When Frank Durant shot his murder mystery pilot “Mystic” in southeastern Connecticut in 2016, he dedicated it to late actress Dorothy Comingore.

Comingore isn’t a famous name now, but she had a briefly shining Hollywood career and a tumultuous life.

She was in what is often described as the greatest film of all time, 1941’s “Citizen Kane,” playing Orson Welles’ second wife. Comingore seemed destined for a robust career but ran afoul of the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) in 1952. When she was called before the committee investigating communist influence in the U.S., she refused to “name names.” The fallout was painful: Her Hollywood career was finished, and her life was horribly damaged.

But, at the end of her life, she ended up having happy years when she landed in Stonington and married a local man. She died at age 58 in 1971.

Durant kept meeting people while filming “Mystic” who knew Comingore when she lived at Lords Point. Durant (who lives outside of Attleboro, Mass., but visits his family’s place on Masons Island regularly) likes to dedicate his films, and, because of her connection with the area and in an effort to keep her memory alive, he selected Comingore for “Mystic.”

Durant was inspired to do more than just dedicate “Mystic” to her; he decided to do a documentary about her life as well and to raise funds to erect a cenotaph, a marker bearing her name, in Stonington Cemetery.

Comingore’s ashes were scattered at sea, so Durant thought it would be nice to have a cenotaph at the cemetery “because a lot of people don’t know that Dorothy spent the last years of her life at Lords Point. She was part of the community.”

Durant is currently trying to raise $6,000 via GoFundMe for the cenotaph in the cemetery’s Poets Corner.

Durant learned late this year that Comingore’s son, filmmaker Michael Collins, has been working on interviewing people for his own project about his mother.

Durant consequently decided to forgo his documentary, and Collins is continuing with his documentary, titled “The Unfriendly Witness.”

Collins, who lives in California, spoke about his mother during a recent phone interview.

Collins grew up living with his father, screenwriter Richard Collins; Comingore fought for but lost custody of Michael and his sister to her ex-husband. She wasn’t allowed to contact Michael until he turned 21, and he ended up seeing his mother in person only three times between the time he was 7 and when she died, though they spoke by phone occasionally.

“One of the things I can tell you about Dorothy is she was incredibly smart, incredibly literate,” Collins says.

She was also someone who strived to help the oppressed, he recalls; more on that later.

“I loved her, I mean, she was really amazing. We had a really strong connection, my mother and I. She was very observant. I basically followed in her steps in that I became an artist before I became a film director. She was very artistic. She could be very dramatic, which is probably why she made a good actress,” Collins says.

Being asked to ‘name names’

Like Comingore, Richard Collins was called before the HUAC. After four years of not being hired because he was blacklisted, he cooperated and gave the committee the name of 26 of his friends.

His career ended up rebounding nicely; he produced the TV shows “Bonanza” and “Matlock,” among other credits.

But Michael Collins remembers people calling his father a rat and a stool pigeon.

“I think it changed my father. The father that I grew up with was a very moral person, and I don’t know if he started that way or learned that through his own experience,” Collins says.

Comingore, meanwhile, saw her career founder and was arrested for prostitution in 1953, though she said she was framed, and the charges were later dropped. Collins says that a question has always been whether the FBI set her up and whether his father played a part in it.

Not long after that, her third husband, Theodore Strauss, committed her to a mental hospital for alcoholism, and she spent two years there.

“Dorothy at a certain point started drinking, and it wasn’t pretty. I mean, I can understand why she started drinking,” says Collins, who wonders if she was actually allergic to liquor and notes her father was an alcoholic.

Life destroyed by powerful men

In a description of his proposed documentary, Collins writes that the movie is about a smart, beautiful actress “with a promising career who had her life destroyed by some of the most powerful men in the world.”

Newspaper magnate William Randolph Hearst, for instance, hated “Citizen Kane,” which was supposedly inspired by his life. He was unhappy with Comingore for playing a character modeled on his mistress, Marion Davies, as “an untalented, shrill, drunken shop girl,” as Collins states.

Collins says that Hearst was friends with the owner of RKO Studios, Floyd Odlum, as well as FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover. When MGM wanted Comingore for a movie, RKO refused to loan her and instead offered her roles they knew she would reject, he says.

Finding peace in Stonington

It was in Stonington where Comingore finally found her peace.

“Even though there are parts of her story that are tragic — what happened to this wonderful movie star — she was really happy in Connecticut, at Lords Point. It suited her. It suited her much more than Hollywood. She really wasn’t cut out for that kind of fame,” says Collins, who describes his mother as a “country woman” at heart.

She and her last husband, postal worker John Crowe, didn’t have much money but were very happy together, he says. Collins traveled to Connecticut in 1966 to visit Comingore and, after she died, he came to Stonington to see Crowe a few times.

As for how Comingore ended up in Stonington, Collins heard this story: she was driving through the region in a Cadillac with a now-unknown man, and they got caught in a snowstorm. Crowe found them and thought the guy was “up to no good.” The guy left; Comingore stayed.

Collins says Crowe had a reputation as someone who, if he saw a bird with a broken wing, he’d take care of it. Comingore “was the perfect blackbird with a broken wing,” Collins says. Crowe took her in, and they stayed together for the rest of her life. Crowe died in 1990.

Dual documentaries

Collins actually started working on a documentary about Comingore back in 1981, when he moved to San Francisco.

Comingore, who grew up in Oakland, still has a sister living in San Francisco, and Collins recalls feeling that he needed to know more about his mother. So he started interviewing her sister and other people who knew her. Over the years, he did more research. He was still working for a living, though, so this project was on and off the front burner.

“Now that I‘m semi-retired, I have the time,” he says.

His half-brother died in March and left Collins a huge trove of information. That helped kickstart renewed interest, including from a couple of producers.

Collins has also been interviewing children whose parents were blacklisted in Hollywood because of HUAC. That’s for a separate project.

“Their stories are particularly relevant today when you compare, which I do, Trump to McCarthy (Sen. Joseph McCarthy, who was the driving force in HUAC) and that period of time. I mean, there are some kind of eerie similarities. Then, it was after World War II, and it was Jewish refugees (that) there was fear of. That seems to be coming back. There are just hundreds of similarities between what was going in the late '40s and early '50s and this period of time,” Collins says. 

Identifying with the oppressed 

Collins heard stories of Comingore teaching kids in Stonington to paint and draw.

“But she was also considered an oddball back there. She would claim to be Jewish, which she wasn’t. I think (she said that) because they were oppressed people,” he says.

She identified with oppressed people, he says. A childhood friend of hers told Collins that when Comingore was 15 or 16, during the Depression, she would take blankets and food to the camps where the so-called “Okies” and “Arkies” were staying after fleeing the Dust Bowl.

“She had very strong beliefs. Some people think her very strong beliefs came out of being exposed to communism, but I don’t agree with that. I think they came out of her background. She had to go to Mass every day with her mother. I think she took on that pure Catholic or Christian ethic, of you have to take care of the oppressed and the needy,” Collins says.

k.dorsey@theday.com