George Reeves was born George Keefer Brewer in Woolstock, Iowa, the son of Don Brewer and Helen Lescher (his death certificate erroneously lists his birthplace as Kentucky). Reeves was born five months into their marriage (the reason Reeves's mother subsequently claimed a false April birth date for her son, something he was unaware of until adulthood). They separated soon afterward and Helen moved back to her home at Galesburg, Illinois.
Later, Reeves's mother moved to California to stay with her sister. There, Helen met and married Frank Bessolo. George's father married Helen Schultz in 1925 and had children with her. Don Brewer apparently never saw his son again.
In 1927, Frank Bessolo adopted George as his own son, and the boy took on his new stepfather's last name to become George Bessolo. Frank and Helen Bessolo's marriage lasted fifteen years and ended in divorce while Reeves was away visiting relatives. His mother told Reeves that Frank had committed suicide. Reeves's cousin, Catherine Chase, told biographer Jim Beaver that Reeves did not know for several years that Bessolo was still alive, nor that he was his stepfather and not his biological father.
George began acting and singing in high school and continued performing on stage as a student at Pasadena Junior College. He also boxed as a heavyweight in amateur matches until his mother Helen ordered him to stop, fearing his good looks might be damaged.
Career
While studying acting at the Pasadena Playhouse, Reeves met his future wife, Ellanora Needles. They married on September 22, 1940, in San Gabriel, California, at the Church of Our Savior. They had no children and divorced ten years later.
At the Pasadena Playhouse, Reeves met fellow actor Frank Wilcox, who was best man at Reeves' wedding. The two were subsequently cast together in eleven films.
Reeves's film career began in 1939 when he was cast as Stuart Tarleton (albeit incorrectly listed in the film's credits as Brent Tarleton), one of Scarlett O'Hara's suitors in Gone with the Wind. It was a minor role but he and Fred Crane, both in brightly dyed red hair as "the Tarleton Twins," were in the film's opening scenes. Like Wilcox, Reeves was contracted to Warner Brothers soon after being cast. Warners changed his professional name to "George Reeves." His Gone with the Wind screen credit reflects the change. Between the start of Gone With the Wind production and its release twelve months later, several films on his Warner Bros. contract were made and released, making Gone With the Wind his first film role, but his fifth film release.
He starred in a number of two-reel short subjects and appeared in several B-pictures, including two with Ronald Reagan and three with James Cagney (Torrid Zone, The Fighting 69th, and The Strawberry Blonde). Warners loaned him to producer Alexander Korda to co-star with Merle Oberon in Lydia, a box-office failure. Released from his Warners contract, he signed a contract at Twentieth Century-Fox but was released after only a handful of films, one of which was the Charlie Chan movie Dead Men Tell. He freelanced, appearing in five Hopalong Cassidy westerns before director Mark Sandrich cast Reeves as Lieutenant John Summers opposite Claudette Colbert in So Proudly We Hail! (1942), a war drama forParamount Pictures. He won critical acclaim for the role and garnered considerable publicity.
Reeves was drafted into the U.S. Army in early 1943. He was assigned to the U.S. Army Air Forces and performed in the USAAF's Broadway show Winged Victory. The long Broadway run was followed by a national tour and a movie version. Reeves was then transferred to the Army Air Forces' First Motion Picture Unit, where he made training films. He looked forward to working with So Proudly We Hail! director Mark Sandrich. Sandrich felt that Reeves had the potential to become a major star, but he died in 1945.Reeves would later comment on the impact Sandrich's death had on his film career.
Discharged at the war's end, Reeves returned to Hollywood. However, many studios were slowing down their production schedules, and some production units had shut down completely. He appeared in a pair of outdoor thrillers with Ralph Byrd and in a Sam Katzman-produced serial, The Adventures of Sir Galahad. Reeves fit the rugged requirements of the roles and, with his retentive memory for dialogue, he did well under rushed production conditions. He was able to play against type and starred as a villainous gold hunter in aJohnny Weissmuller Jungle Jim film.
Separated from his wife (their divorce became final in 1950), Reeves moved to New York City in 1949. He performed on live television anthology programs as well as on radio and then returned to Hollywood in 1951 for a role in a Fritz Lang film, Rancho Notorious. Meanwhile, DC Comics was planning a television adaptation of its most famous character.
In 1953, Reeves played a minor character, Sergeant Maylon Stark, in the motion picture From Here To Eternity. The film won the Academy Award for Best Picture and gave Reeves a second motion picture appearance in a film that ultimately won the Oscar.
Death
According to the Los Angeles Police Department report, between approximately 1:30 and 2:00 a.m. on June 16, 1959, George Reeves died of a gunshot wound to his head in the upstairs bedroom at his home in Benedict Canyon.
The police arrived within the hour. Present in the house at the time of the incident were Leonore Lemmon (who had been Reeves's fiancee at the time), William Bliss, writer Richard Condon, and Carol Van Ronkel, who lived a few blocks away with her husband, screenwriter Rip Van Ronkel.
According to these witnesses, Lemmon and Reeves had been dining and drinking earlier in the evening in the company of writer Condon, who was ghostwriting an autobiography of prizefighter Archie Moore. Reeves and Lemmon had had an argument at the restaurant in front of Condon and the three of them returned home. However, Lemmon stated in news interviews with Reeves's biographer Jim Beaver that she and Reeves had not accompanied friends dining and drinking, but rather to wrestling matches. Contemporaneous news items indicate that Reeves's friend Gene LeBell was wrestling that night—yet LeBell's own recollections are that he did not see Reeves after a workout session earlier in the day. In any event Reeves went to bed, but some time near midnight an impromptu party began when Bliss and Carol Van Ronkel arrived. Reeves angrily came downstairs and complained about the noise. After blowing off steam, he stayed with the guests for a while, had a drink, and then retired upstairs again in a bad mood.
The house guests later heard a single gunshot from upstairs. Bliss ran upstairs into Reeves's bedroom and found him dead lying across the bed, his clothesless body facing upward and his feet on the floor. It is believed that this corroborated Reeves's sitting position on the edge of the bed when he allegedly shot himself, after which his body fell back on the bed and the 9 mm Luger pistol fell between his feet.
Dubious statements from the witnesses which were made to the police and the press essentially agree. Neither Leonore Lemmon nor even other guests who were at the scene made any apology for their delay in calling the police after hearing the fatal gunshot that killed Reeves; the shock of the death, the lateness of the hour, and their state of intoxication were given as reasons for the delay. Police said that all of the witnesses present were extremely inebriated, and that their coherent stories were very difficult to obtain.
In contemporary news articles, Lemmon attributed Reeves's alleged suicide to depression caused by his "failed career" and inability to find more work. The report made by the Los Angeles Police states, "[Reeves was]... depressed because he couldn't get the sort of parts he wanted." Newspapers and wire-service reports possibly misquoted LAPD Sergeant V.A. Peterson as saying: "Miss Lemmon blurted, 'He's probably going to go shoot himself.' A noise was heard upstairs. She continued, 'He's opening a drawer to get the gun.' A shot was heard. 'See there - I told you so!'"' However, this statement may have been embellished by journalists. Lemmon and her friends were downstairs at the time the shot was fired with music playing downstairs. It would have been nearly impossible to hear a drawer opening in the upstairs bedroom through the music. Lemmon later claimed that she had never said anything so specific but rather had made an offhand remark along the lines of "Oh, he'll probably go shoot himself now."
While the official story given by Lemmon to the police placed her in the living room with party guests at the time of the shooting, statements from Fred Crane, who was Reeves's friend and colleague from "Gone With The Wind," put Leonore Lemmon either inside or in direct proximity to Reeves's bedroom, minimally as a witness to the shooting.According to Crane, Bill Bliss had told Millicent Trent that, after the shot rang out, and while Bliss was having a drink, Leonore Lemmon came downstairs and said, “Tell them I was down here, tell them I was down here!” In an interview with Carl Glass, Crane expanded on this: "It needed to be said and that is the way I heard it from Millie as it was told to her by Bill Bliss. Janet Bliss and Millie were very close friends. I met Millie at Bill and Janet’s house up in Benedict Canyon on Easton Drive. We lived on the same street."
Dubious witness statements and the examination of the crime scene by the Los Angeles Police led to the official inquiry conclusion that the death of Reeves's was suicide.Reeves' will, dated 1956, bequeathed his entire estate to Toni Mannix, much to Lemmon's surprise and devastation. Her statement to the press read, "Toni got a house for charity, and I got a broken heart", referring to the Myasthenia Gravis Foundation.
Reeves is interred at Mountain View Cemetery and Mausoleum in Altadena, California. In 1985, he was posthumously named as one of the honorees by DC Comics in the company's 50th anniversary publication Fifty Who Made DC Great.
Source: Wikipedia