First of all: Stunning headpiece. Dutch Deco. You don’t see THAT very often. That’s silent film star Corinne Griffith wearing it in 1926′s Mademoiselle Modiste. A cursory look at Wikipedia reveals a woman who led an extrodinary life. Unlike most silent film stars, she went on to have a highly lucrative career after her film days were over. With the advent of sound, she retired from the movies and became an author, penning eleven books including two best sellers, My Life with the Redskins and the memoir Papa’s Delicate Condition, which was made into a 1963 film starring Jackie Gleason. She dabbled rather successfully in LA real estate, at one point owning four different major skyscrapers in downtown Los Angeles, each of them named after her. She married four times: To her frequent co-star Webster Campbell, to producer Walter Morosco, and to the owner of the Washington Redskins football team George Preston Marshall. During her marriage to Marshall, she composed the lyrics to the Redskins fight song “Hail to the Redskins” which became one of the most famous football anthems. But here’s the interesting stuff: “In 1966, within a few days, she married and divorced her fourth husband, Broadway actor Danny Scholl (Call Me Mister). Scholl was 45, more than 25 years Griffith’s junior. In court she testified that she was not Corinne Griffith. She claimed that she was the actress’s younger (by twenty years) sister who had taken her place upon the famous sister’s death. Contradicting testimony by actresses Betty Blythe and Claire Windsor, who had both known her since the 1920s, did not shake her story. In 1974, Adele Whitely Fletcher, editor of Photoplay, said Griffith was still claiming that she was her own younger sister. On July 13, 1979, Griffith died of heart failure in Santa Monica, California, aged 84. At the time of her death, her personal estate was worth over $150,000,000.” $150,000,000 in 1979. Gotta be almost a billion in today’s dollars. Not many silent-era stars can boast THAT. So she was rich and batshit crazy and beautiful and glamorous and smart. Someone ought to make a biopic.
The post Corinne Griffith Appreciation Post appeared first on World of Wonder.