Monday, March 05, 2012

Billy Rose's disastrous trip to Montreal

These two big name stars traveled together to Montreal in 1951 supposedly to do something strictly platonic involving television, but the trip would lead to headaches for both.
  Anybody know?
    Clues: he was a tiny musician who invested shrewdly and made a ton of dough. He lived in a massive Manhattan apartment with so many rooms he couldn't even count them but he always liked Montreal, in fact he wrote a song about the city. She was a twice-divorced starlet, in fact she had married the same famous actor twice.
     Someone answered Billy Rose and indeed it is the 4'11" songwriter who became a rather massive star with a special connection to Montreal. She is Joyce Mathews (one "t") and the two came to Montreal together in 1951, after which she tried to commit suicide by razor blade in his Broadway apartments. As for Rose, his wife Eleanor Holm - who was to swim for the USA in the Berlin Olympics before getting kicked off the team for boozing too much on the ship to Europe - launched divorce proceedings against him, leading to what the press dubbed The War of the Roses and a massive divorce settlement.
   Apparently their visit together got out and she denied that it was about hanky panky, she said it was about a TV show and indeed he apparently had The Billy Rose show in 1950 and 1951. When asked why she tried to do it, Mathews said, "I just love razor blades."  She had done the deed while locked in the bathroom after Rose said something to her. She had also attempted to leap out of the seventh floor apartment.
    At her bedside was Milton Berle, whom she had divorced twice and adopted a daughter with.
   Rose by this time was massively wealthy, having been a big-name lyricist for a ton of hit songs. He was also a big shareholder of AT&T shares. Rose later confessed that his name was connected to songs that he didn't even write and didn't even like but nobody seemed to mind as it made more money. But one that he surely wrote personally was Hello Montreal. Rose had performed in Montreal and clearly knew the city well, here's a notice for his vaudeville act from 1938 that played here. And he constantly referenced the city in his newspaper column. One hilarious one tells the tale of a Montreal woman who buried her sister in all of the tropical paradises she moved around to.
   So Rose and Holm separated after 13 years and she was given an unprecedented $100 a day to get by.
   Rose eventually married Mathews twice, in 1956 and 1961, and divorced her twice. He died while recovering from heart surgery in Montego Bay in 1966.
   Mathews remarried a guy named Don Beddoe and had a travel agency in California until about 1977, whereupon we lost track of her. 

3 comments:

  1. Anonymous11:41 am

    Robert Culp?

    ReplyDelete
  2. Anonymous11:50 am

    I think it's Billy Rose and one of his girlfriends.

    Huckleberry Hound

    ReplyDelete
  3. Anonymous4:08 pm

    A tip o' the ol' Al Palmer fedora to Huck Hound. Anybody out there remember Billy Rose's Diamond Horseshoe?

    Peabody

    ReplyDelete

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