Paige Young in Los Angeles.PART 2: Richard Sample Interview
Posted on June 15, 2021
Close up of a small copy: Richard Sample as painted by Paige Young.
To open our interview, I promised Richard on our 2nd day interview, we would end after one hour. It end up being two.
I asked Richard if Paige ever used LSD, the drug that inspired the label “the Psychedelic Era.” Richard said no, not that he ever witnessed or heard.
(Melanie Myers, neighbor who found Paige dead, said on the documentary Secrets of Playboy, that she never witnessed Paige using drugs; she was more into “clean living.”)
I brought up the sex tape mentioned in the Daily Mail article, and I brought up David Shane, who was not mentioned in the article.
Richard said, “I think that that is something Dennis (from a Los Alamos, California art gallery) told me about Jonathan Winters. And that tape. I think Dennis knows something about that tape.”
Richard said this is all he can remember.
He has not heard of David Shane.
Richard again mentioned how he and Paige were regulars at Barney’s Beanery and added that they sometime socialized there with the Smothers Brothers.
Malibu Friends:
“In Malibu we hung out a lot with Don Dwiggens. He wrote the book ‘The Life and Loves of Frank Sinatra’. Another one was ‘The Bachelor.’ “Dwiggins took a lot of pictures of Paige.”
Richard does not know if these photos were were ever published. “His wife still lives in Malibu.”
“He was killed in a car accident.” (1988)
I had never heard of Don Dwiggins and neither have most people. It turns out he was a longtime LA reporter, prolific author, pilot, stunt pilot and aviation historian. And a man of numerous hobbies apparently.
Dwiggins lived in Malibu for decades where he was a legend. There is an in- depth tribute for Don Dwiggins that appeared in the LAT, at the bottom of this page. It is written by Jack Smith, one of Don’s good friends. Smith is a legendary Los Angeles columnist and writer who spotted Huston and Hefner playing backgammon, probably at Pips and possibly Paige Young.
More Malibu friends:
“I had my paintings in Jack Bailey’s (Queen for a Day host) gallery and many of my paintings sold when his gallery was shown on a TV show.”
Jack Bailey resided in Malibu during the mid-60s where he ran the Jack Bailey Gallery for about 2 years. There are articles in the Malibu newspapers to support this.
“He owned about 65 of my paintings.”
Vincent Price was another patron of Richard’s. Price is well-known for his art collection.
About the ending of his relationship with Paige: “I had moved out of the studio in Venice and moved to Solvang, and Paige stayed there. (Venice) She was supposed to pay me rent, but she never did. I went and asked her to leave.”
Paige had moved out and and at some point moved onto a houseboat in Marina Del Rey. (See chapter: Paige’s Most Public Year 1969)
“I only talked to her on her houseboat for about 10 minutes. I don’t know who owned it.”
I got the feeling it was an uncomfortable and sad conversation.
We again discussed Rex Ramsey, who tried to steal Richard’s Corvette and Paige’s Mustang.
The Corvette that Rex Ramsey tried to steal: His wife got a flat tire in the Corvette and was on the side of the freeway, when a semi-truck flattened it.
I have spoken to Rex Ramsey briefly on the phone. He said he does not remember Paige, but does remember her husband of one year, Mark F. Segal, his long time friend from high school.
Ramsey hasn’t answered or returned any of my phone calls since that first one.
Richard brought up Hugh Hefner.
“Paige told me she overheard a conversation, with Hefner, about selling women to business men from a foreign country. They were talking about the money.”
Richard Sample
I responded “For what, like, sex or types of sexual favors, or….?”
Yes, he nodded without elaborating.
I prompted with “When Paige told you this, did she seem shocked, upset or…?”
“She said ‘I hope that doesn’t happen to me.'”
He added, “If I could, I would shoot Hugh Hefner and probably get away with it.”
I pressed but he didn’t answer.
Sample just said “Hefner ruined a lot of good women.”
Anything else you can recall that Paige said about Hugh Hefner or anyone connected to him? “Not that I can remember.”
Richard said he never met Hefner nor hung out with any of his crowd. Richard expressed to me and reporter Ryan Parry that he had a distaste for Hefner and “that crowd.” And he let that be known to Paige.
In my opinion, Paige took this into consideration when sharing things about Hefner and “that crowd.” She avoided telling Richard about it. I think she must have been very distressed to share the particular incidents that she did.
Paige personality:
Did Paige have an opinion about the Vietnam war?
“She said ‘ They should just bomb it and get it over with.'”
Did Paige attend any anti-war demonstrations?
Richard shook his head no and kept shaking his head no as I asked, “So that wouldn’t have been something she would have ever done?
Because I have not found any voter registration records for Paige, but I have found many records for her family members, I asked if he ever knew Paige to have voted for President.
Several minutes long pause.
“Who is the president that had a brother who let that girl drown in Chappaquiddick?“
“Teddy, brother of President John Kennedy.“
“Well, we had a picture of Teddy Kennedy hanging up that we would throw darts at, Paige was there (visiting) and she said ‘I hope he gets what he deserves.'”
I looked around at Richard Sample’s art work. He showed me some of his paintings that are “copies” of famous artists like Picasso, Miro, Kandinsky. He said he paints these because it pays well.
I apologized to Richard if I told him any information about Paige that was upsetting. He said it didn’t.
For example, Richard did not know that Paige was born Diana Cotterell or anything at all about her childhood. (Everyone I have talked to was unaware that Paige was ever Diana Cotterell who grew up in the San Fernando Valley.)
Richard misses Idaho and wishes he were still living there.
He mentions John Chapman, President of the NEA.? “I worked for him. And he bought many of my paintings, He owned a mansion in Sun Valley.”
Info: Don Dwiggins. Paige and Richard’s Malibu friend. Richard says Paige modeled for him several times. It was hard to choose which article about Dwiggins to include, there were so many of them. Lots of reviews of his Hollywood aviation stunt pilot books.
Lower article by legendary LA writer Jack Smith.
Eagle Rock Sentinel OCT.31, 1968
The timing of his accident is chilling….
LAT March 29. 1989.
1974 #2. Paige. The Shanes Of Beverly Hills. Huston & Hefner.
Posted on August 12, 2020
Melanie from the Daily Mail article told me that the “brother of Cici Huston” had Paige’s “sex tape” in his possession and would not hand it over to Paige, despite her repeated requests.
And that Paige frequently expressed the serious mental anguish this was causing her.
The Daily Mail didn’t publish this as he “wasn’t a big enough name.”
…..fearful of a “sex tape” that “a relative of a major celebrity had made of her,” is how the Daily Mail phrased it.
CiCi Huston had three brothers.
One of the Shane brothers, David, is a major candidate as the one holding on to Paige’s sex tape; he was very active on the Sunset Strip social scene at the time: 1950s-1960-1970s. Shane owned businesses on the Strip and he was very attractive to women.
In a message to me, Celeste Huston seemed angry in her message to me that her brother David was sex partners with both Paige and Tamara Green.
He started a popular car rental agency, Hav -A -Kar, in the heart of the Sunset Strip. Hav-A-Kar was later sold to Thrifty, and David, as the property owner, saw the space become a Kenneth Cole store for many years before its current iteration, the Eveleigh restaurant. In the early 1960s David, who loved to cook, opened a burger joint called Alfie’s. It was a colorful fixture on the Strip and a veritable celebrity magnet. David decided to eventually lease the space in 1971 to the new owners who created Mirabelle, which remained steadfast on the Strip for over 40 years…… David was a jet setter and an avid outdoorsman. He attended USC for two years before transferring to the University of Mexico, in Mexico City, where he befriended painter Diego Rivera.
Bob Shane is the oldest brother, originally Myron Shane Jr. I know nothing about him but that he changed his first name.
The youngest Shane brother Stephan, not mentioned in the obituary above, moved out of Beverly Hills and lived further north in California. He married, divorced and died young, in the 1970s.
David and Celeste’s father was Myron Shane, already a wealthy business owner from Kansas City who moved his young family to Beverly Hills in the 1940s.
Myron Shane owned a yacht named the “Celeste.” He rented it out to wealthy celebrities including Frank Sinatra.
Myron Shane also used his yacht for charitable purposes.
Myron started Hav-A-Kar per newspaper articles and apparently signed it over to his son David L. Shane.
Melanie told the Daily Mail, and me personally, that Paige went out with several men.
Paige told Melanie that some of her boyfriends paid her living expenses including kitchen appliances and a dog run for her Akita.
( Don’t know what happened to Joshua the Weimaraner or Hamish the horse)
However much Paige expressed her distress over the Shane brother and his refusal to hand over the sex tape, ultimately she built a shrine of sorts about hatred and blame, towards Hugh Hefner.
From the Daily Mail:
“It was covered floor to ceiling with photos of Hugh Hefner, there were news clippings, magazine articles, everything you could think of. Written across it was something like ‘Hugh Hefner is the devil.” The whole wall was a shrine saying, ‘I hate Hugh Hefner,’ the crux of her anger was against him. That was the message she wanted to get across to me. She was pointing up at things, showing me around it. She’s put a lot of work into this, it must have taken her days.”
According to Melanie, Hefner and John Huston were mentioned in the suicide note as well.
“The cops had Paige’s suicide note and read some of it to me…the whole thing was about her anger towards the men who she believed had chewed her up and spat her out. The two men who got the most attention were Hugh Hefner and the director John Huston. I know she dated Huston for a while and had just gotten back from a trip to Ireland with him.”
“Paige also vented against other Hollywood stars who had used her, says Myers.”
This issue of People magazine was released at the end of 1974, 8 months after Paige’s suicide in LA and one month before Bobbie Arnstein’s in Chicago.
Paige Young in Los Angeles. 