In the 1930s, she was a Hollywood movie star, whose fame rose wth the advent of the ‘talkies.’ Then, like the characters she played on screen, her fortunes changed. Now she rests in Middletown Cemetery and few know who she was.

Helen Twelvetrees lies in an unmarked grave in Middletown, far from the glamour of Hollywood, where she made movies. She was a leading lady, acting with Clark Gable and John Barrymore, and her name appeared on movie theater marquees all over the world, but now her ashes lie unnoticed in a small plot in Middletown Cemetery, no headstone, no marker, nothing.

How she got there is a story that sounds like the plot of one of her movies. Desire, love, alcohol, depression. Fame did not bring a lifetime of happiness. Her life was tumultuous. Three husbands, one of whom threw himself out a seventh-story window in New York. The giddiness of instant celebrity, when one of her first films propelled her to stardom, turned sour when she was released from her contract by RKO Pictures. She became a B-movie has-been at the age of 30.”

She was discovered while studying acting at a New York acting school. A noted artist, George Bradshaw Crandall, had painted a portrait of her that appeared on the cover of the Saturday Evening Post. Movie moguls, eager to find new stars for their newest innovation – talkies – flew her to Hollywood. Some silent screen actors, like Valentino, sounded nothing like their film persona, with squeaky voices; others considered talkies a fad, like 3-D, that demeaned their art, and would surely die.

Twelvetrees starred in her first picture, “The Ghost Talks,” in 1929. She rose to stardom the following year, playing a tavern hostess in love with the wrong man in “Her Man,” a performance lauded by critics. A leading role opposite Barrymore in “State’s Attorney” in 1932, playing the spurned wife to Barrymore’s mob attorney, galvanized her stardom. She was a movie star, known throughout the world. When she arrived in Australia in 1936 to film “Thoroughbred,” she was mobbed by fans.
What the public didn’t see was her unhappiness. She was somber, and drank.

“I believe by today’s standards she would easily have been considered manic-depressive,” said her great-grandson, James Anthony, a clothing designer in Miami. “Her life was constantly in shambles and under the public’s judging eye – although in Hollywood this was common, she seemed to pile on the tragedies, divorces and public feuds faster than most.”

Her stardom began to fade soon after it began. Blonde and pixie-ish, with sad eyes, she became stereotyped in films as the Woman Who Loves the Wrong Man, playing the wife or girlfriend of the alcoholic, or the gambler. Critics accused her of hammy acting. She once told an interviewer, “It seems to me I’m the perpetually pure-at-heart streetwalker, always drooping over bars while some director says, ‘Now, Helen, you must be very sweet about this naughty line. Remember, you haven’t the faintest idea what it means!’”

But she was not innocent. She knew life – its highs and lows. Its disappointments.

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“YOU’LL NEVER FORGET IT! The blood-firing romance of a girl WHO DARED THE WORLD FOR LOVE! She was tender, young and beautiful, but she knew LIFE in the raw, vivid, colorful, elemental! A Slice of Life Magnificently Played by Helen Twelvetrees.” – Original print ad for the movie, “Her Man” (1930).

Helen Twelvetrees did not believe in God.

She was an outspoken athiest, said Anthony. She did not pray to God for help, for strength, for hope. There was no creator listening. No grand plan.

Her first husband, Clark Twelvetrees, was an alcoholic. She had met him at acting school, the American Academy of Dramatic Art, where they both studied drama. He worked as a stage manager at theaters in New York, but struggled to find acting jobs.

Just before they divorced in 1931, Clark Twelvetrees threw himself out a seventh-story window from a building in New York. He was saved by landing on a second-floor awning, but rendered unconscious.

 The tabloids accused Helen of pushing him out. Even the police, it seemed, were suspicious: She was held in custody until Clark regained consciousness, and admitted he had attempted suicide. The story made newspapers throughout the world. Helen Twelvetrees got publicity, though for the wrong reasons.

Her second husband, Frank Woody, was a stuntman she met in Hollywood. He earned her more bad publicity in 1936; while they were estranged, Woody passed a restaurant where Helen was dining with a man. Woody beat up the guy, giving him two black eyes, and Helen Twelvetrees was front-page news again.

“I think many of her roles bizarrely portrayed her actual persona, a lovestruck woman always going for the wrong men,” said Anthony.

Toward the end of the 1930s, she settled for bit parts, which eventually disappeared. One of her last performances was on stage: She played Blanche DuBois, the tragic, faded romantic in Tennessee Williams’ “A Streetcar Named Desire,” on stage
in summer stock in Sea Cliff, N.Y. in 1951.

Helen Twelvetrees arrived at the theater for the first rehearsal, wearing a white dress and flat shoes, a pretty woman who looked dissipated, recalled Naomi Caryl, an actor who performed in the show. Alcohol and life’s worries had worn her down. She seemed fragile. And her eyes – the saddest eyes that Caryl had ever seen.

“My God, she IS Blanche,” Caryl thought to herself.

Blanche DuBois: You’re married to a madman.

Stella Kowalski: I wish you’d stop taking it for granted that I’m in something I want to get out of.

Blanche: What you are talking about is desire – just brutal Desire. The name of that rattle-trap streetcar that bangs through the Quarter, up one old narrow street and down another.

Stella: Haven’t you ever ridden on that streetcar?

Blanche: It brought me here. Where I’m not wanted and where I’m ashamed to be.
Helen Twelvetrees’ third husband was an Air Force officer, a crewman of a bomber in World War II. Conrad Payne was a little younger, a big, impressive man. “Handsome as they come,” remembered Audra Henderson, a Middletown resident who worked with him at Olmsted Air Force Base, where Payne was stationed.

Helen lived in one half of a tidy red brick duplex on Oak Hill Drive, in obscurity among neighbors and airmen. Her only child, Frank – Anthony’s grandfather – had little contact with her. He disliked Payne, an acoholic who verbally abused her, said Anthony.

At work, Payne was quiet, and talked little about his wife, said Henderson. He didn’t talk about her movies, her past, her drinking, their marriage.

On Feb. 13, 1958, the day before Valentine’s Day, Payne returned home for lunch. He climbed the stairs to the bedroom. He found Helen dead on the floor.

She had taken an overdose of sedatives.

Helen Twelvetrees had not eaten breakfast, or dinner the night before, an autopsy revealed. She had a high level of alcohol in her blood, and her stomach was filled only with liquid.

She had small facial scars that suggested a facelift. Her fingernails and toenails were painted red.

The Dauphin County coroner ruled her death a suicide.

Helen Twelvetrees was cremated, her ashes buried in a tiny, three-foot strip of cold earth in Middletown Cemetery.

No tombstone.

No funeral.

No procession of mourners.

Nothing.

Not because Helen was an athiest. Because Payne didn’t want to spend the money on her, insists Anthony. Payne never even called Helen’s son to tell him she had died, he said.

“We’re sure he didn’t bother getting a marker because of the cost,” said Anthony.
Payne, who died in 2005, is buried in Arlington National Cemetery.

Anthony visited her grave for the first time last summer, buying flowers at Alma’s House of Flowers on Union St. in downtown Middletown and stumbling upon her plot based on a photo a fan had posted on the internet.

“I look at her life and think of what an amazingly bumpy ride it was and try to understand why it ended as it did,” said Anthony.

So Helen Twelvetrees lies in Middletown, where her unhappiness, her depression overcame her. The resting place of a faded movie star. Far from glamourous Hollywood. “Between pictures I go away,” she once told an interviewer. “I think that is the best way to achieve happiness in Hollywood, the only way to keep one’s perspective. If you stay too close to the motion picture colony you lose your sense of values.”

The distance, in miles and time, did not bring happiness. Instead, she lost her mind, like Blanche DuBois.

Jim Lewis: 717-944-4628, or jimlewis@pressandjournal.com

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