Twilight Zone Curse of the Stars Volume 1 Resigned to Death

Twilight Zone Curse of the Stars Volume One Resigned to Death

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Fix Bay Inc Publishing

Smashwords Edition

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Copyright 2013, Wayne Rollan Melton

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ISBN: 000-0-0000000-0-0

Table of Contents

Dedication

Introduction

Curse of the Three Aces

Curse of the Living Doll

Curse of the Toy Phone

Curse of the Hangman’s Rope

Curse of the Bad Actor

Curse of the H.M.S. Bounty

Curse of the Godfather

Curse of the Radio Star

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About the Author

Dedication

To the stars of the Twilight Zone TV series episodes and the Twilight Zone movie, living or dead.

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Introduction

As fully revealed in each of the following verified and real-life segments, the actors who starred in lead roles and in supporting parts in each episode of the Twilight Zone TV series are cursed—both the living and the dead. Fully revealed for the first time here, these are their real stories—hidden from the general public until now.

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Curse of the Three Aces

On a hot summer day in 1971, actor Terrence de Marney jumped in front of an oncoming train in the London Underground ~ just in time to save the life of 5-year-old Alice Hamilton, who had fallen off a passenger platform, landing onto the tracks.

Tragically, the train’s locomotive smashed into de Marney a millisecond after he tossed the girl out of danger, back onto the platform. Immediately afterward, horrified witnesses screamed at the sight of the actor’s body, cut clean in half sideways.

Unbeknownst to authorities during their initial investigation, the 63-year-old de Marney, also a widely acclaimed writer, had appeared in an April 1963 Twilight Zone episode entitled The Trade-Ins.

The plot of that segment written by Rod Serling featured a fictional 79-year-old man who wins back $5,000 thanks to three kings in his hand of poker. A kind-hearted player in the card game actually had three aces—better winning cards, but folded his hand so that the aging player could use the money to buy himself a new mechanical young body.

During that pivotal scene, de Marney had portrayed a sympathetic, kind-faced poker player who empathized with the old man’s physical pain.

Initially unable to find identification on actor de Marney’s remains after the train accident, investigators from London’s Scotland Yard found three playing cards—each of them aces—in the front breast pocket of his shirt. The playing cards had been glued to a 3-inch-long crucifix, which de Marney told friends he always carried somewhere on his person for good luck along with three aces—a tradition begun immediately after his appearance in the Trade-Ins.

According to the late Edward Pennington, who retired as a Scotland Yard Captain in 1998 at age 65, three hours after the accident constables found de Marney’s waylaid wallet containing his identification, near the train tracks.

Also, amid the hubbub immediately following the tragedy, authorities had initially lost track of the little girl. Alice Hamilton had unexplainably dropped out of sight at the train depot as an ambulance and constables arrived.

I was actually a young rookie detective at Scotland Yard at the time, the retired Pennington said in an interview shortly before his own death of a heart attack. "Along with John Hoyt, another detective, I visited the little girl’s home later that afternoon.

As you can imagine, the child and her entire family were beside themselves, everyone overcome with grief. The girl’s parents were understandably grateful that this actor—a virtual stranger to them—had given his own life at a moment’s notice so that she could live.

Pennington recalled the family pleading for the police to keep Alice’s name from the news media, to save her from a lifetime of being labeled as the little girl who got saved—with the public always wondering if she had been worthy of such a rescue.

Understandably empathetic with their plight, at Scotland Yard we decided to honor the request and to withhold the child’s name and the details of her rescue from the public. Instead, we collectively decided to announce simply that the actor had ‘fallen from the train.’ Goodness knows, the girl and her family, and the family of the dead actor had already suffered enough.

Meantime, amid their investigation into the tragedy, detectives discovered what they considered routine information of no particular importance.

De Marney’s grieving acquaintances told officials that during the final weeks of his life before the train mishap, the actor had suffered from excruciating and unexplainable physical pain—telling friends he hoped for relief. Ironically, these were similar to symptoms that the old man character had complained of in the Twilight Zone episode.

The train tragedy had so profoundly affected Pennington that he closely followed the basics of Alice’s personal life and career during subsequent decades.

I did this out of kindness and genuine concern, rather than any type of morbid curiosity, Pennington said. I genuinely felt some strange type of unspoken bond with Alice and with her family, although we had only met briefly. At least to me, from my view anyway, she always seemed somehow ‘touched’—as if embossed with a specific destiny—a genuine ultimate purpose for her life.

A mother of three young-adult children, Alice had been married three times—all while remaining a teacher at St. Fidelis Catholic Primary School in the London Borough of Bexley. During her exemplary 17-year career, she received numerous awards and commendations.

I was naturally shocked and sad when Alice broke into tears one afternoon in early 1997 during a lunch break at school, said Thomas Templeton, a teacher at the same institution. "It was as if floodgates had opened up, as Alice revealed to me the essence of her soul. I mean I considered the two of us as mere acquaintances, but she suddenly spilled out all of her emotion as if we were extremely close friends.

So, as you might understand, I didn’t know right off precisely how to react to all of this. Alice told of the overwhelming guilt she felt for having been saved. She openly wondered if her life had been worth the sacrifice that the actor de Marney had made. Alice also told me that during the previous week, during the spring of 1997, she suffered from extreme physical pain after being diagnosed with a critical heart ailment.

On the Sunday after Alice’s conversation with Templeton, April 13, 1997, exactly 35 years to the day after the Trade-Ins episode first aired on American television, she went picnicking with her family at London Thames River Park. As Alice ate sandwiches with her young-adult children and two little grandchildren, everyone heard what sounded like a small child yelling—screams emanating from the direction of the river.

As police would later learn, everyone present at the picnic scattered fast, determined to find the source of the commotion. Everyone began weeping profusely 17 minutes later when Alice’s body surfaced on the river. A subsequent report concluded that Alice had found and rescued a 5-year-old boy, Ishmael Mobarek, who had become separated from his family; the child had begun to drown until the schoolteacher rescued him. Alice had somehow managed to push the boy to shore before she drowned, apparently overcome with exhaustion.

While in an ambulance, amid unsuccessful attempts to revive Alice within a half hour of the tragedy, paramedics retrieved personal items from the breast pocket of her shirt—three playing cards, all aces, affixed to a 3-inch-long crucifix.

By happenstance, Alice was buried three days later at West Norwood Cemetery in South London, two rows down from the grave of the actor who had saved her life.

A search of public records nearly 15 years later showed that Ishmael Mobarek, the child whom Alice had saved, became an aspiring New York-based film student by his early 20s in 2013. While honing his filmmaking skills, Mobarek had become an avid fan of the late Twilight Zone creator Rod Serling—telling friends that guy is literally my inspiration, my reason for living.

Through the years, Mobarek has declined the news media’s repeated interview requests. Several of his relatives and acquaintances, insisting that they be quoted only if their names are never revealed, all give this similar account: Every April 13, Mobarek starts out the day by visiting Kensit Evangelical Church in London to pray for the soul of Rod Serling. Then, Mobarek goes immediately to West Norwood Cemetery to visit the graves of Terrence de Marney and Alice Hamilton.

Says one source close to his family: Ishmael knows that he would have been gone from this world, dead by now for certain, without the collective actions of all these people—none of whom he ever met. God only knows whether Ishmael keeps three aces in his pockets at all times in case of any emergency. Whenever anyone dares to broach the subject of ace cards, he immediately clams up—and who could blame him?

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Curse of the Living Doll

Iconic actor and crooner Frank Sinatra was among streams of celebrity mourners at the January 1993 funeral of legendary actor Telly Savalas—who appeared in the classic and still-notorious 1963 Twilight Zone episode entitled Living Doll.

Nine years after Savalas’ funeral, Sinatra’s late former chauffeur Jerry Cartwright revealed Sinatra’s activities on the day that his actor friend was buried. Another employee of Sinatra’s, bodyguard Tom Holt, later corroborated Cartwright’s statements in a separate interview.

Both men made the following claim: At precisely 6:30 a.m., on January 27, 1993, Cartwright drove while Holt rode in the shotgun position in the front seat of Sinatra’s 1993 Lincoln Towne Car limousine. As ordered, on schedule at the appointed time the men picked up Sinatra, who that morning appeared to Cartwright as if as dapper and clean-cut as ever.

Aged 77 at the time, on that day Sinatra wore a sky blue shiny suit, a snow-white tie and a slightly tanned broad-rimmed hat. As Cartwright recalled, that morning the crooner and Academy Award-winning actor seemed as stylish as ever. During the early 1990s retro-style attire reminiscent of the 1960s was again the rage in men’s clothing.

For some odd reason which I failed to fully understand at the time, Sinatra seemed unusually jumpy that morning, said Cartwright, who died of natural causes at age 73 at Chandler Convalescent Hospital in North Hollywood on June 5, 2011. Keep in mind that prior to that day, Holt—the bodyguard—and I had each had hundreds of professional encounters with Mister Sinatra. On the morning of Mister Savalas’ funeral, Frank became much testier and far more nervous than we had ever seen him before.

Giving a similar statement, Holt, the bodyguard who later died when hit by a car on the Las Vegas Strip on August 23, 2004, said that Sinatra had given him and the chauffeur what they each considered a rather unusual order for that day’s initial assignment. Rather than taking the crooner to a funeral home or church, the Sinatra entourage went via limo straight to the Sheraton-Universal Hotel in Universal City, California.

We were greeted by at least a dozen hotel guards and a similar number of Los Angeles County sheriff’s deputies, Holt said. From the commotion, you would have thought Jesus Christ had landed there in a flying saucer or something. The beehive-like activity among these uniformed guys struck me as unusual, even by Sinatra standards.

According to Holt, Sinatra had never told him or Cartwright beforehand the reason for this initial excursion to the hotel. Their only clue: Later that day, they were to travel to Forest Lawn-Hollywood Hills Cemetery for Savalas’ funeral.

As soon as we arrived at the hotel, I went with Sinatra—at his side all the way, straight to a room on the 14th floor, Holt said. Along the way, we linked up with about nine other frequent Sinatra bodyguards, guys that I had worked with many times.

One of those additional bodyguards, Horace Manley, interviewed on October 23, 2012, gave an account of what then transpired, similar to Holt’s tale.

Room 1435 had been guarded round-the-clock as if literally a shrine, everyone involved taking orders from Sinatra and his henchmen. Holt and Manley each recalled that the walls of the massive suite were lined with vivid, bright colored Picasso paintings—some of them classics that you only see in books or magazines. As soon as they entered this virtual indoor kingdom beside Sinatra, Holt felt struck by the realization that Savalas had literally spent the final year of his life living in that sprawling hotel suite. During his 32-year career on Sinatra’s staff, Holt had seen many high-end suites throughout the world in travels with the famed entertainer. From Holt’s view, none of those accommodations—even the many multi-million-dollar sites—came anywhere close to the grandeur of Savalas’ final living quarters. Masculine cherry-wood panels covered every living room wall, the marble floors so shiny—Holt said—that a guy could vividly see his own reflection if he looked down. An adjoining kitchen, at least from Manley’s view, seemed so impressive that the décor and equipment could easily make the likes of Donald Trump jealous with intense rage. Purple silk curtains lined every window, and a card table fitting perfectly in a side cubby-hole underlined Savalas’ well-deserved image as an internationally acclaimed poker wiz.

Sinatra demanded that everyone treat the place as a shrine, out of solemn respect for his late buddy, Holt said. As you can imagine, largely due to Frank’s well-deserved reputation as a mob-attached tough guy, no one dared come even close to acting otherwise. A guy could suddenly disappear for showing any disrespect.

At first, this excursion impressed Holt as perhaps a courtesy visit to Savalas’ grieving relatives. But he soon learned from other guards that the former Kojack star had spent the final 20 years of his life living alone in that hotel suite, fully aware throughout the last 12 months that he was dying—supposedly from complications caused by prostate and bladder cancer. Savalas had become such a fixture at the hotel that he visited the building’s lobby-level bar nightly without fail—prompting the building’s owners to rename the lounge Telly’s.

All along, Holt said—once again his story corroborated by Manley—Sinatra and Savalas had been extremely close buddies. Within the tight-knit inner circle of Southern California tough-guys, their friendship had become legendary, carousing and womanizing for literally days on end without stop. Although Savalas had never been formally inducted into Sinatra’s legendary and notorious Rat Pack of partying entertainers, he had maintained good-buddy status—eternally loyal and true to his crooner pal to the bitter end.

"Unexpectedly, as we all stood at the center of Telly’s suite, Sinatra motioned for me—and for me alone—to accompany him. I always followed such orders instinctively, without any hesitation whatsoever. When such orders happened, the other guys knew to stay put, to remain where they were. I went with Frank to the bedroom, Mister Savalas’ personal living quarters. The moment we got inside, Mister Sinatra closed the door behind us—and it was just the two of us men together