Nicole M. Taylor - The Extra Girl

F ebruary 4th, 1953. Still winter in most parts of the country, but it was plenty warm in Los Angeles, California where the sun shines all year long. Warm enough that thirty-two-year-old housewife Cherie Platt could take her toddler, Donald Platt, out to the park to play.

In a small gazebo next to a picnic table, young Donald discovered an array of unusual items: a womans hair comb with long strands of red hair still attached, a small black appointment book with the letter M monogrammed on the cover in gold leaf, and a black pocketbook with a snap-close, empty save for a handful of bobby pins and a receipt for groceries purchased at a nearby supermarket.

With this seemingly simple discovery, Donald and Cherie Platt would unknowingly break one of the most enduring mysteries in LA history.

Locating the owner of the missing items was easyin addition to the monogram, her name and address were neatly printed on the first page of the appointment book. Moana McKee, a failed actress and dancer who lived with her mother in a small apartment in LAs Hancock Park neighborhood.

Thats when I stopped reading, scrolling down until I found the comments section. I signed in with my real nameBryce Polkand included a link to my website because I wanted everyone who read my comment to know that I wasnt just some random troll; I was a goddamned expert.

Wow. This article is so riddled with basic errors that I cant even bring myself to complete it. Here are just a few of the MANY problems I noted:

1. The hair in the comb was not red. Mona McKee was a strawberry blonde, something that is very apparent if you had bothered to look at even one color photo of her.

2. HER NAME IS NOT MOANA! That name is on the birth certificate, yes, but she went exclusively by Mona for her entire life and that is how she is credited in all of her 62 (yes, sixty-two) movies.

Which brings me to...

3. Mona McKee was in no way a failed actress. (She was also not in any meaningful way a dancer. She learned choreography for certain roles but she was not trained in any type of dance and would not have considered it her primary specialty.) Over the course of more than a decade, she made more than 50 films and successfully transitioned from child star to serious adult actressa jump some of todays starlets only WISH they could make. While it is true that she was never a marquee name she worked steadily and consistently and had really only begun to come into her own when she vanished.

4. A minor point comparatively but this still goes to show how little you truly understand about this case: the house (not an apartment as youve stated) was in Monas name. She purchased it with the money she made in her failed acting career. Her mother did reside there, as did her sister and her family, but it was Monas home.

In the future, please do some basic research before you take it upon yourself to opine about a situation that is still very sensitive to many people.

As soon as I pressed POST I felt a deflation. There was something satisfying about telling off a know-nothing idiot who nevertheless felt comfortable presenting himself as an authority, but it wasnt the sort of thing I was supposed to be doingnot in general and not at that moment. My presentation started in less than fifteen minutesId really just returned to my hotel room to change my shirt and grab my laptop. I had gotten distracted, as usual, by one of my Google alerts for variations on Monas name.

Some days it seemed that the only people who still cared about Mona McKee were the ghoulish weirdos who liked to look up old murder stories online. I found her regularly on all sorts of Most Mysterious Disappearances Ever and People Who Just Vanished lists, in YouTube round-ups of the strangest California mysteries, and on message boards dedicated to dissecting crimes that happened before most of the posters were born.

I wouldnt mind it so much, except that they would invariably fabricate details to spice up what was ultimately a pretty simple and unsatisfying story. Mona was gone and no one knew why but, in their telling, she became a former showgirl, a gangsters moll, a high-end prostitute, and even a Bonnie-and-Clyde-style bank robber. No one ever wanted to talk about her early work in the Little Sally series of films or her big break on At the Sandpiper Inn or her scene-stealing turn in Shores of Desire. No one wanted to speculate about the content of her lost films or extrapolate the direction her career might have taken, had she lived past nineteen. All they wanted was a good solution to a murder mystery, a cackling perp with blood on his hands.

The sad part was, I would probably get more attention for my website (www.monamckee.com) just from that single pissy comment than I would from this presentation, which Id spent months preparing (years, if one considered the totality of my scholarship on Mona and other unfairly overlooked bit players of the early 1950s). The West Coast Cinema Studies Conference Board had deigned to give me a slot but had made their low opinion of me very clear, putting me at seven p.m. on the first night of the conference. Everyone would either be in the bar or at dinner, still catching up with friends and colleagues and extremely uninterested in a presentation from an unpublished grad student.

As narrow and crappy as the opportunity was, however, it was an opportunity all the same and one that I could not afford to pass up. I still had a fantasy that someonean enlightened thinker with deep pocketswas going to chance upon me and, seeing the work I was doing, offer to fund my book on Mona. At the very least, presenting at conferences gave me something to point to when my academic advisors demanded to know why my thesis still wasnt finished.