You might think that the pin-up models of yesteryear had the entire world at their feet.
They were among the most beautiful and glamorous people on the planet, after all.
But underneath those seductive smiles, you'll often find some incredibly tragic stories.
Hedy Lamarr was born in 1914 as Hedwig Kiesler. From a young age, her scientific mind was
encouraged by her father, while her love of the arts was encouraged by her concert pianist mother.
When she was 18, she appeared in her birthday suit in the controversial film Ecstasy. That got the
attention of the man she would marry, Austrian arms dealer Fritz Mandl . But she was miserable
in that marriage, so she fled, first to Paris, and then to the United States. A chance meeting
with MGM Studios' Louis B. Mayer kicked off her career, but she wanted more, as she famously said,
"Any girl can be glamorous. All you have to do is stand still and look stupid."
Lamarr then branched out. She convinced Howard Hughes that airplane wings should be angled
backwards, and she invented a guidance system for torpedoes. Unfortunately,
they were inventions that she never got recognition or recompense for during her lifetime,
even though it laid the groundwork for the WiFi technology that we use today.
"Bluetooth is probably the most purely similar to what Hedy Lamarr invented, and WiFi, too."
By 1958, her career was in a downward spiral, and by 1966,
she was a frequent tabloid headline. She died in 2000, 85 years old and a recluse.
Upon Bettie Page's passing in 2008, The New York Times called her the "Queen of Pinups."
She was 85 years old at the time of her death, and even though her image had seen something of
a resurgence in popularity, her star had faded long ago, in 1957 to be precise. That's when,
at the pinnacle of her career, she vanished from the public eye.
Not too many knew what happened to Page in the decades that she was out of the limelight.
Letters between her and her sister Goldie shed light on her problems, as she described breakdowns
and symptoms of schizophrenia. She also made the occasional headline for violent outbursts.
She struggled with arthritis, she was committed several times, and in 1972,
she attacked her landlord with a knife. She also had weight issues, which were likely partly caused
by her antipsychotic medications. And she struggled with the reality of getting older,
and the shame she felt for being a pin-up girl. That's no wonder, as she claimed that her father
had molested her and her sisters. Later in life she refused to be photographed, as she declared,
"I want to be remembered as I was when I was young and in my golden times."
It's a popular myth of pop culture lore that blonde bombshell Jayne Mansfield
was decapitated in a terrible traffic accident, but that's not quite how it actually went down.
The story about the beheading came about after reporters caught a glimpse of her wig,
which had been thrown from the car upon impact with the back of an 18-wheeler.
The cause of the accident was a mosquito-spray truck that covered everything in a blurry fog.
Undertaker Jim Roberts dismissed the myth when he told The New York Times in 1997,
"Her head was attached as much as mine is."
Roberts also lamented the way that public perception gets so much of Mansfield wrong,
as he noted that she was a devoted mother who couldn't bear to be away
from her children. And on the night she was killed, her children were with her. Sitting
in the back seat were 8-year-old Mickey Jr., 6-year-old Zoltan, and 3-year-old Mariska.
That youngest one is Mariska Hargitay, who would grow up to become the star of Law & Order: SVU.
In 2018, Hargitay talked about her famous mother with People Magazine by noting,
"The way I've lived with loss is to lean into it. As the saying goes,
the only way out is through [...] She's with me still."
You might not know the name Margarita Carmen Cansino, but chances are you've
heard of the woman she grew up to be: Rita Hayworth. She was born in 1918, and by 1931,
her down-on-his-luck father decided to dye her hair, accent her "Latin" features,
and teach her to dance and perform. Meanwhile, the mental and physical abuse remained off-stage.
"Gilda, are you decent?"
"Me?"
"Ha! God, I love it."
In 1937, Hayworth married oilman Eddie Judson. He insisted that she get electrolysis to change her
hairline, dye her hair, and sleep with Columbia Studio executives in exchange for priority
treatment, though she refused. After divorcing Judson, she then married filmmaker Orson Welles,
but he left her while she was pregnant to hook up with heiress Gloria Vanderbilt.
Her next marriage, to Prince Aly Khan, who'd already been married when they met,
would tarnish her image forever. In 1953, she married a fourth time, to actor Dick Haymes,
nicknamed "Mr. Evil." They divorced in 1955, and soon after, she started having trouble remembering
her lines. She was forced to shoot her movies one line at a time, as she then found her career
to be essentially over. While friends and family blamed alcoholism, the truth was very different,
as she was diagnosed with Alzheimer's. She died seven years later, at the age of 68.
It was Veronica Lake's blonde hair and distinctive style that made her popular with World War II GIs.
In the 1940s, she was at the height of her popularity as a pin-up and actress,
but by the 70s, she'd overseen the ghost-writing of a memoir that recounted her fall. And what
a long, hard fall it was. In the early 60s, she was discovered working in New
York as a cocktail lounge waitress. She denied that she'd fallen on hard times,
and insisted that she'd gotten out of Hollywood of her own accord. She was quoted as saying,
"When it became clear to me that the only way to survive was to get out, I left."
Survival was a struggle. When The Hollywood Reporter columnist Sue Cameron interviewed Lake
around the publishing of her tell-all book, she found a woman who was little more than a shell of
her former self. Diagnosed with schizophrenia as a child, she'd reportedly turned to self-medicating
with alcohol. The final insult came when she was given a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame,
and no one showed up. When she died of hepatitis in 1973 at the age of 51, she had nothing left.
Her ashes remained at a funeral home until 1976, when a friend paid $200 for the home
to ship them to her so that she could honor Lake's request of spreading them in the waters off Miami.
"I think rather than a sex symbol, I was a sex zombie."
"What a strange phrase. Sounds like a drink made with an oyster."
Lana Turner was famous for her on-screen portrayals of the blonde femme fatale,
and in a weird twist of fate, she became one in real life as well. She'd had a long-standing
association with the mob. When she was younger, her father was a bootlegger who became the victim
of a gangland execution. But that didn't stop her from getting involved with a mob enforcer
named Johnny Stompanato. Things got ugly when she was filming a movie with Sean Connery.
After Stompanato watched them film a scene that included a steamy embrace,
he pulled a gun on Connery, who reportedly punched him in the face.
When Turner decided to end her relationship with Stompanato once and for all,
things turned deadly. Her 13-year-old daughter Cheryl was home when the confrontation happened.
Cheryl stabbed and killed Stompanato, and a trial declared the killing a justifiable
homicide. Turner then continued to work in high-profile projects,
including the popular primetime soap opera Falcon Crest. She died in 1995 at the age of 74.
"I'm just full of life, with total gratitude."
Everyone knew her as Gypsy Rose Lee, but she was born Rose Louise Hovick, and known as Louise to
her family. It's entirely possible that she wouldn't have had a career on stage at all
if it weren't for her mother, also named Rose. Despite the fact that Rose regularly condemned
her daughter as talentless "excess baggage," Louise was made to sing and dance for her dinner.
Louise's younger sister June was about 16 years old when she decided she'd had enough of their
mother and ran off, leaving Louise to fend for herself. By then, it was the 1930s and
the vaudeville stage they'd relied on was fading away. So Rose started booking her daughter into
burlesque theaters and telling her that if she wanted to make a living, she'd better get
started taking her clothes off. She was only 17. Rebranded as Gypsy Rose Lee, she skyrocketed to
fame as a stripper. But her relationship with her mother remained complicated — so complicated that
nobody's quite sure which of her claims were fact and which were fiction. She died at the age of 59,
and when she was diagnosed with cancer, she called it, quote, "a present from Mother."
Marilyn Miller grew up as part of a travelling theater act that captivated America.
Then she headed to Broadway, became a part of the Ziegfeld Follies,
and swore to never let a man run her life the way that her stepfather had.
While she was with the Ziegfeld Follies, she fell madly in love with her co-star,
Frank Carter. They eloped, and by all accounts it was a match made in heaven. Carter had planned on
giving her a car for their first anniversary, but while driving that car home, he crashed and died.
Miller spiraled into a deep depression, even as she continued to perform. She soon spiraled
off into another extreme: hedonistic and demanding at work, scandalous about town.
That scandal rose to new levels when news broke that she was engaged to Jack Pickford,
who had just lost his wife Olive Thomas under a suspicious set of circumstances.
Miller and Pickford's marriage was filled with infidelity, alcohol, and violent outbursts,
ending in divorce in 1927. Her career survived and she signed with Warner Brothers, but in 1936,
her ever-worsening sinusitis became unbearable.
After chasing a miracle cure, she fell into a coma and died. She was only 37.
Ruth Etting's star rose quickly. She was one of the biggest names of the Jazz Age, and it looked
like she was going to get even bigger, until a romantic scandal hit the headlines. In 1938,
The New York Times was reporting on Etting's testimony against her former husband, Moe Snyder.
She'd been visiting her pianist Myrl Alderman at his home when Snyder forced his way in, started
waving around a gun, and then shot Alderman twice. Etting had been prepared for it. She'd given
Snyder half her earnings in their divorce, but testified that he'd still threatened to kill her.
At the time, Etting had been planning on marrying Alderman once her divorce was final, but Snyder
wasn't the only one in the way. While they were going through the trial over the shooting,
she was handed a so-called "love theft suit" from Alderman's ex-wife, who was demanding $150,000 for
getting in the way of their reconciliation. This story at least has a happy ending,
as Etting and Alderman did end up married, and by all accounts it was a long and happy union.
By the time she was 22 years old, Jean Harlow was already one of the most famous women in the world.
At first, she was known for her looks, but after she met an MGM executive named Paul Bern,
she got a chance to be a serious actress. Their relationship was more than business,
as they got married in 1932, but it was a short-lived union. Just two months after the
wedding, household staff discovered his body. The cause of death was a self-inflicted gunshot wound.
MGM's fixers tried to put a stop to all the rumors and release a story of their own,
but they couldn't stop everything. As it turned out, Harlow was Bern's other wife. He'd also been
married to Dorothy Millette, an actress who'd been committed to an East Coast sanitarium before Bern
had headed to California. Upon hearing the news of his death, Millette jumped off of a riverboat
in San Francisco, and her body was recovered shortly thereafter. Harlow remarried and divorced,
but something even more devastating than failed relationships was happening behind the scenes.
In 1937, she was filming the movie Saratoga when she fainted. She had flu symptoms that
worsened to include blindness, and less than a week later, she died of kidney failure.