Gold Digger: The Outrageous Life and Times of Peggy Hopkins Joyce - Softcover

Rosenblum, Constance

3.56

75 ratings by Goodreads

9780805066418: Gold Digger: The Outrageous Life and Times of Peggy Hopkins Joyce

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0805066411 ISBN 13: 9780805066418

Publisher: Holt Paperbacks, 2001

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One of America's most talked about Jazz Age personalities, Peggy Hopkins Joyce was the quintessential gold digger, the real-life Lorelei Lee. Married six times, to several millionaires and even a count, Joyce had no discernible talent except self-promotion. A barber's daughter who rose to become a Ziegfeld Girl and, briefly, a movie star, Joyce was the original modern celebrity -- a person famous for being famous. Her scandalous exploits -- sping a million dollars in a week, conducting torrid love affairs with both Charlie Chaplin and Walter Chrysler -- were irresistible to tabloid journalists in search of sensation and to audiences hungry for the glamour her life seemed to promise.

Joyce's march across Broadway, Hollywood, and the nation's front pages was only slowed by the true nemesis of the glamour girl: old age. She died in 1957, alone and forgotten -- until now.

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Review:

"I may be expensive," Peggy Hopkins Joyce (1893-1957) once remarked, apropos of the wealthy husbands she acquired and discarded so lightly, "but I deliver the goods." Such racy frankness made Joyce the darling of the newly powerful mass media during the 1920s. Though she was a Ziegfeld showgirl and made a few movies, she was essentially a new kind of celebrity, states Constance Rosenblum in this entertaining biography: "She did nothing of significance [but] Peggy was blessed with a profound understanding of the uses of publicity, not to mention an enormous hunger for its fruits." Rosenblum traces Joyce's trajectory from restless girlhood in the conservative South through her partying teens (she had been married twice by the age of 20) to the zenith of her fame as an icon of hedonistic Jazz Age glamour and the sad years of declining media attention and income cushioned by the judicious sale of jewels from former spouses. In this balanced appraisal, Joyce comes across as neither especially talented nor smart, but nonetheless oddly likable as she parlays her looks and charm into a life of comfort. "She knew what she wanted, went after it with her whole heart, and lived the life she yearned to live," Rosenblum concludes. "That is no small achievement, then or now." --Wendy Smith

About the Author:

Constance Rosenblum, editor of the City Section at The New York Times, was for many years editor of the paper's Arts and Leisure Section. She lives in Brooklyn.

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