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).

First Pot Peace Candidate Had Reason in His Family

Teresa and George McGovern after he won
the Massachusetts Democratic Primary

I haven't had a chance in this busy election season to stop and reflect about the death this year of George McGovern. Among those who worked on Mr. McGovern's 1972 presidential campaign were Warren Beatty, Bill Clinton, Hillary Rodham Clinton and Gary Hart. And, I'm proud to say, me.

My first political act, at the age of 13, was to campaign for McGovern. When Nixon won by a landslide, I was so disheartened about the cynicism of the neighbors I'd canvassed and the country I lived in that I didn't get involved in politics again until I found out about hemp in 1991.


Now I see that the laws against marijuana had a damaging effect on a member of McGovern's family.

According to Wikipedia:

In July 1968, George McGovern's daughter Teresa was arrested in Rapid City, SD on marijuana possession charges. Based on a recently enacted strict state drugs law, Terry now faced a minimum five-year prison sentence if found guilty. At the time McGovern was in the running for the Democratic nomination for president.

McGovern denounced as "police brutality" the Chicago police tactics against demonstrators at the convention in August and ended up supporting Hubert Humphrey's nomination that year. Again, Wikipedia:

McGovern returned to his Senate reelection race. While South Dakota voters sympathized with McGovern over his daughter's arrest, he initially suffered a substantial drop in popularity over the events in Chicago. 

McGovern won the Democratic nomination four years later in 1972, when he famously became tagged with the label "amnesty, abortion and acid," supposedly reflecting his positions. McGovern favored the decriminalization of marijuana (but didn't say the same for LSD). Ever since, McGovernism has come to mean the embracing of progressive social policies that make liberals easy targets for conservatives. See SF Gate's Obituary.

Teresa was 19 when her pot bust happened. The effect it may have had on her life is unknown. For one thing, it might have sent her to more damaging substances, like alcohol.

McGovern writes, "Embarrassed by her Rapid City marijuana arrest, Terry decided not to return to Dakota Wesleyan that fall." Instead she enrolled at the University of Dakota, which was "then a place where heavy drinking and pot smoking were common, and Terry steadily increased her intake of alcohol with some limited use of marijuana and amphetamines." In February 1988, she began occasional use of marijuana, calling it a "pot addiction."

In December 1994, at the age of 45, Teresa fell into a snowbank while heavily intoxicated with alcohol, and died of hypothermia.