Noir Nook: Stranger Than Fiction – Part 1 (Steve Cochran)
“Truth is stranger than fiction,” Mark Twain once informed us, “but it is because fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities. Truth isn’t.”
This month’s Noir Nook introduces a new series that looks actors and actresses who were frequently seen in shadowy situations on the big screen, but who led off-screen lives that would rival the plots of any one of their movies. For the first in my series, I’m shining the spotlight on actor Steve Cochran.
The tough-guy actor with the dark good looks was born Robert Alexander Cochran in Eureka, California, on May 25, 1917. He grew up in Wyoming; in high school, he was involved in athletics like basketball and boxing, and demonstrated an interest in cartooning and architecture. But after only a year at Wyoming University, he dropped out to pursue an acting career, joining the Federal Theatre Project in Detroit. He honed his craft during the next several years in a variety of stage productions throughout the country and on several radio programs. He finally got his big break in the mid-1940s, when his appearance in a New York Theatre Guild production caught the attention of producer Sam Goldwyn, and he made his film debut in a 1945 Danny Kaye starrer, The Wonder Man.
Cochran entered the realm of film noir the following year, playing a smooth criminal in The Chase (1946) and earning praise from critics for his “impressive performance.” Some of his other noir features include White Heat (1949), where he was seen as the ill-fated rival of star James Cagney; The Damned Don’t Cry (1950), starring opposite Joan Crawford as an ambitious gang leader; and Private Hell 36 (1954), where he was on the right side of the law, but the wrong side of morality.
The actor’s film performances usually resulted in favorable reviews, but it was his life off-screen that attracted the most publicity. On New Year’s Day 1952, he became involved in the first of many encounters with the law when he got into a fight with a party guest, a former professional boxer named Lenwood Wright. During the altercation, Cochran hit Wright over the head with a baseball bat; according to the actor, the attack was in self-defense and no charges were filed, but Wright later filed a civil suit against Cochran and was awarded $16,000 in damages. (That amount was reduced the following month to $7,500 by a Superior Court judge.)
The following year, Cochran was arrested for reckless driving and evading arrest after a five-mile car chase with police. He pleaded guilty and paid a minor fine, telling reporters that he “just wanted to show my friends how my new sports car would corner.” And in 1956, the actor reportedly became the first person to receive a flying ticket issued by a police helicopter. Cochran – who had around 100 miles of flying time behind him – received the citation after flying over his mountaintop home in Studio City and rocking his wings. He was fined $500 and grounded for 90 days. Then, in 1964, Cochran was back in the news in two separate incidents – in the first, the actor was arrested on a civil court order after a local disc jockey accused him of adultery. And a few months later, singer Ronie Rae alleged that Cochran had beaten and gagged her. In the latter case, Cochran confirmed that Rae was at his home to audition for a new film he was producing, but stated that he restrained her with neckties because she began “hurtling herself about.” It was determined that Rae was on drugs and Cochran was cleared of all charges, with officials stating that Cochran “may have done [Rae] a great service by tying her up.” The charges in the first case were dropped as well, after the disc jockey admitted that his sole evidence was a thank-you note his wife had received from Cochran.
But Cochran’s unusual experiences weren’t limited to court cases and run-ins with police. Between acting assignments, he’d added boating to his repertoire of fast cars and airplanes, usually without incident. But this uneventful stretch came to an end in the late 1950s when his 35-foot ketch had to be hauled to safety by the U.S. Coast Guart after the actor spent a scary night in the Catalina Channel, bailing water from the boat. And in 1960, after running into heavy fog, his yacht crashed into a Los Angeles breakwater, and he and others on the boat – a 19-year-old lady friend, two dogs, and a monkey – were forced to dive into the water.
But the actor’s strangest stranger-than-fiction episode was yet to come. The film that Ronie Rae was auditioning for, called Captain O’Flynn, was based on the adventures of a real-life ship captain named Lee Quinn, who sailed the Pacific with an all-female crew. Before filming the movie, Cochran decided to recreate one of Quinn’s voyages by hiring three Mexican women to accompany him on an eight-day trip from Acapulco to Costa Rica. Sadly, the trip would be the final adventure of Cochran’s life.
Three weeks after Cochran and the three women set sail, the actor’s 40-foot yacht was towed into a Guatemalan port – and Cochran was dead. It was later determined that Cochran had been stricken with a paralyzing lung ailment called acute infection edema and died 10 days after departing Acapulco. After his death, the women drifted for nearly two weeks before being rescued.
Cochran was just 49 years old.
Adventurous, ambitious, and bold, Cochran was just beginning to explore new aspects of his film career at the time of his untimely and shocking death – he’d started his own production company in the early 1950s, and his initial outing as director, Tell Me in the Sunlight, was completed shortly before he died. Given the actor’s frequent encounters with the law, his boating misfortunes, and the manner in which he perished, it can certainly be said that his life was stranger than fiction.
Tune in next month for Part 2 of Stranger Than Fiction . . .
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– Karen Burroughs Hannsberry for Classic Movie Hub
You can read all of Karen’s Noir Nook articles here.
Karen Burroughs Hannsberry is the author of the Shadows and Satin blog, which focuses on movies and performers from the film noir and pre-Code eras, and the editor-in-chief of The Dark Pages, a bimonthly newsletter devoted to all things film noir. Karen is also the author of two books on film noir – Femme Noir: The Bad Girls of Film and Bad Boys: The Actors of Film Noir. You can follow Karen on Twitter at @TheDarkPages.
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