In the early hours of June 16, 1959, a shot rang out in Los Angeles’s swanky Benedict Canyon. And just like that, something that was thought impossible happened – Superman was dead. Okay, so it wasn’t the real Superman, but the actor who played him for over a hundred episodes in the Adventures of Superman television show – George Reeves.
The police quickly ruled it a clear suicide and no thorough investigation was ever conducted into his death. But many questions still lingered. Multiple people wanted Reeves dead and there were strange elements regarding his demise. So did the actor really do himself in, or did someone manage to kill Superman?
Early Years
George Reeves was born George Keefer Brewer on January 5, 1914, in the small town of Woolstock, Iowa. He was the only child of Don Brewer and Helen Lescher, a young couple who only got hitched because Helen became pregnant with George. Surprisingly, this didn’t last, and the two called it quits just a few months after their baby was born. Helen took George, packed up her bags, and moved to Pasadena, California. There, she met a man named Frank Bessolo, one of the few people who got rich by making alcohol during Prohibition (legally, that is) because his family produced wine for the Catholic Church.
Anyway, Frank and Helen got married and Frank formally adopted George in 1927. The two were close. Too close, in fact, for Helen’s liking, who was quite possessive of her son and didn’t like competing for his affection. After 15 years, Helen and Frank divorced and, following a generous settlement, Helen could afford to buy her own home in a nice neighborhood in Pasadena where it could be just her and George, with nobody else to cramp their style.
As George grew up, he developed into quite a looker. He had a strong 6-foot-2, 190-pound frame plus chiseled good looks. It’s no wonder that his mother imagined him as the next Hollywood heart-throb. But then George did something she greatly disapproved of – he took up boxing in high school. Maybe this was his way of rebelling against a very domineering mother. He was good at it enough to qualify for a Golden Gloves tournament, but Helen was worried that he would damage his good looks, so she forbade him to take part. Eventually, George caved into his mother’s wishes. He gave up the sweet science of boxing and, in 1935, the 21-year-old enrolled to study acting at the Pasadena Community Playhouse.
Over the next few years, George stuck to the stage, appearing in multiple plays, but, at the same time, grew frustrated as he saw many of his acting partners successfully landing roles on the silver screen. He would become very familiar with this frustration throughout his life. But his time would come in 1939 when he finally made his big screen debut and it was a pretty big one. The scuttlebutt around town was that Hollywood big wig David O. Selznick was looking to make a screen adaptation of the 1939 hit novel Gone with the Wind.
George thought that he was perfect to play a young Southern gentleman – he had the looks and he could pull off the accent. And the movie’s casting director, Max Arnow, agreed, so he signed him for the role of Stuart Tarleton, one of Scarlett O’Hara’s suitors. Everything was going fine, but there was just one tiny problem – the name. George went by the name “George Bessolo,” after his adoptive father, but the studio execs felt this was a bit too foreign for 1930s America, especially for an actor who was supposed to embody a Southern gentleman, so they decided to change it. And that’s how George Reeves was born.
Valleys and Peaks
Reeves didn’t have a big role in the movie, but we are talking about Gone with the Wind here. Pretty much every actor in it attracted some degree of attention, and George’s turn as Stuart Tarleton was enough to get him a contract with Warner Brothers. This wasn’t a particularly fruitful relationship, though. Reeves appeared in a string of forgettable movies, usually playing second or third banana to more established stars such as James Cagney or Merle Oberon. Eventually, Warners decided that maybe Reeves wasn’t their next big star and dissolved his contract in 1941. From there, he moved on to 20th Century Fox on a short one-year contract, but it was pretty much a repeat of the same experience – Reeves mostly had minor roles in a handful of movies before the studio said “Thanks for coming” and chose not to renew his deal.
Although his career wasn’t exactly skyrocketing right now, there was one significant moment in his life. In 1940, he met and married a young actress named Ellanora Needles. The pair stayed together for almost a decade and had no children together.
Now without a contract, Reeves thought it would be a good time to do a bit of freelancing. He wanted to focus on Westerns since those were a hot ticket item. Reeves appeared in five films featuring a popular cowboy character named Hopalong Cassidy as his sidekick before finally catching the eyes of Paramount Pictures, the first studio that saw some star potential in him. They offered him a serious role in a war drama called So Proudly We Hail! and Reeves gladly traded in his chaps and spurs for a military uniform. He played the male lead opposite Claudette Colbert and impressed the Paramount bosses enough to sign a contract with them. But just when it looked like George’s career was firmly on the upswing, it took a massive nosedive thanks to World War II as he received his recruitment papers – Reeves got drafted into the Army, although he never actually saw any combat. In fact, he was mostly stationed in New York City as part of the Army-Air Force Special Forces division, acting in a Broadway play named Winged Victory that was meant to boost morale and raise money for the Army Emergency Relief Fund. He eventually got transferred to the Motion Picture Unit where he made training and recruitment films, as well as one on venereal diseases titled Sex Hygiene.
Once the war was over, Reeves discovered just how fickle Hollywood could be. When your name is not up in lights on the marquee, the public tends to forget you pretty fast. If there was a glimmer of hope for him to become one of Tinseltown’s next leading stars following So Proudly We Hail!, it had, more or less, been extinguished. When Reeves got back home, he was shocked to discover that his biggest supporter at Paramount, the director/producer for So Proudly We Hail! Mark Sandrich, had died suddenly. Sandrich was the man who promised that he was going to turn George Reeves into a big star. It seemed like everyone else at the studio was a bit more lukewarm about his potential as a leading man. And it’s not like George actually fought in the war like fellow actors such as Jimmy Stewart or Clark Gable; all he did was stage a play in New York and then talk about venereal diseases, so he couldn’t exactly play the “returning hero” card.
With Hollywood not exactly busting down his door, Reeves traveled to New York where he appeared in a bunch of radio dramas. It wasn’t until 1947 that he got to appear in a film again, and that was only a cameo in Variety Girl. 1948 was a bit more fruitful, with several movie roles, but these were all poorly paid, small roles in B-movies that had no chance of resurrecting his dwindling career. And things were about to get worse in 1949 when George’s professional life reached its nadir as he starred in a 15-chapter serial set in Arthurian times titled The Adventures of Sir Galahad. The sets were cheap and reused from old Westerns even though the action was supposed to take place in medieval England. The writing was terrible. The acting was terrible and, even for a matinee show, this was seen as scraping the bottom of the barrel.
And just because life often likes to kick you when you’re down, Reeves’s personal life wasn’t going so hot, either. His wife divorced him in 1949, fed up with the insecure life of a struggling actor and, instead, preferring to get hitched to a rich attorney. And then George received the shock of his life one day when he was approached by a middle-aged man who introduced himself as Don Brewer – his biological father. The reason this was such a surprise for Reeves was that his mother had always told him that his father had committed suicide and this new revelation caused a rift between the two that would take years to heal.
Things were looking pretty grim for George Reeves, but just when they were at their worst, fate threw him a life preserver, one made out of red and blue spandex.
The Man of Steel
All throughout the 1940s, there was a radio series titled The Adventures of Superman. It ran for over 2,000 episodes, so it wasn’t surprising that in 1951 Hollywood execs thought it might also work on this new and crazy medium called television. There had also been a film serial in 1948 starring Kirk Alyn as Superman so, alas, despite what some might claim, George Reeves was not the first live-action Superman, although he was the first on TV.
Speaking of Reeves, there is a myth that he got the job after the show’s producers spotted him on Muscle Beach in Venice, California. Not true. Although the producers indeed scoped out bodybuilders for their Superman, eventually they decided that good looks and acting ability were more important. Fake rubber muscles were good enough. They considered over 200 actors for the role, but producer/writer Robert Maxwell knew he had found his Man of Steel the moment Reeves walked through the door. It was the jaw, apparently, that did it for him.
So now Reeves had the role, but he wasn’t sure that he really wanted it. Television had only really started to take off in American houses after World War II. By many actors, George included, it was still seen as the place where careers went to die. But just like Galahad, he assumed this would be some crappy, low-budget kid stuff that nobody would actually see, so he swallowed his pride and did it for the money.
The series actually started off with a one-hour feature film titled Superman and the Mole Men which acted as a pilot for the show itself. After that, production immediately started on the rest of the series but got shot down soon after due to lack of interest. Pretty much what Reeves expected to happen, but then someone came to the rescue. It wasn’t a bird or a plane – it was Kellogg’s, the cereal company. They had sponsored The Adventures of Superman radio serial and wanted to do the same for the television show.
It wasn’t until February 1953 that The Adventures of Superman actually premiered on American television. And to the shock of almost everyone involved, it became a success almost immediately. Overnight, George Reeves was Superman in the minds of Americans everywhere, very much to his great displeasure. He still hoped that the TV show would be nothing but a quick paycheck and maybe a springboard to some better movie roles for him. That was still where his passion lay. And the truth is that, in 1953, the same year Superman came out, he got cast in a major motion picture – the war drama From Here to Eternity. It was his biggest movie role since So Proudly We Hail! And Reeves hoped that maybe a career resurrection was on the horizon.
But then his heart was crushed during the sneak preview. As Reeves appeared on screen, everyone in the audience started shouting “Superman!” And then they filled out their preview cards and wrote about how cool it was to see Superman in the movie. The film producers weren’t happy about this Superman character taking the spotlight, especially since Reeves’s role was a minor one, so they cut it from the movie.
Reeves only had one more film role after that. He resigned himself to the fact that, for better or worse, he was Superman.
The Death of Superman
The Superman TV show went on for six seasons and over a hundred episodes. On top of that, Reeves was also paid for all sorts of appearances as the Man of Steel, so he was earning a steady paycheck, but still nothing compared to the big stars of Hollywood. He still felt like he was wasting his life but, at the same time, realized that nothing better would probably come along, especially since he was already in his mid-40s by the time the series had ended.
Reeves’s private life was decidedly murkier than the squeaky-clean public image he projected as Superman. Ever since 1951, he had been in a secret relationship with an older, married woman named Toni Mannix, a former Ziegfeld Follies showgirl. And by secret, we mean that everyone in Hollywood knew about it since the couple was not shy about parading together at all kinds of social events, but their relationship was never mentioned in public out of respect and fear for Toni’s husband, Eddie Mannix.
Ostensibly, Eddie Mannix was a film exec at MGM Studios. In reality, Mannix was known as a “fixer,” a thug who used his connections and gangster tactics to keep the stars in line and their indiscretions out of the newspapers. At best, the man helped silence cases of public drunkenness that got out of hand, drug busts, affairs, the occasional DUI, and maybe arrange for a few secret abortions. At worst, he has been accused of covering up rapes, violent assaults, and, perhaps, even murder. In other words, Mannix was known as a man not to mess with, but Reeves was allegedly in the clear with him. It seems that Eddie Mannix knew of his wife’s relationship with the actor and was fine with it since he, too, had his own affairs.
Toni Mannix was a woman who knew how to get what she wanted. Thanks to her husband, she had power and she had money, so when she decided that she wanted George as her boy toy to parade around town, she knew just what to do in order to keep him. She bought Reeves his fancy house. She also bought his car and paid most of his bills. They were all in Toni’s name, of course, so she basically owned him.
This strategy worked for eight years, but eventually, Reeves fell in love with another woman and wanted to marry again, something which he couldn’t do with Toni Mannix. Her name was Leonore Lemmon, a socialite from New York who was, ostensibly, just as possessive, jealous, and domineering as Toni Mannix and George’s mother. It seemed that Reeves only ever knew one type of woman.
In 1958, Reeves broke up with Toni Mannix and started seeing Leonore Lemmon. As you might expect, the latter did not take it well but didn’t kick Reeves out of his home which, technically, belonged to her. Instead, she began harassing the new couple, probably thinking that she could still manipulate or coerce George into coming back to her. Instead, he took out a restraining order against her.
On June 19, 1959, George and Leonore were supposed to get married in Mexico and then leave on their honeymoon in Europe. This never happened. Three days earlier, the couple had been having drinks with a few people over at their house. In the wee hours of the morning, Reeves went upstairs and retired to the bedroom. Allegedly, that’s when Leonore told the rest of the group that George was probably going there to shoot himself. Everyone either thought this was a joke or was too drunk to care because nobody moved. And then a shot rang out.
Who Killed Superman?
After they heard the shot, Leonore asked one of the guests, neighbor William Bliss, to go upstairs and check on Reeves. Bliss did as requested, and when he entered the bedroom, he saw the body of the actor, lying naked in a pool of blood, with a .30-caliber Luger between his feet. He then went downstairs and informed the rest that Reeves was dead.
After the police were called, two LAPD officers arrived and inspected the scene. They found that Reeves had been shot in the temple in an upward trajectory, with the bullet getting lodged in the ceiling. The spent casing was underneath George’s corpse. This meant that it got ejected and landed on the bed before the body, which was unusual, but not conclusive by itself.
The cops interviewed everyone downstairs. They were all drunk but gave, more or less, the same story. Leonore said that Reeves had been depressed over his dwindling career and his new money troubles, now that he didn’t have Toni Mannix as his sugar momma anymore. For the police, this all made perfect sense. An open-and-shut case of suicide if there ever was one. You know how sensitive and emotional those actor types can be. They didn’t even call in the crime squad to take photographs or dust for fingerprints. They just called the coroner and went on their way.
At the medical examiner’s lab, the coroner gave the body a once-over to make sure there were no other signs of violence. He didn’t find any and, since the police ruled it a “nonsuspicious death,” he had no reason to perform an internal examination. He, too, thought this was a straightforward case of suicide, so he washed the body and embalmed it. Later it was sometimes reported that Reeves did have bruises on his chest and face, but this has never been thoroughly corroborated.
The first person to suspect that not everything was on the level was George’s mother, Helen. As soon as she arrived in Los Angeles, she hired a private detective agency to conduct their own investigation. Like many of George’s close friends, she refused to believe that he could commit suicide. And although the private eyes did find weird things about Reeves’s death, it was never enough to get the case reopened. Therefore, we are left with nothing but speculation regarding any alternative outcomes to the death of Superman.
One plausible scenario implicates his wife-to-be, Leonore Lemon. On the night in question, she waited 45 minutes after George’s death to call the police. This could have had a sinister motive, but a more plausible explanation was that the people in the house wanted to sober up since they were all pretty wasted. After all, why would three other people who weren’t close to Leonore help her get away with murder?
Why exactly she’d want George dead, we can’t say, but she did sneak into the house the following day, breaking the police seal on the door. She was caught red-handed by Reeves’s executor, Art Weissman, who was among those convinced that his friend did not kill himself. It seems that Leonore went there to steal $4,000 in traveler’s checks. After that, she hired an expensive lawyer, went back to New York, and stayed there, washing her hands of the whole affair.
But what about the more obvious possibility? That George Reeves was done in by Toni and Eddie Mannix? Of all the people involved in this story, Eddie Mannix would have been the most likely to arrange a hit on the actor since it was always alleged that he had mob ties. But would he do that to avenge the hurt pride of his wife? It certainly would have been a unique case, where a man killed his wife’s lover not because he slept with her, but because he stopped sleeping with her.
The one suggestive piece of evidence in this direction comes courtesy of Phyllis Coates, the actress who played Lois Lane on the Superman TV show. Decades after the fact, she said that she received a phone call from Toni Mannix around 4:30 in the morning on the day of Reeves’ death. Toni was hysterical and hyperventilating, ranting about how George had been murdered. But this was way before the news had been made public, so how could she have known? Later still, a tabloid show reported that Toni Mannix confessed on her deathbed to having Reeves killed, but both of these accusations have to be taken as pure hearsay. After all, we already knew that Toni Mannix had a motive, but it still doesn’t explain how the killer got in, did the deed, and got out without being seen (or why he undressed Reeves, for that matter).
The question of Reeves’s death has no concrete answer and it will probably continue to puzzle, fascinate, and frustrate crime buffs for years to come. Until then, we can only accept the official series of events which states that the actor was depressed and killed himself, thus bringing an ignominious end to television’s original Superman.
