March
22, 1958: Michael Todd
Michael
Todd was an entertainment giant.
A producer of stage and screen, among his more noted and memorable films
are Around the World in Eighty Days,
which won the Oscar for Best Picture in 1956.
The volatile producer was thrice married, the last time to international
star Elizabeth Taylor. On March 22, Todd
and noted sportswriter/ screenplay writer Art Cohn were headed for New York
along with pilots Bill Verner and Tom Barclay, leaving Burbank at 10:41 p.m.
(Cohn was writing Todd’s biography.) Todd was to be honored by the Friars’ Club
with the “Showman of the Year” award.
The
craft they were flying on, a Lockheed Lodestar, was a twin engine transport developed
by Lockheed before World War II. About
625 were built, though they had difficulty cracking a commercial market
dominated by the Douglas DC-3. After
World War II, many Lodestars found their way into executive use. Todd’s
Lodestar, the “The Lucky Liz,” (named for Taylor) was one such craft. As Todd
and his party traveled east, they encountered winter weather. Near Grants, New Mexico, at about 1:55AM,
Verner radioed flight control, requesting a change in altitude from 11,000 feet
to 13,000 feeet because they had encountered “moderate” ice. No further
communication came from the “Lucky Liz.”
A
flash was subsequently reported by the Grants airport. The next day, the
remains of the craft were found in the Zuni Mountains. The wings had iced, making the craft much
heavier and placing a strain on the engines. Investigators from the Civil
Aeronautics board determined that the plane had crashed nose first into the
ground and exploded.
According
to the Associated Press, “Miss Taylor did not accompany her husband. She stayed
at their West Coast home because of a cold. She collapsed when she heard the
news and was placed under sedation.” They had one child, Liz Todd, born the
previous August. Taylor’s marriage to
Michael Todd was the only one of her eight marriages to seven men to not end in
divorce (it was her third marriage).
Todd
is remembered in industry technical circles for the development of the Todd-AO
process for widescreen cinematic process.
It was first used on the 1955 film adaptation of Oklahoma! and subsequently became an industry standard.
