Jeanette MacDonald: A Pictorial Treasury 50th Anniversary edition

On sale this week for Valentine’s Day! An oversized, hardback, glossy coffee table book; I wrote it at age 19. This updated edition contains a new introduction and also an added chapter about the back story of this project. Dedicated to my friend, Jeanette’s sister Blossom. She kept the book on her night table the rest of her life. It was the first biography of Jeanette MacDonald, published 50+ years ago! In those days, one could not write the truth without threat of lawsuit (confirmed to me by potential authors) but I had the support of Jeanette’s sister so I was untouchable even though I dared to hint at a relationship between Jeanette and Nelson. Other authors, like Fredda Dudley Balling (who helped Jeanette write her unpublished autobiography), were threatened by Jeanette’s husband even though they towed the party line and didn’t mention even much of a friendship between Nelson and Jeanette, much less a romance. Fredda even adapted her manuscript into a third-person biography, rather than an autobiography; but her angry letters exist at how Gene Raymond stopped the revised manuscript from being published.

I had promised Blossom to tell the real story but advised her that it might be years before I could do so. And I was still researching the story as there were many gaps in time for which details were lacking. This was something Blossom could hold in her hand now, and realize that I would indeed keep my word to her in the future. This took years because people were afraid to talk. It was an era when Katharine Hepburn was still denying any relationship with Spencer Tracy, when she angrily severed her friendship with Garson Kanin (who I later interviewed) for daring to spill the beans in his wonderful book Tracy and Hepburn.

I also had the audacity to state Jeanette’s correct birthdate: 1903. Even her crypt has the incorrect date of 1907. You will note that future authors followed my lead, as the world didn’t explode by my revelation. It was a different world then, but I hoped that the little I could reveal in this book would help others to come forward, those who knew the truth and understood that I did as well. And that is exactly what happened.

Also remembered is the displeasure and unease at some of the candid photos featured in this book. They showed a closeness between Jeanette and Nelson that belied all the nice words used to promote the happy Jeanette-Gene marriage. These photos were laughingly shocking to some – and a wink, wink, nod, nod to those who knew. Today we freely share such photos; they show the ebb and flow of where Jeanette and Nelson were on a personal basis at the time taken. The still photographers of that day definitely knew how to catch moments that needed to be saved for posterity. One photo I gave a full page to is the one of Nelson kissing Jeanette on her birthday. This shot is the one that infuriated Louie B. Mayer, especially when he also learned that Jeanette was pregnant with Nelson’s child.

Here’s the book link.