olive and Jack arrived in Paris for their second honeymoon. They checked into the Hotel Ritz, with its glassed gardens and celebrity guests like Marcel Proust and the Fitzgeralds. Soon Jack would head off to London for a few days, leaving his wife alone but far from bored. She had many friends, and parties flooded with champagne.To get more news about 日本黄页网站免费观看, you can visit our official website.

He lay in bed while his wife went to the bathroom to take medicine for a headache. “Oh my God!” she exclaimed. Jack, in his telling, rushed in to find Olive holding a bottle of toxic mercury bichloride, which she had ingested by mistake. Jack immediately called for a doctor, who pumped Olive’s stomach and rushed her to a hospital, by which time she was blinded and her vocal chords corroded. She died five days later, just weeks before her 26th birthday.

The media, which had thus far reported the couple’s every movement, erupted with headlines. They were Hollywood’s power couple, after all. The papers couldn’t wait for the facts. Did Olive commit suicide? Did Jack poison his wife? Was Parisian nightlife to blame? Columnists wrote takedowns of Hollywood as a drug-infested cesspool of miscreants and lawless heathens. Fans mourned the loss of their “angelic” beauty, herself a mere victim of the film industry’s satanic promiscuity.
the event punctuated the end of Hollywood’s golden age and flagged the beginning of the Roaring Twenties, where “suicide, rape, and murder were not the sinister plots of pre-Code Hollywood films; they were real-life situations surrounding many of the biggest names in the industry,” writes author Michelle Vogel. In the 1975 book Hollywood Babylon, author Kenneth Anger cites Olive Thomas’ death as the first scandal that would define Hollywood’s dark side, through present day. It’s the reason Hollywood studios now include “morality clauses” in contracts.

The grotesque innards of the entertainment business did nothing to deter fame-seekers. Overnight success was still possible then. Between 1920 and 1930, Hollywood’s population increased by 120,000 residents, who were enthralled by its ugly spectacle. In 1922, a New York Herald editorial read:

“Hollywood — the motion picture capital; a community of dissolute actors and actresses and others of the movie industry; the worst of them unspeakably vile, the best suspicionable; a colony of unregenerates and narcotic addicts; given to wild night parties commonly known as ‘orgies’; heroes of the screen by day and vicious roisterers by night; a section of civilization gone rottenly to smash.”