Saturday, July 7, 2018

Some more women, and fashions, of the 1920's . . .

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Yola Letellier: 


Yola Letellier served as the model for the character Gigi in the novel of the same name by the French writer Colette. A friend of Pamela Hicks, the youngest daughter of Earl Mountbatten, Hicks wrote that her father had met a “young, extremely attractive, boyish-looking girl with cropped hair and a little snub nose – a French ‘gamine’. Yola did not live with us but would visit frequently, bringing us charming gifts.” 

Mountbatten had married Edwina Ashley in 1922. 

Louis and Edwina Mountbatten 

According to Phillip Ziegler, Mountbatten’s official biographer, Mounbatten admitted "Edwina and I spent all our married lives getting into other people's beds." He maintained an affair for several years with the above Yola Letellier, who was the wife of Henri Letellier, publisher of Le Journal and Mayor of Deauville (1925–28). 

Edwina and Jawaharlal Nehru became intimate friends after Indian Independence. During the summers, she would frequent the Prime Minister's house so she could lounge about on his veranda during the hot Delhi days. 

Lord and Lady Mountbatten with Indian Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru 

Edwina and Nehru in the Moghul Gardens of the Viceroy house during celebrations to mark the 10th anniversary of the Republic of India in 1960 

Yola Letellier 
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Evelyn Brent: 


Evelyn Brent (1901 – 1975) was an American film and stage actress. After moving to New York City as a teenager, her good looks brought modelling jobs that led to an opportunity to become involved in the still relatively new business of making motion pictures. Her sultry good looks brought her roles in over two dozen silent pictures and later in talkies. She was married three times, the last time to the vaudeville actor Harry Fox, to whom she was still married when died of a heart attack in 1975. 

Interesting fact: 

The foxtrot dance was named after Harry Fox. 

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Evelyn Peirce: 


Evelyn Peirce (1908 – 1960) was an American film actress during the silent film era, and into the 1930s. A former dancer, she was pronounced "the most beautiful girl in the world" by Florenz Ziegfeld. Her career as an actress petered out after the coming of sound. She appeared in a few B-westerns before retiring from the screen and later worked in real estate with her husband, former singing cowboy Robert Allen. 

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Lili Damita: 


Lili Damita (1904 – 21 March 1994) was a French-American actress and singer who appeared in 33 films between 1922 and 1937. 

Offered a role in film as a prize for winning a magazine beauty competition in 1921, she appeared in several silent films before being offered her first leading role in Das Spielzeug von Paris (1925) by Hungarian-born director Michael Curtiz. She was an instant success, and Curtiz directed her in two more films. She continued appearing in German productions and in 1928, at the invitation of Samuel Goldwyn, went to Hollywood, making her American debut in a film titled The Rescue. Leased out to various studios, she appeared with stars such and leading man such as Maurice Chevalier, Laurence Olivier, James Cagney, Gary Cooper and Cary Grant. Damita died of Alzheimer's disease on 21 March 1994, in Palm Beach, Florida, aged 89 

Interesting fact: 

In 1935, she married a virtual unknown who would become Hollywood's biggest box office attraction, Errol Flynn, with whom she had a son, Sean Flynn (born 1941). Following the marriage, she retired from the screen. The couple divorced in 1942. During the Cambodian Civil War (Khmer Rouge reign), her son Sean Flynn was working as a freelance photo journalist under contract to Time magazine when he and fellow journalist Dana Stone went missing on the road south of Phnom Penh, Cambodia, on 6 April 1970. Although Damita spent an enormous amount of money searching for her son, he was never found, and in 1984 he was declared legally dead. 


Lili Damita and husband Errol Flynn at Los Angeles airport, 1941 
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Jetta Goudal:


Jetta Goudal 1891 – 1985) was a Dutch-born American actress, successful in Hollywood films of the silent film era. 

Born in Amsterdam, she began her acting career on stage, traveling across Europe with various theatre companies. In 1918, she left World War I-era devastated Europe to settle in New York City in the United States, where she hid her Dutch Jewish ancestry, generally describing herself as a "Parisienne" and shaving 10 years off her age as well. 

Goudal eventually appeared in several highly successful and acclaimed films for Cecil B DeMille and became one of the top box office draws of the late 1920s. DeMille later claimed that Goudal was so difficult to work with that he eventually fired her and cancelled their contract. Goudal filed a lawsuit for breach of contract against him and DeMille Pictures Corporation. Although DeMille claimed her conduct had caused numerous and costly production delays, in a landmark ruling, Goudal won the suit when DeMille was unwilling to provide his studio's financial records to support his claim of financial losses. 

Because of her suing DeMille and her high-profile activism in the Actors' Equity Association campaign for the theatre and film industry to accept a closed shop, some of the Hollywood studios refused to employ Goudal. In 1932, at age forty-one, she made her last screen appearance in a talkie, co-starring with Will Rogers. In 1930, she married Harold Grieve, an art director and founding member of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. When her film career ended, she joined Grieve in running a successful interior design business. They remained married until her death in 1985 in Los Angeles. 

Jetta Goudal and Harold Grieve


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