If anyone can be blamed for killing Dorothy
Comingore’s career, its Dorothy Comingore and not the supposed blacklist. Comingore,
who was married four times, appeared
in 23 films from 1938 through 1951. She was uncredited eight of those 23 films,
and six of those 23 films were actually shorts. She was pregnant in 1941 and
appeared in only one film between that year and 1944 when she became pregnant
again and stayed out of films once again until 1949.
Warner
Brothers used her largely as a model. She was signed by Columbia and tossed
into a series of walk-on parts in low ball cowboys flicks and Three Stooges films.
Her one memorable role was in Citizen Kane for which she was, justifiably,
lauded.
A
WASP with a long lineage, she had a reputation as a hothead with an ego and a leftist.
Her father had been a leftist union organizer and her first husband. She became
an enemy of the studio bosses by canvassing for union solidarity within the film
business. She killed off most of her career by turning down films she felt were
below her talents until finally, the offers stopped coming her way.
Called
before the HUAC in 1952, she refused to admit that she was a communist, telling
the committee that she was in a court fight with her ex-husband, screenwriters Richard
J. Collins, for custody of her two children, then 8 and 11 years old, and being
branded a communist could hurt her case.
When,
in 1947, Collins, a major figure in the LA-Hollywood communist party, was told he would have to appear before the committee,
he declared himself an unfriendly witness
and used the First Amendment to duck questions. However when he actually testified
1951, he had already left the party and his politics had changed and he became
a cooperating witness. He went on to write the cult flick, Invasion of the Body
Snatchers, which he said was based on his experiences as a member of the
Party.
On
March 19, 1953, she was arrested for soliciting an undercover Vice officer in
West Hollywood. Supposedly she agreed to confinement for two years in a mental
ward in exchange for having the charges dropped.
Although
the claim in Hollywood is that she was set up on the charge but the case
against her was airtight. Deputy
sheriffs William Baker and Peter Escanilla arrested the 40-year-old actress in
a parked car at Lexington and Gardner Avenue after she offered a cop oral sex
in the car for $10, in her words "because I'm a little short of money
right now."
She told a hearing judge she was framed on the charge claiming that
two plainclothes men offered her a ride from the bar at 8279 Santa Monica Blvd.
to her home at 1251 North Fuller Avenue. "Then," she told the court,
"they stuck a marked $10 bill in my pocket and drove me downtown to the
County Jail."
The
cops reported that they drove Comingore from a bar on Santa Monica
to another bar at 8279 Santa Monica Blvd. and that she suggested “Let’s find a
dark place to go to” and they drove her to nearby Plummer Park where Deputy Baker
asked, “How much?”, she gave him a price and he handed her a marked bill. When
she took it, he arrested her.
Three
months later, in May of 1953, she willingly took part in a closed-door hearing
before judge Harold Schweitzer in a Hollywood sanitarium where she had been
held since her prostitution arrest. Several psychiatrists who had treated her testified
that she was an acute alcoholic who started drinking in the early morning hours
and that her alcoholism was responsible for her psychical and mental breakdowns
in the past. She agreed to cooperate with the finding of the court, two of her
former husbands were present when the hearing took place. Her lawyer also asked
the court to confine her for treatment before her drinking killed her. Her
alcoholism had already cost her custody of her two children as an unfit mother.
She
spent the last half of her life in Eastern Connecticut, married to a mailman.
She died in 1971 due to pulmonary issues brought on by alcohol addiction. She died in 1971 at age 58.