The mysterious death of ‘the most beautiful woman on earth’
This starlet’s possible suicide rocked old Hollywood
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.
Upon his return, the couple surfed the most opulent circuits in Paris. One soggy night, the pair returned to their hotel in the early morning (hotel staff would say between 1 a.m. and 3 a.m.). But once inside the room, Jack was the only witness.
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.
Though a Paris physician would ultimately rule Olive’s death an accident, its mysterious circumstances cast a shadow across Hollywood.
Olive was born Oliva R. Duffy on October 20, 1894, in Charleroi, Pennsylvania. She left school at 15 to work as a shop girl and help support her widowed mother. Married at 16, she nevertheless still entertained dreams of big-city life.
According to Olive Thomas: The Life and Death of a Silent Film Beauty, she was truly beautiful, with golden ringlet curls and porcelain skin. In her 1955 memoir, her sister-in-law described Olive as having “the loveliest violet-blue eyes I have ever seen. They were fringed with long dark lashes that seemed darker because of the delicate translucent pallor of her skin.”
After being penned in by her small-town world long enough, Olive fled to Manhattan, where she found work at a department store in Harlem. There she learned of a modeling competition for “The Most Beautiful Girl in New York City.” She scraped together her best outfit and headed downtown to audition. She won, despite hundreds of contestants, and earned a picture in the papers. When artist Harrison Fisher dubbed Olive “The Most Beautiful Girl in the World,” her entrée into Hollywood society was set.
Within months, Olive auditioned for the wildly popular showgirl chorus Ziegfeld Follies. She was adored, lavished with expensive jewelry and flowers on top of her $75 per week paycheck ($1,700 today), much of which she sent home to family. “To know Olive Thomas personally is like being on friendly terms with an angel,” wrote Philip Mindil, dramatic editor of The New York Tribune.
She divorced in September, on grounds of desertion and cruelty.
Soon Hollywood got a hold of her. Olive’s first role would be Rita Malone in episode ten of the Beatrice Fairfax film series (1916), financed by William Randolph Hearst. Later, Triangle Pictures offered her an exclusive contract and moved Olive out west to California, where she soon earned a reputation as an energetic brain eager to learn the nuances of film, from acting to directing to prop construction.
During this time, Olive had begun a romance with actor Jack Pickford, brother of “America’s Sweetheart,” Mary Pickford. After eight months of dancing and parties, the pair was secretly married in New Jersey, though no marriage license has been found. Olive kept the surname from her first marriage, eager to prove she could thrive without the benefit of the Pickford family name.
The pair sailed the Hollywood wave, attending parties packed with alcohol and drugs. Theirs was a passionate but contentious romance, full of heated energy and occasional turmoil. Pickford did not quit his womanizing ways after marriage, and contracted syphilis the following year. In fact, the mercury bichloride that poisoned Olive was a topical medication for his disease.
When news of their marriage surfaced, the media began to cover the couple’s many affairs — parties, trips around the world, suspicious car crashes… The American public craved every detail.
Meanwhile, Olive’s contract with Triangle was coming to a close. Selznick Pictures snatched her up in 1919, under contract to star in a breakneck eight films per year, with releases every six weeks.
Among these was The Flapper. Olive’s portrayal of a restless schoolgirl was the first American flapper role, a fad which would characterize 1920s youth rebellion. But its success was ultimately due to the spectacle of her death, in the Paris Ritz on August 20, 1920.
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.”
For years, people would be drawn to the mysterious tragedy of “the most beautiful woman on earth,” and the event’s dark consequences. Though most of her films are now presumed “lost” or destroyed, Olive Thomas was the star in Hollywood’s first major scandal — fit for its own silver screen.