After making his Broadway debut in 1939, Richard Quine was a hit in the play My Sister Eileen and made a handful of motion pictures before entering the Coast Guard in World War Two.

After his discharge from the service, he married Susan Peters, a promising young actress. Fresh off her Academy Award nominated performance in 1942’s Random Harvest, the couple vacationed in Southern California on a hunting trip with Richard’s cousin. During the trip, a .22 caliber rifle accidentally discharged as Susan picked it up. The bullet lodged in her spine, rendering her paralyzed from the waist down. The accident essentially ended her acting career, as she appeared in one more film, The Sign of The Ram in 1948, playing the paranoid wheelchair-bound matriarch of a family, and brief soap opera in the early 50s. The couple adopted a son in 1946, but divorced soon after. Susan passed away from complications of anorexia in 1952. After the divorce, Richard was romantically linked to actresses Judy Holiday and Natalie Wood, but he repeatedly lamented, “I will always hear that shot.”

After the war, Richard embarked on a career as a director and became quite successful. He helmed mostly light romance and screwball comedies, although he often campaigned for projects with deeper substance. His most popular films were The Solid Gold Cadillac, Operation Mad Ball  and a remake of My Sister Eileen.

In the early 1950s, Columbia Pictures president Harry Cohn gave Richard the task of turning the pretty former Thor-refrigerators spokesgirl Kim Novak into a star. He cast Novak in a cheap redo of Double Indemnity  called Pushover. Richard became infatuated by the mysterious Novak. He not only featured her in several more of his movies, the two were engaged to be married. Columbia Pictures built a house in Malibu Beach. The house would be used as a set for Richard’s upcoming movie, Strangers When We Meet, and, after filming, it would be a wedding gift for the new bride and groom. However, the marriage never materialized.

Richard was married three more times, including twenty-four years to actress-singer-Playboy model Fran Jeffries. Fran was featured in 1964’s Sex and The Single Girl  in which she sang the hit title song and a year later she appeared opposite Elvis Presley in Harum Scarum.

Richard remained an active director throughout the 70’s. He directed Peter Sellers’ last film and directed some episodic television. But, amid failing health, depression and a career-long creative battle with movie studios, Richard took his own life by gunshot in 1989.

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Because of her straight-laced upbringing, Linda Boreman earned herself the nickname “Miss Holy Holy” at her strict Catholic high school. Later, in the “free love” times of the 1960s, Linda gave birth to a son. Her mother insisted the boy be given up for adoption to spare humiliation and preserve the family’s good name. Soon after that, Linda was involved in a car crash that almost claimed her life. It would be the cause of a lifetime of health problems.

While recuperating from the accident at her parents’ home in Florida, Linda became involved with Chuck Traynor, a controlling and manipulative sleazebag twelve years her senior. Traynor threatened and beat the impressionable Linda into having sex with strangers and performing in pornographic “loop reels” for his own financial gain and pleasure. Using a loaded M-16 rifle aimed at her head as persuasion, Traynor forced Linda to make the infamous pornographic short film Dog Fucker  in 1971. In 1972, on a budget of around $22,500, Traynor (acting as production manager) and his rifle, “insisted” that Linda, using the name “Linda Lovelace,” participate in Deep Throat. The film was shot over a period of six days in a hotel in Miami, Florida. During the filming, Linda was subjected to regular beatings at the hands of Traynor. Bruises are noticeable on Linda’s legs in various scenes of Deep Throat.

Upon its release, Deep Throat  surprisingly acquired a mainstream audience and became a huge hit among the art film world, with supporters like Jack Nicholson, Johnny Carson and Barbara Walters. Linda was paid $1200 for her work, all of which Traynor took. In 1974, Linda left Traynor and became a fervent anti-pornography advocate. She claimed that she had not consented to any sex act depicted in the film and did so under threats from Traynor.

Linda contracted hepatitis from a blood transfusion after her car accident and received a liver transplant in 1987. In April 2002, Linda was involved in another car accident in which she sustained massive head trauma. After nineteen days in a coma, Linda was taken off life support and died at age 53.

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Marilyn Ann Briggs aspired to be a model. At 16, she often forged her mother’s signature to get out of school to attend auditions. She was given several modeling jobs and even got a small role in the Barbra Streisand film, The Owl and The Pussycat, using the name Evelyn Lang. Biding her time as a Los Angeles topless dancer, Marilyn’s big break came when she landed a modeling job as a young mother fawning over her baby on the box of Procter & Gamble’s Ivory Snow detergent. Filled with confidence, she answered an ad for a casting call and but expressed disinterest when she discovered it was for a pornographic film. The film’s producers, the notorious adult film pioneers The Mitchell Brothers, noted her resemblance to popular actress Cybill Shepherd. Flattered, she told the Mitchells that she was “The Ivory Snow Girl” and they flipped, realizing the marketing potential. They told her that the film they had in mind for her would “sell a hell of a lot of soap for Procter & Gamble.” She negotiated the terms of her own contract to appear in the film — $25,000 salary, plus a percentage of the profits. When the low-budget film, 1972’s Behind the Green Door, ended up earning fifty million dollars, it proved to be a shrewd forethought for 19 year-old Marilyn. Of course, Procter & Gamble dropped her as their product representative, although the famous Ivory Snow box subtly appeared in nearly every one of Marilyn’s films.

Behind the Green Door was a ground-breaking achievement in the world of X-rated films. It was the first feature-length pornographic film to feature an interracial couple. It caused a huge uproar, even among the adult film industry. Additionally, it made Marilyn Chambers (the former Marilyn Ann Briggs) a star, even though she spoke no lines of dialogue. She went on to star in thirty more films over the next four decades, sometimes crossing over into non-adult, mainstream movies working with directors such as horror wiz David Cronenberg. Not fully satisfied with her career in acting, the ever-ambitious Marilyn pursued a brief venture into singing, recording a disco hit in 1976, and later entered the political arena by running for vice-president in 2004 on the Personal Choice Party ticket, supporting presidential candidate Charles Jay.

Marilyn was married three times, including eleven years to Svengali-like Chuck Traynor, who served as her manager until their divorce in 1985.

On April 12, 2009, Marilyn’s daughter, 17 year-old McKenna, came home to find her mother dead. She had succumbed to a cerebral hemorrhage and aneurysm at the age of 56.

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In 1958, Lana Turner was between husband number five and husband number six when she entered into a torrid and volatile relationship with Johnny Stompanato. Johnny was the bodyguard for notorious gangster Mickey Cohen. Lana didn’t care about Johnny’s connections. She was content with his dark good looks and expertise as a lover. So, he had a temper and he was possessive. Lana took the good with the bad.

Lana’s teenage daughter, Cheryl Crane, was leery of Johnny. Although she never actually saw Johnny hit her mother, Cheryl was aware of the welts and bruises Lana often displayed. Cheryl threatened to expose Johnny’s ways to her father (Lana’s second husband, international restaurateur Joseph Crane). Lana pleaded to keep the beatings a secret and Cheryl reluctantly complied.

One night in April 1958, Lana and Johnny were having a particularly heated argument behind the closed door of Lana’s Beverly Hills bedroom. Cheryl heard the yelling through the walls of her own room. She became worried for her mother’s well-being. An anxious Cheryl hurried downstairs searching for something to use to defend herself and her mother. She grabbed the first thing she saw in the kitchen — a large knife.

Cheryl returned to the second floor and stood outside her mother’s bedroom, knife poised in her hand. Suddenly, the door flew open and Johnny, still screaming, stormed out of the room. He was still facing the interior of the room as he exited and walked right into waiting knife blade. Johnny fell to the floor dead.

Lana Turner’s testimony at the subsequent trial was believed by many to have been the greatest acting performance. Cheryl took full responsibility for the stabbing, although she claimed self-defense. Public opinion was that Cheryl was taking the fall for her mother, knowing that, as a minor, she would serve a sentence that would be far less severe. Cheryl, found guilty of justifiable homicide, was ordered by the court to spend two years in a facility as a ward of the state. A facility from which she escaped after a year.

In her 1988 autobiography, in addition to coming out as a lesbian and revealing that, as a child, she had been repeatedly molested by Lana Turner’s fourth husband actor Lex Barker, Cheryl Crane again confirmed the true story of Johnny Stompanato’s death.

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