9780830072354
Gold Digger: The Outrageous Life and Times of Peggy Hopkins Joyce share button
Constance Rosenblum
Format Hardcover
Pages 293
Publisher Holt, Henry & Company, Inc.
Publication Date 8/15/2001
ISBN 9780830072354
Book ISBN 10 0830072357
About Book

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.

Reviews

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

Madonna's Material Girl had nothing on Peggy Hopkins Joyce, the 1920s blonde showgirl and celebrity who became world famous for marrying millionaires. Born Marguerite Upton to a smalltown barber and his wife in North Carolina in 1893, Peggy fled town at age 16 with a vaudeville troupe. After one disastrous, short marriage, she wed the youngest son of a wealthy Washington, D.C., family. When boredom set in, she moved to New York and became a Ziegfeld Girl and a noted society personality. Another short-lived marriage to millionaire James Stanley Joyce ended in a highly publicized, scandalous divorce trial that focused on her numerous indiscretions. By now, Peggy Hopkins Joyce was a household name--an occasional film actress who was famous for being a witty adventuress with a sense of humor and style, whom Cole Porter and Lorenz Hart memorialized in song lyrics and who counted Charlie Chaplin and Irving Thalberg among her lovers. In 1922, Joyce was so notorious that the Motion Picture Theater Owners of America banned her films. By the late 1930s her celebrity faded and, at 60, she entered her last marriage (to a bank clerk 20 years her junior), which may have been the happiest of her six. Rosenblum, the editor of the city section of the New York Times, has assembled a lively and entertaining biography from interviews, press clippings, theater histories and Joyce's own (highly unreliable) memoirs. Filling the book with fascinating details of 1920s social life, Rosenblum not only brings her subject to vibrant life, but also reveals how the cult of media celebrity grew in this century. Photos not seen by PW. (Apr.) Copyright 2000 Cahners Business Information.|

Library Journal

Peggy Hopkins Joyce, a 1920s household name, was long forgotten when New York Times editor Rosenblum acquired a carton of her personal papers. Rosenblum carefully reports how a woman from ordinary circumstances, with scant performing talent, used her stunning looks and allure to live extravagantly. Said to be the inspiration for Lorelei Lee, Anita Loos's diamond-loving blonde, Joyce once boasted of a week-long, million-dollar shopping spree for gems and furs funded by husband number three in 1920. Billing Joyce as "the ultimate metaphor for the Jazz Age" and an early tabloid-manufactured celebrity, the author evokes an era of caf society, Cole Porter lyrics, and passionate affairs with noblemen and titans. Rosenblum argues credibly that Joyce's fearless, unsentimental drive to live the life she chose makes her a worthy subject. Yet the woman presented here is a flimsy, distant artifact, lacking flesh and blood, leaving readers hungry for substance. For larger public libraries.--Elaine Machleder, Bronx, NY Copyright 2000 Cahners Business Information.\

New York Times Book Review

Entertaining and meticulously researched . . . Rosenblum examines the now epidemic phenomenon of media-driven celebrity and the confluence of personality and timing that allowed one woman's 15 minutes of fame to last more than a decade . . .