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| Margo Taft and her "maid" |
If there ever was a place with
over-abundance of skeletons in the closet it’s Hollywood. However, this real story
is quite something even by its standards.
One of the characters in The Last Tycoon, a recent Amazon TV series based on F. Scott Fitzgerald’s unfinished last novel about movie studio business, is actress Margo Taft, a fiercely independent
star who has a secret that could ruin her career – she’s half-black and is only passing for white, while her real mother is by her side, masquerading as her black maid Lucille.
Of course,
there is nothing new about the whole “passing for white” phenomenon back in the
day with numerous actors and actresses (as well as people from other walks of
life) hiding their real origin (if their looks allowed) to get a better chance
in life. What I didn’t know was that the story about a non-white mother acting
as maid to her own “white” daughter is loosely based on an actual Hollywood story,
that of Merle Oberon.
Largely forgotten today, Oberon was a big star in the 1930s and 1940s, renowned
for her striking beauty. Her most famous
role is probably that of Cathy in the 1939 classic adaptation of Wuthering Heights alongside Laurence
Olivier. Looking at her pictures it
boggles me why no one really suspected that she was mixed race, especially at
the time when people allegedly paid so much attention to these things, but, not
unlike Liberace, she managed to take her big secret – she was born in Bombay in
1911 to a British father and an under-age half-Sri Lankan mother (with some Maori
blood to boot) – to her grave.
Throughout her career she concealed her ethnic
origin and maintained that she was born in Tasmania (apparently considered a
lot more acceptable that Bombay, not to mention the birthplace of Hollywood’s
great Errol Flynn) and only moved to India after her upper-class father died in
a “hunting accident”.
The truth however, was that her father was one Arthur Terrence O'Brien Thompson,
a railroad engineer working for Indian Railways, and a 12-year Constance Selby, a daughter of Charlotte
Shelby, a Eurasian from Sri Lanka, and an Irish foreman
at a tea plantation. Charlotte, who was only 26 at the time (she’s given birth
at 14), raised Merle as her own daughter, who grew up thinking her real mother
was her sister. After she moved to England to pursue a career in movies, she did
her best to hide her mixed-race background to the point of having her dark-skinned
mother pretend that she was just a servant in her household.
I couldn’t find a
lot of details on this arrangement and most accounts of her life just mention
it in passing so I can only assume that she wasn’t really treating her as a maid, but one can never know… Apparently,
after Charlotte passed away, Merle would commission her paintings, asking the
artists to give the woman she thought was her mother much lighter skin.
It wasn’t until 2014 that the truth was officially confirmed after Merle’s original
birth certificate was made public for the first time.
Far out. I guess it helped that all her films were in black and white.
ReplyDeleteI do also wonder how Fitzgerald knew about this if it was a secret?
ReplyDeleteF. Scott Fitzgerald is the author of the The Last Tycoon, so created the character of Margo Taft and of course her secret.
DeleteYeah, that's a plot hole. There are two statements that directly contradict each other.
DeleteIf The Last Tycoon is loosely based on the story of Merle Oberon and she took her secret to her grave then F. Scott Fitzgerald couldn't have written about her. He died in 1940 and she died in 1979.
That's a good question. I guess Vanity Fair that stated it as fact (that made it to wiki because of them) just made it up... Or, more likely, what they meant to say is that the story sort of reminded of a real one that happened around the same time. I also can't imagine Scott Fitzgerald knowing about it at the time.
DeleteJennifer Beals who played Margo in the television series had a black father and a Irish American mother.
ReplyDeleteI guess the powerful public relations departments of the big studios of Merles era had ability to both keep her ethnicity secret and present her as she/they wished, as they did for Errol Flynn.
I guess the era she was in helped as info and negative tittle tattle did not get out to the masses, also she had relationships with powerful people which no doubt helped.
Due to The Last Tycoon being unfnished at time of Fitzgeralds death, it was his friend the literary critic and writer Edmund Wilson, who edited it for publication, a perhaps interesting fact is that Wilson actually was the managing editor of Vanity Fair in the 1920s, of course this long before the novel was published in 1941.
I gather that the paragraph beginning "The truth,however..." needs to be edited and one of the "Constances" should be "Charlotte".(If I interpret correctly,Charlotte Shelby gave birth to Constance Selby at 14,and Constance then had Merle Oberon at 12...which was living as a servant of Merle?
ReplyDeleteYes, thanks!
DeleteI am waiting for a new story from you
ReplyDelete