A Ziegfeld Girl and movie actress, Peggy Hopkins Joyce was one of her era's most notorious and chronicled women, world-famous in the 1920s and '30s as the consummate gold digger. A marital chess master, she strutted down the aisle with six different millionaires and was summoned just about as many times in lyrics by Cole Porter (for instance: "Should I make one man my choice/And regard divorce as treason/Or should I like Peggy Joyce/Have a new one every season?," 1929, "Which?," Wake Up and Dream).
In my first book, American Cinderellas on the Broadway Musical Stage: Imagining the Working Girl from Irene to Gypsy, I wrote about (pg. 60) Hopkins Joyce as among Anita Loos's inspirations for Lorelei Lee in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (1925):
"Originally a farmer's daughter from rural Virginia, Joyce had vowed, 'I am not going to have a Dull & Dreary life. I am going to have a thrilling and exciting life full of Ginger and Glory (as Joyce recounted in Men, Marriage and Me, her own 1930 'diary of a professional lady'). Born in 1893, the Gatsbyesque Joyce passed herself of as a Norfolk society belle, married her first millionaire at the age of seventeen, and by 1923, headlined the Earl Carroll Vanities in a $20,000 chinchilla coat. In Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, Looks cheekily inserts Joyce into the narrative, as a friend of Lorelei attempts to introduce the gold digger to (movie censor) Henry Spoffard: "Mr. Spoffard turned on his heels and walked away. Because Mr. Spoffard is a very very famous Presbyterian and he is really much to Presbyterian to meet Peggy Hopkins Joyce."
Anathema to censors, Joyce also winningly plays herself in the 1933 Pre-Code Paramount farce International House, in which she vamps Bela Lugosi and W.C. Fields, and banters with the latter in still-shocking double entendres.
In my first book, American Cinderellas on the Broadway Musical Stage: Imagining the Working Girl from Irene to Gypsy, I wrote about (pg. 60) Hopkins Joyce as among Anita Loos's inspirations for Lorelei Lee in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (1925):
"Originally a farmer's daughter from rural Virginia, Joyce had vowed, 'I am not going to have a Dull & Dreary life. I am going to have a thrilling and exciting life full of Ginger and Glory (as Joyce recounted in Men, Marriage and Me, her own 1930 'diary of a professional lady'). Born in 1893, the Gatsbyesque Joyce passed herself of as a Norfolk society belle, married her first millionaire at the age of seventeen, and by 1923, headlined the Earl Carroll Vanities in a $20,000 chinchilla coat. In Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, Looks cheekily inserts Joyce into the narrative, as a friend of Lorelei attempts to introduce the gold digger to (movie censor) Henry Spoffard: "Mr. Spoffard turned on his heels and walked away. Because Mr. Spoffard is a very very famous Presbyterian and he is really much to Presbyterian to meet Peggy Hopkins Joyce."
Anathema to censors, Joyce also winningly plays herself in the 1933 Pre-Code Paramount farce International House, in which she vamps Bela Lugosi and W.C. Fields, and banters with the latter in still-shocking double entendres.
It was then a delight, and only something of a surprise, to learn that Joyce befriended Bradford Ropes in the late 1930s, during the latter's time in Hollywood as a screenwriter. Joyce was among a group of Ropes's Los Angeles friends who threw him a surprise 33rd birthday party. According to my source (which I will cite in Greasepaint Puritan), Ropes returned to his Hollywood apartment and found it festooned with poinsettas for the celebration. Patsy Kelly and her partner Wilma Cox (one of the few openly lesbian couples of 1930s Hollywood) were also among pals raising a toast to Ropes.
For all her vilification in the press, Joyce appears to have been a fun companion with whom to attend a swell party, as well as resistant to the systemic homophobia that surrounded friends like Ropes, Kelly and Cox. Her Getty Images page shows her both at a 1942 Hollywood Theatre celebration for Eddie Cantor celebrating the comedian's 25th anniversary on Broadway (pictured, at Cantor's left, blowing out the candles with Cantor and others among his former castmates); and at a Hollywood restaurant in 1934 with the comparably much-married Clark Gable and second-of-five-Gable wives, Maria "Ria" Franklin.
It's hard to contest that Peggy Hopkins Joyce exemplified the gold digger stereotype from which she extravagantly profited. Six years before Joyce helped throw Ropes's birthday party, the author briefly conjured her as such within 42nd Street: in the scene in which Geoffrey Waring visits his former cast-mate and implied sometime lover Pat Denning in the latter's midtown apartment. To Geoff, Pat downplays its relative luxury, enabled by his playing the "kept man" to two women, including Dorothy Brock. When Pat complains, "That's the hell of being poor," "Waring cast(s) an envious eye about the apartment. 'Poor? You and Peggy Joyce.'"
Whatever Joyce made of this literary nod (one of so many in the 1920s and '30s), she likely enjoyed the bawdy wisecracks in 42nd Street. She likely also appreciated Ropes's consistent empathy and insight into the lives of chorus girls in his backstage novels. Here, Ropes subverted stereotypes of female chorus dancers as mercenary, idle, and vain: misogynistic images that dominated the media, the stage, and the cinema.
In 42nd Street, Peggy Sawyer (far from the naïf of the film and stage versions) spits at a condescending frat boy with whom she misguidedly goes on a date: "You cheap, half-baked kid." Ropes sets up the insult to which Peggy responds: "He seemed to hold her in contempt, and although he was willing enough to embrace her and attempt a few kisses, she knew he mentally catalogued her as a cheap little gold digger who could be had for a price and then be discarded the moment someone more attractive came along."
While my research hasn't disclosed how close a friendship Ropes and Joyce actually had (my sense is that it was affable but casual), I would imagine that Ropes saw more depth in the dullness-discarding Joyce than the tabloids would have conceded her. He was also likely magnetized by one of the most mythologized women of the age: a self-invented menace to defenders of female "virtue;" and an exemplar of the bawdy, chiseling Times Square in which Ropes's work also played such an important role.
Whatever Joyce made of this literary nod (one of so many in the 1920s and '30s), she likely enjoyed the bawdy wisecracks in 42nd Street. She likely also appreciated Ropes's consistent empathy and insight into the lives of chorus girls in his backstage novels. Here, Ropes subverted stereotypes of female chorus dancers as mercenary, idle, and vain: misogynistic images that dominated the media, the stage, and the cinema.
In 42nd Street, Peggy Sawyer (far from the naïf of the film and stage versions) spits at a condescending frat boy with whom she misguidedly goes on a date: "You cheap, half-baked kid." Ropes sets up the insult to which Peggy responds: "He seemed to hold her in contempt, and although he was willing enough to embrace her and attempt a few kisses, she knew he mentally catalogued her as a cheap little gold digger who could be had for a price and then be discarded the moment someone more attractive came along."
While my research hasn't disclosed how close a friendship Ropes and Joyce actually had (my sense is that it was affable but casual), I would imagine that Ropes saw more depth in the dullness-discarding Joyce than the tabloids would have conceded her. He was also likely magnetized by one of the most mythologized women of the age: a self-invented menace to defenders of female "virtue;" and an exemplar of the bawdy, chiseling Times Square in which Ropes's work also played such an important role.
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