A TRY AT HOLLYWOOD as CHABING COOPER and GIVING UP ON LIFE

Isabel Rosario Cooper went back to entertainment or tried to.  Life in Hollywood didn't renew her work or fame that she'd left behind in Manila.

"Chabing (the name she used as an actor) went from playing a nurse, a geisha, a Siamese harem wife, a Native American, a Chinese servant, a Chinese-American secretary, a hula dancer, another Chinese servant, a Filipina servant, a Carabean slave, and an "Oriental" belly dancer.  In lower budget Charlie Chan films she has full scenes, exchanges dialogue with the lead.  In others she is just another body providing color, being a type.  (Pages 128-129)

"In the decade following her arrangement with MacArthur, Isabel Cooper relentlessly remakes herself, Isabel Kennamer, housewife from Washington, D.C; Belle Cooper, ingénue; Isabel Cooper, actress, possibly Isabel Moreno, wife, Chabing Cooper, nightclub hula dancer; Chabing, actress.  She shaves at least a decade from her actual age, claims to be white, Malay, Scottish, Irish, Javanese.  She moves from being a mistress to getting married, then divorced, to married again (and again.)

Finding herself evicted from a familiar role, and unsatisfied with the one that follows, she invents a plethora of selves in order to survive --sometimes just barely and with bruises to show--in the manifold niches available to women like her.  Both distant from and yet intimately bound to the war raging across both oceans, these roles show a woman making do with scant material and doggedly crafting a life and livelihood through ingenuity and manipulation, or what perhaps has been dismissed as "feminine wiles."  (Excerpt page 110)

The last film she appeared in was shot in 1953 and released the following year and was a fake documentary about burlesque. She had no other roles.

How Isabel continued to live is unknown. However, when she died, she was probably fifty years old and it was an overdose of barbiturates and was likely suicide. Her once upon a time husband, Frank Kennamer, now remarried with children, and a lawyer, was called upon and provided her a burial plot but it is without a headstone in Holy Cross Cemetery, Los Angeles.

There may have been an investigation but the file is lost.

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