the wonder boys and albert dekker

My wife and I were watching the Wonder Boys on
television yesterday. This exchange caught my
attention.

HANNAH GREEN
James'll know about George Sanders.

JAMES LEER
George Sanders?

HANNAH GREEN
Mr. CRABTREE was saying how George Sanders
killed himself, only he couldn't remember how.

JAMES LEER
Pills. August 25, 1972. In a Costa Brava hotel
room.

The few people within earshot glance oddly at James, but
Crabtree's eyes glitter with intrigue.

CRABTREE
How comprehensive of you.

HANNAH GREEN
Oh, James is amazing. He knows all the movie
suicides. Go ahead, James. Tell them who else.

JAMES LEER
There's so many...

HANNAH GREEN
Just a few then. The big ones.

James glances at the loose group of people around him,
watching, then...

JAMES LEER
Pier Angeli, 1971 or '72, also pills. Charles
Boyer, 1978, pills again. Charles Butterworth,
1946, I think. In a car. Supposedly it was an
accident, but, you know. . .
(a trace of irony)
He was distraught. Dorothy Dandridge, she took
pills in, like, 1965. Albert Dekker, 1968, he
hung himself. He wrote his suicide note in
lipstick on his stomach. Alan Ladd, '64, more
pills, Carole Landis, pills again, I forget
when. George Reeves, Superman on TV, shot
himself. Jean Seberg/ pills of course, 1979.
Everett Sioane-- he was good--pills. Margaret
Sullavan, pills, Lupe Velez, a lot of pills.
Gig Young. He shot himself and his wife in
1978. There are more but I don't know if you
would have heard of them. Ross Alexander? Clara
Blandick? Maggie McNamara? Gia Scaia?

HANNAH GREEN
I haven't heard of half of those.

CRABTREE
You did them alphabetically.

James turns, finds Crabtree's laser eyes on him. James
blinks, as if he had forgotten about Crabtree, then shrugs
shyly, looks away.

JAMES LEER
That's just how my brain works, I guess.

I was curious to know more about the story of Albert
Dekker. Here's what wikipedia says:

Dekker appeared in some seventy films from the 1930s to 1960s, but his four most famous screen roles were as a mad scientist in the 1940 horror film Dr. Cyclops, as a vicious hitman in the The Killers, as a dangerous dealer in atomic fuel in the 1955 film noir Kiss Me Deadly, and as an unscrupulous railroad detective in Sam Peckinpah's western The Wild Bunch. Dekker's role as Pat Harrigan in The Wild Bunch would be his last screen appearance.

On May 5, 1968, Dekker was found dead in his Hollywood home after failing to answer numerous phone calls for two days. Although money and camera equipment were missing, there were no signs of forced entry. He was found naked, kneeling in his bathtub with a noose wrapped around his neck that was looped around the shower's curtain rod. He was also handcuffed, blindfolded, gagged and had sexually explicit words scrawled on his body in red lipstick. The coroner's ruling was accidental death by autoerotic asphyxiation. Dekker was 62 years old.^[2]

The website findadeath has more detail on the condition of the body. There are no footnotes, so I wouldn't count on its accuracy.

Dekker was kneeling nude in the bathtub. A noose was around his neck but not tight enough to have strangled him. A scarf was tied over his eyes and a horse’s bit was in his mouth, fashioned from a rubber ball and metal wire, the bit had chain "reins" that were tightly tied beneath his head. Two leather straps were stretched between the leather belts that girded his neck and chest. A third belt, around his waist, was tied with a rope that stretched to his ankles, where it had been tied in some kind of timber hitch. The end of the rope, which continued up his side, wrapped around his wrist several times and was held in Dekker’s hand. Handcuffs clamped both wrists with a key attached. Written in red lipstick on his right buttock was the word, "whip." Sunrays had also been drawn around his nipples. "Make me suck," was written on his throat, and "slave," and "cocksucker," on his chest. On his stomach was drawn a vagina. He had apparently been dead for several days.

Dekker's death was likely an autoerotic asphyxiation accident. Calling the scribbles on his chest a suicide note seems like an exaggeration.

Tragically, his 16 year old son had killed himself one year earlier.