0737   <   0738   >   0739       index

(Bad Girl) author at home

image

I checked, immediately, to see if Viña Delmar (1903-90) appears in Judith Mackrell her Flappers : Six Women of a Dangerous Generation (UK 2013, US 2014). Nope. The Mackrell book, effusively reviewed in the NYTBR, focuses on more glamorous figures than the dangerous homebody portrayed above.

So here is Viña Delmar with her husband (and writing partner) Eugene, and son, and typewriter. This may be in New York (Inwood), before their move to Los Angeles, where Viña would work as a screenplay and script writer.

Delmar was a hugely talented and prolific writer of stories, novels, screenplays. She wrote for (and edited, for a time) Snappy Stories *, and achieved celebrity and notoriety as the author of Bad Girl (1928), and three more books within a year or two. Delmar’s writing career went through several stages, throughout her life. I stumbled onto her via my hardware store literature project, that includes a discussion of the 1947 film Cynthia (starring a young Elizabeth Taylor), that was based on a play and earlier story by Delmar. (There’s a hardware store in the film, and to a lesser degree the play; none at all in the story). That discussion can be found here.

A broader discussion of Viña Delmar stalled; some of it can be found here.

See earlier post 0079 for another press photo of Delmar — together with writer friends Anita Loos, Madeline Brandeis and Nina Wilcox Putnam. Loose ladies, I titled it, referencing her third book, published in 1929.

Finally, the obverse of the above —

image

The photo arrived yesterday, coinciding with my ruminations about flappers and the gains of those years, that would in many ways be shut down through the Depression, war, and their long aftermath in the 1950s.
 

15 March 2014

tags:
Bad Girl; typewriter; awkward; flapper?
Viña Delmar