Biografie

31. Januar 1905 · Louisville, Kentucky, USA

25. August 1948 · Los Angeles, Kalifornien, USA (Selbstmord)

Her career was ruined in 1929 when the public found out she had married an African American doctor. She never worked in Hollywood again.

According to a 1932 newspaper article, Worthing met her second husband in April, 1927, after she was injured by an intruder in her home and he was called in to treat her.

Worthing declared bankruptcy in August 1927. About this same time, she was attacked and beaten by prowlers in her Los Angeles home and was attended to by a black physician, Dr. Eugene C. Nelson. They married that same year and subsequently, she was abandoned by Hollywood and her industry acquaintances. She and Nelson divorced in 1932 and soon after, she was declared by a judge to be mentally ill.

In April 1922, Worthing ingested the slow-acting poison bichloride of mercury and was hospitalized for several days at Bellevue Hospital in New York. Newspapers reported that "the highest paid chorus girl in the world" claimed that she had taken the poison accidentally, thinking it was headache medicine, and that she had done this after getting into a fist fight with another chorus girl at the Amsterdam Theater. Worthing had just been divorced from her first husband, Charles McDonald, after she claimed he could not live with his wife making more money than he. Friends said Worthing actually was despondent over the divorce and then finding out that a new romantic interest had married someone else.

Always a chronic sufferer of insomnia, Worthing became addicted to narcotics. After years of failed suicide attempts and jail time for narcotics use and public drunkenness, she was found dead in her bedroom at the small 3-room Hollywood cottage of her companion of ten years, a Filipino cook, Jerry Oro. Coroners ruled death resulted from an overdose of sleep medication, but they did not rule her death a suicide, instead stating that Worthing had likely built up a tolerance to the medication and had accidentally taken too much.

As a Follies girl and a screen actress I met millionaires, aristocrats, and gentlemen of the highest type but I chose my husband because I loved him.

A woman never forgets the days of her courtship and she yearns often in silence for her husband to be once more the lover of her youth. [Elkhart (IN) Daily Review, Wednesday, October 29, 1919]