Hello Dear – I wanted to chat you up about the site without clamoring for your attention and input too often.  However, I’d first like to tell you about a curious experience I had just recently while Google searching in a, “What ever happened to so-and-so” mood.

During a late night diversion with a Charlie Chan movie, I decided to look up Teddy’s First Wife’s mother, Evelyn Brent, whose name appeared in the featured player credits.  The search revealed that her career had an extensive silent film component to it. I had only been aware of the 1940’s B movie credits, and of her subsequent retirement into alcoholism in a small apartment in New York, in a building ironically named Sovereign Apts, just around the corner from my parents place on East 82nd St.

To digress for a moment:  In the 1940’s, liquor stores in the city still made brown package deliveries to neighborhood residents.  On genteel East End Avenue, Mayo Liquors had provided this service to its customers, legally since Prohibition ended.  Actually, a block over on York Avenue, almost all local businesses delivered – From the small store-front A&P, to Geier’s Meats and Celantano, the greengrocer.  Evelyn Brent, Garbo-esque, safe in the dim anonymity furnished by the blinds drawn against the late afternoon sun,  could use her phone and never go out.

Anyway, as I finished reading Evelyn’s Wikipedia bio, I had expected to find mention of by whom she had been survived.  But, Teddy’s First Wife wasn’t there as a surviving daughter, and there was no note made of Romney Brent as one of her three husbands.  So, I Googled Romney Brent, actor, playwright, intimate of Noel Coward, and putative father, whose daughter Teddy’s First Wife claimed to be. Not only was there no indication of a spousal relationship between Evelyn and Romney here either, but again no mention of an issue resulting from this (apparent) non-union.  Isn’t this wonderfully curious?

Children of the generation of ‘love.’

Teddy in a bar on Bleecker St. 1967

New York, Broad way. Teddy, Vicki and Ralph