The limousines, the screaming fans, the clothes torn from their bodies—for the stars of Old Hollywood, fame was a double-edged sword. “It was very frightening,” one recalled, describing the chaos of adoration. But behind the glittering premieres and magazine covers, a darker reality lurked. The same studio system that manufactured dreams also enabled unspeakable tragedies, hidden behind a veil of glamour.
Old Hollywood sold happiness, stability, and the perfect American family. Very often, it was a lie. Some stars hid gravely ill children from view. Others raised children who later denounced them in public. And in some families, the damage went even further—all the way to murder. One case was darker than the others: a son killed his own mother after years of mental instability, deep family damage, and his mother’s disturbing attempts to cure what she could not accept.
On May 16th, 1990, at Marlon Brando’s home in Los Angeles, his son Christian Brando fatally shot 26-year-old Dag Drollet, the boyfriend of Christian’s half-sister, Cheyenne. That evening, Christian and Cheyenne had dinner together, and Cheyenne told him that Dag had been abusing her. She was about eight months pregnant with Drollet’s child. At around 11:00 p.m., Christian went to confront Dag with a gun. He later said he only meant to scare him and that the gun went off during a struggle. Police said there were no signs of one. Drollet was lying on a couch with a gunshot wound to the head.
Marlon Brando called police himself and tried to save him. In January 1991, Christian pleaded guilty to voluntary manslaughter. By then, Cheyenne had been declared unfit to testify. After Dag’s death, she gave birth to a son, Tookie, was hospitalized more than once and underwent psychiatric treatment. Without her testimony, prosecutors faced a much harder case, and the charges ended in a plea deal. Christian was sentenced to 10 years in prison. On April 16th, 1995, Cheyenne Brando was found dead at her mother’s home in Punalu’u, Tahiti. She was 25.
Dorothy Dandridge gave birth to her daughter, Harolyn Suzanne Nicholas, on September 2nd, 1943. She was married to Harold Nicholas, but he was not with her when labor began. He had gone out to play golf and had taken the car. Dorothy reportedly refused to go to the hospital without him. By the time she arrived, doctors had to use forceps during delivery. Dandridge later believed that this had caused her daughter’s severe brain damage. Harolyn never learned to speak, required constant care, and by Dorothy’s own account, never recognized her as her mother.
In her 1970 autobiography, Everything and Nothing: The Dorothy Dandridge Tragedy, Dorothy wrote that she could survive almost anything except knowing that her only child would never become, in her words, a normal feeling human being. For years, Dorothy paid for private care and tried to keep Harolyn out of public view. She did not speak openly about her until 1963, when she discussed her on the Mike Douglas Show. By then, her career was already in decline, and the cost of care was becoming harder to carry. Near the end of her life, after falling into bankruptcy, Dandridge was forced to place Harolyn in a state hospital. She could not heal her daughter, and she could no longer keep her at home.
For years, Bing Crosby was seen as the perfect family man—radio, films, Christmas songs, a large home, and four sons from his first marriage to Dixie Lee. That image held until November 1st, 1952, when Dixie Lee died of ovarian cancer at 42. Their sons were between 13 and 19. In 1983, the eldest son, Gary Crosby, published the memoir Going My Way. In it, he described his father as cold and harsh and said his childhood was shaped by strict discipline and fear. The book damaged the family’s public image and divided the brothers.
On December 11th, 1989, Lindsay Crosby was found dead in his apartment from a shotgun wound. He was 51. Press reports said he had been under serious financial strain, including problems involving a family trust. Less than a year and a half later, on May 4th, 1991, Dennis Crosby died from a gunshot wound. He was 56. Gary Crosby died of lung cancer in 1995. Phillip outlived his brothers and died in 2004. By the end, the image of a stable Crosby family had collapsed in public.
These stories are only the beginning. The golden age of Hollywood was built on secrets, and some of them were deadly. From the tragic death of Rick Nelson to the shocking murder confession of Lana Turner’s daughter, the pattern repeats: fame, fortune, and family destruction. But the darkest chapters are yet to come.
Rick Nelson grew up in one of America’s best-known television families, appearing as a child on the sitcom The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet. He later became a star in his own right as a singer. On December 31st, 1985, Nelson was flying on a Douglas DC-3 from a concert in Guntersville, Alabama, to a New Year’s Eve performance in Dallas. At 5:14 p.m., the aircraft caught fire in midair and began an emergency descent near DeKalb, Texas. The two pilots survived, but all seven passengers, including Rick Nelson, were killed. He was 45.
The NTSB later concluded the crash was caused by an in-flight fire and rejected rumors that passengers’ drug use had triggered the disaster. His sons, Matthew and Gunnar Nelson, later said they were originally supposed to be on that flight. At the last minute, their father told them to take a commercial flight and meet him in Dallas instead. Both were 18.
Joan Crawford’s family story did not end with her death in May 1977. It became public in a much bigger way afterward. In 1978, her adopted daughter, Christina Crawford, published the memoir Mommie Dearest, describing childhood in Crawford’s home as a life of fear, humiliation, and rigid control. When the film adaptation followed in 1981, Crawford’s public image was permanently divided.
It was not only Christina. Her adopted brother, Christopher Crawford, was also part of the family conflict. Christina and Christopher were the two children Joan Crawford cut out of her will. Crawford wrote that she left them nothing for reasons well known to them. Her younger daughters, Cathy and Cindy, by contrast, received $77,500 each. Christina and Christopher later challenged the will and secured a financial settlement, but the family break had already become public.
Marvin Gaye grew up in a home ruled by fear. His father, Marvin Gaye Sr., was a strict preacher known as harsh and controlling. He beat his children for minor offenses, and his relationship with Marvin was troubled from the start. Even as an adult, Marvin said he had feared his father all his life. On April 1st, 1984, at the family home in Los Angeles, an argument between Marvin Gaye’s parents over a household matter turned into a confrontation between father and son. Marvin stepped in after his father began shouting at his mother, Alberta Gaye.
Minutes later, Marvin Gaye Sr. returned with a .38 caliber Smith & Wesson and shot his son twice. It happened one day before Marvin Gaye’s 45th birthday. Marvin himself had given the gun to his father. Marvin Gaye Sr. later pleaded guilty to voluntary manslaughter and received a six-year suspended sentence with five years of probation.
On April 4th, 1958, at Lana Turner’s home on North Bedford Drive in Beverly Hills, her 14-year-old daughter, Cheryl Crane, fatally stabbed Johnny Stompanato, Turner’s lover and a man linked to mob figure Mickey Cohen. That evening, Turner told Stompanato she was ending the relationship. At the coroner’s inquest, she testified that he responded by shaking her and threatening to kill her, Cheryl, and Turner’s mother. She also said that during an earlier trip to London, he had held a razor to her face.
Cheryl entered the bedroom during the fight and stabbed him in the stomach with a kitchen knife. Seven days later, the coroner’s jury unanimously ruled the killing a justifiable homicide. Cheryl was Lana Turner’s only child and was raised largely by a nanny in a tightly controlled household. She later said her mother did not allow her to have close friends for years and that she did not ride a bus alone until she was 14.
As Turner’s relationships, marriages, and homes kept changing, Cheryl’s life became more isolated. After Stompanato’s death, Cheryl spent about three weeks in juvenile hall and was then placed in her grandmother’s care. What followed included boarding schools, running away, emotional breakdowns, and psychiatric hospitalization, as later described in coverage of her memoir Detour.
Roy Rogers and Dale Evans had a daughter, Robin Elizabeth Rogers, who was born in August 1950 with Down syndrome. At the time, many parents were advised to place such children in institutions, but Rogers and Evans refused. Evans later recalled that one doctor told them, “Take her home and love her.” That is what they did. Two days before her second birthday, Robin died from medical complications. In 1953, Dale Evans wrote about her in her book Angel Unaware.
Judy Lewis was born on November 6th, 1935, after an affair between Loretta Young and Clark Gable during the making of Call of the Wild. Young was unmarried and feared scandal. She left Hollywood, gave birth in secret, and later returned with a public story that Judy was an adopted child. In Judy’s later account, she was kept for a time in an orphanage while Young shaped a version of the story that would protect her career, her public image, and her Catholic reputation.
The rumors circulated in Hollywood for years and eventually reached Judy’s school as well. Judy later said her ears were hidden under bonnets and carefully styled hair because they looked too much like Clark Gable’s. By age seven, they had been pinned back in surgery. But Judy herself grew up without being told the truth. She later said she had suspected it from a young age and in 1966, she directly asked her mother whether Clark Gable was her father.
Young reportedly admitted it in private while continuing to maintain the old story in public. Gable never officially acknowledged Judy as his daughter. In 1994, she published Uncommon Knowledge, openly writing about who her parents were. In her memoir, Judy wrote that he met her only once when she was 15 and kissed her on the forehead.
On March 21st, 1987, Dean Paul Martin, the son of Dean Martin, was killed during a low-altitude training flight in an F-4C Phantom II with the California Air National Guard. The aircraft crashed near San Gorgonio Mountain in California. Captain Ramon Ortiz was killed with him. Dean Paul was 35. By then, Dean Paul had already built an unusually varied life for himself. He had been a musician, an actor, a professional tennis player, and a military pilot. Within the family, he was often seen as the golden boy.
For Dean Martin, the loss of his son became the central tragedy of his final years. Friends later said that after Dean Paul’s death, he never seemed fully like himself again. He appeared in public less often, was said to dine alone in Beverly Hills, and one acquaintance described him as looking like a candle without a flame.
In 1985, Bette Davis’s daughter, Barbara “BD” Hyman, published the memoir My Mother’s Keeper. In it, she portrayed her mother as emotionally cruel, controlling, and dependent on alcohol. The book was quickly compared to Mommie Dearest, but this case carried a different sting. Bette Davis was still alive to read it. BD said she had written the book in the hope of reaching her mother through public exposure. For Davis, it was a public humiliation.
In 1987, she responded in an open letter published in her own book, This ‘n That, writing of her daughter’s lack of loyalty and thanks. There was no reconciliation after that. When Bette Davis died in 1989, BD was not included in her will. Davis had two other adopted children, Margot Merrill and Michael Merrill. Margot was diagnosed in early childhood with severe brain damage and spent much of her life in specialized care. Michael, by contrast, stood by his mother and broke with his sister after My Mother’s Keeper was published. By the end, one child had turned against her, one remained loyal, and one lived outside the conflict in permanent care.
Sean Flynn, the son of Errol Flynn and actress Lili Damita, first worked in film, then left acting in the 1960s to become a photojournalist. During the war in Southeast Asia, he reported from both Vietnam and Cambodia. On April 6th, 1970, he and photographer Dana Stone rode motorcycles into Svay Rieng province, Cambodia to check reports of fighting. They were last seen on Route 1. According to later testimony and declassified material, Flynn and Stone were ambushed and captured. No one from the West ever saw either man again.
After Sean Flynn disappeared, Lili Damita spent years financing search efforts. Journalists and researchers later reconstructed the same basic sequence. Flynn and Stone were seized at a checkpoint, moved deeper into territory controlled by communist forces, and are believed to have been killed. In 1984, 14 years after his disappearance, Sean Flynn was declared legally dead. Even in 2010, searches for his remains were still being attempted in Cambodia. DNA testing later showed that recovered remains were not his.
In 1943, Gene Tierney was pregnant with her first child with Oleg Cassini when she contracted rubella. She later recalled that after an appearance at the Hollywood Canteen, a woman approached her and said she had broken quarantine just to see her. On October 15th, 1943, in Washington, D.C., Tierney gave birth prematurely to a daughter, Daria. The baby weighed about 3 lb, required a complete blood transfusion, and was born deaf, partially blind because of cataracts, and severely developmentally disabled. Daria spent much of her life in specialized institutions. Later accounts said that Howard Hughes helped pay her medical expenses.
After Daria’s birth, Tierney’s marriage to Oleg Cassini began to break down. They separated in 1946, reconciled, and divorced for good in 1952. The strain of constant care, guilt, and exhaustion affected the whole family. By the 1950s, the strain had reached Tierney herself. She was treated for serious breakdowns at Harkness Pavilion in New York and later at the Institute of Living in Hartford.
Frances Farmer’s conflict with her mother, Lillian Farmer, began long before the hospital years. In 1935, after Frances traveled to the Soviet Union as the winner of a student competition, her mother took the dispute into the press and publicly condemned the trip. The struggle between them was already becoming a fight over control. By 1943, Frances Farmer’s career was beginning to collapse. She was arrested at the Hollywood Knickerbocker Hotel and, by her own later account, dragged through the lobby kicking and screaming.
After that, she was placed in a psychiatric clinic in California where she underwent insulin shock therapy. Lillian then came to California and won a court fight to bring Frances back to Seattle. After another conflict at home, she had her committed to Western State Hospital in Steilacoom. In 1944, Frances was briefly released only to be arrested again almost immediately. In 1945, her mother secured her recommitment to Western State and this time Farmer remained there for several more years. In 1950, she was released into her mother’s custody. Only in 1953 did Frances succeed in ending Lillian’s conservatorship and legally regaining her freedom. By then, her career was largely gone.
Barbara Daly Baekeland lived between New York and Europe. She was the wife of Brooks Baekeland, grandson of the inventor of Bakelite, and the mother of Anthony Baekeland, born in 1946. By the late 1960s, Anthony was already showing serious psychiatric problems. Accounts describe paranoid episodes and later schizophrenia. He was also described as gay or bisexual. Later accounts claimed that Barbara was deeply troubled by this and at one stage tried to cure him, first by arranging women for him and, in some versions, by violating sexual boundaries herself.
In 1967, while in Spain, Anthony became close to Jake Cooper, an Australian man later connected in some accounts to drugs and a possible affair. Though Cooper denied that version of events, another figure in the story was Samuel Adams Green, Barbara’s lover, who also denied later claims that he had had a sexual relationship with Anthony. In late July 1972, Anthony had already tried to kill his mother near her home on Cadogan Square in London. He tried to push her into traffic. Barbara survived, in part because her friend Susan Guinness happened to be there. Police detained Anthony, but Barbara refused to press charges. After that, he was briefly placed in the Priory. Anthony then returned home and began seeing a psychiatrist.
On October 30th, 1972, the doctor warned Barbara that her son was capable of murder. She ignored the warning. On November 17th, 1972, Anthony stabbed her to death with a kitchen knife in her London home. Barbara was 51. Anthony was 26. Police found him at the scene and he confessed. Afterward, Anthony spent nearly eight years in Broadmoor. He was released on July 21st, 1980. Six days later, he attacked his 87-year-old grandmother, Nina Daly, with a knife in New York. After his arrest, Anthony was sent to Rikers Island where he died in his cell on March 20th, 1981.
These are the shadows behind the spotlights—the children hidden away, the memoirs written in anger, the guns and knives that ended family wars. Hollywood sold us dreams, but the dream makers often lived nightmares. Which of these stories shocked you the most? Share your thoughts in the comments below.
