Lila Leeds and Dirty Deeds

Lila Leeds was 20 years old when the actress was arrested with VIP Robert Mitchum for marijuana in 1948. While Mitchum's star power, and the money the studios had invested in him, carried him through the ordeal that followed, Leeds never recovered from the incident.

Under contract to MGM, Leeds appeared with Red Skelton in The Show Off (1946); one of of her bit parts was in Lana Turner's vehicle Green Dolphin Street, where she plays a Eurasian woman who drugs the leading man and rolls him. When the film was released, she wasn't even credited for her part.

"It left her shaken up, depressed," wrote Lee Server in Robert Mitchum: Baby I Don't Care. "She would spend long nights at the bop clubs in Hollywood, chasing her blues away. Lila had always been jazz-happy and she knew many of the local musicians. She smoked reefers with them in their dressing rooms and in the parking lots, even at the tables if the owners were cool."

"I smoked socially," Lila said. "The way some people take a drink. Pot doesn't affect me much--just makes me sleepy and relaxed."

Leeds vamping in "Lady in the Lake" (1946)

At the time of her arrest with Mitchum, Leeds was engaged to Turner's ex-husband Steven Crane. Their daughter Cheryl Crane's book Detour: A Hollywood Story says: "Dad knew that Lila had smoked pot ever since she tried it at a St. Louis party three years before with members of the Stan Kenton orchestra, and sometimes she overdid it....She was often stoned, and his friends cautioned Dad that she had a problem, but he knew pot was no enslaving 'devil's weed,' as it has been painted in the unintentionally hilarious 1936 cautionary film Reefer Madness."

After Leeds was arrested on August 31, 1948, Stephen Crane fled to Europe rather than become entangled in scandal. There he tried his hand at writing a gossip column titled, "Champagne and Vinegar." In his debut column he wrote about the Mitchum bust, saying, "Yet if Mitchum should come to Paris he could attend a small private jive club on the Left Bank where waiters come around to the tables and roll the marijuana cigarettes for you." No less than three Hollywood stars, he noted, were "seen entering" the place the previous week.

In a police deposition, Leeds accused her roomate Vicki Evans of being a police informer, and said that Mitchum was framed for the offense (Source: Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, Sept. 27, 1949). Leeds said she and her roomate often smoked reefers together but Evans refused to smoke them on the day of the bust, and she was the one who let police in. Evans (real name: Florence Fidele of East End, Pittsburgh) denied the charge two days later in the same paper. Neither Evans nor bartender Robin Ford, who brought Mitchum to the scene of the arrest, were tried for the incident.

As a Eurasian in Green Dolphin Street (1947) 

Crane writes that Leeds was introduced to heroin by fellow inmates at LA County Jail, and it lead to addiction. Other than the awful Reefer Madness-style anti-drug film She Shoulda Said No (aka The Devil's Weed), Leeds never had another film role. She became so destitute that she hocked the three-carat diamond ring Stephen had given her for $750. In the '70s, she worked as a faith healer for addicts.

Leeds lives in four films TCM will be airing in the coming months:
GREEN DOLPHIN STREET (1947) FEBRUARY 25
THE SHOW-OFF (1946) MARCH 18
LADY IN THE LAKE (1946) MARCH 23
APRIL SHOWERS (1948) APRIL 10

Jennifer Lawrence resembles Lila; she's the perfect actress to play her in a long-overdue biopic. Personally I suspect Lana Turner might have had something to do with the arrest of her seven-years-younger rival (similar to a plotline in the 1997 movie LA Confidential).

Jennifer Lawrence: I Just Won an Oscar! I'm Going to Hawaii to Smoke Pot

"As if we needed another reason to love Jennifer Lawrence," said Michael Hogan of The Huffington Post after photos of Lawrence apparently puffing pot on a balcony in Hawaii appeared days after she picked up the Best Actress Academy Award for Silver Linings Playbook. 

Lawrence tripped up the steps in her big puffy gown, and was game enough to joke about it. After admittedly having a shot of booze before talking to reporters backstage, she righteously flipped one the bird when he asked the stupid question, "Have you peaked too soon (at 22)?" 

What's not to love about this woman? "She's a 22-year-old cool person," effused Hogan, and that persona was enough to win her Hollywood's top prize (probably because she should have won it for Hunger Games.) 

When Spin magazine asked her in March 2012, "What were you listening to the first time you smoked pot?" She wisely replied, "I so cannot answer that question. I'm in a franchise." (Which, you will notice, is not a "no.")

Astute observer/historian Michael Aldrich, among others, predicts that Lawrence won't suffer from the pot-parazzi pix, unlike stars of the past. "I'm remembering back to the days when any starlet (say, Lila Leeds) caught with a reefer was condemned to 'Be contrite, confess, and crusade' against the drug," said Aldrich. "These days I have a feeling there will be no contrition or confession, and if there's any crusade it's among the bloggers who have followed this on Twitter, unanimously saying 'Legalize It!'" (Leeds looks rather like Lawrence in this shot, right, from the 1947 film Lady in the Lake.)

Meanwhile, Lawrence dyed her hair back to black just after the ceremony, making her look more like someone touted as her rival, the pot-loving Kristen Stewart. Stewart didn't have a good Oscar night, appearing on crutches on the red carpet after cutting her foot two days earlier. But the previews of On the Road,  starring Stewart and another pot lover, Kirsten Dunst as Carolyn Cassidy, look like the movie, based on the Jack Kerouac novel, just might make people forget Jennifer Lawrence for a time. 

Even while Hollywood embraces pot in its stars and plots, how many other cool young chicks, and dudes, aren't as lucky as Lawrence and Stewart when the chemical McCarthyism of drug testing means they lose their job. That is, unless they work in Silicon Valley. 

See the true Hunger Games. 

Read more about the Oscars. 

A Not-So-Good Friday

14-year-old Cheryl Crane under arrest. 

I'm reading Cheryl Crane's book Detour: A Hollywood Story. Crane is the daughter of Lana Turner, the "sweater girl" who took her moviestar name from Spanish for "wool." Crane's is a sad tale of being shuffled from nanny to nanny while contending with her mother's string of boyfriends and husbands, one of whom, "Tarzan" actor Lex Barker, violently molested her when she was 10. 

On Good Friday 1958, the 14-year-old Crane confessed to police she had stabbed mobster Johnny Stompanato to death after he attacked Turner, and although the crime was ruled as justified, no story about Cheryl or her mother appeared thereafter without "the paragraph" about the incident.

Crane was indirectly affected by the war on marijuana ten years earlier, when her father's fiancée Lila Leeds (pictured) was famously arrested along with Robert Mitchum for marijuana. Leeds was a 20-year-old starlet under contract at Warner Brothers who resembled Turner and met restauranteur Stephen Crane when she worked as a hat-check girl at Ciro's nightclub. One of her bit parts was in Turner's vehicle Green Dolphin, where she plays a Eurasian woman who drugs the leading man and rolls him.

Leeds smoking weed in "She Shoulda Said No"

Cheryl writes, "Dad knew that Lila had smoked pot ever since she tried it at a St. Louis party three years before with members of the Stan Kenton orchestra, and sometimes she overdid it....She was often stoned, and his friends cautioned Dad that she had a problem, but he knew pot was no enslaving 'devil's weed,' as it has been painted in the unintentionally hilarious 1936 cautionary film Reefer Madness."

After Leeds was arrested, Stephen Crane fled to Europe rather than become entangled in scandal, abandoning Cheryl when she was only five years old. There he tried his hand at writing a gossip column titled, "Champagne and Vinegar." In his debut column he wrote about the Mitchum bust, saying, "Yet if Mitchum should come to Paris he could attend a small private jive club on the Left Bank where waiters come around to the tables and roll the marijuana cigarettes for you." No less than three Hollywood stars, he noted, were "seen entering" the place the previous week.

Crane writes that Leeds said she was introduced to heroin by inmates at LA County Jail when she served her 60-day sentence, and it lead to addiction. Other than the Reefer Madness-style anti-drug film "She Shoulda Said No," Leeds never had another film role. She became so destitute that she hocked the three-carat diamond ring Stephen had given her for $750. In the 70s, she worked as a faith healer for addicts. Read more about Lila. 

According to Wikipedia, Cheryl Crane was detained by the Los Angeles Police Department in 1969 when three half-grown marijuana plants were discovered in the back seat of her car. Another justifiable crime.