Happy 100th birthday
…to Clark Nova, born Clarence Novotny on this day in 1909 in Antioch, KS. At age sixteen, Clarence made his first silent motion picture, “The Underachiever”, for Flixio. It was Flixio’s Stakhanovite brothers who convinced him to change his name to the more leading-man-esque Clark Nova. He quickly moved into the romantic lead role in a series of mildly successful films–all but three of which have since been lost–and navigated the transition from silents to “talkies” better than many of his colleagues.
Although regularly deluged with mail from adoring female fans, Nova found less success in his personal life. Three marriages failed in rapid succession, and rumors that Nova was a “limp wrist” began to circulate in the entertainment tabloids despite the bevy of beautiful young women who came and went from his Beverly Hills home. “The girls circulated through that house like a faucet,” sniffed third wife Florence Vidor years later.
Following his final divorce in 1944, drinking and no-shows became a problem. His violent, drunken outbursts on the set and generally boorish behavior cost him several roles and gave him a reputation among studio execs as an actor to avoid. To make ends meet, he turned to writing for radio dramas, occasionally taking small, often uncredited parts in them as well.
His last performance was on March 24, 1952, in a small role in the Lux Radio Theater production of “Come to the Stable” that in a twist of fate reunited him with “Underachiever” co-star Loretta Young.
On August 14, 1952, Clark Nova was found dead from a single gunshot in his Oceanside apartment. Although the scene appeared to be suicide, no fingerprints were found on the weapon–a .38 Smith & Wesson which also had its serial number filed off. A subsequent investigation found that Nova’s death had probably been a mob hit, most likely revenge for Nova’s highly public outings with a mistress of crime boss Nunzi Spadafora. Spadafora underling Leslie “Bugeye” Rizzoli was eventually indicted but never convicted for the crime. Rizolli went to the electric chair for an unrelated crime in 1959, leaving Clark Nova’s death a decades-long subject for aficionados of unsolved Hollywood murders.
In 1992, Nova’s diaries turned up in a briefcase full of documents at a yard sale in Santa Barbara. In entried tainted with dispair and self-loathing, they revealed a tormented soul, popular but unsuccessful with the ladies, who harbored repressed homosexual urges. His death came only weeks after an entry confessing a sexual encounter with a young man who mowed his lawn, leading many to speculate that his death had been a suicide after all.
Somewhat perversely, Clark Nova is remembered today mostly in the form of the literary allusion he inspired: the talking asshole bug-typewriter in William S. Burroughs’ novel “Naked Lunch”.