It Happened One Night . . . at MGM

What,” asked Jacqueline Onassis, “are we going to do next?” It was September 1993. She had just edited Bombshell: The Life and Death of Jean Harlow, in which I solved the long-standing mystery of how Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer’s beloved Blonde Bombshell died suddenly and inexplicably at 26. (Unbeknownst even to herself, Harlow had been suffering from kidney failure since she was 15.) Now, over lunch at the Peninsula hotel in Manhattan, I told Jackie of an intriguing topic I’d stumbled onto in my Harlow research. A month before the star’s death, in 1937, a dancer named Patricia Douglas had been raped at a wild MGM party thrown by Louis B. Mayer. Instead of bartering her silence for a studio contract or cash, Douglas went public with her story and filed a landmark lawsuit. One person I interviewed told me, “They had her killed.”

I didn’t believe that, I told Jackie, because, though MGM was then the world’s most powerful movie studio, with its own railroad and in-house police force, it would never have gone to such an extreme. Jackie smiled and said, “Well, why don’t you find out what did happen? You’re the only person who can, David.”

It has taken a decade, but the story is astounding. Absent from all reference works, presumed by participants to be buried forever, the Patricia Douglas case is probably the biggest, best-suppressed scandal in Hollywood history. However, I managed to find old newspaper coverage, previously unseen photos, damning studio documentation, long-forgotten legal records, privately shot cinematographic evidence hidden in an MGM film vault, and, most amazing, Patricia Douglas herself. I tracked the reclusive invalid down and eventually persuaded her to break her 65-year silence.

In the spring of 1937, Patricia Douglas was a chunky, chestnut-haired 20-year-old with porcelain skin and perfect teeth. Born in Kansas City, Missouri, she had migrated to Hollywood with her mother, Mildred Mitchell, who was determined to design gowns for screen queens. Instead, she became a couturière for high-end call girls; in the meantime, she neglected her teenage daughter. Patricia dropped out of convent school at 14; she did not drink, date, or dream of film fame—an appealing rarity for the half-dozen male stars for whom she soon became a platonic mascot. She had lemon Cokes at drive-ins with Dick Powell (“When the waitress saw him, she almost fainted”), barhopped with Bing Crosby and pre–I Love Lucy Bill Frawley (“The three of us used to go to this dive on Sunset Boulevard; Bing would sing, and the drunks didn’t even care”), dined at the Brown Derby with Jimmy Durante (“His daddy wanted him to marry me, and I was all of 15”), played kid-sister confessor to George Raft (“He couldn’t get it up, but he had to keep that manly reputation, so the studio manufactured a big romance with Betty Grable”), and learned “truckin’,” the Cotton Club’s latest hep step, from Larry Fine, one of the Three Stooges (“What a blue tongue! Even at the dinner table, you should’ve heard him: ‘Pass the fucking potatoes!’”). A natural-born dancer, Douglas drifted into movies “just for something to do.” By 15 she had already appeared in two classics: So This Is Africa, a pre–Production Code comedy that climaxed with the wedding of its two leading men, Bert Wheeler and Robert Woolsey, and Gold Diggers of 1933, a Busby Berkeley extravaganza, in which Douglas hoofed behind Ginger Rogers.

Since she was supported by her mother, Douglas had no need to work. So when a casting call came on the afternoon of Sunday, May 2, 1937, she demurred at first, but later agreed to show up. “They never mentioned it was for a party,” she recalls. “Ever. I wouldn’t have gone! Oh God, oh God, I wouldn’t have gone.”

elfratar on June 11st, 2020 at 15:44 UTC »

”At sixteen, I went to work for MGM, and I considered it was a windfall. There was an air, a constant air of being pursued. All the men tended to try to break women down. These were very aggressive men. Twice, I was asked to go to be interviewed, and the guy got up and said, ‘Well, let’s see your legs,’ and you’d pull up your skirt and he’d say, ‘Turn around, Honey. Pull it up higher.’ And then he’d say, ‘Let’s see how you feel, ‘ and then he’d walk around the desk and grab you.”

”You couldn’t go to the Citizen’s News and say, ‘You know, Mister So-and-so did this to me at MGM.’ No way! Because the studios owned Hollywood. I mean, this is no exaggeration. It was one of a laws I learned very early on. Even the adults were afraid. Everybody seemed to be afraid of something. Except the men that were pursuing girls, you know. That was the one thing that nobody seemed to have any compunction about.”

-Peggy Montgomery in Girl 27

It is so sad that, even though more than 70 years have passed, we know that this kind of story still happens out there.

Speedy_Cheese on June 11st, 2020 at 15:01 UTC »

This is a perfect example of why it is so difficult for individuals who have been abused to come forward, especially when the abuser holds some form of power. Money and influence can make many crimes disappear that the rest of us would surely do time in jail for. I'm so sick of rich and famous people using their influence to prey on vulnerable people. I feel that the punishment of Harvey Weinstein and Jeff Epstein are a start in the right direction, but we all know the roots of this problem are well established, deep and far reaching. There is a lot of work to be done and we have only just begun.

This is just one individual out of many, both male and female, who has been subject to abuse, humiliation, and harm for simply pursuing their dreams. The industry preys on young talented men and women and spits them out broken, manipulated, and misused.

The entertainment industry needs to stop being a safe haven for molesters and abusers. People need to continue advocating and demanding that companies uphold human dignity and rights and admit that what we have in place currently is a criminal ring that exploits young people. That isn't good enough.

Society needs to make it easier for all victims of abuse to feel safe enough to come forward and expose predators regardless of their status, wealth, or artistic contributions. We need proactive and preventative laws that penalize patterns of predatory behavior before they escalate, not settle for reactionary laws that only apply after a horrible injustice has been committed against a person. The damage is already done then, and again, that isn't good enough.

A person's right to contribute to the art world should not trump another person's ability to live and work in a safe, healthy environment that values and respects human dignity.

Russian_Bagel on June 11st, 2020 at 13:42 UTC »

I did post this before, but I found a better source with more info. This was an editorial Douglas helped publish, she died soon after (in November 2003).

I learned about this when I was looking up the film "Hail Caesar" (I'm wary about Hollywood biopics-edit:Hail Caesar isn't a biopic, I'm talking about biopics in general.). It's about the Hollywood "fixer" Eddie Mannix, who oversaw MGMs problems and "fixed" issues for them. He was linked to several unsolved murders and the mafia. He helped cover up Douglas' assault.

"Hail Caesar" whitewashes his crimes.

edit: several people have told me it's meant to be a meta satire of the golden age of hollywood. Well, it still leaves out the darker things he did. Maybe the complexity of Hail Caesar just goes above my head?

edit: won't link full article, it is very long. But this is the final bit:

It ruined my life. It absolutely ruined my life,” says Douglas. She is 86 and a great-grandmother, housebound by glaucoma, emphysema, and fear. “They put me through such misery,” she murmurs. “It took away all my confidence.” She has not spoken of her rape since the case was dismissed. Until now, not even her family knew about it.

Douglas has agreed to go public again because she realizes this could be her last chance. “When I die, the truth dies with me, and that means those bastards win.” Her need for vindication remains as strong today as it was back then. She can still feel that freshly tilled field underfoot moments before David Ross raped her, she says, adding, “And to this day I can’t stomach the smell of scotch.”

Such sense memories come at a cost. After the dismissal of her federal case, she tells me, “I went from ‘Little Miss Innocent’ to a tramp. I did it to demean myself. I was worthless, a ‘fallen woman.’” Douglas married three times in five years, and two of her husbands were exposed as bigamists. “All washed up with fellas” at 37, she has gone without relationships or sex ever since. “I’ve never been in love,” she states flatly. “And I’ve never had an orgasm. I was frigid.”

Douglas fled Hollywood to settle first in Bakersfield, a desert town she terms “hotter than hell,” and later in Las Vegas, where she subsists on Social Security with a bullterrier named Magdalene. She likes to be called Patsy now, and won’t even answer to Patricia. All her recollections of herself are laced with self-laceration: she says she was “naïve,” “stupid,” “a lousy mother,” “a walking zombie who glided through life.” And because she never shared her deepest secret, which was also the defining event in her life, Douglas can say with confidence, “There’s nobody in this world who really knows me.”

In 1937, burying her past for self-preservation made sense. But even now, in this Oprah era of confession as catharsis, Douglas still lives under self-imposed house arrest, oblivious to her historic status. “What was it I accomplished?” she wonders. “What’s so special about my story?” When I tell her what I’ve turned up, including corroboration from fellow Wild West–party girls and an apology from the children of Clement Soth, whose perjury helped exonerate David Ross, the truth begins to dawn on Douglas. “Pretty gutsy, wasn’t I?” she says.

“Before you found me,” she confides during one of our many long conversations, “I was getting ready to die. I’d buy less food; I wasn’t planning to be around long. Now I don’t want to go. Now I have something to live for. And for the first time I’m proud of myself.” The lion raped, but Patricia Douglas was—and still is—the mouse that roared. Her heroic cry was once cruelly silenced; 66 years later, the last word is hers. The magazine published a postscript to this article in the November 2007 issue.

Douglas died in November 2007 2003. I meant she died after the op ed was published! Credit to u/FatManHarkonnen for the correction.