| Hollywoodland | Feb 9 2023 |
This is your cell, Mitchum. You'll survive fine. Miss Leeds, yours is in the other wing and I'm sorry to say it's the last anyone'll ever hear of you.
In this press photo, a Los Angeles police deputy named Marjorie Kellog, in black, escorts Lila Leeds and Robert Mitchum to jail after their sentencing for marijuana related charges today in 1949. They'd been arrested the previous August after a police sting operation and been sentenced to a year behind bars, but the judge suspended the sentence and gave them two years probation, sixty days of which were to take place in Los Angeles County Jail. Mitchum had fretted that his acting career was over, but he emerged from his stint in lock-up more popular than ever, and law enforcement axe grinders learned an important lesson—arresting stars in hopes of ruining their careers risked making them appealing as rebels.
Leeds, however, wasn't a star. She was a fledgeling actress who'd accumulated nine film appearances, six of them uncredited. It's possible to argue that, had she been a big star her career would have been severely damaged because she was a woman. But on the other hand Lana Turner went through the scandal of her daughter's killing of Johnny Stompanato, was exposed as a mobster's mistress, yet her subsequent movie was one of her biggest hits. But Turner was seen by the public as someone led astray by a bad man. So in the end it's difficult to say if Leeds got a raw deal because she was a woman. Probably. It's usually a safe bet. We can only say for sure that with no earnings record and no power, her dreams of stardom died.
