Well, then, there's this tragic end from the never-finished
Hollywood Babylon III:
JURASSIC BABYLON
In that most manly of departments, natural endowment, many male stars have been rumored about. Chaplin, it is said, and Bogart, and of course Roddy McDowall, though one has to wonder if the last is simply because of his uniquely triple-entendre name. But when the habitues around the women's grill at the Polo Club lowered their voices to get down to strict comparisons, they fessed up
le scoop verite. Any time you wanted to talk about the biggest in Hollywood, there was only one name worth mentioning, and it was Latin. Brontosaurus.
When La Swanson introduced him at a little soiree at Ramon Novarro's in 1925, he made quite a splash. Literally; the sight of Novarro's Olympic-size swimming pool was too much for the bumpkin iguana after a hot and dusty trek from Pasadena, and he dove in. The resultant tidal wave sent poor Nita Naldi onto the second-floor balcony with two cracked ribs.
A Paramount scout saw something in the big green boy with the 40-foot neck, and quickly signed him to play the lead in an upcoming epic, The Lost World. Bronto was an instant sensation. Women swooned over his tragic demise on London Bridge; men admired the way the barrel-chested Bronto trashed Piccadilly Circus like it was a hotel suite registered in the name of R. Arbuckle. In a Hollywood of powder-puffs and fancy boys, here was a real throwback.
At $6,000 a week even a brontosaurus can eat steak every night. But the high life didn't last long. Sound revealed the giant creature's mighty roar to be a high-pitched mewl. His swan song came in 1933's King Kong. For a moment, a little of the old bronto was back, as he overturned a raft and chomped down on Carl Denham's crew. But his impending extinction was already visible on screen; next to a charismatic primate like Kong, the Cagney of the jungle, Bronto was just a ten-ton Francis X. Bushman. His last role came when another broken-down silent great, D. W. Griffith, directed him in a few scenes opposite caveman Lon Chaney Jr. and cavegirl Carole Landis in 1940's One Million B.C. Between those four, the booze bills alone nearly broke Hal Roach.
One night in 1953, coming out of a bar near Wilshire Boulevard, he missed his footing. At first he must have thought he was stuck in mud; as he struggled, drunkenly, did either of his brains register the utter, the prehistorically perfect appropriateness of his end? It took eleven tow trucks to haul his fossils out of the La Brea tar pits the next day.
Farewell, o sleeping dragon. Sic transit gloria brontosaurus.
