Your big debut, like a dream come true. The famous Hollywood sign hovers over Los Angeles like a heat mirage, its white lettering visible all the way from the west side on a clear day. And like a mirage, it seems closer than it really is. Success can be that way too—tantalizingly near, yet never within reach. Maybe that’s what Peg Entwistle was thinking when she climbed a workman’s ladder to the top of the letter H in the big sign, and cast herself into oblivion. Entwistle, who you see above in an early publicity shot, was desperate to be a movie star. She’d acted on stage in New York and done well, but the bright lights of Hollywood beckoned. She plied the L.A. party circuit, met a few big shots, and scored a one-picture deal with the prestigious studio RKO. They cast her in Thirteen Women with Irene Dunn and Myrna Loy, who were both stars. The movie premiered September 16, 1932, and the critics yawned. Two nights later a heartbroken Entwistle scaled the big sign—which back then read Hollywoodland after the hillside subdivision it had been erected to promote. The H was fifty feet tall and Entwistle wasn’t fooling around. She dove headfirst into the ravine below, the impact killing her instantly. She lay there for two days until cops finally got an anonymous tip about a body in the brush. Entwistle was designated Jane Doe at the morgue, but had left behind a suicide note signed with her initials. So the police went to the press for help. Entwistle’s uncle read the resulting story, saw the initials,and realized his niece Peg might be the body in question. She’d been missing for two days. He contacted the police and was brought in to identify the body. Entwistle’s suicide note was short and to the point: “I am afraid, I am a coward. I am sorry for everything. If I had done this a long time ago, it would have saved a lot of pain. P.E.” Her funeral was held in Hollywood, and her body was cremated, but she would never be forgotten. She remains a symbol of broken dreams, and a cautionary tale about the pitfalls of show business. That was today, in 1932.
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The headlines that mattered yesteryear.
1986—Otto Preminger Dies
Austro–Hungarian film director Otto Preminger, who directed such eternal classics as Laura, Anatomy of a Murder, Carmen Jones, The Man with the Golden Arm, and Stalag 17, and for his efforts earned a star on Hollywood's Walk of Fame, dies in New York City, aged 80, from cancer and Alzheimer's disease. 1998—James Earl Ray Dies
The convicted assassin of American civil rights leader Martin Luther King, Jr., petty criminal James Earl Ray, dies in prison of hepatitis aged 70, protesting his innocence as he had for decades. Members of the King family who supported Ray's fight to clear his name believed the U.S. Government had been involved in Dr. King's killing, but with Ray's death such questions became moot. 1912—Pravda Is Founded
The newspaper Pravda, or Truth, known as the voice of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, begins publication in Saint Petersburg. It is one of the country's leading newspapers until 1991, when it is closed down by decree of then-President Boris Yeltsin. A number of other Pravdas appear afterward, including an internet site and a tabloid. 1983—Hitler's Diaries Found
The German magazine Der Stern claims that Adolf Hitler's diaries had been found in wreckage in East Germany. The magazine had paid 10 million German marks for the sixty small books, plus a volume about Rudolf Hess's flight to the United Kingdom, covering the period from 1932 to 1945. But the diaries are subsequently revealed to be fakes written by Konrad Kujau, a notorious Stuttgart forger. Both he and Stern journalist Gerd Heidemann go to trial in 1985 and are each sentenced to 42 months in prison. 1918—The Red Baron Is Shot Down
German WWI fighter ace Manfred von Richthofen, better known as The Red Baron, sustains a fatal wound while flying over Vaux sur Somme in France. Von Richthofen, shot through the heart, manages a hasty emergency landing before dying in the cockpit of his plane. His last word, according to one witness, is "Kaputt." The Red Baron was the most successful flying ace during the war, having shot down at least 80 enemy airplanes. 1964—Satellite Spreads Radioactivity
An American-made Transit satellite, which had been designed to track submarines, fails to reach orbit after launch and disperses its highly radioactive two pound plutonium power source over a wide area as it breaks up re-entering the atmosphere.
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