M*rder, Sl*ttiness & A Twisted Foursome – Ida Lupino’s Fall
M*rder, Sl*ttiness & A Twisted Foursome – Ida Lupino’s Fall.
The Cafe Trocadero, perched prominently on the Sunset Strip, was a hub of high-stakes glamour and intense social maneuvering on the night of December 14th, 1935. The most coveted table in the establishment belonged to the Lupinos—a father and daughter duo who were hosting a party in honor of a dear friend. The guest of honor that evening was Thelma Todd, the iconic “ice cream blonde,” a woman who was, unbeknownst to the glittering crowd, mere hours away from the tragic conclusion of her life. Throughout the evening, she drank, she laughed, and she engaged in a tense, uncomfortable exchange with her ex-husband across the crowded room. As the night wore on, she sat with Sid Grauman, requesting that he call ahead to her home to announce her imminent arrival. The hostess presiding over this gathering was a bleached English import of just 17 years old named Ida Lupino, a young woman whom Paramount had already largely written off as a lost cause. Ida watched as Thelma disappeared into the frigid night, thinking nothing of the departure at the time. Two mornings later, a maid opened a garage door situated above the Pacific Coast Highway and discovered Thelma Todd slumped in her chocolate brown Lincoln. Within mere weeks, Lupino found herself standing before a Los Angeles County Grand Jury, being questioned with extreme courtesy about the exact details of her final conversation with her friend. Interestingly, the narrative she provided to the authorities then and the account she offered half a century later were fundamentally different stories.
Ida Lupino was born on February 4th, 1918, at 33 Ardbeg Road, Herne Hill, located in the historically unfashionable southern regions of London. Family legend maintains that Connie Lupino went into labor right under the dining room table during the chaos of an air raid. However, official reference books have never reached a consensus on the exact year of her birth, let alone the number of Zeppelins supposedly terrorizing the sky. Most sources cite 1914, and Ida never felt the need to correct the inaccuracy. Regardless of the year, she was born into an established theatrical dynasty. The Lupino family had been deeply embedded in the world of show business since approximately the reign of Charles II, having arrived from Italy as puppeteers and choosing to remain for three centuries of pantomime and low comedy. Her great-grandfather had been a renowned acrobatic clown. Her father, Stanley Lupino, was the biggest name in British musical comedy, a man who wrote his own scripts and possessed the uncanny ability to bring a Drury Lane house down with a single, perfectly timed pratfall. Ida’s cousin was Lupino Lane, the man who famously taught England the “Lambeth Walk” in the legendary musical comedy of the same name. Her mother, Constance Gladys O’Shea, worked professionally as Connie Emerald.
When Ida turned ten, she petitioned her father to construct a theater in their garden, and he complied, building a legitimate space complete with working lights, an orchestra pit, and seating for one hundred guests. There is a distinct line between children who are merely indulged by their parents and children who are essentially conscripted into a family trade, and in Ida’s case, the distinction was often blurred. She composed her first play at the tender age of seven. By ten, she had committed every major female role in Shakespeare to memory. Her personal ambition was to become a writer, yet she was sent to the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art, because that was simply what a Lupino did. She arrived at the academy at thirteen, successfully passing herself off as fifteen. In 1932, at roughly fourteen years of age, she accompanied her mother to an audition for the American director Allan Dwan. Dwan took one look at Connie and decided she was far too old for the ingenue role, but he pivoted and offered the part to the child sitting beside her. The film was titled Her First Affair, centered on a young girl’s romantic entanglement with an older married man—hardly the sort of casting that would be met with approval in a modern context.
What followed were two grueling years of British quota pictures, during which a fourteen-year-old girl with bleached-blonde hair played a gallery of characters described in the vernacular of the day as “tarts.” Reflecting on those years, she once remarked, “My father once said to me, ‘You’re born to be bad,’ and it was true. I made eight films in England before I came to America, and I played a harlot or a temptress in all of them.” The trade press dubbed her the “English Jean Harlow” and pressured her to dye her hair to fully commit to the image. Her management agreed with the idea; she objected, but she ultimately lost the battle. Paramount spotted her in a 1933 film titled Money for Speed, in which she played a dual role, and signed her to play the titular character in Alice in Wonderland. She sailed into New York aboard the Berengaria in August 1933 at age fifteen, but by the time she arrived at the studio lot, the executives took one look at her and visibly paled. The girl standing before them was not an innocent Alice; she was a worldly, smoky-eyed adolescent with a low-register London voice and the flat, experienced stare of an adult. Lupino ended the debate decisively: “I could never feel Alice. I’ve never been Alice’s age.” She was stuck with a five-year contract and no clear path forward.
In June 1934, during a Los Angeles polio epidemic that the New York Times attributed to contaminated swimming pools, she woke up with a fever and found herself unable to move her right hand. The newspapers ran dramatic bulletins, hovering over the story like vultures awaiting a tragic teen demise, and some seemed almost to be rooting for one. For several weeks, she lacked reliable use of her hand and one leg, with doctors warning she might never walk properly or work again. While the case proved to be comparatively mild and the symptoms eventually receded, something shifted within her during those weeks in bed that never quite reverted. “I realized that my life and my courage and my hopes did not lie in my body,” she later explained. “If that body was paralyzed, my brain could still work industriously. If I weren’t able to act, I would be able to write. Even if I weren’t able to use a pencil or typewriter, I could dictate.” At sixteen, she had already deduced that her physical appearance was merely temporary, but her intellect was for keeps. While convalescing, she composed an orchestral piece, the “Aladdin Suite,” which the Los Angeles Philharmonic performed in 1937, despite nobody ever actually asking her to write it.
She recovered and dove back into the Hollywood social scene, which in 1935 was defined by nightclubs and press photographers. For a brief period, this included Howard Hughes, who took her to the Trocadero in April of that year and ensured the image was splashed across the papers by the weekend. It was quintessential Hughes: the lanky, awkward, and perpetually lustful millionaire aviator alongside a beautiful teenager. The relationship eventually faded, only to resurface seventeen years later in a form no one could have predicted. This leads us back to the Trocadero that fateful December. Thelma Todd, a twenty-nine-year-old comedian who had held her own against the Marx Brothers, was living in a complex, odd arrangement with director Roland West. His estranged wife occupied the house directly above the Sidewalk Cafe that West had financed for Thelma. At the party, Todd appeared to be in good spirits and focused on her business, even betting a table of studio executives that they wouldn’t show up at her cafe the following evening. Her chauffeur later noted that she was uncharacteristically quiet on the drive home and, upon arrival, declined his offer to walk her to her door—a gesture she had never previously refused. She was found dead on the morning of Monday, December 16th, of carbon monoxide poisoning in a garage she had no logical reason to be in. The ensuing inquest and grand jury proceedings provided everything the Los Angeles public hungered for: an ex-husband with alleged mob connections, anonymous extortion letters, and a lover living with his wife just 300 feet up the hillside.
Ida Lupino was called to testify, and her account of Thelma’s mood was interpreted by the grand jury foreman as pointing toward suicide—a conclusion he found inherently unsatisfying. Ultimately, nothing was proven, and the death was officially recorded as accidental. Decades later, while speaking to biographer William Donati, Lupino firmly leaned toward the theory of tragic, stupid misfortune. “Certain people were incriminating a man who did not murder her at all,” she insisted, “and she did not commit suicide. She had just gone into the garage. You get carbon monoxide and you go.” This reflected a consistent aspect of Ida’s personality: she would consistently look at a sensational event that the public craved as high melodrama and insist upon a far more banal, yet perhaps more frighteningly hollow, truth.
Her Paramount contract dragged on, offering her little fulfillment. Upon meeting Hedda Hopper on the set of Artists and Models in 1937, she received the most valuable piece of early career advice she ever gained: she might be taken seriously if she stopped dressing like a hussy. Taking this to heart, Lupino allowed her eyebrows to grow back and returned her hair to its natural auburn. In late 1937, she walked away from a contract paying $1,700 a week rather than accept another generic ingenue role. She was still only nineteen. She then spent over a year off-screen—an eternity in a town like Hollywood, where promising careers could wither in a matter of weeks. On November 17, 1938, she finalized her conversion to respectability by marrying actor Louis Hayward in a quiet civil ceremony at the Santa Barbara Courthouse. Hayward was South African-born, English-educated, charming, and on the verge of fame as Simon Templar, known as “The Saint.” For a few years, it was a genuinely happy marriage.
Her professional comeback was engineered by sheer force of will. Columbia provided a two-picture deal, and Fox cast her in The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes. Learning that William Wellman was casting for his next project, she decided to bypass the usual gatekeepers. “I was preparing to film The Light That Failed,” Wellman recalled. “Ida swept into my office and asked me point-blank for the key feminine role.” The part was Bessie Broke, a vicious Cockney model who destroys a painting and relentlessly torments a blind Ronald Colman. Wellman didn’t want her, and Colman was equally hesitant. Her own advisors warned that the role would alienate the audience, but the studio backed her, and she took the part, playing it with a controlled, terrifying fury no one had previously realized she possessed. She effectively stole the picture. Mark Hellinger at Warner Brothers took note and hired her for They Drive by Night in 1940, casting her as a truck magnate’s wife who murders her husband using a garage door and a running engine—a character arc that felt strangely prophetic given her history. She dominated the final act with a courtroom collapse so operatic and unhinged that legendary stars George Raft and Humphrey Bogart could do little more than stand by and watch. She was proving, once and for all, that she could truly act.
She subsequently negotiated her Warner contract to include freelance rights. She then starred in High Sierra, again for director Raoul Walsh, and successfully demanded her name be placed above Bogart’s on the advertising posters. It was during the production of High Sierra that she and Bogart had a permanent falling out. While neither ever publicly detailed the specifics, she emerged from that project with the firm resolve never to work with him again, maintaining that stance for the remainder of their careers despite Warner Brothers’ repeated attempts to pair them. The 1940s were truly her decade as an actress, though she never felt entirely at ease within the studio system. She was fantastic in The Sea Wolf, having pressured screenwriter Robert Rossen to sharpen the class politics of her character—a picture she later remarked could easily pass for “current history.” To prepare for Moontide, she took Jean Gabin, the newly arrived and deeply homesick king of French cinema, on a tour of the rougher precincts of Los Angeles to give him a firsthand look at vice and violence. The image of the exiled icon of French cinema getting a guided tour of the San Pedro waterfront from a twenty-four-year-old Ida Lupino remains one of the most vivid in Hollywood lore.
On June 10th, 1942, Stanley Lupino died of cancer in a London hospital, just four days before his forty-ninth birthday. With a world war raging and an ocean separating them, his daughter—the woman he had trained, pushed, and molded into a star—received the news with reserved stoicism in California and promptly went back to work. Her relationship with Jack Warner deteriorated on a predictable schedule. She refused roles she deemed beneath her and rewrote scripts she found intellectually insulting. She was suspended frequently and for long durations. In 1942, she refused to star in Kings Row and was benched as punishment. She famously dubbed herself the “poor man’s Bette Davis,” a remark that was both wryly funny and literally accurate, as many of her assignments were scripts that Davis had rejected first. However, in 1943, she took the role in The Hard Way—playing a woman who viciously manipulates her younger sister into the entertainment industry—with such ferocity that the New York film critics named her Best Actress. Davis reportedly asked, “How did I let that one get away?”
The suspensions, while frustrating at the time, eventually proved to be the best thing that ever happened to her. Barred from acting, she turned to radio for income and haunted the film sets of others to secure an informal Hollywood education. “For about 18 months back in the mid-40s, I could not get a job in pictures as an actress,” she wrote later. “I was on suspension. I had to do something to fill up my time. I learned a lot from the late George Barnes, a marvelous cameraman.” She stood behind cameras and asked endless questions. She sat in cutting rooms, learning the rhythm of narrative construction. Without a conscious plan, she was apprenticing, having grown weary of standing on set while, as she put it, “someone else seemed to be doing all the interesting work.”
Meanwhile, her marriage to Louis Hayward was crumbling. Hayward had enlisted in the Marine Corps in July 1942 and ended up commanding the unit that filmed the Battle of Tarawa, a four-day slaughter on a coral atoll in November 1943. The resulting footage won an Academy Award, but the experience shattered him. He returned home to Beverly Hills unable to sleep or speak about what he had witnessed; in 1944, there was simply no vocabulary for the trauma he was suffering. They separated that July, and she filed for divorce in May 1945. Lupino was never a sentimentalist regarding her own reputation. “I’m mad, they say,” she remarked around this time. “I am temperamental and dizzy and disagreeable. Well, let them talk. I can take it. Only one person can hurt me. Her name is Ida Lupino.” She moved on, playing Emily Brontë in Devotion and a torch singer in The Man I Love. In 1947, after finishing Deep Valley, she departed Warner Brothers, turning down a lucrative four-year exclusive deal on her way out. Her explanation was devoid of artistic posturing: “I had decided that nothing lay ahead of me but the life of the neurotic star with no family and no home.”
In June of 1948, she became an American citizen. That summer, she made Road House for Fox, playing a Chicago chanteuse imported into a lumber country bar featuring a bowling alley out back. She insisted on doing her own singing, which was a fairly brave choice considering she couldn’t actually sing. Yet, what she lacked in vocal range, she compensated for with a cigarette-and-scotch rasp and a total, chilling command of the lyrics. When she sits at the piano and half-speaks the lines to “One for My Baby,” letting her cigarette burn a slow, deliberate groove into the piano lid, it creates one of the most genuinely erotic moments ever captured in American cinema. Her contemporary, Celeste Holm, once noted, “She does more with that voice than anybody I’ve ever heard.”
On August 5th, 1948, she married Collier Young, a Columbia executive. Together with clothing heir Anson Bond, they formed a company called Emerald Productions, named after her mother. When Bond developed cold feet and sold his interest to screenwriter Malvin Wald, the company was renamed “The Film Makers”—with one “M,” a missing letter that has irritated copy editors ever since. Their mission was clear: produce low-budget pictures about subjects no one else would touch. The constraints were tight—two weeks of shooting, under $200,000, real-world locations, unknown actors, and what they called the “ring of truth.” Their first project, Not Wanted, explored the story of an unmarried girl who gives birth, gives the child up for adoption, and eventually steals another’s. Lupino co-wrote, co-produced, and hired silent-era veteran Elmer Clifton to direct. Seventy-two hours into production, Clifton suffered a heart attack. With no money in the budget to hire a replacement, Lupino took over the project herself. She shot the film in under 30 days for $154,000 and brought it in on schedule, with Clifton watching from a chair at the edge of the set. She refused the directing credit, citing respect, though it was also a calculated political maneuver. A Daily News reporter noted, “Lupino isn’t really directing this picture. She says so herself, but it’s difficult to tell just what she’s doing if it isn’t directing.” The Breen Office forced her to change the title from Unwed Mother. She even talked her own doctor into playing the physician in the delivery scene to save on costs. The picture was too strange to be a blockbuster, yet too notorious to ignore, leading to an appearance on national radio to discuss illegitimacy with Eleanor Roosevelt—hardly the typical trajectory for a B-movie.
Her next project, Never Fear (1950), focused on a young dancer struck down by polio. She filmed at the Kabat-Kaiser Institute in Santa Monica, utilizing real patients, including a group of wheelchair-bound dancers who performed an entire square dance on screen. Halfway through the shoot, Lupino fell and broke her ankle, directing much of the film from her own wheelchair. “People are tired of having the wool pulled over their eyes,” she told the press. “They want realism, and you can’t be realistic with the same glamorous mugs on the screen all the time.” While the picture lost money, it caught the eye of the new owner of RKO, who was desperate for inexpensive content. Howard Hughes—the same man who had escorted seventeen-year-old Ida to the Trocadero—put up $250,000 per picture for three features, granting her full creative control.
The first, Outrage (1950), should have cemented her status as a directing superstar. The film explores the aftermath of a rape—though the word never appears in the script, as the restrictive industry code only permitted references to “criminal assault”—and tracks the protagonist not through a legal trial, but through the crushing shame, the desperate flight, the physical revulsion, and the agonizing months that followed. Lupino staged the actual attack off-screen, denying the audience the exploitative voyeurism every other film of the era would have relied on. Bosley Crowther at The Times called her direction “overwrought,” but history has since discarded his opinion as that of a man firing shots in the dark. Meanwhile, her leading man had walked into her life sideways. Woman in Hiding was intended for Ronald Reagan, who broke his thigh, and Universal replaced him with Howard Duff, a radio actor best known as the voice of Sam Spade. By her account, the two initially couldn’t stand one another, and Duff admitted she intimidated him. He eventually sent her white orchids with a note: “From Howard Duff to Ida Lupino, whether you hate me or not.” That was the end of her resistance, and in due course, the end of her current marriage.
The marriage of “The Film Makers” dissolved at roughly the same time. When asked about his domestic life with his vice-president, Collier Young quipped, “It’s pretty hard to have an argument over a script at 5:30 and be romantic and husband-and-wifely at 6:30.” The reality was more poignant; Lupino desired children, and Young could not provide them. She filed for divorce in September 1951. By the time the ink was dry, she was already two months pregnant by Duff. The decree was finalized on October 20th, and she married Duff the following day. Bridget Duff was born on April 23rd, 1952, six months after the wedding and barely more than six months after the finalization of her previous divorce.
In the middle of 1952, caught between the collapse of one marriage and the solidification of another, Ida Lupino drove to San Quentin to interview a twenty-three-year-old man on death row. His name was William “Billy” Cook, and he had spent late 1950 and early 1951 hitchhiking across the Southwest, leaving a trail of bodies in his wake. He had murdered a traveling salesman, wiped out a family of five—the Mosers of Illinois, including three children—and dumped their bodies down a mine shaft. He abducted a deputy sheriff in Blythe, California, and left him tied in the desert to die—a death the deputy miraculously avoided. He was eventually captured in Mexico by a police chief who simply walked up and lifted the gun from his hand. “I hate everybody’s guts,” Cook stated upon his arrest, “and everybody hates mine.” He possessed a deformed right eyelid that wouldn’t close, giving the chilling appearance that he slept with one eye open. Lupino intended to make a documentary about him. She sat across from him in San Quentin, describing him as cold, calculating, and deeply frightening. She walked away with a signed release granting her exclusive rights to his story. She had already tracked down the two prospectors he had held hostage for eight days, securing their releases as well. She had, in effect, constructed the American “true crime” film a decade before the genre existed.
The Production Code Administration reacted as if the studio were on fire. Geoffrey Shurlock objected that the code prohibited films featuring contemporary notorious criminals, and James Bennett of the Federal Bureau of Prisons complained that she had obtained a condemned man’s signature without following proper channels. Forced to fictionalize the account, she renamed the killer “Emmett Myers” and reduced the body count. Cook was executed in the gas chamber on December 12, 1952, after which an Oklahoma undertaker displayed his corpse to the public for a fee. The Hitch-Hiker premiered in March 1953. It runs just seventy-one minutes, features three principal characters—all men—and consists almost entirely of a car, a desert, and a gun. It is airless, sweaty, mean, and nearly perfect; it remains the only film noir of the classic period directed by a woman. Lupino shot it in five weeks in Baja, wearing dungarees and a baseball cap. She was unrepentant when critics called the ending tame. “I wanted realism,” she remarked, “to appease the censors at the Hays Office. I reduced the number of deaths from six to three. Billy Cook was captured by a policeman just walking up to him and taking away his gun.”
By this point, she was the only woman directing features in the United States, a distinction she inherited by default when Dorothy Arzner’s contract was terminated in 1943. She held that position, essentially alone, for nearly twenty years. She survived by playing the role of the “dumb blonde” when it served her. She had the crew call her “Mother,” and the back of her director’s chair was embroidered with the phrase “Mother of us all.” “You do not tell a man, you suggest to him,” she explained. “Darlings, Mother has a problem. I’d love to do this. Can you do it? It sounds kooky, but I want to do it. And they do it. They just do it.” She continued, “Often, I pretended to a cameraman to know less than I did. That way, I got more cooperation.” Whether this was a genius survival strategy or a necessary capitulation to a misogynistic industry is a subject of debate among film scholars to this day. Ida played the game expertly: “I retain every feminine trait. Men prefer it that way. They’re more cooperative if they see that fundamentally you are aware of the weaker sex.” In her own essay for the Directors Guild magazine, she wrote, “Any woman who wishes to smash into the world of men isn’t very feminine. Baby, we can’t go smashing. I believe women should be struck regularly, like a gong.” Underneath the performative submissiveness was a music-hall comedian’s daughter who found delight in lampooning anyone who stood in her way. Cinematographer Archie Stout eventually let the secret out: “Ida has more knowledge of camera angles and lenses than any director I’ve ever worked with, with the exception of Victor Fleming.”
This leads to perhaps the most uncomfortable production in American independent film history. By 1953, Collier Young had married Joan Fontaine, but he remained Ida’s business partner. He wrote a screenplay about a traveling salesman who has one wife in San Francisco and another in Los Angeles, keeping both lives secret. He titled it The Bigamist. Ida Lupino directed. Joan Fontaine played the first wife, working for free as a favor to her husband after the original actress dropped out. Ida Lupino played the second wife. Fontaine’s mother, Lillian, played Lupino’s landlady. Collier Young himself made a cameo appearance. It was a film written and produced by a man who couldn’t produce a child, directed by the woman who had left him, starring the woman he had married after her, about a man unable to choose between two wives—one infertile, one fertile—with his mother-in-law in the supporting cast. Lupino thereby became the first woman in the American sound era to direct herself in a feature film. She directed her ex-husband’s new wife through grueling scenes about infertility and infidelity—an act that was either a display of monstrous professional cold-bloodedness or the most brilliantly satisfying use of a divorce settlement ever devised. The reviews were the best the company ever received, but the production destroyed them. RKO passed on the film, and unable to manage the complexities of a national distribution system, the company watched the film die for lack of bookings. The studio that had tackled rape, polio, illegitimacy, bigamy, and murder collapsed in 1955, a much greater loss to American cinema than anyone realized at the time.
The rest of the decade proved difficult in ways unrelated to art. Howard Duff had been named in “Red Channels” in 1950, finding himself in the darkness of the Hollywood blacklist. He was unable to work, began drinking heavily, and frequently vanished for weeks at a time. In 1954, Lupino wrote a script with Collier called Private Hell 36, produced it, starred in it opposite Duff, and hired Don Siegel to direct. There is a deeply unsettling fascination in watching her write a character depicting a crumbling, alcoholic husband for the man she was actually married to. By then, she had begun referring to her own directing career as having transitioned from the “poor man’s Bette Davis” to the “poor man’s Don Siegel”—a joke that signaled another door closing. Television saved her career, as it did for many artists deemed “too weird” for the new era of safe, blockbuster filmmaking. She made her small-screen directing debut in 1956 with an episode of Screen Directors Playhouse, starring William Talman and Peter Lorre. Between 1956 and 1968, she directed episodes of more than thirty series. Contrary to expectation, she was frequently hired to direct episodes characterized by extreme violence; nobody wanted her for the “weepies.” “No one ever asked me to direct a love story,” she remarked with amusement. Her first episode of Have Gun – Will Travel featured a rape, eight murders, and a sandstorm. On the first day of shooting, star Richard Boone approached her and said, “Doll, I don’t care what you do. Just don’t ask me to rehearse.” It was a business that suited her perfectly. She directed Thriller for Boris Karloff, The Untouchables, The Fugitive, and because she was fast, cheap, and never over budget, Gilligan’s Island and Bewitched. She directed “The Masks” for The Twilight Zone—an episode featuring carnival masks that transform the wearers’ faces into representations of their souls—and remained the only woman to direct an episode of that series. Five years earlier, she had starred in another Twilight Zone episode as a faded movie queen who sits alone in a dark room, obsessively running her old films until she eventually walks into the screen and vanishes. It was a haunting premonition.
Regarding the process, she told TV Guide: “Directing keeps you in a constant state of first-night nerves. You may be terrified, but you mustn’t show it on the set. Keep your sense of humor. Don’t panic. I sometimes wonder how anything gets on film. And yet, if I don’t work, it’s panic manner.” She often prepped on weekends, alone on empty backlots. That is how she came to be on the Universal lot one blazing Saturday, soaked in sweat and working out an episode of The Virginian just as the studio tour rolled around the corner. “There I was, dripping wet in the killing heat, wearing no makeup, looking like a witch searching for an old house to haunt,” she recalled. “The bright young know-it-all guide would happily tell his eager charges, ‘And there, ladies and gentlemen, is the famous actress-directress Ida Lupino.’ I tell you, I wanted to die.” From January 1957 to September 1958, she and Duff starred in a CBS sitcom called Mr. Adams and Eve, playing a pair of married Hollywood actors. It was produced by Collier Young. The set was an exact replica of the Duffs’ real Malibu home, and many of the plots were lifted directly from their actual lives, albeit sanitized for comedy. Everyone involved seemed to find this arrangement perfectly normal.
Her mother died on December 26, 1959, out in the desert at Barstow. Connie Emerald had lived long enough to appear on This Is Your Life beside her daughter. Ida had now buried both the people who had forced her onto the stage. The marriage to Duff lingered for years after it had ceased to be a functioning relationship. They separated in 1966, but did not divorce until 1984. The intervening years were marked by depression and substance abuse on both sides. In 1965, she directed her final theatrical film, The Trouble with Angels, a comedy about Catholic schoolgirls starring Hayley Mills and a magnificent Rosalind Russell as the Mother Superior. She crafted something genuinely tender from the material, yet the critics buried it, and she never directed a feature film again. Her final decade of work consisted of character parts, many of which were beneath her, though there were a few notable highlights. She appeared in Batman, The Mod Squad, and two episodes of Columbo—in one, playing Johnny Cash’s devout wife. In 1972, she played Steve McQueen’s mother in Sam Peckinpah’s Junior Bonner. The role required a suspension of disbelief, as she was only twelve years older than him. He complained to Sam, she remembered: “What’s going on here? How can I look at Ida and think of her as my mother?” She replied, “That’s good because when I look at you, I’m not thinking of you as a son.” They went to the horse races together and won a small fortune, much to Sam Peckinpah’s irritation.
She starred in The Devil’s Rain in 1975,menaced by Satanists alongside a young John Travolta, and took home the first Saturn Award ever given for Best Supporting Actress. She appeared in Food of the Gods, in which the “gods” provided giant, murderous rats. In 1977, she made an appearance on Charlie’s Angels as an aging star, and finally, she stopped. What followed was fifteen years of near-total withdrawal into a rambling ranch house on Old Oak Lane in Brentwood, where the ivy slowly reclaimed the fences and neighbors learned to give the property a wide berth. She drank. Her friends began to pass away, and she ceased replacing them. Residents of Old Oak Lane still recall the afternoon Miss Lupino set fire to her own mailbox. She also took a strange, persistent pleasure in watering not just the neighbors’ lawns, but the neighbors themselves. Her business affairs were mismanaged so severely that in 1984, she petitioned a California court to appoint a conservator. The woman appointed was Mary Ann Anderson, a young sub-agent who had been sent up the hill in 1983 to deliver birthday flowers. “The house was very overgrown,” Anderson remembered. “She came walking down a pathway dressed like a bag lady with a lot of keys.” Anderson said she had flowers. Lupino asked whether they were from the florist, and in that moment, the curtain finally began to fall on the life of the woman who had directed, produced, and acted her way through the golden age of cinema, ending her days in the quiet, tangled corners of the world she had once helped build.
