How Isabel Jewell Got Buried

As promised earlier this morning, our second grim show biz post in a row. This one concerns stage and screen actress Isabel Jewell (1907-1972). Jewell had scads of good supporting parts in Hollywood films. Two in particular that are well known are that of the repentant prostitute in Lost Horizon (1937), and “that white trash Emmy Slattery” in Gone with the Wind (1939).

The daughter of a Wyoming doctor, Jewell travelled with stock companies throughout the mid west before getting her big Broadway break as a replacement cast member in Up Pops the Devil (1930) with Brian Donlevy and Roger Pryor. Her part in Blessed Event (1932) led to her getting cast in the screen version that same year. The movie starred Lee Tracy, whom she dated for a time and considered the love of her life, regretful that he was not among her three husbands.

Standing a mere 4′ 11″, Jewell was frequently cast as gun molls, dumb blondes, best friends, and the like. Some of the other well known pictures she appeared in included Bombshell (1933), Design for Living (1933), Manhattan Melodrama (1934), A Tale of Two Cities (1935), Go West Young Man (1936), Northwest Passage (1940), High Sierra (1941), The Leopard Man (1943), and The Seventh Victim (1943). She returned to Broadway in 1944 to appear in the short-lived Johnny 2 x 4. Meantime, she had been married and divorced twice, to Owen Crump (a writer and director who happened to be Blake Edwards’ uncle), and B movie actor Paul Marion.

Jewell continued to appear in well known movies though gradually she was down to uncredited bit parts. You can see her in such things as Badman’s Territory (1946, as Belle Starr), The Bishop’s Wife (1947), The Snake Pit (1948), and The Story of Molly X (1949). In the ’50s and ’60s most of her parts were in television. She has guest starring roles on shows like Gunsmoke and The Untouchables. For a time starting in 1959, she lived in Las Vegas, but she continued to land TV parts, usually at least a couple a year. But things were clearly not on the upswing. She was arrested twice for writing bad checks, and once for drunk driving.

After 1967 she hit a dry spell, but in 1972 she returned in two films, neither of them calculated to make her turn cartwheels at the time, I am sure, but in retrospect not without value to movie-lovers. One was Sweet Kill (1972), Curtis Hanson’s first film, in which she was fourth-billed in a cast that included Tab Hunter. The other was the infamous Ciao, Manhattan (1972) the tawdry swan song of Edie Sedgwick. I’m pretty certain that it was this film that got me curious about Jewell. The role was not glamorous, to put it mildly. To put it perfectly bluntly, Ciao, Manhattan is basically a home movie by a bunch of drug addicts.

At any rate, by the time the movie came out both Sedgwick and Jewell were dead by barbiturate poisoning. Completely separate incidents, months apart, though I wonder if Edie, who went first, supplied the inspiration for Isabel? Edie’s was accidental of course. It’s possible that Jewell’s was too. One source claims that the coroner ruled that her death was due to natural causes. In both cases I am getting this at second hand, or perhaps, third, fourth, or fifth. If you want to track down her death certificate, be my guest, Columbo. Come to think of it, she should have BEEN on Columbo, she would have been great! Or the Snoop Sisters, even better! I know it’s easy to say, but stay in the game, kids. I know it’s hard, but sometimes when you least expect it, the luck returns.