By Laura Wagner
McFarland & Company, Inc. Jefferson NC. 2020.
ISBN (e-book) 978-1-4766-3833-1
I'm tempted to say I enjoyed this book. But these women had such sad lives that one is left feeling mildly depressed by the litany of "early deaths, accidents, missteps" and all that other stuff listed in the title. It aggravated my pandemic-induced blues.
The book itself is nicely put together: amply illustrated with photos, well written and well researched, with nearly 70 pages of references to sources used. Many of those sources are newspaper stories from the days when these women were still in the public eye. A surprising number were written by gossip columnists of the day. One wonders how much trust can be placed in the accuracy of gossip columnists’ writings, but perhaps there wasn’t much other material to use.
I was drawn to this book when researching the actress Patricia Dane, who gets a 14-page treatment herein. Her bawdy behavior is virtually unmatched by any of the other women in the book, but her life didn’t turn out as badly as most of them. She lived until age 77. She wasn’t drug-addicted, mentally ill, married multiple times, left paralyzed by a horrible accident, killed by a drug overdose or treated badly by a succession of abusive boyfriends - at least, as Wagner tells the story. Depressing or not, this is fascinating stuff.
N.B. Read the Wikipedia article about Patricia Dane here.
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