Koyla Dunaev: The Dime Bender

Washington, DC

Nicholas Alexander "Koyla" Dunaev was a Hollywood hanger-on in the 1920s. His backstory was appropriately cinematic: it was said that he was born the son of a Czarist nobleman, was a graduate of the University of Moscow Law School, was active in the Russian revolution of 1917, and was banished to (and somehow escaped from) a Siberian gulag. Whether any of this was true is unknown, but it served to distinguish him as a Tinseltown personality as well as an aspiring writer, actor, and director. He was also known as "the strongman from Moscow" because of his purported ability to bend dimes in half with his fingers.

Dunaev made headlines as the manager of Eunice Pringle, who claimed that she was raped by Hollywood theater mogul Alexander Pantages in 1929. Pantages was tried and found guilty, and Pringle (and Dunaev) hoped to extract from him $1 million in damages. However, a retrial found Pantages innocent, and Dunaev found himself out of work. By 1947 he was in Washington, DC, where he wrote to President Truman asking for a job, claiming that he was broke. Truman did not respond, and Dunaev died, still in Washington and still broke, in 1963.

His grave remained unmarked until 2016, when supporters paid for a tombstone. The back of the stone notes that Dunaev was a poet and that he appeared in 34 movies, but its front epitaph highlights what has become his legacy: "The Man Who Could Bend A Dime With His Fingers."