The Hollywood Sign Girl
Somewhere in the depths of hell that is Hollywood, a lonely matchgirl breathes the wishful air and sighs ...
Milicent Lillian Entwistle was born in Port Talbot, Wales on July 1, 1908, and moved to London when she was rather young. Her mother's untimely death led Lillian (nicknamed Peg) to New York City to try her career at acting. Soon enough, she arrived at the heart of glitz and glamour, Hollywood USA, to live with her uncle.
In 1927, she got hitched to a blue-eyed all-American boy, Bobby Keith. The marriage was always rocky - both of them struggling to make any cash - and the pair ended up on the wrong side of statistics. If I could just get back to New York..., she would tell her friends and family. But money was tight, and the break never came.
Peg got a small part in a stage production of The Mad Hopes, alongside a then unknown Humphrey Bogart. The part got her name in the trade papers, and RKO gave her a weekly for her first film. She put on a good face, but audiences didn't like the production, and her role was practically left on the cutting room floor.
Some warm California day in September of 1932, Peg went out for a walk and a trip to the drugstore. Only she didn't make it. She took a detour and headed for the HOLLYWOODLAND sign that graced the hills a block from her home on Beachwood. And it was there that she climbed the H at the top of the world and exited, stage left, for the last time. She was 24 years old.
What makes a pretty girl cry? This is the secret that keeps Peg Entwistle afloat in the mysteries of time. Family, fortune, fame - or maybe just a break. Her suicide note, just as cryptic as her final curtain call, gives no answers: only more questions, lost in the depths of hell that is Hollywood ...
I am afraid I am a coward. I am sorry for everything. If I had done this a long time ago, it would have saved a lot of pain.
Source: http://www.findadeath.com/Decesed/e/Peg%20Entwistle/peg_entwistle.htm
UPDATE: Please check out TheHollywoodSignGirl.com for a much more thorough look into Peg Entwistle's life (with pictures and document scans, and such.)