Lorelei

MEN, MARRIAGE AND ME--Peggy Hopkins Joyce--Macaulay ($2.50).

Born in Norfolk, Va., with the fairly respectable name of Margaret Upton, Peggy Upton Archer Hopkins Joyce Morner was only 15 when she ran away, fascinated, with Trick-Cyclist Heurtin, who promised to teach her how to turn a somersault on a bicycle and thus become a great actress. Mr. Heurtin was like a father to her, the simp, but in Colorado she met Everett Archer, who fluttered her; she married him, discovered that "Love is not beautiful and romantic; it is horrible and disgusting." Two days were enough; she went back to Norfolk with the apprehensive Mr. Heurtin, who fed her chocolates nervously on the way. Her marriage annulled, she was put in school in Washington. There at a dance she met her second: Sherburne Philbrick Hopkins. She called him Sherby, he called her Babs. Said he, after they had been formally introduced: "I want you to be my wife, will you?" Said she: "I haven't any clothes." So she was married again, at 16, and went to live in Washington, where she became a great belle and slept late in the morning. After three months they quarreled: Peggy went to Manhattan, where she roughed it at her husband's suite in the St. Regis until he refused to pay the bill.

She contemplated rash doings; instead, went to see Mr. Ziegfeld. All went well. Said he: "So you're the little lady from Washington who wants to go on the stage are you? Well you are certainly a knock-out for looks I will hand you that. Let us look at your legs." Soon she was sharing a dressing room with Fannie Brice.

Peggy was soon making $700 a week, had her own maid and car. Socialite Sonny Whitney. Poloist Tommy Hitchcock, were her good friends (she says). In Chicago Stanley Joyce came into her life. Her marriage with Joyce taught her the last refinements of her peculiar talent: how to spend money. Perhaps that is why, in all her subsequent vicissitudes, she has gratefully kept his name. One week in Manhattan she spent nearly a million dollars. Just shopping. He bought her a house in Coral Gables, Miami, and the neighbors complained of the stink from her monkey house. Said Peggy: "Can I change the direction of the wind?"

Her third marriage ended appropriately in Paris. She lost control of herself, "and just flew at him." The divorce was a "teriffic ordeal" for Peggy--over 4,000 newspaper columns. She won, and her share was about $2,000,000. After a fling in Earl Carroll's Vanities, Peggy went legally to bed again--this time to Count Gosta Morner. He lasted six weeks. The Earl of Northesk (of Vanities Jessica Brown fame) and Count de Janze were later also-rans. Someone, said to be prominent in the automobile business, lately gave her the very biggest diamond she could find at Black, Starr & Frost's--a 127-carat stone called the largest perfect diamond in the world.

Out of the piling wealth of her experience, Peggy drew up ten categorical imperatives for husbands. One of them: "He must get up first in the morning and not let me see him until he is shaved. It is very tiring to have to look at a husband early in the morning." The diary ends with Peggy unmarried again as she was in the beginning. But she leaves you with the impression that she has already begun to cheat old age, and will probably cheat Death.

Fortnight ago Peggy Joyce's publishers gave her a tea in Manhattan, caviarish. terpsichorean. She flashed her teeth, her jewels; two days later went to Harbor Sanitarium to have out her appendix. Though cancellation of her passage to France helped to make the operation seem dramatically sudden, it was not; Authoress Joyce's room at the hospital had been engaged for weeks. Last week one Barbara ("Billie") Riley, cinema dancer, prepared a breach of promise suit for $100.000. In the pocket of her fiance Joe May. vaudevillian, Dancer Riley claimed to have found a picture of Peggy Joyce inscribed: "To My Baby Joe, Love--Pee Wee."

The Significance. Peggy Joyce's publishers have played their hand well. They have somehow induced her to sign her name to a book which, if not quite so funny as Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, has the names and scandal of more real people in it. She is easily the most famous Woman in the U. S.

The Author. Men, Marriage and Me was evidently "ghosted" (in large part), but the ghost has been kept in the background by Peggy Joyce's publishers, who deny that Journalist Basil Woon is it.

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