From Wikipedia:
Lupe Vélez (July 18, 1908 December 13, 1944) was a Mexican actress.
She was born María Guadalupe Villalobos Vélez in the city of San Luis Potosí. Her father refused to let her use his last name in theater; therefore, she used her mother's maiden name. Lupe was educated at a convent school in Texas before finding work as a sales assistant. She took dancing lessons and in 1924 made her performing debut at the Teatro Principal. She moved to California that year and was first cast in movies by Hal Roach.
Emotionally generous, passionate and high spirited, she had a number of highly publicized affairs before marrying Olympian Johnny Weissmuller (of 'Tarzan' fame) in 1933. The fraught marriage lasted five years; they repeatedly split and finally divorced in 1938. She went on to have another emotionally draining affair, this time with Gary Cooper. In 1943 she returned to Mexico and starred in an adaptation of Emile Zola's Nana (1944), which was well received. Subsequently she returned to Hollywood.
Lupe Vélez committed suicide in 1944, at 36 years old, in Beverly Hills, California. Her decision to commit suicide came as the result of the end of her relationship with the married Harald Maresch, whose child she was carrying. Raymond would not leave his wife, and Lupe, a devout Catholic, refused to have an abortion.
Unable to face the shame of giving birth to an illegitimate child, she decided to take her own life. She retired to bed after taking an overdose of secobarbital, but instead of sending her to sleep the drug upset her stomach and she was actually found dead in her bathroom. A persistent legend is that she drowned in the toilet after going to the bathroom to be sick.
Her suicide and the circumstances surrounding it have spawned a cruel but grimly amusing story, made into a film by Andy Warhol in 1965 as Lupe, and repeated as an elaborate anecdote in step-by-step detail by the 'Roz' character on the pilot episode of the television series Frasier.
From Tate Hemlock:
Wikipedia always fails to capture the wonderful and frightening reality of anything. No mention of Lupe dancing on tables for Hollywood producers, raising her skirt and going, "Check it out! No Panties!" Oh how she was loved.
Fails to mention that Lupe was not only distraught because of reasons mentioned above but also up to her eyeballs in debt. The night she snuffed it, she went out, danced the night away, ate like a motherfucker and drank tons of booze. Sadly, rich food and tons of booze does not go well with secobarbital. Though she dressed like an angel (and she was an angel, poor thing) and expected the world to find her beautiful corpse laid out in bed like Sleeping Beauty, she didn't expect to die next to a toilet. Oops.
A sad waste. Today, a mere footnote on Wikipedia, or a non-sensical mention on one bitter, snarky blog. Poor Lupe Velez.
On a side note, I tried pitching a line of heinous celebrity death/controversy action figures to Todd McFarlane but he thought I was serious. Really?
"And when you flush the toilet you hear her retch."
"I don't see how that is marketable."
Do you live in a fucking bubble? Don't you get it when someone is fucking with you? Oh yeah, that's right, you wrote and drew a comic for a 12-year old mentality but made it R-Rated. Comics are literature? Yeah, when Alan Moore writes them.