Playwright Recalls How Badly Lana Clarkson Wanted To Be A Dead Blonde
Throughout the Phil Spector trial, we have learned much about the accused's sociopathic past, filled with misogynist death threats and loaded handguns produced at the slightest provocation. But what of the victim? Lana Clarkson is most often referred to as a B-movie actress, best known for her work in Barbarian Queen, and who had been making ends meet by taking a job as a hostess at the House of Blues.
Following the testimony of Vincent DiMaio, a forensics expert who also happens to have keen insight into the depressive states of minds of 40-something actresses who find themselves losing parts to Paris Hilton, the defense called today John Barons, a local playwright and one of the last people to work professionally with Clarkson. The project was called Brentwood Blondes—a play, ominously enough, about three legendary Hollywood blondes who met untimely ends:
Her main motivation was to be known," Barons said. "It's not like she wanted to be in Dostoyevsky and that she wanted to do Shakespeare ... or even Tennessee Williams. The passion was more to be a famous actress," he said. [...]
The play was a fantasy which envisioned an afterlife in which Monroe, actress Sharon Tate and a Nicole Brown Simpson were talking about dying at the hands of others, though Monroe's real death is a probable suicide. Dixon asked Barons who the play suggests killed Monroe. "Joseph Kennedy Sr.," Barons said. [...]
Later, he said, he rewrote the play to include a fourth Brentwood Blonde, Lana Clarkson.
It's a dizzying hall of mirrors that could only exist in the pulpiest of Hollywood noir (or at least in a mildly diverting episode of Murder, She Wrote): A bombshell plays a bombshell killed under mysterious circumstances, only to be killed herself, and wind up yet another ghostly character in the same story. It's all spookily foreboding, meant by the defense to once again plant the seed in jurors' minds that Clarkson, who was fired from the play for being too difficult to work with, was a failing actress with death on her mind. The tactic might have proven more effective if they hadn't just heard about the time Spector had to be forcibly ejected from a party for threatening to shoot every woman present in the head.
