- Born
- Died
- Nickname
- The most beautiful woman in America
- Helen Lee Worthing was born Helen Wortham on January 31, 1905 in Louisville, Kentucky. Her mother died when she was a child and her father moved the family to Massachusetts. During World War 1 she worked with the Red Cross. She married Charles McDonald, a businessman, in 1917. At the age of twenty-four she entered a beauty contest and was named "the most beautiful woman in America". Soon after she moved to New York City and appeared in several shows. She joined the cast of the Ziegfeld Follies in 1921. The following year her marriage ended and she attempted suicide. Helen made her film debut in the 1923 drama Enemies of Women. She had supporting roles in The Other Woman's Story and Watch Your Wife. Her performances got good reviews and her future seemed bright. In the April of 1927 she was brutally attacked in her home. While she was recovering she fell in love with her African American physician Dr. Eugene Nelson. There was a scandal when the public found out the couple had gotten married. She was shunned by the film community and had to file for bankruptcy.
Helen started drinking and in 1930 she suffered a nervous breakdown. After numerous separations she and Eugene were divorced in May of 1932. A few months later Eugene told the court that she was using her alimony to buy drugs. When she threatened suicide a judge committed her to a sanitarium. She was arrested in 1933 for using narcotics and again in 1935 for public drunkenness. Then in 1939 she was caught forging prescriptions for morphine and had to spend a year in jail. Helen told reporters she hoped jail would help her but her life continued to spin out of control. She was arrested several more times and in March of 1946 she was found passed out drunk on a Los Angeles street. Helen moved into a run-down house where she spent her days looking through scrapbooks from her career. On August 25, 1948 she committed suicide with an overdose of sleeping pills. She was forty-three years old. The police found a note that said "I have had so many heartbreaks and so many let-downs and I don't believe I can stand one straw more." Her friends paid for her to be buried at Inglewood Cemetery in Los Angeles.- IMDb mini biography by: Elizabeth Ann
- SpousesDr. Eugene C. Nelson(June 1927 - 1933) (annulled)MacDonald, Charles L.(January 2, 1917 - January 1922) (divorced)
- 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]
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