Liz Renay

Mickey Cohen was  a real bad guy, a Brooklyn born boy whose family moved to Los Angeles when he was seven (in 1920). In his long career (he died in 1976) Mickey Cohen served time in Alcatraz as well as time as the bodyguard to Bugsy Siegel (Harvey Keitel plays him in the film “Bugsy”). It has been said that it was also Mickey Cohen who set up Siegel for his assassination (he was sitting on a sofa  facing the big living room window of the house of his girlfriend Virginia Hill on Linden Drive in Beverly Hills when he was shot in a drive-by in 1947, after which Cohen took over Siegel’s “business interests”).

Although she seriously pursued an acting career for much of her long life, Liz Renay’s association with Cohen got her labeled as a “gun moll,” a popular term for a gangster’s girlfriend in the 30s, 40s and 50s. She might have been partly motivated by the thought that Cohen could help her movie career as he knew a lot of Hollywood stars and producers (one of his boys was Johhny Stompanato who was Lana Turner’s boyfriend until he was stabbed to death by her daughter Cheryl Crane).

As you will read in the obit, Liz Renay was used by Cohen for financial as well as sexual purposes, neither of which seemed to have given her pause to consider the implications of her association. Years after his death, she lived in the Hollywood Hills on Blue Jay Way (immortalized in the George Harrison song) where neighbors often spotted her (because of her flaming red hair – later bleached blonde) tooling down the  hill in her Corvette convertible with the initials “M.C.” on the door.

Nathaniel West in his novel “Day of the Locusts” captured all of these Los Angeles people for literature. Raymond Chandler did in his books too.  It is safe to conjecture that neither Chandler nor West never would have imagined that the death of one of their tawdry characters would make the obituaries in a London newspaper. But that’s show business.

Convicted of perjury in 1959 when her boyfriend, the racketeer Micky Cohen, was tried for tax evasion, she spent 27 months in prison, a sentence she always regarded as fatal to her career prospects as a budding film star.

As it was, her screen appearances were largely confined to such low-budget productions as The Thrill Killers (1964), Lady Godiva Rides (1969), Interlude of Lust (1981) and The Corpse Grinders 2 (2000). Perhaps her landmark role was as a murderess in John Waters's Desperate Living (1977).

Micky Cohen

She was born Pearl Elizabeth Dobbins at Mesa, Arizona, on April 14 1926. Raised by fanatically religious parents, she ran away from home to enter a Marilyn Monroe lookalike contest (which she won) and became a Las Vegas showgirl and 44DD bra model.

An inveterate attention-seeker, she first came to notice in 1950 when her antics on a film set in Phoenix earned her a five-page picture spread in Life magazine headed "Pearl's Big Moment".

Working as a stripper in New York, she dated Tony Coppola, bodyguard to Albert Anastasia, head of Murder Inc, before leaving for Hollywood in 1957. As Liz Renay, she worked at a charm school between taking small television parts fixed by Micky Cohen.

The pair were often photographed canoodling together, and when Cohen was accused of laundering mob money through her bank account she was jailed for perjury.

On her release, she toured with her daughter in a double striptease act; and in 1974, watched by a crowd of 4,000, she became the first grandmother to streak down Hollywood Boulevard at high noon. Although it was a publicity stunt for a film, the authorities charged her with indecent exposure. She was acquitted.

In one of her several memoirs, My First 2,000 Men, she claimed to have had flings with numerous celebrities, including the baseball player Joe DiMaggio and Cary Grant.

Liz Renay's seven marriages ended in divorce. Her daughter committed suicide on her 39th birthday in 1982.