December 14, 1944: Lupe Vélez commits suicide, with an overdose of sleeping pills. The Mexican film star was 36.
María Guadalupe Villalobos Vélez was born on July 18, 1908 in San Luis Potosí, Mexico. At the age of 13, her parents sent her to a school in Texas to learn English and dance. By 1926, La Niña Lupe was appearing in silent films in Hollywood, as spirited Latin women. In spite of her accent, she had no trouble making the transition to talking pictures.
She also had no trouble finding boyfriends, having affairs with actors Charlie Chaplin, Tom Mix, Clark Gable, Gary Cooper, John Gilbert and Errol Flynn; novelist Erich Maria Remarque; and former Heavyweight Champions Jack Johnson and Jack Dempsey. She was briefly married to Olympic swimmer turned Tarzan actor Johnny Weissmuller.
In 1934, she appeared in Hollywood Party, starring the comedy team of Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy, Jimmy Durante, the Three Stooges, and, in a partly animated sequence, Mickey Mouse, voiced by Walt Disney himself. Hardy directed.
In 1939, she starred in The Girl from Mexico, as Carmelita Fuentes, a singer, who marries radio man Denny Lindsay, played by Donald Woods. This earned Vélez the nickname "Mexican Spitfire," and it resulted in a series of movies with Vélez as Carmelita Lindsay: Mexican Spitfire and Mexican Spitfire Out West in 1940; The Mexican Spitfire's Baby in 1941; Mexican Spitfire at Sea, Mexican Spitfire Sees a Ghost and Mexican Spitfire's Elephant in 1942; and Mexican Spitfire's Blessed Event in 1943.
If the titles "Baby" and "Blessed Event" confuse you, here goes: In the former, the Lindsays are set to adopt a war orphan, but she turns out to be a grown woman who was orphaned in World War I; in the latter, it's Carmelita's cat that has had kittens, but one thing leads to another, and she has to pretend to have had a baby. In neither film did she have a baby.
But in real life, in 1943, she dated Austrian actor Harald Maresch, whose stage name was Harald Ramond. It has been rumored that she also re-ignited her affair with Gary Cooper. She found herself pregnant, and didn't know which man was the father. She announced her engagement to Ramond, then broke it off, and kicked him out of her house.
As it turned out, while she wasn't too Catholic to fool around outside of marriage (including with married men) or to commit suicide, it appears she was too Catholic to have a child out of wedlock, or to have an abortion.
On the evening of December 13, 1944, Vélez dined with two friends, the silent-film star Estelle Taylor (ex-wife of one of her ex-boyfriends, Jack Dempsey) and Venita Oakie (then married to actor Jack Oakie). In the early morning hours of December 14, Vélez retired to her bedroom, where she consumed 75 Seconal pills and a glass of brandy. Her secretary, Beulah Kinder, said that she found the actress's body on her bed later that morning.
A suicide note, addressed to Harald Ramond, was found nearby. It read:
On the back of the note, Vélez wrote:
It has been reported many times, including on the pilot episode of the sitcom Frasier in 1993, that she drowned herself by sticking her head in a toilet bowl. It wasn't true. And yet, because she lived so long ago, before the TV era, we probably know her more for the salacious lie about her death than for the wild truths about her life.
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December 14, 1944 was a Thursday. Russian painter Vassily Kandinsky also died on this day, although much older, 77. This was also the day the film National Velvet premiered, making a star out of 12-year-old Elizabeth Taylor. I have a separate entry for this event.
Baseball was out of season. Football was in midweek. The NBA hadn't been founded yet. There was 1 game in the NHL: The Montreal Canadiens and the Toronto Maple Leafs played to a tie, 2-2 at the Montreal Forum.
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