This article was originally published in the January 2013 issue of the now sadly defunct New Empress Magazine. In honour of both International Women’s Day earlier this week and the centenaryof her birth, we are reposting this to celebrate Thelma Todd; one of the greatest female comedians of her era.

“You’re a woman who’s been getting nothing but dirty breaks.  Well, we can clean and tighten your brakes, but you’ll have to stay in the garage all night.”  – Groucho Marx, Monkey Business (1931)

Picture the scene: we open on a mild mid-December morning in sunny Los Angeles. A personal maid to a high profile Hollywood star pulls her car off the Pacific Coast Highway and navigates the gnarled side roads to the garage. She parks her car and gets out to open the garage door. She finds her employer’s car, a prestigious Lincoln Phaeton, still parked inside. This wasn’t anything new; the maid usually had to take her employer’s car out of the garage before she could put her own in. What was peculiar however, is that her employer, a glamorous platinum blonde akin to Jean Harlow, wasn’t usually found slumped over the steering wheel. The maid opened the door and her employer, still in her exquisite evening garb, fell lifelessly to the side. She had been Thelma Todd, comedienne extraordinaire, and she was dead at 29 years of age.

This sounds like a moment straight from a forties Noir or one that might be found in the pages of a Raymond Chandler yarn but, unfortunately, the case of Thelma Todd is all too real, tragic and mysterious even nearly eighty years on.  She was an ardent worker during the era which saw the death of silents and the birth of talkies and as such, the majority of her work is unfortunately now either lost or out of print. Fortunately, there are still four gems available to the public at large which showcase the brilliance of “Hot Toddy” (as she was want to calling herself).

Thelma Todd was born in Lawrence, Massachusetts in 1906.  She was a studious and beautiful girl and had ambitions to become a school teacher. Her mother, however, had hoped for better for her daughter and pressed her to enter several beauty pageants, or so the story goes. Thelma caught the eye of Jesse Lasky, co-founder of Paramount, after winning the title of Miss Massachusetts in 1925 whilst simultaneously teaching in her hometown. She was fast tracked into a scheme that sounds like it could be rehashed in the present day as a dreadful reality show. Thelma, along with 17 other hopefuls, were ushered into a “Paramount School” at their Astoria lot, where a prestigious one-year contract with the studio awaited those that impressed. Within ten months, she was a bona fide leading lady in some, admittedly, mediocre films, but already starring across from names as big as Richard Dix, Wallace Beery and Gary Cooper. Less than ten years after this incredible change of fortune, however, she would be dead.

Although things seemed rosy on the surface, in these early days Todd was having a tough time reconciling the tinsel town she knew from the newsreels to the one she experienced on a daily basis. She found the men of Hollywood to be rude and forceful creatures when it came to actresses, especially the powerbrokers of the big studios. She also disliked being in direct competition with girls who’d allow “too much familiarity” in order to advance their careers. As time went on, her own behaviour grew far more scandalous, but in these early days, Thelma was relatively clean cut. Soon, she’d fallen out of favour at Paramount, and was rented to other studios, netting her employers a healthy profit from her $100 salary.

Things really began to blossom in 1929, when she found herself at the Hal Roach Studios and into talkies. Hal Roach was a personal fan of her work and thought she’d be great with Laurel and Hardy. She was getting noticed by all the right people and in 1931, found herself back on a Paramount lot delivering what is arguably her greatest performance whilst starring alongside against the four Marx Brothers in Monkey Business. Here, she plays an unhappy gangster’s moll aboard a cruise ship, but as with all Marx Brothers films, the plot is a mere contrivance getting in the way of the jokes. Crucially, she has three fairly lengthy scenes shared with Groucho and in each of them, holds her own against the great purveyor of wit. Margaret Dumont may be the actress forever tied to the Marxes as their straight-woman, but Thelma offered something more.  She wasn’t just the butt of Groucho’s barbed jokes, she could also bit back without any hesitation.

Sadly, this high didn’t last. Thelma had informed Roach that she was unhappy merely doing comedy and strove for more serious roles. She managed to put a lot of noses out of joint by changing her name to Alison Loyd (yes, only one “L”) for a role in the drama Corsair, implying that her real name was tainted by her background in comedy. Not only was Corsair a critical and public disappointment, her roles in comedy were severely affected by this slight. When re-teaming with the Marx Brothers in Horse Feathers (1932), her role was substantially diminished, though one of the highlights of this uneven film (even by their standards) sees Todd again duelling with Groucho.  

The story is sadly similar for the remaining two films readily available on DVD.  In Speak Easily (1932), a remarkably tepid film considering the talent involved, she plays a gold-digger, chasing after Buster Keaton’s cash. The sole high point of the film again features Todd heavily, with her character plying the Great Stoneface’s stately Professor Post with booze in order to force a marriage proposal out of him. Seeing her match Keaton’s great comedic physicality really makes one question why she ever wanted out of comedy. Her natural talent is completely transcendent. Unfortunately, no such sublime scene can be found in her final collaboration with Laurel and Hardy. Fra Diavolo (1933) is a very funny film, but Todd is given little to work with, acting only as an aristocratic love interest for the villain of the piece.

Todd herself could see which way the wind was blowing. She knew that her long-term security wasn’t to be found in the picture business, where youth and beauty were the currencies of choice. Alongside her Corsair director and on/off lover Roland West, she opened ‘Thelma Todd’s Sidewalk Cafe’, a popular hotspot for celebrities located on the Pacific Coast Highway. It was here that her body was found December 16th, 1935.

The story of her death is unfortunately one that has been subject to many alterations and exaggerations over the years but there are some facts that the various accounts agree on. Thelma was a guest-of-honour at a debutante party at the Trocadero Cafe, December 14th. Prior to arriving at the party, her and West argued. He disliked her being away from the Cafe; she brought in the punters and her absence hurt business. He threatened to lock the door at 2am whether she was home or not. Thelma Todd’s ex-husband, Pat DiCicco was also attending the party at Trocadero and had made it known that he wished to be seated alongside Thelma. However, he turned up with another young starlet on his arm, which infuriated her. She had divorced him the previous year on grounds of cruelty, so this action was much in character. He had also been violent during the marriage and in one instance this resulted in Thelma receiving an emergency appendectomy. At the Trocadero, they argued and DiCicco left after making a phone call. Thelma proceeded to drink heavily and tell her friends about a mysterious businessman from San Francisco that she was involved with. She made plans to attend a gathering the next day and left. Her chauffeur drove her home. The studios demanded that she have a driver after getting into some serious drink driving scrapes. He usually walked her from the garage to the house, pertaining to the fact that they were quite far apart (a staircase of over 200 steps separating them), but this night she refused. This is the final verified time anyone saw her alive.  

From here, the story gets confused. The official report deems the cause to be accidental death from carbon monoxide poisoning between the hours of 5 and 8am, Sunday 15th December. The report surmises that Thelma walked the steps, found the apartment locked and went back to the garage to sleep in her car, leaving the engine running for warmth presumably. The broken nose she suffered was simply the effect of collapsing onto the steering wheel. A tragic end to perennial talent.

If it were that simple however, people would have shut up about this case years ago. The crime scene offered several questions. She was found with a key to the apartment in her handbag. She had enough alcohol in her bloodstream to make it plausible to suggest she might have had difficulty finding it, however, that doesn’t explain how clean her evening shoes were. The stairs between the house and the garage were dirty enough to sully the shoes of the sober investigatory police officers at the scene, but her’s were immaculate and this was after two supposed trips. Further to this, there were several reported sightings of Thelma with an unidentified man during Sunday daytime, including one such account from Jewel Carmen, West’s estranged wife (who had a sordid Hollywood history of her own). Several papers even ran stories claiming that she’d called the gathering she was meant to attend, apologising for her tardiness, but claiming that the partygoers would “drop dead” when they saw who she was turning up with. Conspiracy theories were further fueled when the LAPD urged Todd’s mother to cremate the body, preventing a second autopsy.

As with all popular whodunnits, there are many theories as to the real events surrounding her death, but the one with the most traction revolves around an altercation Todd had in the Brown Derby Cafe a couple of weeks prior. Charles “Lucky” Luciano was mobster, looking to make it big in the largely virgin territory of LA. He’d spied the Sidewalk Cafe as a potential front for a gambling/extortion racket. Though accounts vary regarding how closely their pasts intertwined, Lucky was, at the very least, an associate of DiCicco’s and knew Thelma through him. She refused his offer and threats. She was not one to sucumb to bullies as was proved on the Paramount lot – rumour is that by turning down an executive’s sexual advances, she lost the chance to play the lead in Hell’s Angels, the role that made Jean Harlow’s career.  The alleged argument in the Brown Derby played out like a bad movie. Todd proclaimed that Lucky would get the Cafe “over [her] dead body”. Lucky succinctly reminded her such a thing “could be arranged.”

Putting aside the mobsters, the violent ex-husband and the enraged lover, the sad truth remains that this seems to be yet another story of a small town girl making it big in the city of dreams and finding the reality all too cruel. She lived large and paid all too final a price for her excesses in a tragically avoidable incident. Regardless of the circumstances, the fact remains that Thelma Todd was found dead before she even hit her thirtieth birthday – a great talent extinguished that has gone largely unsung in the time since. This is, as far as I’m concerned, as equally tragic as the events surrounding that weekend in December 1935.