Biography

Filmmaker John Waters made a highly controversial and irreverent 16mm improvisatory short film in 1969 entitled The Diane Linkletter Story (1970) starring Divine as Diane and "based on the events surrounding her death." Waters claims that the film was "accidental" - he and his friends improvised a story while testing a new synch-sound camera (later used on Multiple Maniacs). The film was unreleased in any form until it showed up on a 1990 videotape entitled A Divine Double Feature.

On October 4, 1969, she jumped out of her kitchen window of her high-rise apartment to her death one morning in West Hollywood, California. She actually died in a hospital about an hour and a half later of her multiple injuries. She was only 20. Her death was widely reported in the media at the time, and her father blamed her death on "flashbacks" experienced after an LSD trip taken months earlier. Shortly thereafter, Art became a prominent anti-drug campaigner.

Daughter of Art Linkletter and Lois Foerster.

Younger sister of Jack Linkletter, Robert Linkletter, Dawn Linkletter and Sharon Linkletter.

An investigation was conducted by the Los Angeles Coroner Office and it was determined that she died as a result of an "accidental" fall, not of any drug-taking. A friend, Edward Durston, was there at the time. He had visited her after she called him up a few hours earlier (3:00 a.m.) depressed and upset. All available evidence suggests that she was a despondent woman and that her death was a suicide. Still, due to the way her death was portrayed in the media and Art's insistence that she was on LSD, Diane became the poster child for the evils of taking hallucinogens.