In Raymond Chandler’s 1940 novel, Farewell, My Lovely, PI and hardboiled icon Philip Marlowe accompanies Lindsay Marriott on an errand. The latter’s lady-friend has had a priceless Fei Tsui jade necklace stolen from her and Marriott has a date to “buy” it back from the thieves. The dandy hires Marlowe to act as his bodyguard during the transaction.

The detective’s client lives on Cabrillo Street in Montemar Vista. Chandler describes that neighborhood as, “ … a few dozen houses of various sizes and shapes hanging by their teeth and eyebrows to a spur of a mountain and looking as if a good breeze would drop them down among the box lunches on the beach."(1) To reach Marriott’s home, Marlowe parks his car in the lot of what had been a popular LA area landmark of the 1930’s, Thelma Todd’s Sidewalk Café, located on the Pacific Coast Highway between Malibu and Pacific Palisades. From that spot, access to Cabrillo Street is gained by climbing a long stairway up the side of the aforementioned mountain. With his trademark use of lush and expressive metaphor, Chandler paints the picture as follows:

Above the beach the highway ran under a wide concrete arch which was in
fact a pedestrian bridge. From the inner end of this a flight of concrete steps
with a thick galvanized handrail on each side ran straight up the side of the
mountain. Beyond the arch the sidewalk café … was bright and cheerful inside
but the iron-legged tile topped tables outside under the striped awning were
empty … I drove past and gave the café my business to the extent of using
its parking space. I walked through the arch and started up the steps. It was
a nice walk if you liked grunting. There were two hundred and eighty steps
up to Cabrillo Street. They were drifted over with windblown sand and the
handrail was as cold and wet as a toad’s belly. When I reached the top the
sparkle had gone from the water and a seagull with a broken trailing leg was
twisting against the offsea breeze. I sat down on the damp cold top step and
shook the sand out of my shoes and waited for my pulse to come down into
the low hundreds. (2)

What Chandler has crafted here is a brilliant scene rich in atmosphere and local color. This minor episode becomes even more interesting and evocative, however, when one discovers the lurid and mysterious past associated with Thelma Todd’s Sidewalk Café. Indeed, the story of that trendy establishment and of Todd’s bizarre death there in 1935 reads like the plot from one of Chandler’s own novels. Who knows, perhaps that history was part of the reason that the author chose to use that particular locale in Farewell, My Lovely in the first pace?

Thelma Todd, who became known as the “Blonde Venus” and the “Ice Cream Blonde,” was an enormously popular actress working principally for Hal Roach Studios during the late 1920’s and the early 1930’s. Appearing in over forty movies(3) between 1926 and 1935, Todd was best known for her roles in comedies such as Horse Feathers and Monkey Business with the Marx Brothers and as the co-star of a series of “shorts” where she was teamed with her best friend, Zasu Pitts(4). Todd also took on more dramatic roles and acted opposite such legends as Gary Cooper, Randolph Scott and Humphrey Bogart.

Todd’s rise to stardom vaulted her into the fast lane of Hollywood society and she quickly gained a reputation as a ferocious “party girl.” She married Pasquale (“Pat”) De Cicco, who billed himself as an “agent,” but who was widely known as a pimp and a bootlegger(5) , in 1932. It was common knowledge that De Cicco did not treat his wife particularly well and, amid rumors of abuse, the couple divorced in 1934.

At about that time, Todd opened up her sidewalk café and it quickly became a fashionable restaurant that catered to a well-heeled clientele. Todd moved into an apartment above the café with her lover, co-owner and movie director, Roland West. It was in the garage of their apartment –which was located up the stairs and on the street above the café – that Thelma Todd’s body was found slumped behind the wheel of her brown 1933 Lincoln phaeton automobile on Monday morning, December 16, 1935 by May Whitehead, Todd’s personal maid (6). Todd had succumbed to carbon monoxide poisoning sometime early in the morning of the previous day, Sunday the 15th. Although her death was officially ruled an “accidental suicide,” rumor and speculation willed it otherwise. What actually took place at the café during the very early hours of that Sunday morning has remained one of Hollywood’s most enduring mysteries.

Over the years, numerous theories have been advanced to explain Todd’s death. Reports that evidence at the scene pointed to foul play were widespread immediately following the discovery of her body. Allegedly, there was blood around Todd’s mouth and a smudged handprint was seen on the door of her car. What’s more, if Todd had ascended the celebrated stairs up to the garage at 4 A.M. on Sunday morning after being dropped off at the café by her chauffeur, how could it be that her dress shoes showed no signs of dirt, sand or scuffing? (Recall Marlowe’s rather disheveled condition upon reaching the top of those same stairs!) All of that coupled to the fact that, at the time of her death, the starlet’s blood alcohol content was .13% have led some to suspect that she was subdued then left in the car to die by a person or persons unknown(7).

The idea that Todd was murdered is reinforced by the fact that, according to some sources, local mobsters who were already gaining influence in various Hollywood and studio circles at the time also had designs on the beachside café as the site of an illegal gambling casino. Lucky Luciano’s mob, it was said, was attracted to the establishment because of its somewhat remote location and ready-made wealthy clientele. According to that scenario, Todd was murdered when she refused the proverbial offer “you can’t refuse.”(8)

Interestingly, anecdotal evidence has been advanced to suggest that gambling, albeit on a very small scale, was already taking place at the café at the time of Todd’s death. Rudy Schafer, whose father was the manager of Thelma Todd’s Sidewalk Café, contends that slot machines, roulette wheels and card tables were in place in some of the rooms above the restaurant. They were there, Schafer recalls, for the informal use of Thelma and her guests. If what Scafer says is true, then the issue was one of gangsters wishing to take control of and to expand an existing operation rather than trying to start one from the ground up(9). Although it was also reported that Todd had received threatening letters and that she had seemed fearful and somewhat ill at ease in the days and weeks prior to her death, none of this has ever been established as more than popular gossip. Related speculation that Todd was despondent during this time and that thus she may have willfully taken her own life has likewise never risen above the level of conjecture.

In 1987, over fifty years after the fact, two Los Angeles journalists, Marvin Wolf and Katherine Mader, made the startling claim that they had solved the Thelma Todd case. According to Wolf and Mader, Ronald West was himself inadvertently responsible for his girl friend’s death. The two writers further asserted that the authorities knew all along what had actually happened on that Sunday morning in 1935. Working in collusion with such Hollywood luminaries as Hal Roach and Joe Schenk (founder of 20th Century Productions and one of the most powerful people in the industry), Los Angeles County Sheriff’s and LAPD officials engineered one of the most successful cover-ups in the history of Tinseltown. The overriding concern of all involved was to avoid the same type of scandal and financial ruin that had ensued with the Fatty Arbuckle debacle in 1921. After all, as Wolf and Mader put it, virtually everyone had “ … an institutional interest in the film industry’s financial health … {at that time} … The movies were the nation’s fifth largest industry and LA County’s most visible … With the Fatty Arbuckle imbroglio still a vivid memory, avoiding yet another movie scandal became … {their} … chief concern.”(10)

As reconstructed by Wolf and Mader, Todd arrived back to her apartment at about 4:00 A.M. on Sunday morning after attending a celebrity dinner at the famed Trocadero nightclub on Sunset Strip. Infuriated by the fact that she had come home so late, West locked Todd out of her apartment. Todd then ascended the long stairwell up to the garage. Her intention was either to stay warm (it had been a chilly night) by starting her car or to drive to a friend’s house where she might be able to go to bed and sleep it off. In either case, West followed her up the stairs and, without any rational thought as to the consequences of his actions, he locked the door to the garage after Todd had entered it and had started her car. His object was not to harm Todd but, rather, to teach her a “lesson.”(11) After daybreak, West returned to the garage in order to confront Todd. At that point he discovered her body and thus set in motion a conspiracy of silence that lasted more than half a century.

If Wolf and Mader are correct, and their scenario is supported by the testimony of Hal Roach himself, one of the architects of the cover-up, then the story of Thelma Todd’s death is a classic Hollywood tale of anger, jealousy, hubris and manipulation. Whatever really took place on that fateful early morning in 1935, when Philip Marlowe made his fictional climb up those same steps (12)\on his way to Lindsay Marriott’s home in 1940, he was also taking a walk back into the dark heart of Hollywood’s past. Here was a story featuring mobsters, movie moguls, jealous lovers, gamblers and beautiful starlets. Not even Chandler, who trod that territory more meaningfully, more poignantly than anyone else before or after, could have done any better himself. This is one of those rare instances where the truth, whatever it actually happens to be in this case, is indeed stranger than fiction!(13)

Footnotes:

(1)Raymond Chandler, Stories & Early Novels (New York: The Library of America, 1995), p.799.

(2)Ibid., pp.799-800.

(3)see “The Mysterious Death of Thelma Todd” on the web at: http://www.usc.edu/isd/archives/la/scandals/todd.html.

(4)see the fan site: http://homes.acmecity.com/movies/grip/267/thelmatodd.html.

(5) Ibid

(6)Marvin J. Wolf & Katherine Mader, “Solved! Thelma Todd’s Death” on the web at:
http://people.we.mediaone.net/marvwolf/todd_frameset.html

(7) http://usc.edu/isd/archives/la/scandals/todd.html.

(8) see Wolf & Mader

(9) see “The Schafer Mystery” at: http://homes.acemecity.com/movies/grip/267/thelmatodd.html

(10) see Wolf & Mader

(11) see Wolf and Mader

(12) Photographs of the hillside stairway and of the sidewalk café can be found in: Elizabeth Ward & Alain Silver, Raymond Chandler’s Los Angeles, reissue edition (New York: Overlook Press, 1997)

(13) For a fictionalized treatment of the Thelma Todd case featuring none other than Philip Marlowe, see “The Perfect Crime” by Max Allan Collins in: Byron Preiss, editor, Raymond Chandler’s Philip Marlowe (New York: ibooks/Simon & Schuster, 1999), pages 3-23.