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Gold Digger
The Outrageous Life and Times of Peggy Hopkins Joyce
By Constance Rosenblum Henry Holt and Company
Copyright © 2000 Constance Rosenblum
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-62779-824-2
CHAPTER 1
"I Am Not Going to Have a Dull & Dreary Life"
Peggy Hopkins Joyce, heartbreaker, gold digger, and international celebrity, was invariably described by reporters as a barber's daughter from Norfolk. Her audience took this sort of narrative to their hearts, for Peggy's story vindicated their belief in the possibility of limitless achievement and showed that even a person of humble origins could escape the confines of her class. As it happened, for once the description was true. She was born and primarily raised in Virginia, or more precisely Berkley, a community across the river from Norfolk that was later incorporated into its larger neighbor. And her father, Sam Upton, was indeed the local barber, although the village in which he plied his trade shifted over the years as he moved from one part of the South to another.
Peggy never objected to mentions of her roots, but her family was less enthusiastic about publicizing its ties to their loose-living progeny. Once the scandals started and Peggy began accumulating and shedding husbands, relatives on both her parents' sides were reluctant to acknowledge her as kin, especially in front of their children. When her movies came to town, even first cousins kept quiet about her being one of their own. In the conservative small towns of the South where her forebears lived, a person had little to gain by admitting a connection with a girl like Peggy Joyce.
Her father's people, the Uptons, were country folk who lived close to the land and tended to marry the girl or boy next door or at least down the road. Their roots were in the Albemarle, a cluster of communities in northeastern North Carolina that, like the people who inhabited them, possessed long histories. Its largest metropolis, bustling Elizabeth City, had been a seafaring town since the seventeenth century; residents boasted that the pirate Bluebeard once hid there. On the other side of the Pasquotank River lay the tiny crossroads of Camden, dominated by a traditional redbrick courthouse facing a tidy town green. It was in and around this speck of a village that generations of Uptons made their homes, raised their families, and tilled a living from the rich, loamy soil.
The family patriarch, Mark Upton, with his wife, Margaret Boushall, produced five children in the early years of the nineteenth century. Their son Samuel also married a local girl called Margaret, siring seven children in the space of a decade. His namesake, Samuel Boushall Upton Jr., Peggy's father, was born in 1864. Following family tradition, at the age of twenty-four he married a young neighbor named Maggie Sawyer.
The bodies of many of these early Uptons rest in a family burial ground just off Camden's main road, the weathered slabs of granite almost hidden in the thicket of honeysuckle, periwinkle, and wild grape. Even to a sharp eye, the names of the dead and the traditional Baptist inscriptions that comforted their loved ones are barely legible. "Sallie H. Upton, born April 14, 1858, died August 29, 1891. Weep not, she is not dead but sleepeth." "Samuel Upton, 1830–Feb. 27, 1896. Asleep in Jesus."
Little information survives beyond the dates on which these stolid Southerners entered and left the world. But the Uptons of Camden are remembered by their descendants as a pious, God-fearing lot, strict Southern Baptists who were dutiful worshipers at the local Shiloh Baptist Church and attended to their earthly duties by producing generous harvests of cabbage, potatoes, and soybeans on their small family farms. Though not particularly rich, they were industrious. And for country people with little time to fuss over their appearance, they were also remarkably attractive. Family photographs reveal that young Sam Upton was an especially fine- looking specimen, a tall, lanky fellow with regular features and thick brown hair parted neatly in the center. The women tended to be blonde and blue-eyed, blessed with fine skin, inviting smiles, and an unexpected air of glamour that would have turned more than a few heads in a quiet Southern town.
* * *
If Peggy's family on her father's side represented the enduring traditions of nineteenth-century rural America, her mother's people exemplified the life of the nation's burgeoning towns and cities. They were more adventurous, more restive, and more willing to move and marry outside the small circles in which they had been raised.
Peggy's grandmother Emma Jane Sykes, the rebel of the family, was born in 1850 in Princess Anne County, the part of Virginia later known as Virginia Beach. At the age of fifteen she shocked her little world by marrying Laderna Wood, a feisty Union soldier from Elmira, New York, who had come south during the Civil War and stayed after his discharge. It was bad enough for a Southern girl to marry a Yankee, and this particular Yankee had a reputation as a wild man. He had a celebrated temper, going after his enemies with a pair of brass knuckles, and his pugnacity was exacerbated by his taste for liquor. "Emma Jane used to say Laderna was fine until he started hitting the bottle," their grandson Francis Price recalled years later. "But then he'd be mean as the devil."
Emma Jane herself was a stern figure. In a formal photograph, she presides unmistakably as the family matriarch, a dour, unsmiling woman in a dark, high-necked dress, wedged into an ornately carved chair. With her pince-nez glasses hanging on a chain around her neck, her white gloves clenched tightly in her hand, and a grim expression in her beady eyes, she has the decided appearance of someone not to be trifled with.
After their marriage in 1865, the Woods settled in Berkley, then a small town that was fast becoming a thriving center for shipbuilding and lumber mills. It was there that Emma Jane bore sixteen children, four of whom survived. Dora Selena, born in 1873, was the eldest. Although she had a soft side, earning the family nickname Pattycake for the hours she spent playing clapping games with her nieces and nephews, she had inherited her mother's sturdy backbone, not to mention a generous dose of Emma Jane's rebellious spirit.
Dora was a teenager when Sam Upton left his people for reasons no one remembers exactly. Perhaps he wanted to escape ghosts of the past; according to some accounts, a child born early in his marriage did not survive infancy, and his wife may have died in childbirth. In any event, by the early 1890s he had made his way north to Berkley. A garrulous man, Sam found cutting hair more to his taste than farming and before long he was the chief attraction at the most popular barbershop in town. He also found time to walk out with the dark-haired, high-spirited Dora Wood, and in April 1892 the local paper reported "a large crowd present at the Christian Church" for the wedding of the twenty-eight-year-old Carolinian and his nineteen-year-old bride.
The Uptons set up housekeeping in a buff-colored bungalow with a peaked roof at 318 Lee Street, one of three identical houses on a quiet residential street. Except for a rose arbor by the back porch, both the house and its neighborhood were utterly nondescript, although they did offer the comforting advantage of proximity to family: Emma Jane lived next door, and Dora's sister Evelyn lived one house down from Emma Jane. Census documents indicate that in 1893, thirteen months after her marriage, Dora gave birth to a daughter. The infant was christened Marguerite, a prettified version of the name that had been in the father's family for generations. Like many of her Upton cousins, the baby had silky blonde hair and memorable blue eyes. Although she would always celebrate May 26 as her birthday, no official certificate survives to mark the actual year — a lucky stroke of fate for a woman who would start fudging her exact age the moment she became famous.
* * *
Marguerite Upton's timing was excellent. She entered the world together with the modern age, her arrival happily coinciding with a series of profound social, cultural, and technological changes of which the most pertinent involved the transmission of information. The Graphic Revolution, as historian Daniel J. Boorstin calls it, was based on the rapid and inexpensive dissemination of both word and image by a number of common technologies. The invention of the telegraph helped give birth to the modern news service. The rotary press made it possible to print newspapers faster and more cheaply. Halftone engraving meant newspapers could publish pictures as well. The railroad and automobile enabled rapid distribution. Whether earthshaking or trivial, news would soon travel incredibly quickly and cheaply and be consumed voraciously by an increasingly urban and literate populace. Movies, too, would become an enormously powerful cultural force. Not long before Marguerite Upton's birth, Thomas Edison had demonstrated a device he called a Kinetoscope, a box in which a strip of film was moved past a light to create the illusion of moving images, and the first public showing of a motion picture had taken place two years later.
Taken as a whole, these developments would hasten the emergence of a "culture of personality" and affect the very nature of fame. The definition of what made a life worthy of note would begin to shift rapidly. The emphasis was less on achievement and increasingly on behavior, on the image one projected — on personality. Adorable Mary Pickford and sultry Theda Bara would be as well known and at least as interesting as the men who commanded armies and waged wars. A face, even a voice, from the worlds of politics, sports, and especially show business would be instantly recognizable to millions of people.
Across the country, Americans would soon have access to motion pictures, phonograph records, mass-circulation magazines, and many more newspapers. So significant would the newspaper be that by the 1920s up to a dozen would compete furiously in a single metropolis, with new editions spewing out every few hours.
Still other momentous changes were afoot in those waning years of the nineteenth century when Marguerite Upton was playing with her dolls under the cigar tree in her backyard and listening to carriage wheels clatter along the cobblestones of Lee Street. Henry Ford's contraption would make a vast nation smaller. The Wright brothers were fooling around with kites. Far to the north, a great bridge would help give birth to the metropolis of New York. The fresh-faced Gibson Girl was striding into public consciousness, tennis racquet in hand and a purposeful gleam in her eye. Women were still wearing voluminous long skirts and pounds of heavy cotton petticoats, but they would shed them, along with their stiff hats and even stiffer manners, in the century ahead. The music would change. The beat would quicken.
But Marguerite Upton was born in the deeply traditional South. It would be years before the modern age reached Berkley. In the meantime, life there was dull and constricting, with little to excite the soul or tempt the spirit. Marguerite Upton would seek to make her escape as fast and as completely as possible.
* * *
For a girl who dreamed of going places, nothing mattered more than a pretty face, and in that respect young Marguerite Upton was supremely blessed. "She was a smashingly beautiful child with flawless skin and enormous blue eyes," George Tucker, a local newspaper columnist, wrote nearly a century later in an article about Berkley's most famous daughter. Some dyspeptic naysayers claimed she had hair the texture of straw and the gait of a turkey, but a photograph taken when she was not yet in her teens reveals an angelic-looking creature with classically even features — a high forehead, straight brows, large, wide-set eyes, a shapely, slightly turned-up nose, and exquisitely sculpted lips. Her blonde hair is swept back from her face and held with a ribbon; around her neck is an ornate lace collar. She looks both innocent and knowing, a combustible mixture.
Though Margie, as she was called, had a willful streak, she also had a quick smile and pretty ways, and when in the mood she could be the most agreeable of children. "She learned early that smiling rather than bawling got her the candy suckers that she craved," George Tucker wrote, and classmates remembered her as bubbly and good-natured, an easygoing youngster who rarely took offense. "She had nice manners and people liked her," her father once told a reporter. "She would do anything in the world to please anybody, and she never cried unless she was sick." She charmed her crusty grandfather — Daddy Wood, as she called him — who bought her candy and took her walking, and she endeared herself to the imperious-looking Emma Jane. She also became a frequent visitor at her father's barbershop, bringing his dinner in a basket and receiving a nickel for her trouble. "The men getting haircuts talked to her, and they used to be carried away with her," her cousin Elizabeth Nixon recalls. "People said she was real cute when she was little."
As a child, she had scant interest in her studies at the local one- room schoolhouse, but she did adore an audience, and happily for such a youngster she could sing, dance, and recite better than most of her peers — at least that became the accepted wisdom. "Every Friday we had to speak a piece, and Margie would always speak the nicest piece of all," a classmate remembered. "When we had plays, Margie was always better than the rest of us.... We all used to say Margie will someday be an actress." Townspeople invariably uttered such comments after a local offspring made it big on the stage, but in this case, the people of Berkley recognized that, at the very least, the gangly extrovert with the unruly golden curls had a passionate appetite for the spotlight.
Early on, Marguerite realized that her appearance would be her passport. In a rare moment of candor she admitted years later in her memoirs that she knew her beauty could be an asset and was determined to use it, however shamelessly, to achieve her goals. "Deep inside me ever since I was a little girl I have always wanted nice things and luxuries and love," she wrote, "and I suppose once or twice I have said to myself, why be beautiful if you can't have what you want." The child had good looks, charm, ambition, and a taste for an audience, all attributes that could help a girl make her way in the world.
Around 1900, Sam Upton packed up his little family and moved back to Camden, North Carolina. He set up his shop next to the courthouse and established his wife and daughter in a modest house down the road, not far from his brothers and sisters. Maybe he was homesick; more likely his marriage was in trouble and a change of scene seemed advisable. But the shift in environment did nothing to improve relations in the Upton household; the tedium of life in turn-of-the-century rural North Carolina surely exacerbated the tensions, as did Dora's own personality, for she had always been the wildest and most rebellious of Emma Jane's children. After three years in her new home, Dora took off, leaving her husband and daughter, and headed north to Richmond, Virginia. She settled into a boardinghouse, where she met a young railroad worker named Arthur Hudson, and after a brief courtship, she divorced her first husband and remarried. Sam left Camden as well. With his ten-year- old in hand, he too went north, to the central Virginia hamlet of Farmville, where he promptly took a third wife, a straitlaced fellow Baptist named Josephine Bowman. Within a few years the household included a baby girl called Lucille.
Sam did the best he could with his elder daughter. He sent her to Sunday school and urged her to read the Bible, giving her a palm- sized New Testament with the words "Marguerite Upton, a preasant from Papa" written in a childish hand inside the back cover. He arranged for her to take piano lessons; she practiced her scales on an elaborate old upright decorated with gold scrollwork. And for a time, she found ways to amuse herself. She made something of a local reputation reciting poems at parties and other get-togethers, and at a charity benefit for the Baptist church she offered a memorable portrayal of a mechanical doll. Wearing a pink organdy frock and matching ribbons in her hair, her vivid features accented by dabs of red chalk and burnt cork, she held herself rigid as she was carried onto the jerry-built stage for her grand entrance. Despite the primitive setting and the harsh glow of the flickering kerosene lamps, her performance brought down the house.
But Farmville was a backwater, and an unpleasant one at that. Marguerite quarreled with her stepsister and fought even more bitterly with her strict stepmother, who was none too happy to be saddled with another woman's strong-willed child. By the time she entered her teens, Marguerite had persuaded her father that the best place for her was back with her grandmother in Berkley. It would be her fourth home in thirteen years.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Gold Digger by Constance Rosenblum. Copyright © 2000 Constance Rosenblum. Excerpted by permission of Henry Holt and Company.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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