Gold Digger

A sparkling biography of the original blonde whom gentlemen preferred, a woman who made a career of marrying millionaires and became the first tabloid celebrity.

One of America's most talked about personalities during the Jazz Age, Peggy Hopkins Joyce was the quintessential gold digger, the real-life Lorelei Lee. Married six times, to several millionaires and even a count, Joyce had no discernible talent except self-promotion. A barber's daughter from Norfolk, Virginia, who rose to become a Ziegfeld Girl and, briefly, a movie star, Joyce was the precursor of the modern celebrity-a person famous for being famous. Her scandalous exploits-spending a million dollars in a week, conducting torrid love affairs with the likes of Charlie Chaplin and Walter Chrysler-were irresistible to the new breed of tabloid journalists in search of sensation and to audiences hungry for the possibilities her life seemed to promise.

Joyce's march across Broadway, Hollywood, and the nation's front pages was only slowed by the true nemesis of the glamour girl: old age. She died in 1957, alone and forgotten-until now. In prose as vibrant as its subject, Constance Rosenblum's Gold Digger brings to life the woman who singularly epitomized this confident and hedonistic era.