FLORENZ ZIEGFELD HELPED LAUNCH MANY WOMEN'S CAREERS

 

The film came out in 1936 and featured a large and well loved cast of 

characters, in particular the leading men William Powell, Luise Rainer, and actress Myrna Loy.

It suggested the life of Florenz Ziegfeld, 

as a man who womanized, made a fortune but lost it, 

and who helped launch many a showgirl's career.

Ziegfeld girls often went on to pursue modeling, acting, 

and marrying or mistressing rich men.

Several of them have been featured here at MISTRESS MANIFESTO.

When it came to actresses, it was Mary Pickford who established United Artists, along with others. Clara Kimball Young was the next, and by 1916 many actresses had the same idea. They wanted more control over their careers, to expand, and to prosper.

PEGGY HOPKINS JOYCE & CLARA KIMBALL YOUNG : ZIEGFELD FOLLIES SHOWGIRLS WENT INTO ACTING

In this passage from the book by Axel Madsen, a man named Pat Powers, nineteen years older than Joseph P. Kennedy,  who'd started out as a policeman, had become a businessman and had gotten involved in the nickelodeon business, in particular the Edison-Biograph company.  At the time a number of small companies were at war with each other to dominate the movie making business and the movie theater business. 

Excerpt page 99 :  Powers was a loner. He sold out to (Carl) Laemmle and for the next decade was in and out of film investments with a variety of partners. Known as a "bonus shark," he loaned production money at steep interest rates or became a participant in the profits. One partner was Lewis Selznick, the former jewelry dealer from Kiev who had persuaded his sons they were heirs to a kingdom, but who had lately lost his fortune. When he hadn't been able to pay a debt of a mere $3000, Selznick's enemies had forced him into bankruptcy. His sons, Myron and David, vowed vengeance.

Clara Kimball Young adored Powers and believed him to be the most wonderful, clever man in the world. He had lost money, however, by becoming a major stockholder in Equity Pictures. A year later he had invested $120,000 in one movie --- The Miracle Man with Lon Chaney --- and made three million dollars.

Now in his mid-fifties, Pat had become infatuated with the icy blond charms of Peggy Hopkins Joyce. She had distracted Mickey Neilan (who Gloria Swanson had once had a between-marriages affair with) and told (Charlie) Chaplin of her gold-digging days while skinny dipping with him on Catalina. Peggy had added MGM's frail wunderkind, Irving Thalberg, to her list of conquests, wanted Erich von Stroheim to write and direct a film starring his Peggy. Pat was courting the stormy, individualistic Stroheim because in The Merry Widow, MGM's current hit, the director had managed the feat of turning Mae Murray, another ex-Follies hoofer, into a star

Reflating the careers of former chorus girls was not among Joe Kennedy's ambitions in 1924....

Lewis Szelnick's mistress was Clara Kimball Young.

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EMMA MARGUERITE "PEGGY" UPTON BECAME PEGGY HOPKINS JOYCE THROUGH MARRIAGES : MICKEY NEILAN WENT FROM PEGGY TO GLORIA

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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PEGGY HOPKINS JOYCE : SPENDTHRIFTY GOLD DIGGER : THE GOLD DIGGER AS A COMIC FIGURE : HUNGER MAKES YOU THINK

PEGGY HOPKINS JOYCE 

 SPENDTHRIFTY GOLD DIGGER

First posted on April 5th 2010

Born Emma Marguerite Upton

1893 – 1957

PEGGY HOPKINS JOYCE was the most publicized Mistress-Courtesan of the 1920's and 1930's. She was introduced to Florenz Ziegfeld, who owned the famous showgirl venue New Amsterdam Theatre, by a dressmaker to fashionable ladies, Madame Frances, and her career began. She was a heartbreaker and international celebrity, perhaps the first famous to be famous woman of the 20th century. She was known for her spendthrifty ways as well as a steamy sex life. Was Peggy ruthless and sociopathic? Or did she simply decide at a young age that she would do well, beyond her childhood as the daughter of a Norfolk barber?

She had three multimillionaire husbands. And a great number of generous patrons. She came to own one of the largest blue diamonds known to the world in her time.

PEGGY HOPKINS JOYCE : THE GOLD DIGGER AS A COMIC FIGURE

First posted April 6 2010

Excerpt Page 84 :

"Though the gold digger is a comic, not a tragic figure, she is not totally uncomplicated. While men adored these creatures, they were also made slightly uneasy by them. It was appealing to have a glamorous plaything whose favors could be bought for no more than the price of a fashionable apartment, a generous allowance, and a regular supply of steak dinners and expensive jewelry. But in making such a hard-nosed exchange, these women exhibited not only a deep cynicism but also a degree of power, which is one reason men felt a certain anxiety in their presence. Men were also made uncomfortable by females who so flagrantly flouted the social rules designed to keep people in their places. Unlike the courtesans of Europe, who occupied an established an respected niche, the American gold digger was a renegade; there was nothing subtle, or admirable, about her methods - or her goals."

 

PEGGY HOPKINS JOYCE : HUNGER MAKES YOU THINK

First posted April 9 2010

Excerpt Page 43: 

In her memoirs Peggy described her transition from society wife to Broadway showgirl as the ultimate Cinderella story... As she told it, she left home in March on 1915 with a single suitcase full of clothes and headed by train to New York, where she ensconced herself in the Hopkins family suite in the St Regis Hotel off Fifth Avenue... Wearing torn stockings, her last pair of fresh underwear, and a plaid suit that badly needed cleaning, she headed south towards Times Square pondering the ways of the world.

"Hunger certainly makes you think about things," she wrote. "When I was a kid I used to think that it was Love that was the most important thing in Life, then after that experience in Denver I thought it was money, but now I know it is food." - Peggy Hopkins Joyce

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LOUISE "TEDDY" DUDLEY LYNCH - SOCIETY CHANTEUSE and J. PAUL GETTY MISTRESS and ABSENTEE WIFE

After J. Paul Getty was through with marriage #4, he is said to have become a world class womanizer, possibly also hiring prostitutes, and his personal reputation was being trashed. So perhaps when he met LOUISE DUDLEY LYNCH, called Teddy, he was considering that he needed a high society woman as cover.  The man uncharacteristically rented a luxurious penthouse in New York that was already furnished by its socialite owner with antiques, after so often running home to live with mom after romantic disasters.  Along for a visit with an old friend came Teddy.  In the 1930's she was a "society Chanteuse," (Use the Google Search embedded on this blog to read about Little Edie!) and sang at upper crust dinner clubs like The Stork.  Teddy was 22 and legal.  Paul wooed her with regular attendance at her engagements, kind of like one of those wealthy "stage door Johnnys" who awaited a Ziegfeld Follies girl back stage.  He sent her flowers, bottles of champagne, and one might have thought - for a moment - that he'd back burnered business.  But he was just working hard and playing hard.

In the chapter called "Teddy Phoned, Miss Her So Much," in the book "The House of Getty," we learn that on August 16, 1936, Miss Lynch's New York Times engagement announcement mentioned her exclusive education and professional singing.  Paul was 42 and continued in his unconventional and adventurous personal and business life. This would be his fifth and last marriage. Also his longest.  And here with Teddy is where the J. Paul Getty story moves into the story of the beginnings of his museum in Malibu, the property which he called the ranch, for his is where Teddy would live out her life, after Rome, London, and New York City, while he lived in England.

Teddy's ambition at 22 as a Getty Mistress was to be an opera singer and Getty financed lessons in Rome calling money he never expected to be paid back a loan. Teddy leaned into her dream by having herself photographed dramatically.  As he had when married but seeing Ann Rork around town, though not yet divorced Getty was seen escorting Teddy.  Instead of the posh Hollywood nightclubs it was the Metropolitan Opera House and restaurants.  Still running his empire as Emperor, Getty used the telephone for hours every day and delegated, but was very mobile in his travels.

I found this interesting because I tend to think like this as well; "If you can trust a man, a written contract is a waste of time and if you can't trust him, a written contract is still a waste of paper," is how Getty thought.  (But he would this time insist on something futuristic for 1936, a PRENUP!  While he suited up every day for a day at his hotel room office, he liked to keep things simple - except in his personal life. 

In the spring of 1938 Teddy left New York for England to train her voice with a respected London teacher.  Paul kissed her goodbye.  By now he was considered a serious collector of antiques and antiquities (and loved a bargain) and spent much of his time touring Europe by car and visiting estates, museums, art galleries, and dealers.  He met other women along the way.  That June he met up with Teddy in London and they went out on the town, then off to Paris. But they both seemed content with their separate lives.  He saw little of his four sons and was to have yet another with Teddy, a sickly boy named Timmy who would not live into adulthood.-book page 54 of this chapter, "...Paul wanted Teddy to return to the United States with him after the marriage, whereas Teddy was determined to stay in Rome to continue her operatic studies..."  (World War II was soon to begin, already there were signs.)

As Hitler invaded Poland, they met up in Switzerland but during a visit to Berlin, Paul is said to have kept breakfast, lunch, and dinner dates with three different women friends.

Teddy went back to New York City because of the World War on European soil.
In 1940 the couple met up in Los Angeles and Getty used the trip to visit with ex-wives and sons. Once Teddy was back in New York, Paul began an affair with an actress, age 23, Joan Barry and would soon become embroiled in the scandal that involved her pregnancy, blamed on Charlie Chaplin!

Oh, Paul hated to testify, but the truth was he'd seen Joan frequently in 1941 and in November of 1942 and he gave her "loans," but since (primitive compared to what's available now) blood tests proved Chaplin was the father, why mention that Joan's son might be Paul's?!

When J. Paul Getty died, Teddy was the only one of his wives in his will.  She wrote a memoir entitled "Alone Together."


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THE GREAT ZIEGFELD

Marion Davies was a Ziegfeld girl... a lot of the girls had "Stage Door Johnny's, Sugar Daddys... some became mistresses, some became wives.

ZIEGFELD FOLLIES

This sheet music cover presents an image of the Great Ziegfeld, entertainment pioneer and presenter of the dance review.

He personally selected each of his dancers and the competition was fierce...

Many of these dancers had "Back Stage Johnnys." These were men who wore their heart on their sleeves and weren't afraid to pull out their wallets and make life easier for their beloved. Some of these dancers became mistresses. Some married.