In this passage, the way movie stars, directors, producers, and financiers intertwined in Golden Era Hollywood reminds me that it was once a very small town.
Excerpt page 79 Mickey Neilan swept her (Gloria Swanson) off her feet that summer with his madcap, brilliant, vivacious insouciance and his claim that there were only some 290 days before he was free to marry her. "After Herbert, how could I not love him?" she would ask. "After one afternoon with him, how could I not forget Craney Gartz and every other handsome man who had ever tempted me? As Mickey waltz me into my first real love affair, it never occurred to me to utter a syllable of protest."
While waiting for his divorce to become final, Mickey lived like a young lord at the Los Angeles Athletic Club next to Charlie Chaplin, who was trying to escape the sensational charges surrounding his divorce from the teenage Mildred Harris. Mickey's romance with Gloria was particularly torrid and came after his affair with Peggy Hopkins Joyce, a former Ziegfeld Follies girl who distracted him so much from his long and confused Strangers Banquet that the cast and crew had to wait two weeks after the starting date before Neilan showed up. The term "gold digger' had been coined in honor of Peggy around 1920. Born Margaret Upton in Virginia, the bid blonde had arrived in Chicago in 1914, changed her name to Hopkins, and landed her first millionaire husband, Stanley Joyce. Divorced with a million-dollar settlement, she had, in quick succession, netted four more millionaire husbands. Dressed in stylish mourning outfits, because Henri Letellier, a famous Parisian publisher and man-about-town, had just taken his life on her account, she had cruised into Hollywood with a three-million-dollar bankroll, bent on a movie career. After Mickey's infatuation with her had cooled, he had introduced her to Chaplin, who used the story of her relationship with Letellier as a basis for A Woman of Paris.
Notes: Herbert Somborn was Gloria Swanson's second husband. She had an affair with Mickey but decided on marriage to Henri de la Falaise, during which she had her relationship with Joseph P. Kennedy.
A Woman of Paris was Chaplin's movie that came out in 1923
Margaret Upton is an Americanization of her name given a birth : Emma Marguerite Upton
The Author was incorrect that Peggy changed her name to Peggy Hopkins. The name was a result of her second marriage.
in 1910 she married Everett Allen Archibald Jr., a millionaire. But she was only fifteen years old and so the marriage was annulled. (What kind of parents did she have?)
In 1913 she married Sherburne Philbrick Hopkins, a lawyer from a prominent and rich family. She left him to pursue acting and with his approval that she marry James Stanley Joyce.
in 1920, she married James Stanley Joyce. She married two days after ending her marriage with Hopkins. This was her most famous marriage because of the story that she refused to come to him on their wedding night unless he wrote her a check for half a million dollars first.
During this era in Hollywood, in which Pat Powers, an associate of Joseph P. Kennedy, attempted to move Peggy into an acting career, she then married in 1924 to Count Gosta Gustave Morner, who she said was her first true love. They divorced in 1926.
Peggy had two more husbands in her life, years later. This information was culled from Wikipedia. I note that her reputation as a "Gold Digger" came because of her many marriages to rich men, but also because she attracted other men who wanted to marry her, but I wonder if it was only that she was beautiful and charming. What about men who go after a woman knowing they may not succeed with her?
Missy.
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