This is the sad last picture of Sabrina, the women who became famous as Britain’s answer to Marilyn Monroe – but who, DailyMail.com can reveal – died in agony from botched back surgery to cure pain caused by the breasts which brought her fame.
Photographed just a month before her death with the ‘Shirley Temple ringlets’ she asked her carer to arrange, it was a last moment of glamour before she died with him holding her hand in a Hollywood hospital, an end to painful, drug-addicted and guilt-wracked fall from fame.
Sabrina, real name Norma Ann Sykes, achieved renown in the 1950s; famous first in Britain and then in America for her 41 inch chest and 18-inch waist.
Now DailyMail.com can tell for the first time the full tragedy of the woman who was called Britain’s Marilyn Monroe – and the Kim Kardashian and Jordan of her day but who died in such obscurity that it took almost a year for her death to emerge.
At the height of her fame she boasted of 1,000 fan letters a day and insured her breasts at Lloyds of London for £100,000 – a figure probably close to £2.2 million or $2.9 million in current values.
But she died a virtual recluse, in a squalid North Hollywood house wrecked by years of neglect, cared for by a formerly homeless man who claimed to love her.
The last picture: A month before she died, Sabrina – real name Norma Sykes – asked her carer to get a hairdresser to come to her North Hollywood home. She wanted ‘ringlets like Shirley Temple’ – but she was close to death.
Tragic ending: Sabrina had been at the height of glamour and fame in the 1950s but when she died last year she was drug-addicted and confined to a wheelchair
The way she was: Sabrina posed in Las Vegas in 1962, displaying the body which had made her famous. She told the British papers she was known in the U.S. as the ‘British bosom lady’ but by the middle of the decade her fame was fading
He now squats in it, growing pot plants and leaving her bedroom a shrine which he refuses to let anyone see.
Sabrina’s decline was caused by the most ironic of twists: the breasts which had her famous left her plagued with back pain and a botched surgery to attempt to cure the pain left her unable to walk.
She became addicted to pain medication and died of respiratory failure last November, aged 81, but her death only emerged this week.
Friends and neighbors – and her last care-give- revealed to DailyMail.com the full tragedy of that end.
It was a long, and slow, decline fro m fame.
The spotlight had been fading throughout the 1960s, and by the mid-1960s, Sabrina was appearing in touring shows in the mid-west.
Gossip column items claiming Vanessa Redgrave had started a feud with her
But she found love and in 1967 married a wealthy Hollywood gynecologist in November 1967, Dr Harry Melsheimer.
Melsheimer was 11 years her senior, a German immigrant who given his age appears certain to have been somehow caught up in World War II, and a divorced father.
He owned several sports cars, a 40ft yacht and a mansion in Encino, California.
Public records show that the marriage ended in divorce in 1974 – not 1977 as had been widely reported – but in fact, DailyMail.com learned, it was even more briefly lived than that.
Judy Stoller, a 78-year-old friend and neighbor, said: ‘She hardly mentioned her husband. She just told me she blew it because she should have divorced him so she could get some financial gain.
‘She never did. He did divorce her in time. As time went by she found out she was divorced, she didn’t sign papers or anything.’
From there, things went from bad to worse.
Separated from her husband, she moved into to where her mother was already living: a scruffy single-story building near the freeway in North Hollywood which was to be home for the rest of her life.
She was still young and glamorous – enough to appear on This Is Your Life in the UK in 1977 but she was plagued by chronic back problems from her large breasts, and in 1988 she decided to have a back operation at Dayton General Hospital.
The surgeon was negligent and botched the operation, leaving Sykes wheelchair-bound.
She successfully sued him for $190,000, but soon required full-time care at the North Hollywood house and became a recluse with her elderly mother, Annie, looking after her.
Her friends said the house was in a poor state and lacked air conditioning, and her mother’s room on the west side of the building would become baking hot under the California sun.
Sykes told her friends that one night in 1995, she ignored her mother’s cries for help. When she checked on her in the morning, Annie had died of heat exhaustion.
‘Sabrina carried this bitter pill with her, she knew she was to blame for that,’ said her neighbor, Stoller.
In her early appearances on TV and film as a classic dumb blonde, Sabrina, pictured, remained exactly that — dumb — rarely uttering a single word
Sabrina left Blackpool and moved to London, where she worked as a waitress and housemaid, before turning to ‘glamour modelling’, posing nude for pictures used on the backs of playing cards, and for various magazines
‘Did she think she was going to cause her mother to die? No. But she did, and she knew she did.
‘She’d say to me, ‘When I think of what I did to my mother, I can’t stand it.”
Stoller was one of the few to know the full story of the fallen star in the suburban street.
‘When I first met her she had this really long hair,’ she told DailyMail.com.
‘I thought it was a wig at first she had so much hair. And her skin was luminous and wrinkle-free. It was from living a life indoors.
‘There was nothing artificial about Sabrina, although she had this artificial look when she was young.
‘But she was completely genuine. It’s wonderful to be around someone who is that genuine. She wore her heart on her sleeve, there was nothing held back.
‘I was fond of Sabrina. I think she was special.
‘Maybe a year before she died she showed me photographs of herself. I was stunned when I saw them, because that wasn’t the Sabrina I knew. That woman was drop-dead, stunningly beautiful.
‘She told me the story. Her mother had pushed her forward to be in the movies. And it worked, because she was a one-of-a-kind beautiful woman.
‘She had that Marilyn Monroe thing. She had a sweet voice and a woman’s body.
‘But she said something to me one time, which I thought was the most endearing thing she ever said to me. She said “You know Judy, I didn’t want to be in the movies because I didn’t have any talent.”‘
Last home: This is the North Hollywood house where Sabrina moved in with her mother after leaving her brief marriage, and where she lived until her death last year
Improved: Sabrina’s last carer – and by his own account, her love – Bruce Cram, turned the dilapidated home into a more presentable place in her final years but it remainsa far cry from the lifestyle she lived in the 1950s and 1960s
Last friends: Neighbor Judy Stoller, an artist, befriended Sabrina, and saw her first as a beauty, and then an increasingly frail woman, but one with sparks of her former life. Her final carer, Bruce Cram, told Dailymail.com how he held her hand as she died
Shrine: Sabrina’s clothes – she binged-bought while watching QVC – remain in one of the rooms in the house where she lived until her death. Bruce Cram exepcts to eventually lose the house but her next of kin remain a mystery
Sad reality: One of the rooms in the home is used by a squatter
‘That is such humility, for someone who had been as famous as she was. Probably she was right, it was all about her physical presence. So she lived with that.
‘She told me all about her life in England, and movies that she was in. She had a glamorous life.’
But Stoller said that without her mother or a proper carer, the house fell into disrepair.
A builder cheated Sykes out of thousands of dollars, leaving the single-story house half-faling down.
‘She had hired a builder, some young guy. Sabrina had a weakness for young cute guys, paid him a lot of money in advance,’ said Stoller.
‘He did a minimal amount of boards and this and that, abandoned the job and never came back.’
Her weakness was to lead to one of the unfinished back rooms being squatted by a homeless man called Joe, who turned the property from tumble-down to squalid.
‘Joe was truly an opportunist, a carpet-bagger I call him,’ said Stoller. ‘He was selling clothes out of his trunk.
‘He saw Sabrina waiting in front of the store in the wheelchair for a taxi. He seized on her, gave her a ride home, took her groceries in. And late at night he moved into the back without her permission, without her even knowing it for a while.’
Stoller said although Joe would sometimes run errands, much of the care for Sykes fell to her.
In the news: Walter Winchell was America’s most famous syndicated columnist and in April 1967, Sabrina made her last appearance in his column – with a claim of that Vanessa Redgrave, the renowned actress, had made a snarky remark about Sabrina’s figure at a cocktail party, prompting a running feud
The last notice: In Auguat 1966, she was playing in the Ivar Theater in Hollywood. A year later she was married – but it was not to last
Memories: Norma Sykes left behind photographs of her life as Sabrina, including with this unknown man. It may be her husband, Harry Melsheimer, a German-born divorced doctor
‘I went to see Sabrina almost every day, to offer help to her in any way I could. She needed a lot of help,’ said Stoller.
‘She and I were friends, I liked her very much, she was a very sweet woman. But she was not right in the head.
‘She had become a drug addict from pain medication for her back. She suffered a lot with back pain.
‘I think she was in a pretty deplorable living condition. Sabrina was a hoarder, her entertainment was to be up all night visiting these shopping channels.
‘She would order tonnes of stuff which she couldn’t really pay for. So the back part of that house would just be stacked up with useless stuff that Sabrina would order.
‘There was a little tiny space for her in that little tiny bed, and it was piled high with debris – medical bottles, empty bottles, magazines.’
Neighbors said Joe, who suffered from poor mental health, would shout and run on the street half-naked. When he started harassing neighbors, they called the police who went to inspect Sykes’ house.
‘The cops went into the house to look into the living conditions, and said it was really really bad,’ said the neighbor. ‘There was feces across the wall in his bedroom in the back, and there was no plumbing. The police said it smelt like urine.’
In 2009, Bruce Cram came into her life. He had been homeless for 10 years and had been a sign-writer in the past, but Joe was increasingly mentally vulnerable and Sabrina offered him a job as her carer.
‘She said she needed somebody real bad, nobody else would take the job. So I felt like I might as well try it out,’ said Cram who is now 65.
‘Things weren’t as good as they were supposed to be. Joe was picking her up in the middle of the night and leaving her on the toilet. She was complaining a lot.
‘I decided the only way I can solve that is by moving in, so I could pick her up in the middle of the night.
‘She never stopped peeing. I had to change her every four hours. So that’s 2am, 6am. Just me, 24/7, no days off.’
Squalid: This was her home in the early 2000s, when she lived with a ‘carer’ called Joe who was increasingly mentally ill.
Difficult life: Joe, thought to be the man in this photograph, was with Sykes for many years, but she left behind photographs showing a more glamorous past
How she was: These are the memories of her time in the spotlight kept by Sabrina in her home
Highlight: The British Marilyn Monroe, Sabrina was acutely commercially aware, as this memento of her time in the spotlight shows
In fact, he said, they fell in love: ‘You can’t do that unless you love the person. You’d go batty.
‘I wouldn’t tell her I loved her, until after about four and a half years,’ he said. ‘She told me she needed me. I said “Well I’m never going to leave you.”‘
Cram told DailyMail.com that they had both wanted their relationship to be sexual but that Sabrina had by then lost all feeling below the waist.
‘I took care of all those bodily parts,’ he said.
‘Was it alright? Yeah it was beautiful. We used to kiss. But we didn’t go into any intercourse because she couldn’t feel anything down there. So it’d be one-sided and that’s not how I’d like it to be.’
Cram, however, was not the only man in Sykes’ life during her final years.
Around 2015, a young British man called Steven came to the street, knocking on the doors of the older female homeowners, according to Stoller.
‘He would browse the neighbourhood for women. I would fit the bill, I own my own home, I’m that age. It’s just that I’m a lot smarter than Sabrina. I hate to say that but Sabrina was lonely,’ said Stoller.
Steven said he had Hollywood bit parts including a role as an extra on the TV series Lost and was in his 30s at the time, both appealing claims to Sykes.
Stoller said he soon became Sykes’ ‘boyfriend’. She would treat him to lunch, and send him money when he returned to the UK.
Sykes told her neighbor that she let him stay in her London property, which he promised to renovate and rent out – a promise which he never fulfilled. Where the property was is unclear.
‘She was hopelessly locked into personal drama,’ said Stoller. ‘She felt everybody was ripping her off.
Making the most of her assets: Sabrina, pictured, in Blue Murder At St Trinian’s
Despite her first nude photoshoot not going to plan, she managed to get a regular spot on Before Your Very Eyes in 1955
‘She would talk about leaving Steven but she couldn’t give him up. She wanted to. He kept her believing they could be in love, be lovers and be together. She was very childish. She never grew up, it was part of her charm, was this childlike believe that she had.
‘She’d say to me “You know Judy, Steven called last night and we had sex on the phone,”‘ said Stoller.
‘He had to keep her somehow hooked. He was definitely in it for himself because he gave me a big pitch, believe me.
‘And not only me, the girl at the corner. He pretty much passed his line out for every woman on this street.’
Cram said: ‘I don’t like Steven at all. I think he just used her. He wanted to be her nephew all the time.
‘He’s terrible. He jerks her around, he wasn’t careful with her. He treated her like she was more of a problem than a friend. Most of the time he was gone.’
Her interest in men was matched by her desire to stay glamorous.
Cram said a month before she died, in October last year, he paid for a hairdresser to come over and dye Sykes’ hair blonde, giving her ‘more ringlets than Shirley Temple’ – pictures he shared with DailyMail.com.
‘I always told her she was still beautiful no matter what. I never would ever say she got old or talk about oldness.
‘She would just sit there and look in the mirror and pout, and I would think that’s the power of suggestion,’ said Cram.
He said Sykes was admitted to hospital for her final four days.
‘On the last day she would only try to murmur or mumble to me. I couldn’t understand what she was saying.
‘But I held onto her, I wouldn’t let her go,’ he said. ‘I think that’s what she wanted to tell me, not to let go.
‘I was holding her hand as she died. She stopped breathing, her heart stopped.’
The fate of her property reflects the sad fall of Sabrina.
She never registered her mother’s death, apparently to avoid tax, and left no will.
Californian authorities have begun the legal process of seeking her next of kin. Who that would be is unclear as she told neighbors she was an only child.
Sykes had pictures of herself with two young children, who she claimed were her husband’s children from a previous marriage.
Sykes told friends that Melsheimer’s ex-wife, Elza Marie Carlson, had died when the children were young, although Carlson herself remarried in 1971.
Attempts by DailyMail.com to trace Carlson’s children were not immediately successful.
For now her last home is still lived in by Cram, who uses the garden to cultivate marijuana – growing for your own use is legal in California – and letting another formerly homeless man live in one of the bedrooms.
Cram will eventually be evicted, he believes, and Sabrina’s presence in the Hollywood where she wanted to be a star will be over for ever.
‘Living here she was completely different than her beginnings,’ said Stoller.
‘She was Cinderella, and then she went home in a pumpkin.’