Elaine Worth Pt. 2—Where There Is Honey, There Are Dead Bees

Frisco, 1928. A French sex farce at the Green Street Theater in North Beach, and a blonde in the title role who turned it into the hottest ticket in town. She claimed to be a ballerina, Naana Wartova, from Moscow. Offstage she was Elaine Worth. The cops said she’d been born Carrie Ellsworth, over in Richmond. Pick one. She didn’t care.

Men swarmed her like bees to honey, and they kept turning up dead. Handsome Gerri Ferri, a racketeer who told her he was in the pineapple business, took six slugs through a locked bathroom door. Of course, pineapple was gangster-speak for bomb. A month later, the man police fingered for the hit was lying on a clay road outside Sacramento with five bullets in him and her pictures in his pockets. Then Rene Fabri at the bottom of a cliff on Rockaway Beach, beaten and shot. Her leading man went out a sixth-floor window into a Tenderloin light well, and a coroner’s jury called it an accident. The fixer, Frank Grupico, for whom she signed in as his wife at City Prison before she collapse from pills and gin fizzes caught a bullet of his own in 1932. 

All she wanted was love, she claimed. 

By 1932, a blonde named Alice Dunn was playing Zee Zee in Hollywood. She wouldn’t say whether she’d ever been Elaine Worth, only that Death seemed to follow her wherever she went. This is Part Two of the Elaine Worth story. Pour yourself a cup of coffee and listen to Frisco: The Secret History, Episode 39, “Elaine Worth: Where There Is Honey, There Are Dead Bees.”