A beloved film comedienne who worked alongside the Marx Brothers, Laurel
and Hardy, and dozens of others, Thelma Todd was a rare Golden Age star
who successfully crossed over from silent films to talkies. This
authoritative new biography traces Todd's life from a vivacious little
girl who tried to assuage her parents' grief over her brother's death,
to an aspiring teacher turned reluctant beauty queen, to an outspoken
movie starlet and restaurateur.
Increasingly disenchanted with Hollywood, in 1934 Todd opened Thelma
Todd's Sidewalk Café, a hot spot that attracted fans, tourists, and
celebrities. Despite success in film and business, privately the
beautiful actress was having a difficult year-receiving disturbing
threats from a stranger known as the Ace and having her home
ransacked-when she was found dead in a garage near her café. An inquest
concluded that her death, at age just twenty-nine, was accidental, but
in a thorough new investigation that draws on interviews, photographs,
documents, and extortion notes-much of these not previously available to
the public-Michelle Morgan offers a compelling new theory, suggesting
the sequence of events on the night of her death and arguing what many
people have long suspected: that Thelma was murdered.
But by whom?
The suspects include Thelma's movie-director lover, her
would-be-gangster ex-husband, and the thugs who were pressuring her to
install gaming tables in her popular café-including a new,
never-before-named mobster. This fresh examination on the eightieth
anniversary of the star's death is sure to interest any fan of Thelma
Todd, of Hollywood's Golden Age, or of gripping real-life murder
mysteries.
