A child actress in the 1940s, Lora Lee Michel was billed as a “sensation” with “the greatest appeal since Shirley Temple.” But following a scandalous custody trial and a stint in federal prison, she vanished from the public eye.
When Leslie Hannah and her sister were children, their aunt, Lora Lee Michel, appeared to them as a spectral figure, becoming real only when she appeared on screen.
All families have their stories. But for Wright Isaacs and her two daughters, theirs was a ghost story. For years, the family’s search yielded some clues, a few leads — but mostly dead-ends. “I don’t think there was ever a time they weren’t trying to find her,” Wallace said. Soon, I was watching Lora Lee’s films, excavating archives, sifting through old movie magazines, reading newspaper clippings, obituaries, county clerk records, letters and court filings. Like an anthropologist, I began tracing genealogy reports and tracking down anyone who crossed paths with her, trying to understand what they might tell me about who Lora Lee Michel was and what happened to her. Eventually, I discovered the many hidden threads of her life.
Money was tight. Willie, known as “Red,” worked as a truck driver, with a side hustle in the local cotton business. He frequently drank, and Lena frequently bolted. The home Barbara found herself in was perfectly ordinary and strict. But with Otto and Lorraine, Lora Lee found herself catapulted into a world where childhood make-believe came to equal money.
Invited to sing and dance at the Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel in front of 500 studio officials, Lora Lee ended the routine by sitting “on every lap in the place,” her mother boasted to their hometown paper in 1948.Lora Lee could deliver both charm and two to three minutes of uninterrupted dialogue. She landed her first big movie role, playing Lulu, the daughter of Gary Cooper and Ann Sheridan, in the 1948 romantic comedy “Good Sam.
When “Good Sam” opened, the local paper devoted a full-page article to the girl they called “a 7-year-old package of personality plus.” In the accompanying photo, it appears as if the entire town turned up, holding a banner that read, “Lora Lee Michel, Schulenburg’s Own Movie Star.” That same year, Lora Lee received top billing alongside Richard Denning and Frances Rafferty in the murder mystery “Lady at Midnight.”
Wargin, however, did not take Lora Lee to the interview. She went to the authorities, alleging that she had seen bruises on the actress. Lora Lee told the officers she was afraid of her adoptive mother, who she said mistreated her, starving her to keep her small for roles. She pleaded “never [to] send her back to that woman.”
In a letter to his brother Henry, Otto called Cummins “our red hot lawyer” and expressed his belief that they would prevail. “I feel so confident that God is with us.” Otto countered that he had nearly gone bankrupt keeping his wife and daughter in Hollywood, telling one newspaper, “I have sold all of my war bonds and sold some of my property to keep them out there, where I didn’t want them to go in the first place.”“We are up against one of the slickest, slimiest, diabolical frame-ups you could possibly imagine,” he said. “Ona Wargin has been working and waiting for this opportunity for two years.
The matter of Lora Lee’s custody was the first issue to go before the court. The hearing began on Jan. 23, 1950, before Judge Alfonso Aloysius Scott.“This is proving to be a worldwide international case,” Otto wrote Henry. “You can not imagine the wide publicity.”Lora Lee claimed that her adoptive mother beat her with a hairbrush if she gained a pound, news reports said. She told the judge that she was so hungry that she was forced to steal milk and cheese left on her neighbors’ doorsteps.
Lena’s time on the stand was fraught. She called the adoption a “fraud,” insisting that Red, her ex-husband, had threatened her with harm if she didn’t sign papers giving the girl away. She had no idea where Lora Lee was living and had no money to look for her. It was only after she saw “Good Sam” that she realized her daughter was in Hollywood.
Inside the courtroom, hearing that Judge Scott denied the petition to remove her from the Michels and return her to Lena, Lora Lee burst into tears. “I want my real mother,” she sobbed, according to multiple accounts. In 1950, trials involving the custody and purported abuse of Lora Lee captured headlines around the world. It was front-page news in the Los Angeles Times.
Lorraine explained, “Lora Lee is happy here. She loves acting and she loves Hollywood. It would be a shame to cut her career short at this point,” The Times reported. Sundstrom called the Hollywood sheriff’s office. Lora Lee was taken into custody and sent to juvenile hall for the night. In the morning, Scott and an investigator from the district attorney’s juvenile office went to see Lora Lee. “One thing is certain,” he vowed. “We’re going to get to the bottom of this and I mean the real bottom.”
“She’s a precocious, emotional child who could get a lot of people in trouble,” The Times quoted the judge as saying. “I can’t tell when she’s acting and when she’s telling the truth.” Parsing through the whiplash account of the hearing and its aftermath, it’s not hard to see that this child actor was acting out. Precocious and savvy but still a young girl, Lora Lee barely had the chance to discover, let alone develop, her own persona beyond her movie roles. She was separated from her siblings at age 5 and given a new name. Now she found herself toggling between the whims and agendas of the adults around her. And she was lonely.
More shocking, Lora Lee claimed that her acting coach, Wargin, had instructed her on what to say. It was Wargin who told her to declare that she wanted to live in a shack with her birth mother and that her adoptive father took her to bars during the custody hearing. And it was Wargin who directed her to take milk and cottage cheese and not ask any questions.
Wargin fervently denied ever coaching the girl or instructing her to steal from her neighbors. She testified to seeing “marks on her arms — they were black and blue — her little buttocks were black and blue.” In July 1950, the Michels returned to Schulenburg. Lora Lee, who remained in the children’s home in Altadena during the trial and after, joined them six weeks later. Judge Scott, who retained jurisdiction over the girl, authorized her return to Texas, where local authorities would have oversight.
“It’s wonderful here. I love Texas. I hate California,” Lora Lee, wearing a party dress and ribboned pigtails, told the reporters waiting for her when she first landed. “Heck, I always got enough to eat,” she was heard to say. After Lora Lee’s return, however, Wright Isaacs recalled that her mother, Lillie, kept the girls apart. She didn’t understand why she was allowed to see her sister only under controlled, limited circumstances — or not at all. While all of Schulenburg had basked in Lora Lee’s movie glory, Wright Isaacs was never allowed to see any of her films. Once Lora Lee returned, Wright Isaacs said her mother referred to her sister as “that girl.
Lorraine had told reporters that they wanted “to give her a complete change from the bright lights and excitement of Hollywood.” And they did, exchanging the silver screen for local plays and recitals that Lora Lee now regularly performed in around Schulenburg and Houston. By 1953, the picture had changed considerably. At 65, Otto died of pancreatic cancer. Lorraine followed two years later after a battle with lung cancer. She was 66.This is the point at which Lora Lee’s story began to fray and sputter. The Michels were no longer around to chase movie and TV roles. And Lora Lee, now a teenager, began to lead a more obscure life, its twists and turns seemingly lost to history.
Lora Lee briefly attended Mount Carmel Catholic High School, a Houston private school. She was a poor student who was largely truant. The Rev. Gerard Benson, the school’s principal, told investigators that he doubted Lora Lee had ever been in films, saying she was “mentally incapable.” But he pointed out that she was “always trying to act.”She got married the first time, at 17, to a man named Donald Mayo Ford on Feb. 28, 1958, according to court filings.
Seven months later, Lora Lee checked herself into Austin State Hospital, a psychiatric facility, the oldest in Texas. “Please be assured that everything possible is being done for your niece’s comfort and welfare,” the hospital’s social service department wrote to Henry Michel, Otto’s brother. Wright Isaacs’ parents kept this from her, and she only found out about the hospitalization years later.
Owen had several siblings and two daughters. I was able to locate his surviving sisters and one sister-in-law. Over the next four weeks, we went back and forth. She asked why I thought Lora Lee’s husband might be her father, but she didn’t yet agree to speak to me.drama in our family,” she blurted out. “So that was my hesitation.”
Before we spoke, McWilliams tried talking with her mother. “My mom is still maintaining that this was all a secret — that she didn’t know that Daddy put one over on her,” she told me. But McWilliams was skeptical. Her mother had recoiled at the mention of Lora Lee, telling her daughter, “I cannot believe this woman has come back to haunt me.”
Before ruling this out as a curious coincidence, I tried calling Bray’s children, who were largely spread out across the South. It was a shot in the dark. But before we hung up, I told him I had one last question. Perhaps he remembered hearing some crazy story growing up about a woman stealing his father’s car?Minutes later my phone rang. It was Bray. “I just spoke to my sister Penny in Georgia,” he told me. “She knows everything. Call her.”
But Pearson took a dislike to her immediately. “Well, she was just really horrible. She said to me one time, ‘I screwed your father on the piano bench.’ I mean, and here I am, a 14-year-old girl!” She added, “But anyway, I think she was a con artist.” Just months later, she ran off again, this time driving off in the Ford, forcing Bray to take the bus to work. But, Pearson said, “I just had this feeling one day that she was going to come back by the house and take some more stuff out.”“If you want your car back, you better get home pretty quick,” Pearson told her father. “She’s here.” Pearson then sneaked out and let the air out of two tires.
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