Who Killed Mae West’s No. 1 Fan?

Late in 1971, a shaggy, 23-year-old college student and aspiring screenwriter was toiling away at his master’s thesis at Bowling Green State University in Ohio. Born Feb. 2, 1948, in Waukegan, Illinois, David Ray Johnson displayed nothing particularly remarkable at first glance. He stood about 5-foot-7, had long brown hair and a thick mustache, and was “your basic Midwestern kid,” as one friend would later describe him.

But he was not entirely basic. Johnson was openly gay and rather flamboyant. He was entranced by drag queens. He spoke with a breathy, halting affectation. He’d often declare of things that met his approval, “What a hoot!”

And he was obsessed with Mae West.

The pioneering sex symbol was the subject of Johnson’s film studies thesis. The 72-page dissertation, “An Historical and Interpretive Analysis of the Development and Perpetuation of the Mae West Phenomenon on Stage and Screen 1900 – 1970,” reverentially traced how West parlayed her wisecracking, oversexed vaudeville persona into one of Hollywood’s most legendary careers.

Three years later, in 1974, Johnson mailed that thesis to West, then 80, in Hollywood. Within three months, he had insinuated himself into her strange life and home. Like in the 1950 film noir classic Sunset Boulevard, Johnson found himself an unlikely roommate to a long-faded screen diva, lost inside a cocoonlike existence, complete with pet monkeys and loyal manservant.

And like Joe Gillis, that film’s down-on-his-luck screenwriter narrator, Johnson would be killed within the year.

***

Mae West arrived in Hollywood from her native Brooklyn on Jan. 16, 1932. Then 38, West had already conquered Broadway with a string of controversial hit plays like Sex and the gay-themed The Drag. West was leery of the movie business. But Paramount Studios had summoned her for a role in Night After Night. She stole the film — particularly thanks to a self-penned zinger, “Goodness had nothing to do with it, dearie” — and was instantly minted a superstar.

Paramount had put West up at The Ravenswood, the studio’s art deco apartment hotel at 570 N. Rossmore Ave. It remained her primary residence for 48 years. Her sixth-floor penthouse apartment was, like West, relatively small, and had two bedrooms, a tiny kitchen and some modest common rooms. The fun came in the accoutrements. The theme was “naughty rococo.” Everything was gold, white and cream-colored. The furniture was Louis XIV. Mirrors hung everywhere, including above her bed. “I like to see how I’m doing,” West would quip.

West bought a second property in the mid-1950s. It was a beach house on the Pacific Coast Highway, a mile north of the Santa Monica Pier. The house, which still stands and is currently occupied (estimated market value $17 million), was designed in 1938 by famed architect Richard Neutra for Albert Lewin, who directed The Picture of Dorian Gray.

“The beach house decor was kind of eclectic,” recalls Tim Malachosky, who worked as a personal assistant to West in her later years. “She had two master suites upstairs that faced the ocean. One had a balcony — we called it the white room. It had a round white bed, and that was French design. The room next to it had a king-size bed. That was the pink room.” The house had a third bedroom, for West’s sister, Beverly, “decorated in blue because that was Beverly’s favorite color.” West’s pet monkeys — she had several over the years, with names like Bad Boy and Tricky — had the run of the place.

West was rarely without her companion on her arm — Paul Novak. A former wrestler who worked as background beefcake in West’s Las Vegas review, Novak was later promoted to bodyguard and chauffeur; he eventually became West’s lover and devoted caretaker until her death.

Novak would drive West — or “Miss West,” as everyone addressed her — to the beach house once in a while to “take the air,” as she put it. She insisted on keeping the shades drawn in the house, concerned the sunlight might compromise her pink and alabaster complexion. Swimming was not a consideration, but they would occasionally wade up to their ankles once the sun had dipped past the horizon.

In the late 1960s, West was enjoying a career resurgence. She was profiled by The New York Times Magazine and could be found reclining seductively on a Life cover that read: “Mae West going strong at 75.” She released Great Balls of Fire, a cover album featuring her interpretation of pop classics, including The Doors’ “Light My Fire.” And she emerged from a 27-year screen absence with 1970’s Myra Breckinridge, a doomed adaptation of a Gore Vidal novel, which improbably cast Raquel Welch as a transgender woman who infiltrates Hollywood.

Film critic Rex Reed was cast in the movie as Myron Breckinridge, the pre-transition Myra. During filming, he got to spend time with West at the beach house. “Mae gave me a painting from on the wall that I liked,” recalls Reed, 83. “I liked it very much and she gave it to me, so that was a surprise.” The painting depicted a girl in a bikini standing on a beach. “It fits perfectly in a spot I have in my apartment in New York. I’ve always kept it with a great sense of fun that it came from her.”

West enjoyed a busy social life around this time, circulating at parties thrown by Groucho Marx and Roddy McDowall and attended by the likes of Lucille Ball and Cary Grant (whom she launched to stardom by casting him in 1933’s She Done Him Wrong, based on her hit Broadway play Diamond Lil). A strong believer in the supernatural, West also hosted her own seance-like soirees — first at The Ravenswood, overseen by the Rev. Thomas Jack Kelly, a psychic; then, after Kelly’s death, at the beach house, presided over by West’s psychic, Dr. Richard Ireland. West’s best friend, Gilda star Glenn Ford, was usually in attendance.

“It would be invitation only,” recalls Malachosky of the ESP demonstrations. “Twenty-five, 30 people. Many celebrities would come, and I would greet them and give them a piece of paper and tell them to write three questions. After that, I would collect all the papers. And Dr. Ireland would blindfold himself. And I would put the papers on the table in front of him. He’d pick one up and hold it to his forehead and would make predictions about the future.”

Recalls Jeff Redford, a former TV actor who attended several of the soirees, “Glenn Ford asked a question about his career and whether it was going to go again. He was quite old at that time and had a hard time finding work.”

West liked to keep the beach house occupied. “To her, it was like the place was being looked after and inhabited, so it wouldn’t be broken into,” says R. Mark Desjardins, a West historian. “It suited her purposes.” One such house guest, the female impersonator Craig Russell, worked as her personal assistant for seven months in 1967 before things between them went sour — and Russell fled the beach house with multiple suitcases stuffed with West’s custom gowns and screenplays. (They were later recovered.)

Then, in 1974, she received Johnson’s package. “It’s very, very flattering,” says Desjardins of the thesis. “I can see why Mae was totally ‘Wow — some university person wrote a thesis on me?’ You must remember that Mae West had at best a third- or fourth-grade education. She began as a child performer, and school wasn’t a big thing for her.”

(A sample of Johnson’s essay: “Mae West is both a uniquely American institution and an immortal sex symbol. … Perhaps it is testimony to her unique contributions to the theatre that Mae West has been both worshipped and damned throughout her entire career.”)

West was so taken with it, she decided to retitle it “Biographical Study of Mae West” and publish it as an appendix in her upcoming book, Mae West on Sex, Health & ESP. She invited Johnson, then 26, to visit her in Santa Monica and stay at the beach house. He was given a small bedroom on the second floor to call his own; a departure date was never specified. Also occupying a housekeeper’s residence on the property was the elderly Larry Lee, West’s secretary since 1929. West made a call to Universal Studios and got Johnson a job as a tour guide.

Redford, a distant cousin of Robert Redford, was one of Johnson’s fellow tour guides; Johnson brought him to the beach house on three occasions. “It was like a dream,” Redford recalls. “As you went up the stairs, there was a huge mural of musclemen with gold-leafed erections ejaculating. The bedrooms were funereal. There was gauze over the beds. On the television, which was ancient, there was a statue of two musclemen holding chains. They were holding up this giant orb. Just extraordinary.”

Recalls Lesley Mitchell-Clarke, a close friend of Johnson’s and daughter of the late Gordon Mitchell, a writer on All in the Family and The Jeffersons, “David was always very different and eccentric.”

Like Redford, Mitchell-Clarke met Johnson at Universal. “We were on every lot in town,” she recalls. “Me trying to be an actress, him trying to be a writer-director.” Adds Desjardins, who has interviewed many of the gay men who made up West’s inner social circle, “Some of the guys thought he was a bit nerdy.” Redford describes him as “quite intelligent and very witty.”

Says Malachosky, “I only had one or two meetings one-on-one with him. He basically just wanted to see my Mae West memorabilia collection. He was thrilled with it all. And then after that is when he was killed.”

***

Patricia Pawlak also met Johnson working as a Universal tour guide. “Best job a bunch of people could have out of college,” says Pawlak. “You got there and you had a family. I’m still friends with these people.” Like Mitchell-Clarke, Pawlak had dreams of movie stardom. A statuesque 5-foot-9, she tended to go up for action-hero roles, like the lead in 1985’s Red Sonja, but lost out to bigger names (in Sonja’s case, Brigitte Nielsen). She eventually went into film distribution.

But in 1974, anything seemed possible for a tour guide, who for two hours at a time would stand at the front of the fabled Universal trams and regale tourists with Hollywood lore. “And they let us work parties, like this one event for Hitchcock,” Pawlak says. “I’ll never forget it. Hitchcock arrived in a hearse.”

The guides had come from all over to pursue their Hollywood dreams. They were young, attractive, ambitious; straight, gay and bisexual. They worked together all day and partied together all night. “These were the days where anything went,” says Mitchell-Clarke. “Before AIDS. Everybody was sort of casting off whatever moral thing had been present in the ’50s and ’60s. It was a very experimental time.”

One evening in early 1976, while a group of off-duty guides lay around a living room in a marijuana-induced haze, someone came up with an idea to mount a musical variety show on the Universal backlot.

“And so David went to Miss West, who said she’d produce it and put her name on it,” says Pawlak. Thus began a series of rehearsals conducted at West’s beach house. “The house had a white baby grand piano and round staircases,” Pawlak recalls. “She was very pleasant — but I wasn’t allowed to look at her directly, because she didn’t have makeup on.”

At the time, West was readying what would be her final screen appearance, in 1977’s Sextette. If Myra Breckinridge was a critical misfire, West emerged from it relatively unscathed. Not so with Sextette, which featured Timothy Dalton as love interest to West — then 87 but playing a sexed-up ingenue — who was “motivated by a kind of grandmother fixation,” The Hollywood Reporter observed in its scathing review.

“She was very, very deaf by the time I met her,” recalls Mitchell-Clarke. “She wore two big hearing aids. And, literally, they had her on a platform and were rolling her around the set.” Shot on the Paramount lot by Chitty Chitty Bang Bang director Ken Hughes, the $8 million film made only $50,000 before being abruptly pulled from cinemas ($31,000 of that came in the first week, when West made personal appearances at theaters to promote the film).

On April 15, a few nights before Pawlak’s birthday, she picked up Mitchell-Clarke at her apartment in North Hollywood, with the intention of heading over the hill to Santa Monica for a rehearsal with Johnson at West’s house. “We were running late,” Pawlak says. “Traffic was terrible. So we called up David and we all decided we would call off that night’s rehearsal.”

There are differing accounts of what happened next. As Mitchell-Clarke recalls it, Johnson began his evening at Oil Can Harry’s in Studio City — L.A.’s longest-running gay bar, which shut down amid the pandemic in January 2021 after 52 years.

Then, in the early evening, Johnson drove southbound on the 405 — the route was obscured by heavy fog that night — to downtown Santa Monica, about 2 miles from the beach house, where he dropped into one of his favorite watering holes.

According to Malachosky, it was the Pink Elephant, located at 2810 Main St. and described in the 1980 Bob Damron’s Address Book, a gay nightlife guide, as a “cruisy disco” spot. The Pink Elephant, now long-defunct, hosted drag shows and, according to Redford, Johnson was always eager to take one in.

But Desjardins insists Johnson was drinking at Bar Sinister, “a popular gay cruising spot” a few blocks down, at 2709 Main St., which since 1983 has housed Wolfgang Puck’s Chinois on Main. Desjardins was told this by Robert Duran, West’s assistant from 1968 to 1972, who relayed West’s version of that evening’s events.

At some point, Johnson left the bar and crossed Main Street. Redford recalls that Johnson had a bad habit of crossing in the middle of the street instead of at demarcated crosswalks. “And he was hit, as I understand it, by a speeding van that ran a red light,” says Mitchell-Clarke. “He was thrown something like 40 feet. It was horrible.” An ambulance rushed him to nearby Saint John’s Hospital, where he died an hour later.

Mitchell-Clarke was the one who informed West of his death. “It was horrible,” she says. “I called Miss West and told her that he had passed.” Novak then placed the difficult call to Johnson’s parents to tell them of their son’s killing. “Miss West thought it was very tragic,” Malachosky recalls. “She was saddened by it.”

The following morning, Pawlak was awoken by a call informing her that Johnson was dead. “You can imagine my guilt, and how you would feel, if you were supposed to meet a friend and they died,” she says.

A witness outside the bar told police “a cream-colored van sped away in the fog,” notes Desjardins. According to Pawlak, a witness also said the van had no license plates, but that detail has proven inconclusive. An autopsy was performed on Johnson by Thomas Noguchi, the same L.A. chief medical examiner-coroner who determined Marilyn Monroe’s cause of death in 1962. Johnson’s death certificate listed “auto versus pedestrian” as the method of his demise.

No mention was made of the killing in the Los Angeles Times. But the Santa Monica Evening Outlook featured a short item on the incident on April 16, listing Johnson’s age as 28 and his home address as West’s Pacific Coast Highway residence.

West quickly dispatched Novak to deal with the Santa Monica police. He gave a statement on her behalf — though Novak used his birth name, Charles Krauser, in an attempt to keep West’s name out of the papers, according to Desjardins. Mitchell-Clarke then mobilized a small group to clean out Johnson’s bedroom of his porn collection, drug paraphernalia and anything else that might add to the distress of his grieving parents, who were taking the next red-eye from Chicago. West offered to pay the fee to ship Johnson’s remains home for burial.

As for the driver of the van, “he was never apprehended and the case remains unsolved,” Desjardins says.

***

Among Mae West’s entourage, the possibility that Johnson was killed by a simple hit-and-run seemed too quotidian. Within hours of his death, theories began to surface that this was no accident — that Johnson had been targeted by the cream-colored van that sped off in the fog.

“I was the first one who said, ‘I think it was on purpose,’ ” says Pawlak. “And they all turned on me. I remember that. Everyone went freakish on me. ‘What are you even talking about?!’ But to me, something felt off.” Others would soon echo her suspicions.

Johnson was popular — but some in his inner circle concede he had a dark side. Redford says Johnson “was a predator. He just went after people. On the tour, wherever, he was always bedding somebody. It was kind of a strange thing.” He recalls a Swedish tourist — a teenager — who went home with David after one tour. “He was definitely into that,” Redford says.

Mitchell-Clarke — who was closer to Johnson than anyone — notes that Johnson was “very gossipy. And I think that it’s possible that he may have been saying the wrong things about the wrong people who were empowered at that time. Particularly on the tour, we did a lot of talking about the history of Universal Studios and the fact that MCA, which bought the studio in 1958, was a very mobbed-up organization. So it’s always been at the back of my head, that they may have just taken him out because he said the wrong thing to the wrong person.

“I could see somebody getting pissed off and saying, ‘Just get rid of that kid,’ ” she continues. “But David gave beautiful tours at Universal. He did give wonderfully informative tours.”

Pawlak concurs that there were more than a few shady types working in the Universal C-suites at the time. “At night, random men would call and beckon me to come over to their hotel rooms. They spotted me in the Black Tower,” she says, referring to corporate headquarters at 10 Universal City Plaza. “It was creepy.”

Desjardins notes that West grew extremely paranoid in her later years. “I have gathered that Mae was aware David was going to write a second, more telling book about her, based on the questions he asked while he resided at her beach house,” he says. “She was not pleased about that — but I cannot see that being the cause of his demise. Mae would never have OK’d a ‘hit.’ ”

Still, Mitchell-Clarke is disinclined to accept the targeted-hit theories. “I tend to believe that it was a random event, that some idiot just accidentally ran a light and hit somebody and, out of fear, left the scene,” she says. “We did get a weird phone call at Universal Studios, at the headquarters for where the tour guides are, a couple of days later — somebody who didn’t want to identify themselves but wanted to know about David, which was a little weird. And when they gave me the number to call this guy back, which I did, it was a wrong number. I think some guilty person was drunk or fucked-up, committed this terrible hit-and-run and has lived with it their whole life.”

She does, however, believe that she may have been contacted from beyond by Johnson. “I got a phone call around 8 p.m. the night of his death,” Mitchell-Clarke says. “The connection was terrible. There was all kinds of static on the line, but it was David. He was asking me to join him for dinner at the Feed Bag in Santa Monica. Then the connection dropped. The thing that is so odd is he died an hour before that call.” She also recalls that Lee, West’s elderly secretary, had heard Johnson “walk up the steps, use his keys and go into his room” just as the 11 o’clock news came on. “And then he said, ‘I heard him rocking in his chair for at least an hour after that,’ ” Mitchell-Clarke recalls.

Pawlak has her own theories as to what may have happened. She describes another tour guide, a handsome aspiring actor, whom she says was sleeping with many of the girls on the lot and with whom she had a brief affair. According to Pawlak, one day Johnson walked up to her and pointedly declared of the 20-something actor: “I’m going to get him in bed. He’s my boyfriend.” Then he stormed off.

According to Pawlak, months later, the actor broke down at her apartment. “He starts sobbing. He’s in my arms. It was a sob that was so primal. And he goes, ‘Miss West used to host seance parties at the beach house. I wanted to bring you to one. But they said no,’ ” she recalls. “And he keeps sobbing. He said, ‘They drugged me and gang-raped me. I tried to fight it. They were everywhere, doing everything to me. Putting things in me.’ ” The encounter has haunted her for years, and has led Pawlak to believe Johnson’s death was the result of an elaborate revenge plot.

Her colleagues are less than convinced. “I don’t believe it for a second,” says Mitchell-Clarke. “I think that’s complete bullshit.” Mitchell-Clarke recalls that the actor was a “very mentally unbalanced guy. He had a lot of issues. I know that he had a sexual relationship with David once. But rape? No. He was one of those guys who couldn’t come out publicly and would never have admitted that he had participated in consensual homosexual sex.”

The actor died in August 2013 after suffering years of serious health complications.

***

Efforts by The Hollywood Reporter to further investigate Johnson’s killing have proved inconclusive. The Santa Monica Police Department was unable to locate the incident report and the L.A. Coroner’s Office held no records of Johnson’s autopsy. Johnson’s parents, meanwhile, are both dead, and his closest surviving relative, sister Linda Peterson, died April 4, 2022, after battling cancer.

The truth of what happened that night to David Ray Johnson will perhaps remain enshrouded in mystery, the identity of the van’s driver — guilt-ridden or not — lost forever to time, like so many unsolved Hollywood homicides. In the meantime, the theories persist as vestiges of that strange, heady period.

As for West, after suffering a stroke, she died at 87 in a room at the Good Samaritan Hospital on Nov. 22, 1980, surrounded by six dozen roses sent by Elizabeth Taylor, the ever-dutiful Novak standing at her bedside.

“You only live once,” the screen goddess once said. “But if you do it right, once is enough.”

This story first appeared in the June 15 issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine. Click here to subscribe.