How Yvonne De Carlo Used Her Bedroom To Conquer Hollywood. ht

How Yvon D. Carlo used her bedroom to conquer Hollywood. The woman behind two masks. In 1956 on the largest movie screen in the world, she stood at the edge of the parting Red Sea, and wept not as herself, but as Sephora, the devoted wife of Moses, the most morally pure woman Cecile B. Deill had ever put on film.

The New York Times called her portrayal notably good in a severe role. Deil himself said he saw in her a depth and emotional power, a womanly strength that no other actress could bring to the part. Audiences across America watched her and believed every second of it. That same year, a young actor named Tony Curtis was riding in a studio limousine through New York City.

He spotted a former classmate, Walter Matthau, standing in the rain outside their old acting school. Curtis rolled down the window, leaned out, and shouted loud enough for half the street to hear, “Walter, it’s me, Bernie. I went to Hollywood. They changed my name to Tony Curtis. I made a couple of movies. I slept with Ivonne D. Carlo.

” Then he rolled the window back up and drove away. Two stories, same woman, same year. Neither one of them a lie. You’ve probably seen Ivonne D. Carlo at least once in your life, even if you never knew her name. She was Lily Monster, the pale, elegant, surprisingly warm-hearted vampire mother on the Monsters.

One of the most beloved characters in the history of American television. Maybe you grew up watching her. Maybe your parents did. Maybe all you know is that face, the dark hair, those gray blue eyes, the kind of beauty that stops a room cold without asking permission. What you were never told is what that face cost her.

What she used it for, what the industry that worshiped it eventually did to it. Her real name was Margaret Ivonne Middleton. She was born in Vancouver, Canada on September 1st, 1922. The name Middleton died quietly in 1945, replaced by something that sounded more like a movie star and less like a girl from a cold Canadian city whose father had walked out the door when she was 3 years old.

That is where this story actually starts. Not in Hollywood, not in a studio, not on any red carpet. It starts with a man who boarded a ship, promised to send for his wife and daughter, and was never heard from again. What Vancouver teaches you. His name was William Shelto Middleton, a salesman from New Zealand with blue eyes and a talent for disappearing.

He left when Peggy, as her family called her, was barely old enough to remember his face. No letters came, no money, just her mother, Marie, and a succession of apartments in Vancouver that sometimes had no furniture and no working stove. Marie waitressed Peggy danced, not because she was passionate about dance, because dance was the only door available.

By 15, she was performing in clubs, and even then, the world was already trying to take something from her. A Vancouver nightclub owner tried to pressure her into exposing herself as part of her act. Her mother pulled her out that night. But Peggy had already learned the fundamental lesson of her world.

Men with money expected something in return, and a girl without money had to decide every single morning how much she was willing to give and what she expected to get back. Here’s the thing people who study Hollywood never quite say plainly. The women who survived in that system were not naive. They were not victims stumbling blindly into powerful men’s arms.

The women who lasted were the ones who understood the transaction clearly, who could look at a room full of hungry eyes and calculate with the precision of a chess player exactly which move to make next. Peggy Middleton understood that before she was old enough to vote. In 1940, mother and daughter made their second trip south to Los Angeles. Peggy was 18.

She danced in chorus lines at night and auditioned at studios during the day, collecting small uncredited roles, a background face, a silent extra, a woman who walked through the frame and disappeared. Paramount signed her in 1942 for $60 a week and gave her 20 plus uncredited bit parts before dropping her entirely like a line item removed from a budget spreadsheet.

Universal picked her up next. More bit parts, more waiting. Then came Arty Shaw. Shaw, the band leader, who had already been married to Lana Turner, would later marry Ava Gardner and had a documented history of relationships with the most beautiful women in the entertainment business, offered to pay Peggy’s wages for a full month so she could leave the nightclub circuit and hire a real talent agent.

That agent was Jack Pomemeoy. Pomemeroy got her her first credited film role, a $25 salary, and a Screen Actor’s Guild card. One relationship, one month’s salary, a career launched. She would go on to tell that story in her memoir with remarkable calm, the way a woman describes taking the correct bus rather than the wrong one.

No shame, no apology, a decision made, a result obtained. Peggy Middleton was becoming someone else, and she knew exactly what the transformation required. the rules of the game. By 1945, she had a new name, Ivonne D. Carlo, and her first starring role in a Universal feature called Salame, where she danced. The film was not especially good, but the woman in it was impossible to ignore.

Producer Walter Winganger, one of the most powerful men in post-war Hollywood, watched it and declared she was the most beautiful girl in the world. Universal placed her under a long-term contract. Hollywood cameramen voted her queen of Technicolor 3 years running. And somewhere along the way, as the fan mail arrived and the studio limousines appeared and the invitations to the right parties landed on the right doorstep, Ivon D.

Carlo made a calculation. She would not hide. She would not pretend. She would use the currency she had been given. that face, that figure, that particular quality of dangerous warmth, and she would spend it strategically. She began with Billy Wilder. This was 1943, before Salameé, before any of it. Wilder was separated from his wife, already brilliant, not yet the legend he would become.

She called him the first great love of her life, not for his looks, which she described with polite brutality as the physical opposite of everything she had dreamed of, but for his mind, his wit, the way he saw the world. They lived briefly in a small rented apartment they called their love shack.

He left her for an actress named Doris Dowling. The first lesson reinforced, sentiment is a luxury. move forward. Then came Howard Hughes. Hughes had seen Salame where she danced five times. Five. He flew from Los Angeles to Vancouver specifically to meet the woman on that screen. When she saw him, lanky, underfed, with eyes that seemed to be looking at something just past her shoulder.

She felt, she later wrote, something close to pity. This was the most powerful and richest man in the American entertainment industry, and he looked like a man who had not slept in several years. She stayed anyway. In her memoir, she described him as an expert lover, precise, deliberate, careful in a way that felt less like passion and more like engineering.

She was put off by his toenails, which had grown so long they curled almost completely around his toes. She noticed everything. She cataloged everything. And years later, when she wrote it all down, she summarized their entire relationship in a single sentence that became the most quoted thing she ever said. Howard taught me how to land a plane and how to take off.

But he never taught me anything about flying in between. two years with the most powerful man in Hollywood. No marriage proposal, no public acknowledgement. What she got instead was a name in every gossip column in America, a reputation for being extraordinary company, and a social standing in the industry that money could not simply purchase.

The press named her Hollywood’s number one bachelor girl. She accepted the title without complaint. any publicity she believed was good publicity. The name stayed in front of the public. The public kept buying tickets. The system kept running. The list nobody was supposed to read. In 1987, she published her memoir.

The dedication read, “To all the kings, princes, lords, millionaires, and truck drivers I have known.” She later told an interviewer she had not wanted the book to be scandalous. She had tried to write about her work, her craft, her films. The publisher had other ideas. What appeared in print was a document that named names with the equinimity of a woman settling an old account.

Not vindictively, not boastfully, just thoroughly. A record of transactions rendered in her own voice. After Hughes came Robert Stack, who remained devoted to her for the rest of his life. Then Howard Duff, a Universal contract player she actually became engaged to in April 1947 before his alcoholism ended it.

The studio had approved that relationship. By the way, Universal’s own matchmakers had quietly encouraged the Duff courtship the same way they later orchestrated a publicityfriendly romance between her and Bert Lancaster. Lancaster. She described their first encounter as so spontaneous and explosive she thought she was performing a scene from a romance novel.

The night they made love on a mink coat spread across her backyard. One night, one encounter never repeated became, in her telling, not a confession, but a footnote. One of many, many such footnotes. She compared notes with Ava Gardner because several of the same men had passed through both their lives. She spent time with Prince Abdul Raza Palavi, the Sha of Iran’s half-brother, and followed him to New York and eventually to Thran.

She described an affair with Prince Ali Khan, the playboy aristocrat who would later marry Rita Hworth, in language that was the most alive, the most frankly sensual she used about anyone in the entire book. There was Sterling Hayden on his schooner. There was Jock Mahoney, Sally Field’s future stepfather, with whom she fell genuinely in love, became engaged to, and lost a child with when a surgical procedure to remove an ovarian cyst ended the pregnancy.

When reporters later asked her what made Mahoney famous, she answered without hesitation. The only fame he has had is what he got by being seen with me. This was not a woman protecting herself with cruelty. This was a woman who had learned at great personal cost that sentiment was the first thing that got used against you.

And then there was a drive-in restaurant in Santa Monica called Jacks at the Beach. Robert Wagner described it in his 2008 memoir. He pulled his Ford convertible into the parking lot. Ivon Carlo was in the car next to him. She looked at him. She nodded. He followed her home. Three days later, he emerged and drove back to find his car exactly where he had left it.

A week after that, he ran into Tony Curtis, who began telling him about a remarkable encounter he had just had at a drive-in restaurant with a woman in the adjacent car who had nodded at him. Curtis eventually published his own version of this story. He described how earlier in his career riding a studio limousine through New York, he had spotted Walter Matau on a rain soaked sidewalk and leaned out the window to announce to the surrounding street that he had just slept with Ivonne D. Carlo. Read through her memoir today, knowing what she survived, knowing what came next, and you will not find arrogance in those pages. You will find someone conducting an audit, checking what she had been given against what she had spent, making sure for the record that she had not wasted a thing. The man who loved her for the wrong

reasons. In 1954, on the set of a film called Shotgun, she met a stunt man named Bob Morgan. He was not a director. He was not a producer. He held no contracts. He had no gossip column presence, no studio relationship that could advance her career by a single frame.

Bob Morgan’s job was to walk into the situations that could injure or kill a more valuable man, take the impact, and walk back out. He was the person Hollywood sent into the fire so the person Hollywood had actually paid for could stay safe. He was also by every account genuinely decent, quiet, straightforward, a man who told the truth and meant what he said.

They reconnected on the set of The Ten Commandments in Egypt. And this time something held. On November 21st, 1955 at St. Steven’s Episcopal Church in Reno, Nevada, they married. Their first son, Bruce, was born in 1956. Cecil B. Deill, the man who had given her the role of Moses’s saintly wife, who had told her she possessed the deepest spiritual strength in Hollywood, stood at the baptism and became the child’s godfather.

The man who had filmed her as America’s most virtuous woman was now godfather to the child she had with a stunt man. And somewhere in that room, if you knew how to look, was the entire story of what Ivonne D. Carlo actually was. Not the studio creation, not the bachelor girl, not the queen of technicolor, but a woman who, for the first time in her adult life, had chosen something that could not advance her career by a single step.

The industry did not know what to do with that. Neither in the end did she. April 9th, 1962. It was a Tuesday. The film was How the West Was One, an MGM production so large they filmed parts of it across three states. The scene was straightforward. Bob Morgan doubling for actor George Pipard positioned on a flat car loaded with fiberglass logs while the train moved at speed.

The chain snapped. 6,000 lb of logs shifted and came down. Morgan was crushed between the timber and the undercarriage of the train. His left leg was severed above the knee. Bones were removed from his spine. His face was shattered. Surgeons spent hours rebuilding it from what remained.

He was transported 70 mi to a hospital in Phoenix and placed in a condition that his doctors later described as barely survivable. Ivon D. Carlo received the call and went to the hospital. She sat in a waiting room and wrote, “Years later, before the accident, we were on the verge of breaking up. But when they took me to the hospital, I just choked up, and only one thought filled my mind.

I don’t want my husband to die. He did not die. He required 5 years to recover enough to walk again on a prosthetic leg with damage to his spine that never fully healed.” Morgan sued MGM for $1.4 $4 million, alleging negligence on the set. His attorneys, working quickly in the immediate aftermath of the accident, accepted workers compensation benefits on his behalf before the civil lawsuit was properly structured.

Under Arizona law, that single procedural decision made while Bob Morgan was still in a hospital bed having his face surgically reconstructed eliminated his right to pursue a separate civil claim against his employer. The Arizona Supreme Court upheld the dismissal in April 1967. MGM paid nothing.

Not because they were found innocent, because a clause in a compensation form had been signed at the wrong moment by a lawyer who did not read far enough ahead. While the legal proceedings ran their course, Ivon D. Carlo worked. She took a small role in a John Wayne film. She accepted touring productions of musicals in New Zealand and Australia.

She signed whatever contracts her agent could arrange. The bills from 5 years of surgeries, physical therapy, and roundthe-clock care had consumed everything she had built. Then in 1964, CBS called with an offer. So, it’s come to this. The role was Lily Monster. The premise was a family of lovable monsters living at 1313 Mockingbird Lane.

The makeup involved green foundation, hollowed cheekbones, a streak of white in the black wig, and a costume designed to suggest that the woman wearing it had recently climbed out of a coffin. She had misgivings. That is the word she used. She had misgivings. She had been cast by Cecil B. Deill. She had been declared the most beautiful woman in the world by one of the most powerful producers in the industry.

She had stood at the edge of the Red Sea on the largest biblical epic ever filmed. And now a makeup artist was handing her a mirror. She looked at what looked back at her and said to no one in particular, “So it’s come to this.” Then she signed the contract because there was no other contract.

She played Lily Monster for 70 episodes. She played her as a devoted wife, a warm and caring mother, a woman of profound domestic loyalty, deeply committed to the well-being of her family, regardless of the challenges the outside world presented. She played her, she once said, exactly as she had been directed on the first day of production.

play her just like Donna Reed. The woman who had been named Hollywood’s number one bachelor girl, who had been written about in the memoirs of some of the most celebrated men in post-war American culture, now spent 2 years playing America’s favorite monster mom. The checks cleared, the medical bills were paid.

The irony, if she noticed it, she kept to herself. What stayed and what went. She and Bob Morgan divorced in July 1973. The legal documents cited irreconcilable differences. Neither of them said much about it publicly. They had been together in one form or another for nearly two decades. They had built something real or tried to.

What the accident had broken between them was not structural. It was quieter than that. The money was gone. The arguments accumulated. She traveled constantly for work. He remained behind, increasingly defined by what had been taken from him. A marriage can survive poverty or bitterness.

Perhaps it struggles to survive both at once. Morgan eventually returned to acting, small roles in westerns and action films, his prosthetic leg occasionally written into the character. John Wayne, who valued loyalty in the people around him, kept hiring him. Morgan appeared in at least nine Wayne films over the following years. He lived until 1999.

He was 82 years old. In 1971, 7 years before the divorce was even filed, Ivon de Carlo had walked into a Broadway audition for a new Steven Sandheim musical called Follies. The character was named Carla Campion, an aging Hollywood star reflecting on a life of reinvention and survival. Sonheim had originally written a different song for the role.

It was not working. His libertist, James Goldman, suggested the character should simply be singing about the fact that she had endured, that she was still standing. “I’m still here,” Goldman said. Sonheim wrote the song in her voice. The lyrics moved through every version of a woman that Hollywood creates and discards.

the Anenu, the vamp, the mother, the camp icon, and arrived at the only line that mattered. I’m still here. On opening night, the audience rose before the final note landed. Standing ovation. For the first and perhaps only time in a career that had lasted three decades, Yvand Carlo was applauded not for her face, not for the name the studio had given her, not for the image any producer had manufactured.

She was applauded for the fact of her survival, for what it had taken to remain standing. She earned $1,000 a week for the run of the show. The production received 11 Tony Award nominations. She received none. The final account. Her son Michael died on November 1st, 1997. He was 39 years old, the result of brain damage following a stroke.

Those who knew her said she never recovered from it. She talked about him constantly in the months that followed, looping back to the same memories, the same questions, the ones that have no answers. The following year, she suffered a stroke of her own. She moved into the motion picture and television country house and hospital in Woodland Hills, the retirement facility that Hollywood built for the people it used and set aside. And she did not leave.

She died on January 8th, 2007 of heart failure. She was 84 years old. Her son Bruce, who had been her primary caregiver in those final years, was there. The woman once declared the most beautiful girl in the world was cremated and interred at Hollywood Forever Cemetery, which is a real place, and whose name in this particular context reads less like a destination and more like a final sentence.

Her estimated estate of death was somewhere between 2 and $3 million, most of it generated by residuals from the monsters, the role she had taken because she had no choice. the role that had outlasted everything else. The question she never got to answer. Ivan Carlo used every tool the world gave her.

She used her face, her body, her willingness to be talked about. She walked into rooms where powerful men decided who became famous, and she made herself impossible to ignore. She did not apologize for any of it. The dedication of her memoir to all the kings, princes, lords, millionaires, and truck drivers was not a confession.

It was a ledger. This is what I had. This is what I did with it. The system that applauded her for it was the same system that dropped her from Paramount when she stopped being profitable. That confined her to be pictures because her cheekbones photographed well in desert lighting.

that watched Bob Morgan’s career end on a flat car and paid his lawyer’s procedural error as the price of doing business. That handed her green face paint and told her to be grateful for the work. Lily Monster is still playing on television somewhere tonight. The character who loved unconditionally, who kept the household together, who endured every strange and difficult thing the world brought to her door and smiled through all of it.

That character outlasted everything. The films, the romances, the autobiography, the lawsuit, the divorce, the son she lost, the stroke, the years in the care facility. Lily Monster is still there. Margaret Ivonne Middleton is buried at Hollywood Forever Cemetery under the name the studio gave her. Her father left Vancouver on a schooner when she was 3 years old.

He told her mother he would send for them. She spent the rest of her life learning in a thousand different rooms how to make sure that no one would ever leave her with nothing again. Whether she succeeded, that depends entirely on what you think nothing looks like.