Jeannette's This and That: May 2012

Tuesday, May 29, 2012

Ice Cream Blonde

For the last couple of weeks, I've been finding myself reading and Googling information about Thelma Todd, a popular actress in the 1930s...way before my time. In fact, she died around the same time both of my grandparents were born, so she was way before their time. But I didn't see her movies on TCM or AMC or where-ever other than more about her death. I'll confess: I'm a bit morbid. Certain deaths have caught my attention and Thelma Todd is my latest casualty. I've heard of her and how she died for a good number of years but was never really interested until recently. Another thing I was also fascinated with her was of my culinary interest with her Thelma Todd's Sidewalk Cafe-- I was curious to see if I could access from Google if she had a menu for it. I was reading about old Hollywood restuarants that were popular in the day and found out that Elizabeth Taylor used to have Chasen's Chili shipped over to her while she was overseas filming Cleopatra and managed to find the recipe for that. Then I thought of Thelma's cafe and went from there, her death pretty much merged into the search. Unfortunately I couldn't find any menu items from her cafe; another thing I also learned was that it closed not long after she died. The building is still there but it's now some production company office. It's also been said that it's haunted, more likely by Thelma's ghost.

Thelma died of carbon monodixed poisoning...or so it seemed. She was pretty friendly with the mob when they were ruling Las Vegas, Chicago, New York, and LA, trying to get their hand into show business when alcohol and gambling and mysterious deaths/disappearances wasn't enough for them. One popular mobster, Lucky, wanted to open a casino in her cafe (she already had two kinds of restaurants in her building, including an empty room that Lucky wanted to use and it had a few apartments, one of them was her home). Thelma objected to it, saying "over my dead body" and he was heard saying "that could be arranged" (Dude, you are a mobster, you should've been smart by not saying that in public, especially when there's people around!). Well Lucky's involvement in Thelma's death was never proven-- it was just one of the many theories surrounded her death. It's really hard to pinpoint what exactly happen to Thelma- she was cremated, so anything that's available now with the technology that could really help is no good. You can't prove anything with ashes, unfortuately but you know something...maybe they can recover a bone? Not all bones get grinded up. Not to be disgusting and to make you lose your lunch, but I recall someone telling me that after he had his wife cremated he saw a few rib bones and other bones that didn't get grinded up...so it's very possible that there's a bone in Thelma's ashes that could be used for testing; even a tooth may work as it's have it's own blood vessel pump inside. I could be wrong but at least I'm thinking! Well, anyway, I think her death case is closed.

Jean Harlow's Funeral

Clark Gable and Carole Lombard were good friends with Jean Harlow; Clark and Jean appeared in a few (or maybe just one? I'm not entirely sure right now, I'll have to look it up) movies together and, at the time of her death, Jean was with William Powell, Carole's ex-husband. The foursome used to hang out together and when Jean died of kidney failure in her early 20s it was a tough time to get over...until Carole's own death a few years later.