Leon Waycoff Ames #15

By 1933, he'd spent 2 years in Hollywood as a young leading man in small to medium-sized roles under his birth name of Leon Waycoff. In Universal's "Murders in the Rue Morgue"(1932) with Bela Lugosi, he played the handsome young medical student, Pierre Dupin, who exposes the diabolical scheme of Lugosi's character, Dr. Mirakle! That same year, he would film a fight scene in "The Famous Ferguson Case" opposite an actor named Kenneth Thomson. The next year, 1933, Thomson would lure Leon into what would become the Guild--enticing him one night at Masquers Club club with the ol "Come to my house" invitation he'd use on Boris Karloff and others. Leon recalled in later years: "The meetings we had at Ken Thomson's house were secret meetings. I remember one night taking a girl out on a date in the open-topped car of mine. I said 'I have to drop by this address up here for a very important reason. I won't be but a minute'...and she said 'That's all right.' I came out three hours later. She was asleep and very skeptical of what was going on in that house!"