Peggy Hopkins Joyce

Early life

Born Marguerite Upton in 1893 in Berkley, Virginia (now part of Norfolk), she was known as Peggy. Upton left home at the age of 15 with a vaudeville bicyclist. While the two were en route to Denver, Colorado, via train, she met millionaire Everett Archer Jr. She dumped the bicyclist and in 1910 married Archer. Archer had the marriage annulled after six months when he discovered Joyce was underage. Joyce later claimed she divorced Archer because the life of a millionaire's wife "was not at all what I thought it would be, and I was bored to death." Using the settlement money she received from Archer, Joyce attended the private Chevy Chase School for Girls in Washington D.C., where she met Sherburne Hopkins. Hopkins was a lawyer and son of a prominent, wealthy lawyer. They were married on September 1, 1913.

Joyce left Hopkins in 1917 to pursue a career in show business in New York City. They eventually divorced in January 1920.

Career

Joyce made her Broadway debut in 1917 in the Ziegfeld Follies, followed by an appearance in the Shuberts' A Sleepless Night. She later had an affair with producer Lee Shubert for a time.

In 1920, she married her third husband, millionaire lumberman J. Stanley Joyce, and took his name. The newly married Mrs. Joyce drew attention for a $1 million shopping spree over the course of a week's time. By 1922, Joyce's romantic escapades had made her one of the most written-about women in the American press. She granted any interview, sometimes receiving reporters in her bedroom while wearing a sheer negligee, sans undergarments. Cole Porter and Irving Berlin both used her name in their lyrics, The New Yorker magazine ran cartoons mentioning her, and comedians of the time such as Will Rogers, Eddie Cantor and Frank Fay could get a laugh by invoking her reputation. Be Yourself!, a 1930 American Pre-Code musical comedy film, gets a laugh by invoking her reputation.

Due to her notoriety, Joyce caused a sensation with her performance in the 1923 installment of the annual Earl Carroll's Vanities. She appeared in her second film, The Skyrocket (1926), which provoked the Wisconsin state legislature into introducing a bill to allow censorship of all movies entering the state. In any event, the film was a box office failure. In 1930, Joyce published a ghostwritten, "tell-all" book reputedly taken from her steamy diary entries. Men, Marriage and Me advised, "True love was a heavy diamond bracelet, preferably one that arrived with its price tag intact."

In 1933, Joyce played herself in the ramshackle film, International House, which contained some good-natured joshing about her love life.

Joyce owned a jewel known as the Portuguese Diamond, one of the most expensive in the world, which she sold to Harry Winston. It is displayed at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C.

Recounting a meeting with Joyce in the late 1920s, Harpo Marx claimed that she was illiterate. But, she was credited with writing a column in the early 1930s for the spicy New York publication Varieties (not to be confused with the show business trade publication Variety). The column reported gossip about the hijinks and goings-on of public figures in both New York and London.

Personal life

Marriages and affairs

Joyce was married six times and claimed to be engaged around fifty times.

Joyce's first marriage was to millionaire Everett Archer Jr. in 1910. Archer had the marriage annulled later that year after he discovered that Joyce was underage. Her second marriage was to lawyer Sherburne Hopkins, the son of a prominent and wealthy lawyer. They were married in 1913. In 1917, Joyce left him to pursue a career. While travelling with the Ziegfeld show in 1919, she met wealthy Chicago lumberman J. Stanley Joyce. J. Stanley paid for Peggy's divorce from Hopkins; the divorce was granted on January 21, 1920.

Two days later, on January 23, Peggy and Stanley were married. On their wedding night, Peggy locked herself in the bathroom of the couple's hotel room and refused to come out until Stanley wrote her a check for $500,000. Within the year, she left Stanley for Parisian playboy and multimillionaire newspaper owner Henri Letellier. She sued Stanley for divorce and asked for $10,000 a month in alimony and attorney fees of $100,000. Stanley counter sued, claiming that she had married him only to defraud him of money. He also accused Peggy of having multiple adulterous affairs, being a bigamist (he claimed that Peggy was not divorced from her first husband before she married her second, thus making their union invalid), and for having driven a United States Army lieutenant to suicide. Stanley's lawyer claimed the man shot himself in a Turkish bath after going broke trying to keep Peggy happy.

During the couple's well publicized divorce trial in 1921, testimony revealed that J. Stanley had given Peggy a reported $1.4 million in jewelry, a $300,000 home in Miami, furs, cars, and other properties during their marriage. Peggy was awarded $600,000 in the divorce settlement. She was also allowed to keep all the jewelry she had acquired during the marriage, and was given stock in J. Stanley Joyce's lumber company that allotted her an annuity of $1,500 monthly for life.

The media later reported that Peggy Joyce had eloped with Henri Letellier, but the two never married. She later said that she did not marry him because "Frenchmen understand women too well. A girl should never marry a man who understands women." After her third divorce, Joyce declared that she never would marry again.

Later years and death

After marrying her sixth husband in 1953, Joyce moved to Woodbury, Connecticut, where she spent her remaining years. On June 1, 1957, she was admitted to Memorial Hospital for Cancer and Allied Diseases in New York City after being diagnosed with throat cancer. Joyce died there on June 12, 1957, at the age of 64.

Joyce is buried at Gate of Heaven Cemetery in Hawthorne, New York.

References in pop culture

Her name was frequently incorporated into song lyrics of the 1920s and 1930s to invoke images of excess and "naughtiness". Cole Porter regularly referenced her:

In "Why Shouldn't I?" (from Jubilee), referring to love, the Princess sings "Miss Peggy Joyce says it's good, and every star out in far Hollywood seems to give it a try, so why shouldn't I?"

In "They Couldn't Compare to You" (from Out of This World), the god Mercury sings of his affairs with women real and fictional through history: "...When betwixt Nell Gwyn/And Anne Boleyn/I was forced to make my choice/I became so confused/I was even amused/And abused by Peggy Joyce..."

"Which" asks, "Should I make one man my choice/and regard divorce as treason/or should I like Peggy Joyce/have a new one every season?"

"Let's Not Talk About Love" from 1941's Let's Face It!, Maggie Watson sings, "I've always said men were simply deevine/(Did you know that Peggy Joyce was once a pupil of mine?)"

In songs by others:

"I've Got Five Dollars" by Richard Rodgers and Lorenz Hart includes: "Peggy Joyce has a business/All her husbands have gold..."

In the Gus Kahn-Walter Donaldson song, “Makin' Whoopee”, popularised by Eddie Cantor, he sung: "Take Peggy Joyce/With little voice/She soon became the nation's choice!/I tell you, buddy/She's made a study/Of makin' whoopee."

Zora Neale Hurston refers to Peggy Hopkins Joyce in her essay "How It Feels to Be Colored Me". Hurston compares her own positive self-image to Joyce as "aristocratic" and declared that Joyce has "nothing on me."

In the 1925 novel Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, Anita Loos wrote "And all of we girls remember the time when he was in the Ritz for luncheon and he met a gentleman friend of his and the gentleman friend had Peggy Hopkins Joyce to luncheon and he introduced Peggy Hopkins Joyce to Mr. Spoffard and Mr. Spoffard turned on his heels and walked away. Because Mr. Spoffard is a very very famous Prespyterian [sic] and he is really much too Prespyterian to meet Peggy Hopkins Joyce."

Selected filmography

The Turmoil (1916)

The Skyrocket (1926) *lost film

International House (1933)