Vickers had also been an early Playboy playmate, but I best remember her in the part of the "other woman" in the 50s grade-Z classic Attack of the 50-Foot Woman.
Susan Savage, an actress, went to check on Vickers after noticing old letters and cobwebs in her elderly neighbor's mailbox.
"The letters seemed untouched and were starting to yellow," Savage said. "I just had a bad feeling."
After pushing open a barricaded front gate and scaling a hillside, Savage peered through a broken window with another piece of glass taped over the hole. She decided to enter the house after seeing a shock of blond hair, which turned out to be a wig.
The inside of the home was in disrepair and it was hard to move through the rooms because boxes containing what appeared to be clothes, junk mail and letters formed barriers, Savage said. Eventually, she made her way upstairs and found a room with a small space heater still on.
She was looking at a cordless phone that appeared to have been knocked off its cradle when she first saw the body on the floor, she said. Savage had known Vickers but the remains were unrecognizable, she said.
There are certainly a lot of legitimate questions that need to be raised about this. Nobody even noticed for over a year something was amiss? I could understand the utilities still being on, as I have read Vickers was not at all destitute but did well in real estate investments. But it is just unbelievable.
She's not the first Hollywood performer to have been neglected. I recall the famous silent movie star, Vilma Banky, who with her husband Rod La Rocque were the toasts of the town. Her husband died in 1969, but Banky remained active until her last decade, when she suffered from ill health. THEN she, like big lottery winners, found out who her true friends were, at least those who were still alive by the time she died in 1991:
Falling ill in her 80s, she became embittered that none of her friends visited her, and she decreed that no notice be made of her death.
Only now has a spokesman revealed the actress died in a Los Angeles nursing home on March 18, 1991, at the age of about 90.
Word of Banky's death began appearing in publications this fall. Yet her passing went largely unnoticed until this week, when her attorney confirmed the death following an inquiry from The Associated Press. "Banky was ill at home for five years and for another five years at the St. John of God Convalescent Hospital," attorney Robert Vossler said Thursday.
"During all that time, not a single soul came to visit her. She was so upset that she wanted no notice and no service when she died," he said. "I followed her wishes."
The obituaries were published a year after she died.
link
_____
No comments:
Post a Comment