From the Editor: Death in the Afternoon

I am a sucker for offbeat celebrity stories. While I don't revel in the hard luck stories of the rich and famous, I am fascinated by human drama; let's face it, when it comes to unusual celebrity deaths, such drama tends to come wrapped in odd, even distressing packages. We Americans tend to put our celebrities in a special compartment. Why? They are, after all, just people. Sure they possess money, recognition, or a beach house cantilevered over Malibu beach, but we are always caught by surprise when we learn that they tend to end up like the rest of us—dead. In the pages of the Eagle, and its sister publication North Country Living magazine, I recently told the sad story of 1940s actress Veronica Lake who died in Vermont in 1973. Lake was cursed with schizophrenia; pills and alcohol only hastened her death in obscurity. There's a similar celebrity story which haunts me—the death of model and actress Yvette Vickers. This tragic story, barely reported when it occurred three years ago, bears repeating. The sad demise of Vickers reminds me that while we can be surrounded by many friends in life, we always die alone. Vickers' story could be slugged ghoulishly, "The Strange Case of the Mummified Playmate." A former Playboy Playmate magazine model, Vickers was born in 1928 in Kansas City. While she certainly wasn't a household name like pinup model Anna Nicole Smith (who's last cult film by the way, titled "Illegal Aliens", was shot in Rutland in 2006), the sexy Vickers managed to carve out a burgeoning career in movies during the 1950s. (Some Hollywood observers went so far as to say that she had promise in the dramatic arts and could have been a major player if she had better management.) Now if you pay attention to the screen, you'll see Vickers in an odd variety of '50s films such as "Attack of the Giant Leeches", the classic Billy Wilder film "Sunset Boulevard," and cult favorite, "Attack of the 50 Foot Woman". Following several of these big screen appearances, B-movie maven Russ Meyer snapped Vickers jaybird for Playboy's now famous (and collectible) July 1959 issue; that sealed her image—and her fate. But as the late 1950s slipped into the decade of the '60s, Vickers' beauty faded rapidly and she dropped out of the public eye. She dated the late actor Jim Hutton and had short flings with actors Lee Marvin, and even Cary Grant. From her rise to pinup stardom and until her final curtain call, Vickers lived in a beautiful 1920s-style mansion in Los Angeles's Benedict Canyon. She occupied the Spanish Mission-style house from the 1950s until her bizarre death. It was a residence right out of Billy Wilder's "Sunset Boulevard" in which she appeared. Then, on the afternoon of May 2, 2011, Vickers' long-time friend Susan Savage—who hadn't heard from the 82-year-old Vickers in a long time—decided to drop by. Outside the Vickers villa, an overflowing mailbox and high weeds poking through cracks in the driveway bitumen alerted Savage that something was awry. Savage jimmied a back door and entered the mansion. She immediately went upstairs to the master bedroom. There she found an electric space heater blasting out dry heat into the already hot interior of the southern California house. On the floor, next to a wireless telephone handset, was Vickers' mummified remains. It was a wonder that the thermostatically controlled heater hadn't started a fire after running for just over a year. (Imagine the whopping electric bill which was eventually paid by the Vickers estate?) LAPD detectives ruled Vickers' death by natural causes. She apparently had a heart condition, suffered a massive heart attack, and died alone, there, on the bedroom floor. The telephone handset on the floor next to Vickers' remains suggests that she probably tried to dial 911 for help. After a short investigation, the L.A. Coroner's Office reported that the former pinup's body had remained undisturbed for more than a year. No foul play involved. "So sad," a friend in Orwell remarked to me in a Facebook post chatting about Vickers' death, "that anyone should die all alone and forgotten. To think that it took over a year for a 'friend' to come-a-knocking." While beauty may be fleeting, mummies can last for centuries—but in the strange case of Yvette Vickers, it was all vanity in the end. Her mummified corpse was cremated at an undisclosed locale. End of a life. End of a story. Louis Varricchio, The Vermont Eagle

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From the Editor: Death in the Afternoon

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