By MICHAEL OLDHAM | Special to the Palisadian-Post
It was a strange, long journey from a poor mining town in the British Midlands to Pacific Palisades, a path littered with Hollywood glory and dark secrets. And it ended in tragedy. But it fulfilled a promise director James Whale made to himself and his audience back in the 1930s: never be tedious and never overstay your welcome.
Handsome, charming and gifted, Whale was born in Dudley, England on July 22, 1889. He grew up disadvantaged financially in a mining town, the child of a working-class family.
But the man who was behind the camera for such scary classics as “ Frankenstein” and “The Invisible Man” would die in a Riviera swimming pool in 1957.
Whale, who advised many actors such as Boris Karloff where to stand or move in his screen picture productions, would direct his own death scene. And his final fade out was not on any Hollywood lot. He would choose his own backyard as the setting of his suicide with a note that would not be revealed for decades after his death.
While Whale was brought up in a large family with six siblings, he would die alone and sad, undone by fickle fortunes of Hollywood caprice, bodily weariness and maybe the stresses of forbidden love.
The house where Whale’s ending took place was located in the 700 block of Amalfi Drive. It was built in 1935—the year Universal Pictures released “Bride of Frankenstein.”
The sci-fi horror movie was one of Whale’s signature screen achievements. It starred actress Elsa Lanchester, also English-born, who once lived in The Huntington in the 1940s.
Whale moved into the home sometime in the 1930s, the decade when his Hollywood career would reach its highest point of fortune and fame.
Whale discovered his artistic interests when interned as a prisoner of war by the Germans during World War I. He was also a skilled poker player, which gave him a nest egg when he returned to Britain to find work in the theater. He turned the young Laurence Olivier into a stage star and transferred with him to New York’s Broadway.
His first Hollywood job was writing dialogue for Howard Hughes, who wanted to turn his silent wartime epic “Hell’s Angels” into a talkie. That moved Whale into the director’s chair at Universal, where no one but him wanted to direct the “trashy little movie” called “Frankenstein.”
It was the storylines or backdrops of his movies that he acknowledged made his job easy.
“A director must be pretty bad if he can’t get a thrill out of war, murder, robbery,” he once declared.
While some bad editing on the 1937 film “The Road Back” certainly contributed to the final fade-to-black silver screen ending for Whale’s directing career, he may have been inside the wrong era of Hollywood to survive.
Whale was openly gay and working during the ultimate conservative Hollywood of the Golden Age. Some screen historians claim that Whale was too “open” for Hollywood’s tastes at the time. But they may have forgiven him if he was still making them money. Others point to a string of film failures that contributed to his director’s chair being folded up for good.
Either way, Whale put down his camera lenses and left a Hollywood his wallet no longer needed.
Ultimately, Whale was a realist and knew all good things, even inside the insular world of the movie business, come to an end.
“Hollywood is just too marvelous,” he once proclaimed. “One feels the footprints of all the immortals are here, but has a terrible feeling that they are in sand and won’t last when civilization comes this way.”
When “civilization” came Whale’s way in the early 1940s, he had a bundle of Hollywood career earnings to survive it. Putting these earnings to good work by investing smartly in Los Angeles real estate allowed Whale to spend his time on the hobbies of traveling and painting. The single man was only in his early 50s at the time of his retirement.
But Whale was not completely single. By this time in his life, he was enjoying a years-long, live-in partner by the name of David Lewis. In “Queer Hauntings: True Tales of Gay & Lesbian Ghosts,” author Ken Summers wrote that “the duo held many private parties at home, entertaining a wide variety of guests” on Amalfi Drive.
But after a couple of decades, the romantic paradise that Whale and Lewis had enjoyed would come to an end. This would be in early 1952. Ultimately, this parting of the ways would lead Whale to build his own future water-filled deathbed.
After Lewis moved out of Amalfi Drive, Summers wrote that “he installed a small pool at his new home.” In a fit of gamesmanship, Summers added, “James had his own pool dug in his back yard.”
Whale had a multitude of male guests over for pool parties in the back of his Amalfi property. Yet he could only watch or wade in the shallow end of his cement pond. The campy film director who barked orders at monster characters could not swim.
When Whale dove into his pool one morning in the spring of 1957, it was not to learn—Whale was ending his life.
In his book, Summers detailed Whale’s last day on Amalfi Drive
“James awoke on the morning of May 29, 1957, with a copy of William Brinkley’s novel ‘Don’t Go Near the Water’ on his bedside table. He showered and shaved as usual, dressing in his customary suit and having breakfast before retiring to his studio. Not long afterward, James walked over to his pool and leapt in headfirst, striking his head on the bottom. His body was discovered after James did not answer his call for lunch.”
“James Whale was a brilliant, theatrical man,” Summers told the Palisadian-Post. “And yes, he did die on the property. His health was in rapid decline following a stroke, and that, coupled with depression, led to a sense of hopelessness.”
Whale’s home—and the fatal pool—was recreated for the 1998 biopic “Gods and Monsters” where he was portrayed by Sir Ian McKellan. But a commentator said the Amalfi recreation shot in Pasadena was “too small to be true.”
The real house would go on to be owned by Goldie Hawn.
Whale left a suicide note that spoke of him believing his future to be bleak. His declining health was a real monster that devoured him. But his celluloid creations, both frightening and pitiful, live on.
Today, the former home of Whale is a two-story property with seven bedrooms and more than 6,000 square feet of interior space. The fate of the pool is unknown.
Michael Oldham is co-author of “Movie Star Homes:
The Famous to the Forgotten” and author of the novel
“The Valentino Formula.” He can be reached at hollywoodlandings@sbcglobal.net.
This page is available to subscribers. Click here to sign in or get access.