#4 ...Ah, but Beauty is no promise of happiness:
...Their private life was as tragic as their public life was stellar. One of their Ziegfeld friends, Olive Thomas, who had invited Rosie to tour the nightclubs of Paris with her in September of 1920, would be found (supposedly wrapped in nothing more than a sable coat) dying of mercury bichloride poisoning. Rosie, who had declined the outing, would instead see Olive in hospital just before her death.
Such would be merely a foretaste of the tragedy to come as in 1933, Jenny was invovled in a serious car crash near Bordeaux with her former lover Max Constant. It took six weeks and fifteen painful surgeries and the sale of most her jewelry to restore her to some semblance of her former beauty but it left her ‘a broken shell' as she would say to friends. She lingered until May 1, 1941 when she committed suicide, hanging herself in the shower of her apartment in the Shelton Hotel.
As is often the case with twins, Rosie would prove to represent the opposite of the manic highs and lows of Jenny's personality, living long enough to see a biopic made in 1945 of their lives called, inevitably The Dolly Sisters - starring June Haver and Betty Grable - but in 1962 she attempted to follow her sister in suicide. It was a failed bid and she would live on until January 1, 1970, succumbing to heart failure.
Mike |
