TABLOID TABOO

Meet Hollywood’s very first Brittany Murphy. Sort of.

Actress Olive Thomas was born in Pennsylvania in 1894. She won a beauty contest in New York City in 1914, and from there, she was Hollywood bound. Olive worked in the Ziegfeld Follies, and became the first of the “flappers” in the burgeoning ‘jazz age’. She also became the sister-in-law of acclaimed silent movie actress Mary Pickford, when she married Mary’s brother Jack Pickford in 1918.

Then tragedy struck. In 1920, while on vacation with her husband in France, Olive was found unconscious in her hotel room, of apparent narcotic poisoning, and she died shortly thereafter. She was only 25. The tragic news hit Hollywood like a ton of bricks: in 1920, Hollywood was still in its infancy, and this was its first major “scandal”. Rumors abounded, varying from suicide, to death after too much partying, to even having been murdered by her husband. Upon closer examination, however, a less glamorous truth was revealed: The authorities involved determined that Olive likely misread a prescription, written in French, in a dimly lit room, and ingested mercury bichloride tablets dissolved in alcohol, by mistake. Her death was officially ruled an accident.

That didn’t stop the backlash back in America, however, and only encouraged pundits, clerics and blowhards from all across the country into expounding the evils of Hollywood, and its threat to the flower of Young American Girlhood. The Olive Thomas incident remained grist for the tabloid mill for an entire year, until she was finally pushed out of the headlines in 1921 by the second Hollywood scandal, involving a comedian named Fatty Arbuckle.

But that’s another story. And besides, surely you already know about that one.