mariemcdonald.ew.comEntertainment Weekly: Marie McDonald—Hollywood&aposs Original Gone Girl

Entertainment Weekly: Marie McDonald—Hollywood&aposs Original Gone Girl The latest story in our series that revisits some of the most infamous and curious crimes in Hollywood history Hollywood&aposs ORIGINAL GONE GIRL IN TINSELTOWN’S GOLDEN AGE, CELEBRATED SCREEN SIREN MARIE “ THE BODY” McDONALD SHOCKED THE NATION WITH HER SENSATIONAL STORY OF BEING KIDNAPPED, ATTACKED, AND HELD FOR RANSOM. THE CONVERGENCE OF TRUTH AND FICTION BAFFLED POLICE AND CREATED SUSPICION THAT BECAME PART OF HER LEGACY By JOE McGOVERN @ JMCGVRN MCDONALD: BETTMANN ARCHIVE/GETTY IMAGES T here are many mysteries in the nighttime desert. A spooky whistling noise could be the wind or a wolf’s howl. A shift of movement in the sand might be moonlight or a rattlesnake. A stranger approaching could be a crazed lunatic or someone who is desperately lost, seeking help, pleading to have a story heard. At 11:15 p.m. on Jan. 4, 1957, a truck driver named Richard D. Corn became the first of many to hear one such tale. Corn was barreling his tractor-trailer 15 miles east of Coachella, Calif., when his headlights illuminated a blond woman with sand in her hair, dressed in a bathrobe and slippers, waving her arms on the highway. “I had a hard time stopping,” Corn later told police. “She runs around to the side of the cab and there she is, crying and carrying on hysterical.” The woman had a swollen lip, two cracked teeth, and bruises on her face and legs. As Corn was speeding her to the nearest hospital, something occurred to him. “I thought I recognized her from the pictures in the papers,” he said. Sure enough, earlier that day, The New York Times and other publications had run articles about the disappearance of 33-year-old Hollywood starlet Marie McDonald. Here she was, 24 hours after she reportedly had been abducted from her home. And here is her story. The desert road near Coachella, Calif., where Marie was discovered by a truck driver Who was Marie McDonald? Though she appeared in more than a dozen movies throughout the 1940s, mostly in supporting roles, her name as an actress has slipped into obscurity. Born Cora Marie Frye in Kentucky in 1923, she ventured to New York as a teenager with her mother and entered numerous beauty pageants. By 17, she had won the title of Miss New York State and debuted on Broadway as a showgirl. Making her way to California, McDonald landed a contract for $75 per week with Universal Pictures. It was after her appearance in the 1942 Abbott and Costello vehicle Pardon My Sarong that she acquired her notorious nickname, based on her voluptuous figure: The Body. “Can you imagine being called that today?” asks Tina Diamond, McDonald’s only biological child. (Before giving birth to Tina, McDonald also adopted two children.) “It would be just awful. But back then calling a woman ‘The Body’ was apparently okay as a marketing tool. I don’t think she liked it. In fact I know she didn’t. She was funny and very smart, and she knew it was creepy.” Despite—or perhaps because of—that label, McDonald never caught hold of a project to launch her into major stardom. In 1944, at the height of World War II, she flashed some leg as a pinup girl in the U.S. Army’s Yank magazine, and in 1947 she was romanced on screen by Gene Kelly in the musical Living in a Big Way. She screentested for the leading role in the comedy Born Yesterday, the movie that won star Judy Holliday an Oscar in 1951. Marilyn Monroe, three years McDonald’s junior, was cornering the market on bleach-blond seductresses. A greater degree of McDonald’s fame came from her love affairs and marriages, which tabloid newspaper and magazine writers of the day covered voraciously. By her early 30s, McDonald had been married four times—and for a few months was even the mistress of infamous gangster Bugsy Siegel, shortly before he was shot to death through the window of a Beverly Hills mansion. “Her biggest problem was that she had terrible relationships with men,” her daughter says. “And there were always men chasing her, I guess for her looks, and she couldn’t resist them.” The Los Angeles Times front page from Jan. 5, 1957 Her third and fourth marriages were to wealthy tycoon Harry Karl, owner of the largest privately owned shoe-store chain in the country. Six weeks after divorcing him in late 1954, McDonald announced her intention to remarry Karl—yet then reversed course, telling the media that she was allergic to him and that “when I am with Harry, I get sick. When I am away from him, I never get sick.” Nevertheless, McDonald and Karl did tie the knot for a second time in June of 1955. But by the fall of the following year, after McDonald filed a police report accusing Karl of domestic violence, they were separated and living apart again. And so it was around midnight on the evening of Jan. 3, 1957, that McDonald was alone in her bedroom in her lavish home at 17031 Magnolia Blvd. in Encino, Calif. A housekeeper and a chauffeur were asleep downstairs, as were her three children (Tina was 5 months old), when McDonald heard a clanging noise outside her window. There she saw her boxer dog running toward a man tapping a stick against the property’s fence. Next to him was another man holding a sawed-off shotgun. Both were wearing long leather jackets. “Call off the dog or else we’ll shoot,” the first man shouted. McDonald obeyed. Within moments the two men, one African-American and the other Mexican, were inside her home. She asked what they wanted. “We want your rings, your money, and your body,” they said, and threatened the lives of her children if McDonald screamed or made any sudden gestures. Over the next half hour, they stole pearls and diamonds from her jewelry boxes and prepared a ransom note by clipping block letters out of newspaper headlines. Once the note was finished and placed in the house’s mailbox, the men blindfolded McDonald and forced her at gunpoint into a two-door sedan parked in the street. (Top) Marie McDonald flanked by police during a filmed reenactment of her abduction (Bottom) McDonald speaks about her ordeal upon arriving home MCDONALD: MPTVIMAGES.COM (Left) Marie McDonald flanked by police during a filmed reenactment of her abduction (Right) McDonald speaks about her ordeal upon arriving home MCDONALD: MPTVIMAGES.COM Sitting in the backseat of the car, she was terrified as the men drove for more than an hour toward the California desert. Eventually they arrived at a small bungalow, where she was brought inside and made to swallow several pills with whiskey. McDonald was able to hold some of the pills in her cheek, but soon enough she was fading into drowsiness. Around this same time, Marie Tuboni, McDonald’s mother and a former Ziegfeld Follies girl, received a phone call at her home in Woodland Hills, Calif. “We have Marie,” a nervous young male voice told her. “No harm will come to her if police are not notified.” Yet Tuboni immediately called the cops and then drove to McDonald’s home. The gate and the front door were wide open, but the three children were safe in their beds. A policeman soon arrived, discovered the note in the mailbox (“She won’t be hurt to get money,” it awkwardly read), and informed his superiors at the Los Angeles Police Department. Then, at 2:10 a.m., McDonald’s estranged husband was awakened by the ringing of his phone. “We have your wife,” a man murmured to Harry Karl. “If you want to see her alive again, don’t contact police.” Back in the bungalow, McDonald roused herself from the narcotics-induced slumber. The men had left her alone in a room with a telephone. She could hear them arguing about her ransom amount, and she knew she needed to do something. It was after four o’clock in the morning when she quietly lifted the phone’s receiver and dialed the number of famed Hollywood gossip columnist Harrison Carroll. “Tonight at my home these two men came in and abducted me,” she whispered to him. “I’m blindfolded and doped. I wish to God I knew where I was.” A...