Revisiting Peg Entwistle’s Life and Death: Myth vs. Reality in Netflix’s “Hollywood”
May 21, 2020 § 2 Comments
Peg Entwistle in 1932/Courtesy Bruce Torrence
Filming “Peg Entwistle’s Last Walk
Jeremy Pope, Darren Criss and Laura Harrier in “Hollywood”
Soon after Netflix released the new Ryan Murphy-Ian Brennan miniseries “Hollywood,” I heard from Chris Yogerst, a University of Wisconsin film professor who has corresponded with me off and on since 2010, that Peg Entwistle’s story was a major theme. Naturally, I got right on it.
Since releasing my short film “Peg Entwistle’s Last Walk,” my documentary “Under the Hollywood Sign” in 2009 and my book of essays (Peg Entwistle and The Hollywood Sign) in 2013, a number of Peg-related projects have been announced, such as this one ://underthehollywoodsign.wordpress.com/2014/10/05/the-newly-announced-peg-entwistle-biopic/ , but “Hollywood” is the first major one to be completed. It’s also the most imaginative, using Peg’s story not as a grim cautionary tale but the departure point for a wildly revisionist Hollywood history.
At the outset of “Hollywood,” a script about Peg is greenlit by the Paramount-like Ace Studios. The screenwriter, Archie Coleman (Jeremy Pope) is predictably male but also black, and his struggle to make it in Hollywood gives him empathy for Peg’s tragic story. Fortunately for Archie, his champions at Ace Studios are self-professed outsiders: the director Raymond Ainsley (Darren Criss), though passing for white, is half-Filipino, and the acting head of production Avis Amberg (Patti Lupone) is a former silent film star whose acting career was cut short by her apparent Jewishness.
Though the Peg Entwistle project begins as a straightforward biopic featuring a blonde, white starlet, Avis agrees to cast Claire Wood (Samira Weaving), a Dorothy Dandridge-like actress whose screen test blows away the competition, in the lead. Thus Peg becomes Meg, and the film changes from a tragedy to a triumph of interracial romance and career redemption. If that weren’t enough, a major subplot involves Archie’s romance with the young Rock Hudson, and the couple soon smash racial and sexual barriers by walking the red carpet hand-in-hand at the Oscars. When Anna May Wong (Michelle Krusiec) becomes the first Asian to win an Academy Award, every studio-era wrong is righted, and it’s only 1948.
In short,”Hollywood” is a fantasia of racial and sexual justice. Though it’s based in fact–Rock Hudson, his manager Henry Willson (Jim Parsons) and the gas station/prostitution ring all existed–the series becomes increasingly fantastical as it careens toward a universal happy ending. This revisionism actually works for Peg Entwistle’s story, which–stripped of her Depression Era suicide–becomes a tale of movie stardom and true love.
Unfortunately, Ryan and Brennan can’t let go of the biggest myth about Peg: that the Hollywood Sign symbolized Hollywood The Industry. In fact, it didn’t even symbolize Hollywood The Place. As I’ve said many times, the Hollywoodland Sign (which is how it appeared even when “Hollywood,” is set) was a billboard for the neighborhood where it stood. What it symbolized was real estate, nothing more. If Peg Entwistle hadn’t been living in Beachwood Canyon in 1932, she would have chosen another spot from which to jump–or might not have jumped at all.
As for Peg’s drinking beforehand, it didn’t happen, not only because there were no legal alcohol or bars during the Depression but because no inebriate could have climbed Mt. Lee, let alone the ladder to the top of the H. In “Meg” this fiction does, however, give Rock Hudson something to do: in the role of bartender, he not only serves Meg a drink but tells her how to get to the Sign. The directions, it should be noted, are accurate.
For Peg Entwistle’s actual story, as well as photos and artifacts, here are links to my film, documentaries and book:
Holiday Gift Ideas From Under the Hollywood Sign
December 12, 2016 § Leave a comment
Back of the Hollywood Sign/Hope Anderson Productions
DVDs will be shipped overseas as well as domestically. Please order soon to have them arrive in time for the holidays.
Documentaries on DVD:
JIM THOMPSON, SILK KING–Remastered 2015 Version with DVD extras http://www.hopeandersonproductions.com/dvds/
THE JIM THOMPSON HOUSE AND ART COLLECTION http://www.hopeandersonproductions.com/dvds/
UNDER THE HOLLYWOOD SIGN http://www.hopeandersonproductions.com/dvds/
PEG ENTWISTLE: THE LIFE AND DEATH OF AN ACTRESS http://www.hopeandersonproductions.com/dvds/
Documentaries on Vimeo:
JIM THOMPSON, SILK KING–2015 Version with DVD extras https://vimeo.com/ondemand/silkking?utm_source=email&utm_medium=vod-vod_publish_confirmation-201408&utm_campaign=10308&email_id=dm9kX3B1Ymxpc2hfY29uZmlybWF0aW9ufGYyYjY0OTMzYjc0MTVjM2Y4ODdiY2E5ZWJjNGJmM2I0NjUwfDI1Nzc3MzE3fDE0NDI5NDU5MDV8MTAz
UNDER THE HOLLYWOOD SIGN: https://vimeo.com/ondemand/uths
PEG ENTWISTLE: THE LIFE AND DEATH OF AN ACTRESS http://vimeo.com/ondemand/17445/100467934
e-Books:
ON “BLADE RUNNER”: FOUR ESSAYS https://www.amazon.com/Blade-Runner-Four-Essays-ebook/dp/B00E8M1GW2/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1400119149&sr=1-1&keywords=on+%22blade+runner%22+by+hope+anderson
PEG ENTWISTLE AND THE HOLLYWOOD SIGN https://www.amazon.com/Entwistle-Hollywood-Sign-Hope-Anderson-ebook/dp/B00FSOGCV4/ref=sr_1_sc_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1400119275&sr=1-1-spell&keywords=peg+entwistle+and+the+hollywoodsign+by+hope+anderson
Among the Dead at Hollywood Forever
November 17, 2014 § Leave a comment
Hollywood Forever Cemetery 11/11/14/All photos Hope Anderson Productions
Johnny Ramone
Hattie McDaniel
Mickey Rooney’s Headstone at the Mausoleum
Heath Woodward at Tony Scott’s grave
By then it was getting dark, so my efforts to pay respects to John Huston, whose excellent autobiography An Open Book I’m reading, had to be postponed. Along the way we had picked up a couple of fellow travelers–a woman and her live wire four-year-old son. The little boy grabbed my sleeve, showed me his blankie and attached himself to our self-guided tour, saying “We need more people!” Unlike us, he didn’t mean dead ones.
The Fairbanks Memorial, burial place of Douglas Sr. and Jr.
Toto’s Memorial Statue
The Newly Announced Peg Entwistle Biopic
October 5, 2014 § Leave a comment
Still from “Peg Entwistle’s Last Walk”/Copyright 2007 and 2014, Hope Anderson Productions
When I started researching Peg Entwistle’s life for my documentary Under the Hollywood Sign in 2006, the accurate public record of her life was tiny, consisting of three or four photos, her nationality at birth (English) and her suicide from the Hollywoodland Sign in 1932. The amount of erroneous information, however, was enormous. It included her career (she was not a wannabe starlet but a successful and accomplished Broadway actress); her background (she was brought up not in England but as a naturalized American in New York and Hollywood); her motivations for suicide (which were not as much professional as existential). Among the falsehoods was the assumption that Peg’s choice of the Hollywoodland Sign was a message to the film industry. It’s a great bit of symbolism, except that the Sign was nothing more than a billboard for the Hollywoodland tract at the time. Because I knew the history of the Sign and live along the route she took, it was obvious that Peg chose the Sign for two simple reasons: it was high enough to do the job and in 1932 so isolated that no one was likely to stop her. As I progressed in my research, the misinformation kept coming. Even the date on her death certificate was wrong–it appears as September 18th, the date her body was discovered. But because Peg went to the Sign on the evening of September 16th and could not have survived her fall for long, the date of her death was clearly September 16th.
Many of the lies about Peg came straight from Kenneth Anger’s Hollywood Babylon , whose chapter on her tragic end was accepted as fact until I set about correcting it. I identified the book’s half-nude portrait of Peg as a fake, which should have been obvious since the only feature the model shared with Peg was her platinum blond bob, a ubiquitous hairstyle in Hollywood at the time. Yet everyone, including her family, had taken Anger’s word for it.
As a way of telling Peg’s story, I made a short feature film about her fateful climb to the Sign called Peg Entwistle’s Last Walk, incorporating the footage into my documentary Under the Hollywood Sign. After I put the short on YouTube in 2007, it caught the attention of tens of thousands of viewers, including James Zeruk, Jr., who was researching her life for a book. James helped me to find Peg’s family, who generously made available a trove of playbills, photographs and documents about her life. Most importantly, I was able to interview Peg’s half-brother, Milt Entwistle, then 92 and the only living person with direct memory of her.
Under the Hollywood Signwas released in 2009. Peg Entwistle’s Last Walk remained on YouTube until this year, when I pulled it off to release it on DVD and Vimeo, along with her biography, as Peg Entwistle: The Life and Death of An Actress. http://hopeandersonproductions.com/?page_id=3361
Last year I published an ebook consisting of Entwistle family photos, the script of the biographical documentary and the production diary of Peg Entwistle’s Last Walk. http://www.amazon.com/Peg-Entwistle-The-Hollywood-Sign-ebook/dp/B00FSOGCV4
Zeruk’s book Peg Entwistle and the Hollywood Sign Suicide was also published last year.
Biopics can’t be entirely invented, and I can’t imagine whose work Tony Kaye will draw on for his script if not mine and James Zeruk’s. Because alternative secondary sources don’t exist and many of the primary sources can only be found in the Entwistle family’s archive, I await Kaye’s film, assuming it gets made, with considerable interest.
“Peg Entwistle: The Life and Death of An Actress,” Now Available for Sale or Rent on Vimeo
July 10, 2014 § Leave a comment
My new release consists of two short films: a biographical documentary featuring interviews with Peg Entwistle’s surviving family, as well as previously unpublished photos and artifacts; and a silent black-and-white feature about her fateful walk to the Hollywood Sign in 1932. It’s available as a download for the first time; $4 to rent; $9 to buy.
Here’s the trailer:
For more about Peg Entwistle, my ebook Peg Entwistle and The Hollywood Sign is available at Amazon and other ebook sellers:
http://www.amazon.com/Entwistle-Hollywood-Sign-Hope-Anderson-ebook/dp/B00FSOGCV4/ref=sr_1_2?s=digital-text&ie=UTF8&qid=1405712489&sr=1-2&keywords=peg+entwistle
Now Available on DVD: “Peg Entwistle: The Life and Death of An Actress”
December 24, 2013 § Leave a comment
DVD Cover Design Copyright Hope Anderson Productions, 2013
My two short documentaries on Peg Entwistle are available on a new DVD for $12. The first,”Peg Entwistle: A Life,” is a biography featuring interviews with family members, as well as previously unpublished photos and artifacts. The second, “Last Walk,” is a black-and-white short feature about her fateful walk to the Hollywoodland Sign in 1932. You can order it at http://hopeandersonproductions.com/?page_id=3361 or rent it at http://vimeo.com/ondemand/17445/100467934
For more about Peg Entwistle, see my ebook Peg Entwistle and The Hollywood Sign http://www.amazon.com/Entwistle-Hollywood-Sign-Hope-Anderson-ebook/dp/B00FSOGCV4/ref=sr_1_2?s=digital-text&ie=UTF8&qid=1405712489&sr=1-2&keywords=peg+entwistle
Peg Entwistle’s Childhood Home in London
October 12, 2013 § Leave a comment
Peg Entwistle’s House 10/12/13/Hope Anderson Productions
Yesterday I visited the house in Barons Court where the actress Peg Entwistle lived from soon after her birth in 1908 until she immigrated to the United States with her father at the age of six. The house, # 53, is at right. Many thanks to Heath Woodward, whose forthcoming play “Goodnight September” tells Peg’s story, for taking me there.
Beachwood Canyon in the 1940 Census, Part IV: Familiar Names and Addresses
June 7, 2012 § 2 Comments
The 1940 Census is numbered sequentially only to a point; it jumps from street to street on any given page, making the search for specific names and addresses time-consuming and difficult. Fortunately, I’ve been able to locate some of the notable Beachwooders who appear in my documentary “Under the Hollywood Sign.”
First among them is Charles Entwistle. After the actress Peg Entwistle’s suicide off the Sign in 1932, her adoptive parents–her paternal Uncle Charles and his wife Jane–remained in their house, which still stands, at 2428 N. Beachwood Drive. In 1940, Charles was 75; Jane was 55. Both were retired from their acting careers, listing no occupation or income on the Census. The other resident of the house was their younger nephew Robert Entwistle. At 21, he was working as a bookkeeper in a bank and earning $898 annually, $14,758 in today’s terms. His older brother Milt was not listed; at 23 he had left the household, possibly for the Navy, in which he served during WWII.
The Entwistle Family, line 12/All photos courtesy http://www.the1940census.com
A half-mile southwest of the Entwistles lived the Theosophists Henry Hotchenor, aged 58, and his wife Marie, aged 69, at 6139 Temple Hill Drive. Marie Russak Hotchenor, the architect of Moorcrest, also designed their Moorish-Spanish stucco house, which stands directly across the street from Moorcrest. Interestingly, Henry listed his occupation as “manager of own real estate,” while Marie claimed no occupation.
The Hotchenors, line 60
Finally Albert Kothe, caretaker of the Hollywood Sign and Wolf’s Lair, appears at the address where he lived from the mid-1920s until about 1960, when his dwelling was torn down: 3200 N. Beachwood Drive. His home, a foreman’s cabin dating from the days when Hollywoodland’s stone masons lived in tents on the property (1923-1925)–was located at the northern edge of Beachwood Drive, where the dirt road to Sunset Ranch begins. The certainty of his address should lay to rest the enduring myth that Kothe “lived in a shack behind the Hollywood Sign.” In the Census, Kothe listed his occupation as laborer for a private employer; he earned $800 a year ($13,148 today).
Albert Kothe, line 76
Background information about the Entwistles, Hotechenors and Mr. Kothe can be found in previous posts.
Hollywood Sign Truth and Fiction, Part II: Leo Braudy’s Book
September 19, 2011 § 6 Comments
Photo by Hope Anderson Productions
Leo Braudy is a USC professor and pop culture critic whose latest book, The Hollywood Sign (Yale University Press, 2011) is an everything-but-the-kitchen-sink look at Hollywood–the Sign, the place and the industry–as well as the culture at large. In attempting to cram huge swaths of Los Angeles’ history into 192 pages, Braudy turns his hummingbird-like attention to topics ranging from A (the Academy Awards) to Z (the Zoot Suit Riots), touching upon each so briefly that the result is less a book than a dizzying exercise in name-dropping. (The index lists 24 entries under “A” alone, including Fatty Arbuckle, Ansel Adams, Gene Autry and Angelyne.) For the reader, The Hollywood Sign is less exhaustive than exhausting: if you’ve ever wanted a book to unite Marcel Duchamp, “101 Dalmations” and Laura Ingalls Wilder, this one’s for you.
In the midst of this pop-culture stew, Braudy does one thing brilliantly: deconstructing the Hollywood Sign. For all the ink that has been spilled over the Sign’s meaning and appeal, no one has improved upon his analysis:
Its essence is almost entirely abstract, at once the quintessence and the mockery of the science of signs itself….It isn’t an image that looks like or refers to something called Hollywood; it is the name itself. Yet people everywhere recognize it as the symbol of whatever “Hollywood” might be–with whatever ambiguity is part of that meaning.
Braudy also emphasizes the Sign’s unique interactive quality, in which its admirers become the admired:
Seeing the sign lets you know you are in Hollywood, that special place. Photographing it enhances your own sense of identity….Instead of looking at the Liberty Bell or the Lincoln Memorial and appreciating their importance and the history they represent, we look at the Hollywood Sign and it looks back at us, enlarging our sense of our prestige by its symbolic aura.
Nevertheless, Braudy makes more than his fair share of factual errors. Despite residing in Los Angeles, he seems not to have spent much time in the Hollywood Sign’s vicinity, confusing Mulholland Highway with Mulholland Drive and asserting that Hollywoodland’s staircases “were less functional than picturesque” as “few of the new inhabitants would be traipsing up and down” because they owned automobiles. (In fact, Hollywoodland residents have always used the stairs to get from their homes to Beachwood Village, which has a market and bus stop. In the early days of one-car households, people had to walk; now they do so for convenience and exercise.)
More serious are the mistakes he makes about Albert Kothe, the Sign’s caretaker, and Peg Entwistle, the Sign’s only suicide. In repeating the fiction that Kothe “lived in a shack behind the first ‘L’,” Braudy concocts a full-fledged conspiracy theory about Peg’s death.
And where, while [her jump from the Sign] was going on, was Albert Kothe…..Could Peg Entwistle have been killed elsewhere and the scene at the sign staged?
This astonishing question comes on the heels of Braudy’s assertion that Peg couldn’t have climbed to the Sign due to its distance from her house (which he puts at “three or four miles,” though the route she took was closer to two) and steepness, her lack of athletic clothing and, most bizarrely, her “trudging her way on foot in an area designed only for cars.”* Yet Braudy apparently thinks it’s possible that someone (who?) killed Peg (why?) and transported her body (how?) up to the Hollywoodland Sign, steep grade and lack of running shoes notwithstanding.
The murder theory is ludicrous; beyond that, it is hurtful to Peg Entwistle’s surviving family. But it probably will be treated as fact, thanks to Braudy’s reputation and the power of the Internet. It’s discouraging that despite my efforts and those of James Zeruk, Jr. (whose biography on Peg is nearing publication), the lies about Peg Entwistle keep coming.
Disclosure: I briefly met Leo Braudy at a reading soon after the publication of his book. When I asked if he had heard of me or my documentary, “Under the Hollywood Sign,” he said no. In light of the above, I believe him.
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*Beyond the fact that Peg Entwistle was an athletic 24-year-old, it should be remembered that most Americans in 1932 routinely walked long distances in regular shoes.
Related articles:
https://underthehollywoodsign.wordpress.com/2009/05/19/peg-entwistles-powers-of-persuasion/
Hollywood Sign Truth and Fiction, Part I
September 6, 2011 § 3 Comments
The Hollywood Sign During Its Reconstruction in 1978/Courtesy Bruce Torrence
For a monument popularly known as “our Eiffel Tower,” the Hollywood Sign is the object of a surprising amount of misinformation, as well as outright lies. The Internet, of course, has been a great transmitter of these untruths. I’m not just talking about random erroneous posts, such as some of those by viewers of my YouTube channel, but official sources. For example, Chris Baumgart, Chairman of the Hollywood Sign Trust, told me in our 2006 interview that the current Hollywood Sign was a replica of the old one in every aspect but one–the height of the letters, which he said were five feet shorter than the originals. Though it sounded logical, it wasn’t true. My later interview with Raiden Peterson, who supervised the Sign’s reconstruction for Pacific Outdoor Electric, confirmed that the new letters were exact replicas of the old, standing 45 feet. “I measured every piece,” Peterson said.
For the rest of this article, please see my new eBook, “Peg Entwistle and The Hollywood Sign,” which will be available from online booksellers in September 2013.
Related articles:
Under the Hollywood Sign 
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