So Sad: Susan Cabot

She is unknown to most people.  I suspect even at the top of her career, she never made much of an impact on filmgoers, aside from her exotic looks.  Exceptions would be the fans of B westerns where one was able to spot her as an Indian maiden and for those who liked 1950's sci-fi flicks.  While good fortune didn't exactly rain on her in her chosen profession, it must be acknowledged that she made some poor choices.  Everyone's climb to the top is different but hers was... well, so sad.

Her name rang my bell because I happened to go to school with someone named Susan Cabot.  And of course I saw the actress in every B western she ever made.  Her best work and most visibility undoubtedly came from three Audie Murphy oaters, which, frankly, says a great deal.  

Frankly her 19 films are all pretty wretched.  So why are we writing about some actress you've never heard of who made films that weren't very good?  Oh, you'll see.  The conclusion I've drawn in bringing together all the information I could find on her is that she never really had much of a chance in life.

Susan Cabot was born Harriet Shapiro in 1927 Boston.  She was left traumatized as a young child when her father abandoned the family without a word.  After her mother was institutionalized, the girl was sent to the first of her eight foster homes.  She was terrorized before she reached the first one and each that followed as well.  When she finally left the last home, she hoped the emotional and sexual abuse she had suffered would be no more.

By high school years in Manhattan her self esteem had not improved nor had her periodic dark moods.  But then a good thing happened. She discovered drama in high school.  Like many others have said about acting, it was good to step into playing another character and be able to not think about one's own life for a short while.  While still a minor, she married her first husband, a childhood friend and an interior decorator, as a means to get out of foster care.

Hollywood loved the bullet bra

She had turned into a beautiful young woman who illustrated children's books and sang at the Village Barn in Manhattan at night.  20th Century Fox was shooting its film noir, Kiss of Death (1947), on the streets of New York and hired Cabot for a bit part as a restaurant patron.

She managed some appearances on local television but it was at the Village Barn that a Columbia Pictures agent took note of her and before she knew it she was starring opposite Jon Hall in On the Isle of Samoa (1950).  Somehow I missed this epic but I am assured it was the right move.

As a portent of how her career would go, she went from a leading lady role (ok, in a D flick) to doing two films where she wasn't even given screen credit.  Then Universal-International took an interest but why wouldn't they?  Here was an attractive, sexy woman with an unknown talent, just the type they hired.  And like so many who came to the studio, little interest was paid to her and she ultimately vanished from the screen.

They first assigned her the role of an Indian maiden in the Van Heflin western, Tomahawk (1951).  She went on a publicity tour with costar Alex Nicol and they enjoyed a little romance.  It would also be around this time that she divorced her husband.

In no time at all it was known her métier was playing Indian maidens and if they were all sewn up at any point she could easily transition into an island native or a harem girl.  U-I had no intention of doing anything with her.  If she could act, they either didn't care or didn't take the time to find out.  They knew she was decorative and that seemed to be all they cared about.  

I thought she more than held her own in her acting but who knew that the best movie she would ever be in was her first and that Fox was the only big studio to use her.  U-I held her down and perhaps after awhile she didn't really care.  We know she did love to date, including studio-arranged dates, and she loved to be photographed.  Privately she struggled with her emotional and mental fragility.

She was all bangled and baubled for Flame of Araby (1951) and in buckskin for The Battle at Apache Pass (1952), both with her buddy Jeff Chandler.  She had way more fun with Tony Curtis off screen than she did onscreen in the ridiculous Son of Ali Baba (1952).  

Then, by her standards, things picked up a bit when she made three westerns with Audie Murphy, U-I's resident B movie cowboy.  She thought the world of him and she loved horses.  Their first movie, Duel at Silver Creek (1952), was like a warm-up because she wasn't even the leading lady.  That honor went to the little-known Faith Domergue.  But Cabot's role was a spunky one and at 5'2", she was a perfect fit for Murphy.

The pair went on to make the much better Gunsmoke (1953) and Ride Clear of Diablo (1954).  I liked her because she was one of those sassy actresses I was so drawn to.  She was excited to have garnered so much attention in western circles.  She likely didn't know they would be the best professional notices she would ever have.

She said that she never understood why she played so many exotic roles and that Universal never really let her do what she was capable of doing.  Still, she never missed an opportunity for publicity or to go on press junkets for movies in which she didn't appear.  Finally she asked to be released from her contract and she accepted an offer to appear in a Broadway play.  It was back to New York.

Cabot (who took that name, by the way, because it was an important one in Boston) appeared in a couple of plays and then studied with the acclaimed Sanford Meisner, something she should have done a few years earlier.

Nonetheless it was back to Hollywood and into a series of cheesy horror films from Roger Corman and his lowly American-International studios.  Why did it seem her career was going backwards?  Some have said that her mental illness, her rages and temper tantrums, were on the scene more than usual.  Nonetheless, there was a reported romantic entanglement with Corman and he starred her in six films.  Four of them were Sorority Girl, The Saga of the Viking Women and Their Voyage to the Waters of the Great Sea Serpent (I know you could kick yourself for missing it), Carnival Rock and War of the Satellites.  There are no words...

They all disappeared before you had time to gather your car keys.  Equally bad was The Wasp Woman (1959) but Cabot seemed to collect some attention for this one.  The best of the Corman projects is Machine-Gun Kelly (1958), the story of the 1930s robber-killer with Charles Bronson dynamic in the lead and a feisty Cabot as his moll.  

With Charles Bronson

Also in 1958 she was back as an Indian in the Joel McCrea western, Fort Massacre.  Technically it was standard cowboy fare about several men holed up in an abandoned mission along with an old Indian man and his daughter, with marauding Indians a concern for the entire 80 minutes.  But it was well-written, tense, plausible and well-acted.  It's actually my favorite Cabot movie.

She had one more film in her.  Surrender - Hell (1959) put Cabot and hunky Keith Andes in the center of Filipino guerrilla warfare.  It went nowhere. 

As her film career came to a close, her romantic life, never exactly stagnant, gathered some momentum when the 32-year old actress met Jordan's King Hussein in 1959.  The 23-year old king was visiting Los Angeles and New York on political business and asked the CIA to secure him some female companionship while he visited both cities.  He met Cabot at a party and was immediately taken with her.  After their time in L.A., he asked her to accompany him to New York which she did.  He was apparently upset when worldwide papers picked up their romance which he countered by saying he didn't know her.

King Hussein

Their relationship lasted for around five years, in some of the playgrounds around the world, and usually in secret.  It all ended when the royal family found out she was Jewish.  But apparently Hussein also had finally realized her manic episodes were sure signs of mental illness and he needed to distance himself from her.  The rejection hurt her a great deal and she acted out.

She tried to resurrect her singing career with little encouragement.  She still made a splash in movie magazines and society columns when she was on dates with Marlon Brando, Hugh O'Brian, Ralph Meeker, Red Buttons, Desi Arnaz, Mark Damon, Christopher Jones and others.

In 1964 she bore a son who she named Timothy.  Paternity belonged to the king but she told people that she was married to an English diplomat (though no longer) and the child is a product of that relationship.  Timothy suffered from dwarfism which apparently added to her deepening depression.  The two of them remained recluses.

In 1968, at 40, she met 25-year old Michael Roman in an acting class and shortly thereafter married him.  He adopted Timothy and tried to make a go of it for 15 fraught-with-drama years.  Eventually Roman left her, apparently saying that she was a good person but she was crazy.

The last three years of Cabot's life were particularly troubling.  A psychologist she was seeing claimed (after her death) that their sessions were emotionally draining because she was so deeply ill.  Although never sure-footed on the path to stability, she became more unstrung when she began taken the growth hormone medicine that was prescribed for her son.

She found it difficult to take care of herself.  She counted largely on her son who, at the same time, she berated and demeaned and hit.  She was overwrought from her many fears, suicidal and constantly depressed.  She no longer took care of herself or her home.  What money she made apparently came from real estate investments.

Mother and son

 


On December 10, 1986, Timothy bludgeoned his mother to death with a workout weight bar.    

He told the police that a burglar in a ninja mask had killed her.  They didn't believe him.  Timothy, who had grown to 5'4", then told his truth.  He said that his mother, dressed in her nightgown, seemed not to recognize him as she screamed, cursed, rambled and choked calling out for her mother.  When Timothy tried to call paramedics, Cabot attacked him with a scalpel and the weight bar.  He said he actually didn't remember taking the bar and killing her but knew that he must have.  He claimed to love her very much.

Timothy would be in jail for nearly three years before his trial began.  Astonishing to some, he would be found not guilty of murder but rather involuntary manslaughter (an unlawful killing without malice but with intent to kill) because there was no evidence of premeditation.  Because of his jail time and exceptional behavior, he was sentenced to three years' probation.  He left the courtroom with Cabot's mother.  

So sad is Susan Cabot's death.  Can there be any doubt?  But perhaps it was just in the cards that so shattered a life would end in so horrific a death.  She carried around her mental illness, inherited it would seem from her mother who was institutionalized for her own mental illness.  Susan's mother was around to take her grandson into her home and it's unlikely that would have happened had she not been fit.

Too bad Susan didn't get institutionalized with the hope that in the like-mother-like daughter spirit, she, too, would lead a life with a happier outcome.  Acting and particularly seeking the Hollywood dream is probably not the best choice she could have made for herself, for her well-being.  Hollywood always messes with people and only the strong truly survive.  Susan Cabot was not going to be one of those people. 

I remember her from some western where she was galloping alongside her male costar (likely Murphy), smiling atop a palomino, her dark tresses blowing in the breeze, looking golden in some promise of newfound happiness.  The young cowboy, still within me, thanks Susan Cabot for delivering the goods on the happiness I got from watching her.  She would have liked that.


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