| Pepi Lederer | |
| Birthname: | Josephine Rose Lederer |
| Birth Date: | March 18, 1910 |
| Birth Place: | Chicago, Illinois, U.S. |
| Death Place: | Los Angeles, California, U.S. |
| Alma Mater: | Westlake School for Girls |
| Father: | George Lederer |
| Mother: | Reine Davies |
| Relatives: |
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Pepi Lederer (born Josephine Rose Lederer; March 18, 1910 – June 11, 1935) was an American actress and writer. She was the niece of actress Marion Davies, the mistress of newspaper publisher William Randolph Hearst. After her parents divorced, Lederer was raised in Southern California by her wealthy aunt at her Beverly Hills estate and later at Hearst Castle in San Simeon.
As a high-spirited lesbian, Lederer became a popular figure in the gay and bisexual community of Jazz Age Hollywood. She had many sexual relationships with women, including with actress Nina Mae McKinney. In May 1935, due to drug addiction or her overt sexual orientation, William Randolph Hearst committed Lederer against her will to a psychiatric ward at Good Samaritan Hospital.
In June 1935, a 25-year-old Lederer committed suicide by jumping from a sixth-floor hospital window. Whereas early newspaper obituaries reported her death as a suicide, later obituaries in Hearst's papers depicted her death as an accident and attributed her hospitalization to "a nervous breakdown caused by overstudy". Lederer is buried at Hollywood Forever Cemetery in Los Angeles.
Born Josephine Rose Lederer in Chicago in 1910, Lederer was the daughter of stage actress Reine Davies (née Douras)—the sister of Rosemary and Marion Davies—and her first husband George W. Lederer, a Broadway theatrical producer and director. Lederer had a younger brother, Charles Lederer, known as "Charlie". Her brother became a well-known Hollywood screenwriter who co-wrote The Front Page (1931), His Girl Friday (1940), and Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (1953). During her childhood, Lederer's family nicknamed her "Peppy" due to her high-spirited personality. At the age of 18, she changed the spelling to "Pepi" and legally changed it to her first name.[1]
Due to her mother Reine's alcoholism, her aunt Marion Davies raised Lederer and her brother, and the two children lived in Davies' luxurious Beverly Hills estate. Lederer's mother, Reine, occasionally appeared uninvited and accused Davies of stealing her children.[2] When Davies entered into a relationship with publishing tycoon William Randolph Hearst, Lederer and her brother moved with Davies to the Hearst Castle, where she spent much of her early youth during the 1920s. At this time, Lederer attended the Westlake School for Girls in Los Angeles, California where she graduated in 1926.
As "the only fixed reality in an endless procession of celebrities" at Hearst Castle, Lederer often defied the rules of proper decorum set by Hearst and Davies and usually escaped unpunished. She often played pranks on Hearst's important guests, such as stealing actress Claire Windsor's "false bosom" and writer Elinor Glyn's red wig while they slept. She delighted in inventing outlandish stories about sensational events at Hearst Castle, and she planted these stories in Louella Parsons' syndicated gossip column much to Hearst's annoyance.
Although Hearst and Davies encouraged the career ambitions of her brother Charles to become a screenwriter, they regarded Lederer's ambitions to be a screen actress far less seriously.[3] [4] Davies secured a part for her niece in her 1927 film The Fair Co-Ed, but the final cut eliminated Lederer's role in the film. Davies promised her distraught niece a role in another upcoming film, but her acting career consisted only of a few small parts in Davies' films.
In December 1929, Lederer upset Davies and Hearst after a mutual acquaintance revealed her sexual relationship with African-American actress Nina Mae McKinney. During Lederer's affair with Nina Mae McKinney at Davies' Beverly Hills estate on Lexington Road, neighbors became irate at seeing black people on the adjacent premises and telephoned Davies. Davies' sister Ethel visited the premises and found Lederer in bed with McKinney. Outraged, Davies and Hearst shipped Lederer to New York City where she lived alone in an apartment at 42 West Fifty-fourth Street and continued having sexual relations with women. During this period of exile, Lederer became close friends with actress Alma Rubens, and both women allegedly shared an addiction to drugs, including heroin and morphine.[5] [6] Rubens died a year later in January 1931.
Following a riotous New Year's Eve party in 1930, a male acquaintance drove an inebriated Lederer to her New York apartment and, after she became unconscious, raped her. At the end of March 1930, while still in New York, Lederer discovered she had become pregnant by her rapist. As an overt lesbian exclusively attracted to women, the news of Lederer's pregnancy shocked her friends and family. Advised by her aunt Marion,[7] Lederer procured a black-market abortion.[8] The abortion resulted in severe complications that caused her lingering health problems.[9]
After recovering from the abortion, Lederer traveled with her aunt and William Randolph Hearst to Europe in 1930. While abroad in England, Lederer convinced Hearst to hire her to work as a writer for one of his magazines, The Connoisseur. Lederer enjoyed the job and worked in London for the next five years on a generous allowance from Davies and Hearst. Lederer told her friend, Louise Brooks, that she felt happy living in London as she was her own person for the first time in her life.
In April 1935, Lederer returned to the United States with her girlfriend, Monica Morris, whom she met in London. The couple first arrived in New York City, where they stayed at William Randolph Hearst's suite at the Ritz Tower. After several weeks, Lederer and Morris departed for Los Angeles, where they stayed at Marion Davies' Beverly Hills mansion on Lexington Road. Davies and Hearst remained at San Simeon but, in an unusual move, they neither contacted Lederer nor invited her to any parties at Hearst Castle. At this point, Lederer had become persona non grata at San Simeon due to both her worsening drug addiction and overt lesbian relationships.
Either due to her drug addiction or her unconcealed sexual orientation,[10] [11] Hearst committed Lederer to the psychiatric ward of Good Samaritan Hospital at 1212 Shatto Street in late May 1935. On June 11, 1935, Lederer took her own life by distracting her nurse with a request for food and then jumping from the sixth-floor window of her hospital room.[12] [13] According to her nurse Marion Pope, Lederer had been seated in her hospital bed reading a motion picture magazine and asked for something to eat. "I turned just in time," Pope recalled, "to see Miss Lederer plunge against the window screen.... and she fell out."[14]
Plummeting six stories to the shrubbery below, Lederer broke her neck upon impact. Hospital attendants rushed to the shrubbery, but she died within several minutes. She was 25 years old. Early newspaper obituaries attributed Lederer's suicide to "acute melancholia" as described by her doctor, Samuel Hirshfeld, a frequent visitor at San Simeon and a personal acquaintance of Hearst. A subsequent obituary printed by Hearst's flagship newspaper The San Francisco Examiner instead depicted Lederer's suicide as an accidental mishap and attributed her involuntary hospitalization to "a nervous breakdown caused by overstudy".[15]
Two days after her suicide, a funeral service was held in the Church of St. Mary of the Angels on June 13, 1935. The Reverend Neal Dodd—who only a few weeks prior conducted funeral rites in the same church for Judge Bernard J. Douras, Pepi's grandfather—officiated the service. Lederer's body was interred in the family mausoleum at Hollywood Forever Cemetery in Los Angeles. Her pallbearers included Harpo Marx, Buster Collier, Orry Kelly, Ted Draper, Harry Crocker, Matt Moore, William Haines, and Jimmie Shields—William Haines' longtime gay partner. With the exception of Harpo Marx, nearly every pallbearer at Lederer's 1935 funeral was a prominent gay or bisexual figure in Jazz Age Hollywood.
"When she was a little girl, she was nicknamed Peppy because of her high spirits."
"Pepi said that her mother had called Marion a scheming bitch for having robbed her of her children."
"In contrast to their serious treatment of her brother Charlie Lederer, for whom they obtained a screenwriting job at the Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer studio, their treatment of Pepi was that accorded a naughty, entertaining child, incapable of any serious endeavor."
"Secretly, she had yearned to be a movie actress.... Pepi realized that no one had been really serious about her career—it was just a gag."
"When Pepi hung up, she cried, 'Quick, Watson, the needle!' and dashed off to the apartment of the actress Alma Rubens, in the same building."
"Pepi was much sobered when, after an hour, she returned from Alma's apartment. She had to wait till one of Marion's doctors came to give Alma an injection of morphine. Pepi had found her pacing up and down like a madwoman. All her money had gone to the drug-sellers".
"Marion told her to stop wasting time.... [and] to make an appointment to see an abortionist at once."
The doctor "found that Pepi was pregnant, and aborted the fetus the next day."
"At the end of March, I stopped by the Warwick to see Pepi and found her in bed, sick, feverish, and frightened. She had had an abortion and was hemorrhaging badly."
Monica Morris, Lederer's partner shortly before her death, told Louise Brooks that "without warning, Marion and Mr. Hearst decided to have Pepi committed to the hospital for a drug cure."
Brooks inadvertently told an acquaintance of Marion Davies about Lederer's sexual orientation shortly before her commitment to a psychiatric ward. A shocked Lederer warned Brooks about this breach of confidence, "Everything you told Avis she will tell Marie Glendinning, who lives next door to her in Greenwich Village, and Marie will tell Marion." Soon after, Hearst institutionalized Lederer at Good Samaritan Hospital.
"In the hospital, she was left alone by the nurse for a moment in a room with steel-mesh screening over the window. In an agony of desolation, this powerful one-hundred-eighty-pound woman must have taken a running dive at the window in order to tear through the screen, and she hit the ground with force enough (according to the autopsy) to fracture her spine and almost every other bone in her body."
"Pepi had just killed herself by jumping out a window of the psychiatric section of the Good Samaritan Hospital in Los Angeles."
In obituaries published by Hearst's newspaper chain, Marion Pope's statement was altered to imply Lederer's death was an accident as opposed to a suicide: "Suddenly I heard a noise behind me and turned in time to see Miss Lederer falling from the window, the weight of her body having pried the screen from its fastenings."
"Miss Lederer, who had entered the hospital on Monday to recover from a nervous breakdown caused by overstudy, fell from the window when, weak from illness, she attempted to walk alone... A brilliant student, she had continued her studies since graduating from the Westlake School for Girls in 1926, and her recently completed an intensive period of education abroad.... This overstudy led to the collapse which caused her to enter the hospital Monday."