Discovery of old Vancouver nightclub sign rekindles memories of unsolved murder, tragic car crash
Nightclub owner Starvin’ Marvin Goldhar was stabbed in the heart in 1982, and his fiancée died after crashing her Ferrari two weeks later.
By John Mackie
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Taking apart a shelf in his carport, Ilia Boutoma discovered there was a design on the bottom of the wooden shelves.
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He pieced the wooden slats together and they formed a sign for Starvin’ Marvin’s Discotheque, a popular Vancouver club in the 1970s. It was also somewhat infamous — the owner was murdered.
According to a Vancouver Sun story on July 19, 1982, Starvin’ Marvin Goldhar, 29, died after being “stabbed repeatedly in the heart” in an apartment on Cornwall Street in Kitsilano.
Evidently somebody was angry with him: Goldhar’s former house at 1906 West 25th Ave. had been firebombed the day before, when “two beer bottles filled with gasoline were thrown at the house.”
Newspaper reports said Goldhar had a dispute with someone over money.
Boutoma posted images of the sign and a newspaper clipping on Facebook, asking for the public’s help in piecing together the story: “The deeper I went searching up the story of that fellow’s establishments and his death … the more interesting it kept getting!,” he wrote.
I have some information: The police think my then-next door neighbour Paul Bogdanovich killed Starvin’ Marvin.
The police came looking for my neighbour that night, banging on my door in Gastown at 3 a.m. The location was above the Blarney Stone bar at 214 Carrall St., which has four lofts upstairs.
But he had fled. Bogdanovich was charged with second degree murder, but has never faced a trial. Years later, a retired cop told me he was believed to be in Italy.
At the time, the police told my landlord the dispute was over a drug deal.
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The tragedy was compounded on Aug. 3, 1982, with the death of Goldhar’s fiancée, Army and Navy heiress Kacey Cohen.
Cohen had attended a tree planting ceremony in Goldhar’s memory in Deep Cove with Goldhar’s former wife Marie Similia. Cohen was driving on the Stanley Park causeway in her Ferrari with Similia as a passenger when it swerved into a lane of oncoming traffic and crashed.
Cohen died of head injuries at Vancouver General Hospital. She was 28.
The police estimated the Ferrari had been travelling at speeds up to 145 km/h, but Similia said Cohen “could handle the car” and wasn’t going that fast.
“It was not until we were skidding that I realized what was happening and I reached for her,” Similia told The Sun. “She had her seatbelt on, it broke, and she came flying across to my side smashing against the window. I held her up so she was not swallowing the blood that was pouring down her throat.”
Goldhar’s mother, Margie, told The Sun that Cohen “never got over his murder. I think she felt she could join him.”
In death, Cohen was memorialized by her one-time boyfriend, Texas novelist/singer/politician Kinky Friedman, who called her his “great love.”
An album released after Friedman’s recent death includes a touching ode to her, Kacey Needs a Song. The song was highlighted in a recent New York Times review of Friedman’s album, Poet of Motel 6. It starts: “I walk alone in Stanley Park/Oh Canada, you broke my heart.”
Cohen’s birth name was Karen. She was called K.C. after her initials, which became Kacey.
When Kacey and her sister Jacqui lived in Los Angeles in the 1970s, she dated Dodi Fayed, who years later became the last boyfriend of Diana, Princess of Wales, who also met a tragic end.
“He was a film producer in those days,” said Jacqui Cohen. “A very wealthy Arab guy that had an entourage, when the Arabs were just starting to kind of move into Beverly Hills.”
Jacqui Cohen liked Starvin’ Marvin, whose real name was Meyer Leonard Goldhar.
“I had my 21st birthday party at Starvin’ Marvin’s,” she said. “No matter what anybody wants to say about Marvin, he was a gentleman.”
Starvin’ Marvin’s Bump City opened at 1727 West Broadway at Burrard on July 19, 1973. Sun columnist Jack Wasserman noted it was in the former Manhattan Ballroom and had 90-cent drinks and a kosher-style menu designed by Goldhar’s mom.
The claim to fame of Starvin’ Marvin’s club was that the rock band Heart had played there before they became famous. The original club closed after it was hit by arson in 1975. Starvin’ Marvin’s reopened at 195 East Broadway, but closed in 1978.
He also owned part of the Crazy Horse strip club at 1024 Davie St., and for a few months operated an after-hours club with no liquor licence in the basement.
Kacey Cohen’s death wasn’t the only tragedy in the Cohen family. Her brother Jeffrey died of a drug overdose in 1978 at age 26, and their father Jack Cohen had multiple sclerosis for decades before dying of a heart attack in 1995 at age 69.
