Hollywood secrets and scandals

‘I've never seen someone who wanted to die so much:' Veteran Hollywood reporter details Sandra Dee's descent into alcoholism, Veronica Lake's sad demise and the tragic death of her friend Joan Rivers (who she says spoke to her from the grave)

• Sue Cameron spent more than 40 years covering Hollywood and befriending some of the world's biggest screen and music stars
• Her new book, Hollywood Secrets and Scandals, offers behind-the-scenes insights about the industry, their personal lives, feuds and relationships
• Cameron says she was naive when she first started reporting after college to the point  she thought Jimi  Hendrix was tired - and not passed out on quaaludes
• She details the tragic losses of Veronica Lake, Sandra Dee, Cass Elliot and Joan Rivers, the latter two close friends of the reporter
• Cameron says she personally knows nine people who have been murdered and ended up befriending one of the imprisoned Manson girls 
• She includes more fun anecdotes, as well, such as Carol Burnett wetting herself with excitement when Hollywood legend Cary Grant walked into the room 
• She's known the Kardashians for decades and says she's not surprised by their family empire because 'Kris is one of the smartest people I’ve ever met'

By Sheila Flynn For Dailymail.com

Published: 17:49 BST, 20 August 2018 | Updated: 23:27 BST, 20 August 2018

A Hollywood reporter and a household-name comedian sat on a couch, waiting for Cary Grant to walk through the door. It sounds like a barroom joke – and the story does become hilarious – but the scenario actually happened years ago at the Beverly Hills home of singer Peggy Lee, who was launching a new album and threw a related soiree.

Reporter Sue Cameron and performer Carol Burnett had been invited to the cocktail party, and the two friends had been told that Hollywood legend Cary Grant – beloved by both, though they’d never met him – would be in attendance. So they sat on Peggy’s couch, obsessively watching the door, waiting for the handsome actor to walk through.

Finally, he did – and quickly headed to the bar. Cameron jumped up to follow and urged Burnett to do the same.

‘I can’t. I can’t!’ Burnett responded.

‘I said, “What’s the matter with you?”’ Cameron tells DailyMail.com. ‘And she said: “I wet my pants.”’

Cameron adds: ‘When I told the story to Joan Rivers, she said, “What happened to Peggy Lee’s couch?”’

Hollywood reporter and columnist Sue Cameron, who began covering stars of music and screen straight out of college, poses with one of her favorite celebrity friends, Joan Rivers

Cameron's new book, Hollywood Secrets and Scandals, includes an anecdote about how Carol Burnett (left, with Cameron) got so excited to meet Cary Grant that she wet herself; other sections detail Cameron's friendship with Faye Resnick (right), the best friend of the late Nicole Simpson. Resnick and Cameron helped to host a fundraiser for a domestic violence shelter following Simpson's murder

Cameron says one of the most tragic stories included in her book focuses on 1940s screen siren Veronica Lake, pictured during her heyday

When Cameron met Lake to interview her on the same day the actress received her star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, she discovered 'a woman who very clearly had abused alcohol horribly and led a miserable life … She was forty-seven at the time of the interview and looked like she was in her 70s … I think Veronica Lake was one of the most broken human beings I’ve ever seen.’ Cameron accompanied her to the ceremony and posed (above); only one other person had turned out for the actress

The veteran reporter laughs as she recounts this anecdote, one of her favorites from a new book she’s written titled Hollywood Secrets and Scandals. It chronicles behind-the-scenes and deeply intimate tales from Cameron’s 40-year-plus career as a show business columnist and journalist in Hollywood, a career which led to close friendships with many of the people she wrote about.

As the tables are turned and she’s interviewed herself by DailyMail.com, Cameron is speaking from a hotel in Chicago’s Highland Park – the ‘Beverly Hills’ of the city, she says – and she’s plotting to get pizza delivered from famed Chicago joint Lou Malnati’s for dinner with her travel companion.

That travel companion is none other than retired screen legend Kim Novak, who’s in the city for the 40th anniversary of her film Vertigo, shown in a live screening with the Chicago Symphony playing the soundtrack.

Novak, in fact, is one of three close friends – and Hollywood stars – to whom Cameron dedicated the book; the others are Debbie Reynolds and Joan Rivers, who both considered the reporter practically part of their families, Cameron says.

Not all of the stories are light and funny, however, and the book chronicles the sad decline and tragic ends of many other stars, witnessed firsthand by its author. Woven throughout are themes of faith, family and caution when it comes to alcohol and drugs; Cameron touches upon everything from the Manson murders to the loss of Sandra Dee, Veronica Lake and Cass Elliot in the book.

Initially, Cameron says, she didn’t even think she’d want to publish the recollections she’d put down in writing.

‘I just wanted to get the stories out of my head to make sure that they were on paper,’ she tells DailyMail.com. ‘Because I knew they would be important, if people ever really wanted to understand why someone goes into show business, what an artist is, who they are as real people, how it affects their lives and families.’

She adds: ‘No one has ever had the access that I’ve had in any kind of press position … I want people to know that these famous people are as special as the public thinks they are, and that they are human beings, too – but being a human being doesn’t take away from the specialness.’

She adds: ‘This is what the life of a human being is who becomes a giant public figure, and I want the public to see how hard that is.’

Cameron – who grew up herself in a wealthy household in Los Angeles and studied journalism at USC – was an idealistic and naïve reporter who initially had no idea of what she’d gotten herself into when she began covering music and television after graduation.

Before that, she tells DailyMail.com: ‘I never saw any drugs. If someone had one beer in college, I thought that was scandalous. I believe I went to one fraternity party and they served hard cider, and I remember being carried back to the sorority house, throwing up on some poor guy’s back. So I had no understanding of anything.

‘So I’d never seen drugs; I couldn’t tell when somebody was on drugs … Someone would have to literally shoot up in front of me for me to notice that they’re on something.’

An anecdote from her early career sums up her naivete perfectly: Cameron interviewed Jimi Hendrix in his hotel suite, only for him to fall asleep in the middle of the conversation. She went out to tell his manager that the musician must be tired, but she understood given his touring and performance schedule.

‘It was years before I figured out Jimi had passed out on quaaludes,’ she writes in the book. ‘Someone had to explain to me what a quaalude was.’

She tells a similar story about Jim Morrison, a man she deeply admired, who electrified her the first time she saw him on stage. Not long after, she came upon him in the middle of the night in a supermarket, transfixed by the colorful cereal boxes – and presumably on LSD.

Despite her vastly different values and life experience, however, she believes that she earned the respect of artists because of her genuine interest in and knowledge of their craft – and her ability to pinpoint star quality and talent. 

‘If you take someone like a Jimi Hendrix or a Jim Morrison, where they were obviously people in great trouble, I didn’t see them as people in great trouble, because I didn’t notice,’ she tells DailyMail.com. ‘I only knew years later. I saw them as people who were shy, a little sad, introspective …

‘When you looked into Jim Morrison’s eyes, it wasn’t like looking into the eyes of a human being; it was an ethereal being, almost like an angel. So I was attracted to those inner qualities that I would see in people.

‘Jim Morrison wasn’t the greatest singer, probably not even the greatest poet, but when you put it all together in that kind of package, it attracts you so much. And when you see Jimi Hendrix on stage, these people, they are blessed with a gift that is so rare.’

It saddened her immensely, she says, to watch when that talent was squandered, beaten down by either demons, the industry, hangers-on or a devastating combination of it all. She was crushed by the loss of several close friends – with some deaths sending her into months-long spirals.

Cameron poses with Lili Tomlin and Lucie Arnaz, daughter of Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz

In addition to discovering the tragic life trajectory of Veronica Lake, Cameron also says she watched actress Sandra Dee (left) descend into alcoholism, while she was sent to interview an aging Rita Hayworth (right, in her heyday) following a disastrous on-stage performance - well before it was revealed that Hayworth was suffering from Alzheimer's

Cameron poses with Joan Rivers, whose family she would join on trips and for holidays

Cameron dances with James Brown early on in her Hollywood reporting career, which has spanned more than 40 years

When Cass Elliot died in London in 1974 from heart failure – after suffering from obesity and substance abuse – Cameron still had some of the singer’s belongings in her car. She had been oblivious to much of Elliot’s drug use, but still, she drove over to the singer’s home to clear it out of any remaining drug paraphernalia. She found nothing – and only discovered years later that another friend had beaten her to the clean-up, leaving the home just minutes before Cameron arrived.

She says she tried to save actress Sandra Dee from a similar fate, noticing the star’s declining health and profile against the backdrop of a dysfunctional family life. Dee’s marriage to Bobby Darin had broken up and, by the 1970s, it seemed her star was on the verge of burning out.

‘In the case of Sandra Dee, it was her mother who basically pimped her out and didn’t care,’ Cameron tells DailyMail.com. She insists that Dee’s stepfather had abused her from an early age and her mother turned a blind eye as the family used their stunning daughter as a cash cow.

Cameron tried to step in in the 1970s to try and give the woman a boost, ‘sure that a lovely story in The Hollywood Reporter might help.’

They arranged a meeting at the Beverly Hills Hotel, but Cameron was astonished when she arrived at the appointed booth in the Polo Lounge.

‘Instead of sweet, shiny Sandra Dee sitting there, I saw a troubled, aged before her time woman who had vodka and cigarettes for lunch,’ she writes in the book. ‘I was extremely upset – not disappointed. I was upset for her and what surely was not a fairy-tale life. She looked hard and worn, and so very fragile and sad.

‘I would ask friendly questions, and she would answer them. I even got her to laugh a few times. When the waiter came to take our order, I ordered the McCarthy salad, and Sandy ordered another straight vodka.’

Cameron also tried to get the actress on television when the reporter briefly transitioned from journalism to working as an executive at ABC-TV, visiting Dee at her home in Beverly Hills, where she was seated on the couch – another vodka in front of her.

‘As I was talking to her, she sounded very enthusiastic and hopeful. Her mother was lingering in the background like the plague,’ Cameron writes. We said goodbye and she told me she’d let me know. A few days later she actually did call and say she “wasn’t up to it,”’ but she thanked me profusely.

Sandra later approached Cameron about writing her story – a book deal which the reporter did not believe would sell at the time – so Cameron declined, a decision she says she ‘will regret to my dying day.’

Dee herself died in 2005 at the age of 62 after ‘drinking straight vodka all through the dialysis and other treatments,’ Cameron writes, adding: ‘I’ve never seen someone who wanted to die so much.’

Cameron stepped in to do damage control for another star, too, after Rita Hayworth made a disastrous appearance at the Golden Globes, slurring and acting irrationally in such a way that she had to be escorted off stage and everyone assumed she was drunk. The reporter was invited to her home the next day for tea, where a shaking Hayworth gave her a benign interview as two of the actress’ PR people stood by.

It would come out much later that Hayworth had been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease. 

‘Who knows if she really recognized deeply what she did the night before, because I don’t know how far along the Alzheimer’s was,’ Cameron tells DailyMail.com, concluding that Hayworth had been heavily coached before the interview and the reporter was chosen because it was known she’d write a favorable piece.

‘Rita Hayworth was a studio girl – Elizabeth Taylor, Debbie Reynolds, all of them. They are given lessons early on how to perform for the public – meaning when you are doing an interview, what your behavior is, it’s almost like Meghan Markle. It’s the same kind of training. It’s not new, whether you’re training to be a royal or training to be a star in those days. It doesn’t happen nowadays, which is sad. That’s why we have so many pigs around.

‘I’m sure they said to her, “Okay, go back to the training, this is what we do. You know how to do a tea, you know what to wear.” I’m sure everything was rehearsed and closely supervised. And I made sure that I didn’t ask any hard questions; I just wanted to give her soft balls. I asked boring questions. I just needed to get her to get through it.

‘I actually felt I was on her team; I felt I was complicit with her PR people. They called me knowing that I would do that for them. So it was very orchestrated – everybody played a part. Including me.’

But the reporter had a jarring experience similar to the encounter with Dee at the Beverly Hills Hotel when she met actress Veronica Lake for an interview in 1970. 

Cameron forged a strong friendship with actress Kim Novak; when the reporter speaks to DailyMail.com, she is visiting Chicago with Novak for a screening event

Cameron also formed close bonds with Carrie Fisher and her mother Debbie Reynolds - one of three actresses to whom the author donated her book, alongside Rivers and Novak

While visiting a prison for another purpose, Cameron was introduced to - and at first horrified by - three of the Manson murderers: (from left to right) Susan Atkins, Patricia Krenwinkel and Leslie Van Houten. She formed an unlikely relationship with Van Houten, who was not present on the night of the Sharon Tate murder

Cameron was also acquainted with murdered pregnant actress Sharon Tate, and says she has personally known nine murder victims over the years

‘Gone was the slinky femme fatale who steamed up the screen,’ Cameron writes in the book. ‘In its place was a woman who very clearly had abused alcohol horribly and led a miserable life … She was forty-seven at the time of the interview and looked like she was in her 70s … I think Veronica Lake was one of the most broken human beings I’ve ever seen.’

Lake announced that she was getting her star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame after lunch and invited along Cameron – who turned out to be practically the only person with the actress for the ceremony that should’ve been one of the most proud and memorable moments of Lake’s life. The announcer from Laugh-In, Gary Owens, was also there, and the trio posed for a picture in front of the former siren pin-up’s star.

‘It was the saddest Hollywood event I’ve ever witnessed,’ Cameron writes. ‘Veronica Lake was a star with the same stature as Marilyn Monroe or Lauren Bacall, but it was 1970, not 1940, and she was all but forgotten.’

Lake was dead three years later.

Another far more recent Hollywood death that crushed Cameron, however, came nearly four years ago, when Joan Rivers died in 2014. Cameron was exceptionally close to Rivers and her family, joining them on vacations and spending holidays with them; she was shocked and devastated when Rivers died at the age of 81 after what was meant to be a relatively routine procedure.

‘I don’t deal with death well; no one does,’ Cameron tells DailyMail.com. ‘I have a hard time, particularly when it’s a death that shouldn’t have happened.’ (Rivers’ daughter, Melissa, sued for medical malpractice and settled two years ago for an undisclosed amount, with the doctors admitting responsibility.)

Cameron was so upset, in fact, that she consulted a medium she trusts, which she’s done on a handful of occasions, she says. The reporter says that Joan’s messages came through to her, and the late star spoke of her dead husband, Edgar, describing his library in one of their properties.

‘Joan went on to tell me how tired she was at the end,’ Cameron writes. ‘She actually said, “I was so tired of being Joan Rivers. It was such an ordeal to keep the machine going. I’m exhausted, exhausted. I don’t want to be Joan anymore.”'

Cameron explains in the book how she complained to Rivers about the circumstances of her friend's death, adding: 'I want to kill your doctor.'

‘”Don’t bother,” said Joan. “She’ll get a reality show, and that’ll kill her.”’

And when it comes to killing, Cameron laments that she personally knows nine people who’ve been murdered – including Sharon Tate. That connection came full circle when she found herself in a prison years later speaking to inmates, when the warden asked her to visit a group of sequestered prisoners. They turned out to be the Manson girls, which initially horrified her; she balked at the meeting before her reporter’s instincts kicked in and she agreed. She walked into a room with Leslie van Houten, Patricia Krenwinkel and Sue Atkins, who she calls ‘the most terrifying person I’ve ever met,’ adding that she felt the women could ‘kill me on the spot.’

Not all of the women were exactly what she expected, however, and she forged an unlikely bond.

Van Houten, who was convicted in the Manson gang murder at the LaBianca home in Beverly Hills in 1969 – and was not present on the night of the Sharon Tate massacre – commented on Cameron’s penny loafers and struck up a conversation.

‘I could not get over how someone who looked like a young Mary Tyler Moore was caught up in a Manson gang … when I left after that first visit, she said, “Will you write me? Will you write me and visit? I’d love to keep talking to you.” And the prison gave me a form to fill out, and I did – and I went back many, many times. And it’s not that she evolved into this innocent, lovely, hardworking person; I never saw the bad one.’

She adds: ‘She made a bad choice, and she’s paying for it. She has two or three different college degrees, and this is one case where prison reform, it really worked – and I hate to see her being punished all of these years. The other ones should never come out.’

Cameron befriended actress Valerie Harper (left) and even campaigned politically with her comedian friend Rivers (right); she was so devastated by Rivers' shock 2014 death that she later consulted a medium and claims to have communicated with the late TV personality

From left to right: Geena Davis, Cameron, Meryl Streep and Carrie Fisher at a Women in Film Awards Ceremony; the author says that 'No one has ever had the access that I’ve had in any kind of press position'

Cameron, left, with (left to right) Lainie Kazan, Debbie Reynolds and Connie Stevens; the reporter says: ‘I just wanted to get the stories out of my head to make sure that they were on paper. Because I knew they would be important, if people ever really wanted to understand why someone goes into show business, what an artist is, who they are as real people, how it affects their lives and families’

The book touches on the OJ Simpson murder trial, too; Cameron had known him quite personally because her friend had been his mistress – a woman he’d gifted with a white Bronco matching the one he’d lead on a police chase following the murder of his wife, Nicole.

‘I only knew OJ cheated,’ she writes in the book. ‘I had no idea he was a horrible physical and mental torturer of Nicole. Almost immediately people were saying he did it. I defended him to everyone who talked about it to me. I simply couldn’t believe that someone who was a personal friend, who only showed me kindness, could be a murderer. How could someone I really liked be a killer? How could I not notice any signs?’

Her thoughts soon changed, however.

‘Within a few days, as evidence came in, I had to let go of any thoughts of his innocence. What was I thinking before? I was blinded by my past experiences with him.’

Cameron connected with Nicole’s best friend, Faye Resnick, an outspoken and public proclaimer of OJ’s guilt. They became friendly and, several months after the trial ended – with a verdict of not guilty – the two women together hosted a fundraiser for a battered women’s shelter.

The event turned out to be on the same night that Simpson was found liable in the deaths of his wife and Ron Goldman in a civil trial, Cameron says - and ‘accidentally became the ONLY party that ever happened to celebrate his finally being found guilty,’ as key players in Hollywood and the trial itself poured into the party, she writes.

Her new friend Resnick was very close to another Hollywood name who would go on to become a superstar years later: Kris Kardashian. Cameron’s description of the mother and reality star is glowing, a nice contrast to the sad and tragic stories which are peppered throughout the book – in which she describes Kardashian as being richer ‘than God.’

‘I think that Kris is one of the smartest people I’ve ever met,’ she says. ‘Her management of Bruce [Jenner] – because when they started dating, he really didn’t have a lot of money – and she saw that he could be something, and she, at that point, was living with Faye Resnick. That was right after the Kardashian divorce, and she needed to find a job. She needed something to do.’

Cameron says Kardashian thought: ‘I can mold him into a motivational speaker, and we can make money.’

She says: ‘So she started everything. That all started because she wanted to make Bruce a motivational speaker, and then she married him, and then she pitched the idea for the television show.

‘I used to see her at [legendary Hollywood restaurant] La Scala, when Faye and I would have lunch during the OJ trial. I remember being startled at the beauty of Kylie and Kendall. I mean, they were all just a bunch of beautiful kids. I’m not surprised that any of this happened. Kris has a great brain.’

Following the creation of the Kardashian empire, she says: ‘When we’d run into each other, I’d look at her and laugh, and she’d look at me and laugh – because we get it. We were there at the beginning.’

Cameron tells DailyMail.com: ‘These things keep happening to me, where I’m always at the center of some explosion that everybody is interested in – and it’s not planned.’

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