By John Cinnamon
Who was Elaine Townsend?
Savvy businesswoman? Government informant? Casino operator? A woman whose death in 1964 at the age of 46 is shrouded in mystery? Why, even the name “Elaine Townsend” was one she made up. It sounds like the makings of a Hollywood movie. And if Townsend’s grandniece, Robin DeTrude, has her way, that’s just what it will be. Robin and her husband Kevin DeTrude, of Fishers, are in negotiations to have Elaine Townsend’s story made into a major motion picture.
Most of what Robin DeTrude knew about her great aunt she learned from her paternal grandmother, which wasn’t much. “We’d be out to lunch and I’d move a certain way and she’d get a look on her face,” DeTrude said of her grandmother. “I said, ‘What’s going on?’ and she said, “You remind me so much of Margaret.’”
Margaret Helgeson was Townsend’s birth name. “I said, ‘Well, tell me about her,’ and she wouldn’t,” said DeTrude, owner of Elaine’s Salon in Fishers – an homage to Townsend.
It wasn’t until DeTrude inherited her late grandmother’s scrapbook that more pieces of Margaret Helgeson’s life fell into place. Graduation announcements and newspaper clippings led the DeTrudes to do more research at libraries and on the Internet. They found that Helgeson was born in Wyoming in 1919 and, in 1940, moved by herself to Hawaii at age 20. “We see (Margaret Helgeson) in the 1920 census,” said Kevin DeTrude. “We see her in the 1930 census, then nothing.”
As Robin and Kevin would find out later, sometime between 1940 and 1946 while in Hawaii, Helgeson changed her name to Elaine Townsend. No one knows why.
Once the DeTrudes made the connection that Margaret Helgeson was Elaine Townsend, the trail led to Havana, Cuba, and even more intrigue. Townsend had moved there in 1947, initially buying into the dice concession at the Gran Casino Nacional for $30,000 cash. By 1950, she was running two Havana casinos and associating with mobsters and movie stars, alike.
The DeTrudes’ movie plans are not the first time Elaine Townsend has received the Hollywood treatment. A script about her life was written in the early 1950s with Lucille Ball set to play the lead. But Kevin DeTrude believes a newspaper article at the time led the mob to put the kibosh on the production. “In one of those articles,” DeTrude explains, “Elaine is outed by a quote from the screenplay writer as someone who is providing valuable information to both the Cuban and American governments.”
Pamala L. Hall, who is writing the new script for the DeTrudes, calls Townsend “strong, but with an innocence that puts her amidst very intriguing circumstances.”
