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Of the stock company of stereotypes who continually recurred in ’30’s films, some survived through the ’40’s or even later (the private eye, the brash reporter, the ruthless spy), but others, for a variety of reasons, perished with the decade or even before it (the runaway heiress, the playboy, the Bengal Lancer). One of the most conspicuous of these was the gold-digger, who in the early ’30’s was almost as familiar a heroine as the wrongly imprisoned working girl, the longsuffering mother or the well-kept courtesan. Like the last-named, she was among the casualties of the Production Code.

Though it was never quite clear just how deep she had to dig before striking pay dirt, her main difference from the elegant lilies of the field played by Garbo, Dietrich, Bennett, Crawford et. al., was that the true gold-digger, as gaily amoral as Robin Hood, kept a wise-cracking tongue planted firmly in her well-rouged cheek. Since her willing victims were usually pot-bellied stage door Johnnies played by actors like Guy Kibbee, Eugene Pallette and George Barbier, who could quarrel with such an equitable re-distribution of wealth?

This was one field – perhaps the only one – in which female characters enjoyed far wider latitude than males.

The gigolo (another vanished ’30’s type) was, after all, the male counterpart of the gold-digger. Both used their charms to exploit rich, gullible, older members of the opposite sex, but whereas the gigolo was invariably depicted as a hand-kissing foreigner (Ivan Lebedeff, Alexander D’Arcy, Gilbert Roland), often with a phony title, or at best a harmless clown (Erik Rhodes, Mischa Auer), the gold-digger, always American, was shrewd, knowing, tart-tongued, the kind of personality later associated with Eve Arden – on the assumption, no doubt valid at the time, that with so many other options open, it was always despicable for a man to live off wealthy women, but quite understandable, even laudable, if a girl was smart enough to beat a system in which all the important cards were stacked against her. Even if she worked, how much did a chorus girl earn? (The first kept hero, O’Hara’s Pal Joey, came as a shock even to Broadway in ’41 and did not make it to the screen until ’57, considerably laundered and still not quite sympathetic.)

Presented seriously, of course, the gold-digger could easily turn into a cold-blooded climber, like Stanwyck in BABY FACE, Harlow in RED HEADED WOMAN or Crawford in THE WOMEN.

On the other hand, softened by sentimentality, she would become a Cinderella, the poor but honest girl who lands not the elderly millionaire as protector but his handsome son as husband, and that only as virtue’s reward. (A few film gold-diggers did indeed marry for love, but seldom without money as well.)

Mutual attraction between ladies of the stage and the power elite, whether titled or merely moneyed, is a tradition that can be traced back at least as far as Charles II and Nell Gwynne, and enabled Lavinia Fenton, the original 1729 Polly Peachum, to become the Duchess of Bolton (the same tradition later carried on by Edward VII and Lily Langtry, not to mention all the Gaiety girls who married into the peerage).

This aspect of New York’s demimonde, first gingerly touched on in the theatre by Eugene Walter’s play, THE EASIEST WAY, that sensation of ’09, had already been far more luridly exposed to a scandalized America by the trial of millionaire Harry Thaw for the ’06 murder of architect Stanford White over beautiful show girl-model Evelyn Nesbit, who, before marrying Thaw, had been among White’s many young mistresses. (“Show girl” is used here in the broadest sense, to mean any girl in the theatre, especially the musical theatre, not restricted to those “long-stemmed American beauties” who in the annual revues danced not, neither did they sing, but merely walked gracefully down stairs or just stood still in elaborately costumed tableaux.)

Not all such affairs ended in tragic notoriety, of course. Ambitious girls could take heart from the more discreet marital careers of the Florodora Sextette or others whose charms, first displayed on the stage, won them at least transient fame and wealth, either through a series of marriages (Peggy Hopkins Joyce), one marriage (Hope Hampton) or one successful liaison (Betty Compton and Jimmie Walker, Marion Davies and William Randolph Hearst).

No doubt the earliest use of the word “gold-digger” itself (like “flapper” and “gangster”) could be traced back before WWI, but what gave it general currency in the language was Ina Claire’s great hit in Avery Hopwood’s ’19 comedy THE GOLD DIGGERS, which Warners filmed in ’23, starring, aptly enough, Hope Hampton, with Louise Fazenda as her comic sidekick. As cited by Rosen in Popcorn Venus, the American Film Institute Catalogue lists literally one hundred other films between ’20 and ’30 dealing with chorus girls, most of the titles now forgotten, except perhaps for SALLY, IRENE AND MARY (’25).

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