D AV I D PAT R I C K C O L U M B I A “ L O OT : M A D A B O U T J E W E L R Y ” B E N E F I T AT M U S E U M O F A R T A N D D E S I G N
Emma Dunch
banks, the most famous leading man in the world of silent films who was married to the most famous film actress of that era, Mary Pickford. Pickford and Fairbanks were known as the King and Queen of Hollywood. The couple, along with D.W. Griffith and Charlie Chaplin, had been so successful throughout the late 1910s and 1920s that the four had become partners and founded their own studio, United Artists. So famous were Fairbanks and Pickford in the world that, when Edwina Ashley married Lord Louis Mountbatten in 1922, the newlyweds honeymooned in Beverly Hills at “Pickfair”— 28 QUEST
Barbara Taylor and Robert Bradford
Lisa Cohen
the estate of Pickford and Fairbanks on Summit Drive. In 1934, Lord Ashley filed for divorce and named the King of Hollywood as co-respondent. Two years later, in March 1936, with both Sylvia and Fairbanks divorced from their spouses, they married. He was 53 and she was 32 (while she admitted only to 30). Three years later, in December 1939, Fairbanks died in his sleep of a heart attack at age 56, leaving Sylvia the bulk of his considerable fortune. Five years later, Lady Sylvia Ashley (as she was known in the American press) married another British lord, Edward Stanley, 6th Baron Stanley of
Patricia Falkenberg and Noreen Buckfire
Jane Pflug and Boo Grace
Alderley. That marriage lasted for four years. The following year, in 1949, she married Clark Gable, the movie star who had succeeded Fairbanks as the King of Hollywood. Meeting at a party he had attended with socialite Dolly O’Brien of Palm Beach, Gable was immediately drawn to the English lady who, for him, bore a great resemblance to his late wife Carol Lombard (who had died in a plane crash a few years before). By then, Lady Sylvia Ashley had become a popular figure in Hollywood life and society. She became a close friend of stars such as Norma Shearer (who was also the leading
stockholder at MGM after her husband, Irving Thalberg, died) and Loretta Young. She moved with Gable to his 20-acre ranch in Encino in the San Fernando Valley. She loved the film colony social life where—with her British title—she was a special kind of star. She frequently gave dinner parties, filling the house with glittering guests, relatives, and friends from abroad. A year into the marriage, however, Gable had already had enough of “her ladyship” with the “champagne voice” and extravagant ways. One night when she was soaking in the bath, he walked in and said, “I want a divorce” and walked
PAT R I C K M C M U LL A N
Barbara and Donald Tober