nominated for an Academy Award in 1936 for Mutiny on the Bounty, the one with Clark Gable. Tone married Joan Crawford that year. The marriage lasted until 1939, when she filed for divorce, citing extreme cruelty. Tone took the divorce hard but rebounded with a younger model – an actual model turned actress. He married her in 1941. That’s why Franchot Tone should have known better. He knew what could happen, marrying a peroxide-blonde sex kitten half his age.

Two boys, two suicide attempts

Jean Walacek had arrived in Hollywood in 1940. An Irish-Polish platinum blonde fresh out of high school in Chicago, she was already calling herself “Jean Wallace” and wasted no time extracting job offers from wolves in the studio casting offices. Right away, she was signed by MGM for her first movie role — a bit part in Ziegfeld Girl that began filming in November 1940. She lost the role when the studio discovered she was seventeen, not nineteen as she’d claimed. By law, she could work only four hours a day – and required a tutor. All squeezes aside, that was a dealbreaker. Jean found work as a showgirl in one of producer Earl Carroll’s scantily-clad musical revues before she got a second shot at the movies. Paramount moved in and gave her a six-month contract, a tutor — and her first screen credit, in 1941, in Louisiana Purchase, the musical comedy starring Bob Hope. Jean met Franchot Tone in July of that year. He was also eighteen years her senior.

The teenager and the movie star had a wild, hot romance, and on October 18, 1941, eloped to Yuma, Arizona. With a crowd of fans clogging the corridors of the Yuma County courthouse, they were married in the chambers of Superior Court Judge Henry C. Kell. Jean was eighteen. Tone was exactly twice her age. When the newlyweds stepped outside the courthouse, they encountered a festival parade making its way through the downtown streets. A gaggle of fans placed the newlyweds atop a firetruck, and they became king and queen of the cavalcade. The couple stopped in for a toast at the local Elks Lodge before flying to Palm Springs and seven years of a wedlock that would be far more turbulent than the flight.

During the course of their marriage, the couple produced two children and at least one suicide attempt. Pascal “Pat” Franchot Tone was born on July 29, 1943. Thomas Jefferson Tone arrived on September 16, 1945. Jean tried suicide with sleeping pills on May 28, 1946. Franchot Tone and his press agents attributed the hospital run to food poisoning and a medicine mix-up. On June 3, Walter Winchell reported on a warning sign when Jean walked out of Helena Rubinstein’s salon with her hair dyed “opalescent pink.” Jean filed for divorce on August 23, 1948, claiming her husband was “extremely jealous” and had a violent temper. “Many times, when I was called to work at the studio,” she said, “I could not report because of our arguments the night before.” Jean’s friend, a singer named Elinor Parker, backed up her claims, and testified that Tone called his wife “dirty names.” Parker would not repeat the “vile and vulgar” words in court, but wrote them on a slip of paper and passed it to Judge Thurlow T. Taft.

The divorce was granted. Tone was awarded custody of their two sons, now aged five and two. Outside the courthouse in Santa Monica, Jean Wallace said she was leaving for New York and Paris to star in a movie — opposite Franchot Tone.

On Sunday, November 20, 1949, Jean Wallace picked up the boys at her ex-husband’s home in Beverly Hills and took them to see Santa Claus. That evening, while Tone was out on a date, Jean, the boys and her mother, Frances Ingham, had dinner at his home before she returned to Ingham’s apartment.

At 4:30 AM Monday, Frances Ingham was awakened by a scream. She found her daughter in the kitchen, with a fourteen-inch butcher knife in her hand and blood pouring from a gaping wound — an inch deep and an inch-and-a-half across — in her abdomen. Jean was taken to George Street Receiving Hospital and then to Hollywood Presbyterian Hospital, where her condition was listed as “not serious.”

Jean Wallace was not invited to her ex-husband’s home to be with the boys on Christmas Eve. That evening, she did not give up hope that an invitation would arrive. She sat in her mother’s apartment at 1015 North Doheny Drive in West Hollywood, waiting for his call — waiting and knocking back jiggers of vodka. Early Christmas morning, she was in her car, behind the wheel, three miles away when she smashed into a parked car at the corner of Orange Street and Crescent Heights Boulevard. Arthur Koontz owned the car she hit. He reached into Jean’s sedan, took away the key and held onto it until police arrived. The cop found Jean Wallace as Arthur Koontz had, wearing an open red coat, blue lace-trimmed panties, and bedroom slippers. Jean was booked on a “drunk in auto” charge at City Jail. Jean’s mother paid the fifty dollars to bail her out and drove her back to the apartment.

“I had been here all evening alone, hoping I’d get a call from Franchot inviting me to see the children,” Jean Wallace told reporters the next day. “I had some drinks and, well, I guess I just waited too long.”

Gossip columnist Jimmy Fidler, an influential, judgmental squirt who was the third wheel in the Hedda Hopper-Louella Parsons monopoly on Hollywood shame, weighed in on Jean’s situation on New Year’s Day. In wake of the recent suicide attempt and drunk arrest, he wrote that the troubled actress “seems to be taking over the dubious distinction recently vacated by Lila Leeds, of being Hollywood’s No. 1 headline-maker.” (Recently nabbed for drunk driving, Lila Leeds had been arrested along with Robert Mitchum on marijuana charges in 1948 and cashed in with a Reefer Madness-style flick called She Shoulda Said No!) Fidler wrote that he couldn’t help feeling some sympathy for Jean, since she seemed to be in love with her ex and upset by the separation from her boys. “But neither can one help feeling that a person so temperamentally unstable, is scarcely a fit custodian for those same children.”

The Respectful Prostitute

Jean surprised most everyone when, on January 28, 1950, she ran off to Tijuana, Mexico and married a twenty-three-year-old former Army Sergeant named James Lloyd Randall. She’d met the soldier the previous year while making a personal appearance at a service hospital in Tacoma, Washington. Randall, who’d been injured in a training accident, was a patient. While Randall’s family back in Virginia had wedding announcements posted proudly in the local papers, Jean’s mother did not try to hide her displeasure. “Jean definitely did this on the rebound,” Frances Ingham told reporters. “I know it can’t last. It’s not good for her and it’s no good for Jim Randall. I already have told Jean that I’m going to try to get the marriage annulled.”

Jean was wearing a print dress and ankle-length mink coat when she appeared in court on February 28 to face the Christmas morning drunk charge. She avoided thirty days in jail by paying a sixty-dollar fine.

She was in Superior Court on June 13, with high-powered celebrity attorney Jerry Giesler at her side, when she sued to end her marriage to Jim Randall. She asked for an annulment or divorce on the grounds that the Tijuana marriage was not legal and that she and Randall had never set up home together.

While awaiting the judge’s decision, at four o’clock in the morning on Saturday, October 14, two days after she turned twenty-seven, Jean Wallace wound up in another compromising situation. This time she was in the front seat of Lawrence Tierney’s Cadillac while the oft-arrested actor stood in the street, drunk and ranting, until the cops dragged him away. Jean was sent on her way, but she got her name in the papers, anyway.

“Larry called and asked if I would be interested in playing with him in a play, The Respectful Prostitute.” Jean Wallace told her story to Louella Parsons the following day.

“We talked about the part and then I offered to drive him home. Suddenly he became wild and started to scream.” The Respectful Prostitute was actually a respectable play about racism in the American South, written by Jean-Paul Sartre, but try telling that to average movie fan eating up the gossip in the morning paper.

It was quite unfortunate, Parsons concluded. Wallace had been “making a wonderful comeback, and everyone in Hollywood knows that she has given up all intoxicants.” She also had much at stake in court, with that annulment hearing followed by an attempt to regain custody of her sons from Franchot Tone.

“I don’t think Franchot will oppose this move — or even care,” Jean Wallace said. “He is so taken up with Barbara Payton. Everyone says they will be married.”

And that’s where Barbara Payton comes in.

Kiss Tomorrow Goodbye

She was born Barbara Lee Redfield in 1927 to a couple of alcoholics in Cloquet, Minnesota. When she was eleven, her family moved to Odessa, Texas, where she learned that her beauty and sexual availability could get her places. She eloped at sixteen with her high school boyfriend. Her parents had the marriage annulled but didn’t make a peep when she married again at seventeen, this time to John Payton, an Air Force captain stationed at Midland Army Airfield. He said he’d take her places. When she said she wanted to go to Hollywood, he took her there. He took some classes. She went out for modelling jobs.

In 1947, Barbara Payton gave birth to a son. In 1948, the couple separated. She dedicated her time to getting noticed in nightspots like Ciro’s and the Mocambo on the Sunset Strip. The attention led to a movie contract. In 1949, she starred with Lloyd Bridges in the film noir, Trapped. In the spring of 1950, she was a gangster moll opposite James Cagney in Kiss Tomorrow Goodbye. Barbara Payton was impressive in both films.

She met Franchot Tone that summer, either when she was trolling at Ciro’s or after he watched her win a Charleston dance contest at the Mocambo. Whatever, soon enough Tone was engaged in another public romance with a hot young blonde. He was forty-five. She was twenty-two, and she had more tricks up her sleeve than… You get the picture.

Naked and nude

Los Angeles Superior Court Judge Thurmond Clarke granted Jean Wallace an annulment of her marriage to Jim Randall on November 6, 1950. Jean then headed west to Santa Monica Superior Court to battle her other former husband over custody of their boys. Those proceedings were bitter and lurid, with testimony and accusations of intoxication, a thrown ashtray (Jean admitted she’d hurled it toward Tone because he’d taken Barbara Payton to Las Vegas – but only after “he pulled some hair out of my head” – the ashtray crashed through a window), her dalliances with Mickey Cohen’s bodyguard Johnny Stompanato, and his association with “somebody mixed up in narcotics” – namely Payton, who was introduced as “the other woman,” and was subpoenaed to testify. It was a bonanza for the news photogs when the two blondes were in the same room. The women didn’t look at each other, but everyone was eyeing both of them up and down when the subject turned to nudity.

Jean Wallace’s attorney got the naked ball rolling when he got Franchot Tone on the witness stand and asked if he’d seen his new girlfriend Barbara Payton in the nude.

“Have you ever seen her naked?”

“Yes.”

“Frequently?”

“Yes.”

“Was this in a room in a hotel?”

“Yes.”

Tone was embarrassed by that last question, but his attorney bit back. He’d already had the cop who’d arrested Jean on Christmas morning testify that he’d gotten a gander at Jean’s bare breasts when they spilled out of that red coat. Now he called to the stand an actor and writer named Leonid Mostovey, who testified that he’d seen Jean Wallace in her apartment with a young man he knew as “Corky.”

“How was Miss Wallace clothed?’ Tone’s attorney asked.

“Like Eve.”

Judge Orlando H. Rhodes ruled on December 12 that Franchot Tone would retain custody of the two children. Wallace, whom the judge said he did not consider to be an unfit mother, was granted liberal visitation rights.

Jean Wallace married actor Cornel Wilde on September 3, 1951, in the chambers of Superior Court Judge Arthur Crum in Los Angeles City Hall. The newlyweds were in Superior Court in Santa Monica on September 11, fighting a request by Wallace’s ex-husband, Franchot Tone, to move her two sons to New York City, where he was working in television and radio. Wallace again claimed that Tone was a bad father. (She regained custody in May 1952 and remained married to Wilde until their divorce in 1981).

Flipped

Tone’s relationship with Barbara Payton had only deepened by this time. The forty-six-year-old sophisticate and the woman half his age were now engaged, on the path to their own third weddings — until the summer, when Payton laid her eyes on knockabout actor at a pool party.

Tom Neal was thirty-seven (about five years older than his official “Hollywood age”), a former Golden Gloves and amateur boxer who’d made his Broadway debut in 1935 and headed west to Hollywood a few years later. He scuffled among B-movies, most notably Detour, a low-budget film noir in which he played the sap, described by Roger Ebert as a “petulant… flaccid, passive and self-pitying… sad sack… loser with haunted eyes and a weak mouth, who plays piano in a nightclub and is in love, or says he is, with a singer named Sue.”

When Payton got a look at Neal by the pool, he was wearing only swim trunks. Payton told friends she “just flipped” at the sight of the well-built, near-naked man. Tone was on the east coast. Payton remained in Hollywood to work on her latest movie, Bride of the Gorilla. While Tone was away, she played with Tom Neal. Neighbors of her home at 1803 Courtney Avenue in Nichols Canyon reported that Neal spent much of the summer on her patio, in those trunks, working on those muscles with heavy barbells while Payton watched and sunbathed, nude.

Payton didn’t hide the affair with her new hunk. She went back and forth between Tone and Neal, playing the men against each other, publicly. Payton ultimately decided that Tone was old and “dull,” and announced at the end of July that she planned to marry Tom Neal on August 5 in Ensenada, Mexico. When the date passed without vows, columnists like Dorothy Kilgallen suggested she’d only announced the engagement to “needle” Franchot Tone.

Payton later told the gossips that she and Tom Neal planned to tie the knot on September 15 in San Francisco, the day after her divorce from her forgotten second husband came through. (Neal also had an ex. He’d married singer Vicky Lane in 1944, when she was eighteen. She divorced him in 1949, citing his “unreasoning jealousy.”)

Los Angeles Police Chief William H. Parker would assign three detectives — two from the Hollywood Division and one from the Homicide Squad — to piece together the sequence of events that spoiled the wedding plans.

Beaten into a coma

Around noon on Thursday, September 13, 1951, Barbara Payton borrowed Tom Neal’s car and drove into Hollywood to meet Franchot Tone. That afternoon, while Neal waited at her house, Payton phoned her maid and asked that she send her mink coat to the Beverly Hills Hotel, where Tone had checked in. That evening, she and Tone went out on the town to several nightclubs. At about 1:30 AM on the morning of September 14, the couple returned to her home, where Tom Neal and several other people were drinking and waiting. The ever-fickle Payton asked Neal to leave. When he refused, she turned to Franchot Tone and said, “Get rid of him.”

According to Tom Neal, Tone asked him to step outside to fight. Neal said he counseled Tone to reconsider the offer, because of the difference in their ages, weight (Neal was 180 pounds of muscle, Tone weighed in at about 155 pounds of pampered movie star), fighting skills, and the negative publicity that was sure to result.

Neal claimed that Tone responded with a wild right haymaker. The younger and stronger former boxer ducked and avoided the swing easily, and countered with several punches that left Tone on the ground and bleeding. When Barbara Payton ran from inside the house and rushed him, Neal said he pushed her out of the way.

Payton and other witnesses told it differently. Franchot Tone never raised a fist. Once the two men walked out of the house, Tom Neal slugged the older man in the face with such force that Tone was lifted off his feet, flew ten feet into the air and landed on his back on the steps. Once Tone was down, the ex-pug who’d won forty-three of forty-six amateur fights continued to punch the older man in the head. When Barbara Payton ran out to stop him, Neal punched her in the face, blackening her eye, before tossing her into the bushes.

Judson O’Connell, who lived in the house next door, said he was awakened by Payton’s screams, and then the sound of a steady pounding. “There were no words, no cries,” he told the reporter from the Los Angeles Times. “Just a methodical pounding. At first I thought it was my refrigerator.” He beat a rhythm on a table with his fist. “Then I noticed it had a sickening sound and realized it was someone being beaten.”

The neighbor told the U.P. reporter that he heard Payton scream, “Don’t do that! Don’t! Leave him alone!” and then what “sounded like a prizefighter in a gym beating the bags. It was one of the bloodiest fights I’d ever seen.”

O’Connell told the Times he looked out from his apartment window above Payton’s house and saw Tone lying across three walkway steps and Neal standing over him. “Miss Payton came running out of the apartment and asked, ‘What did you do? Why did you do it to him, Tom?’ And the answer was, ‘Because he asked for it.’”

To be continued… (In Part 2, the “sordid and sorrowful aftermath”…)

© 1999, 2026 By Burt Kearns

We arrived in Los Angeles in the summer of 1990, accompanying our leader and mate, A Current Affair’s executive producer Peter Brennan, who’d been hired away at the peak of the tabloid television show’s success to rescue the confused and struggling Hard Copy, an imitator with offices on the Paramount Pictures lot in Hollywood. It was Brennan and me and Rafael Abramovitz. Rafael was a fifty-year-old former civil rights attorney and Dupont Award-winning documentary filmmaker who found himself working as a tabloid television correspondent. At the time, he was well-known for his role, with Steve Dunleavy, in acquiring video of Robert Chambers, the “Preppie Killer,” surrounded by scantily-clad young women at a slumber party, twisting the head off a doll saying, “I think I killed it.” (Chambers had confessed to strangling 18-year-old Jennifer Levin in Central Park in 1986, and after a “rough sex” defense resulted in a hung jury, had pleaded out to first-degree manslaughter.) Rafael and Dunleavy played themselves in the television movie, The Preppie Murder, starring Billy Baldwin as Chambers.

Rafael had a distinctive presence on and off camera. A Lithuanian Jew who’d escaped the Holocaust as a child, he didn’t look like the typical television news reporter of the early nineties. He had a beard, a small ponytail, and, although he’d never lived west of Maryland, dressed like a cowboy, with a four-beaver Resistol hat, Levi jeans and lizard boots (and he opened his segments seated, tapping away at a typewriter). In Los Angeles, Rafael bunked in the second bedroom of my house in Benedict Canyon – I should say “camped,” because he slept in a sleeping bag on the floor and made frequent trips back to New York because he’d never exactly told his wife that he’d taken a job in Los Angeles.

By the spring of 1991, Brennan had reshaped Hard Copy and the show was on its way to success. Rafael and I were learning that Hollywood was a lot different from the Upper East Side of Manhattan — and that the taboid television genre, which had unearthed and mined a an alternative morality bubbling under acceptable American culture, may have done more than simply report on it — as illustrated in this excerpt from “Fake Tits and Real Blood,” Chapter 14 of Tabloid Baby.

Rafael and I had become fast friends in a slow town, spending much of our time driving my orange Karmann Ghia or his ‘67 Mustang up and down the long boulevards of Los Angeles, looking for action of any kind, anywhere. We were convinced that somewhere in L.A. was a shadow city where men like us and beautiful women filled bars, laughing and toasting and indulging in intellectual conversation.

Instead, we drank at dives like the Formosa and sipped tequila next to poodle-haired men in heavy metal clubs like the Rainbow, consorted with off-duty strippers and tried to urge a smile from the female bartenders....

Yeah, it was Sunday night and we were drinking at the Rainbow again. The Rainbow Grill was, and is, a legendary rock’n’roll hangout on the western edge of the Sunset Strip, sharing a driveway parking lot and clientele with the Roxy music club and its private upstairs boîte On the Rox, where John Belushi had his last supper and in more recent years Heidi Fleiss and her friend Victoria Sellers held court and took orders from celebrities.

Back in the fifties, the Rainbow was the site of the Villa Nova the restaurant where Vincente Minnelli proposed to Judy Garland and Marilyn Monroe met Joe DiMaggio on a blind date. In the seventies, the Rainbow was a place where heavy metal gods Led Zeppelin would rest, surrounded by a never-ending menu of groupies who’d wanked the Sunset glam scene through the eighties. These days it was usually jam packed with heavy metal kids and occasional stars like Slash of Guns N’ Roses and Jason Bonham, son of Led Zeppelin’s dead drummer. The Who’s John Entwistle was a semi-regular, as was chubby porn star-director Ron Jeremy and his ever changing bevy of “actresses.”

The Rainbow was dark and comfortable, with checked tablecloths and a specialty in pizza and drinks. Memorabilia like Entwistle’s bass and a Stray Cats drum cover adorned out-of-reach parts of the walls. Upstairs, in a third floor loft above the rest rooms, was a hidden bar and dance floor, but the most singular attraction was the exclusive dining room open only on the most crowded nights. It was in the kitchen: tables and booths and even a bar set up in the space not taken up by the dishwashers, fryolators and pizza ovens. The party at the Rainbow went on into the early hours under the fluorescent lights

The place rested on Sundays, the nights Raf and I often stopped in on the way home to the canyon. We didn’t exactly fit in at the tiny bar, Raf in his Resistol hat and denim jacket, me in my sports jacket, he sipping his Johnny Walker Black, and me trading off between Bud Lights and tequilas.

On this night, the bartender was a slim attractive woman in her mid-thirties with tight black jeans and a permanent frown that all the bad one-liners in the bar wouldn’t erase.

Lemmy at the Rainbow

Lemmy Kilmister, mythical leader of the legendary metal band Motörhead, sidled over to give her a kiss. Lemmy was royalty. The bartender offered a rare smile and a cheek, even though Lemmy’s face was plastered with boils that prompted British music writers to dub him “The Carbuncular One.”

“Raf, it’s Lemmy,” I pointed out.

“Who the fuck is Lemmy?” Raf was from a different world. He was amazed at my pop culture references.

On the other side of Raf sat two women from a place somewhere between the worlds of stripping and rock ‘n’ roll. One wore lingerie is a blouse. The other wore leather straps wrapped around her torso until all strategic parts were covered. They were shapely, sturdy girls with the look of the farmland, tainted milkmaids with teased hair and cornfed, tanned skin.

We got to talking. Candy and Renee were sisters. Renee gave me her number. I promised to call.

Rafael Abramovitz, 1941-2021

Later that week, I convinced Raf to accompany me to meet the sisters at another rock’n’roll haunt in Hollywood. Boardner’s was a grungy tavern on a sidestreet off Hollywood Boulevard. It was steeped in Hollywood history. W.C. Fields once drank there, a time since, Raf was convinced, the glasses had not been properly washed.

We were squashed into a booth in back. Rock ‘n’ roll music played. Across the aisle, a TV script writing conference carried on. A thirty-something preppy whose Boola Boola demeanor shouted Ivy League lorded over several pitchers of beer and three young men -- two white and one Black -- who could have passed as underclassmen but were in fact his writing staff. The leatherbound script on the table near his beer glass showed they all worked for a Black sitcom.

Raff sat on the aisle, leaning back as far as possible from the two sisters across from us. Both could have been dressed up for a transvestite parade, and traded knowing winks with many of the male rockers trolling the aisles in leather jackets and torn jeans.

I leaned over my beer, talking nonstop, a veritable James Woods of let’s-get-it-on anticipation.

“Candy saw you on television this week,” Renee said to Raf.

That got his attention. He couldn’t resist a smile. “Yes, I spend most of my time hanging around bars, but I try to do some good.”

“We thought you might have been bullshitting.”

“You know how dudes are,” said Candy.

“Especially at the Rainbow,” Renee completed. “Anyway, we thought maybe you could help us.”

“You being on television and all,” Candy said. She brought her arms close to her chest, forcing her artificial breast to squeeze out further. “And Kurt –”

“Burt,” I corrected.

“Burt said you were a lawyer and stuff.”

“Once a lawyer, always a lawyer,” said Raf.

“See, we have a problem with our mother.”

“She has a drinking problem.”

“Don’t we all.”

Renee continued. “She’s got this new boyfriend.”

“He’s an Indian,” Candy added.

“He’s a motherfucker. He beats her. And our brother—”

“He’s in the army, he’s stationed in Germany. He’s coming home soon, and he knows about what’s going on.”

“He’s coming home soon,” Renee added. “And we’re afraid that he’s going to kill the Indian.”

“We thought maybe you could help us,” Candy said. “You being on TV and all.”

“On Hard Copy,” said Renee. “Help us before our brother gets back and kills the Indian.”

Raft swirled his Johnny Walker Black and tipped back his hat before smiling again and sipping from the cloudy glass. “I can understand. I’ve heard this kind of story many times before. You’d like me to have a word with your brother--”

“We could do that,” I butted in. “Easy.”

“—Or perhaps find out about a shelter for your mother.”

The two women shifted uncomfortably and traded looks.

“Not exactly,” said Renee.

“Not exactly,” her sister echoed.

“We were hoping maybe, with your connections—”

“Working for Hard Copy and all—”

“That you could help us find a hitman to kill the Indian before our brother does.”

There was a pause in the time it took for the impact of their words to sink in and for Raf’s eyes to widen.

“I don’t believe this,” he said, standing and sliding out of the booth. “I’m a lawyer. I can’t be hearing something like this—”

“Uh, I don’t think so.” I was thinking on my feet and trying to somehow recoup the evening and those big fake breasts. “Maybe we should talk—”

The sisters heard nothing more. Raf had me by the collar and was dragging me up the aisle, past the comedy writers, pushing me past the bar and back onto the sidewalk.

“What are you doing?” I sputtered into the night air.

“Those fucking women asked me to kill somebody!”

“They didn’t really. They only asked you to help find someone to kill somebody.”

“What the fuck’s the matter with you?”

“We could of talked them out of it.”

“Talked them out of it? You’re over the edge, man. What’s the wrong with this fucking town?”

To be continued…

© 2019, 2026 by Burt Kearns and Jeff Abraham

Johnny Ace. The name doesn’t get much more rock ’n’ roll than that, and neither does his story. Even those who aren’t familiar with his music — Memphis R&B from the early 1950s — have heard the name, and most likely the legend attached to it. Paul Simon referenced him in his 1983 song “The Late Great Johnny Ace” (a song in which John F. Kennedy and John Lennon were made honorary “Johnny Aces”). Dave Alvin offered a more straightforward recitation of his early exit in “Johnny Ace Is Dead.” Johnny Ace was one of those tragic legendary rock & roll figures who’s remembered less for the way he played than for the way he left the building.

As legend has it, Johnny Ace went out in a most romantic way on Christmas Day 1954 — romantic like the love scene between Robert De Niro and Christopher Walken in The Deer Hunter. Johnny Ace died at 25, playing Russian Roulette, the game in which you load a bullet into one chamber of a revolver, spin the cylinder, then pull the trigger while pointing the gun at your head. It’s said to be quite a rush if you only hear “click.”

There’s one small catch to the legend of the late great Johnny Ace: It wasn’t Russian Roulette, and it was only a matter of luck that it wasn’t a murder-suicide.

Johnny Ace was born in 1929 as John Marshall Alexander Jr., the son of Baptist preacher. He served time in the Navy and a bit more in a Mississippi prison before he washed up on Memphis’s Beale Street, the bubbling cauldron of southern urban blues, in 1949. He played and toured with Bobby “Blue” Bland and B.B. King in a band called the Beale Streeters before going solo and signing with Duke Records in 1952. There, he was christened Johnny Ace and out of the box went to #1 with “My Song.”

“My Song” – Johnny Ace and with the Beale Streeters

That was the first of eight chart hits in a row, and the beginning of a long slog of touring, much of it with Willie Mae Thornton (also known as “Big Mama” Thornton, enshrined in rock & roll history as the first to record Leiber & Stoller’s “Hound Dog”), a trajectory that blasted him into immortality on Christmas Day, 1954.

Johnny Ace’s last day began the day before. He played a Christmas Eve show in Port Arthur, Texas and drove to Houston for a show on December 25th. At 9 a.m. Christmas morning, he arrived at Olivia Gibbs’ apartment. Olivia was twenty-two years old. She’d attended the University of Wisconsin, but worked as a waitress at the Club Matinee, a blues showcase nicknamed “The Cotton Club of The South.” She was Johnny’s girlfriend. She considered herself his fiancée, and hoped to marry Johnny the following June — if his divorce from his wife and mother of his two kids came through by then.

Olivia later told a reporter that Johnny had invited his band to her place for Christmas dinner. Johnny, she said, wasn’t a doper and he wasn’t a boozer and he wasn’t mean. He was a prankster, always acting foolish, and well, truth be told, he was something of a boozer, after all. Johnny was drinking on Christmas morning, guzzling vodka and playing with his gun. It was the little pistol he carried, a .32 caliber number he’d bought off another musician in Florida. He was always playing with his gun. He liked to shoot at road signs and show off, “just like a little boy,” Olivia said.

When Olivia told Johnny to knock it off and put the weapon away, he did. Then he showed everybody the gold and three-stone diamond ring she’d bought him for Christmas. When it was time for dinner, Johnny Ace used a big knife to carve the Christmas turkey. He was in the Christmas spirit.

“I loved Johnny and he loved me,” Olivia said.

That evening, a crowd of 3,500 showed up for the “Negro Christmas Dance” at the City Auditorium. Johnny Ace was a featured act on a bill that included Big Mama Thornton, Johnny Otis and the headliner, B.B. King. Johnny capped off the first half of the show as usual, by inviting Big Mama onstage and then driving the crowd wild with a duet on his rollicking, rocking hit “Yes, Baby.”

Hey-ay-ay, tell me, baby!

Yay-hey, tell me, baby,

What is wrong with you?

“Yes Baby” by Willie Mae “Big Mama” Thornton and Johnny Ace

Intermission began around 11 p.m. Johnny was still pranking around in the dressing room backstage at the City Auditorium, drinking vodka, but not in as fine spirits as he’d been earlier in the day. Now he was grousing about a toothache that was killing him. Despite the fact that thousands of fans were in the auditorium waiting for the second half of the show, he said he didn’t think he could go on.

There were four other people in and out of the room. Olivia Gibbs was there, along with her friend Mary Carter. So was another singer named Joe Hammond and Big Mama Thornton. Olivia crawled up onto Johnny’s lap to try to make him feel better. All the while, Johnny Ace was playing with his little .32 caliber pistol, pointing it at people in the room and pulling the trigger. With no bullet in the firing chamber, every time he pulled the trigger, the gun made a snapping sound. Snap! Snap! He was really getting on people’s nerves.

Willie Mae Thornton

Big Mama Thornton, all six feet of her, finally had enough. “Hey, man! What the heck you doin’ with that gun? Don’t you know it might go off?”

“It ain’t got but one bullet in it,” Johnny replied.

“Hell, it don’t take but one bullet to kill you!” Big Mama snatched the pistol, turned the chamber and a bullet tumbled into her hand. She took a swig of 100 proof Old Granddad and headed out toward her second set.

“Gimme the gun!” Johnny demanded as she neared the door. She handed it over.

“You ain’t gonna play with it no more, is you?”

“Where’s the bullet?” She threw it at him.

Snap! Now Johnny pointed the gun at Joe Hammond.

Snap! Snap!

Now he’d gotten on Joe Hammond’s last nerve. “Damn!” Joe spat. “You snapped it at everyone else! Try it on yourself!”

“Now watch me,” said the prankster. “Show you it won’t shoot.” Johnny Ace had his arm around Olivia. He placed the gun to his temple. He pulled the trigger once more.

‘Crack!’ Johnny Ace fell to the floor.

Big Mama stopped dead in her tracks. She swore that when the gun went off, “that kinky hair of his shot straight out.”

“I thought he was just up to his usual playing until I raised his head and saw the blood,” Olivia recalled.

Olivia Gibbs was lucky that Johnny Ace was playing with a small-caliber revolver and that the bullet didn’t pass all the way through his brain. When he pulled the trigger, he was hugging her close. Her head was pressed right up against his.

None of the thousands of dancers in the auditorium heard the gunshot, because Johnny Otis and his band were onstage, playing at the time. They were in the middle of a number when Big Mama came running onto the stage in tears and grabbed the microphone. “The concert is canceled! Johnny Ace has just been killed! There ain’t gonna be no music tonight! Johnny Ace has been killed!”

The Associated Press story was carried in newspapers around the country the following day: “A Memphis, Tenn. bandleader was shot to death playing Russian Roulette last night…

“According to the detectives, Alexander would spin the cylinder, put the gun to the head of one of his companions and pull the trigger. Each time, the bullet failed to come into the chamber. The last time Alexander tried it, however, he sat down and pulled the girl on his lap and put the gun to his head after spinning the cylinder, police said. When he pulled the trigger, the hammer clicked on the bullet, which went smashing into his head.”

The report was not accurate, but the story stuck.

Meanwhile, they carried Johnny Ace’s body back to Memphis. The Reverend Dwight “Gatemouth” Moore, a former blues singer himself, preached over the casket.

Duke Records, Johnny Ace’s label, didn’t waste time crying once word of the tragedy got back to Memphis. Johnny’s next single was released within days of his death, before the new year. “Pledging My Love” was produced by Johnny Otis and featured the Otis band. The opening lines were, “Forever my darling, my love will be true, always and forever, I’ll love just you.” The record became Johnny Ace’s biggest hit, balanced at the top of the Billboard R&B charts for ten weeks beginning February 12, 1955.

“Pledging My Love” by Johnny Ace

The magazine stated that the death of Johnny Ace “created one of the biggest demands for a record that has occurred since the death of Hank Williams just over two years ago.”

Olivia Gibbs, the girlfriend who just missed joining Johnny Ace on his final journey, said the song had been dedicated to her. “I’ll miss those nightly phone calls,” she said. “He called me every night when he was on the road, as if he wanted to hear me for inspiration before he went on the stage.”

BURT KEARNS & JEFF ABRAHAM wrote the book, The Show Won’t Go On: The Most Shocking, Bizarre, and Historic Deaths of Performers Onstage, published by Chicago Review Press, and available at a reduced price at Amazon.com.

© 2019, 2026 by Burt Kearns and Jeff Abraham

Cathy Wayne, a pretty teenage Australian pop star, made history on July 20, 1969. Fifty-seven years ago, on the day Neil Armstrong and the Apollo 11 crew landed on the moon, Cathy Wayne became the first Australian woman to die in the Vietnam war. She was nineteen years old. She was killed by a bullet.

She died onstage.

CATHY WAYNE was the stage name she adopted midway through her successful run on Australian television. She was born Catherine Anne Warnes in Arncliffe, an outer suburb of Sydney, on December 7, 1949, eight years after Japan’s surprise attack on Pearl Harbor, just short of six years before the official start of the conflict in Vietnam. She began taking singing and dancing lessons as a child at the Athelstane Public School. By the age of twelve, she was appearing on stage in community shows and school concerts. Cathy wasn’t yet sixteen when she was spotted by a talent scout and landed a gig as a dancer on The Wonderful World of Leslie Uggams, a Seven Network television variety show taped in Sydney. This led to a steady gig, dancing on TCN 9’s series, Opportunity Knocks.

Joe Martin and Cathy Wayne with Leslie Uggams on TV special

It was the following year, when she was sixteen, that Cathy Warnes took flight. Winning second prize in a talent competition led to a role on another Nine Network show. Bandstand was a live pop music variety program, a combination of Dick Clark’s American Bandstand and those 1960s variety series in which performers sang other people’s hits of the day (Cathy’s deracinated Aussie soul versions of “The Name Game” and “(You Make Me Feel Like) A Natural Woman” survive on YouTube and illustrate her perky, little girl-in-makeup appeal). Bandstand was hosted by a radio presenter and television newsreader (“deejay” and “anchorman” in the States) named Brian Henderson and featured its own stable of homegrown performers known as the Bandstand Family. The family would record their songs at Natec Sound Studios on Bligh Street and lip synch them in one of the TCN 9 television studios in the northern suburb of Willoughby.

The group included only-in-Australia stars like old rock ‘n’ rollers Col Joye, Digby Richards and Johnny Devlin (“New Zealand’s Elvis Presley”), and country acts Judy Stone and the De Kroo Brothers, along with future superstars the Bee Gees, Olivia Newton-John and Peter Allen, who performed with Chris Bell as the “The Allen Brothers,” though they weren’t related. (Allen, a protégé of Judy Garland, married Judy’s daughter Liza Minnelli in 1967, came out as gay after their divorce seven years later and died in 1992, one of the first well-known Australians to fall to AIDS.)

Along the way, Cathy Warnes became Cathy Wayne. She made records and recorded advertising jingles. She toured around Australia with the Bandstand Family, and though she was under the legal age to enter the joints, performed in nightclubs.

Meanwhile, the Vietnam War raged on. Australia had recently begun increasing its troop commitment alongside United States forces, and the war was a constant presence in Sydney. The city’s Kings Cross nightclub and red-light district, full of bars and whorehouses, was not only the first stop for sailors from the Royal Australian Navy’s nearby Garden Island Fleet Base, but one of the places opened to R&R (rest and recreation) for American servicemen given a week’s respite from the war zone.

In the first half of 1967, Cathy and a group of entertainers embarked on a concert tour of military bases in South Vietnam. The trip was an official government project, sponsored by the Australian Forces Advisory Committee on Entertainment. Because she was still months away from the age of eighteen, tour organizer Bruce Webber had to get approval from Cathy’s parents. They weren’t keen on the idea, but according to Webber, Cathy had “leapt at the chance.” The performers weren’t paid outright, but were handed daily expenses, and promised security.

The planned three-month tour was not sanctioned by the government, which made it all the more risky.

In 1969, Cathy Wayne was working the nightclubs. She was no longer a girl but not yet seen as a woman. Her style of overproduced, assembly-line, black and white television pop was passé, and her television career seemed to be in the suddenly distant past when another opportunity knocked. Jimmy Taylor, the bloke who played the piano, had one of his brainstorms.

“I was working a club and Cathy was singing in the club with us,” Taylor recalled for a documentary. “I said we’ve only got to put a little bit of a show together and we can earn some money in Vietnam. So we formed a band, we got loaded up with a couple of girl dancers. The show was quite good. Everyone liked it. She was a good-looking little girl, Cathy. She looked like a little doll. The Yanks just loved her. And she sang great.”

Somebody came up with a name that sex-starved soldiers would go for: Sweethearts on Parade. Jimmy would handle the keyboards and bass. They hired a guitarist, a compère and comedian, and a pair of go-go dancers. Clive Cavanagh was on drums. He was Cathy’s fiancé. A promoter and performer named Ingrid Hart arranged the details of the Vietnam jaunt. The planned three-month tour was not sanctioned by the government, which made it all the more risky. This time, Cathy’s parents and Col Joye, who’d moved into managing acts and promoting tours of his own, made a big push to dissuade her.

Cathy told them she wanted to make some money to get her recording career back on track. Ingrid Hart sold a more romantic view. She said Cathy “wanted to be there with her boyfriend. They were going to get some money together and get married.”

The troupe set off on June 26, 1969, and lodged in Saigon between performances at bases for Australian and United States troops.

Getting them ready for Vietnam

SWEETHEARTS ON PARADE arrived at the United States Marine Corps’ 1st Reconnaissance Battalion base, four miles southeast of Da Nang, on July 20. That evening, they performed at a club for non-commissioned officers. This meant that the other enlisted men on the base — the grunts, the infantrymen — were not allowed to be among the 75 higher-ranked soldiers and staff members enchanted by the charms of sweetheart Cathy Wayne and the go-go girls.

Corporal Robert Stockham was one of the Marines who wasn’t invited. “We’d known about Cathy Wayne’s show and everybody was pretty excited about it because we didn’t see that many Caucasian women,” he recalled years later. “A lot of us enlisted people were a little bit upset because the show was just for staff and officers, and we’d had a pretty hard time down in An Hoa. We were living in tents, we were getting shelled almost every day, and we were the ones going in the bush, so we felt that we deserved entertainment also.”

He remembered the night, and the events that transpired in his barracks. “There were several people in the hooch and we were in there talking, drinking beer. Sgt. Jim Killen came in. We referred to him as ‘Pappy’ because he was so old. He was twenty-eight years old and the rest of us were nineteen or twenty. He had heard that I had a .22 high standard automatic with a silencer. This was the type of pistol that we’d taken out on patrols with us to do prisoner snatches. Pappy asked me if I still had the gun, said he wanted to use it. I asked him what he was gonna do with it. He told me that he was going to go down to the perimeter and shoot at some feral dogs that would hang out around there.”

Sgt. James Killen headed out with Cpl. Stockham’s gun and silencer. Not far away, the Sweethearts on Parade were giving the noncoms and staff members some good old Caucasian stimulation.

Cathy Wayne, an hour before her death

It was around 9:15 pm. Inside the officers’ club, Cathy Wayne, wearing a pink miniskirt, had finished a song and was introducing some of the other Sweethearts when she stopped short — and suddenly dropped like a marionette whose strings had been severed.

“We were halfway through the show and I was playing the organ and all of a sudden she fell down!” Jimmy Taylor said. “And I thought she’s got an electric shock from the microphone, and I thought, ‘Hang on’ — and I knew then that she’d been shot. And, of course, I just fell to pieces. I wiped all the beer off the top of the organ — there was about twelve cans of beer that went everywhere — and I said, ‘My God!’ I just lost control. There was no lights on. Everyone was running around screaming and it was just awful.”

Cathy Wayne had been shot in the chest. Blood spread across her breasts and seeped though her sexy costume. She died almost immediately because the bullet had severed her aorta. Clive Cavanagh, who’d climbed over his drum kit as soon as Cathy collapsed, now cradled his lover’s body in his arms, his tears splashing across her ashen face.

What made the scene even more chaotic was that nobody heard the shot. No one knew where the bullet came from.

Cathy Wayne

WHO SHOT CATHY WAYNE? An investigation revealed that the bullet had been fired from behind a Jeep about 35 yards away from the club and had passed through the insect screen of an open window before entering the left side of Cathy Wayne’s body and exiting the right side. No one heard the shot, Marine Corps investigators explained, because the .22 caliber pistol that was fired outside had been equipped with a silencer. So who did it? The finger pointed to Pappy, Sgt. James W. Killen of Winter Haven, Florida. He allegedly had been trying to kill his commanding officer, Major Roger E. Simmons, who was inside the club, watching the show from the front row.

Killing your superior during a time of war? Not so unusual, Cpl. Stockham admitted. “There were officers that were fragged in Vietnam. If you’re in combat and you blindly follow your leader and he’s incompetent, something’s got to give somewhere. Cathy Wayne was an innocent party who was voluntarily there to provide entertainment for the military.”

When he heard about Cathy’s death in Vietnam, Col Joye remembered the warning he’d offered her. “Don’t go there. It’s not a nice place.”

“But finally she decided,” he said. “The boyfriend was there, so she went – and never came home. Well, she did, but in a box.”

Cathy Wayne in Vietnam

Cathy Wayne’s body was autopsied and then returned to Australia. The body was cremated. There was an Anglican funeral.

Marine Corps Sgt. James W. Killen was court-martialed later that year in Da Nang for the killing of Cathy Wayne. He insisted from the start that he didn’t do it, and pleaded not guilty to a charge of first degree premeditated murder. Two corporals, including Robert Stockham, testified that on the night Cathy Wayne was shot, Killen had entered “Hooch Six” demanding a weapon and ammunition. They said he found the pistol under a rubber air mattress. A sergeant testified that Killen entered his room and pulled up his shirt to show off a pistol in his belt. “Look at what I’ve got,” he supposedly said, pointing to the silencer.

All three witnesses said this occurred around 9:15 pm, the time Cathy Wayne was shot.

Killen, who’d been in Vietnam three years and had received a Purple Heart and the South Vietnamese Cross of Gallantry, testified in his own defense. He admitted taking the pistol from the hooch. He claimed that he went out to shoot the dogs that had been running into the barbed wire on the base’s perimeter, but didn’t see any. He said he returned to the Enlisted Men’s Club, where he drank eleven or twelve beers before leaving around 9:30.

Lance Corporal Ronald Prohaska testified, however, that Killen returned to the hooch while the search for a presumed enemy sniper was still ongoing. “Why in the hell did you do something like that for?” Prohaska said he asked. He said that Killen replied, “She was just winged.” When he asked about the gun, Prohaska said Killen told him it was “taken care of.” The weapon was later found in a ditch. There were no fingerprints, and no witnesses.

On October 29, an eight-man court martial panel convicted James Killen of un-premeditated murder in the second degree. Sentencing took place the following day. The panel ordered that Killen receive a dishonorable discharge, be busted to the rank of private, and forfeit all pay and allowances. Then they sentenced him to 20 years at hard labor.

Killen went to prison. A year and a half later, the Navy Court of Military Review looked at the case and found that the two corporals had altered their testimony after an offer of immunity from prosecution. Killen’s verdict and sentence were set aside. On August 4 and 5, a new trial took place at Camp Pendleton in southern California. This time, James Killen was cleared of all charges. He was released after serving two years and nine days in prison.

In the decades to follow, the legend of Cathy Wayne only grew in Australia, right up there with Slim Dusty, Michael Hutchence and Bon Scott. The story, and the questions surrounding her death, became an obsession for a drummer who’d played the Vietnam base circuit with a band called Xanadu. Don Morrisson spent nine years investigating the case, and under the pen name JD Owen wrote a book called Murder On Stage. He concluded that Killen was innocent. Morrisson said he knows the soldier who pulled the trigger, but didn’t have enough evidence to name him.

He told Shane Green of the Sydney Morning Herald: “Were they aiming at Cathy? Well, they may have been aiming in the general direction and pulled the trigger because that was the only real noise in the camp that night, a band playing, and that’s where the lights were.”

When we tried to reach Don Morrisson in 2019, we found out he had died suddenly a few months earlier.

Cathy Wayne — Catherine Anne Warnes — was one of three Australian women killed in Vietnam during the war. The other two, Lee Makk and Margaret Moses, were welfare workers who died in a plane crash in 1975.

(United States Army nurse Sharon Ann Lane of North Industry, Ohio, was the only American servicewoman killed as a direct result of enemy fire during the Vietnam War. On June 8, 1969, she was working as a general duty staff nurse at the Army’s 312^th Evacuation Hospital in Chu Lai when a 122mm rocket struck between two Quonset huts during an enemy rocket attack, killing her and a Vietnamese child, Sharon was twenty-five. The Army posthumously awarded her the Bronze Star Medal for heroism.)

**

BURT KEARNS & JEFF ABRAHAM wrote the book, The Show Won’t Go On: The Most Shocking, Bizarre, and Historic Deaths of Performers Onstage, published by Chicago Review Press and available at a reduced price at Amazon.com.

© 1999, 2026 By Burt Kearns

The death of Betty Broderick yesterday while serving a prison sentence of thirty-two years to life for the 1989 murder of her ex-husband and his new wife brought to an end a saga that had significance beyond the true crime files. This was a local news story that ordinarily would only have been of local interest, but became a national obsession and subject of entertainment, thanks to the innovations of a new genre of journalism called “tabloid television.”

In the summer of 1990 Peter Brennan, the brilliant producer and mastermind of the Fox Television magazine series A Current Affair, left the show in New York City to take over Hard Copy, a troubled imitator launched the previous year by Paramount Television. Brennan headed west to the Paramount lot in Hollywood to begin an overhaul of Hard Copy in time for its second season. He took me, A Current Affair’s managing editor and producer, and reporter and consigliere Rafael Abramovitz along with him.

In this excerpt from the book Tabloid Baby, Betty Broderick makes television history.

While A Current Affair relied on a seat-of-the-pants unfinished quality that made the show real and immediate, Paramount demanded a slick product in the mold of Entertainment Tonight. It wasn’t bad enough that just as ET had two perky anchors ,so would Hard Copy. To make the show a “Hollywood” version of reality TV, the suits deemed that the anchors would be shot against a blue screen, with videotape of a working newsroom in Detroit projected behind them. The anchors looked like two people sitting against a projection, while our actual working newsroom was only several yards away in the Paramount soundstage, under asbestos skies on the other side of the prefab wall.

The bigger challenge would be keeping up with stories in a city like L.A., where news didn’t matter and where the plugged-in, Manhattan-based competition had a three-hour headstart.

We got around the time problem by dividing up the day. The content of each show would be decided the previous afternoon. Each morning we’d have a six a.m. conference call with the New York office and decide whether to throw out one of the stories for something new. We’d have until noon to whack something together.

This split approach worked well, yet it would soon develop into a dangerous pattern: wake up with a hangover before dawn, review the stories, write a day-of-air lead, record the show at noon, go to lunch, lunch drink til four, come back and work til six or so, drink tll midnight, up with a hangover at six a.m.-- but we’re getting ahead of ourselves.

For now, in these first months of Hard Copy’s second season, we managed to re-establish the show, make people forget the embarrassing bad writing, two-minute copy stories, blood, body bags, and general ineptitude of the first season. We pulled out all the stops to get noticed in a big way. We went after serial killers. We tracked down the voluptuous Barbi Twins. We even had Gordon Elliott ambush A Current Affair host Maury Povich outside the show’s offices on East 67th Street. It wasn’t too difficult because we had arranged the meeting with Maury the day before.

Most important, we took the idea that Brennan had expressed at an A Current Affair staff meeting the previous summer: “A Current Affair stories are nothing more than stories about people, emotional stories. It’s a straight theft from what worked in the past, long before there was A Current Affair. Think of them as sagas, mini-movies. When Hollywood did movies, there was one star. They made a movie about World War II, they focused on one soldier or a platoon…”

Now we were in Hollywood. Hard Copy would be the home of the reality mini-movie. We’d spend big money on high-quality dramatizations, sometimes spooling out the drama over several nights in the style of a TV miniseries.

Our first attempt came from a one-column item I pulled out of a newspaper from a town near San Diego. On October 22,1990, a middle-aged divorcee was to go on trial for murder. The previous November 5, she’d walked into the home of her ex-husband and his new wife and shot them dead in their marital bed. Betty Broderick was facing murder charges, cut and dried, yet the most cursory background check revealed a story that would win her the sympathy of every housewife in America.

Betty and Dan Broderick married when they were kids in college. She worked to put him through medical school. She bore him several children. She made the mistake of getting older. Dan left her for his beautiful young secretary.

There were many warning signs before Betty’s ultimate explosion. She broke into Dan’s house and set his clothing on fire. She vandalized the newlyweds’ house. She gained weight. She broke down.

We recreated the story on film -- which was unheard of in the quick-shooting video world of tabloid TV -- and wrote the story as a three-act tragedy . We called it A Woman Scorned.

We followed Betty Broderick through her two trials, conviction, and troubles in prison. Eventually Meredith Baxter starred in the television movie. They called it A Woman Scorned.

(Over three television seasons, Peter Brennan would launch more multi-part Hard Copy “mini-movies,” including dramatizations of Chappaquiddick, the deaths of Marilyn Monroe and Elvis Presley, and the case of murderer and body snatcher Ed Gein. Meredith Baxter received an Emmy nomination for her role as Betty Broderick in the 1992 made-for-television movie, A Woman Scorned. That same year she starred in a sequel, Final Fury: Betty Broderick, The Last Chapter. These were two of many television and feature films whose plots and dramatic arcs were originally mapped out in tabloid television shows, including To Die For, I, Tonya, three competing TV movies on the Amy Fisher “Long Island Lolita” case, and The People vs. O.J. Simpson.)

© 2022, 2026 By Burt Kearns

Born in Los Angeles, a high school classmate and friend of Brian Wilson, rock ’n’ roll tenor and devotee of Ritchie Valens, teenage Mexican-American Ezekiel Christopher Montañez got a name change to Chris Montez and at nineteen had a Top Ten record in 1962 with Let’s Dance.

Meanwhile, in another part of L.A., a Jewish singer, songwriter, and trumpeter named Herb Alpert formed a record label called A&M, and, inspired by a group of mariachis at a bullfight in Tijuana, recorded a song called The Lonely Bull. The single hit the charts alongside Let’s Dance in the fall of 1962, and also made the Top Ten. The twenty-eight year-old quickly released an album credited to Herb Alpert & The Tijuana Brass. His star began to rise, as Montez’s career had apparently already reached its zenith.

CHRIS MONTEZ: It was the latter part of 1962, when I came back from touring with Sam Cooke. They said, “They want you to go to England.” I couldn’t believe it. “Yeah, you’re a hit, your song’s real big over there, and you’re going to be up there with Tommy Roe” — he had Sheila at the time – “and this group called the, the Bugles, or the Boscoes?” No, they were called the Beatles. Tommy Roe was in the middle and I closed the show. The Beatles were the warm-up group. And the Beatles were getting this momentum going.

The Beatles were already causing a stir with their second single, Please Please Me, when the 21-city tour of England opened on March 9, 1963 in East Ham, London. The Beatles’ first album was released in the UK on March 22. By March 24, the Beatles were headlining the tour, and remained on top through the last show in Leicester on March 31.

ANDREW LOOG-OLDHAM (tour publicist): Chris came in just as the curtain was coming down. He saw the curtain come down. I mean, he watched. He had a wonderful experience, as we all did, but there was no denying what was happening with this incredible phenomenon, the Beatles. By April, they were it.

CHRIS MONTEZ: As I was leaving England, Some Kinda Fun was my next release, which became Top 5. After Some Kind of Fun, the record company and my producer weren’t paying me, and they were cheating me. So I decided to walk away from contracts and let them have the royalties because they had a five-year contract with me, and they would just keep me there and I couldn’t record again. So I got away from it. I walked away from my career and I decided to go to college to study music. I couldn’t care less about recording again. I figured there’s other parts of my life I’ve got to continue.

Chris enrolled at El Camino College in Torrance, California and studied music composition. He remained out of the business for two years.

CHRIS MONTEZ: One day, this friend of mine, his name was Bob, had to pick up some recording tapes, and he insisted I go with him for the ride to Hollywood. We got there, and this person came out and said to him, “I’m sorry, I can’t use your material, but thanks anyway.” And Bob said, “Oh, by the way, this is a friend of mine. This is Chris Montez.” And the person said, “You’re Chris Montez, the singer? Who had Let’s Dance?” I said, “Yeah.” He said, “What are you doing?” I said, “I’m going to school.” And he said, “I’d like to have you for my label. Be interested in recording?” I said, “No, no. I don’t want to record any more.” And he said, “Well, think about it. I’d love to have you on my label.” And this is Herb Alpert talking to me.

HERB ALPERT: I don’t actually remember exactly when we met. I remember hearing his early records. I remember hearing Let’s Dance and thinking he clearly has an unusual voice.

Click the image to hear “Let’s Dance”

CHRIS MONTEZ: A few months later, I came back, and he got me a staff producer, and we started recording some of the same stuff that I previously was recording. I thought it was good stuff, but the staff producer said, “Herb doesn’t like what we’re doing. He doesn’t like any of the stuff.”

HERB ALPERT: I guess it was rock n roll. I didn’t think it had anything magical happening.

CHRIS MONTEZ: I said to myself, “Oh no.” And he said, “He’s got an idea. He wants to talk to you.”

HERB ALPERT: My recall is I was on the road with the Tijuana Brass at the time, and I heard this song, Call Me. I was really in the middle of the Tijuana Brass period at the height of the group, and I wasn’t thinking about too many other artists, although when I heard Chris’s voice, it just struck me that this idea for this song Call Me, he felt like a perfect match for it. I used to work with my guitar player John Pisano, and John and I started working out these ways of doing Call Me. I remember singing it into a tape machine and I sent it to Chris.

CHRIS MONTEZ: Herb said, “I’ve got this song that I’d like to try with you. It’d be great for your voice.” And he started singing this song to me and it goes, (singing) “If you’re feelin’ sad and lonely, there’s a service I can render…” And I looked at him and I said, “You must be kidding.” I mean, I’m a rock ‘n’ roller, and this kind of song to me was something that a mature person would be singing — like a Sinatra!

HERB ALPERT: I said, “Try learning it pretty much the way I’m singing it.” I didn’t want to take away his inspiration or his creativity, but I said, “Yeah, learn it in this kind of way.” Because I had a whole concept of what to put behind it.

CHRIS MONTEZ: I didn’t want to get classified in that genre of music, because I thought, “I’m still a rock ’n’ roller.” But I went along with it.

HERB ALPERT: He did. He learned it that way. And I got together with, I think it was — well, it was Pete Jolly. The great jazz musician was playing piano. Julius Wechter was on vibes. And I don’t really remember the bass player or the drummer. I think the drummer was Nick Ceroli, the drummer that played with the Tijuana Brass. It was either Nick or Hal Blaine. I’m not sure. We recorded it at Gold Star Recorders. I think there was a track and then Chris overdubbed his voice.

CHRIS MONTEZ: He was standing next to me to help me get this song across in the studio. I have Herb Alpert standing next to me, whispering, and he’s helping me vocalize this. He’s standing next to me, and he’s saying “Okay, that’s good Chris, yeah, okay.”

HERB ALPERT: That sounds like me. It sounds like I was right in the booth with Chris and doing that. I don’t think Call Me was Chris’s natural instinct of a way of performing. But I was amazed.

CHRIS MONTEZ: And then he says, “Great, great cut. I’ll take care of it from here.” And he hit glasses and got all these voices in the background to sound like a live recording.

HERB ALPERT: There was a record called (I’m In with) The In-Crowd, which was an instrumental. (The Ramsey Lewis Trio’s jazzy take on the Dobie Gray hit, recorded live at the Bohemian Caverns nightclub in Washington, D.C., was released in June 1965 and reached number 5 on Billboard’s Hot 100 on October 9.) I always gravitated towards that really natural feeling opposed to a record that’s really clinical and so sanitized that it doesn’t have a heartbeat. I like that little spillover and then the feeling of it — the spontaneity of it happening on the spot.

CHRIS MONTEZ: So it was Herb Alpert doing that. And he changed my whole sound.

Click image to hear “Call Me”

HERB ALPERT: We added some hand claps and that was it. And then I remember hearing the record when it was finished and I thought to myself, “Wow. This is pretty close to what I was hearing when I originally thought of the idea.” And of course, being the “A” of A&M Records, I said, “Sell this thing. Promote it. Do a good job. This is a good artist. He deserves it.”

CHRIS MONTEZ: And after we did that recording, it started getting played. And so all of a sudden, I’m on the scene again.

Call Me, written by Tony Hatch and originally recorded by Petula Clark, was released in November 1965, spent ten weeks in Billboard’s Hot 100 and nineteen weeks on the Adult Contemporary Chart, reaching #2 in March 1966.

HERB ALPERT: The reaction to Call Me was pretty darn good, right from the start.

CHRIS MONTEZ: It was funny, when Call Me came out, a lot of these disc jockeys were wondering if this was the same Chris Montez they heard with Let’s Dance and Some Kinda Fun. And a lot of them thought I was a female singer by the name of Chris Montez. They thought I was a woman! Yes, they thought I was a lady singer. In fact, I got fan mail from a couple guys that said, “Miss Montez, we love your music, and we love your songs.” And I laughed to myself, because I said, “I’m the same Chris Montez!”

HERB ALPERT: He has a very distinct voice. A lot of people, when they first heard the Call Me record, they didn’t know if he was man, woman or beast. (laughing)

CHRIS MONTEZ: When they realized it was me, they couldn’t believe it. And they started playing my stuff. They loved the new transition. And here, it’s in the middle of Beatlemania, because in ’66, that was where it was happening. And it’s funny, I was probably one of the few artists that got on the charts even with all this rock ’n’ roll and British music going on in America.

HERB ALPERT: This was a completely different Chris Montez than the record he had a hit with years back, but I think that was a good part of it. People were willing to play it based on the merit of its strength. It was a good record. It had those elements that made it sound really good on the radio.

CHRIS MONTEZ: And all of a sudden, I’m involved with doing these standards. You know like Fly Me to the Moon, The Shadow of Your Smile. And all of a sudden, I forgot about my rock ’n’ roll, because when I went on the road again, these are the songs I was singing. I never sang Let’s Dance or Some Kinda Fun, or any of those ballads again. I didn’t want to. Yeah, I guess it was becoming a lounge sound, for lounge lizards. It was becoming this kind of sexy music. I got a lot of mail from people saying, “Oh, I met my girlfriend singing that song, and I got married this and that.” So it became a whole different format for me.

A reunion, decades later

HERB ALPERT: Like I say, he’s very musical and he’s very adaptable, and it was one of those things that really worked out well. Because even to this day, when I hear that record, it works. A good song is a good song. But it was the performance, the song, and the arrangement that really put it together.

CHRIS MONTEZ: I think everything happens for a reason, and I think it was meant for me to meet Herb. If it wasn’t for him, I wouldn’t have ever gotten to this genre of music which I love now. Herb Alpert was the best, he was he was hip, he was mellow, he knew what he wanted to do.

HERB ALPERT: The only great artists are honest artists, ones who can express themselves in an honest way. just the way it comes out. And to hear him sing, that’s the way it’s gonna sound. He didn’t affect that sound. That’s Chris’s sound. I think Chris has a niche for what he’s done and it’s beautiful. It’s his own thing, he didn’t copy anyone, and I think it’s beautiful. He should be very proud. I’m proud of him.

ANDREW LOOG OLDHAM: Chris is on the list of people who had not even a national anthem but had an international anthem. And if you’re dealing with aware people, you don’t get “Chris who?” It’s “Chris Montez, Let’s Dance.” And he was very lucky because he had it again when he was at A&M. Two international or national anthems with Call Me. That’s actually a career.

Herb Alpert is now on tour with the Tijuana Brass.

Catch up with Chris Montez at ChrisMontez.com.

More at BurtKearns.com

© 2019, 2026 by Jeff Abraham and Burt Kearns

Deborah Gail Stone was a beautiful and talented California girl, an excellent student and star athlete in track and swimming at Santa Ana High School. In June 1974, she was poised to blossom into adulthood. She turned eighteen and graduated with top honors and that year’s Principal’s Award for academic excellence. In the fall, she’d travel seventeen hundred miles from home to begin her freshman year at Iowa State University. Until then, she’d be residing in “The Happiest Place on Earth,” because shortly before her birthday she’d landed a job in Disneyland.

Petite, blonde, and from a devout Christian family, Deborah was the perfect match for the squeaky-clean theme park. Soon after she arrived for training, her superiors saw her as ideal for the role of hostess for a brand-new attraction that was about to replace the Carousel of Progress located in Tomorrowland. America Sings would feature a cast of audio animatronic animals warbling songs from America’s musical history. Although the show didn’t really fit into Tomorrowland’s theme, which was an optimistic look into the future, America Sings was designed in anticipation of America’s Bicentennial. The twenty-four-minute program featured the voices of Burl Ives as Eagle Sam and Sam Edwards (who voiced the adult Thumper in the Disney film Bambi) as Ollie Owl, and made use of the Carousel building’s unique layout.

The large circular structure contained an outer ring of six theaters, connected by divider walls that revolved mechanically around six fixed stages about every four minutes. Two of the theaters were used for loading and unloading the guests. The walls revolved clockwise for the Carousel of Progress. For America Sings, they’d turn in the opposite direction.

As the theaters rotated, each theater audience would experience each song in sequence. Between each act, the lights blacked out, and the theater was illuminated with flashing stars. During the rotations, Sam sang about the next era the audience was about to enter, reprising the chorus of “Yankee Doodle.”

America Sings opened to the public on Saturday, June 29, 1974. Debbie worked the prime evening shift, standing at the left of each stage, using a microphone to welcome and say goodbye to the guests during every turn. On July 8, the ride had been in operation for just over a week, and the rotating theaters, animatronics, and hostesses were working in precision. This was also a very exciting and special day for Debbie Stone.

Her boyfriend asked her to marry him, and before she began her shift, she called her parents to ask their permission. Permission was granted. Deborah had so much to look forward to. Around 11:00 pm, at the end of the 10:30 show, and near closing time at the park, there was another forty-five-second period in which the audience cleared out and the stage moved into position for another cycle.

Then came the scream. It was described by a guest in an adjacent theater as “a blood-curdling scream,” and the sight he saw resembled a child being pulled between the moving walls and a stationary one. That “child” was the five-foot, five-inch, one-hundred-pound Debbie Stone being pulled between two hard walls without enough space in which to fit. By the time the ride operators rushed over and the wall stopped moving, beautiful Debbie had been crushed into a bloody, shattered pulp and dismembered. No one was sure exactly how it happened—whether she was leaning in to the adjacent stage to talk to a fellow cast member, trying to jump from one stage to the other, or simply distracted.

Debbie’s parents got word of word of the tragedy a few hours later, in the middle of the night. “It was around two o’clock in the morning,” her father Bill told the Omaha City Weekly thirty years later. “It was somebody who lived in another street saying the deputy sheriffs were looking for us. Just about the time I hung up, they pulled up to the house.”

The memory was fresh as yesterday to Debbie Stone’s mother Marilyn. “I can picture the two guys that were here,” she told the Omaha reporter. “I can pretty well picture what they said and what I said. Of course, when you hear that, you go into shock. The feelings are there, but they’re dulled to a point that you really aren’t feeling anything.

“When the deputy left, my husband and I knelt down and thanked God he gave her to us for eighteen years.”

Bill Stone remembered his last conversation with Debbie. “The night of her death, she asked us if would be okay if she got married. She really got engaged that night, so she was calling to ask our permission. I think the hardest thing that I had to do during that whole thing—other than go through it—was call her fiancé in the morning to tell him.”

The America Sings attraction was closed for two days after Debbie Stone’s death while sensor lights were installed to warn the operator if someone went too close to the walls. Later, breakaway walls were constructed, in case the sensors failed. The attraction remained in operation until 1988.

The Disney corporation never memorialized its first fallen cast member anywhere in Disneyland. Her high school renamed a pool, and her friends created a scholarship award, in her honor. Although there have been more than a dozen deaths, including at least one homicide, in the world of yesterday, tomorrow, and fantasy (not to mention a number of suicide jumpers from the Disneyland Hotel and the more recent Mickey & Friends parking structure), Debbie Stone is, as of this writing, the only performing “cast member” (the term used to refer to all Disneyland employees) to have died while performing on the big stage called Disneyland in more than seventy years of operation.

Walt Disney World, the resort in Orlando, Florida, envisioned and designed by Uncle Walt, opened in 1971, five years after his death. The place encompasses four theme parks and 43 square miles, as opposed to Disneyland’s 500 acres and two parks (the Disneyland Resort also includes California Adventure theme park). As might be expected due to its size (and the addition of “Florida” to the equation), the Walt Disney World death toll (which includes drownings, ride mishaps, car accidents, suicides, and an alligator attack) is much greater than Disneyland’s. Yet, like its classic cousin in Anaheim, it has so far lost one performing cast member in the line of duty, in front of an adoring crowd. That tragedy occurred thirty years after the death of Debbie Stone.

Javier Cruz

Javier Cruz, a thirty-eight-year old former park custodian, was divorced, the father of two children, and living with his mother at the Mystic Pointe apartments not far from the resort. On the afternoon of Wednesday, February 11, 2004, he was dressed as Mickey Mouse’s dog, Pluto, and participating in the Share a Dream Come True Parade, a spectacular display of moving floats, giant snow globes, and costumed characters that worked its way from Splash Mountain toward Main Street, USA.

Javier was passing through the backstage gate into view of the crowds that lined the road between Frontierland and Adventureland when he stumbled. Before he could raise his front paws and get out the way, he was run over and crushed to death by a three-section, three-ton Princess float.

Disney workers needed a forklift to raise the float and peel off Javier. Megan Long, who played Winnie the Pooh at the park, said the bulky headpieces worn by the character actors made it difficult to navigate around the floats. “Sometimes, it’s tough to see when the sun is glaring right on you,” she told the Orlando Sentinel.

The Disney corporation paid dearly for the death of Javier Cruz. It was fined $6,300.

**

A second death of a performer onstage in Disney World took place five years later. Comic actor Mark Priest died on August 10, 2009, four days after he slipped and hit his head in the middle of a mock sword fight that was part of an interactive show called “Captain Jack’s Pirate Tutorial” in Disney World’s Magic Kingdom. He was forty-seven.

From The Show Won’t Go On: The Most Shocking, Bizarre, and Historic Deaths of Performers Onstage, by Jeff Abraham and Burt Kearns, published by Chicago Review Press, on sale at Amazon.com