She answered: “What could I do? I couldn’t say anything. It would have spoiled the party.”
Not all Doug’s money was left to Sylvia. Douglas, Jr., was more than comfortably off when he married Mary Lee Epling, divorced wife of financier Huntington Hartford. They live in old-world style in a small London town house with their three daughters. Douglas, Jr., does not stray from the hearthstone. They are extremely social, with British and European royalty and ambassadors of all nations, including one of our own, Winthrop Aldrich, who had a penchant at parties for pinching old ladies in the Latin fashion. They absolutely adored it—no one had paid them such attention for years.
Hollywood has all the excuses you find anywhere for divorce—boredom, egotism, emotional immaturity, and the rest. It also has some special reasons of its own—press agents who can get bigger headlines with a scandal than with a happy home life; producers who resent a husband or wife “interfering” in a star’s business; managers who stop at nothing to hold onto their percentages. Elsewhere in the world, children are usually a bond that holds parents through many a squabble. But that’s not always the case in the Empire of Guff, which was one of Gene Fowler’s labels for us.
This is a hard, rocky place for a child to grow up in. Some of them don’t know who their fathers really are because they’ve had so many in the family. They’re brought up by nurses, cooks, and chauffeurs instead of parents because mother and father are too busy to give them any time. All the children can be spared is money, which is a stone to suck on when a child needs love.
Eddie Robinson, Jr., was spoiled. His mother, Gladys—the first Mrs. Robinson, Sr.—was never allowed by her husband to lay a hand on the boy. At thirteen he “borrowed” other people’s cars without asking. He has been in one automobile accident after another. Now he has a wife and child, whom Gladys helps support. Edward G. Robinson couldn’t be accused of being stingy toward his son, however, since he continued to make Junior an allowance of $1000 a month.
Dixie Lee Crosby brought up her four sons strictly but well. Bing somehow found other things he had to do, so the children didn’t see a lot of their father. Dixie had problems in her pregnancies, when she virtually was forced on to brandy to survive. She had to stay home, sick, when Bing sailed off to Paris at the time Queen Elizabeth was crowned, taking Lindsay with him and having a gay old time. The boy went to London to see the coronation and stayed with the Alan Ladd family at the Dorchester. Bing was having too much fun in Paris to leave. Lindsay was the youngest and sweetest of the four sons. Like Gary, Philip, and Dennis, he started whooping it up the minute Dixie’s restraint was lifted.
Henry Ginsberg for a while attempted to be a kind of foster father to the Crosby boys, inviting them to use his apartment as a second home while Bing was courting Kathy Grant. Finally Henry got tired of their drinking and other night-owl habits which brought them to his door at two and three o’clock in the morning. “I like you, but I can’t put up with it any longer,” he said, and the door was closed to them.
I have seen the frightening looks given to her mother, Lana Turner, by Cheryl Crane, who was found guilty of stabbing Lana’s good friend, the hoodlum muscle man, Johnny Stompanato. I’ve argued with Joan Crawford after she told the oldest girl of her four adopted children that she had to leave home. “This at a time when she needs love and protection most?”
“She’s a wild girl with no respect for anything,” snapped Joan.
I know one young girl, the daughter of one of our most married stars, who fell madly in love with her mother’s fourth husband and made up her mind to steal him away by hook or crook. She went to her mother and said: “He tried to make love to me.”