The nine white letters reading “HOLLYWOOD” rise 45 feet over the hills of Los Angeles, forming one of the world’s most identifiable cultural symbols. The sign is a must-see tourist attraction for the 10 million tourists who go to Griffith Park each year to catch a look. But it’s much more to budding stars wanting to make it big: a reminder of the city’s illustrious history and a hopeful peek into the possibilities of their own sparkling future.

However, Ryan Murphy’s new Netflix series Hollywood, which is suitably named after the prestigious district, tells a lesser-known narrative of the iconic sign.

The film is about a beautiful young actress who was chewed up and spat out by the film industry, and it was written by Jeremy Pope’s character Archie. She climbed up to the “H” of the Hollywood sign and jumped after being cut from her first major film and losing her studio contract.

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Millicent “Peg” Entwistle was born in Glanmorgan, Wales, in February 1908. She was the daughter of actor Robert Entwistle and Emily Stevenson Entwistle. According to James Zeruk Jr.’s book Peg Entwistle and the Hollywood Sign Suicide: A Biography, her parents split when she was a youngster.

Following her parents’ divorce, she spent her early years in London before immigrating to the United States with her father at a young age. In 1922, tragedy struck when her father perished in a vehicle accident in New York City. Entwistle and her siblings then moved in with their uncle.

She had always aspired to be a Broadway performer, and the family relocated to Los Angeles after a few years. Peg, on the other hand, was adamant about her aspirations and returned to New York to act.

Entwistle began her Broadway career when she was 17 years old. Her performance in The Wild Duck reputedly influenced a young Bette Davis, who told her mother, “I want to be exactly like Peg Entwistle,” after viewing Entwistle’s performance.

Entwistle’s plays were well received, and she was gaining a reputation as a rising star. But this optimism was short lived.

Entwistle toured with the New York Theatre Guild.
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Entwistle married actor Robert Keith in 1927, the same year she featured in Tommy, but the two separated two years later, partly because he had concealed his secret son from her. Brian Keith, who was then six years old, went on to play the father in the original version of The Parent Trap, starring Haley Mills.

While travelling with the Theatre Guild, she continued to perform and even received some notoriety from a New York Times piece about her. Entwistle told the Oakland Tribune in 1929 that she wished for more difficult acting jobs.

“I would rather play roles that carry conviction. Maybe it is because they are the easiest and yet the hardest things for me to do. To play any kind of an emotional scene I must work up to a certain pitch. If I reach this in my first word, the rest of the words and lines take care of themselves. But if I fail, I have to build up the balance of the speeches, and in doing this the whole characterisation falls flat. I feel that I am cheating myself. I don’t know whether other actresses get this same reaction or not, but it does worry me.”

Entwistle continued to aspire to a career on the stage, but she jumped at the chance to audition for roles in the film business. Thirteen Women, a novel about murder and the supernatural with a tinge of lesbian romance, was intended to be her big break. But the relationship between Entwistle’s character and another lady led to most of her parts being cut. It had nothing to do with her performance and everything to do with the tight censoring regulations of the day; she only got roughly four minutes of screen time in total. Unfortunately, Entwistle had broken a theater contract in order to appear in the film, and she was painted as an untrustworthy outcast in the theatre world. Her contract with RKO Pictures was then terminated. She thought she didn’t have a future.

She left her uncle’s home on Beachwood Drive on September 16, 1932, telling him she was going to meet some friends at a local drug shop, trekked into the canyon, and climbed up to the sign.

A hiker going beneath the Hollywoodland sign two days later discovered a woman’s shoe, jacket, and handbag, along with a suicide note. When the hiker peered down and found Entwistle’s body, he reported the information to the authorities. Police later assumed Entwistle climbed to the top of the sign using a workman’s ladder attached to the back of the letter.

“I am afraid I am a coward and I am sorry for many things,” she said in her message. “If I had only done this long ago I could have saved a lot of pain.”

Peg Entwistle has become a Hollywood legend in the 88 years since her death. A letter giving her the lead role in a play… about a lady driven to death, is said to have come the day after she died. Others claim that her spirit has been haunting the iconic monument ever since, leaving behind the aroma of gardenias, her favorite perfume.