How a Silent-Film Vamp Nearly Drove Her Ghostwriter Mad
What do Sergei Rachmaninoff, Charlie Chaplin, Greta Garbo, Artur Rubinstein, Sergei Prokofiev, Marlene Dietrich, Igor Stravinsky, and Tallulah Bankhead have in common?
Dagmar Godowsky.
Once a famous beauty, by the late 1950s Dagmar Godowsky found herself subsisting on caviar, cake, and tales of the past. Typecast as a vamp in the silent-screen era of the early 1920s, she had “hissed her way through a thousand scenes.” She had died by blade, bullet, poison, or strangulation. Yet the demise of silent cinema ended her own film career. Now she performed at the dinner tables of New York’s beau monde. Dagmar Godowsky knew how to busy herself. She always had.
Born in 1897 as the daughter of the pianist and composer Leopold Godowsky—known better for his paraphrases of Liszt’s or Schubert’s pieces than his own—Dagmar grew up in Berlin, Paris, Vienna, Los Angeles, and New York. Wherever they made their home, her father—a near-maniacal host—collected celebrities. On an
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