NO WAY!!!!!! I just watched that short TODAY!
Wow, I can't believe I never heard that Tom Ince's bro was in that short!!!!
Yup.....Hearst did it!
You never know
what you'll learn here! I favor the stray bullet theory, myself; someone was fooling around with a gun, it went off, and the bullet hit Ince. Hearst was a major s.o.b., but people who knew him said that he was personally gentle and it wasn't in his nature to commit a murder; if you were part of his inner circle he could be
very nice, and his favorite activities were throwing lavish parties and going on big picnics with 20 or 30 of his friends. It would have been more likely that he'd have hired a gunman to have Ince hit if he wanted him out of the picture for whatever reason, and not when Hearst himself was anywhere in the vicinity. Either that, or he could have pulled strings with the government to have the guy sent out of the country, like he did with Orson Welles after "Citizen Kane" came out.
Of course, Charlie Chaplin
was a notorious womanizer, which might have been motivation enough for Hearst to want him dead, if he was really hitting on Marion Davies. But that doesn't quite add up, either— since like Errol Flynn later on, Charlie liked 'em young and tender... that is, under 20. Besides, would this immensely famous man (the most recognized face in the world at the time) have been stupid enough to risk it all by angering The Chief, when he could have had literally any other woman he wanted, but just not Marion Davies?
If it was an accident, it's highly ironic that Ince had missed the boat, and he raced to catch it at its next port of call. That's sort of like what happened to a friend of mine who was killed on 9/11. She was a flight attendant on the second plane that hit the towers, and the
only reason she was on that plane was because she'd traded shifts with a co-worker who wanted the day off (they're always doing that; my ex was flight attendant, so I know the lifestyle very well).
The moral of both stories is that sometimes you're simply in the wrong place at the wrong time, and there's not a thing you can do about it.
