On the night he took his life, Lemmon and Reeves drank heavily and fought openly in front of William Bliss, writer Robert Condon and Carol Van Ronkel, who were all present at the scene. Evidently, the drama became too much for Reeves, who committed suicide three days before their scheduled wedding, and left his estate, what there was of it, to Mannix.Īlthough alternative theories persist over Reeves' suicide, ably explained in the 2006 film Hollywoodland, the passage of time has told the tale of an ultimately frustrated artist locked in a spiral of bad luck and disastrous relationships. She was also the ex-wife of Jacob Webb (a loaded descendant of Cornelius Vanderbilt who faced bigamy charges after marrying someone else while married to Lemmon) and of musician Hamish Menzies. In 1958, Reeves called off the long-running affair with Mannix and became engaged to Leonore Lemmon, the high-society daughter of a successful Broadway ticket broker. and not much else.Īs the '50s came to a close, he was culturally popular on the outside and artistically miserable on the inside. The result was a slow trickle of non- Superman work, including an appearance in Fritz Lang's The Blue Gardenia, Fred Zinneman's war epic, From Here to Eternity, Disney's Westward Ho the Wagons. While Reeves' several years with Mannix were productive in terms of playing* Superman*, he had now become so identified with the character that he was typecast and effectively straitjacketed by it. (Mannix, according to gossip of the period, was reputed to have underworld connections, and was accused of murdering his first wife Bernice Fitzmaurice and implicated in the cover-up of the salacious suicide of MGM's Paul Bern.) The situation worsened when Reeves divorced Needles and became entangled in an affair with ex-Ziegfield Follies showgirl Toni Mannix, wife of MGM general manager Eddie Mannix.
Superman actor series#
Although he became a national celebrity due to his role in the film Superman and the Mole Men and the popular television series Adventures of Superman, he was still a B-lister in the glitzy clique of Hollywood. The reality behind the scenes was that he worked for meager pay under punitive contracts that forbade him from acting in other series or films.
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