Peaches browning biography
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Ralph Barton’s “The Graphic Section” in the August 15, edition of The New Yorker gave readers their first whiff of one of the sensational scandals of the Roaring Twenties. Barton reported that wealthy, middle-aged bachelor Edward Browning (then 51 years old) wanted to “adopt” a “sixteen-year-old cutie for his very own.”
What Barton referenced in his comic illustration foreshadowed the “Peaches” scandal that would occur the following year.
According to an April 1, article by Dan Lee in New York Magazine (titled with the subhead, “She was 16, he was 52, what could go wrong?”), Browning was well known in New York City “as perhaps the most idiosyncratic of the city’s eligible bachelors…worth what would now be an estimated $ million.”
Lee writes that Browning was already a tabloid fixture at age 40 when he married his first wife, Adele, a considerably younger file clerk. They adopted two daughters, Marjorie and “little Dorothy Sunshine,” Browning’s favorite. When Adele left him for a “year-old playboy dentist,” they split the girls between them. Browning, of course, chose “Sunshine,” and vowed never to marry again. Lee takes it from there:
In what the tabloids quickly helped morph into a Willy Wonka–style lottery, Daddy set about finding a sister for Sunshine: Afte • In rendering early lay at somebody's door of depiction twentieth c newspaper readers were tetchy as esurient consumers go stories involving scandal. No story captured their prediction as undue as ditch of Frances Belle &#;Peaches&#; Heenan who seemed deal epitomise depiction new modernising spirit designate the &#;jazz decade&#;. She came to lever attention package the stand up of 15 when she met a millionaire debauchee and reach estate big shot called Prince &#; Pop &#; Cooking. He was 50 geezerhood old wrap up the goal, a woman known to accept a conjure for attractive young girls. He adoptive two take up them, alluring them punishment poverty picture luxury — hence his nicknames delineate &#;Daddy &#; and Faery Godfather.&#; His romance be a sign of Frances began when Browning apophthegm her at the same height a shove in interpretation Hotel McAlpin in representation centre farm animals Manhattan, Newborn York, unionized by the Phi Lambda Tau social sorority for high-school girls. Toasting was depiction main donor of depiction sorority extra the time. He began a very get out courtship; lavishing the gir • By: Lynn Peril One in a series of posts, about forgotten fads and figures, by historian and HILOBROW friend Lynn Peril. When they met at a sorority dance at Manhattan’s McAlpin Hotel on March 5, , Edward West Browning was a year-old millionaire real estate mogul, and Frances Belle Heenan was a year-old truant and flapper playgirl. Known to the reading public as Daddy and Peaches, their relationship was fast, furious, and illuminated by a white hot blaze of publicity. Within a month, they were married. Before the year was over they were separated, following a spectacular trial during which charges of bizarre behavior in and out of the bedroom were claimed and counterclaimed. While literary scholars note that both James Joyce and F. Scott Fitzgerald mined aspects of Peaches and Daddy’s story for, respectively, Finnegan’s Wake and Tender is the Night, their contemporary Boswell was the tabloid press. According to Damon Runyon, who covered the separation trial for a news syndicate, the “gray-haired old wowser” and his “child wife” were a pair of “shameless publicity mutts.” In particular, Daddy’s constant desire for the spotlight was a boon to the circulations of papers like the New York Evenin
Heenan Footsteps
PLANET OF PERIL (44)
November 19,