Every once in a while, we come across a truly tragic figure for this column. It is also more often the women than the men. And, yes, this is another one of those instances. She’s another person who I’m writing about who died young. In point of fact, she killed herself, though I’m given to understand that her family questions the validity of that. I’m kind of wondering if her family thinks Rex Harrison was a murderer. Which is a thing to think about.

She allegedly got her first job because her employer felt sorry for her. He called her a “nervous $35 a week blonde” and insisted she’d never get anywhere. Still, she saved $100 and moved to Hollywood. She bounced around various studios before getting a contract at Fox. Her first credited role was in Blondes at Work, a “Torchy Blane” movie in which she was eleventh-billed. She did at least a couple of those movies. She was higher billed in movies like One Million Years B.C., Topper Returns, and I Wake Up Screaming. She also played herself in Four Jills in a Jeep, a movie I hope to get to for Camera Obscura if I can get my hands on the source material. (This is one where supporting my Patreon or Ko-fi may or may not help.) Alas, her career was on the decline in 1948, when she died at the age of 29 of a Seconal overdose.

And then we go behind the scenes. I’m afraid it does seem probable that Darryl Zanuck pushed her career because they were in a sexual relationship, but that means it’s true that her career started falling off when she broke up with him. It’s worth noting that even Darryl Zanuck wouldn’t have left her undubbed if she didn’t have the voice to carry the musical numbers she performed, so it’s hardly as though she was untalented. It’s just that, you know, old Hollywood sucked sometimes. And this seems to have been one of the times.

She was married to four men. Her first marriage was actually when she was fifteen; her mother had it annulled. Her father, who had left the family when she was very young but lived nearby, signed permission for her to marry the man again. Later in life, she began a relationship with Rex Harrison. He apparently refused to divorce his wife for her, and she killed herself. I don’t know that I believe she was murdered—and again, if they think Rex Harrison killed her, that feels unlikely to me. It does, that said, sound as though Harrison definitely tried to distance himself from her and their relationship in a way that probably damaged the investigation.

So let’s get back to the good stuff about her, because she really doesn’t deserve to be forgotten or just remembered for her unfortunate personal life. Sure, she’s got the thankless role in Topper Returns, wherein she’s the heiress whose best friend is murdered in a case of mistaken identity. Still, she does what she can with it. She toured with the USO during World War II. Apparently she traveled more than 100,000 miles during the war and was one of the only actresses who willingly visited wounded soldiers. She contracted malaria and nearly died. She was a feminist who attempted to start a girls’ football team when she was in high school. She really resented her forced nickname of “the Ping Girl,” apparently an abbreviation of “purring girl,” and fought against it. She was a popular pin-up who didn’t want to be defined by her breasts, and Gods love her for it.