"Dying Like Elvis on the Toilet"

The End. In this episode we chronicle Don's final days. His last gasp attempt at making a comeback with his film, "The Rock". His dependency on a team of doctors  that would bill him upwards of $50,000 a month while keeping him hooked on over a dozen uppers and downers. And we look for anyone who might have been able to save Don from himself. 

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:26):
The end. In this final episode of season two of
The Dawn, we returned to where we left off at
the end of season one, to the scene of the crime.
What exactly happened to Dawn in his final days, Who
might have contributed to Don's death, who might have covered
it up? We'll look at the key events of Don's
final hours, where Don was purportedly sequestered in his bathroom

(00:49):
drowning in pills and red wine. Here's Pierce on tape
recording his recollections in the days after Don's death. J S.
I'm lying in Don's lounge chair beside Don's sparkling saylit
pool under a trellis of organ Villeo on a crystal
clear winter's day in bel Air. A quick recap. Pierce

(01:14):
was on tape for much of season one. He had
been summoned to town by Don's former drug dealer, who
believed his drugs might have killed Done. Pierce had begun
to investigate what might have happened. Here we pick up
on those tapes from season one. It's been a week
since I crashed Don's wake of Morton's, a week since
my invitation to stay at Don's house, a week since

(01:36):
the woman who invited me to stay at Don's house
left to go on location. The house is empty with
Don gone. The staff has been let go. No housekeeper,
no house man, no gardener, no chef, no flower arranger,
no personal assistant, no bodyguard, Just me alone in the house,

(02:00):
surrounded by Don's possessions. Dawn is dead. I've been repeating
those words every day since Don died, and I suspect
I will continue to do so until there is clarity
as to what happened. So far, we only know what
has been released by the Los Angeles Times. Los Angeles

(02:23):
Fire Departments. Booksman Brian Humphrey said that business associates of
Mr Simpson had called from his home and that paramedics
had found Simpson's body on the floor of an upstairs
bedroom in his lavish Bell Air home. Spectacles and a
book found beside the body indicated that he apparently collapsed
and died while reading. First Police officers to reach the

(02:43):
scene told the coroner's office that they found no drugs
or drug paraphernalia near the body. Police officers reported death
to be of natural causes. Just four sentences on cause
of death, Don Simpson died of natural cause. This no no, no, no, no,

(03:03):
shame on U L A p D. Don did not
die of natural causes. Don died from unnatural causes. I
was at Don's house in early January when Don had
come home from his gastro entrologist appointment. Dr Stuffy I'll
never forget the name. Dr Stuffy had charted Don's nervous

(03:25):
system over a period of twenty four hours, and what
he found was, in his words, shocking. There were so
many substances in Don's system that he was deemed high risk,
not from some future heart attack, but from an immediate
sudden cessation of his heart. If you took that report
to Las Vegas, betters would be looking for odds on

(03:48):
how soon Don would expire. Stuffy said, reading his chart
was like a singing telegram that was saying, you are
going to die. He even predicted not just when, but
where it was most likely to happen, either at the
dinner table or on the toilet. Dr Stubby might have

(04:10):
been shocked by the report, but Don's friends weren't. They
all knew Geffen Katzenberg, Tish, Jim Burkas, at U T A,
Jimmy Wyatt, at I C. M. They all tried to
get done help. The l A Times report was an
insult to all of us who knew Don and failed
to help him. I feel as if I am failing

(04:31):
him right now, failing to write the truth of Don's
last days. My dear friend Neil Gaiman told me once
that in Victorian times, when writers were struggling to ratchet
up word count, they would pitch their work as a trilogy,
chopping up their book into three short novels. This allowed
publishers to stagger printing costs and allowed the writer to

(04:53):
meander through stories, adding out their word count along the way. Well,
I feel I too have been padding and meandering my
way through a story. Why do you I have come
to love Don's supporting cast of characters, The fabulous Alan
Cars and the tough talking Julia Phillips, the drug dealers

(05:15):
and the Madame's the lioness Dawn Steele, the gentleman Burt Fields,
his gum shoe Anthony Pellicano, the pill pushers and the mobsters,
the bodyguards who Don gave day player roles. These were
larger than life characters, and they all played a part
in Don's wild, sprawling, traveling road show. But at times

(05:38):
I feel they only served to pat the story. Did
they help me to get any closer to understanding Don.
I want to be clear, Don did not invite me
to write his biography, and yet, for some unknown reason,
Don started calling me daily from early December to early January.

(06:04):
We never explained it. I likened it to Warhole's daily
phone calls to his assistant. There was no agenda, no
real motive for the cause. It was just more of
a validation and acknowledgement that Don needed to say, I'm
still here, I'm still Don Simpson. It was an extension

(06:25):
really of how little Don, as a kid, would say
his name in the mirror after being scolded by his parents.
He needed someone to know he was still there, that
he still meant something, that he was still kinned on
Blockbuster producer, even if the only audience was me. In

(06:48):
the beginning, much of Pierce's initial cause with Don were
about one subject an this is the strongest warm water
event in the Pacific that's ever been seen. The storm
after a storm battering in southern California, making more flooding
with wind bringing down trees and power lines. Thirty years ago,
the Great Easter Sunday earthquake had destroyed Don's home state

(07:11):
of Alaska. Now Don was submerged in an Alnino event
that would cause one billion dollars in damage across California.
There were massive mud slides in Glendale. The Las Floreses
Creek became a raging river of mud, knocking out the
bridge across the pH The surf was so heavy it
rocked the Great Palings under the Vnter appear it had

(07:31):
taken an act of God, a natural disaster, to get
Don out of his house. Dawn is shouting for me
to come up on the roof. He has his binoculars
trained down the road to the bel Air Hotel. I
can see there's a hotel valet on the street corner
to direct cars out of the driveway. But the valet
isn't directing traffic, He's directing garbage bins. The canyon is

(07:54):
a river, and the bins are getting swept down the
street like fifty pound guided missiles and up all the cars.
Dawn's like a Nascar announcer, giving me the make and
owner's name of each car. Jimmy Cahn's Mercedes. It's totaled
and go by humped things Bentley just got creamed. Runaway
bins in Los Angeles are what you would call a

(08:16):
first world problem. The average person has three bits, one
for trash, one for recycling, and one for gardening. But
the rich always had a lineup of bins, often as
many as ten to twelve bins in front of their estates.
Now factor in an alnno flood and the fact that
rich people don't take in their bins, their staff does,

(08:36):
and with no staff showing up for work in a
trential flood, you get a city of rich people's bins
crashing into rich people's cars. The smashing bin's demolition derby
was the high line of Dawn's day. He'd watch for
a while, absolutely drenched, and they go back inside his
empty house. It was there that the sad sat Dawn

(08:56):
they all is lost on would return. Just day earlier.
Don's outlook was Dan ro Rosie. He was upbeat like
I'd never seen him before. Here Pierce describes Don's surprise
visit to the studio just weeks before his death. Eight
Don called Today happy to report that Hensley was the

(09:19):
right call to over all the script. Screenwriter Jonathan Hensley
was brought in to rewrite Don's final film, The Rock.
Hensley was a favorite writer of Don's, one of those
no nonsense action writers that Don loved. Every single piece
of physical action has to accomplish the following. It has
to show Connery as the old lion who is capable

(09:41):
of doing anything and and has the training to do it.
And Nick Cage is this lab rat who is utterly
out of his element. And if you look at the picture,
that's every single moment that dynamic is up front and center.
All the action scenes must come out of character. He

(10:01):
would say, over and over again, Don love this. It
was the perfect of it. When Don made his surprise
visit to the studio, The Rock was two months into
production and already many millions over budget. News of Don's
arrival rippled through the studio. Cars were moved so that
Don could have his executive parking spots. They even painted

(10:23):
his name on his space. At the time, he was
driving a rather refined, somewhat understated Mercedes. His louder fleet
of sports cars were under tarps in his garage. Perhaps
this was a signifier that Don had mellowed, but on
that day Don was anything but mellow. Don went into
the screening room to review the footage and came out

(10:45):
three hours later with the confidence of a military general.
The movie was in big, big trouble, he declared. This
wasn't news to director Michael Bay in the producing team.
What was news was that Don had a plan to
fix it. On was incredibly precise in identifying how to
fix the movie. By the end of the day, he

(11:06):
had everybody believing they could make a great film. It
was a hero's moment, like you see in one of
Dawn's movies. It had been a long time since Don
had played the hero. He had rarely left the house
since his doctor died. The last time Dawn was out
in public was when we went to The Bad Boys premiere.
That was in May. By the time the Dangerous Minds

(11:29):
premiere came out in August, Don was completely m i
A Dangerous Minds, like The Rock, had also been in
real trouble. Test screenings were so poor the studio was
ready to claim it as a loss. Don, despite his
heavy drug use, was still sharp enough to write the Ship.
His shrewdest move was in cutting Andy Garcia entirely out

(11:50):
of the movie. Michelle Peiffer's character can't have a boyfriend,
Don argued that would take time away from her students,
and the title My Posse Don't do Homework, the worst
title in the history of movies. Don had a new
title at the ready, Dangerous Minds. With the new edits,
you could feel the excitement run through the marketing department.

(12:13):
Everybody was suddenly energized to see all the deal Don
brought in the coolio track Gangsters Paradise. As I walked
with the van of the Shadow of Death, I take

(12:35):
a look gam on Like every line, there's who are
those kids? Reach outs from hell? The kids with high
IQs and low grades. But I got all you gotta
do is get their attention. One submarine, always submarine. One

(12:58):
would think Don would have wanted to basque in the
glory of his genius. Nobody loved the premiere more than Done.
Why didn't he show up? Dangerous Minds was just days
after Don's doctor died. Don wasn't leaving the house and
he couldn't leave the house. He was on so many
meds and there was no one to supervise his intake.
And that's when Don reached out. We hadn't spoken since

(13:22):
Days of Thunder. That was both the best and worst
of times, being on set in Florida with Tony and
Tom Cruise, the energy and shooting those driving scenes, and
then Don's falling out with Tom over his clear sound
system and Don being too high and unprepared in his
acting debut. It all ended so terribly wrong for Don.

(13:45):
But it had started out with such incredible energy and promise,
and I was feeling some of that now with Don
in Making the Rock. It feels like old times. Don
has his writer Hensley was part of a special group
of writerist Warren scar and Robert Town who could bring
Don's vision to life. And it's all going so well,

(14:07):
and I get to come along for the ride. The
only thing that could have stopped Don's big comeback was
the calendar. Hollywood always shuts down for a month over Christmas,
but Don didn't want a month off. Don didn't want
a single day off. Don needed to work because work
was all he had. Don's calls to Pierce would continue

(14:29):
over the holidays. It was a lonely time for Done,
a time when Don had nobody to answer his thirty
page memos or his three am script note phone calls,
or to go to Morton's to talk about his latest
movie Idea. December had always been hard for Don, and
this holiday season would not only be the loneliest, but
the most destructive. When we return Don's last Christmas, Here's

(15:01):
Pierce in one of his last tapes. Recorded during Christmas.
The flooding and the rains have stopped. Don calls to
say we're going for a drive, a drive in the
middle of rush hour in Los Angeles. Don tells me
not to worry. We're taking the test Rossa. She needs
a good run on the track. I must say I'm
a little unnerved. I'm sure as to what Don is

(15:23):
actually saying, but I say yes, because well it's done.
We take the test Rossa. Speed limits be damned. We're
frying down the freeways, too many to remember the four
oh five, the one, and the one oh five. Don
isn't saying much. He's only focused on how fast he
can drive. I mean, he hasn't left the house in weeks,

(15:44):
other than a few late night runs to in an
out burger. Where are we? I spot a street sign
for Lakewood Avenue. Don steps out of the car and
beckons me to follow him. We're somewhere in the suburbs.
We finally stopped after a few blocks, and Dawn says
to me, you know those grids of houses you see

(16:05):
when you're flying over Los Angeles, Well, we're standing right
in the middle of the biggest one of them all.
Where are we? I ask? We're in Lakewood, Peace, home
of the American Dream. They called it Lakewood Tomorrow's city.
Today it became world famous. Thousands of houses were sold

(16:30):
before they were built. People came from Maine, New York, Texas, Canada, England, Germany, everywhere.
They fell in love with Lakewood. They loved the way
the homes and streets were laid out so neatly around

(16:51):
the supermodern shopping centers with acres of free parking. Their
whole pattern of living, working, and shopping became that of
in suburbia too many. Lakewood was Paradise, the world's biggest subdivision,
Don says, seventeen thousand houses, each one one thousand, one

(17:13):
hundred square feet on a fifty by hundred foot lot.
The lucky owner gets to pick his own paint color,
thirty nine colors to choose from. There's thirty seven playgrounds here,
twenty schools, seventeen churches, and the big kicker the world's
largest shopping complex, close enough to walk to, but don't bother.

(17:34):
There's parking for thousands. What do you think this? Don
takes a beat, and then he says, very forcefully, this
here is life at its most perfect, regular folks living
the most ordinary, safe and protected existence. There are no

(17:57):
disappointments because there is no hope. There are no nightmares
because there are no dreams. There is no risk because
there is no danger. You raise your family, take a job,
shop at them all, find your church, and come home
to all of this. Can you imagine if these people

(18:17):
knew what we knew. I'll give a pause, I asked
on I'm not sure what he means, and Don says,
I want to knock on every door, on every single
one of these houses and take a syringe and shoot
up every single one of these ordinary fucking people. You

(18:41):
know what's in this syringe? Pis my fucking life. Imagine
if they could get off on the way I get off,
or making movies, on creating something with hundreds of other
people all hopping on my back to make my dreams
come true. If they got that syringe and they got

(19:03):
off on what a fucking ride My life is they
will put a match to this seventeen thousand how subdivision
and burn the whole thing down. You get it now,
don't your peers. Don's voice trails off. We get back
in the testa Rosser and drive home. Don doesn't speed

(19:25):
this time. I realized he was pretty high when we
trove over, and now the drugs are wearing off, the
spark is gone. He runs a few lights, but we
make it home. He parks the car and his garage
and goes into his house. I take a taxi back
to my hotel. What was Don trying to tell me

(19:47):
that without the movies, without his movies, he would rather die,
that he would rather die than have a Lakewood sort
of life. I suddenly get a chill, a realization that
Don knows he exactly what he is doing with all
these pills. He would use them to make movies or
die trying. Now, at this time, Don was in fact

(20:11):
making movies. They just weren't Don Simpson movies. And so
the question becomes was done trying to slowly kill himself
with pills? Or was done using those pills to try
to summon the energy to make his movie? Comeback here,
Pierce reveals what little he learned of his investigation around
Christmas time is when I first heard Don had a

(20:33):
new personal doctor that was writing him scripts. Don said
she used to work in the arts, that she was
a real creative type who understands the pressures of making movies.
Don had several doctors writing scripts for him. But the
doctor we think Pierce is referring to is a psychiatrist
named Gnomi Frederick. Frederick had indeed worked as an artist

(20:56):
for Jim Henson. In fact, it was Frederick who was
widely attributed as designing the prototype for Miss Piggy. According
to Chuck Phillips, a journalist at the l A Times,
Frederick was one of the last doctors that was prescribing
meds to Don. She was also prescribing meds to the
oil heiress Eileen Getty and had at one time prescribed
Getty over four thousand pills in one year. Frederick had

(21:18):
also been sued by an actress named Melissa Holiday for
over prescribing electroshock therapy electro shock. My mind immediately raced
back to the actress Fortumn Western and her connections to
Don's doctors. To be clear, doctor Frederick was not the
only doctor prescribing Don. The police discovered more than two thousand,

(21:39):
two hundred pills stockpiled in alphabetical order in a bedroom
closet next to Don's bathroom. Remarkably, this was a small
amount when considering that Don had been getting over fifteen
thousand medications over the last three years by a team
of fifteen local doctors and eight different pharmacies. I have
been prepared to track down Don's psychi wrist, but when

(22:01):
I heard that staggering number fifteen thousand medications fifteen different doctors,
I simply lost any and all motivation to probe any further.
I mean, what was the point to find out that
Don had been overprescribed? But he was lightly under the
care of predatory doctors who were keeping him high and

(22:22):
building him huge sums of money. I think that's all
pretty self evident. Don, in his most desperate of times,
had fallen victim. What I longed to know, more than
any record of doctors or prescriptions, was Don's state of mind.
Was he in fact taking the pills as a means

(22:43):
to the end, or was he using in order to
keep his edge and make movies? Was down in the
throes of one last comeback or had he given up?
Was he in pain? Was he despondent or was he
upbeats and looking towards the future? And if so, how
is he functioning? How does a man when he has

(23:03):
twenty one different medications in his system act? Can he drive?
I wouldn't think so? Can he move? Can he speak
without slurring? Was he impaired at all? Maybe Don was
a superhuman Keith Richard's type, who could handle substances like
no mere mortal could. Well we do know of the

(23:24):
final hours of Dan's life was that Don was excited
to make movies again. He was in negotiations with a
major studio on a new production deal. I'd heard rumors
of a Disney deal a few weeks earlier. I had
driven with him to a meeting at Universal with Casey Silva.
Casey had been Adrian Lynn's former assistant and worked with

(23:45):
Don and Flashdance. He then ran development at Don's production company.
Casey knew Don as well as anybody, and now as
head of Universal, Don hoped Casey would want to once
again be in business together. There were reports that Don
had indeed pitched Casey and the Universal team on a
number of projects. Casey was reportedly mulling over Dan's projects

(24:08):
and had yet to make a decision. Meanwhile, Don had
left his agents at CIA and signed with his old
friend Jimmy Wyatt at I c M. Jimmy was really
excited for Don. Don was in great spirits and had
a real vision for his new company. He wanted to
direct and spoke about trying to act again. He was
even looking to returning to Canyon Ranch to try and

(24:29):
lose a few pounds. After the wire meeting, Don goes
home to dinner and then gets on a phone call
with his old friend James Tobak. Tobak has a new
film that he's trying to finance called Harvard Man, about
a college basketball player who gets into drugs and sexs
and whose basketball career begins to spiral. Don will have

(24:50):
a substantial role playing an FBI agent. Don knows that
the FBI has strict rules on body weight. He can't
realistically be a it's FBI agent. That wouldn't be realistic.
Don vows to cut carbs lose the weight. After the
weight discussion, they have a talk about financing. Don guarantees

(25:13):
he can get Joe Roth to give them the green
light by five pm the following Monday. Toeback asks how
is he going to get the head of Disney to
green light a movie that's filled with sex and sleeves
and that has absolutely no commercial value, to which Don says,
We're going to tell him all that up front. He's

(25:34):
going to know exactly what the movie is. He's going
to do it because of how I handled Dangerous Minds,
how I made that film into a massive hit, how
I handle Michelle Pifo who wanted to make an art
house film, how I've got the best track record in
the business for making money, and how I'm shopping my
new production company to every studio in town. That my

(25:56):
new company is something that Joe Roth and Disney can
a Ford to miss out on. That's how I'm going
to sell off on Harvard Man Done. According to James,
Toback was on the phone that night for nearly five hours.
Tobak would read done the entire screenplay over the phone.
Surely anyone having to listen to someone read an entire

(26:18):
screenplay over the phone would have suffered some sort of
ill fate of one kind or another. Tobak would report
that Don had been drinking red wine, and that he
had likely drifted off to sleep after their call. The
coroner's report stated that Don was found on the toilet
and Oliver's Stone Biography was lying on the floor next
to him. What could have transpired in the time that

(26:38):
Don hung up with Toback and going to the toilet
to read his biography on Oliver's stone. I've played out
this scenario dozens of times. Don's just been told he's
going to star in a movie. He lightly got off
the phone and assessed how much weight he needed to lose.
He was lightly shirtless, and because his bathroom was wall

(27:00):
to all mirrors, he was lightly in the bathroom. How
long was he looking at himself? Well, he's got the
twenty pills in his system. Is he growing tired? He's
carrying two and fifty pounds. He's been eating a lot
of peanut butter and now drinking red wine. So he
goes to sit down on the toilet, grabs his reading glasses,

(27:22):
picks up the Stone Biography, and keels over. That's it
so long the end of a life? Could it be
any less dramatic and any more pathetic and sad? Or
was there more? Did Don get off the phone with Tobac,

(27:45):
look at himself in the mirror, assess his massive girth,
and say, my life begins anew right here, right now.
I've gone into the blackest hole of darkness. I have
seen my death, and now I am blessed with one
more chance, one more shot to change my life. More
time is all I ask, And what do I do

(28:06):
with it? I would make peace. I would embrace the
impermanence of change. I would embrace the uncertainty of it all.
The intellect is a beautiful servant, but a terrible master.
I know that now. I know better. Now. Don's body
was found within twelve hours of his death. There was
a second Corners report and a second police report that

(28:29):
revealed Done did in fact die of drugs, and that
there were in fact thousands of pills as much as
worth in his cabinets. Done died alone, overweight, strung out,
and satis d of all optimistic about his future. When
we return. The tributes come pouring in. In the hours

(29:00):
after Don's death, every publication in the country ran this
front page headline, Hollywood producer of top Gun, Beverly Hill's
cop dead at fifty two. The press had always looked
to Don for his outlandish, brazen, and brutally honest confessions,
much to the dismay of Don, who was often upset
with the press for simply printing his statements word for word.

(29:23):
In Don's mind, he was being manipulated and had long
soured on his unfavorable press coverage. But when Don died,
the press was incredibly respectful. For the first time in
Don's life, he got the positive reviews he was seeking.
There were tributes in the Wall Street Journal, the Los
Angeles Magazine, and The New Yorker. John Gregory Dunn wrote

(29:46):
a sort of obituary slash profile on Don and their
time working together on their UFO movie Darma Blue. Don's
dear friend Steve Tish took out a full page ad
in Variety with a photo of a marble tomb in
a forest and the words of Jonathan Swift. When a
true genius appears in the world, you may know him
by this sign that the Dunces are all in confederacy

(30:08):
against him. Rest in peace, dear friend. Don's former assistant
and protege, Jeffrey Katzenberg, gave a tribute to Don at
Morton's around dawn every aspect of every day was magnified
in its intensity. The fun was more fun, the drama
was more dramatic. Nothing in life was ordinary. Linda Oapst

(30:33):
had perhaps the pitheist and certainly the most memorable tribute.
Like Elvis, Don died in the toilet for our sins.
Even today, twenty five years after Don's death, journalists are
still paying tribute. Kim Masters, the venerable Hollywood journalist who
has been covering entertainment for the past five decades, wrote

(30:56):
about her time with Don in a column on the
recently released Top Gun sequel. Don was brilliant and funny
and profoundly self destructive. He was also one of my
most important early sources. He absolutely gloried in the gossip
and social comedy of the town. I knew about the madness,
the hookers, and the blow and he knew that I
knew and took a dim view. But it wasn't my

(31:18):
job to look after him or to scold him. It
was my job to learn and report. On the day
of Gon's death, they were discussing an interview and whether
Don should speak out on his doctor, who had died
in his pool house. Masters wrote, I told him I
couldn't advise him, but I offered to let him off
the hook entirely. I didn't want to put more stress

(31:39):
on a person whose health had long been a worry.
But Don said he'd do the interview. Only hours after
we hung up, someone called me and said Don was dead. No,
he's not, I said, I was just talking to him.
With all the tributes that came pouring in, there was
one colleague of Don's who was conspicuously silent, one person

(32:00):
that knew Don best Don's best friend. Out of respect
for Jerry Bruckheimer's relationship with Don, we have purposefully avoided
any depiction or recreation of their twenty year friendship and partnership.
Don and Jerry were arguably the greatest producing duo in
the history of Hollywood. They were inarguably the most memorable

(32:22):
their style, their flair, their bad boy image. Always dressed
in matching black, with matching sports cars and matching office
desks and lookalike secretaries, they were one of a kind,
the likes of which we will never see again. They
came of age in the eighties and defined a decade
of filmmaking. Producer Bradley Fisher most aptly summed up their
clout when he said, Simpson Bruckheimer movies were the equivalent

(32:46):
of Marvel movies today. Throughout this series, we've looked at
how and why Don died at age fifty two and
such tragic circumstances. There were, of course, many factors and
many influences, namely drugs that led Don to leave the
most toxic corpse in the history of California autopsy. But
there is one cause of death that has been overlooked.

(33:08):
And forgive me the sentimentality, but let's just take a
look at this. A broken heart. Don was incapable of deep,
abiding love. He was to jaded, to damage to ever
think he was worthy of having a wife or a family.
But he had a best friend, Jerry. Jerry loved Don,

(33:28):
he was loyal to Don. When Jerry called to say
it was over, Don was devastated. Jerry had done everything
he could to help Don, and Don knew it. He
knew Jerry had never wanted the partnership to end, and
that that was perhaps the biggest tragedy of all. The
theory exists, and it is of course purely speculation, but

(33:51):
the theory exists that what ultimately killed Don was losing Jerry.
It was announced in the trades that on December Don
and Jerry's partnership had ended. One month later, on January,
Don was dead. As the credits open on the sequel
to Top Gun, that familiar lightning bolt logo of Don

(34:13):
and Jerry's production company flashes across the screen, and then,
much to our surprise, Don's name magically appears on the
movie screen produced by Don Simpson. Don, of course, had
nothing at all to do with producing the sequel of
Top Gun, but it was fitting that Jerry would give

(34:35):
his old friend the credit, for it was Jerry who
had always given Don the credit. Jerry was Don's protector
in life, and now he was his protector in death.
Must have brought a smile to Jerry's face. Knowing how
much Dawn would have loved the Top Gun sequel, For
Jerry knew better than anyone that for Don, making a
great film like Top Gun meant that the film could

(34:58):
make you feel as alive as the world around you,
and that movies should never be anything less. In the
days that followed Don's death, I took the rather macabre
approach of processing my grief in researching and recollecting on
those in Hollywood who suffered a death far worse than Don.

(35:19):
You'd be unsurprised to learn that there were many who
suffered far worse. The one that is perhaps the most
thematic to this story is that of Sunset Boulevard and
William Holden. Holden plays Joe gillis a dead man floating
in Norma desmond swimming pool who tells the tale of
Norma Desmond. By the end of the tale, we learn

(35:42):
of his demise. We see gillis informed Norma that there
will be no comeback, that her fan mail comes from
her butler, Max, and she has been forgotten. He disregards
Norman's desperate suicide state and attempts to leave the house
when Norma shoots him three times in the back and
he falls into the pool. A few years later, we

(36:05):
tracked the real William Holden, living not far from where
Don's doctor stripped naked and tried to climb out of
his ninth floor window. Holden has been staying in his
apartment on Ocean Avenue, an apartment where he would often
come to be alone. He is found dead in a
pool of blood, five days old. He had fallen down

(36:28):
trunk and hit his head on the corner of a table.
He had tried to stop the bleeding with a tissue,
but passed hours. He would not survive to tell the tale.
The Dance season two is executive produced by Will McCormick
and David Harris Klein. Klein also wrote and created the series.

(36:51):
Mike Jurst's is the editor, sound designer, and producer of
the series. The podcast is produced and narrated by Malia
Vera Drew That's Me. Louis Weymouth voices the character of
Pierce and also produces the series. For more episodes of
The Dawn season two, listen to the series on the
I Heart Radio app or wherever you listen to podcasts.