America’s original California girl

Fifty years ago today in Los Angeles, where I’m writing these words while facing a screen of a kind that didn’t exist in 1962, a thirty-six-year-old woman fatally overdosed on Nembutal and chloral hydrate, sedatives she used, or tried to use, to sleep. She had a long history of insomnia, as well as a long history of attempted suicide, but to this day it can’t be stated conclusively if she killed herself accidentally or intentionally or if someone else administered the drugs.