Who is the mystery woman on The Tattooed Lady?

Photo by Simon Liddiard

Yesterday was the seventh birthday of my art work The Tattooed Lady! She made her debut on the 22nd May 2015 as part of the launch exhibition at HOME Manchester and since then has appeared at other art events dispensing temporary tattoos (you can find out more about her on this blog). As a birthday treat I thought I'd write about the history of the mysterious woman whose photo I used as inspiration for the painted section of my penny arcade machine and share her dark and forgotten story. She was an enigma to me until recently, but her story is unforgettable.

So get comfortable, take a deep breath, and read on as we explore the tumultuous history of a tragic showgirl star...

A tale of love and regret:

As one of the stars at the Ziegfeld Follies, Imogene was riding a wave of notoriety and fame. She had become one of it's most popular showgirls, sparkling and shimmying every night in her Erte costume and her effervescent personality could be felt far beyond the stage.

 

The columnist Mark Hellinger had once quipped, "Only two people in America would bring every reporter in New York to the docks to see them off. One is the President. The other is Imogene "Bubbles" Wilson." Frequently spotted around town in the best restaurants and night clubs, she had earned a reputation as a party girl and how the press adored her! 'Bubbles rhymes with troubles' yelled the headlines!

It was 1922, and Imogene was a jazz baby living as a fashionable and daring young thing. Yet she had arrived in New York under very different circumstances just a few years earlier. 

A small and thin child with few belongings, Imogene had made the long journey from Kentucky to the Big Apple to live with her older sister Mabel. She had chosen to leave behind the foster home that her father had put her in after her mother had died, and in doing so had changed the course of her life. 

Aren't you going to dance? by Arthur William Brown

By 13 Imogene was already a beautiful girl and began to work as a model for magazine illustrator Arthur William Brown. Word must have got around about her good looks as Broadway producer Florenz Ziegfeld Jr soon came calling and put her in his musical revue. He dubbed her 'Bubbles' due to her irrepressible nature and gave her a featured role in the show catapulting her into stardom.

By 1924 everyone's favourite showgirl was to begin a highly publicised affair with fellow Vaudeville act Frank Tinney. A popular black face performer, Frank was successful, older and very married. He must have made quite a glowing impression on the teen but shared a condescending attitude with others stating, “Sure I have a wife, a mortgage and an appendix, but why should I bring these things up and spoil a pleasant evening?”

 

 

Unfortunately for Imogene, Frank was also a heavy drinker and over the length of their relationship she would often turn up for work with bruises where he had hit her. Things reached a head when Frank found her alone in her apartment with a newspaper reporter and assuming the worst beat her so badly that she afterwards attempted suicide.

Later the newspapers reached a frenzy when 'Bubbles' Wilson appeared in court to press charges against Frank Tinney. She showed her bruised belly where he had kicked her and claimed he practiced his boxing on her lithe frame. Even Imogen's maid testified that Frank was a heavy drinker and was often violent. She herself claimed he had 'chastised' her and caused injury.

Despite all this, a grand jury refused to indict Tinney on assault charges and he went on to tell the press that Imogene had fabricated the whole thing as a publicity stunt. Already known as a free spirit and party girl, it wasn't a far stretch for the 1920's general public to also paint her as a deviant and liar. 

 

Ziegfeld was not impressed by Imogene's 'cheap' behaviour and fired her, feeling that her reputation would be bad for the show and the morale of his performers. This was in spite of the fact that his own personal doctor had inspected her injuries himself and declared “this girl looks as though she had been struck by an automobile.”

 

Even with her bruises and losses, Imogene was still infactuated with Tinney and in a move to get his attention that only cemented her delinquent image, she threw a 'suicide party' and swallowed heaps of sugar pills in front of her guests. After an ambulance was called and news of this hit the papers, Tinney beat her once more.

 

 

It seemed nothing could deter Imogene from her addiction to this toxic relationship. After Tinney announced he was leaving for an stint on the English vaudeville circuit the two reconciled and she boarded the ship to see him off before his departure. She told the waiting reporters that Tinney was, 'the only thing in my life. I know it, you know it, so why should I beat around the bush?'. She cried as the ship sailed away.

The next month she too was sailing, heading to Europe to appear in a French revue. It was not long however until she hopped across the Channel back to Tinney. He had begun to drink again and shortly after their reunion Imogene was once more black and blue. In early 1925 they finally split up for good when Imogene was tempted away to star in German films. When later asked about her affair with Frank she claimed she had only been 14 when it started, and it had been, 'a nonsensical mixture of fights and laughs, and half and half'.

 

On a side note; When Frank Tinney returned to New York his reputation had been tainted and his reception was less than glowing. Many of his friends abandoned him, his career floundered and his wife having divorced him wanted nothing more to do with him. Soon ill health and debts overtook his career and he faded from the limelight.

 

Back in Germany, it was a different tale. Imogene was now known as 'Imogene Robertson', and making a genuine go of things. For the next two years she starred in several films and received good revues earning her around $1500 a week. This led producers in Hollywood to take interest and offer her American projects, but she turned them all down. In Europe, while her life was still chaotic, she was at least free of her dubious past.

 

 

However, when Joseph Schenck of United Artists offered her a lucrative contract to return to the USA and work for him, she finally relented. The press took a huge delight in retelling her scandalous history prompting some women's groups to protest against her making films in America, while well known prude William H Hayes also expressed his dislike of her return. As a way to distance 'Bubbles' links with her past United Artists relaunched her career under a new screen name, Mary Nolan.

Under United Artists Mary starred in a just two films before moving to Universal Pictures. Here she played opposite such Hollywood elite as Lon Chaney and Lionel Barrymore and made such an impression on movie goers that she became a sought after starlet making $3000 a week. By 1929 she was once more riding high and had earned a lead role in the drama 'Shanghai Lady' playing a former prostitute and opium addict embarking on a respectable love affair only for her sordid life to catch up with her.

 

 

In reality it seems Mary likewise couldn't contain her still in-suppressible nature and she fell in love once more. This time the object of her affection was none other than legendary 'Fixer' and all round shady character, the executive and producer Eddie Mannix. If his status as the man who covered up Hollywood's crimes and disgraces by nefarious means wasn't enough, he was also, like Tinney before him, very married.

 

Mannix used his connections to push Mary's career and got her work with MGM on the film 'Desert Nights', while rumours flew that he also forced the star to undergo an abortion. Not long afterwards he abruptly ended their relationship. 

 

Mary, never one to handle a break up well, threatened to tell his wife about their affair which sent Mannix into a rage beating her into unconsciousness and hospitalising her for six months where she underwent 15 operations to repair the damage he had inflicted to her abdomen. It was during her recovery that Mary was prescribed morphine for pain relief and it was rumoured she became addicted to the drug. The next year while being treated for severe sunburn, nurses gossiped of finding needle marks up her arms.

 

 

In 1930 while making the movie 'What Men Want', Mary got into an argument with the film's director when she complained that she was the only cast member not to receive a close up. She was first banned from the set then fired altogether. After threatening to file a lawsuit against them, Universal bought her contract and possibly encouraged the hearsay about her temperamental behaviour and alleged drug use around Hollywood cutting her chances of ever getting work with another major studio.

 

 

From here on Mary worked on bit parts and supporting roles in low budget films for Poverty Row studios and in another attempt at love she married a stock broker named Wallace T McCreary. One week before their nuptials he lost $3 million on bad investments. With his remaining money the couple opened a dress shop, 'The Mary Nolan Gown and Hat Shop' but it went out of business within months. The couple were sued by creditors and ex employees seeking their wages. When giving a statement on proceedings, Mary said, 'They hound me because they remember a naughty Imogene Wilson. Don't they know that the side of me... vanished?' The next year Mary filed for bankruptcy and divorced McCreary, she was 24 years old.

Over time Mary's name was seen in the papers again when in 1935 she made an ill judged decision to file a lawsuit against her former lover Eddie Mannix for the physical abuse that had contributed to her career's downfall. She asked for $500,000 in damages. Predictably Mannix, an old hand at manipulating events to turn his way, stated that the claims were made in an attempt to resurrect her flagging film work. He further went on to discredit her and ruin her reputation by leaking negative stories about her sex life and many abortions, and he even sent a private eye to her home to threaten her with arrest for possessing morphine.

 

Now, shunned by Hollywood and making a shaky living back on the vaudeville circuit, Mary's life was punctuated by an arrest for an unpaid dress bill and several stays in hospitals for an attempted overdose and  'severe nervous strain'. Eventually upon her release she changed her name to Mary Wilson and got a job managing a bungalow court.

 

In 1948, Mary decided to write her memoirs  titled, 'Yesterday's Girl', with the help of the writer John Preston, but they remained unfinished. Suffering from malnutrition and residing in a small Hollywood apartment she was found dead at 42 from an overdose, the cause of which was never decided.

 

 

In her short life Mary blazed a trail across the entertainment industry burning brightly and very fast. It seemed that even with her talent energy and beauty, she was drawn to terrible relationships with awful men which took hold of her and kept her in a state of self destruction. With little to no support or understanding from the machine that had fed off her fame, she was left as an outsider and remembered as a dream that once was. Despite all this she is known to have said, 'I've had a beautiful life. I've tumbled into the most beautiful life in the world. I'd never change it'.

 

The Hidden Pin Up #1 - The Black Pin Up

Following on from my post about the Vogue Ball introducing work I will be doing with Manchester dance troupe The House Of Ghetto I've begun to look into the history of the black pin up which will be the project's starting point.

Obviously, I adore the Pin Up and when speaking of the Pin Up I refer to models, dancers and performers who have all appealed to popular culture through their work and mass produced image. I have even painted pin ups myself in the past. Yet pin ups are almost always shown as white women. It seems the Western world never quite managed to embrace the idea of other races having a sexual identity. The Pin Up's black sibling (and for that matter Hispanic or any other race) is majorly under represented in mainstream popular culture. 

That's not to say that the beloved Pin Up hasn't donned the apparel of other cultures, but she's hardly given those cultures any agency or freedom of expression. She was simply play acting and appropriating cliched ideas.

Despite the lack of portrayal in the Western world, the black female form has long had a power to fascinate the Western audience. Going back as far as the early 19th Century we can find the example of Sara Baartman. 

Born in the Cape Colony (present day South Africa)  Baartman was a Khoikhoi woman who was exhibited as a freak show attraction because of her unusually large buttocks. Her 'performance' drew huge crowds across England (where she was baptised in Manchester Cathedral) and France, where she eventually died at the young age of 29. After her death her skeleton and body cast were put on display at the Natural History Museum in Angers. 

I understand it is a far leap to put Baartman in the story of the black Pin Up yet she holds an important place in terms of non white women being seen as more 'exotic', animal-like and sexually primitive by white audiences. She wasn't accepted as a 'normal' woman because of her different physical qualities, she was an oddity and her threat was minimalised by making an example of her. This is something to bear in mind when thinking of how the black woman's image has been represented in popular Western culture through the ages.

Moving forward a century, most people will have heard of Josephine Baker and her 'Danse sauvage' where she thrilled the audiences of the Folies Bergere dancing in her famous banana skirt. Baker embraced the things that made her stand apart from the Western ideal, and unlike the upsetting and unsettling story of Baartman, she was able to freely exploit Western notions of the primitive woman to her own advantage. Often referred to as The Black Pearl,The Bronze Venus and The Creole Goddess, Baker created a colourful parody which gained her money, fame and lasting notoriety. Her legacy was to create a shift in how a black woman could hold the power to her sexuality whilst being objectified.

As technology evolved and took hold of the entertainment industry, performers from the burlesque scene became popular fixtures in Hollywood musicals. One such talent from the chorus line was Jeni LeGon. 

Jeni LeGon (see more @gemma_parker_artist)

Dancing from the age of 16 for the Count Basie Orchestra, LeGon had a distinctive gangly style both acrobatic and comedic. She was soon spotted and whisked to Hollywood to appear in her first film Hooray For Love in 1935. As she credits herself, 'I had moves that were typically men’s moves because they were so technically difficult - flips, splits, cartwheels - I could do it all'. No one else offered the particular package LeGon could and because of this she broke new ground as a black woman singing and dancing in mainstream Hollywood films pre the likes of Lena Horne and Dorothy Dandridge.

You can see her technical ability and sweet girlish style on the screen as she performs alongside Fats Waller and Bill 'Bojangles' Robinson. Yet despite the film's success leading to a contract with MGM, her dancing career on film was short lived. She was so skillful she outshone the white leading ladies and soon MGM couldn't find a project suitable for her. She was pigeonholed into typically black roles such as the grass skirt wearing dancer in Swing Is Here To Stay (1936) or increasing, during the 1940's, as a housemaid. It is sad to think of all that frenetic talent going to waste. 

It's interesting to note the difference in how LeGon was represented as the savage black woman to how Josephine Baker chose to do it. LeGon had no authority over her image in this scene. Unlike Baker her control has been taken away so she becomes a 2 dimensional cartoon, another minimalised black stereotype with no sexual identity and no threat.

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Jeni LeGon had varied success in her career and, as with most true greats, her talents weren't fully appreciated until much later in life. There is a brilliant article where you can read more about her highs and lows HERE . 

While researching the black Pin Up I hope that my brief notes give some context to the power of the images that these women left behind.
Join me next time where I'll be looking into the past at the little known stars of the black burlesque scene through the 1950's and 60's.