Guadaloupe

In Hollywood, whose great ladies may water-ski in evening gowns, Guadaloupe Velez de Villalobos became rich and famous and was known as Lupe Velez. She lived in a Spanish mansion, bathed in a jade-green tub, slept in a bed which was eight feet square, and was courted by many handsome men. She had been impatient with her good home in Mexico and with San Antonio's Convent of Our Lady of the Lake, where she was instructed in the duties of womanhood. But although she lived in Hollywood for 17 years and changed the color of her hair, she could never forget that she was really Guadaloupe Velez de Villalobos. Last week this fact proved fatal.

As Lupe Velez she led a strange and unfettered existence--even for Hollywood. She was very young when she became famous. Her teen-age whims and appetites, her shallow fits of rage and delight remained unchanged. She loaded herself with jewelry. She delighted in entering nightclubs with a spurious dignity. She also delighted in tantrums during which she spat oaths like an angry cat. She loved to go to prizefights, where she screamed advice to the boxers.

Her bedroom had a refrigerator and bar and an oyster-white rug, often littered with phonograph records or clothes. She liked to be interviewed in bed in the late afternoon and sometimes leaped from the covers in a transparent nightgown to admire herself in the mirror. Sometimes, at parties, she raised her dress neck high, to show that she had a compact little body and a magnificent overall tan.

She played endless practical jokes. When one of her victims sent her a dead rat in retaliation, she screamed with laughter, sent it back with a lily on its chest. She loved her two dogs--a Sealyham, Chips, and a Scottie, Chops--summoning them with ear-splitting whistles. In moments of remorse she would sink to her knees to pray.

On and off the screen she was known as the Mexican spitfire. Her five years of marriage to Swimmer-Actor Johnny Weissmuller were punctuated by endless quarrels and reconciliations, mostly in public. After her divorce she joyously telephoned the columnists the details of many careless new affairs. She was no longer a star, but her private life kept her in the public eye.

Few months ago she fell in love with a young and darkly handsome Continental with an adventurous past. Harald Ramond had fought the Nazis in Vienna and Prague, was captured and escaped from Dachau, fought the Nazis again in France, then came to Hollywood as a bit player. Soon thereafter, Lupe became pregnant. And although her make-believe world had a solution even for this age-old dilemma, Guadaloupe Velez de Villalobos could not bring herself to accept it.

One night last week she had a long chat with two close friends. She was distressed, and she said so. The friends left at 3:30 a.m. Lupe whistled for her dogs, went to her bedroom. She undressed, stepped into blue silk pajamas, sat down on her huge bed to scribble a note. In her childish scrawl she wrote: "Harald: May God forgive you and forgive me too, but I prefer to take my life away and our baby's before I bring in him with shame or killing him."

Then she climbed between her white silk sheets, arranged her blond hair in a circle on the pink silk pillow. Hastily she swallowed an overdose of sleeping pills. Next morning, the first policeman to arrive described his first impression: "She looked so small in that outsize bed that we thought at first she was a doll."

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.