SEVEN WEEKS BEFORE she was found dead in her Lake Worth Beach apartment, Cindy Morgan gave her final starring performance.
For three days in November 2023, the former starlet flashed her smile as celebrity guest of the Houston Arcade Expo, an annual showcase of more than 300 classic pinball machines and video games.
From a table in a Marriott convention hall, she signed autographs, shared Hollywood gossip and posed for photos with fans still smitten with Lacey Underall and Dr. Lora Baines/Yori, the beguiling characters she played, respectively, in two of the 1980s’ biggest films, “Caddyshack” and “Tron.’’
The gig paid $3,000, money Morgan desperately needed. And it offered an attractive perk — an all-expenses-paid weekend escape from the turmoil consuming her life at home in Lake Worth Beach.
She was 72 and living with her dog and two cats in a room she rented in a house a block west of the FEC railroad tracks on the city’s north end. She wasn’t getting along with her landlord, roommate and neighbors. She told friends she didn’t feel safe and was being stalked.
Her driver’s license had been suspended in September; she failed to pay a $166 fine for making an improper lane change on Lucerne Avenue downtown a month earlier. (The citation said her 1998 Pontiac collided with another car.)
She was fighting in court with her previous landlord, who sued her for more than $25,000 for unpaid rent and repairs in the Delray Beach condo she was evicted from in August 2022.
She was estranged from her family. And she was struggling to make ends meet, a plight that had become a recurring theme after her once-promising acting career lost momentum.
Instead of retiring to Beverly Hills or Malibu, she was crashing with friends or in rentals she could barely afford, at times wearing out her welcome, while she sought to rekindle her celebrity.
In a way, she embodied the tragedy of “Sunset Boulevard,” the 1950 film about a one-time star, forgotten and down-and-out, who dreams of making a triumphant return to the screen. Except in Morgan’s case, she wasn't entirely forgotten.
“I hope Cindy Morgan knew that in many ways she was (and is) the heart of ‘Tron’ fandom,’’ one admirer wrote in a tribute zine after her death. “It’s the passion and care Cindy had for her characters that make our fandom what it is today.’’
As the Chicago Tribune wrote in January, “In another life, she might have been Jennifer Lawrence.’’
Born Cynthia Ann Cichorski, she discovered her passion while acting in school plays. She changed her name to Cindy Morgan, moved to Los Angeles and landed a spot in an Irish Spring soap commercial. Next came roles in “Caddyshack” in 1980 and “Tron” in 1982. That year, Johnny Carson interviewed her on “The Tonight Show,’’ a rite of passage for up and coming stars.
But the high-profile acting opportunities suddenly dried up, the result, she claimed, of a clash with a vindictive “Caddyshack” producer. She appeared on “Matlock,” “Falcon Crest” and other ’80s/’90s TV shows before her career trickled to a stream of movie conventions, fan festivals and comic cons.
She spent the rest of her life trying to make a living off her past. She collected modest royalty checks and Screen Actors Guild residuals, side-hustled “Caddyshack”-themed golf appearances and lobbied industry colleagues to revive her “Tron” characters.
But to get by, she relied on the popular convention circuit for potential income infusions of thousands of dollars per appearance.
She traveled to gigs big and small — The Hollywood Show in Los Angeles, Steel City Con in Pittsburgh, Retro Expo in Plano, Texas, and the Granite State Comic Con in New Hampshire, to name a few.
In a booth decorated with images of her screen characters, she hawked autographed photos and shared insider stories about working with Bill Murray, Andy Griffith, Ted Knight and Jeff Bridges.
Surrounding her in many of those “celebrity petting zoos,” as she once described the con circuit to a friend, would be a sampling of pop-culture royalty: William Shatner, Richard Dreyfuss, Chuck Norris, Giancarlo Esposito, Christopher Lloyd and Lou “The Incredible Hulk” Ferrigno.
Mixed in was a roster of B- and C-listers like Butch Patrick (little Eddie Munster from the ’60s TV classic “The Munsters”); Billy Redden (the banjo boy from “Deliverance”); Peter Mayhew (Chewbacca in “Star Wars”); and Jonathan Lipnicki (the little kid from “Jerry Maguire”).
Morgan enjoyed crossover appeal from two very different film roles. To her geek-culture fans, she was still computer scientist Dr. Lora Baines and virtual heroine Yori from “Tron.” To her male golf-cheesecake fans, she was always Judge Smails’ bad-girl niece Lacey Underall from "Caddyshack,” a sultry performance that made FILA golf shirts fashionable and inspired a "Family Guy" shout-out.
She didn't always attract the longest lines but she often did well, especially if other guests included her “Caddyshack” co-stars Chevy Chase and Michael O’Keefe or “Tron” co-star Bruce Boxleitner.
Wherever she went, she brought stacks of glamour photos from her early career — “my catnip,” as she told Palm Beach Post reporter Craig Dolch in 2007.
"Once I walk in the room and hand these out, I usually get what I want,’’ she said. “People have a hard time saying no to me.’’
Not everyone had a hard time saying no to her.
At least on one occasion after her career washed up, a landlord rejected her offer of autographed photos in exchange for rent. And several friends who offered assistance said they eventually parted ways because of issues with her behavior.
“She really manipulated people into helping her,’’ a former friend said, speaking on condition of anonymity.
There’s no denying that she cast a spell on her fans. And she used it to her advantage, as did other past-their-prime guests on the con circuit.
When the first Pop Con LA was wrapping up in 2012, she accepted a ride back to her hotel from a few fans and invited them to her suite for “a fantastic little pajama party,” one blogger wrote.
She was active on social media. “The Ladies of Twitter” was the nickname she gave a group of her more than 9,700 followers on the platform now called X. Another 4,900 she referred to as “my Facebook Family of Friends.”
Many provided a financial lifeline for her. After the Delray Beach eviction, she posted a Facebook plea for money. Within a day or two, she received more than $2,800, according to a thank-you she posted.
“To my Facebook Family of Friends! Especially thankful after your support this year!” she wrote on Thanksgiving Day 2022 above a screen-shot of the “thanks for the wings” note George Bailey received from his guardian angel, Clarence, in the classic “It’s a Wonderful Life.’’
People who knew her said she could be fiercely private. But she allowed some fan interactions to develop into distant friendships via phone calls, texts and social media.
Although hustling from show to show could be a struggle in her later years, she was excited about the Houston Arcade Expo and looking forward to hitting the circuit again in 2024, friends said.
And for Morgan, the hustle wasn't always just about money, even if paying rent was a constant source of anxiety.
“I think that doing these shows and interacting with people who came there to celebrate her career and her work, that's the kind of stuff that probably helped her keep going,’’ said Blake Dumesnil, co-showrunner of the Houston Arcade Expo.
🎬 ‘A great fit’
THE WEEKEND OF Cindy Morgan’s final gig got off to a precarious start: She missed her Thursday flight out of Fort Lauderdale.
“She got to the airport. Her bags got checked and made it to Houston, but she never got on the plane,” Dumesnil said.
He said Morgan never gave a clear explanation for how she missed the flight. And for a while that Thursday night and Friday morning, expo organizers “were very skeptical that she was even going to make it,” he said.
"We ended up having to rebook her and fly her out extremely early on Friday morning, because the show started at noon Friday,'' he said. "But she made it. She got here.’’
The Houston Arcade Expo is one of the smaller cons on the circuit, but Morgan was happy to have the spotlight to herself. And she was a perfect match thanks to her roles in “Tron,” a sci-fi film set in a computer game that has enjoyed a cult following.
Just seven months earlier, when Disney World launched the TRON Lifecycle Run at the Magic Kingdom, she joined Boxleitner in Tomorrowland for the rollercoaster’s grand-opening ceremony.
Hoping to cash in on that latest “Tron” buzz, Houston expo organizers wanted Morgan and Boxleitner to appear together. They were told Boxleitner, who played Alan Bradley and Tron, had a scheduling conflict.
But they were thrilled to get Morgan, who played Dr. Lora Baines and Yori. They paid her airfare and put her up in a suite at the Houston Marriott Westchase.
More than 2,000 people filed past her booth that weekend in the maze of classic pinball machines and games on the hotel’s convention floor.
“We knew Cindy would be a great fit for the show, and she was,’’ said Dumesnil, who served as Morgan’s chaperone. “She was a very pleasant guest. Everybody was very happy to have her there.’’
She made $3,000 under the terms of a guaranteed contract: She would make as much as she could selling her photos, and if she fell short of selling $3,000 worth, the expo would make up the difference. “She came close to meeting her guarantee,’’ he said.
Morgan was professional, engaging and “incredibly pleasant,’’ he said. But she also could be a little too engaging at times, volunteering to people she’d just met “too much information” about personal problems, he said.
“She was having issues with landlords and neighbors at the place she lived. She seemingly felt kind of threatened by some of those people — she did voice that to us. She really went on and on about that over the course of the whole weekend,’’ he said.
Dumesnil said he and his boss, expo director Keith Christensen, tried to not read too much into it.
“Cindy, you know, I don't want to call her scatterbrain, because that has a negative connotation, but it seemed like she always had a lot on her mind, like she was worried about a lot of things,’’ Dumesnil said.
“She seemed kind of jaded, kind of like the world was against her a little bit.’’
He also found it odd when Morgan told him that her Lake Worth Beach neighbors — the same neighbors she felt threatened by — drove her to Fort Lauderdale-Hollywood International Airport early Friday for her rebooked flight to Houston.
“The whole thing with the neighbors just didn’t make sense,’’ he said.
But he said Morgan was a pro that weekend and helped make the expo a success.
“Overall, other than missing her flight, she wasn't problematic to us at all. She was professional in coming down from her room, and once she was at her table she did her job,’’ he said.
The expo ended at 1 p.m. Sunday, and she was scheduled to return to South Florida that afternoon. But organizers, feeling sorry for her, let her stay an extra night and rebooked her return flight for Monday.
Dumesnil carried her luggage from her room and drove her to George Bush Intercontinental Airport.
“I kind of felt bad that she was going back home to what seemed like were issues,’’ he said.
“I sent her a message after I dropped her off, before she left Houston, and thanked her for everything,’’ he said. “She sent me a message back and said she had a wonderful time.’’
In the weeks after news broke about her death, Dumesnil reflected on his interactions with her during her final convention appearance in Houston.
“What I found to be sad, it was very clear that she just didn't have any friends,’’ he said. “What remaining family she had alive she was not interacting with them or not frequently. She just seemed to have kind of an empty, very independent life.”
🎬 An 'uninhabitable' condo
NOT LONG AFTER she returned from Houston, her financial straits grew more perilous.
On Dec. 12, a Palm Beach County judge issued a final ruling on the 2022 eviction lawsuit, ordering Morgan to pay her former landlord $25,200 — $11,200 for unpaid rent and $14,000 for damages to the Delray Beach condo.
Three months before the lawsuit was filed, Morgan had complained on social media about a burst toilet that flooded her condo with 4 inches of water, ruining her possessions. She claimed her landlord refused to repair it.
“My rent was just raised to $2,500. Unless I’m planning on living in the Everglades, I’ve got a situation on my hands,” she wrote on her Facebook page on Feb. 25, 2022.
Eight months later, during her eviction, she posted a photo, taken at least a year earlier, of her hugging her black lab, Jesse. Above it she wrote: “Please wish Jesse and me luck tomorrow. We’re going through a move under duress.’’
Court records offer another version.
Morgan moved to the Bahia at Delray condo in April 2019 after signing a lease for $1,700 a month. In January 2022, she and her landlord, New York doctor Anthony Sampino, agreed to a rent increase of $1,800. But Sampino said in court filings that Morgan stopped paying rent a month later and continued living there for most of the summer.
In May 2022, Sampino sued to evict her, a request a judge granted three months later.
When Sampino got access to his vacated unit, he discovered his condo “uninhabitable” and “in a hazardous state and complete disarray, including but not limited to feces on the floor, piles of garbage and personal items,’’ he wrote in a court filing. There was a television in the kitchen sink with the water running over it.
The urine and feces belonged to Jesse. (Two years earlier, the black lab was the focus of a welfare check by a county Animal Care and Control officer responding to an anonymous complaint about a dog tethered to a door knob on the porch of Morgan’s condo. Morgan was issued a warning, records show.)
A cleaning crew Sampino hired wore protective suits while removing a urine-soaked mattress and gutting the condo. They scrubbed the tiles and grout “to get the smell out of the apartment,’’ court records say.
Morgan’s lawyer reiterated her version, writing in a court filing that the landlord failed to repair the burst toilet.
When she stopped paying her rent and was evicted, Morgan made appearances at two conventions, the Great Richmond Convention Center in Virginia in March 2022 and the Raleigh Convention Center in North Carolina in July 2022.
Her agent for those shows was GalaxyCon founder Mike Broder of Fort Lauderdale. Broder, who would not comment for this story, referred Morgan to a friend to represent her in the eviction proceedings, Fort Lauderdale attorney Scott Behren.
Behren, citing attorney-client privilege, would not say whether Morgan paid him for his services.
“I felt bad for her. She was living a lot in the past from ‘Caddyshack’ and ‘Tron’,’’ Behren said. “She's had some struggles later in life, but she was a super nice warm person, honestly.’’
Despite the judge’s order, Sampino never received any money from his former tenant.
🎬 'She was on her way'
ONE NIGHT IN 1979, Michael Cichorski had just fallen asleep watching “Saturday Night Live” when a voice on television jarred him awake.
Gets a strong man fresh!
The voice in the Irish Spring soap commercial had an Irish accent, but it sounded familiar: It was his big sister, who’d gone west a year earlier to chase her acting dreams.
“I woke up saying, ‘Hey, that’s Cindy!’ I recognized her voice in my sleep,’’ he recalled in an email.
Just a few years earlier, Cynthia Ann Cichorski (sick-HORSE-skee) discovered a passion for theater and acting, flourishing in plays at Mother Theodore Guerin High School, an all-girls Catholic school (now closed) in River Grove, Ill.
In one performance, she played an Irish nun.
“Cindy put significant effort into learning to speak with a strong Irish accent. She was an absolute hit,’’ Cichorski said. “This energized her to move in that direction in college.’’
Morgan, in a 2020 interview with the popular podcast "1980snow," said that acting was not her immediate career goal after graduating high school. Her initial focus, she said, was broadcasting.
After earning a communications degree from Northern Illinois University, where she spun records on the college radio station, she decided to change her name. She sent out two sets of resumes, some using her birth name and some as Cindy Morgan, a name inspired by a story she’d read when she was 12 about the mythological character Morgan le Fay.
“Only Cindy Morgan got interviews,’’ columnist Christopher Borrelli wrote in the Chicago Tribune earlier this year. “Cynthia Ann Cichorski was never heard from again.’’
She worked a short while as a TV “weather girl” in Milwaukee and on radio around Chicago, then registered with a modeling agency and landed a gig appearing at Fiat car shows across the United States. Occasionally she’d pick up the phone to check in with her family.
One day, she called from Los Angeles. “She said, ‘I really like this city. I think that I will stay here.’ Well, she did just that,’’ her brother said. “She quit the (car) show, got an agent and we sent her belongings to her.’’
When the Irish Spring commercial aired, Cichorski figured the impressive acting chops his sister showed in high school were paying off.
“She was on her way,’’ he said.
She appeared in commercials for Continental Airlines, Wishbone Salad Dressing and Johnson & Johnson suntan lotion. Her role in the megahit “Caddyshack” paid her $10,000, the Tribune reported.
After “Caddyshack” and “Tron,” she almost got Kim Cattrall’s role in ‘“Police Academy’’ and Linda Hamilton’s in “Terminator,” two successful 1984 films, according to the newspaper.
But her fast rise turned into a rapid descent.
In interviews over the years, Morgan blamed the tailspin on “Caddyshack” producer Jon Peters. He blackballed her, she said, for refusing his demand to let Playboy photograph her nude scene. She said she complained to her agent but the agent sided with Peters, so she fired him.
The agent went on to become head of casting at ABC and Peters has producer credits on “Superman,’’ “The Color Purple,’’ “Rain Man” and both the 1976 and 2018 remakes of “A Star is Born.’’ According to reports, Peters has been sued for sexual harassment over the years; he was ordered to pay his accuser $3 million in one case.
Will Padilla, creator of the “1980snow” podcast, said he is surprised the mainstream media never focused on Morgan’s claims.
“She wasn't the star she should have been or could have been but for this incident with producer Jon Peters,’’ Padilla, who asked Morgan about it in a 2020 podcast episode, said in an episode early this year.
She had been “destined for stardom, but unfortunately, sadly, in the last few years of her life had been struggling to find just a place to live that was safe and affordable,’’ Padilla said. “This woman deserved a bigger career and certainly in the very least, like all of us do, a peaceful twilight.’’
If Morgan discussed the decline of her career with her family, her brother didn’t share it in emails with ByJoeCapozzi.com. (Michael Cichorski would not agree to a phone interview; he answered select questions via email.)
At some point during her acting career, she continued her “life’s journey without any contact with any family members,’’ he said.
He said Cindy had no children and was married once to a man named Fred Villanueva, who offered condolences in her online obituary: “I will never forget you Cindy. We were married July 4, 1976 and shared three beautiful years together until things fell apart. You remain in my heart and always will.’’
Cichorski said he last saw his sister more than 15 years ago on a business trip to Los Angeles. “I had dinner with Cindy then drove her back to her apartment in 12 Oaks,’’ he recalled.
For a while, he tried to follow her on social media. “For some reason, she chose to eventually block family from her Facebook page, so we respected her privacy,’’ he said.
As a result, Cichorski said he and his family weren’t aware of her financial and legal problems or her issues with landlords and neighbors in the final years of her life.
🎬 'An elderly person having trouble'
MORGAN ENDURED OTHER challenges in the final weeks of her life.
Around the time the judge ordered her to pay her former Delray Beach landlord $25,000 — money she didn’t have — she was at odds with her landlord, roommate and a neighbor in Lake Worth Beach’s Sunset Ridge neighborhood west of U.S. 1. And she was attracting scrutiny again from the county’s Animal Care and Control agency.
Morgan shared on social media and with friends screenshots of what she said were text exchanges with a neighbor who was threatening her. She also shared screenshots of what she said were texts from her landlord, who Morgan said was trying to force her to leave.
“Two weeks is the end of the month. Your agent contacted me and said you would be out and made arrangements to move,’’ the landlord wrote, according to a screenshot Morgan shared.
Morgan replied that she didn’t have an agent, that the person claiming to be her agent “is a fraud who got ahold of me because I’m famous … and has been turned into the FBI.’’
“I don’t have time for (this), Cindy. I just need my place,’’ the landlord replied on Dec. 17, 2023.
Later that day, Morgan wrote on Facebook: “All I want for Christmas is a safe place to live! I’ve got two weeks.’’
A few weeks earlier, she texted a friend, “I don’t belong in this neighborhood.’’ To the same friend, she sent this text: “If these bastards give me another seizure and I die, I will come back and haunt them!”
The landlord, Sherryl DeLisser, said she did not want to comment for this story out of respect for Morgan’s family.
Meanwhile, an Animal Care and Control officer showed up at Morgan’s apartment in response to a complaint about feces on the floor and patches of missing fur on her dog.
On Dec. 10, the officer noted debris cluttering the apartment and watched Morgan struggle to control Jesse.
“Numerous times it appeared as if Jesse was overpowering her and pulling her to the ground,’’ the report said.
Morgan was issued a violation notice and given a week to clean the feces and provide medical care for the dog.
On Dec. 19, the officer made a follow-up visit and determined the issues had been corrected.
“She had trouble caring for her animals in the final weeks of her life. We issued her a violation to take some corrective action and she did all that we required of her right before her passing,’’ Dave Walesky, assistant director of Animal Care and Control, said in an interview.
“We definitely see far worse every day, so this is not a case of chronic animal cruelty or neglect from my perspective,’’ he said. “This is a case of an elderly person having trouble.’’
🎬 'No drink rule'
TWO DECADES EARLIER, police in LaValle, Wis., responded to a domestic dispute at a home Morgan shared with her mother.
Two officers arrived just before 11 a.m. on Oct. 19, 2001, and were met by Morgan in the driveway. A red welt was visible around her left temple, an officer wrote in a report.
Morgan, 50 at the time, said her mother, Ardeth Cichorski, slapped her in the face during an argument. She asked the officers to arrest her 71-year-old mother.
One of the officers went inside to talk to Ardeth, who’d called the police. She told the officer “her daughter was an alcoholic” who had recently left California and moved in at her mother’s invitation, the report said.
“One of the stipulations for her daughter living there was the fact that her daughter had to go to AA, stay in AA and continue sobriety. One of the rules was that she was not to have any alcoholic beverages in the house,’’ the report said, citing Ardeth.
Cichorski said she slapped Morgan after an argument erupted when she asked her daughter to clean up her room and clean up after the cats she’d brought with her.
“Ardeth then took me to the bedroom, showed me how big of a mess the bedroom was. I did witness the room in disorder,’’ the officer wrote in a report. “Ardeth also showed me a hidden 12-pack of Red Dog in the closet and two empty cans lying beside the bed.’’
The officer wrote “it appeared that Ardeth wanted me to enforce the No Drink rule.’’ He said he told her “I would not be able to enforce any house rules.’’
Both mother and daughter were arrested, handcuffed and taken in separate patrol cars to the Sauk County Jail. Ardeth Cichorski was charged with battery, her daughter with disorderly conduct.
Just before 1 p.m., the officers conducted a breath test on Morgan and “the results of that was a 0.11 prohibited alcohol concentration,’’ the report said.
Michael Cichorski, in response to an email asking if his sister was close with her parents, said Cindy was closer with their father, who emigrated from Poland to Chicago during the Great Depression and died in 1996.
He did not offer comments about his mother, 94, who is believed to be living in the Chicago area, or about the 2001 arrest.
🎬 'She moved like a movie star'
AFTER LEAVING WISCONSIN, Morgan went to New York City. She found a studio apartment in Brooklyn and a job selling memberships for a Manhattan health club.
Mike Fecht, her supervisor at Crunch Fitness, said he met Morgan in September 2002 not long after he started a new job as area manager in charge of the chain’s 10 health clubs around New York City.
One of his first days on the job, his boss asked him: "Have you met the girl from ‘Caddyshack’ yet? She’s one of our sales reps."
Fecht was familiar with the movie. He saw it in a middle-school classroom when his teacher incorporated the film into a lesson plan. Fecht said he and his classmates watched “Caddyshack” and were quizzed on it.
The first time he saw Morgan walk into Crunch's SoHo club, he saw flashes of Lacey Underall.
“I was speaking with the sales manager when she walked in wearing a black scarf and big black sunglasses. She might have been selling memberships at a health club, but she moved like a movie star,’’ he wrote in a Facebook tribute after she died.
“We took a tour through the club and connected a bit. She confided that her life was not that of a movie star. Bad relationships and other circumstances led to a studio Brooklyn apartment and no real opportunity to speak of, so she took a job selling memberships at Crunch,’’ he wrote on Facebook.
“She always called me, ‘Michael,’ in that sexy voice of hers, and said I was the strongest person she ever knew,’’ he wrote.
Before long, Fecht and his wife became friends with Morgan. He said he encouraged her to try to revive her career.
But in 2003, their friendship hit a rough patch. He said he had to fire Morgan for not showing up for work. He said he lost touch with her until she called him a few years later to thank him for lifting her spirits at a difficult time in her life.
“She said that I'd helped her get her confidence back and that she'd gotten an agent and was doing celebrity golf tournaments and comic con shows,’’ he said.
Fecht said he last saw Morgan about 16 years ago when they met for dinner in Atlanta where she was appearing at a convention.
They would stay in touch off and on over the years through phone calls, he said, most recently a few months before her death.
“She talked about having some difficulty with her living situation and she felt like she was being stalked by people over the last few years,’’ he said.
“These last few years have been tough on her, so I am glad she's at peace. But I'm sad my friend is gone.’’
🎬 'No signs of foul play'
ON DEC. 29, 2023, a Palm Beach County Animal Care and Control officer was called to Morgan’s Lake Worth Beach home again, this time on an abandoned animal investigation.
“It was reported that the resident of this address has three animals that have been left inside the house,’’ the officer wrote in a report.
The officer knocked on the door and telephoned Morgan but got no answer. The officer left a voice message and posted a “24-hour Abandonment Notice” on the door.
The officer had no idea that just beyond the other side of the door, Morgan lay dead on the bathroom floor.
Late the next day, Corina Bryan, who was living in the other half of the house with her 1-year-old son, returned home from a Christmas visit with family. She knocked on Morgan’s door and, aside from a barking dog, got no response.
But she smelled a foul odor. She called 911.
A fire rescue crew, summoned by a Palm Beach County Sheriff’s deputy, forced entry into the apartment. After watching Jesse jump off the bed and run out of the room, they found Morgan on her back, her left arm covering her face, on the bathroom floor.
The deputy’s report noted “obvious signs of decomposition which make it difficult to determine any additional trauma.’’
She was pronounced dead at 11:03 p.m. on Dec. 30, even though first responders could tell she’d probably passed away days earlier. The report noted “evidence of vomiting” in the toilet and “no signs of foul play.” Four prescription bottles were found.
Dr. Michelle Duhaney signed the death certificate, according to the PBSO report, which noted that Morgan had died of “apparently natural” causes.
In an email last month, Michael Cichorski said his sister’s death certificate listed the cause of death as “cardiac arrest and a history of seizures.’’
The Palm Beach County Medical Examiner arranged for All County Funeral Home in downtown Lake Worth Beach to retrieve her body. No autopsy was performed.
Deputies tried to notify her family but could not find information in her apartment about relatives. Instead, they reached out to a name listed as an emergency contact on Morgan’s Florida identification card — Donna Cheatham.
🎬 Living 'hand to mouth quite a bit'
FROM NEW YORK CITY, Morgan went south to Virginia’s Chesapeake Bay, where she met Donna Cheatham in 2003.
“A friend of my husband’s brought her to Newport News, where we lived, to help her out,’’ Cheatham said in an interview. “Then they had a falling out. She came over to stay with us and stayed for two years.’’
Morgan brought two cats and became fast friends with Cheatham, who remembers her friend often wearing a Crunch gym shirt around the house.
Cheatham, a jewelry designer, made necklaces that Morgan wore on photo shoots. She tagged along with her to fan conventions in Richmond and Baltimore.
She laughed when recalling her husband’s adolescent enthusiasm about Lacey Underall living with them. Although she had seen “Caddyshack,’’ she said she’d never heard of Morgan before they met.
“To me, she was Cindy, my friend. I didn't look at her like a crazed fan,’’ Cheatham said. “Maybe that's why she put me as her emergency contact because I always helped her. If she needed help, money for food, whatever, I was the first one there to help.’’
She said Morgan guarded her privacy. “If you became her friend, it was a rarity because she just didn't trust people,’’ Cheatham said. “She went to a lot of trouble to make sure that nobody knew any negative things.’’
Cheatham wasn’t the only person helping Morgan around that time.
“The thing to know about Cindy was she lived hand to mouth quite a bit. She was not rich by any means,’’ said Dave Arnspiger.
He said he met Morgan in 2003 when he was working for Disney software on the computer game Tron 2.0. Morgan’s voice is one of the characters. A friendship took root.
When she came to the Los Angeles area once a month or so for trade shows and conventions, Arnspiger and his wife invited her to stay in a guest house on their property.
She turned to them for marketing help. Arnspiger said he built one of Morgan’s early websites. And at her insistence, he took fresh publicity photos that she autographed and sold at shows, even though he told her he was just a budding photographer still learning his craft.
“She needed a new head shot. I think I mentioned I had never done a headshot for anyone before,’’ he recalled. “We sat down one day and I think I took 5,000 pictures of her that day and only one really looked good. She loved this one image and it ended up being her main headshot for a while that she used in promotional materials. It sort of cemented our friendship.’’
They worked together for about eight years. He said he drove her to conventions and helped set up her table where she sold headshots for $10 or $20 each and modeling shots for $30 each.
“The autograph circuit, those were her main means of making money. She'd sell headshots and pose for pictures. That was how she pulled bucks together,’’ he said.
“She made a decent amount at each show. She obviously saved money by staying with friends she had in different cities so she wasn’t paying for hotels,’’ he said.
For years, Morgan told colleagues and fans she was writing her memoirs. She even had a title: “From Catholic School to Caddyshack.’’
“Pretty much since the day I met her she kept saying, ‘I'm working on my autobiography,’’’ Arnspiger said. But the book never appeared.
Andrew Sigman of Boynton Beach said he was among those Morgan recruited to help with the book. It was supposed to be a 30-page coffee table book of photos more than a traditional memoir, he said.
Sigman, who met Morgan in 1999 at a convention in New Jersey, convinced her in 2016 to move to the Renaissance Commons apartment complex off Gateway Boulevard where he lived. He said she was evicted after about a year.
Sigman, who said he designed a website for her, said he became close friends with Morgan and invited her to family dinners and Passover celebrations. Their friendship ended in 2020 when "it became too stressful’’ for him, he said.
Arnspiger said he parted ways with Morgan around 2011 after she became too demanding.
“She had a lot of ambition,’’ he said. “I think ability was lacking in some cases to get it all done.’’
🎬 'She wanted to be rewarded'
SOUTH FLORIDA BECAME Morgan’s home after she left her two cats with Cheatham in Newport News in 2005.
By 2007, she was living in an oceanfront bungalow in Ocean Ridge, about 40 miles north of the Davie, Fla., golf course where “Caddyshack” was filmed in 1979.
She took long walks on the beach, hosted parties and frequented Hurricane Alley, a Boynton Beach eatery just across the Ocean Avenue Bridge from Ocean Ridge.
“She had this natural magnetism,’’ said one friend, who recalled the time Morgan had a frozen deep dish pizza shipped from Chicago. “She was like a flame when she came into the room. Everybody gravitated to her.’’
With Ocean Ridge as her base, she kept busy traveling the con circuit, appearing at the PGA Merchandise Show in Orlando and working celebrity bartender gigs at fundraisers around Palm Beach and Fort Lauderdale.
She made guest appearances at the annual Fort Lauderdale International Film Festival off and on from 2006 to 2018.
She considered doing a photo shoot for Playboy to promote the autobiography she was working on. “I would do it now because it's my choice," Morgan, who was 56 at the time, told The Palm Beach Post in 2007, referring to her refusal to pose in 1979. "Nobody tells a woman when and where and how."
She also tried to leverage her “Caddyshack” legacy.
“She is starting a venture where country clubs around the U.S. can have a Caddyshack-themed party that Morgan will attend — for a fee, of course, … ’’ the Palm Beach Post reported in 2007.
Morgan told the newspaper, "Clubs have been having these Caddyshack-themed parties for years. Why not have Lacey attend and make it truly memorable?"
In 2006, she organized a charity tournament outside Chicago with a promise to bring co-stars Chase, Murray and other “Caddyshack” cast members to raise $250,000 for military families. She said she discussed her plans with Illinois Lt. Gov. Pat Quinn, who endorsed the idea.
"As the daughter of a Polish immigrant who lied about his age to join the Army in World War II because he was ‘proud to be an American,' I feel very passionately about supporting our military," she told a reporter for The Daily Press of Virginia. "I feel unbelievably humbled by the fact that some movie I did 25 years ago can help these men and women."
But the tournament raised no money. Instead, it spawned lawsuits from the hosting hotel and golf course and others seeking more than $100,000 from Morgan’s non-profit corporation. Quinn’s office issued a statement expressing disappointment in the failed event.
Morgan said she got in over her head and blamed a professional planner for setting a high budget, but the plaintiffs saw it differently.
“(T)hose still owed money lay the blame squarely on Morgan,’’ the Tribune reported in 2007. “They say they fell for her claims that cast members Chase and Murray would appear at the event (they didn’t) and now believe Morgan, who makes appearances at golf courses, may have seen the tournament as a way to drum up business for herself.’’
A few years later, she attracted attention from the IRS. From 2009 to 2013, she failed to pay $18,800 in taxes, according to an IRS lien filed in 2014.
She tried to revive her “Tron” characters, too.
Landry Walker, co-writer of the comic series “Tron: Ghost in the Machine,” said he received a call from Morgan around 2004 asking him for ideas to develop Yori.
Walker remembers being starstruck; he’d admired Morgan since he was a teen. Now she was calling him on the phone.
“This amazing, very present-in-my-adolescence Hollywood celebrity would call me,'’ said Walker, who isn’t sure how she found his phone number. "I would never call her.''
Each time she called, he couldn’t help feeling “a little intimidated,’’ he said. But he didn’t mind.
“It was such a surreal experience, and she was so engaging and friendly and warm with her outreach,’’ he said.
Morgan called him randomly for a few years, “always with some scheme or plan to put her characters back in the spotlight,’’ he said.
“She was a very, very talkative person. She had very passionate feelings about her characters in ‘Tron,’ hoping to help steer any representation of those characters. We were limited in our usage, following Disney canons where her characters were no longer alive.’’
Morgan might have mentioned financial problems, Walker said, but he mostly remembers the pride she exuded when talking about the characters she played 20 years earlier.
“From my conversations with her, finding ways to make money was absolutely on her mind, but it was a degree more than that,’’ said Walker, who said he last spoke to Morgan in 2009.
“For her, ‘Tron’ wasn't that far in her rearview mirror at the time. It was her character. It was her work. It was her art. I do think she felt very passionately about that. She wanted to be rewarded for it.’’
Morgan was not offered roles in two “Tron” sequels, which “crushed her,” a friend said.
“Tron: Legacy” in 2010 featured Jeff Bridges and Boxleitner, who both appeared with Morgan in the 1982 original. Bridges is also in “Tron: Ares,” due out in 2025 and starring Jared Leto, but Boxleitner is not.
🎬 Making plans for 2024
DESPITE HER PROBLEMS in the final weeks of her life, Morgan was looking forward to hitting the con circuit in 2024. She was making plans to attend a show in Chicago in the spring, said Joe Arce, photographer in the Windy City.
“We were going to do a photo shoot in March,’’ he said, quoting her as saying in a text two weeks before she died: “‘I'm jogging and I'm on a new workout thing. I want to lose 15 pounds before we do another shoot.’’’
Arce, who shot the portrait on her Wikipedia page, said he was always impressed by her confidence.
“The thing about Cindy, despite her age she wanted to shoot cheesecake. That’s why she was insistent on working out and losing that 15 pounds because she wanted to do some sexy shots,’’ he said.
Arce said he met Morgan in 2009 when he was senior staff photographer for The Hollywood Show Chicago. He remembers she approached him and said, “I hear you’re the Annie Leibovitz of Chicago.’’
He said she “adopted” him as her “official hometown personal photographer.’’ They became good friends, bantering about everything from show business to her beloved Bears and Cubs.
They shared a mission “of showing that contrary to industry standards, an actress over 50 could still fully embrace her Hollywood bombshell status,’’ he wrote in a tribute to her.
“Together we made sure that a heaping helping of photographic ‘cheesecake’ remained on the menu for all the fans that followed her on social media.”
But she shared little with Arce about her personal life.
“She was very private about her life and family. ‘I'm a tough Polish chick from Chicago is all you need to know,’’’ he recalled her saying.
In 2018, he said, Morgan invited him to move in with her in Boynton Beach and work as her personal assistant. He declined.
“I'd just entered into a relationship with a new girlfriend,’’ he recalled with a laugh. “Moving to Florida to shack up with Lacey Underall is going to kind of be a deal-breaker for any girlfriends. She’s like, ‘Well, don’t say I didn’t ask.’’’
Arce said he tried to “lure her back to sweet home Chicago several times over the years but she preferred the warmer Florida weather and to remain closer to Disney because she hoped she would be included in future ‘Tron’ reboots or projects.’’
He wasn’t the only person urging Morgan to leave Florida.
“We were trying to get her to move out here to Kansas where my wife and I live. She didn’t want to do that,’’ said James Anderson, a “Tron” fan and convention circuit regular.
Anderson, who recruited celebrities for charity appearances, said he met Morgan in person for the first time in 2012 at The Hollywood Show in Los Angeles. A year or two earlier, he said, he was surprised when she accepted his ‘friend’ request on what he thought was her Facebook fan page but was actually her personal page.
“I walked up to her table and she goes, ‘Hi, James.’ I didn’t think she was talking to me. She goes, ‘You’re James Anderson, right? I know you from Facebook,’’’ he recalled.
Anderson, 51, said they became friends, speaking or texting at least once a month. “She sent me a gift for my daughter when my daughter was born in January 2017,’’ he said.
He said she also confided her personal problems with family and neighbors. She told him she was living in a motel at one point and didn’t feel safe in Lake Worth Beach, prompting him to share real-estate listings of homes in Kansas.
“The last time I talked to her I think was the day after Christmas,’’ said Anderson, who’d suffered health problems after a bout with COVID. “She was checking up on me to see how I was doing.’’
Anderson might have been the last person Morgan communicated with before she died.
“She seemed fine on Dec. 26,’’ he said. “She didn't seem like she was in pain.’’
🎬 A final trip home
EARLY LAST NEW Years Eve morning, Cheatham woke up to find six missed calls and voice messages from a PBSO deputy. Knowing Morgan lived in South Florida, Cheatham said she immediately wondered if her old friend had gotten into trouble.
At the time, Cheatham said she’d been reading Morgan's social media comments about her problems. A few days earlier, Cheatham made a mental note to reach out to Morgan after the holidays. “I even sent her a message (via Instagram), ‘We need to catch up. Is everything OK?’’’ she recalled
When Cheatham connected with the deputy on Dec. 31, she learned Morgan had died.
She told the deputy she was surprised Morgan listed her as an emergency contact because she hadn’t seen her in eight years or spoken to her in four years.
A short while later, Cheatham received another phone call from a West Palm Beach-area phone number. This time, it was a funeral home calling to ask if she wanted to claim the body and make arrangements for a showing.
Cheatham said she called PBSO and told them they needed to find Morgan’s family. She urged them to issue a press release about Morgan’s death, which she hoped might generate publicity that would catch the attention of relatives.
PBSO issued a release on Jan. 6 but it did not mention Morgan’s career as an actress.
“I was like, ‘This is crazy,’’’ Cheatham said. So she contacted the celebrity news website TMZ, which promptly broke news of Morgan’s death, sparking stories from other media outlets.
A day later, Morgan’s brother in Chicago called Cheatham.
“Thank God. Because Cindy never really talked about her family,’’ she said.
Cheatham said she has had several conversations with Morgan’s family since Cindy’s death but she would not elaborate out of respect for their privacy.
“I hope everybody tries to put her in a good light,’’ Cheatham said. “I know a lot of conspiracy theories are going around.’’
Morgan's social media posts about feeling threatened by her neighbors and landlord sparked online speculation about whether her death might have been caused by foul play.
Morgan’s brother, Michael, said he and his family are not among those second-guessing authorities. “We had no reason to doubt the findings of the police,’’ he said in an email.
Cichorski said he had his sister’s remains and personal items flown to Chicago. He said a Christian service was held at a funeral home and Cindy was buried in a private family plot not far from where she grew up.
Morgan’s dog, Jesse, and her cats, Oscar and Jackie, were adopted in February by animal rescues.
On Nov. 19, Morgan’s brother answered a set of questions that was emailed to him July 30. On Nov. 28, he sent a polite email declining to answer follow-up questions sent to him a week earlier.
“I don't wish to add anything else or answer any further questions. Nothing against you, I just am not going to go any further with this,’’ he wrote.
In an email in August, he shared a photograph of his sister at her seventh or eighth birthday party.
“In that picture, she was having the time of her life at her birthday party,’’ he wrote. “It is the smile I remember.’’
Story edited by Joel Engelhardt
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About the author
Joe Capozzi is an award-winning reporter based in Lake Worth Beach. He spent more than 30 years writing for newspapers, mostly at The Palm Beach Post, where he wrote about the opioid scourge, invasive pythons, the birth of the Ballpark of the Palm Beaches and Palm Beach County government. For 15 years, he covered the Miami Marlins baseball team. Joe left The Post in December 2020. View all posts by Joe Capozzi.