On Christmas Eve 1936, a gaunt, disheveled woman sobbed behind the iron bars of a Los Angeles jail cell. Her hair, once gleaming on movie screens, had faded to a dirty gray, and tear streaks cut channels down her hollow cheeks. She insisted the authorities had it all wrong, claiming the morphine and syringe found in her purse were for a friend she was trying to help, and that her name was Dorothy Craig, not Wanita Hansen. The distraught woman was Wanita Hansen, the former Max Sennett bathing beauty and silent serial queen.
Her arrest on that cold December night was the latest scandal in a life that had spiraled from Hollywood stardom into a decades-long battle with addiction. Wanita Cecilia Hansen was born March 3rd, 1895, in Des Moines, Iowa. Her parents, Henry and Sophia, were of Danish descent and moved the family to Southern California while Wanita was still a girl. Growing up in Los Angeles during the nascent days of the film industry, she was drawn to the magic of Hollywood.
She attended Los Angeles High School and showed a flair for dramatics from a young age. At 16, she landed her first bit part in the movies, appearing briefly in The Patchwork Girl of Oz, a 1914 film based on L. Frank Baum’s book. By 1915, Wanita had caught the eye of casting directors.
She landed a supporting part in another Oz series film, The Magic Cloak, and soon found herself cast as the female lead in a 15-chapter action serial called The Secret of the Submarine. This World War I-era cliffhanger about a submarine sought by enemy agents put Wanita front and center in perilous on-screen situations. It was her breakthrough role. Moviegoers watched the pretty young blonde escape one death-defying trap after another in weekly installments.
Newspapers gushed about Wanita becoming the leading feminine daredevil of the screen, telling tall tales of how she had to be rescued from quicksand and a waterlogged submarine just before doom closed in. Off-screen, Wanita was savvy about cultivating her career. The name Hansen never seemed to belong to me, she told gossip columnist Louella Parsons in 1920. But I refused to change it to Imogene Winthrope or Gladys Drowp because I wanted to keep my own identity.
By keeping her real name with a slight flourish, Wanita signaled a headstrong sense of self in an industry fond of reinvention. The budding star’s home life also set her apart from the typical Hollywood flapper of the 1910s. Wanita remained exceptionally close to her mother, Sophia, who acted as her rock and roommate, even as fame grew. Girls who live with their mothers usually succeed faster than those who live by themselves or with other girls, Wanita advised younger actresses.
Sophia watched over Wanita’s health and social life like a vigilant guardian. By 1916, Wanita had parlayed her early roles into steady work and growing recognition. She possessed a sparkling photogenic beauty, blue-eyed, very blonde, and petite at around 5’3″. The famous producer Max Sennett, known as the king of comedy, took notice and added Wanita to his bevy of shapely young actresses known as the Sennett Bathing Beauties.
These girls were featured in short slapstick comedies, often clad in swimsuits and performing goofy gags on California’s sunny beaches. At Venice Beach in June 1917, Sennett’s girls even competed in a famous bathing suit beauty contest, and Wanita won second prize. Despite the sunshine and slapstick of her Sennett days, Wanita’s ambitions lay beyond frothy comedic roles. I never could understand why people continually refer to me as a Keystone girl, she later told Louella Parsons, referring to Sennett’s Keystone Studio.
I served only a very brief period throwing pies. I did not like comedy, and slapstick comedy I loathed. I hated it so much I left the Keystone company with only $200 to my name and no job in sight. True to her word, Wanita quietly quit in late 1917, waiting until the boss was out of town to make her getaway so he could not sweet-talk her into staying.
By 1918, she had signed with Universal Studios, which cast her in several modest feature films and a high-profile 18-chapter adventure serial titled The Brass Bullet. In that serial, Wanita played an imperiled heiress guarding a fortune in gold, proving she could carry a dramatic action role. Unusually, she performed many of her own stunts. The press crowned her the era’s leading feminine daredevil of the screen.
In one serial, she was trapped in a pit with real lions. In another, she had to be rescued from a sinking submarine. Photoplay magazine dubbed her the queen of the thrills. Yet even as Wanita enjoyed the spoils of success, her love of risk extended beyond the film set.
She loved fast cars and was arrested for speeding through the streets of Los Angeles on several occasions. The daredevil persona that served her so well on camera began to bleed into her off-camera world in ways that would soon turn destructive. Wanita’s first brush with the darker side of Hollywood glamour came in the form of a little white powder passed around at a chic party. She was about 23 when she accepted an invitation to an elite Hollywood soiree sometime in 1918.
There were seven or eight of our prominent artists there, Wanita later recounted. When I was initiated into the fraternity, as it is called in the West, a fellow guest offered her a dose of heroin and instructed her how to sniff the powder off the edge of a nail file. I did as I was told, but instead of inhaling, I exhaled and blew the powder all over the room, which of course caused a great deal of mirth, she recalled. On her second try, she managed to inhale a small amount.
The effect was very pleasant, she admitted of that first flirtation with narcotics. At the time, no alarm bells went off for Wanita. She continued using the drug socially now and then, but she always went back to work on Monday, hitting her marks at Universal. There was no outward sign that the fraternity initiation had planted a time bomb in her life.
She carried on through 1918 making films, even as the great flu epidemic struck her down in October of that year with a serious case of influenza. Wanita recovered only to be stricken a few months later with encephalitis lethargica, commonly called sleeping sickness, likely an aftereffect of the flu. For almost three months in early 1919, she lay incapacitated fighting the strange illness. Once back on her feet, Wanita plunged straight into work again.
She signed on to do yet another serial, The Lost City, even before she was fully recovered. When The Lost City finally went into production in mid-1919, Wanita found herself burning the candle at both ends. Her manager informed her that Universal had loaned her out to Fox Studios to star opposite the famous cowboy actor Tom Mix in a feature film called Rough Riding Romance. For three arduous weeks, she tried to juggle the shooting schedules, working 16 to 18 hours a day.
After one week of the strain of double work, her body gave out. I fainted while doing my work on the serial, she wrote of that period. It made me realize that I had overtaxed my strength. Desperate to keep going, Wanita turned to the artificial boost she had first sampled at that Hollywood party.
It was during this frantic double-duty stint in 1919 that Wanita made her first deliberate purchase of drugs for non-recreational purposes. Just a sniff of heroin between scenes, she found, was enough to banish fatigue, and a little cocaine could jolt her back into performing those demanding stunts. With the help of the powders, Wanita miraculously completed both projects on schedule. But before she had time to step back and grasp what was happening, the actress was addicted.
The indulgence had grown into a dependency. In the public eye, 1920 was Wanita’s banner year. The Lost City was released and proved a popular success, positioning her as the heir apparent to the outgoing serial queens. Fan magazines predicted she would replace Pearl White or Ruth Roland as the new queen of the chapter plays.
Pathé, a prestigious French studio, offered Wanita a lucrative deal to star with actor Warner Oland, later famous as cinema’s Charlie Chan, in a New York-based serial titled The Phantom Foe. Filming for the final episode of The Lost City wrapped on Christmas Eve 1919, and by 8 p. m. that very night, Wanita was boarding a train bound for New York.
Wanita arrived in New York already in the grip of what she later bluntly called the dope. The Phantom Foe would film through the early months of 1920, and Wanita needed a reliable source for her daily fix. An acquaintance in New York persuaded her that the only real way to take narcotics was by injection. The drug of choice now was morphine, and in no time, Wanita was introducing the syringe to her veins.
By day, she took cocaine to jolt herself awake for filming. By night, she injected morphine to mellow out and catch a few hours of rest. Her habit was draining her bank account at an astonishing rate. $150 a week alone for cocaine, $125 an ounce for morphine, she later tallied.
In one frenzied year in New York, Hansen estimated, I spent $65,000 and ran $10,000 in debt in addiction. The breaking point came in the summer of 1920. Wanita overdosed. The incident was severe enough to strip away all denial.
When she came to, pale and trembling, she finally faced a brutal ultimatum from the attending physician: if she did not stop using narcotics immediately, she would not live out the month. Her weight had plummeted to a skeletal 105 pounds, and the once radiant beauty was shockingly haggard. Wanita’s resolve to get clean was quickly tested. In August 1920, while she was still filming The Phantom Foe in New York, a scandal erupted.
The notorious socialite and former showgirl Evelyn Nesbit, famed for her role in a 1906 murder scandal, filed for divorce from her latest husband, dancer Jack Clifford. In the proceedings, Evelyn named Wanita Hansen as one of two women who had allegedly come between them, accusing Wanita of having an affair with Clifford. Wanita flatly denied the allegation. Regardless of the truth, the divorce scandal splashed Wanita’s name across the front pages for the first time in a less-than-flattering context.
In December 1920, on the very day she finished shooting her last scene of The Phantom Foe, Wanita boarded a train bound for the serenity of upstate New York. Her destination was a sanitarium, essentially a private rehab clinic of the era. She underwent three weeks of treatment, and by early 1921, she emerged proclaiming herself free of narcotics. But as any addict can attest, the physical detox is only the beginning of recovery.
As she prepared to head back to California, Wanita told herself there was only one way she could make the long trip without collapsing: by arming herself with a supply of cocaine and heroin. She rationalized one last binge to bridge the gap between rehab and home. Back in Hollywood in 1921, Wanita’s devoted mother, Sophia, pleaded with her to seek spiritual help, having seemingly exhausted the medical options. At her mother’s urging, Wanita turned to a Christian Science practitioner who worked with her intensively for over three months.
After an extended rest, Wanita was declared cured once more. Hollywood, however, has never been good at keeping secrets. In April 1921, the entertainment trade paper Variety broke the story that she had been confined to a sanitarium and would not be fit to resume picture work for over a month. They diplomatically labeled her illness as a nervous breakdown.
When Wanita recovered, The Yellow Arm from 1921, her fifth serial, was released to theaters. But by the time the serial reached audiences, Wanita was in no shape to capitalize on its success. She pivoted to live theater, touring on the vaudeville stage in the fall of 1921. On a chilly night in Winnipeg, temptation found her again.
She obtained a bag of cocaine. Once more, the cycle resumed. By the time Wanita finished that tour and arrived back in Hollywood just before Christmas 1921, she was drowning in her familiar quagmire of addiction. She spent much of 1922 in the Bay Area, where later that year she checked herself into yet another treatment facility, Dr.
John Scott Barker’s sanitarium in Oakland. Dr. Barker specialized in treating drug addiction. After a months-long stay, reports were that Wanita had been clean for seven months and cured of her disease yet again.
Then came the raid that blew the lid off everything. In January 1923, state and federal authorities descended on Dr. Barker’s Oakland sanitarium, acting on suspicions of illegal handling of narcotics. Among the many names in the patient files were two that leapt out: Wanita Hansen and Wallace Reid, the latter being a famous matinee idol battling his own well-publicized morphine addiction.
The press pounced. Wanita’s private battle with narcotics became public knowledge. In the spring of 1923, as authorities hinted they would like to question her about a narcotics ring smuggling drugs into Hollywood, Wanita slipped out of sight. Detectives eventually tracked her to an apartment on West 81st Street in New York City.
On the night of May 20th, 1923, police burst in and arrested the one-time starlet. According to their report, they found her in possession of a box containing cocaine and a hypodermic needle. Upon the officers’ entry, she had first given her name as Jane Hansen and denied she was the famous movie serial actress. Cornered and terrified, Wanita protested vehemently that she was being set up, that the cops had no warrant, and that this whole ordeal would ruin my career.
Five days later, a subdued Wanita appeared in court for her hearing. She arrived dressed in somber black and dramatically veiled, hiding her face from the crowd of sensation seekers who packed the courtroom gallery. Detective Patrick Carter, the arresting officer, testified that he had broken into her apartment and caught Wanita red-handed with narcotics. She had the needle in her right hand, and when I came in, she grabbed for the box of cocaine with her left to destroy it, he told the judge under oath.
Under questioning, the detective recounted how Wanita had begged him for mercy in that moment of arrest. My God, give me a chance. Do you know what this means to my career? she had cried according to Carter.
Haven’t you anyone to love? I’m supporting my family. When it was Wanita’s turn to speak in court, she did not deny her past drug use. In fact, she admitted she had been an addict, but insisted she had been cured the year before.
I’m trying to live right, and why don’t the police leave me alone? she implored. She argued that if she were truly back on drugs, she never could have sat in a jail cell for 14 hours after her arrest without suffering withdrawal. She claimed that when the police barged in, she had merely been lighting incense.
The judge chose leniency, dismissed the charges, and released her. As she passed Detective Carter in the corridor, she shot him a withering glare and snapped, You are a liar, one of the worst liars. By mid-1923, Wanita Hansen was branded in the public consciousness as a dope fiend. Her film career, already on life support, was effectively over at the age of 28.
Things got worse. The following month, Wanita filed for bankruptcy. She enlisted $1,157 in liabilities and exactly zero assets. It was a staggering fall for someone who just a few years earlier had earned the equivalent of a king’s ransom.
Rather than retreat in shame, Wanita did something extraordinary. In the spring and summer of 1923, mere weeks after her humiliating court ordeal, she penned a series of newspaper articles detailing her descent into addiction. It was a lengthy serialized confessional that ran in papers nationwide. In doing so, she became the first Hollywood celebrity to openly come clean about getting clean.
My arrest nearly broke my heart, she wrote. It almost crushed everything I believed was good. With her unvarnished life story splashed across newsprint, Wanita forged a new identity in the mid-1920s: that of an anti-drug crusader. She went on the lecture circuit, determined to warn others, especially young people, about the perils of narcotics.
In late 1923 and through 1924, she traveled from town to town, taking the stage in theaters and meeting halls. In March 1924, Wanita’s crusade took her back into the courtroom as a star witness for the defense. The federal government had finally brought Dr. John Scott Barker, the Oakland physician who treated her, to trial, accusing him of improperly dispensing narcotics.
Wanita testified in Barker’s favor, crediting him as instrumental in her cure, effectively arguing that addicts needed doctors, not jailers. Late in 1925, Wanita took a rare vacation with her closest friend from her Sennett days, Mary Thurman. The two traveled to New York for the holidays. Tragically, Mary Thurman caught pneumonia in the cold New York winter and fell gravely ill.
Wanita stayed by her friend’s bedside for days as doctors tried in vain to save her. On Christmas Day 1925, Mary Thurman died at the age of 30. Wanita, devastated, accompanied Mary’s body on the long train ride back to Utah for burial. In May 1928, Wanita managed to land a part on Broadway, appearing in a supporting role in a play called The High Hatters.
Unfortunately, the play closed after just 12 performances. Still, the fact that Wanita had made it to a Broadway stage at all, five years after Hollywood had deemed her finished, was a small triumph. Then fate dealt Wanita one of its cruelest blows. In June 1928, she was staying in a suite at the Hotel Lincoln in New York City.
One evening, Wanita stepped into the bathroom to take a shower. As she turned the faucet lever, something went horribly wrong. The plumbing was faulty or mislabeled. Instead of a tempered mix, boiling hot water suddenly gushed forth at full force.
The scalding torrent struck Wanita and knocked her off balance on the slick tub floor. Hotel porters heard her screaming and found a terrible scene. She had suffered severe burns over her entire body. She was rushed to a hospital in serious condition, remaining in critical condition for two weeks.
Miraculously, Wanita pulled through, but the damage was lasting. Her left shoulder and arm were especially injured, reportedly losing much of their normal function. Worse for Wanita, the burns had marred her face and body, her instruments as an actress. And as was often the case in her life, physical pain opened the door for an old phantom foe.
To cope with the agony, she was given morphine by a staggeringly incompetent doctor. The drug that had nearly ruined her once was now medically administered to her daily. She grew dependent on it again during her long recovery. Wanita did not take the Hotel Lincoln accident quietly.
In April 1929, she filed a major lawsuit against the hotel for negligence. Initially, she asked for $100,000 in damages, but later upped the demand to $250,000. The case went to trial in November 1929 and became a media spectacle. The hotel’s defense team produced a witness who testified that Wanita had been under the influence of narcotics when she entered the bathroom that night and that she had improperly manipulated the faucets herself due to her impaired state.
The jury, swayed by sympathy for the tragic actress, awarded Wanita a massive $167,500 in damages, one of the largest personal injury verdicts of that entire decade. The victory was short-lived. The hotel appealed, and in 1930 the New York State Supreme Court set aside the verdict. Justice George Taylor Jr.
deemed the award grossly excessive, suggesting that the sympathetic jury had been influenced by the sight of a comely woman plaintiff rather than by cold facts. One male newspaper columnist, Ted Cook, even snidely joked that if Wanita were to retry the case, perhaps the judge should require her to wear long skirts to dampen the effect of her sex appeal. Wanita did not give up the fight. The case wound its way through appeals for two more years.
Finally, in November 1931, the Court of Appeals in New York reinstated a portion of her award: $100,000 in damages, with interest. Wanita ultimately received $109,269. Right after Christmas 1931, Wanita, now financially secure for the first time in nearly a decade, boarded a Panama Pacific ocean liner and sailed home to California. She announced upon arrival in San Francisco that she intended to attempt to come back in the movies.
Hollywood’s doors, however, only opened a crack. In 1933, Wanita managed to land a small role in a low-budget B movie titled Sensation Hunters. It was her first talkie, and it would be her last. The hoped-for triumphant return did not materialize.
Even the money did not last. By September 1933, not two years after her settlement, Wanita was back in court, this time suing her own financial adviser. She accused Clarence M. Levy of swindling her out of the $25,000 nest egg she had set aside from her award.
According to Wanita’s complaint, she had given Levy $25,000 in cash and Liberty bonds to invest in gilt-edged securities so that she might have a small income for life. Instead, Levy had plunged the money into risky stocks and promptly lost it all when the market went south, then brazenly told her he did not owe her anything. The $25,000 was practically all the money I had in the world, Wanita lamented to reporters. Now it too was gone.
By the mid-1930s, Wanita Hansen was once again perilously close to destitution. In 1935, she made the rounds of studios desperately seeking any film work. She visited the Warner Brothers lot where a short comedy called Keystone Hotel was being shot with many of her old Sennett colleagues. Director Ralph Staub spotted her on set and placed her in a bit part among the ensemble.
It was a small kindness, a brief moment in front of the camera that likely never yielded an on-screen credit, but it meant the world to Wanita. Later in 1935, as the Depression ground on, Wanita survived on a scant $94 a month from a New Deal initiative called the Federal Theater Project. She took whatever work came her way, organizing community theater productions, assisting backstage, even taking bit acting roles in local stage shows. It was humble labor for someone who once earned $1,000 a week as a headliner, but Wanita was grateful for it.
Then the law came for Wanita again. On December 24th, 1936, exactly five years after she had set sail with newfound hope, a police officer arrested Wanita Hansen in Los Angeles on a narcotics charge. They claimed she was carrying a vial of morphine and a hypodermic needle in her purse, enough to charge her with illegal possession. The arrest could not have come at a worse time.
Wanita was literally on her way to appear in an FTP Christmas play that night. Instead of taking the stage, she spent the night in jail. It’s a lie, a frame-up, she tearfully protested to reporters, insisting, I haven’t taken dope since 1928, for eight years. I can’t understand why they have done this.
Wanita stuck to her story that the morphine was not for her own use. She said she had been taking the medicine and syringe to an addicted friend who was in the throes of withdrawal while trying to get clean. It was a plausible story. After all, Wanita had made it her mission to help other addicts, and this friend’s doctor could supposedly vouch that Wanita was delivering the medicine on medical advice.
As she rattled the jailhouse bars in a panic, she begged the authorities to call a physician who would corroborate her account. By God, I can’t spend Christmas in jail, she cried. Fortunately, some of Wanita’s theater colleagues rallied to her aid. They pooled money to post her $1,000 bail, and by Christmas morning, Wanita was released.
When her case went to court in early 1937, Wanita threw herself at the mercy of the judge. In court, her physician indeed testified that the morphine was prescribed and that her actions were driven by altruism, not addiction. The judge, moved by her explanation and mindful of her well-publicized crusade, dismissed the narcotics charge and cleared her of all wrongdoing. Once again, Wanita Hansen walked out of a courthouse a free woman, and this time vindicated.
In the wake of that scare, Wanita renewed her anti-drug crusade with fresh vigor. She put together a new lecture program pointedly titled Red Grows the Poppy, the red poppy being a symbol of opium. Packing halls and high school auditoriums, Wanita used her own life as a stark example, preaching passionately, This vile curse is no respecter of persons. None of you is immune.
In 1938, she authored a book titled The Conspiracy of Silence, a scathing indictment of society’s approach to drug addiction. She argued that addicts should be treated in specialized medical facilities, not thrown in prison. She even founded the Wanita Hansen Foundation, aiming to raise awareness and funds for these efforts. By the early 1940s, Wanita’s crusade was running out of steam.
World War II was erupting, and people’s attention turned to global conflict. Bookings for Wanita’s talks dwindled, and she quietly exited the spotlight again. As the 1940s progressed, Wanita’s life took on an unassuming, humble character. By 1941, at age 46, she was living in a modest hotel in Chicago, effectively anonymous.
Her constant companion was a pet bulldog named Tiny Alexander. When her finances grew too strained to care for the dog, she tearfully gave Tiny away to a friend, a decision that broke her heart. In June 1941, overwhelmed by mounting despair, Wanita attempted to take her own life. She swallowed a handful of sleeping pills.
She was found in time. She regained consciousness in a charity ward and confessed to the attending police officer the depth of her despondency. I gathered many friends during my January days of luxury, she said, referring to the fleeting period when she had money and success. They’ve been grand to me.
I’ve been living off their gratitude for some time. I just couldn’t go on being a parasite. Thankfully, Wanita survived her suicide attempt. By March 1942, she found a semblance of stability by securing a job as a banquet planner at a Chicago nightclub called the Lockwood.
Eventually, as the war years went on, Wanita drifted back to California. In the late 1940s, she found employment with the Southern Pacific Railroad as a telegraph clerk. By 1950, at 55 years old, Wanita Hansen was living in downtown Los Angeles, renting a tiny hotel room for $12 a week. It was a modest life, but for the first time in ages, she felt a measure of peace.
She was clean from drugs by her count. On her 55th birthday that year, Wanita declared, 15 years ago, I took my last treatment for the horrible curse of drug addiction. It was then that I won the greatest victory of my life. Looking back on her tumultuous life, Wanita harbored no bitterness, only gratitude for having survived.
The millions slipped through my fingers easily enough and vanished, but not the memories. I have those and my health, and I’m happy, she told a journalist in her later years. She had outlived many of her contemporaries who succumbed to their vices, including Wallace Reid, dead of morphine in 1923, and her dear friend Marie Prevost, dead of alcoholism in 1937. Wanita had walked that same razor’s edge and managed through grit and grace not to fall.
In her final years, Wanita lived quietly in a small house at 858 Hilldale Avenue in West Hollywood, only a few miles from the Keystone studio lot where she had once thrown pies. On September 26th, 1961, Wanita Hansen died at home of heart failure. She was 66 years old. It was her maid, Pearl, who found her lifeless body in bed.
Fittingly, Wanita’s death certificate did indeed list her as cured of the drug habit. She was laid to rest at Holy Cross Cemetery in Culver City, California. Having never married or had children, Wanita left behind just $500 in personal belongings, bequeathed to two lifelong friends, one of them her faithful maid, Pearl. She was the fearless golden-haired serial queen who leapt from airplanes and the humbled woman who used her own fall to help others rise.
In the end, she got to write the last act of her own life, not as a victim, but as a survivor.