Peg Entwistle, Ghost of Hollywood

Her story is often told in a sort of sloppy shorthand: She went to Los Angeles to become an actress, failed, and then became desperate. But that isn’t a really accurate picture of Peg Entwistle at all. 

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff you missed in History Class from how
Stuff Works dot Com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Holly Fry and I'm Tracy V. Wilson. Uh. Today
we have a little bit of a ghost thing, but
that's very late in the thing, uh, in the story.

(00:22):
The person that we were talking about today has a
life story that is often told in what really comes
down to sort of a sloppy shorthand it goes like
this in the way you will often hear it. She
went to Los Angeles to become an actress. She failed
and then became very desperate. That is not a really
accurate picture of Pagan Whistle or her life at all. Um.

(00:43):
But her name is sort of like a touchstone name
that people will use, and people kind of know what
happened and how her life ended, but they really get
that version of her story, and it's not accurate at all.
So today we're going to talk about her life and
her career, and this will serve as a little bit
of an on ramp into our spooky Halloween topics because
there is a tiny bit of paranormal stuff at the

(01:04):
very very end. Uh. One note that I wanted to
include just in case we have any Peg aficionados among
our listeners. She went by Babs with her family, although
it is unclear how she got that nickname. Her name
was in no way Barbara, which is normally the person
that would get the nickname Babs, but we are not
using that nickname in this episode just to keep things

(01:24):
from getting confusing. So just in case there are any
Peg fans out there who are wondering why we are
not calling her that, particularly during her childhood, before she
started going by Peg after seeing a production of the
stage play Peg on My Heart as a preteen. That
is why we're just doing it for a little bit
of clarity and to keep things smoother, especially because there
are a lot of names that come up in this

(01:44):
If we can pare those down and keep it simpler,
so much the better. Also, just a heads up that
this episode includes a person taking their own life. Also
some discussion of domestic violence. If those are sensitive topics
for you, this one might be one that you skip,
which is just fine. But other than that, we were
going to get right into Peg Entwistle Peg was born
Milicent Lillian Entwistle on February nineteen o eight in Port Talbot, Whales.

(02:08):
Her parents weren't Welsh but English. Robert and Emily Entwhistle
had gone to Wales for their child's birth so that
Emily's mother, Caroline could be their midwife. After Emily and
the baby were well enough to travel again, the Whistles
made their way back home to West Kensington. In London,
the end Whistles ran a public house that served food
in alcohol, but the family also had roots in the theater.

(02:31):
Robert and his brother Charles were both actors. Robert also
designed sets, and PEG's uncle Charles, who went by Anti
as a nickname, was the more successful of the two
in this regard, both as an actor and as a manager,
working on behalf of actors and theater owners in their
business dealings, and in nineteen o six Charles Entwhistle made
his way to the US to work for producer Charles Frohman,

(02:53):
and from that point on he really had a pretty
steady stream of business and some anchor in New York.
Two years the Peg was born, Robert and Emily abruptly divorced,
and we really don't know why Robert got sole custody
of Peg, though although both sides of the family remained
very involved in her upbringing. Yeah, Emily's involvement in her

(03:14):
life was minimized as much as possible, but both Emily's
relatives and Robert's were involved in Pig's childhood and in
nineteen eleven, PEG's uncle, Charles, met an actress named Jane
Ross during a production of a play called Hobson's Choice,
and the two were married the following year and made
Jane's Santa Monica House their home together initially. When Charles

(03:35):
brought his new wife to London in nineteen to meet
his family, he also brought an offer to PEG's father, Robert.
Broadway producer Charles Frohman, who Charles and Wistle had been
working with at various points at that point, was willing
to hire Robert as a stage manager so that he
and his daughter could move to New York. There is
some confusion in the historical record about exactly when Peg

(03:56):
arrived in New York as a girl. It had long
been reported that she made her way across the Atlantic
in nineteen sixteen, and her name is on a passenger
manifest for the s S Philadelphia for nineteen sixteen, but
she was definitely already in New York as early as
nineteen thirteen, based on entries in Jane Ross's diary. On

(04:16):
July nineteen fourteen, Robert married Jane Ross's sister, Loretta. Charles
Entwhistle and Jane Ross meanwhile had moved to California to
see what the motion picture industry had to offer, and
Charles worked in a variety of jobs in California, both
in front of and behind the camera. I think his
total career he made something like fifty movies at various points.

(04:38):
But Robert was still working both off and on stage
in New York. He was acting in steady but minor roles.
He was still doing things like stage managing and handling tickets.
So he Laretta and Peg remained on the East Coast
as a sort of a side For just some historical context.
In nineteen fifteen, when the Lusitania was torpedoed by a
German U boat, one of the casualties was Charles Frohman,

(05:03):
who still employed both of the Entwhistle brothers. His company
continued after his death, and both Robert and Charles continued
their relationships with the company. And it's probably not surprising
that a child that was raised around so many theater
folks found herself drawn to the stage, and that was
exactly what happened with Peg. In nineteen seventeen, when Peg
was nine, the family had moved from home in the

(05:25):
Bronx to one on West eighty A Street, and the
closer proximity to Broadway gave her ample opportunities to visit
her father's work and watch shows as often as she
could convince some adult in the family to take her,
and she would memorize her father's old scripts from previous productions,
and then she would mount her own stagings of those
shows in the family home. PEG's brother, Milton, was born

(05:47):
on September nineteen seventeen, and Loretta was pregnant again a
year later. This expanding family caused Robert to rethink his
life in the theater. He had never been particularly passionate
about it. He had just sort of all and into it,
and it was becoming less and less stable as a business.
So after finishing up a brief rount of a play
called Humpty Dumpty in En, Robert left the theater. He

(06:10):
opened a stationary shop at the corner of East fifty
four and Madison Avenue that was just called Box smart.
That sounds kind of generic, but Robert had learned how
to make exquisite custom gift boxes years earlier, and that
coupled with a very high end offering of stationary made
the shop really popular. And he had a very wealthy clients.
Hell yeah, his box, his custom boxes. You had to

(06:34):
have an appointment to meet with him to get one made.
And I read a description of some of them, and
it sounds like they were almost like an event to
open up in and of themselves, like they would sometimes
open up in layers and have sort of little tableau
that would be related to what the gift was inside.
And they sounded incredibly intricate and beautiful, uh, and like

(06:54):
something anybody would be delighted to open. Eig joined the
American Junior Red Cross and she assisted primarily with the
Friendship Boxes project, which assembled kits of blankets, medicine, food,
and other basics for war refugees, and she also fundraised
for the organization. She was at this time also attending

(07:15):
parochial school at St. Agnes Academy, and with the Armistice
of November eleventh, nineteen eighteen, PEG's Junior Red Cross duties
pretty much ended just a few months later, on March
eighteenth of nineteen nineteen, Peg got a new baby, brother, Bobby,
when he was born. Although Robert Entwhistle had left the theater,
the stage really still captivated Peg. She starred in her

(07:37):
first school play as Peter Pan when she was twelve.
She also enjoyed a high degree of access to the
world of theater thanks to frequent visits from her aunt
Jane and uncle Charles. Charles continued to manage actors in
New York while also pursuing a career in California, so
Peg got to meet a lot of broadways most popular
performers and asked them about their work. For a teenager

(07:59):
interested in theater, this was like an Insiders acting school. Yeah,
it would be like if you just could like go
wander onto movie sets as a kid and like talk
to all of the leads and be like, oh, really,
what do you what do you do when you have
to do a scene like this? And then oh, sorry,
I'm gonna go over to this other a lot where
my uncle also is managing somebody very famous and talk
to them about their process. I can't imagine how incredibly

(08:22):
cool that must have been. Yeah, as a as a
theater team Yeah Heaven but Justice. Peg was becoming really
focused on what she was starting to see as her
career destiny. The family experienced a sudden loss when Loretta Entwhistle,
peg stepmother died of bacterial meningitis in April, and she
was only thirty five when she died. Peg traveled with

(08:45):
her father and brothers to Cincinnati, Ohio, to bury Loretta
near her family, and they stayed there in Ohio for
several weeks. And while Peg was very very close to Loretta,
she in fact would refer to her as her mother
and kind of left Emily out of the sure uh.
And while this loss was completely devastating, it also changed
PEG's home life in a way that really impacted her

(09:07):
dream of acting, because she was, as a teenage daughter
at that time, expected to take on the care of
her younger brothers. Another huge emotional blow followed a year
later when PEG's father was badly injured in a hit
and run accident while walking home from his shop that
happened in November. After a long hospital stay during which

(09:28):
he seemed to be improving, he died suddenly of a
brain hemorrhage on December nineteenth. So though his death was
somewhat unexpected because he had been recovering. The accident had
prompted Robert to dictate his will while he was in
the hospital, and he had stated in it that Charles
and Jane were to take care of the children in
the event that anything happened to him, with very specific

(09:50):
language that even though PEG's biological mother was still alive,
that he did not want her to have custody of
Peg Box Marked. His successful store was bequeathed in two parts.
Half of it went to his brother, Charles, and half
of it went to a woman named Marian Gressing, who
had been Robert's assistant in the business pretty much from
the time he started it, and Charles sold his interest

(10:12):
in the store to Marian immediately and she just took
it over. After Robert's death, Jane quit her acting career
to be a full time mother to Peg, Milton, and Bobby.
They all moved to Ohio to be closer to Jane
and Lauretta's family, but after Bobby got a bad bacterial
ear infection, doctor suggested that he might do better in
a warm climate. While Charles had more or less left

(10:34):
California and gone back to managing Broadway actors Los Angeles
beckoned to the End Whistles. Charles preferred the theater to film,
but theater jobs in l A were sparse, so once
again he tried to make a go of it in
the movie business. And we're going to talk about the
family's relocation to the West Coast in just a moment,
but first we're gonna pause and have a little sponsor break.

(11:02):
So when the End Whistles got to Los Angeles and
settled in, Bobby was still too sick to go to school,
and Milton went to public school. But Peg was really
uncomfortable with the idea of public school. She was still
grieving from the loss of both of her parents, and
she feared that she would be seen as an outsider
and that she would have difficulty connecting to other girls
her age. But a more appealing option presented itself, and

(11:26):
that was the Bishops School, which was a private girls
boarding academy in La Joya, which initially was a really
good fit for Peg. She spent the summer after her
first year of school in Los Angeles with Jane and Charles.
Charles bought a fixer upper and started renovating it, and
it turned out that he was still working in New
York a good deal. There were opportunities there that were
a lot more plentiful than they were in Los Angeles,

(11:47):
so he traveled a lot back and forth. Yeah, I
feel like this whole family really lives a bicoastal life
throughout their their years. Peg returned to the Bishop School
for the school year, but her enthusiasm that she had
initially had for this boarding school really waned. She had
grown tired of its strict schedule, and she was once
again thinking about how she really wanted a life in

(12:09):
the theater, and she just knew she did not want
to go back to the girls academy. So she was
still firmly against public school. So her uncle, instead of
making her go either to the private school or to
public school, hired her a private tutor. When she was sixteen,
Peg enrolled at the Hollywood Theater Community School to take
acting lessons. Because of her childhood spent attending all these

(12:30):
Broadway productions and soaking up the atmosphere and culture backstage,
she was way ahead of her fellow students. Her teacher
suggested to Jane Ross that Peg get an agent and
go ahead and get into the film business, but Peg
really only wanted to do theater. In PEG's uncle, Charles,
used his connections to give Peg basically everything she ever

(12:51):
could have dreamed. The New York Theater Guild was opening
a school called the Theater Guild School of Acting, and
it offered a program that was into did to weed
out the best of the many hopefuls that were arriving
in New York hoping to make a career on the stage,
and then formed that small group that made it through
the whole program into a theater company, and Peg, because

(13:13):
Charles had done a little work behind the scenes, was
invited to attend. So she finished her courses at the
Hollywood Theater Community School, and then in June, she and
Charles headed east together. But shortly after arriving in New York,
Peg met Henry Jewett at a party full of her
theater her uncle's theater friends. The Henry Jewett Players was

(13:33):
already a well established acting troupe in Boston, and Jewett
was so impressed with Peg that he asked her to join.
She would be acting professionally and she would start earning
money immediately, rather than waiting for the theater guilt program
to play out. And see if she was in the
top tier of talent that would be offered contracts at
the end of the program. So she took that offer,

(13:54):
abruptly changing course from New York to Boston for the
debut season of the Boston Repertory Theater. When Jewitt handed
her a list of the twenty two plays he was
considering for the season for her to memorize, she already
knew twenty one of them by heart. Yeah. Allegedly, the
story goes that he handed her this list, she said, Oh,
I already know all but one of these, and he

(14:15):
kind of looked two people that knew her, like as
she just show voting, and they were like, oh, no,
she knows him. Um. She stayed in New York with
her uncle Charles until August, and then she went back
home to Hollywood briefly for a visit, and then back
to New York, where she awaited Juet's call that her
Boston job was to begin. And in the meantime, her

(14:35):
uncle's friend, Walter Hampton, who was a successful actor and
theater manager, arranged for Peg to have a walk on
role in a Broadway production of Hamlet starring Ethel Barrymore
and Peg could not be credited or paid for this
because of her contract with Hewittt, but it was a
really exciting and fun opportunity, so she jumped at the chance.
Just two weeks later, she was settling into her new

(14:57):
life in Boston and rehearsing for her first credit did
minor role on the professional stage. That was as a
maid in the comedy of manners, The Rivals. While the
schedule of working at a repertory theater was grueling, rehearsing
some shows during the day and performing and others at night,
giving twelve shows a week every week for eight months,

(15:17):
Peg loved it, and critics and audiences loved her. PEG's
performance is Head, Big and Einrich Ibsen's The Wild Duck
that season was often referenced by Betty Davis as the
thing that inspired her to become an actress. Yeah, Betty
Davis had apparently seen her in this repertory and was
blown away and was like, I want to do what
she does, which is a pretty cool uh. Feather in

(15:39):
her camp in the Animals of History. And when that
season was over, Peg, who at that point had kind
of become the darling of the Boston theater scene, once
again turned her eyes to her first love, which was Broadway,
and her opportunity came rather suddenly in an unexpected way,
very much like her contract with Jewett had. So she

(16:00):
ended up as a last minute replacement for a minor
role in The Man from Toronto when she ran into
one of its actors randomly and he mentioned that they
had an open slot that one of their actresses hadn't
worked out, and they needed a pretty blonde with an
English accent, which basically was Peg. She thought he might
just be hitting on her, but it did turn out
to be a legit offer. The just off Broadway play

(16:21):
was not especially well received. Peg got one nice mention,
but she really wasn't even noted in most of the reviews.
She was cast next in The Hometowners, which ran for
seventies shows a block off Broadway and paid well. She
was written up in The New York Times and critics
praised her work in it. But she got her big
Broadway break in a play called Tommy, which was produced

(16:43):
by George C. Tyler. It rehearsed briefly before test stagings
in Atlantic City in Boston, and then it opened at
the Gayety Theater on Broadway on January tenth. The reviews
initially were just okay, not great. It was kind of like,
this is a fine show. But the play became a
huge success, do in part to the fact that it
was wholesome at a time when some shows were being

(17:05):
shut down due to inappropriate content. Peg was making five
hundred dollars a week plus a cut of the box office.
When the Gayety Theater suddenly switched over to become a
movie house, the production of Tommy moved four blocks to
the Elting Theater, which had more seats, which always sold,
and larger dressing rooms. By the time Tommy closed at

(17:26):
the end of July, it had become one of the
most successful shows of the year. That is also a
nice accidental crossover to our episode on Julian Elting. It
all connects, um And while Tommy had been making it
successful run, Peg had met the handsome and charming actor
Robert Lee Keith. He was ten years older than she was,
and Pagan Robert married on April eighteenth, after what the

(17:50):
press reported as a four day courtship, although in a
letter to her family, Peg indicated that she had met
him a year before their wedding. They did not actually
see each other in the time between then and the Thursday,
where she met him a second time, just days before
saying I do, in a very brief courthouse wedding in
port Chester, New York. So really their courtship was only

(18:10):
four days long, but she maybe had met him a
year prior briefly. But then they had to hustle back
to Broadway because peg show was running and Robert had
just opened a new play that he had written. We
will talk about some of the realities of this marriage,
and just a moment after we hear from one of
the sponsors that keeps the show going. So when we

(18:35):
left off, we mentioned Peg and Robert Keith's sudden whirlwind
romance and marriage, and it sounds really romantic and exciting.
Perhaps I always want to root for those crazy kids
that do crazy things like that. But this was a
really terrible mistake on PEG's part. For one, Robert had
never disclosed to her that he had actually been married

(18:56):
before and that he had a child from that marriage.
His mother and best friend, who had also signed the
marriage certificate, had also kept that information from Peg. And
by the way, Robert's son was actor Brian Keith, who
went on just to hearn a variety of roles in
film and television, including the parent Trap and the series
Family Affair, which I desperately loved as a kid. It's

(19:16):
like four days is an incredibly short courtship, but that's
an important piece of information to just not give up
in that four days. Well, and it sounds like because
Peg was pretty open in the press and just socially
that she did not want kids, She did not enjoy kids.
She did not want a family because she thought it
would detract from her career, which was the only thing

(19:37):
she cared about. So there is uh sort of a
general suspicion that he willfully kept it from her, knowing
she would never have married him. Yeah. Then she commented
on a photo of a young boy and her new
husband's apartment, and his mother said it was Robert's child.
Peg naturally was shocked and humiliated because, as Holly just said,
she did not like children. For another thing, it was

(20:00):
instantly clear that her new spouse was comfortable keeping really
important things from her. The entire foundation of this marriage
was basically faulty. She kept her cool about it, though,
and it was partly because she knew if she made
a big fuss over the situation. It would create bad
pr for her. She didn't want to taint her career
because she was becoming a real success on the Broadway stage. Yeah,

(20:23):
she wanted no scandals, um, but things were unfortunately even
more complicated than she knew even after the reveal of
this child. Robert was actually wanted by the police for
failing to make his alimony payments, and he also had
a drinking problem, and he asked Peg for money repeatedly,
which she would give him, but he would always squander
it rather than paying his debts and making those alimony

(20:45):
payments that he had been missing. Peg also got pregnant
during the early days of their marriage, but she opted
to determinate the pregnancy, and she and Robert, despite being
two of the most popular actors in the New York theater,
seemed to constantly have financial problems at Tommy Closed, and
as her personal life was really unraveling, Peg starred in
the play The Uninvited Guest, which was panned by critics,

(21:08):
even though she was written up as better than the
material she was working with. The play had a really
short run and afterward Peg did not work for months
for Marksber to April, she had no gigs, and after
many auditions, Peg lost a juicy role that she desperately
wanted in the stage adaptation of Serena Blandish. Ruth Gordon

(21:30):
was the person who was cast in that role. Then
the Theater Guild, which Peg had always wanted to be
part of despite leaving their training program for Boston, signed
both Peg and Robert to their touring company, and that
was on the anniversary of their one year wedding anniversary. Yeah,
they had actually made the deal several days before, and
Peg guess if they could wait until the day of
their anniversary so it would just feel like a very

(21:51):
special day. And so Pagan Robert seemed, despite the messy
and deceitful started their marriage and their financial difficulties, to
actually get along for a while. Peg was determined to
make their marriage work and they really did like each other,
and once they were signed with the Guild, she seemed
to feel as though she had truly arrived and that
things were turning around. The money wasn't going to start

(22:12):
rolling in until the fall when they actually started the
job that they had been contracted for, but better times
were clearly on the horizon. But then in August, Peg
and Robert were eating together in a restaurant when a
detective came up to the table and told Robert he
had to pay a thousand dollars in back alimony or
he would be taken into custody. Neither he nor Peg

(22:34):
had the money, and Peg was horrified that Robert hadn't
been using the money she had been giving him for
his alimony. She was embarrassed to be put in this
position in public, and they had to ask their new
bosses at the guild for a loan to get Robert
released from custody. They got past this incident, although Peg
was the one who paid back the loan from her pay,

(22:55):
not Robert, and then they went on touring starting in
the fall, and once they were on their road, the
couple's relationship really rapidly declined. Robert's drinking got far worse,
and one night he assaulted Peg in their hotel room.
She had been in bed, and he grabbed her by
the hair and pulled her out of bed and then
threw her on the ground, and then he picked her
up again by her hair, and this sort of continued

(23:18):
in this cycle. The hotel detective responded to her screams,
and she packed all of her things and moved to
another room. She was pretty much done at that point.
Robert sobered up and begged her to take him back
and forgive him, and she did, but the behavior continued.
But when the Guild's management found out about all of this,
Robert was fired and he was blacklisted on Broadway. Peg, however,

(23:41):
continued with the company for the rest of the tour.
Robert moved out to California to find work, and when
the Guild's tour got to Los Angeles, he showed up
at the theater after a matinee performance. He was drunk
and he was barred from entering, but this also trapped
all of the actors inside while he ranted outside. Peg
spoke to Robert at the door, promised to meet him

(24:03):
the following day on the condition that he'd be sober,
and then called an attorney to begin a legal separation.
The following day, she met him as promised and told
him that their marriage was over. Peg was quickly granted
the divorce that she saw it and she felt that
she was free afterward. Yeah, she basically testified and said,
like he lied to me from day one. He abused me.

(24:24):
This is not a real marriage, and they were like, yes,
we all agree. Uh. The tour continued and even flourished
after all of this madness, but as it wound down,
Peg kind of found herself the victim of Robert's bad behavior.
In another way, her contract with the guild was not renewed,
even though she had done a phenomenal job, because of
fears that Robert might once again show up and make

(24:46):
a scene, and those divorce proceedings had been covered in
the papers, and the theater Guild just did not want
any more bad press like that. So Peg decided that
she would head to Hollywood and spend some time with
her family. The By the end of the summer of
nineteen twenty nine, she was really struggling. She was twenty one.
She had had success and then had this big mess

(25:08):
erupt and she was depressed and she was unsure of
her future. Walter Hampton offered her array of light when
he asked her to join his tour of Sherlock Holmes
was going to be actor William Gillette's last tour. He
was coming out of retirement to do it, and it
opened on November fifteenth, nineteen twenty nine in Springfield, Massachusetts.
The tour lasted for seven months and it was a

(25:30):
massive success. It wrapped up in New Jersey on May twelfth,
nineteen thirty. Peg was then invited to join the Lakewood
Players in residence at the Colony Resort that summer. She
spent the fall visiting her family in California, and returned
to New York at the beginning of nineteen thirty one.
She immediately started the play She Means Business, which only

(25:50):
ran for eight shows, but the Theater Guild hired her
next for a production of Getting Married, which opened in March,
and it went fairly well, but this was her last
show with the Guild as the scandal of Robert's abuse
still lingered within the company. But perlier contract rules, Peg
had to be cast in one of their New York
shows after fulfilling her touring dates, so it wasn't like

(26:13):
they really wanted her, but they legally had to hire
her for something. She spent the summer of nineteen thirty
one back with the Lakewood Players and had a season
of well regarded performances at the resort. Among them had
been a production of a play called Just to Remind You,
which was then staged for Broadway. Peg was asked to
be in the Broadway show, so she cut her summer

(26:34):
season with Lakewood Shorts to take the job. But New
York audiences didn't love the show the way the resort
crowd had, and it lasted for just a dozen performances
before being pulled. After a few months with no work,
Peg played Amy in a revival of Little Women, but
then she moved on to a show that was called
Son of Satan, which was actually canceled in January ninety

(26:57):
two before it even opened. It just was plagued by problem.
Peg was then cast in Alice Sit By the Fire,
which was written by Peter Pan author J. M. Berry,
and it started stage legend Laurette Taylor, who was lauded
by critics, but she had a drinking problem which led
to canceled shows and ultimately the cancelation of the entire run,
which had no shortage of paying customers, but they just

(27:20):
couldn't keep it going with any sort of consistency, and
that was the last Broadway play of Peg and Whistle's career.
She once again crossed the country to Hollywood to appear
in an l A production of The Mad hopes. In
May of nineteen thirty two, I was alongside Billy Burke,
who people mostly know as Glinda the good Witch, and
Humphrey Bogart. The theater at the Los Angeles premiere overflowed

(27:43):
with viewers forced to stand. On opening night, it had
sixteen hundred seats, but there were two thousand people in
the audience. All three of the stars got great reviews
and a Broadway run of the show was planned, but
then it had a problem when Billy Burke was cast
in a film in Lost Angels and had to pull
out of the stage play. Peg was soon offered a

(28:03):
role in a film as well, called Thirteen Women at
RKO Pictures, and she had thought originally that she was
going to be in the same picture as Billy Burke,
which was a Bill of divorcement, but the role that
she was up for ended up being given to Catherine
Hempburn and so PEG's one picture contract, which actually made
her one of the Radio Pictures starlets, was used instead
to cast her for the Thirteen Women, and the film

(28:26):
features a woman plotting to murder twelve of her former
schoolmates using supernatural powers. This movie was a mess because
it ended up being heavily edited and twelve minutes of
peg screen time were cut, and that left her in
it for only four minutes and change. Her character's storyline
had involved a lesbian relationship and it was all removed

(28:46):
from the final film. Thirteen Women was made before the
four Hayes Code that dictated the bounds of morality that
can be portrayed in film, but it still fell victims
some mounting tensions between studio os and the Studio Relations
Committee about propriety. In the end, there were only eight
women in the film, although it kept the original title

(29:08):
of thirteen Women. Shortly after that, on September fourteenth, Peg
and two other actresses, Phillis Fraser and Harriet Hagman, were
dropped from the RKO starletts. On September sixto, Peg told
her aunt and uncle that she was going out to
buy a book at the drug store and then to
meet up with some friends, and she did not come
home that night, but her family wasn't worried. She had

(29:30):
stayed over at friends houses before when they had all
been out late. She was just meeting up with girlfriends
and hanging out. But she also didn't come home the
next day either, and Jane Ross started calling her friends
to find out that none of them had seen her.
On Sunday, September eight, a woman phoned the Los Angeles
Police Department and said that she had been hiking near
the Hollywood Lands sign when she saw a woman's jacket

(29:53):
and not far away there was a purse with what
appeared to be a suicide note. She also thought she
could see a body down below the sign on the mountain.
The woman told the officer on the call that she
did not want any publicity and that she had wrapped
up the items and placed them outside the Hollywood Police station.
The collar hung up before giving a name. The Hollywood

(30:15):
Precinct was called, and the bundle mentioned by the anonymous
collar was found outside. The Hollywood Land sign on Mount
Lee in the Santa Monica Mountains was erected in Peg
was actually fifteen then, and she and her brothers had
watched its massive letters get hauled up their street on
the way to be installed, and the sign was intended
initially as a way to advertise a real estate development

(30:36):
in the Hollywood Hills. The letters, each thirty ft wide
and forty three ft tall, were lighted by four thousand
bulbs and they were intended to stay in place for
a year and a half because that was how long
the developers expected it to take to sell all of
the available lots, and then they just planned to take
down the sign. The police investigated. They recovered the body

(30:56):
of the young woman and determined she had climbed a
ladder was behind the h of the sign, and then
jumped from the top of the letter. She wasn't identified
by the police, though her suicide note and a brief
description were published in the paper with the hopes that
they would figure out her identity based on that. When
Jane Ross read the description and the information about the note,

(31:17):
which was signed Pe, she knew that it was Peg.
Charles made the formal identification, and almost immediately headlines and
articles started to rewrite Peg as this wanna be film
star who had failed, ignoring completely that she had been
a successful stage actress. And additionally, rumors circulated that in
a fit of desperation, she had posed for nude photos

(31:40):
shortly before her death and then regretted it, possibly leading
to her state of mind. But while she did have
a series of professional photos taken shortly before her death,
there's no evidence that any of them were at all racy.
A semi nude photo of a model who was not
Peg Entwhistle was incorrectly labeled as her in a book
of Out Hollywood, and that has led to ongoing muddling

(32:02):
of this particular matter. PEG's funeral was held on September twenty.
Her body was cremated and her ashes were interned back
in Ohio in January of nineteen thirty three, and since
her death, Peg has taken on another role, at least
in the public consciousness, that of a ghost who haunts
the Hollywood Sign in the eighties. Six years since PEG's death,

(32:24):
numerous reports of an apparition in nineteen thirties apparel have
been made, generally all centered around the Hollywood Sign or
the surrounding Hollywood Hills. Some people allegedly also smell Guardinia's,
which was the scent of PEG's favorite perfume. The h
in the Hollywood Sign fell in ninety nine, fueling speculation
that it was the work of Peg spirit. But really though,

(32:47):
that sign, as you recall, wasn't meant to last even
two years, let alone the twenty five that it had
up to that point, and after the letter fell, the
Department of Parks and Recreation turned responsibility for the sign
over to the Hollywood Chamber of Commerce. The h was repaired,
the land was removed to make the landmark represent the
city rather than the residential development that had instigated its installation.

(33:09):
Uh And since then, in the seventies, the entire sign
was replaced. And of course there's ongoing debate about PEG's death,
whether it was really a suicide, and who this mystery
woman was who called the police. To some degree, at
least in the minds of some people, it remains a
history mystery. Yeah, the Corners finding didn't indicate that there

(33:29):
had been foul play or that something else had gone on.
She had shattered her pelvis when she fell, and those
are the injuries that ultimately killed her. Um. So yeah,
people love to speculate, which I get, but there's really
not much evidence for that. Uh In non spooky appearances.
Peg story and its tragic end has shown up in
all kinds of media as a sort of shorthand reference

(33:50):
to the cruelty of Hollywood and its ability to destroy
the lives of hopeful performers. But that doesn't really tell
her whole story. She had a lot of other things
going on. One of the things that sometimes gets brought
up as uh, something that may have led her to
feel quite despondent is that her husband Robert, after they
had divorced, got married again very quickly, but that marriage
was very successful and he actually kind of put his

(34:12):
life together and was selling plays, and that she had
learned that he was getting kind of successful and that
maybe had impacted her. There are also some discussions of
of the fact that her moving around so much had
led some of her friends to be in a sticky
position in terms of like she had rented rooms with
them or apartments with them, and then she had to
leave and they were left kind of holding the bag,

(34:34):
and she felt very guilty about it. Like there there
are a lot of things that go into a person's
mental makeup that are not always as simple as she
tried something and it didn't work and then everything fell apart.
Even though she was still very young when she died,
she had already had a very lengthy and complex life
and career. So I wanted to give her a little

(34:54):
more attention rather than just being like a two line
story about a failed starlett which isn't really accurate at all.
I'm doing a very quick since this episode is a
little longer, a very quick postcard round up. The first
is from our listener Jessica, who sent us a beautiful
postcard from the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, which continues to

(35:14):
be a popular topic for the show and sometimes comes
up on our Unearthed episodes. Uh. It's a really cool
postcard because it is a blueprint diagram of the museum,
which I love blueprints, so I love it. Thank you Jessica. Uh.
The other is from our listener. I believe it is Adrian.
This is one of those ones that has fallen victim
to being in the mail program, and it looks like

(35:36):
possibly got rained on, but it is. It is one
where she mentions that because of our Iceland episode that
Tracy did on correct me on my pronunciation. Is it him?
I think it's more like Ham. Yeah. She ended up
booking a ferry to the island even though she had
not ever planned to go over there while she was traveling,

(35:57):
and she ended up loving it and thought it was amazing,
So thank you to Tracy. She sent us a lovely
postcard of what appears to be a puffin with a
bunch of fish in its mouth and it is super cute,
So thank you to both those listeners. Also, if you
would like to write to us, you can do so
at History podcast at how stuff works dot com. We
can also be found all over social media under the
handle missed in History and missed in History dot com

(36:19):
is where to find us at our home online our
website where the entire show archives live and show notes
for any of the ones that Tracy and I have
worked on. So come and visit us at missed in
History dot com and subscribe to stuff you Missed in
History class on Apple Podcasts, Google Play, Spotify, or wherever
you get your media. For more on this and thousands

(36:45):
of other topics, visit how stuff works dot com