AllMovie

The son of a Massachusetts lieutenant governor, handsome David Bacon had entered show business with the University Players of West Falmouth, MA, a group that at one time or another also numbered Henry Fonda and James Stewart. He did the obligatory rounds of off-Broadway theater before landing a contract with millionaire turned movie mogul Howard Hughes, who brought him to Hollywood to test for the role of Billy the Kid in The Outlaw. Perhaps too clean-cut to play the notorious outlaw (a part that eventually would go the equally unsuited Jack Buetel), Bacon instead portrayed All-American boys in typical wartime fare, most notably Someone to Remember (1943). He married Austrian émigré chanteuse Greta Keller (who later would perform "Married" in the 1972 screen version of Cabaret) and was hired by Republic Pictures to play one of the young agents in the adventure serial The Masked Marvel. Two weeks after the serial wrapped, Bacon was dead, stabbed in the back while driving with an unidentified young man near Venice, CA. The vicious crime, which came to be known as the "Masked Marvel Murder Case," was never solved but rumors of a homosexual liaison gone wrong persisted.