6.2 Farewells
On June 30, 1945, Alla Nazimova suffered a heart attack after dinner with Glesca Marshall in their villa. She was hospitalized and never recovered. Her nephew, Val Lewton, visited but she didn’t recognize him. She died on July 13, age 66.
Nazimova made her final film in 1944, Since You Went Away, produced by David O. Selznick. It echoed her first film, War Brides, both centered on women during wartime. In April 1945, just months before her death, she was visited by her goddaughter Nancy Davis – later Nancy Reagan. Davis remembered Villa 24 as “so small, nicely furnished but… how terrible it must be for her after all that fame and glamour.” Nazimova bore it gracefully. She was a registered Democrat, a Roosevelt supporter, and a fervent liberal. Davis, shaped by her Republican stepfather Loyal Davis, would later help Ronald Reagan, a lifelong Democrat, switch parties.
Nazimova feared obscurity. “I am vain, and afraid that I’ll leave nothing of myself behind when I die,” she wrote. “An actress is dead when the last person to remember her dies! And that is not enough for me!”
Three months after Nazimova’s death, Robert Benchley died of a cerebral hemorrhage at home in Connecticut. His son Nat Benchley returned years later and found the place changed. “There were drunks at the bar and no sign of the old joy,” he said. Seven months after Benchley’s death, Charles Butterworth crashed his MG Magnette into a utility pole at Sunset and La Cienega. He was thrown from the car and died of a fractured skull. His blood alcohol level was .25%. He was 46.
When Dorothy Parker returned to Hollywood in the late 1940s, she checked in across the street from the Garden of Allah at the Chateau Marmont Hotel. She had divorced Alan Campbell, her writing partner and caretaker. They had met through Benchley in 1932. She was 39, he was 28. He cooked, cleaned, walked the dogs, and mixed cocktails. They married in 1934 and likely lived at the Garden for a time. Together, they wrote Suzy (1936), A Star Is Born (1937), and Sweethearts (1938).
They lived in a Beverly Hills mansion with staff, and a country home in Bucks County, Pennsylvania. In 1943, she contributed to Watch on the Rhine, and in 1947 earned her second Oscar nomination for Smash-Up: The Story of a Woman. After divorcing in 1947, they remarried in 1950. He bought a small house on Norma Avenue in West Hollywood, where Alan died in 1963. Dorothy Parker returned to New York and died there in 1967 at 73 years old.