Charles H. Falke -- Heads Up

The 55-year-old burlesque manager-producer suffered a mental collapse after attending his mother's funeral four days earlier and, devastated by depression, walked off The Sporting Duchess, a burlesque show he was managing in Union City, New Jersey.  Falke traveled to New York City and checked into a third floor room at the Forrest Hotel at 224 West Forty-ninth Street.  On the afternoon of March 20, 1928, as a friend was knocking on his door to inquire about his health, the veteran burlesque manager leaped to his death.  Falke barely missed actresses Miriam Hopkins and Frances Goodrich as they approached the stage door of the Ritz Theatre where they were appearing in the John McGowan comedy Excess Baggage.  The hysterical women required medical attention.  Falke died later that day at Bellevue Hospital from a compound fracture of the skull and other injuries.

Tom Forman -- The Wreck

Courtesy:  www.silentsaregolden.com

 A World War I veteran who entered the military as a private and was discharged a lieutenant in the flying corps, Forman acted in several motion pictures prior to turning to direction in 1920 with a pair of films for the Famous Players-Lasky studio:  The Ladder of Lies and The Sins of Rosanne.  From 1921 through 1926, the director helmed some 25 films including a 1923 version of the classic Western The Virginian, staring Kenneth Harlan in the title role.  In early 1926, Forman suffered a nervous breakdown brought on by years of overwork.  Separated from his wife and child, the 34-year-old director was recuperating at his parents' home at 26 Avenue Thirty-one in Venice, California.  On November 7, 1926, one day before he was set to begin directing The Wreck for Columbia, Forman rose early and went into the bathroom to shave.  His mother and father, cooking breakfast together in the kitchen, did not hear the shot.  When Forman failed to answer their call, they found him lying full length on the bathroom floor with a .45-caliber revolver beside him.  According to authorities, Forman had pressed the gun so tightly against his heart that there had been no sound of a report.

Oliver Jay Bright -- None too Bright

The sales manager for 23 years of the Levy-Page Company, a music equipment house in Norfolk, Virginia, Bright abruptly quit just weeks prior to the last day of his life. , June 9, 1936.  At 3:40 P.M. that day, Bright, 55, visited the City Hall Rifle Range in Norfolk, calmly asked for a .22-caliber target pistol, and announced to bystanders, "I want to see if I can shoot a bullseye."  He fired two shots at the target then fired a third into his right temple.  Bright died four hours later at St. Vincent's Hospital.  In a note found afterward, the former sales manager explained that "business worries" had driven him to the act.

Samuel Martorana -- The Band Doesn't Play On

In addition to organizing and conducting the Reading (Pennsylvania) Royal Italian Band, the 31-year-old Martorana played in the Federal Band, the Ringgold Band, and the Reading Symphony Orchestra.  In the weeks prior to his suicide, colleagues noticed that Martorana was acting strangely.  Despite having a pregnant wife at home, the conductor worked ceaselessly over the scores of operas and the creation of band music.  At 6:30 A.M. on March 5, 1939, Martorana leaped head-long from the third floor window of his sister-in-law's West Reading home where his wife awaited the birth of their second child.  Shortly afterward, the conductor's body was found outside on the pavement by his mother-in-law.  The coroner issued a certificate of death by suicide, blaming mental derangement brought on by excessive work and worry over his wife's condition.

Jess Arnold -- He Died with His Boots Off

Arnold, a foreign correspondent during the Spanish Civil War who once operated a two-man news bureau with Walter Cronkite for the International News Service in El Paso, was a well-known and colorful figure in Texas.  A novel based on his war reportage, Reunion in Barcelona, was serialized in Cosmopolitan magazine, and his short story "A Mission to General Houston" served as the basis for the 1950 Paramount film The Eagle and the Hawk, which starred John Payne and Rhonda Fleming.  On January 3, 1964, Arnold's body was found at the Garza Ranch on Brodie Lane near Austin, Texas.  The 46-year-old writer had fully dressed and packed a suitcase before firing a fatal shot into his chest with a British made .38-caliber pistol that he had asked a friend to sight for him a few days earlier.  Several years before when he talked of living to be a hundred, Arnold wrote his own obituary, dated it March 11, 2016, and gave it to a friend for safekeeping.  It read:

"Jess Arnold, the centaur passed away today,  The rootingest, tootingest, non-fightingest, runningest Texan that ever lived died quietly....  The Mighty Arnold died as he lived -- with his boots off.  He never wore a hat.  The Mighty Arnold never wrote anything of note, but did keep on living.  He was always going to write a novel, but never got around to it....  'Hell,' he would say, 'that takes work.'"

Hugh (Bud) Ernst -- The Reporter's Friend

Ernst, a radio producer and husband of Betty Furness, the actress who was then doing the Westinghouse commercials on the CBS television program Studio One (1948-1958), called a newspaper reporter on the afternoon of April 10, 1950, and told him that if he went to his room at New York City's Westbury Hotel at 15 East Sixty-ninth Street he would get a good story.  The newspaper called Furness at her Park Avenue home and she went to the Westbury.  While Furness waited in the lobby, a bellboy entered Ernst's room to find that the 39 year old had apparently placed a 20-gauge shotgun between his knees, closed his mouth over the barrel, and pulled the trigger.  In a note addressed to Furness, Ernst claimed that he was "tired of everything."