Twenty-three year old Jon-Erik Hexum took his college diploma and his good looks and headed to New York City to persue an acting career. He took a job cleaning apartments until he struck gold — and it paid off. Jon-Erik met Bob LeMond, John Travolta’s manager. LeMond saw real acting potential in Jon-Erik and urging him to audition for the male lead in Summer Lovers. He lost the part to Peter Gallagher, but was soon cast as Phineas Bogg, a time-traveler in a TV series pilot called Voyager from the Unknown. The show, now called Voyagers!, was picked up by NBC and was on the 1982 Fall schedule. Jon-Erik and his young co-star Meeno Peluce (actress Soleil Moon Frye’s older half-brother) filmed twenty episodes until CBS ratings powerhouse 60 Minutes trounced Voyagers! and it was canceled.

Jon-Erik sprang back quickly, landing a role opposite Joan Collins in the TV movie Making of a Male Model and later a guest role in the anthology series Hotel. In 1984, he showed up on the big screen in a featured part in the biopic The Bear, the story of famed football coach Bear Bryant.

Another series was offered to Jon-Erik and he took it. The show was Cover Up and his co-star was model-turned actress Jennifer O’Neill (one of the most married women in Hollywood – nine times to eight husbands). Cover Up told the far-fetched story of a CIA agent posing as a male model. Jon-Erik described his character as “part-James Bond, part-Indiana Jones, part-Superman.” Cover Up debuted in September 1984 and was fairly popular.

During a lull in the filming of Cover Up‘s seventh episode, Jon-Erik and a few cast members were sitting around the set. Jon-Erik was fooling with a prop .44 Magnum handgun. He believed he had emptied its chambers of the unspent blanks from in the previous scene. As a joke, he placed the muzzle of gun to his temple and pulled the trigger. A forgotten blank — a mass of wadded paper propelled by gunpowder — was released. The force blew a quarter-sized piece of Jon-Erik’s skull into his brain. He was rushed to Beverly Hills Medical Center, when he endured five hours of delicate surgery.

Six days after the accident, Jon-Erik was declared brain dead and removed from life support. A number of his vital organs were dispersed around the country to various recipients, including a woman who had waited eight years for a kidney.

With a short three-year career as his legacy, Jon-Erik’s life ended at 26.

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Johnny Ace sat backstage at Houston’s City Auditorium on Christmas Day 1954, taking a short break between sets. In just two whirlwind years, Johnny had gone from stumbling into the vocalist role in B.B. King’s band to a string of eight consecutive hits on Duke Records. And now, as part of the touring company supporting headliner Big Mama Thornton, Johnny was headed to real stardom. The stardom for which he hoped would show his preacher father that his time was not wasted singing “the Devil’s music.”

Johnny was a bit on the mischievous side and Johnny liked guns. He was known to lean out the window of a moving car and fire off a few shots at billboards and street signs, laughing as the bullets ricocheted in all directions. So, while it was a bit unnerving to some, it wasn’t unusual to see Johnny playing around with a small .22 caliber handgun as he rested before his next performance.

Big Mama Thornton had had enough of Johnny’s carelessness with his firearm and confiscated it early in the tour. But, on Christmas Day 1954, she felt bad for Johnny and returned the pistol to him. Smiling, Johnny twirled the gun and pretended to fire off shots. Thornton, acting as a surrogate mother to the 25-year-old, issued a warning to “Be careful with that!” Johnny laughed and reassured her, “There’s nothing in it… see?” He playfully raised the gun to his temple and pulled the trigger in demonstration, blasting a single bullet through his head. Thornton screamed and ran out of the dressing room crying, “Johnny Ace just killed himself!”

Johnny’s biggest hit, “Pledging My Love,” was released two months after his death and it stayed at the top of the Billboard R&B Chart for ten weeks.

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In 1960, Life Magazine graced its cover with a photo of a pretty 23-year-old budding actress named Ina Balin, accompanied by the teasing headline “An Early Look at a Star-To-Be.” By that time, young Ina had received critical acclaim for her performance on Broadway in A Majority of One and she starred alongside Anthony Quinn in her first film The Black Orchid. Life Magazine obviously saw something.

As the 60s progressed, Ina saw her star shine with roles opposite some of Hollywood’s most notable names. She appeared with a wide range of co-stars, from John Wayne to Jerry Lewis to Elvis Presley. Ina supplemented her film roles with guest appearances in popular episodic television like Bonanza, 12 O’Clock High and The Dick Van Dyke Show. Her exotic looks allowed her to play characters of varied nationalities and she was regularly cast as Italians, Jews, Greeks and the mysterious “undetermined ethnicity.”

Because of her popularity, Ina was recruited for a USO tour of Vietnam in 1966, her first of many. Ina was so moved by the deplorable conditions in Saigon’s notorious An Lac orphanage that she returned several more times over the next nine years. She worked tirelessly with other volunteers to help the children who were abandoned or displaced by the battle raging within their country. She managed to make a few more films between her trips to Vietnam and the orphanage, but in 1975 as the war ended, Ina adopted three of the children – two infants and a 16-year-old girl. The harrowing story of Ina’s involvement in the evacuation of the An Lac orphanage during the fall of Saigon inspired a TV movie in 1980, with Ina playing herself.

Ina passed away in 1990 from an unusual case of pulmonary hypertension. She was 52. Posthumous investigation theorized that she may have inhaled or ingested something in Vietnam that caused and exacerbated her fatal condition. She had never previously suffered from the ailment, but, curiously it affected a great number of indigenous Vietnamese women.

While working on the An Lac television movie, Ina met a young aspiring writer named Christy Marx who was working as a producer’s liaison. Christy was so intrigued by Ina and her story that she used it as inspiration for a sub-plot when she created the animated series Jem and the Holograms. The character Ba Nee, one of the foster children cared for by Jem at the fictional Starlight House, was based on Ina’s adopted daughter Ba-Nhi.

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Twenty years before Marilyn Monroe‘s big-screen debut, there was Jean Harlow.

No one dreamed the frail and sickly Harlean Carpenter from Kansas City. Missouri would blossom into the world famous “Blonde Bombshell.” The actress, who as a child who fought off scarlet fever and meningitis, caught the attention of eccentric director Howard Hughes and she was cast in his provocative 1930 film Hell’s Angels. Her sultry screen persona was born, as she uttered the oft-repeated line “Would you be shocked if I changed into something more comfortable?” Jean was known to apply ice to her nipples in order to appear sexier in scenes. It worked. The picture was a hit and the country became obsessed with the young star. Peroxide sales skyrocketed. Blonde actresses were now being considered for the roles of heartless vixens, previously reserved for raven-haired seductresses. Jean’s role the following year in Platinum Blonde gave her true sex symbol status.

Jean appeared opposite James Cagney in The Public Enemy as his subsequent girlfriend, after famously dumping girlfriend Number 1, Mae Clarke, with a grapefruit to the face.

Jean was paired with Clark Gable in six films. While filming Red Dust, their second teaming, Jean’s husband, producer Paul Bern committed suicide. The news nearly halted production, with actress Tallulah Bankhead considered as a quick fill-in for Jean. But, she soldiered on and the film was a huge success. She began to pick and choose her roles, turning down the female leads in both King Kong and Tod Browning‘s infamous Freaks.

In 1935, Jean met and fell in love with actor William Powell. However, two years into their relationship, Jean’s health began to decline. While filming what would be her final picture Saratoga, Jean was hospitalized with uremic poisoning and kidney failure, a result of her childhood battle with scarlet fever. Nearly ten years before the introduction of kidney dialysis, doctors were helpless. Jean passed away in 1937 at the age of 26. With creative camera angles and the help of stand-in Mary Dees, Saratoga was completed and released. It became the highest grossing film of 1937.

Jean was the first movie actress to grace the cover of Life magazine, just a month before her death.

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