THE ORIGINAL ‘GONE GIRL’ Marie
Mcdonald’s story from 1957 became part of her legacy.
There are many mysteries in the nighttime desert. A spooky whistling noise could be the wind or a wolf’s howl. A shift of movement in the sand might be moonlight or a rattlesnake. A stranger approaching could be a crazed lunatic or someone who is desperately lost, seeking help, pleading to have a story heard.
At 11:15 PM on Jan. 4, 1957, a truck driver named Richard D. Corn became the first of many to hear one such tale. Corn was barrelling his tractor-trailer 24km east of Coachella, California, when his headlights illuminated a blonde woman with sand in her hair, dressed in a bathrobe and slippers, waving her arms on the highway. “I had a hard time stopping,” Corn later told police. “She runs around to the side of the cab and there she is, crying and carrying on hysterical.”
The woman had a swollen lip, two cracked teeth and bruises on her face and legs. As Corn was speeding her to the nearest hospital, something occurred to him. “I thought I recognised her from the pictures in the papers,” he said. Sure enough, earlier that day The New York Times and other publications had run articles about the disappearance of 33-year-old Hollywood star Marie Mcdonald. Here she was, 24 hours after she reportedly had been abducted.
How Mcdonald got to that point begins, like many Hollywood stories, with a teen chasing a dream. Though she appeared in more than a dozen movies throughout the 1940s, mostly in supporting roles, her name as an actress has slipped into obscurity. Born Cora Marie Frye in Kentucky in 1923, she went to New York as a teenager with her mother and entered beauty pageants. By 17, she had won the title of Miss Yonkers and debuted on Broadway as a showgirl. Making her way to California, she landed a contract for $US75 per week with Universal Pictures. It was after her appearance in the 1942 Abbott and Costello film Pardon My Sarong that she acquired her notorious nickname, based on her voluptuous figure: The Body.
“Can you imagine being called that today?” Tina Diamond, Mcdonald’s only biological child, tells WHO. (Before giving birth to Tina, Mcdonald had adopted two children.) “It would be just awful. But back then calling a woman ‘The Body’ was apparently OK as a marketing tool. I don’t think she liked it. She was funny and very smart, and she knew it was creepy.”
Despite—or perhaps because of—that label, Mcdonald never caught hold of a project to launch her into major stardom. In 1944, at the height of World War II, she flashed some leg as a pin-up girl in the US army’s Yank magazine, and in 1947 she was romanced on screen by Gene Kelly in the musical Living in a Big Way. A greater degree of Mcdonald’s fame came from her love affairs and marriages, which tabloid newspaper and magazine writers of the day covered voraciously.
By her early 30s Mcdonald had been married four times—and for a few months was even the mistress of infamous American gangster Bugsy Siegel, shortly before he was shot to death through the window of a Beverly Hills mansion. “Her biggest problem was that she had terrible relationships with men,” her daughter says. “And there were always men chasing her, I guess for her looks, and she couldn’t resist them.”
Her third and fourth marriages were to wealthy tycoon Harry Karl, owner of the largest privately owned shoe-store chain in the country. Six weeks after divorcing him in late 1954, Mcdonald
announced her intention to remarry Karl—yet then reversed course, telling the media that she was allergic to him and that “when I am with Harry, I get sick. When I am away from him, I never get sick.” Nevertheless, Mcdonald and Karl tied the knot for a second time in June of 1955. But by the autumn of the following year, after Mcdonald filed a police report accusing Karl of domestic violence, they were separated and living apart again.
And so it was around midnight on the evening of Jan. 3, 1957, that Mcdonald was alone in her bedroom in her lavish home at 17031 Magnolia Blvd in Encino, California. A housekeeper and a chauffeur were asleep downstairs, as were her three children (Tina was 5 months old), when Mcdonald heard a clanging noise outside her window. There she saw her boxer dog running towards a man tapping a stick against the property’s fence. Next to him was another man holding a sawn-off shotgun. Both were wearing long leather jackets.
“Call off the dog or else we’ll shoot,” one shouted. Mcdonald obeyed. Within moments the two men, one African-american and the other Mexican, were inside her home. She asked what they wanted. “We want your rings, your money, and your body,” they said, and threatened the lives of her children if Mcdonald screamed or made any sudden gestures. Over the next half hour, they stole pearls and diamonds from her jewellery boxes and prepared a ransom note by clipping block letters out of newspaper headlines. Once the note was finished and placed in the house’s mailbox, the men blindfolded Mcdonald and forced her at gunpoint into a two-door sedan parked in the street.
Sitting in the backseat of the car, she was terrified as the men drove for more than an hour towards the California desert. Eventually they arrived at a small bungalow, where she was brought inside and made to swallow several pills with whiskey. Mcdonald was able to hold some of the pills in her cheek, but soon enough she was fading into drowsiness. Around this same time, Mcdonald’s mother Marie Tuboni received a phone call at her home in Woodland Hills, California. “We have Marie,” a nervous young male voice told her. “No harm will come to her if police are not notified.”
Yet Tuboni immediately called the cops and then drove to Mcdonald’s home. The gate and the front door were wide open, but the three children were safe in their beds. A policeman soon arrived, discovered the note in the mailbox (“She won’t be hurt to get money,” it awkwardly read), and informed his superiors at the Los Angeles Police Department. Then, at 2:10 AM, Mcdonald’s estranged husband was awakened by the ringing of his phone. “We have your wife,” a man murmured to Harry Karl. “If you want to see her alive again, don’t contact police.”
Back in the bungalow, Mcdonald roused herself from the narcotics-induced slumber. The men had left her alone in a room with a telephone. She could hear them arguing about her ransom amount, and she knew she needed to do something. It was after 4 AM when she quietly lifted the phone’s receiver and dialled the number of famed Hollywood gossip columnist Harrison Carroll. “Tonight at my home these two men came in and abducted me,” she whispered to him. “I’m blindfolded and doped. I wish to God I knew where I was.”
As night turned into day, Mcdonald’s kidnapping appeared in headlines. “Marie Mcdonald Missing on Coast,” boomed The New York Times. The LAPD sprang into action. Roadblocks were set up as far away as Arizona. In the bungalow, Mcdonald was left alone as the two men went out for turkey sandwiches. She was able to make two more phone calls—one to actor and beau Michael Wilding (the soon-to-be ex-husband of
Elizabeth Taylor) and the other to her business manager Harold Plant. Shortly before 3 PM, she cried to Plant, “I’m still held captive!”
As dusk was approaching, the men entered the room and discovered Mcdonald on the phone. They grabbed her by the wrist. A struggle ensued, and she was slapped in the face before being blindfolded again and shoved back in the car. This time she fought furiously, scratching both men on their faces and chests. “We have to get rid of her here,” one said to the other, “because we’re getting close to the border.” The men twisted Mcdonald’s sevencarat diamond ring off her finger and dumped her out of the car, and she plummeted down a 7.6m embankment. Minutes later, a full day after her ordeal had begun, she was saved by spotting the headlights of Corn’s truck.
That was Marie Mcdonald’s story—and she was sticking to it. On Jan. 7, the actress wore large sunglasses as she was carried on a stretcher back into her house. “Thank God I am safe with my children,” she told the assembled press. “There were times when I thought I would never see them again.” However, before she had even been found alive and returned home, estranged husband Harry Karl was expressing an alternative point of
view. “Marie is very sick,” he said to reporters, “and I think she left the house of her own will.”
Karl wasn’t alone in doubting the full truth of Mcdonald’s claims. In comments to reporters about her case, LAPD officers uttered the phrase “puzzling discrepancies,” while the words “hoax” and “publicity stunt” appeared in news headlines as early as the next day. One cop was asked if the force was actively searching for Mcdonald’s abductors, and he quipped, “Yeah, but not very hard.”
Her reputation was working against her. She had not appeared in a movie for seven years but was still generating headlines—for marriages, divorces, a DUI hit-and-run in Beverly Hills, and another car crash in Benedict Canyon. After her arrest for the hit-and-run, she was accused of kicking one LAPD officer in the groin and biting the thumb of another.
In the kidnapping case, she initially claimed to have been sexually assaulted, but physician Allan Fisher explained she showed “no evidence of any type of a criminal attack.” There was the matter of the crumpled newspapers found in Mcdonald’s fireplace, remnants of the ransom note. “It is far-fetched to believe that any kidnappers would take that much time and trouble to make up a note in the home,” LAPD inspector Edward Walker said. There was the bizarreness of her telephone calls from the bungalow. “It’s hard to imagine kidnappers who would let their victim have access to a telephone,” remarked LAPD lieutenant Ernest Johnston, head of a 10-man team assigned to the investigation. “And why didn’t she call police instead?”
On that point, Mcdonald offered an explanation that only intensified the police’s scepticism: The kidnappers, she now asserted, had ordered her to make the calls. “They wanted to alarm the people they planned to ask for ransom money,” she said. “They would ask me the number, dial it for me, and then hand me the phone. The only number I could remember was Harrison Carroll’s, so I called him.” But then why had she told Carroll, according to his account, “They’re in the next room. They think I’m asleep”?
Most scintillating to the public were the similarities between Mcdonald’s tale and the plot of Sylvia Tate’s 1956 comic novel The Fuzzy Pink Nightgown, a copy of which was found in Mcdonald’s home. In the book, two men kidnap a famous blonde actress in her pyjamas from her home; the woman bonds with her captors and falls in love with one of them. The lead character in The Fuzzy Pink Nightgown is vexed by the
“I think she left the house of her own will” —Harry Karl
possibility that people might think her abduction was a stunt—a fear also very much alive within Mcdonald. After making remarks to the media, she settled back in her home, along with her mother, boyfriend Wilding and superstar lawyer Jerry Giesler, who had three years earlier represented Marilyn Monroe in her divorce from Joe Dimaggio. And according to the Associated Press, “After [Mcdonald] entered the house, reporters could hear her sobbing, ‘Nobody believes me.’ ”
But Los Angeles chief of police William H. Parker wasn’t including himself among the doubters. As Giesler was denouncing the suggestion that Mcdonald take a lie-detector test as “insulting” to his client, LA’S top cop spent Sunday, Jan. 13, reading The Fuzzy Pink Nightgown. In speaking to reporters, Parker noted that the similarities between Mcdonald’s case and the novel did not prove her kidnapping was a hoax. “We don’t want to be charged with harassing her,” he said. “She hasn’t been accused of anything.” Says best-selling author Steve Hodel, a retired 25-year veteran of the LAPD’S homicide division: “To state the obvious, high-profile stars get treated by police differently from your average victim.”
The Mcdonald case proved that truism with one of the most spectacular charades in California law-enforcement history. Two days after her safe return home, the LAPD orchestrated a Hollywoodcalibre reenactment of her alleged abduction. The two dozen reporters and photographers on the scene were ecstatic. Newspaperman James Bacon penned an article snarkily headlined “Police Crew Films ‘The Body Snatchers,’ ” in which he wrote, “The movie had everything any Cecil B. Demille epic ever had—except camels. There were four scenes requiring six takes; a bedroom shot and an outdoor location; a producer and director ( both policemen)!”
According to Hodel, such an occurrence was unprecedented. “Thad Brown was the LAPD’S chief of detectives back then, and he loved to rub elbows with movie stars,” Hodel says. “One of his drinking buddies was Jack Webb, who was the creator and star of Dragnet, which was extremely popular on TV in 1957. And I wouldn’t be surprised if Brown spearheaded the whole reenactment thing.” But Hodel notes that the elaborate cinematic overture could also have been the LAPD’S own demonstration of crisis management. “Their main motivation might have been what we call Cya—cover your ass—so that nothing in the Mcdonald case came back to bite them.”
Two weeks later Mcdonald appeared for three hours before a grand jury, empanelled to decide whether there was enough evidence for indictments against the two still-unidentified assailants in her case. Walking out of the hearing with tears in her eyes, she told reporters, “I was in a state of shock when I made my statement in [the hospital]. I’m glad to clear up these so-called glaring discrepancies.” She expressed her hope that the grand jury would issue “John Doe” indictments against the two men, who she said would probably still show scratch marks on their faces from her fingernails. Yet the 19-man jury concluded that there was insufficient evidence to issue charges. The case was effectively closed. Mcdonald was shattered. “We will not rest until the men who kidnapped me are brought to justice,” she said.
One more twist was left to come. Fourteen months after the grand jury decision ceased momentum in her case, Mcdonald reported to police that she knew who had been the
“High-profile stars get treated differently” —Steve Hodel