CHILD STAR’S LIFE OF CHAOS AND SECRETS
When Leslie Hannah and her sister were children, their aunt, Lora Lee Michel, appeared to them as a spectral figure, becoming real only when she appeared on screen. A child actress in the 1940s, Lora Lee at 7 was billed as a “sensation” with “the greatest appeal since Shirley Temple.” She appeared in more than a dozen films, sharing the screen with Humphrey Bogart, Glenn Ford and Olivia de Havilland.
“We’d be watching TV and there’d be these films Lora Lee was in and my mom would turn them on and show us,” Hannah said. “That’s her. You can hear her voice!”
But Lora Lee was a shooting star — one that would quickly crash-land. At 9, during the height of her celebrity, she stood at the center of a scandalous custody trial that grabbed headlines and captured the country’s imagination. It set in motion a chain of events that not only cut short her promising career but led to the unraveling of her life.
Just before her 10th birthday, a judge ordered Lora Lee to leave Hollywood and return home to Texas.
At 22, she landed in a federal prison.
Then she vanished.
“I have been looking for Lora Lee for a period of about 55 years,” lamented Barbara Wright Isaacs, her only surviving sibling. “I thought to myself, she’s either got to be dead or she doesn’t want to be found.”
Long before there was Britney Spears, Gary Coleman or Lindsay Lohan, there was Lora Lee Michel. A small-town girl with big Hollywood dreams caught up in the vortex of show business before many protections were in place for child entertainers. Hers was a classic tale of childhood stardom: the adorable moppet who got her once upon a time but not the happily ever after.
Her story, as I soon discovered, was a parable, revealing the underbelly of Hollywood’s Golden Age and the perils facing child actors. But it was also one family’s search for answers and the buried secrets that have a way of eventually surfacing.
All families have their stories. But for Wright Isaacs and her two daughters, theirs was a ghost story.
“I don’t think there’s a time I didn’t know about Lora Lee,” Wright Isaacs’ youngest daughter, Allison Wallace, 50, told me. “My mom talked about her our whole life. I remember my mom crying, saying how much she wanted to find her sister and showing us the pictures of her when we were little kids.”
Last September, I traveled to Bandera, Texas, to the home of Hannah, 54, Wright Isaacs’ eldest daughter.
We sat in a room filled with Lora Lee’s movie memorabilia. Hannah pulled out a large three-ring binder stuffed with yellowed newspaper clippings going back 75 years, as well as correspondence and photographs. There, under framed movie posters, Hannah and Wallace unspooled the tale of their once-famous aunt and the family’s unsuccessful efforts to find her.
As they grew up, they began to understand the mythology around her. Wright Isaacs and Lora Lee were sisters, born into the same family but later adopted out to a pair of brothers. Yet they were separated for most of their lives.
For years, the family’s search yielded some clues, a few leads — but mostly dead-ends. “I don’t think there was ever a time they weren’t trying to find her,” Wallace said.
Hollywood is notorious for erasing people. But Wright Isaacs and her daughters refused to forget Lora Lee.
They knew the broad contours of her life: the movies, brief marriages and the arrest for car theft that sent her to prison. But little else.
What they did know of Lora Lee was by turns anguished and dramatic. “I think everybody in her life just wanted to get whatever they could out of her,” Wallace said.
Wright Isaacs’ memories of her sister were bittersweet and fragmented. She still had the baby doll her sister gave her in 1950. The publicity photo signed, “Greetings from Hollywood to Barbara from Lora Lee,” sits in a frame.
In recent years, Wright Isaacs, 78, simply wanted closure; Lora Lee would be 81.
“I would like to not worry about where [she] is or what happened to her or why she never tried to find me,” she said. “I would very much like to know if she’s gone. If she’s deceased. Then maybe I can find myself resting in peace about her.”
I picked up the binder. Though much of Lora Lee’s early years were well documented, once she left Hollywood there were major gaps in her life story.
Soon, I was watching Lora Lee’s films, excavating archives, sifting through old movie magazines, reading newspaper clippings, obituaries, county clerk records, letters and court filings. Like an anthropologist, I began tracing genealogy reports and tracking down anyone who crossed paths with her, trying to understand what they might tell me about who Lora Lee Michel was and what happened to her. Eventually, I discovered the many hidden threads of her life.
Istarted at the beginning in Schulenburg, west of Houston, in the heart of Texas Hill Country. Tucked inside the Schulenburg Historical Museum, in the old Wolters Mercantile, stands a small exhibition devoted to Lora Lee. Photos and newspaper clippings chronicling her oncedazzling career are displayed among items stretching back to the town’s founding by German immigrants 150 years ago: a horse-drawn buggy, farm equipment, period clothing and 178 examples of barbed wire.
A drowsy railroad hub, Schulenburg was where farmers and ranchers once came to ship their cotton and hides. Today, people still refer to Schulenburg as “halfway to everywhere, middle of nowhere.”
Lora Lee remains its most famous resident and its most enduring mystery.
Lora Lee Michel began life as Virginia Joy in 1940. She was born to Lena and Willie Walker Willeford in La Grange, a small town in Texas’ German belt, nestled along the Colorado River. She was one of five, possibly six, children the couple had together.
Money was tight. Willie, known as “Red,” worked as a truck driver, with a side hustle in the local cotton business. He frequently drank, and Lena frequently bolted.
“She was a runner,” Linda Robbins, one of her granddaughters, told me. “If she got too comfortable, she had to leave.”
Their union inevitably collapsed.
When Virginia Joy was 5, Otto Michel, a cotton broker, and his wife, Lorraine, adopted and renamed her Lora Lee. The childless couple lived in Schulenburg. At 57 and 56, they were old enough to be her grandparents.
The story of Lora Lee’s adoption, however, was told several ways.
In one version, Lena Willeford took off (some say with a Baptist minister) and left all of their children with Red, who was unable to care for them. He sent the older ones to stay with friends for a period, but had the younger ones adopted. In another version, the local children’s services came in and removed the entire Willeford brood, placing them with new families.
The account that Lora Lee’s adoptive mother, Lorraine Michel, gave to the press was that she first noticed Lora Lee in a Schulenburg store. The two struck up a conversation and she learned of the family’s difficulties. The childless Michels had raised a greatnephew from the time he was 6, but he was serving with the U.S. Army Signal Corps in Japan. “We were lonesome, and when I saw Lora in the store that day I fell in love with her,” she told the New York Daily News in 1950.
“She was a ragged little waif. We took her in and gave her a home, and she loved us like she was our own child. We loved her too,” Otto Michel was quoted in one press account.
Otto’s brother Henry Michel and his wife, Lillie, who lived in San Antonio, took in Lora Lee’s younger sisters, Barbara Ann and Penny. They eventually adopted Barbara and sent Penny to a friend, who adopted her.
The home Barbara found herself in was perfectly ordinary and strict. But with Otto and Lorraine, Lora Lee found herself catapulted into a world where childhood make-believe came to equal money.
Lora Lee was a bright and charismatic child, with warm brown eyes and a smile that could light up a room. Lorraine taught the girl how to recite nursery rhymes, she said, and Lora Lee did so with a “sparkling charm.”
Soon, Lora Lee was lighting up the stage in local pageants.
While performing at a Lions Club banquet in Schulenburg, she caught the attention of a clutch of Texas dignitaries including Beauford Jester, then the Texas Railroad commissioner — soon to be the state’s governor. One bigwig was so impressed that he sent a telegram to Warner Bros. bosses saying, “If you don’t take a look at this child, you’re missing $1 million worth of Texas talent,” the family told me.
In 1946, the year after she was adopted, Lora Lee and Lorraine arrived in Hollywood. They moved to Crescent Heights Boulevard into a striking French Normandy-style apartment building that later housed Marilyn Monroe and Rock Hudson.
Otto remained back home to pay the “mounting bills,” according to a local news report.
Lorraine encouraged Lora Lee’s talents, enrolling her in dance classes and hiring a drama coach, fellow Texan Ona Wargin, who specialized in children.
Before long, Lora Lee began acting in TV and radio dramatizations and plays. Within a couple of years, she appeared in “I Remember Mama” at the El Capitan Theatre and in Clare Boothe Luce’s “The Women” at the Key Theater.
Invited to sing and dance at the Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel in front of 500 studio officials, Lora Lee ended the routine by sitting “on every lap in the place,” her mother boasted to their hometown paper in 1948.
Lora Lee could deliver both charm and two to three minutes of uninterrupted dialogue. She landed her first big movie role, playing Lulu, the daughter of Gary Cooper and Ann Sheridan, in the 1948 romantic comedy “Good Sam.” She vaulted over all 10 girls up for the part, telling Leo McCarey, who’d previously directed the hit film “The Bells of St. Mary’s,” “make up your mind so the other nine can go home,” according to several press reports.
A succession of casting coups followed.
Lora Lee began appearing in the kind of pulpy, noirish films that now rotate regularly on the classic movie channels, such as “Mr. Soft Touch” with Glenn Ford. By 1950, she was earning $100 a day, according to The Times, equal to about $1,150 today.
A vivacious presence, her scenes with Humphrey Bogart in “Tokyo Joe” capture both her charm and ability to hold the screen with a Hollywood icon.
In 1949, she played the plucky young version of Jill in “Mighty Joe Young,” the story of a girl who lives on an African ranch with her father and raises an orphaned baby gorilla, which she later brings to Hollywood.
“She was breathtaking. She was fascinating. And every time I see the movie, I can’t wait to see her,” recalled Terry Moore, who played the grown-up Jill in the film, in a video interview with Leslie Hannah.
Moore, now 93, who was nominated for an Oscar for the 1952 film “Come Back, Little Sheba,” added: “I’ve been with all the child actors, and I’ll tell you, Lora Lee was the prettiest child actress I’ve ever seen in my life. She had what’s called star power.” Schulenburg swelled with pride. The town’s only cinema, the Cozy Theatre, usually played a single film twice a week, but made an exception for Lora Lee’s movies, giving them seven performance runs.
When “Good Sam” opened, the local paper devoted a full-page article to the girl they called “a 7-year-old package of personality plus.” In the accompanying photo, it appears as if the entire town turned up, holding a banner that read, “Lora Lee Michel, Schulenburg’s Own Movie Star.”
At 80, Gus Breymann can still vividly recall the excitement. Generations of his family owned Schulenburg’s pharmacy. Breymann now lives in Michigan, but he remembers how he and others used to drive past the Michels’ house.
“I think that was part of the surprise, that someone from that small German community could actually go to Hollywood and become a star as quickly as she did,” he said.
It wasn’t long before Lora Lee began playing bigger parts in more ambitious films.
She appeared as the younger version of the emotionally fragile character portrayed by Olivia de Havilland in “The Snake Pit.” The 1948 film chronicled a woman’s stay in a state mental institution. Nominated for several Academy Awards, it is considered one of the first realistic treatments of mental illness on film.
That same year, Lora Lee received top billing alongside Richard Denning and Frances Rafferty in the murder mystery “Lady at Midnight.”
The film’s studio, Eagle-Lion, centered its publicity campaign around Lora Lee. “This youngster has a charm and talent to make her one of the screen’s outstanding child stars,” its promotional materials proclaimed.
Numerous movie magazines echoed the breathless treatment.
As one columnist from Screenland declared earlier: “If she’s handled properly, wouldn’t be surprised if she’d turn into another Shirley Temple.”
On the morning of Jan. 12, 1950, Lora Lee’s acting coach, Ona Wargin, arrived at the Michels’ apartment to take her to a modeling interview. Wargin asked to have the girl “dressed prettily,” as Lorraine later recounted.
“I told Lora Lee to be a good girl, kissed her goodbye and then Mrs. Wargin said, ‘Don’t worry if we’re late. We’ll be at Paramount studio.’ I said good luck, Ona.”
Wargin, however, did not take Lora Lee to the interview. She went to the authorities, alleging that she had seen bruises on the actress. Lora Lee told the officers she was afraid of her adoptive mother, who she said mistreated her, starving her to keep her small for roles. She pleaded “never [to] send her back to that woman.”
Within hours, Lora Lee was placed in the care of the Rev. Elford D. Sundstrom, pastor of the United Brethren Church in Burbank.
Lorraine was arrested, charged with child abuse and neglect. She was later released on $1,000 bail.
Four days later, Otto flew to Los Angeles.
“There’s either a mistake or a frame-up and I’m going out there to see,” he told a local Texas paper, saying he had never supported sending their daughter to Hollywood. Now he planned to “fight and keep my home together.”
The couple hired Oscar Cummins, an attorney with connections to Columbia Pictures, where Lora Lee had made several movies.
In a letter to his brother Henry, Otto called Cummins “our red hot