Northwest Arkansas Democrat-Gazette
He took my hand and led me down the primrose path
Below is Part 2 of an essay written in June 1920 by Claire Whitney, a stage and film actress who that March had obtained a divorce from her (bigamist, fake Belgium diplomat) husband and now sought an annulment of the marriage.
Part One of her essay — “Why Actresses Are So Often Deceived in Love” — can be found here: arkansasonline.com/706claire.
Her whole dramatic argument was published June 27, 1920, in the Arkansas Gazette and in several other American newspapers about that time.
The sorrowful story picks up after Whitney and the Marquis Jean van Hoegaerden, aka actor John Sunderland, leave a municipal court as man and wife in summer 1917.
We motored away on a little wedding tour but returned in a
few weeks that I might fill my [acting] engagement. My presumed lord set about celebrating our wedding in his own way. A hundred dollar bill was to him as $1. He did not spend our honeymoon in serene and sentimental quiet. He always wanted a crowd about us. He wanted admiration. It was to him as the breath of his nostrils. Always the actor!
We went back to my mother’s home at her request. My grandmother was well again and had returned from the hospital. We planned to be a happy family of four. But my husband’s love of society splintered the plan. We had a large drawing room in which 20 couples could comfortably dance. My “marquis” was always arranging dinner dances and keeping that drawing room full, or he gave motor parties, taking the family and a dozen others to Long Island to dine or sup.
That was well enough, perhaps, though it made our honeymoon a strenuous one. But when my husband’s slight amount of funds was gone and I had to pay the bills for these festivities they irked me. They got upon my mother’s nerves.
But with a smile and deep bow, he would dispel our gloom. When he entered the room, kissed my grandmother’s hand, my mother’s and my own, he did it with the grace of one to the manner born. Americans look like fools when they kiss a woman’s hand.
The marquis and I had never had a quarrel. He retained his lover-like attitude to the last. But when he went to Canada to join the flying corps I was deserted. I realized that in a gentlemanly way he had abandoned me.
His title, his wealth, his love were all phantasms, mere “figments of a dream.”
Yes, I have been taken in. Why? For the reasons that actresses are easy prey to the adventurer. They claim to know life. They do know life. They draw upon our knowledge of life to make their portrayals of character. But remember that it is not humdrum life that they portray, but the life romantic.
A soldier back from the other side wanted to marry a stenographer, whom he had met on the Knights of Columbus boat. She trusted him and was willing to place her hand in his and go with him to his Texas home. But the woman in whose office she works, said, “wait.” She wrote to Knights of Columbus officers in the soldier’s hometown and asked for his credentials. They were more than satisfactory. Then the businesswoman went to the train with her stenographer and kissed her saying, “I am so glad it is all right. Goodbye.”
It would not occur to the actress to do this. She is used to kindling love in a man’s breast. Generally, she is beautiful. Always she has charm. She has been so long and so well trained to exercise charm on the stage and enthrall an audience that she, without effort, or with little effort, charms a man whom she happens to meet off the stage. It does not surprise her when a man falls in love with her at sight. That which would be remarkable to a woman in private life is a commonplace to the actress. She regards romance as her right. She accepts it as her due.
The actress is used to meeting brilliant men, men of wealth or position or fame, or all these. Such men are attracted to her. They ask for an introduction. It was not remarkable that Marquis van Hoegaerden should want to meet me. Other men who have titles and millions have. As they have wished to meet other actresses.
It is natural that we should live in the atmosphere of our work. The banker carries home the atmosphere of his bank. The editor takes uptown with him his bundle of ideas as surely as he carries his bundle of newspapers. The professional manner of the doctor is proverbial, as proverbial as is the lawyer’s stoop. We women of the stage carry about with us the atmosphere of our workshop, the stage. On the stage, the star or leading woman is a queen. She is the sovereign in the land of make-believe.
Stage life develops her ego. The stage career is one long battle for the existence and the growth of that ego. A premium is placed upon her individuality. The more she develops it the more valuable are her services to her management and more agreeable to the public. Adulation is part of her atmosphere. Excessive admiration is the oxygen, the vital principle of the air she breaths. Naturally, her vision is blurred. She is blinded in the clearer light of everyday folk and affairs.
Lillian Nordica married an erratic man, a scenic adventurer, who flew away in a balloon and never came back.
Lillian Russell says frankly that her marriage to her second husband was not a marriage because his previous bonds had not yet been broken. My story is a parallel of hers.
Grace Hamilton married Lieutenant Higginbotham after six hours’ acquaintance and had to sue him for divorce on the grounds of nonsupport six weeks after the wedding.
Chorus girls are accounted wise, and yet that is what happened to a chorus girl. Another married a young cousin of the late president Carranza and her marriage was annulled because he was 17 at the time of the marriage. He had told her he was 21, and she believed him. She believed him, she said, “because he talked so nice.” In other words, he employed the phrases of stage lovemaking, and the stage girl believed them as surely as the stage heroine who is betrayed by a stage villain.
No, the actress doesn’t know the villain in real life. She should, but she doesn’t. My humiliating story proves it.
In 1921, Whitney married another actor, Robert Emmett Keane, and their marriage endured through the ends of their lives. Both are buried at Forest Lawn Memorial Park in Hollywood.
When Whitney died in 1969 at Los Angeles, the brief notice published in the Arkansas Gazette listed her age as 69. She was 79. Keane died in 1981, age 96. Her grave is an unmarked space beside his. (See arkansasonline.com/76grave.)
IMDb has a photo gallery and biography, see arkansas online.com/76imdb.
Unreported there or anyplace else I have seen except a 1915 wire story carried in newspapers like the Jan. 29, 1915, Arkansas Democrat, Whitney claimed descent from a “famous Hutchins family” that was massacred in 1660 on Long Island, N.Y. Her greatgreat-great-grandmother, she said, was one Mistress Patience Hutchins, who carried a paisley shawl to the New World in 1620 as wife of a refugee from “the English restoration period.”
Whitney had converted this relative’s precious shawl into an evening wrap, which she modeled over a “Polly Prim” gown.
So, was there anybody named Patience on the Mayflower? Something for you to look up.
Actresses!