HISTORY YOU NEVER KNEW: The Two Oscar Winners And The Tragedy That Connects Them
I don’t know if actresses Claire Trevor and Whoopi Goldberg ever met in real life, but they have several things in common despite their 45-year age gap. Both embarked on massively successful careers as Hollywood Stars and both were awarded the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress almost 40 years apart; Trevor for Key Largo in 1948 and Goldberg for Ghost in 1990. They also have a tragic connection in the form of what was at the time the worst air disaster in American history.
Long before her career as a comedian, actress, and talk show host, Goldberg was living and working as a waitress in San Diego, California. On September 25, 1978, she was one of many witnesses to the crash of Pacific Southwest Airlines Flight 182. The 727 on a flight from Sacramento and Los Angeles was attempting to land at San Diego’s Lindbergh Field when it collided in mid-air with a Cessna. The plane crashed into a residential neighborhood a few miles northeast of Downtown San Diego, obliterating 22 homes and killing seven residents on the ground. A further 135 people died on board the doomed jet as well as the two occupants of the Cessna.
The crash was, at the time, the deadliest air disaster in American aviation history. One of the passengers who died aboard PSA Flight 182 was Charles Bren, the only child of Claire Trevor. Born in 1943, Charles was the son of the actress and her second husband, Navy Lieutenant Cylos Dunsmoore, who served in the Second World War. Trevor and Dunsmoore divorced a few years later and she married movie producer Milton Bren. Charles took his stepfather’s surname and was raised by his mother and stepfather alongside the elder Bren’s children from a previous marriage. Charles Bren was 34 years old when he died aboard the flight.
Goldberg, who was only 22 at the time, witnessed the collision and the crash from the balcony of her apartment where she lived with her four-year-old daughter Alex. She later said the experience traumatized her so badly that she developed a fear of flying and would only travel by land transportation for decades after. The San Diego crash happened during an era when air disasters felt fairly common. A crash in Chicago just eight months later would supplant the San Diego disaster as the worst in American history. In the successive decade, more than a dozen fatal jetliner crashes would occur across the country killing over a thousand people between them.
In a 2011 interview with Piers Morgan, almost 33 years after the crash happened, Goldberg fought back tears recalling her memory of the tragedy. She explained that because about 20 to 25 seconds elapsed after the collision and before the plane slammed into the ground, she was haunted by the thought that there was enough time for the plane’s occupants to realize what was happening and that they were about to die.
“I just feel for the folks in a situation like that, who see something that they’re not sure they’re going to be able to live through,” Goldberg told Morgan.
A local photographer captured the now-famous photos of the plane careening toward the ground, which are often cited by those afraid to fly as triggering.
Her son’s tragic death was part of a string of losses for the then-68-year-old Trevor. She lost her husband, Charlie’s stepfather, to a brain tumor a little more than a year after the crash. In an interview with The Los Angeles Times many years later, Trevor said losing her husband “was the biggest loss except for our son, who was killed. That was something you never get over. But losing my husband left me without anybody. I mean, I felt completely alone.”
Trevor moved to her native New York City after her son’s and husband’s deaths but later relocated back to California where she died in 2000. Goldberg later got over her fear of flying when her career required her to travel overseas, but admits she still holds some residual fears about getting on a plane.