How a young Welsh actress climbed up Hollywood sign and hurled herself off

Tragic Peg Entwistle in Thirteen Women (1932) (Image: Youtube) A pretty 24-year-old aspiring actress from the Welsh Valleys looked up from her apartment at the Hollywood sign which had come to represent all that glittered in the City of Angels. She climbed a 45ft ladder to the top of the ‘H’ – losing one of her new shoes in the process – and saw the city of Los Angeles spread out below…a city of broken dreams. She jumped. The world-famous sign was completed 100 years ago, lit up by 4,000 light bulbs. At a cost of $21,000 ($335,000 today), it was actually built by a real estate company to promote a proposed housing development called Hollywoodland, Beachwood Canyon, overlooking the burgeoning studio complexes. The original longer sign was built by a real estate company (Image: Getty) The development never happened and the sign was intended to last just 18 months. But it came to represent the movie industry, whose glamour was sweeping the world with stars like Charlie Chaplin, Douglas Fairbanks and Mary Pickford during the Golden Age of Hollywood . Among those enamoured was Millicent Lilian Entwistle, known as Peg, who was born in 1908 in Port Talbot, Wales. Her English parents were divorced when she was an infant and her actor father Robert won custody. They spent several years in West Kensington, London, as he appeared in West End productions. The pair emigrated to America in 1913, sailing from Liverpool and settling in New York where Robert was cast in several Broadway plays. He died in a hit-and-run accident on Park Avenue in December 1922 and Peg was taken in by her theatre manager uncle. With her family connections, Peg was given bit parts in Shakespeare productions and at 17 began to win starring roles, usually cast in light comedies on tour. Hollywood (Image: Getty) But she was dissatisfied with just frothy parts and wanted to be taken seriously as an actress, just like her favourite film stars. In 1929, she told a reporter: ‘I would rather play roles that carry conviction. Maybe it is because they are the easiest and yet the hardest things for me to do. ‘To play any kind of emotional scene I must work up to a certain pitch. If I reach this in my first word, the rest of the words and lines take care of themselves.’ Hollywood beckoned. Her uncle and two half-brothers had moved there and she joined them in 1932 at their modest home in Beachwood Canyon Drive. Peg won a part in a play which had just transferred from Broadway – The Mad Hopes – and the Los Angeles Examiner gave it a positive review: ‘In the cast Peg Entwistle and Humphrey Bogart hold first place in supporting the star (Billie Burke) and both give fine, serious performances.’ She appeared to be on the threshold of movie stardom and was thrilled when major studio RKO signed her for a secondary role in the murder mystery Thirteen Women. But the film got poor reviews and the studio dropped her. She fell into a familiar cycle of depression. From her new home she could see the Hollywood sign. Her family later believed that after going from one fruitless casting call to another, she saw it as a symbol of despair. On September 18, 1932, after a night of heavy drinking, Peg told her Uncle Harold that she was going to walk up Beachwood Drive to meet some friends at the local drugstore. Instead, she clawed her way up the rocky slope through thorny thickets to the base of the sign. Once there, she removed her black and tan silk coat, folded it neatly and placed it alongside her stylish purse, which contained a suicide note, at the base of an electrician’s ladder. Later that day, a woman hiker found Peg’s clothing and spotted her body 100ft down the ravine. Police recovered the broken corpse which remained unidentified for two days. Her uncle realised it was her when newspapers reported her suicide note. It read: ‘I am afraid I am a coward. I am sorry for everything. If I had done this a long time ago, it would have saved a lot of pain. P.E.’ Peg’s remains were buried alongside her father. A few days after her death, a letter arrived at her home from the Beverly Hills Playhouse offering her the star part in their next production. It was about a young girl who commits suicide. And a few weeks after that Peg’s only Hollywood film, Thirteen Women, was released and proved something of a hit. Before moving to Hollywood , Peg had briefly married and divorced a man who had not told her he had a six-year-old son. That boy grew up to become the TV and movie star Brian Keith. After a long and successful career, he also committed suicide in 1997. Keith’s life had seen the birth of the Talkies, the dominance of such epics as Gone With the Wind and Ben Hur, the Westerns of John Ford and John Wayne, such romantic comedies as Some Like It Hot as well as hit TV productions. But the Hollywoodland sign did not match the glamour it represented. High winds and neglect saw it deteriorate into what residents described as an ‘eyesore and detriment to the community’ and advocated its demolition. In 1949 the Hollywood Chamber of Commerce came to the rescue on condition that ‘LAND’ be removed to reflect the district, not the property development. The sign’s wood-and-sheet-metal structure again deteriorated over the following decades, and by the 1970s the first O had splintered into a U and the third O had fallen completely. It was seen as a metaphor for a film industry in trouble thanks to rival TV. Millionaire Playboy magazine owner Hugh Hefner launched a campaign to save it and in 1978 a new refurbished sign was unveiled at a cost of $250,000, more than £1million at today’s prices.