Month: December 2005

Lou Costello’s Mama Gets Robbed

December 1, 1947
Studio City

It was 2 am, but the lights were blazing in Mrs. Helen Cristillo’s home at 4037 Coldwater Canyon. Helen and her sister Mrs. Alma Kelly were in the kitchen, preparing gifts for the Lou Costello Jr. Foundation Benefit Bazaar, when they heard a noise in a guest room and discovered the furniture in disarray. A ladder propped outside the window and the missing screen made it clear that they were dealing with thieves, not poltergeists, and the cops were called.

When houseguests Mr. and Mrs. Louis Failla came home soon after, Mrs. Failla discovered her jewelry box and its contents valued at $3715 was missing. And Helen Cristillo found that her purse, which had contained eight hundred dollar bills and a $7000 pair of diamond and platinum earscrews (a gift from Helen’s proud son, comic Lou, last Christmas), was also missing.

Not a bad haul for a few minutes work, but assuredly the act of someone without any holiday spirit. Phooey!

4037 Coldwater Cyn., To-day

Costello must’ve gotten one hell of a paycheck for 1948’s-Meet Frankenstein. (1947’s $7,000 has 2005’s purchasing power of $62,529.) This, despite Bud Abbot famously signing lousy contracts while liquored to the gills (he was combating epilepsy-it was medicinal).

So-did Costello skim from the Lou Costello Jr. Foundation? Not likely. Costello bordered on the Christlike, as he-after his 3-yr-old son drowned in daddy’s Los Angeles pool-became obsessed with building churches and sending terminally ill children to world-class doctors. Every child a potential Lazarus.

Valley landmark, the LCJF:

(As for Bud Abbot, by Costello’s death in ’59 [there was no resurrection], Abbot had become penniless and forgotten, excepting some work voicing himself in the 1966 Hanna-Barbera A&C cartoon.)

Hurrah for the telephone!

November 30, 1947
Los Angeles

Hurrah for the telephone!

First, Mrs. L.B. Beddoe, 4587 Date Ave., La Mesa, received a call from daughter Pamela Evans, who said she was going to kill herself. Mama called the LAPD business office and asked if someone could please stop her.

Radio patrolmen J.P. Hooper and T.A. Gibson raced to Pamela’s pad at 104 N. Catalina, where the 19-year-old department store worker was passed out beside an empty pill box. The officers rushed her to Hollywood Receiving Hospital for a stomach pumping. Pamela presently revived, and murmured of the financial woes that had inspired her act.

But happily the phone had still been working, and so the lady lives. Moral: always pay your phone bill first.

104 North Catalina To-day

104, where Pamela worked at turning suicide from a verb to a noun, is no more.

The evolution of a neighborhood. From left to right, a nice Italian Renaissance/Spanish Eclectic, ca. 1935; some dingbatian boxitude ca. 1955; and our friend 100 Catalina with the Mexican lamp, Colonial S-bracket and Mansardisme, ca. 1975.

And look, here’s a copper blazing through the red, off to go help some wayward lass with a belly full of Seconal. We presume.

Whether suicide is an act of weakness or strength is beyond the scope of this post, but what’s certain is that in telephoning her mother, Pamela has revealed her attempt to be merely a parasuicidal gesture. I say neglect the phone bill!