Suicide at the Hotel Empire
The tragic mystery of Helen Zurfluh, a real-life Judy Barton.
(The San Francisco Chronicle, courtesy of Christine Madrid French. Animation by Joel Gunz.)
This article is adapted from The Architecture of Suspense: The Built World in the Films of Alfred Hitchcock, (September, 2022, University of Virginia Press).
THE BODY HURTLED FROM THE PRECIPICE, plunging past astonished onlookers in a final, irrevocable, descent. Such scenes of death by falling occur throughout Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo (1958). Indeed, leaping into the void is a critical part of this story of betrayal and loss of identity. But the subtle mysteries of this film reach beyond the cinema. In an eerie parallel to these themes, one very real woman, an out-of-work salesclerk living in San Francisco, jumped to her death from the roof of the Hotel Empire only a few weeks before Hitchcock, his actors and crew began filming on the same spot.
Our story begins on Tuesday, August 27, 1957. The day opened with fair skies, with an expected high temperature of sixty-six degrees—slightly warmer than it had been earlier in the week. The morning edition of the San Francisco Examiner published a first look at Fords’ Edsel automobile, fall fashions at the department store I. Magnin, along with the local film screenings and television listings. Viewers could tune in to The Alfred Hitchcock Hour at 10 o’clock that night to watch a murderous taxidermist in “The West Warlock Time Capsule,” with Henry James and Mildred Dunnock. Or movie-goers could catch a double bill of “Hitchcock classics”—The 39 Steps and The Lady Vanishes over at the 4Star theater on 23rd and Clement streets. Like the Golden City’s famed fog, Hitchcock himself seemed to be in the air.
The staff at the Hotel Empire prepared for another busy day, serving breakfast to the long-term guests at the residential hotel. Helen Zurfluh—the aforementioned unemployed saleswoman—ate breakfast at a solitary table in the dining room. She left to catch the automatic elevator back to her second-floor room, carrying the newspaper and her room key. But she failed to exit the elevator on floor two. Instead, she shot straight to the roof, walked out on a ladder over the fire escape and leaped into thin air. She left no note. Passerby Virginia Bryant, walking near the hotel entrance at the time, narrowly escaped her own death that morning. Helen landed on the sidewalk a mere two feet away.[1]
Helen’s history is as mysterious as that of the characters Madeleine and Judy from Hitchcock’s landmark film. Before she checked into the Hotel Empire, she’d been a patient at the Napa State Hospital. The newspapers reported that she was despondent “because of her failure to find work in San Francisco department stores.”[2] Hotel staff reported to Police Sergeant George Simonetti that she had “appeared ill and depressed during her month’s residence at the hotel.” Her horoscope in the San Francisco Examiner that morning had read, “Generous influences promise a productive, heartwarming day.”[3] How did she end up dead at the Hotel Empire? Did Hitchcock know about this traumatic real-life incident when he started filming Vertigo?
(The San Francisco Chronicle, courtesy of Christine Madrid French.)
Helen
HELEN'S LIFE STARTED ON A BRIGHTER NOTE. She was born in Portland, Oregon, on May 11, 1907, to Samuel Wertheimer and Ruby Marks. Although Samuel was from Salt Lake City and Ruby from Portland, the couple lived in and were engaged in San Francisco in 1902. They later moved to Oregon, relocating frequently throughout Helen’s life. By 1910, Samuel was the manager of a department store in Portland. The family at that time (including his brother, Ralph) had two live-in servants (Nettie and Katie) at their house on Marshall Street. As a child “Little Helen Wertheimer” once served as a ring bearer at a socially prominent wedding attended by 400 guests. She was “gowned in [a] white chiffon frock and bearing the ring on the center of a white satin pillow,” followed by a maid of honor carrying a shepherd’s crook decorated with pink roses.[4] The family of four later found a place in Astoria, Oregon, and then returned to San Francisco where Helen served as vice president of the Junior Council of Jewish Women. In 1930, the family lived at 2205 Sacramento Street in an Italianate-style structure completed in 1908 (apartments there now sell for $1.5 million and up). Helen was listed on the census as a “saleslady.” She was an active person, traveling south to Santa Barbara, Los Angeles, and Palm Springs with her aunt and uncle in the spring of 1934.[5] By 1940, she had finished two years of college, but still lived with her brother and father. The three of them moved after Ruby passed away, this time to an apartment at 3299 Washington Street, a Victorian Revival-Gingerbread style complex built in 1916 near the Presidio military post. Her brother Ralph became a lawyer with the U.S. Department of Agriculture, served as president of the Young Democrats of San Francisco, and graduated from both the University of California and Harvard University. He later moved out with his new wife Ernestine.
Helen Zurfluh’s death certificate. (Courtesy of Christine Madrid French.)
Samuel passed away in 1952. Shortly thereafter, Helen accepted a proposal of marriage from Benjamin Zurfluh, a native of San Francisco who was sixteen years her junior. They celebrated with friends “at a party in the future bride’s home.”[6] There is, however, no evidence they were ever married. In fact, she was listed as “Miss Helen Zurfluh,” in the Contra Costa Gazette report of her death. Perhaps she was separated or divorced, or never completed the engagement.[7] At some point she entered treatment at Napa State Hospital, which held more than 5000 patients in 1957. The hospital offered occupational, recreational, and music therapies, a library, “weekly motion picture shows” and a patient’s monthly magazine.[8]
The San Francisco Chronicle coverage of Helen’s death appeared under the title “Jobless Woman in Death Leap,” above a three-quarter page advertisement for cashmere sweaters from I. Magnin & Company, a department store where she could not find employment and where character Judy Barton worked in Vertigo.[9] The newspaper printed a graphic of the “Path of Death,” in which a “dotted line traces the death plunge Helen Zurflua [sic] took from her hotel,” a drop that passed directly by the blade sign highlighted in Vertigo’s interior and exterior views of the building. The undertaker received the call by 12:25 p.m.; her brother Ralph identified the body. The funeral was held at Emmanuel El Chapel, two days after her death, accompanied by an organist that was paid $3.50 for professional services. Helen wore her own clothes for her burial in Casket No. 229.
The Hotel
VERTIGO'S JUDY BARTON (played by Kim Novak) lived at the no-frills Empire Hotel. Its revelatory scene, when Scottie Fergusen (Stewart) realizes her duplicity, takes place here. Her room is suffused with the toxicity of distrust, a green atmosphere generated by the hotel’s neon sign just outside her window. Within this environment, Scottie pieces together Judy’s real story when he snaps a necklace around her neck that was once worn by Madeleine.
Judy on the street, where Zurfluh landed. She also appears in the window above.
(Composite image from Vertigo. Design and additional photography by Joel Gunz.)
The real hotel, like the fictional one—not to mention so many characters in Vertigo and perhaps the film’s version of San Francisco itself—had fallen into decline. Located at 940 Sutter Street, it opened as the Hotel Glen Royal, designed and built by William Helbing, of the Helbing Company, in 1925. Helbing was a prominent developer in San Francisco at the time and constructed at least seven other hotels in the area. In an unusual arrangement, this prolific entrepreneur assumed three different roles at his properties: owner, designer/architect, and builder. The building is typical of the period, with four arched openings at the street level (two doors and two large windows), with the main entrance near the center of the structure. The base is accentuated with decorative block masonry that supports four bays of windows illuminating the guest rooms above. The cornice line is simply articulated; the most accurate style description would be “Italian Renaissance Revival” with an urban twist.
The Hotel Glen Royal announced its debut in the San Francisco Examiner with an advertisement for the “Opening Dinner,” in the “beautifully furnished and up to date” building.[10] Later posts in the same newspaper promoted the hotel as “San Francisco’s Newest Hostelry,” with a detailed description of the modern features:
Built and furnished for comfort as a first-class family hotel. It has an atmosphere of refinement accentuated throughout and caters particularly to refined out-of-town visitors. Large rooms, gorgeously furnished; spacious closets and dressing rooms. Every room with bath and shower. Running ice water.[11]
The hotel was purchased by Sacramento banker Harry C. Muddox in 1927 and sold to Eugene N. Fritz in 1938, a “capitalist” who maintained a chain of properties in San Francisco.[12] By the 1940s, the hotel was known alternatively as the “Empire Lodge” and the “Empire Hotel,” with rooms “including private bath, shower, and telephone” advertised at $17.50 a week in 1957.[13] During World War II, the hotel filled with ladies when the Coast Guard leased the hotel as a “SPAR barracks” to house between “100 and 140 . . . women, on duty in San Francisco,” with plans to expand further with more recruits arriving from Palm Beach, Florida.[14] SPAR—an acronym for“Semper Paratus—Always Ready”—was used to denote the U.S. Coast Guard Women’s Reserve, established by Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1942.[15] The San Francisco Examiner noted the change from private hotel to military housing, reporting that “where maids once went from room to room making beds and sweeping carpets, SPARS will arrange their own bunks and fan down the deck,” while officers’ spent time in their quarters at the eighth-floor penthouse.[16]
By 1957, the Hotel Empire was under new ownership, having been recently purchased by Bob Schuman with Mike Armstrong and Mark Annau. Schuman hired Carl Engel to redecorate The Twelfth Knight bar in an “Elizabethean motif,” with line drawing murals “studded with jewels” and twelve shields drawn by tenants of the hotel. (The sign for the bar is visible during the exterior shots in Vertigo.) Guests and visitors at the time could get a “complete dinner” for $1.25 (including N.Y. steaks, chicken or chops) from 5:30 to 9 p.m. The San Francisco Chronicle reviewed it as “one of the best buys in town” and a “terrific dinner.”[17] The Plush Room cocktail lounge opened at 4 p.m. and welcomed visitors until 2 a.m. daily. As for the hotel, the classified advertisements noted that the “large sunny rooms,” started at $15 a week—with a telephone, private bath and housekeeping included. Some rooms also had access to a sundeck. The hotel had a long history by that point and had converted to a residential format as it aged. The prices for rooms fell about 15% over rates at the beginning of the year. Nonetheless, the lobby retained some dignity, with two-story tall square columns framing a Juliette balcony on the second floor.
In 1959, owners Ethel and Anna Ross sold the Hotel Empire for $400,000 to an undisclosed buyer.[18] Sid Goldie and Mary Jenkins ran the popular Plush Room, featuring singers such as Tiny Watson (“300 pounds of Dynamite!”). Other businesses, such as Sandro’s Italian Restaurant operated in adjacent spaces.[19] The hotel was later known as the York Hotel and featured an entertainment space named the Empire Plush Room, reflecting the long history of the building.[20]
To confuse matters, there was another Hotel Empire in San Francisco during the same period, near the Civic Center at Leavenworth and McAllister Streets. (The presence of two hotels with the same name might explain why the canopy of the Sutter Street hotel is emblazoned with “Empire Hotel,” while the neon sign reads “Hotel Empire.”) Formerly the William Taylor Hotel, and the taller of the two Empire buildings,that grand edifice featured a Sky Room in the penthouse on the 24th floor boasting views of the city from an Art Deco-designed bar. A postcard for the Sky Room described the romance of the city in Hitchcock’s time, viewable from the penthouse: “Long files of street lights marching up the encircling hills. Blazing windows from a thousand serrated buildings. Neon signs intense with green and crimson fires. And overhead, the spangled canopy of the sky, with perhaps a silver crescent sailing through wisps of cloud.”[21]
Hitchcock
QUESTIONS EMERGE FROM THE LAYERING OF FACT AND FICTION. Did Hitchcock hear about the tragic death of Helen, which was published in at least five Northern California newspapers? And if so, did he tell James Stewart or Kim Novak about the real-life tragedy that so closely mirrored the fate of the heroine in his movie? Was Judy’s profession as a shopgirl at I. Magnin written into the script as a tribute to the hotel’s ill-fated real-life occupant?
Hitchcock directing Kim Novak as Judy Barton. (Universal Pictures.)
According to news reports in the San Francisco Enquirer, Alfred Hitchcock was in San Francisco ten days before Helen’s suicide. On or around August 17, he called Ernie’s for a dinner reservation and discussed using the interior of the restaurant with the owners. At that point the film went by the working title of “From Among the Dead” or “From Amongst the Dead.” Hitchcock didn’t end up filming on site, though he did mention in an October interview that “I went there for a delightful dinner one night and it seemed like just the right setting for us.”[22] Instead, production designer Henry Bumstead re-created both the façade and the interior of the building for filming on the set at Paramount.
Hitchcock’s Unit Production Manager, Doc Erickson, was interviewed on the delays associated with location shooting for the film, in which it reportedly took “the Alfred Hitchcock people over a year to shoot eight days worth of San Francisco scenery.” The production started in September 1956, and Erickson “made and cancelled all arrangements five different times.” He provided a lengthy interview on the topic:
In twenty years at Paramount, this is the longest I’ve ever worked on one picture. To begin with, last September, we had a prepared script and two stars, Vera Miles and Jimmy Stewart. But Hitch was dissatisfied with parts of the script—that is the story didn’t ‘develop’ as rapidly as expected. We were just a bit too optimistic. By the time it was finally approved in December, Hitch got sick, had to have an operation. We were ready to roll by March [1957]—Hitch had a relapse, more surgery. Around Eastertime we found out Vera Miles was pregnant. Had we been able to go ahead right then, we could’ve shot her scenes before she was in trouble photographically. But Hitch was still recuperating. At least we had to give up on Miles altogether and arrange to borrow Kim Novak from Columbia. She wasn’t available until September, which meant another delay. That wasn’t the end, though. Novak recently got into a salary hassle with Columbia and they put her on suspension. But they straightened it all out after a week, and in two days we can start rolling.[23]
On September 11, 1957, Hitchcock started filming “Among the Dead” at Paramount. Shooting location scenes in San Francisco occurred in late September and October. Jimmy Stewart told celebrity reporter Hedda Hopper that he was heading to San Francisco on September 23. He added that he hoped the title of the movie would be changed, noting that nobody liked “From Among the Dead.” Notes taken by script supervisor Peggy Robertson indicate that shooting started at Mission Dolores on September 30.[24] Over the next week, the film team shot footage at the McKittrick Hotel, the alley behind Podesta’s, and Fort Point. On October 4, the crew packed up at Fort Point and headed to The Empire Hotel to capture scenes of Judy entering the building and another of her looking out the window of an upstairs room.[25] The hotel interiors were shot on a soundstage. As per his dedication to authenticity, Hitchcock and production designer Bumstead re-created the actual rooms of the hotel, mirrored in plan. The crew and stars spent a little more than two hours at the hotel on that day and returned on Saturday for another evening shoot.
Hitchcock was spotted in town on October 8 and 9, as noted by entertainment columnist Paine Knickerbocker who visited the set at the Portman Mansion at the corner of Gough and Eddy streets (playing the McKittrick Hotel onscreen). The cast and crew moved to San Juan Bautista on October 12, where “more than 200 persons crowded police lines to see Kim Novak and Jimmy Stewart,” filming on location. By October 21, the cast had flown back from San Francisco, with the exception of Kim Novak who was said to have “motored home because she won’t fly.”
In a 1957 article published in the San Francisco Chronicle, Hitchcock mentioned that “I pick out all the sites,” for filming. In his discussions with Francois Truffaut, Hitchcock said that “when Stewart first meets Judy, I decided to make her live at the Empire Hotel…because it has a green neon sign flashing continually outside the window. So when the girl emerges from the bathroom, that green light gives her the same subtle, ghostlike quality.”[26] Scholars Martin Kevorkian and Stanley Orr posit Hitchcock may have selected the Hotel Empire (with its enormous neon sign) as a reference to the history of Northern California, building a “narrative trajectory from New World conquest to mission trail” as expressed in Scottie’s travels following in the steps of Madeline.[27]
Dan Auiler writes that the Empire “was chosen for its seediness and for its memorable green neon sign. Hitchcock wanted the green neon light to spill through Judy’s window for two key scenes.”[28] The hotel tableau and the overwhelming color of the sign are critical in both the transformation scene, when Judy emerges from the bathroom fully manifested in Madeleine’s form, and the 360-degree kissing scene between Scottie and Judy, with the green of the Hotel Empire sign outside the window marking the moment that both characters return to a new present and the fulfillment of his fetishistic pursuit. The light from the sign is also interpreted as a signal representing “key moments of Scottie’s loss and illusory regaining of power,” according to Henrik Gustafsson.[29] Both green and red make frequent “rhyming” appearances throughout the film, in clothing, furnishings, wall covers, even in the red of Scottie’s apartment door in contrast to the green of Madeleine’s Jaguar.
From Among the Dead
TODAY, THE HOTEL EMPIRE has been renovated and renamed the Hotel Vertigo in homage to the film and its prominence in cultural memory. You can even stay in Judy’s Room. Though, as film and psychoanalysis professor Diane Borden asks, “was it a place of actual carnal knowledge or a site of phantasmatic enactment?”[30] But one questions looms: did Hitchcock know about the fatality on the sidewalk where Judy herself walks? There is no evidence that anyone involved in the production knew about this. But, based on his reputation for attention to detail, one would expect that Hitchcock was cognizant of the recent history of the Hotel Empire while directing location scenes 38 days after Helen’s suicidal leap. Further, according to Hitchcock scholar Dan Auiler, the script was finalized by August, 1957, so any similarities between Helen Zurfluh and Judy Barton—such as their shared professions, are coincidental. A remarkable coincidence, indeed.[31]
The Hotel Empire, now Hotel Vertigo, 2017. (Joel Gunz)
Borden wrote that in Vertigo, “the perverse and the sublime conflate in a kind of psychological irony.”[32] The filmic landscapes of the movie (both real and imagined) are mythically linked by the traumatic memories of the characters. Every building, pathway, and destination they visit is transformed into a memento mori within the audience’s minds; these places achieve an immortality and are elevated to objects of obsession.[33] As Gustafsson states, “time passes while places remain” and that “events may possess places long after their occurrence.”[34] This psychic effect is so powerful that visitors to Mission San Juan Bautista,where Madeleine’s body was thrown from the tower and Judy plunged to her death, have reported seeing the ghost of Kim Novak “sitting alone in the plaza, gazing silently at the mission as if lost in a dream.”[34] (As of this writing, Novak resides alive and well in rural Oregon.) Like Judy, Helen Zurfluh was a woman seeking something more for her life. Perhaps pilgrims to the Hotel Empire will encounter her ghost still roaming the halls.
Note: We can all help prevent suicide. The National Suicide Prevention Lifeline provides 24/7, free and confidential support for people in distress, prevention and crisis resources for you or your loved ones, and best practices for professionals in the United States. Call 1-800-273-8255.
[1] “Woman Jumps to Death From Hotel,” Napa Valley (CA) Register, August 27, 1957, 1.
[2] “Jobless Woman in Death Leap,” San Francisco Chronicle, August 28, 1957, 3.
[3] “Your Horoscope for Today,” Frances Drake, San Francisco Examiner, August 27, 1957, 23.
[4] The (Portland) Oregon Daily Journal, February 14, 1915, 43.
[5] San Francisco Examiner, March 3, 1934, 7.
[6] “Helen Wertheimer Tells of Troth,” San Francisco Examiner, October 24, 1954, 78.
[7] Contra Costa Gazette, August 27, 1957, 1.
[8] “Napa State Hospital Year in Review,” Napa Valley Register, January 18, 1957, 2.
[9] “Jobless Woman in Death Leap,” San Francisco Chronicle, August 29, 1957, 3.
[10] “Hotel Glen Royal, 940 Sutter Street,” San Francisco Examiner, November 28, 1925, 5.
[11] “Hotel Glen Royal,” San Francisco Examiner, March 31, 1926, 22.
[12] “H. C. Muddox Buys San Francisco Hotel,” Sacramento Bee, June 11, 1927, 7; “Hotel Deals Here Involve over $750,000,” San Francisco Examiner, November 5, 1938, 9; “15 Story Hotel El Cortez Is Sold to Fritz,” San Francisco Examiner, May 17, 1941.
[13] Advertisements in the San Francisco Examiner for “940 Sutter Street” are listed as the “Empire Lodge,” until January 23, 1957, and then changed to the “Empire Hotel,” in a February 21, 1957, classified advertisement (“$17.50 WEEK,” San Francisco Examiner, February 21, 1957, sec. 2, p. 18.
[14] “Empire Hotel Leased for SPARS,” San Francisco Examiner, October 17, 1943, 2.
[15] “Coast Guard Now Ready to Enlist SPARS,” Minneapolis Star, November 29, 1943, 25.
[16] “Coast Guard Spars Take over Hotel Which Becomes Official S.F. Barracks,” San Francisco Examiner, November 13, 1943, 10.
[17] San Francisco Chronicle, August 24, 1957, 7.
[18] “Ross Sisters Lease One Hotel and Sell 2d,” San Francisco Examiner, May 21, 1959, 1.
[19] “Opening To-Night!,” San Francisco Examiner, June 5, 1950, 38; “Sandro’s,” San Francisco Examiner, December 19, 1952, 21.
[20] “Come to the Cabaret,” San Francisco Examiner, January 9, 2008, A19.
[21] “Hotel Empire,” postcard in the hands of the author.
[22] Knickerbocker, Paine, “It’s Hitchcock Again, Shooting Up the Town,” San Francisco Chronicle, October 9, 1957, 24.
[23] San Francisco Examiner, 27 October 1957.
[24] Aulier, Dan. Vertigo: The Making of a Hitchcock Classic (New York: St. Martin’s Griffin, 1998), 72.
[25] Aulier, 80.
[26] Truffaut, Francois. Hitchcock (London: Bloomsbury Publishing, 1985), 245.
[27] Kevorkian, Martin and Stanley Orr. “Souvenirs of a Killing,” The San Francisco of Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo, ed. Douglas A. Cunningham (Toronto: The Scarecrow Press, Inc., 2012), 49.
[28] Dan Aulier, quoted in Martin Kevorkian “Souvenirs of a Killing,” 57.
[29] Gustafsson, Henrik, “Beyond Location: Vertigo and the Capacity for Wonder,” The San Francisco of Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo, ed. Douglas A. Cunningham (Toronto: The Scarecrow Press, Inc., 2012), 185.
[30] Borden, Diane. “Travelogue as Traumalogue,” The San Francisco of Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo, ed. Douglas A. Cunningham (Toronto: The Scarecrow Press, Inc., 2012), 175.
[31] Dan Auiler, personal correspondence with Joel Gunz
[32] Borden, 174.
[33] Borden, 159.
[34] Gustafsson, 185.
[35] Oliver-Goodwin, Michael and Lynda Myles, “Alfred Hitchcock’s San Francisco,” The San Francisco of Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo, ed. Douglas A. Cunningham (Toronto: The Scarecrow Press, Inc., 2012), 81.
