WRITER David Stenn was working on a book about the mys terious death of screen icon Jean Harlow when he stumbled across another juicy Hollywood scandal that erupted that first week of June 1937.
The papers were full of stories about Patricia Douglas, a dancer who claimed to have answered a call for a movie shoot – and ended up at a wild, booze-fueled orgy organized by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer as part of convention for its field reps.
Douglas, 20, was dragged to a car and raped by a man she identified to cops as David Ross, a 36-year-old salesman from Chicago.
Stenn, a student of Hollywood history, was intrigued. Why had he never heard of a story that pushed not only Harlow’s death but the abdication of England’s King Edward VIII off the front pages?
A decade of persistence in digging up this long-forgotten scandal led to “Girl 27,” a powerful documentary about the case that makes its DVD debut Tuesday after premiering to acclaim at this year’s Sundance Film Festival.
After the district attorney declined to bring charges, Douglas filed the first federal suit of its kind against her assailant.
Stenn has uncovered evidence that the suit was dismissed because Douglas’ mother and her attorney were both paid off by the powerful MGM, which also had the Los Angeles district attorney in its pocket.
An MGM official later boasted that Douglas had been “killed,” but in reality she was relegated to obscurity and an unhappy life that included three broken marriages.
But Stenn still admires her spirit.
“I thought what she did was heroic,” said Stenn, who persuaded the reluctant Douglas, then ailing and in her 80s, to sit for an on-camera interview.
“She understood it would be the end of her career and of her reputation, and she didn’t really expect to win. But she didn’t want this to happen to another girl,” Stenn continued. “And this was the last convention party that MGM ever held.”
Stenn said he was convinced Douglas’ allegations were true after he showed the elderly, reclusive woman two dozen photographs, including one of Ross, the long-dead man she accused back in 1937.
“So had no reaction until she got to his picture,” Stenn said. “And then her whole body shook and she said ‘bastard.’ She had not seen that face in 70 years yet in her mind’s eye she had seen it all the time.”
Stenn also dug up rare footage that MGM shot of the convention, which was never shown after the scandal erupted. It includes a glimpse of the rapist getting off a train, where he is among the crowd greeted by MGM honcho Louis B. Mayer.
Douglas died in 2003, long before the film was completed. It was only then that her own daughter learned about the incident that had haunted her mother’s life.
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