Chapter Three
THE GIRL NAMED HARLEAN CARPENTER, born to a genteel Kansas family in 1911, came to Hollywood with her divorced mother, a woman who had ambitions of movie stardom for herself. But the daughter fared better, took her mother’s name as her own, and as Jean Harlow worked as an unbilled extra in silent films and then more remarkably in comedy shorts with Laurel and Hardy. Her first major appearance was in Hell’s Angels in 1930. The bond between mother and daughter continued to be so strong that even during her three marriages “The Baby,” as everyone affectionately called Jean, frequently spent nights at her mother’s home.
In nine films released during the next two years (most notably The Public Enemy, Platinum Blonde and Red Headed Woman), Jean Harlow’s overt sexuality, her shockingly dyed and cinematically lighted platinum-colored hair and her shimmering screen image made her endlessly fascinating. The general critical consensus, however, maintained that she was merely a cheap, sassy twenty-year-old playing a succession of cheap, erotic roles. Longing for better parts in more serious films, in 1932 she signed a contract with MGM, where producer Louis B. Mayer carefully guided her star image and where she developed a natural flair for comedy. She was also, contrary to what the public was led to believe, a rather sweet young woman with a genuine longing to supplement her brief formal education and greatly—perhaps neurotically—attached to her mother, known always as “Mama Jean.” Expressing the common sentiment of those who knew Jean Harlow, the actress Maureen O’Sullivan remarked that “there wasn’t anyone at MGM who didn’t love her, who wasn’t amused by her or didn’t think her an absolute darling.”
Playing opposite such stars as Clark Gable and Spencer Tracy, Jean Harlow at twenty-two was, despite promises of more serious roles, still asked to show more cleavage and disport herself with more blatant sultriness than any star of her day. When Grace McKee took Norma Jeane to see Harlow in Dinner at Eight, Bombshell and The Girl from Missouri—all released between the summers of 1933 and 1934—the critical tide was turning in Harlow’s favor.
MGM continued to keep her in skintight white gowns emphasizing her startling blond-white hair. This presentation of frank eroticism corresponded with something in her own character; she rarely wore underclothes, and in restaurants and at press conferences was often seen (apparently distractedly) caressing and fondling herself. Like many stars of both sexes, she had no greater admirer than herself. Offscreen, Harlow’s life lacked anything like sustained happiness. Married three times by the age of twenty-four, she spent her short life in a constant search for her missing father, from whom she was always separated. But audiences adored her, and even the mysterious circumstances surrounding the apparent suicide of her second husband (twenty-two years her senior) could not diminish public approval.
It is no exaggeration to say that during the Great Depression, Jean Harlow was America’s great apotheosis of daring but often comically exaggerated carnality. There were stars who sometimes tried to imitate her hair color or were given a similar studio buildup, but publicists and reporters insisted there would never be another like Harlow.1
But this Grace McKee stoutly denied: “There’s no reason you can’t grow up to be just like her, Norma Jeane. With the right hair color and a better nose . . .” For the child, then eight (and for those who overheard this oft-repeated refrain), Grace must have sounded a little ridiculous, not to say intimidating. But she was the importunate and prophetic screen mother. As if incarnating a hoary cliché, both she and Mama Jean transmuted their own dashed hopes of stardom into energies on behalf of others, through whom they lived and who, they hoped, would succeed where they themselves had failed. In September 1934, Grace added to her own peroxide blond hair a lavender rinse and applied touches of makeup to Norma Jeane’s lips and cheeks. The race to stardom, insofar as it involved the child’s unofficial guardian, was beginning with an Olympic sprint.
That year passed for Norma Jean with the routines of grade school, regular moviegoing with Grace, and uneven visits from Gladys, who went with them at least three times to Sunday lunch at the Ambassador Hotel, a rare and glamorous treat. Quiet, sad and remote, Gladys picked at her food while Grace chattered gaily, proudly showing off a dress she had bought for Norma Jeane and the pink ribbons she had tied into the child’s curled hair. Such occasions must have been awkward for the mother, who could only have felt more incompetent than ever; and for the daughter, estranged again from a woman she had never really known.
On such visits, Gladys was inevitably disconnected from the “real world” of family life to which her doctors wished her exposed. Nor could Gladys have felt more attuned to actuality when she met her daughter at the house on Arbol Drive. There the Atkinsons, still immured in their endless, unrealized fantasies, were packing for England and, they said, the certainty of success. Frightened of responsibility for Norma Jeane and doubtless guilty for failing her doctors, her daughter and her friend Grace, Gladys returned to the relative calm of the hospital. There, at least, was the comfort of a routine where she had no real chores and where maternal duties were nonexistent—and so Gladys could avoid any lingering guilt. The only reality was what she saw and heard; for her, Norma Jeane was a vague presence, lingering perhaps only like a phantom pain. “My mother,” Norma Jeane said later, “never really made any effort to be with me. I don’t think I existed for her.”
The house on Arbol Drive was put up for sale that autumn; this portion of the street soon vanished, and the land became part of the Hollywood Bowl complex. Grace, however, did not take the child to live with her, and the reason for this was quite clear. She had decided to become Norma Jeane’s legal guardian, but the State of California required proof that the living natural parent or parents were incompetent and likely to remain so. In addition, the prospective adoptee was required to spend at least six months in a county orphanage while the guardianship was approved.
The first requirement was readily met after Grace obtained a formal statement from doctors that Gladys was insane. Grace then arranged her transfer from Los Angeles General to Norwalk State Hospital, where Della Monroe had expired. Gladys’s condition had stabilized and Los Angeles General’s staff said they could no longer accommodate her. “Her illnesses,” proclaimed the chief’s report, “have been characterized by (1) preoccupation with religion at times, and (2) at other times deep depression and agitation. This appears to be a chronic state.” Such an assertion perfectly demonstrates the impoverished state of both diagnosis and treatment of emotional illness in 1935. One might reasonably ask whether a longing for spiritual health, often the result of depression and agitation, was not in fact an appropriate response to much of what Gladys had known in her life.
Since the house on Arbol Drive was no longer the family home, there was no alternative but further institutionalization for Gladys. In addition, Norwalk had (at least by comparison with General) a better reputation in managing chronic cases of various mental illnesses. Quite apart from Gladys’s general apathy and loss of affect, county physicians at General were persuaded of the patient’s incompetence by Grace’s statement of Norma Jeane’s illegitimacy as well as her presentation of the family “history”—the now traditional but inaccurate account of mental illness afflicting Tilford, Otis and Della.
Thus in January 1935, Gladys was taken to Norwalk, where she remained one year before another transfer. “I was sorry she was sick,” Norma Jeane said later, “but we never had any kind of relationship. I didn’t see her very often.” Nor did Grace encounter difficulty fulfilling the second legal mandate. She learned there was a place available for Norma Jeane the following September at the Los Angeles Orphans Home, and until then she arranged for a family in West Los Angeles named Giffen to take in Norma Jeane. But before doing so, Grace cannily determined that the Giffens were already a houseful, with their own and several other foster children: no, they could not keep Norma Jeane very long.
Because she was demonstrating such care for Norma Jeane and filing weekly reports with the appropriate authorities, Grace then repetitioned the court, asking the orphanage requirement to be waived so that Norma Jeane might live with her after a time with the Giffens. “You can imagine how happy I was when Grace told me I wouldn’t be sent away to live at some kind of school with children I didn’t know, and no family.”
And so, after two months with the Giffens, while the court investigated Grace McKee’s fitness as legal guardian, Norma Jeane was allowed to live temporarily with Grace’s mother, Emma Willette Atchinson. She had an apartment on Lodi Place, Hollywood, in a pleasant white stucco building with a Spanish tiled roof, a flowering courtyard and a gently splashing fountain. Norma Jeane moved there in early spring 1935.
That same month, Grace swung into action—not only expediting the cause of her guardianship, but also asking the court to appoint her the sole control over affairs of Gladys P. Baker. Grace rightly saw that Gladys’s financial affairs must be kept regular to avoid seizure by the surprise appearance of someone claiming to be Norma Jeane’s father, or by the tax authorities. She also knew that proper investments and sales of any cash or real property needed a careful eye, and that she could, on Norma Jeane’s behalf, draw on these monies for the girl’s support. Accordingly, on March 25, Grace swore an affidavit that Gladys needed a court-appointed guardian and that, despite the interim orphanage requirement, she was the proper candidate.
In April, the assets of Gladys’s “Estate” were assessed:
Gladys Baker, as she was then known, had $60 cash in a bank account; $90 in unendorsed insurance checks (for loss of work due to illness); one table radio valued at $25, with a store balance due of $15; a debt of $250 on a 1933 Plymouth sedan Gladys had scarcely used; and $200 owed on the white piano.
On June 1, Norma Jeane’s ninth birthday, Grace McKee received full possession of everything owned by Gladys Baker—along with responsibility for its disposition. Within days, she drove the Plymouth back to its original owner (who canceled the debt); she sold the piano for $235 (duly returning the profit to the Estate); and the house was repossessed by the mortgagee without penalty.
At the same time, Grace submitted items for reimbursement—sums to which she was entitled during her earlier care of Gladys and Norma Jeane: $24 for a fee to a nurse named Julia Bennett, for example; $25 to Emma Atchinson for custody of Norma Jeane; $49.30 in fees owed to the Santa Monica Rest Home; and a $43.16 clothing bill for items purchased for Norma Jeane. Able to negotiate her way through the thicket of many legal and social matters, Grace McKee was a formidable conjunction of fantasist and pragmatist.
But some things cannot be anticipated or readily adjudicated—a surprise romance among them. For the first time in several years, so far as can be determined, love overswept Grace’s life in the person of a man who forever altered her plans and Norma Jeane’s destiny.
Precisely how Grace McKee met Ervin Silliman Goddard that spring of 1935 is unknown; that there was a great mutual rush of passion is beyond dispute. Ten years younger than Grace, Goddard stood six feet five inches tall, was sometimes mistaken for film actor Randolph Scott, and was in fact handsome enough that he was engaged as Joel McCrea’s stand-in on several movies. (One of his daughters later spotted him as one of the soldiers alongside Laurel and Hardy in Babes in Toyland.) A divorced Texan with three children he did not see for long periods, Goddard was, as his daughter Eleanor later described him, “the ultimate Hail Fellow Well Met.” Charming and intelligent, he was an inveterate tinker and the son of a former surgeon, and so on both counts bore the nickname “Doc.” But his handsome geniality and his dream of movie stardom often led to periods of indolence, and indolence to prolonged appointments with cronies at local saloons. Not unexpectedly, he found Grace’s energy infectious, her passionate nature gratifying, her adoration and encouragement irresistible.
For her part, she was besotted by the flattery and ardent attention of a strong, young and comely man she described to everyone as a movie star. Side by side, Doc Goddard and Grace McKee were almost comical: she was a full foot shorter, thin and trim, and he was the proverbial brawny cowboy. Their own joviality forestalled laughter at them or snickering at her seniority, and friends enjoyed their sheer luxuriant enjoyment of one another’s company that spring and summer of 1935. They were married in August, after a wild weekend frolic in Las Vegas, where Grace’s aunt was witness and hostess.
Returning to Los Angeles, the newlyweds gathered one of Goddard’s daughters, Nona, who had come with him to California (she later became the actress Jody Lawrance), and the foursome took a small bungalow on Odessa Avenue in Van Nuys, in the San Fernando Valley just over the Hollywood hills. “Norma Jeane was a shy, introverted little girl,” Jody Lawrance said years later, adding that they were both “neurotic children [who] clammed up and were very sensitive toward our surroundings.” Lawrance remembered that the two girls assembled a makeshift tree house in a pepper tree, “and we crawled up there when we thought we’d get in trouble. That tree house was our escape.”2
Modest would be too grand a word to describe the bungalow itself, which was essentially a shack. Both Doc and Grace were at this time employed only intermittently, and neither had savings. Goddard insisted that Norma Jeane’s was the unnecessary extra mouth to feed, and he prevailed on Grace to give the child up to the orphanage—for a short time, he promised, until his proverbial ship came in.
In light of her clear dedication to Norma Jeane’s welfare and the grand scheme for adopting and guiding her toward stardom, it could not have been easy for Grace to tell the child that she would have to move into the orphanage that September. For Norma Jeane, here was another relationship suddenly ruptured, another promise broken; she was once again an unwanted commodity. As she had been told by Ida Bolender, her own mother had “dropped her off,” and Norma Jeane learned for herself that she could be turned away when she was an inconvenience. In adulthood, her lack of close female friends owed much to these early experiences: she had had no primary experience on which to base any trust of a woman, no experience (after the remote, obsessive Ida Bolender) of womanly constancy. Once again, any semblance of a normal pattern of early socialization was subverted.
On September 13, 1935, Grace packed Norma Jeane’s clothes and delivered her to the Los Angeles Orphans Home, at 815 North El Centro, Hollywood, where she was registered as the 3,463rd child in its twenty-five-year history. The place was nothing like a flophouse; on the contrary, it was an attractive and spacious red brick colonial mansion. Nevertheless, it was an institution for orphans.
The Home could accommodate fifty or sixty children, not all of whom were actually without parents: in the 1920s, fully a third of the residents were runaways or street urchins forsaken by the poor or immigrant workers incapable (or unwilling) to provide for unwanted offspring. In the 1930s, many poverty-stricken parents could apply for a child’s short-term lodging. These, like Norma Jeane, were classified as “temporary guests or students.” Her residency lasted until June 26, 1937 (just after her eleventh birthday), by which time Doc Goddard’s ship was still unberthed. “Doc had a lot of trouble during the Depression,” as Norma Jeane’s first husband later recalled. “This was unfortunate, because he really had a great mind and seemed to me able to do just about anything.”
At the Home, boys and girls were housed in separate wings, four, five or six in each neat, tidy room. From 1952, Marilyn Monroe’s statements to the press about the orphanage became more and more fantastic. By 1960, she said (among other embroideries) that she “slept in a room with twenty-seven beds,” and she added distressing tales of orphanage trauma: dreary accommodations, cold-water baths, rigid discipline and endless menial tasks such as toilet-scrubbing and washing hundreds of plates after meals. In fact, there was a team of adult employees to cook and clean at the Home, but, to encourage a sense of responsibility, the children were paid five or ten cents a week for less arduous, minor chores suited to the age and strength of each.
According to Eleanor Goddard, Norma Jeane was inspired by the accounts of the really dreadful and abused situations Eleanor herself had known in Texas, when at an early age her parents divorced and she was pitchforked from stranger to stranger and house to house, many of which situations were in fact miserable. But Norma Jeane’s time on El Centro was quite decent, and because the Home was nonsectarian, the supervisors, while encouraging children to attend church on Sundays, imposed no religious obligations.
Norma Jeane’s file noted that she was in 1935 “a normal, healthy girl who eats and sleeps well, seems content and uncomplaining and also says she likes her classes.” Formal education was not offered at the Home, but at the Vine Street Elementary School, a five-minute stroll away. Of her two years at Vine Street, in grades four and five, no records remain.
On Saturdays during these two years, Grace frequently appeared and took Norma Jeane for a day’s outing, which usually meant lunch and a movie—especially if there were an early evening premiere, when they both applauded the stars and joined the throngs in the cries of adoration typical of the time. Among the pictures Norma Jeane especially remembered was Mutiny on the Bounty, with Clark Gable; he reminded her of the dark-haired, mustached man whose photo had hung at Arbol Drive. Gable, she said repeatedly, was “the man I thought of as my father.” Grace often replied that she was still trying to “fix things up so you can come back with me where you belong,” by which, no doubt, she meant the Goddards’ legal guardianship.
On such days, Norma Jeane was often taken to Grauman’s Chinese, where she remembered “trying to fit my feet into the footprints—but my school shoes were too big for the stars’ slim, high-heeled ones. Then I measured my hands with theirs, but mine seemed too small—it was all very discouraging!”
But with Grace as tutor, Norma Jeane’s dejection could not last long. The girl was routinely taken to a beauty parlor, Grace standing by anxiously as curlers, irons and brushes attempted the proleptic glamorization of Norma Jeane. She was sometimes hauled into the ladies’ lavatory at a tearoom or movie theater and shown the proper application techniques of face powder and lip rouge; eyeliner and a delicate cologne completed a spectacle passersby could only have regarded as the slightly bizarre, premature display of a pre-adolescent. “Grace was something of a wizard with cosmetics,” according to Eleanor Goddard, “and she loved to sweep down on us with all kinds of advice about makeup.”
In 1935, two Harlow films opened in Hollywood—China Seas and Libeled Lady—and Grace reiterated her conviction that Norma was going to follow Jean Harlow, a vision in sparkling black-and-white pictures: platinum hair, a shimmering white wardrobe whenever possible, white decor and props. After seeing several Harlow pictures in 1935 and 1936, Grace dyed her own hair blond, went into a period when she was seen only in white, bought only white clothes for Norma Jeane and briefly considered dying the girl’s hair platinum but wisely reneged: the Home would not have admired such a change in a ten-year-old. As the New York Times reported, it was due to Harlow that platinum blondes “made their appearance everywhere, among actresses, dancers, show girls and blues singers . . . in the subways, in the streets and in the audiences at theatres.”
“Time after time, Grace touched a spot on my nose,” Norma Jeane said years later. “ ‘You’re perfect except for this little bump, sweetheart,’ she’d say. ‘But one day you’ll be perfect—like Jean Harlow.’ But I knew that no matter what, I would never be perfect—as anyone else, let alone myself.” Looking at the girl, Grace imagined a young Harlow and said so to Norma Jeane (who later told this to friends so often it became an obsession). Both had blue-green eyes and a slightly receding chin (that “could also stand fixing,” Grace said); the hair color would be altered in due course. Such early preparation and exhortation to become an imitation of a major movie star would naturally appeal to a child with a confused identity, a lack of normal home life and a pattern of needing to please so many mother figures. She was, in other words, primed to be the ultimate, manufactured facsimile of a culture’s fantasies.
There was also something of a stir in the gossip columns on June 1, 1936—Norma Jeane’s tenth birthday—when the blond star announced that after almost a decade of acting under her mother’s maiden name, she was at last formally changing her own to Jean Harlow. She would thenceforth no longer, after three marriages, be legally Harlean Carpenter McGrew Bern Rosson. About the same time, it was widely touted that Harlow was one of the celebrity volunteers campaigning vigorously for the reelection of President Franklin Roosevelt—a political involvement that much impressed Grace.
Saturdays with Grace were welcome breaks from school and communal living. But in a way it would have been surprising if Norma Jeane did not deem her “Aunt Grace” a variation of Gladys—a fantastic creature who arrived at her own convenience, one to whom she might gradually be unimportant, even negligible. Norma Jeane had, after all, been displaced by the arrival of Doc and one of his daughters.
In addition, Grace was not entirely reliable or predictable in her visits, although her account books (carefully preserved) reveal her regular payments to the Home and her purchase of clothes for the girl. (In 1936, for example, Grace paid the full fee to the Home, fifteen dollars monthly.) She spent almost the same amount on clothes, makeup and “expenses for minor.” Norma Jeane must have feared that Grace, like Gladys, might be taken away without warning. And so she seemed to be, when Grace failed to come to the Home after five consecutive Saturdays in late 1936. That season, the girl broke into sobs of despair at the slightest provocation. If she was “almost perfect,” she may have reasoned, why was she abandoned? One of the administrators, a good-natured soul named Mrs. Dewey, reminded her that most of the children never had any visitors, but that was very cold comfort indeed. Years later, her third husband felt that “she was able to walk into a crowded room and spot anyone there who had lost parents . . . or had spent time in orphanages.”
By early 1937, Norma Jeane’s mood darkened. “I was never used to being happy during those years,” she told a reporter later. Indeed, a supervisor that year noted that she occasionally seemed “anxious and withdrawn . . . and at such times she stutters slightly. Norma Jean [sic] is also susceptible to a lot of coughs and colds. . . . If she is not treated with much reassurance and patience at such times, she appears frightened. I recommend her to be put with a good family.”
Typically, Norma Jeane’s yearning for solace evoked a vivid fantasy life. “I sometimes told the other orphans I had real wonderful parents who were away on a long trip and would come for me any time, and once I wrote a postcard to myself and signed it from Mother and Daddy. Of course nobody believed it. But I didn’t care. I wanted to think it was true. And maybe if I thought it was true it would come true.”
Inventing idealized fantasy-parents may sometimes have briefly eased the loneliness; later (even when she admitted the truth) she found relations with women difficult to negotiate. Just as she found contradictory the injunctions set by Ida and Grace, just as they gently reminded her that she could always “do better” and “be perfect,” so no one could match the expectations aroused by her lost parents. In addition to a pitiable cycle of search and inevitable disappointment, she sometimes chose unsuitable partners for friendship, romance or marriage—perhaps in the unacknowledged belief that in repeating the unhappiness of the past she might at last reverse its effects.
There was another outlet for her longing and her fantasy. To her first husband and to many friends, she later said that she often
went up to the roof [of the Home] to look at the water tower at the RKO Studios a few blocks away, where my mother had once worked. Sometimes that made me cry, because I felt so lonely. But it also became my dream and my fantasy—to work where movies were made. When I told this to Grace, she almost danced for joy.
The child’s bleakness and daydreams are easy to understand. The Home cared diligently for its young charges, but in the custodial manner of institutions and enforced communities. There was necessarily an atmosphere of impersonal affection that strictly discouraged particular friendships between children and mentors, to avoid unhealthy dependence as well as the erotic attachments inevitable in close quarters when adults are placed in loco parentis. As a result, there is often found in institutionalized children a paradoxical indifference to the welfare of others. Each child is, after all, but one of dozens, and because the staff strives to act without favoritism, there is a kind of emotional insipidity. However dedicated the supervisors, orphanages are not usually happy places. Everyone implicitly understands the artificiality of the milieu, and children know very quickly that there has been something woefully incomplete about their lives.
There was one notable exception to the general impersonality. Mrs. Dewey saw Norma Jeane returning from a Saturday outing with Grace. Primped and fluffed, with new ribbons in her curled hair and makeup freshly applied, the girl approached the building. Later she remembered:
I suddenly stopped. I knew we weren’t allowed to wear makeup [at the orphanage], and I forgot until that minute that I was wearing the makeup Grace had put on my face that day. I didn’t know whether to go in or just run away. Another girl had been given some kind of punishment or de-merit . . . for wearing lipstick, which the teachers thought was pretty trashy.
But Mrs. Dewey surprised Norma Jeane. “You have very lovely skin,” she said, “and you don’t want to have a shiny face, but sometimes you hide it with a little too much rouge.” And with that she toned down Grace’s handiwork without embarrassing Norma Jeane.
Grace kept her promise to bring Norma Jeane home. Her final papers for guardianship were filed on February 26, 1936, and (with the slowness typical of bureaucracies) the petition was finally granted in the spring of 1937. She left the Los Angeles Orphans Home and arrived at the Goddard bungalow in Van Nuys on June 7, 1937—a week after her eleventh birthday. Just as she was climbing into Grace’s car that evening, radio bulletins announced the death of Jean Harlow, who died suddenly of uremic poisoning at twenty-six. Louis B. Mayer, Harlow’s boss at MGM, summarized the consensus of those who knew her and those who simply admired her: “This girl, whom so many millions adored, was one of the loveliest, sweetest persons I have known in thirty years of the theatrical business.” As one reporter wrote, “She added little that was new to comedy, but she intensified in her person several comical ideas of her day: the gold-digger type, the under-educated, utilitarian, quick-tongued, slightly unaware females then in vogue among cartoonists, magazine writers, jokesters.” Grace was torn, according to Marilyn years later, between grief at the death of this beautiful young woman and her conviction that this made Norma Jeane’s future all the more certain.
Norma Jean’s residence with the Goddards was brief—because of a singularly unpleasant and even traumatic event for the young Norma Jeane. According to her first husband, James Dougherty, Doc Goddard was very drunk one night. He grabbed the girl and, fumbling and fondling her crudely, tried to force himself on her. She managed, however, to disengage herself from his embrace and dashed off, shaking and crying. Especially for so vulnerable and fatherless a girl, this incident was alarming and repellent, and she repeatedly described it throughout her life. Norma Jeane’s initial experience of physical contact with a man dissociated sex from the context of affection: what may have at first seemed like a gesture of tenderness turned ugly and abusive.
At once, Norma Jean complained to her “Aunt Grace,” who must have thought her husband’s drunken advance portended more serious trouble. “I can’t trust anything or anyone,” Grace muttered. And so, in November 1937, Grace shipped the girl away again—this time to board with relatives. “At first I was waking up in the mornings at the Goddards’ and thinking I was still at the orphanage,” Norma Jeane told friends eighteen years later. “Then, before I could get used to them, I was with another aunt and uncle, waking up and thinking I was still at the Goddards.” She concluded the reminiscence poignantly: “It was all very confusing.”
1. Harlow’s image was attempted by or forced on stars as various as Marion Davies, Joan Crawford, Carole Lombard, Betty Grable, Constance Bennett, Lyda Roberti, Alice Faye and Joan Blondell.
2. Jody Lawrance assumed minor roles in six films between 1951 and 1962. She took her life soon after finishing the last.