Home >
1932 Peg Entwistle Hollywood sign suicide....
1932 Peg Entwistle Hollywood sign suicide....
Item # 575939
Currently Unavailable. Contact us if you would like to be placed on a want list or to be notified if a similar item is available.
September 20, 1932
THE DETROIT FREE PRESS, Michigan, September 20, 1932
* Actress Peg Entwhislte suide
* Hollwood sign jump
This 22 page newspaper has a one column headline on the front page:
* Stage Star, a 'Flop' in Hollywood, Takes Life in Plunge
with nice photo of Entwistle with caption: "PREFERS DEATH TO FAILURE" (see)
Tells of the suicide of young actress Peg Entwistle by jumping off the letter "H" of the famed Hollywood sign in California.
Other news of the day. Light browning, minor spine wear, otherwise good.
wikipedia notes: Peg Entwistle (5 February 1908 – body found 18 September 1932) was a Welsh-born, English stage and screen actress who gained notoriety after her death at the age of 24 when police found her body in a ravine below the Hollywood sign following an anonymous phone call.
On Sunday, September 18, 1932 an anonymous woman telephoned the police and said that while hiking she had found a body below the Hollywood sign (which then read Hollywoodland) and then, according to a police transcript of the call, "wrapped a jacket, shoes and purse in a bundle and laid them on the steps of the Hollywood Police Station." A detective and two radio car officers found the body of a moderately well-dressed, blonde-haired, blue-eyed woman in the 100-foot ravine below the sign. Entwistle remained unidentified until her uncle connected her two-day absence with the description and initials P.E. on a suicide note which had been found in the purse and published by the newspapers. He said that on Friday the 16th she had told him she was going for a walk to a drugstore and see some friends. The police surmised that instead, she made her way from his Beachwood Drive home up the nearby southern slope of Mount Lee to the foot of the Hollywoodland sign, climbed a workman's ladder to the top of the "H" and jumped. The cause of death was listed by the coroner as "multiple fractures of the pelvis."
The suicide note as published read:
"I am afraid, I am a coward. I am sorry for everything. If I had done this a long time ago, it would have saved a lot of pain. P.E."
Entwistle's death brought wide and often sensationalized publicity. Her funeral was held in Hollywood and the body was cremated, with the ashes later sent to Glendale, Ohio for burial next to her father in Oak Hill Cemetery, where they were interred on January 5, 1933.[26] The burial site was unmarked until 2010 when, following a donation drive carried out on the social networking site facebook.com, an engraved granite marker was installed on September 16th, widely believed to be the 78th anniversary of her death.
Category: The 20th Century
No Longer Available
