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7

Mother and I did some movie-going too. Among other shows, we saw "The Cat and the Fiddle" with Jeannette MacDonald and Ramon Novarro and I was captivated as never before by Jeannette. For charm, attractiveness and a lovely fresh voice, she was hard to equal. I'd never seen her to such good advantage. She made one dream of being the poor musician (Novarro) with nothing but her love--but that adequate. I guess it was later that she and Nelson Eddy made such a hit together. A few days later, Mother and I saw Frederic March and Evelyn Venable in "Death Takes a Holiday," which I refer to as a "very beautiful picture to me at least. To see it and appreciate it is to feel a little more worthwhile." Unfortunately the diary fails to expand upon this so I fear the blessings of "Death Takes a Holiday" are lost upon me at "this point in time" some forty years later.
Perhaps my most enjoyable social affair while Willie and Bab were gone was the Griswold Club spring formal dance. I'd not considered going to it in Willie's absence until Maybelle Scarborough suggested that I go stag and sit at their table. This I did and had a whale of a good time. Roz Harris invited me there for cocktails before going out to Hunter's Lodge where we had dinner before the dance. I don't know who was in the party besides the Scarboroughs and Harrises but presumably the Reeds, Lamborns and others. At any rate, I danced with many of the wives and enjoyed it thoroughly. At that time, with Maybelle I seem to have established a very fine rapport, in fact appeared to have more in common with her than any of the other wives. There seemed to be some kind of what I called "sympathy" between us although it was never mentioned between us. But we did enjoy being together and we had a lot of fun together. There was never anything off the beam about it. But as I've written heretofore, at that time Maybelle was a beautiful, vivacious, fun-loving, exciting young woman and I think all the men in our crowd were very happy to know her. As I put it then, I had "a very deep and sincere regard for Maybelle." She was "one of the finest girls I have ever known and how different from my first impression of her." Time was about to change all that. In one of the most inexplicable turnabouts in my memory, Maybelle simply became a different person. She inherited money which she came into at age thirty as I recall, and with that she seemed to go off the deep end. She established a fairly well-known liaison with "the banker" and finally divorced Walter only to be jilted by her lover. As a result of this, she married a worthless, crooked gold-digger who gradually relieved her of her money, she was reduced to menial labor to support herself while her husband either was in jail or sponging off her. She went down and down, moved away, drifted around the country in an unbelievably tragic situation, and a few years ago, died of cancer somewhere in the middle west. Only Marian Lamborn had been able to keep in touch with her at all and that very sketchily. Her's was one of the worst tragedies I have known of.