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It seems probable that both the term and the idea of “gold-digging” reached even wider circulation through its archetypal embodiment in Lorelei Lee, heroine of Anita Loos’ novel (’25), play (’26) and film (’28). GENTLEMEN PREFER BLONDES. Whatever its origins, “gold-digger” was indeed as much a part of ’20’s night life as “love nest”, “sugar daddy”, “tired businessman”, “butter and egg man”, “bald-headed row” and other slang evocative of those years when lavish Broadway musicals provided the recognized showcase where rich middle-age could seek out youthful beauty, then wait in Rolls-Royces and Cadillacs to shower orchids, ermine and jewels on chorines whose on-stage talents would scarcely have kept them in silk stockings.

Even when ardor cooled, the right lawyer could always extract “heart balm” in the form of payment for indiscreet letters, breach of promise settlements or juicy alimony. (This was the ’20’s ambiance so well captured in the ’50 stage musical GENTLEMEN PREFER BLONDES and so noticeably missing from the ’53 film.) In the kind of cultural lag often seen in ’30’s films, this was also the glittering, pre-Depression Broadway that screenwriters, eating their hearts out in exile by the waters of Hollywood Babylon, continued to evoke as a dazzling myth long after the actuality had disappeared, along with Texas Guinan, Legs Diamond and angels with unlimited bankrolls.

Except for minor characters in backstage musicals, perhaps the earliest talkie to center on a show girl kept by a wealthy, married, older man was not a musical at all but Norma Shearer’s THE TRIAL OF MARY DUGAN (’29), based on the Broadway hit of ’27. As one reviewer put it, the big question was whether Mary (known in the Follies as Mona Wood) had been goose enough to kill the golden egg. Amid all the dated courtroom theatrics, what stands out in retrospect is the clear picture presented in the testimony of Mary and her show girl friends of a “half-world” in which such a girl was respected as “decent” just as long as she did not cheat on the man keeping her.

Later in ’29 Warners re-made its ’23 silent as one of its earliest musical talkies, in Technicolor, as THE GOLD DIGGERS OF BROADWAY, featuring Nancy Welford, Winnie Lightner, Conway Tearle, Ann Pennington and Nick Lucas, with a score that included “Tiptoe Through the Tulips” and “Painting the Clouds With Sunshine.” After such a success, it is surprising that no other studio picked up the theme, but most ’30 backstage musicals were more concerned with male song-writers or entertainers who let success go to their heads.

In NEW MOVIETONE FOLLIES OF 1930, to be sure, Noel Francis (who in life had been a famous Ziegfeld beauty) played a likable show girl who takes family pressure off the playboy hero (William Collier Jr.) by revealing at the right moment that her hitherto secret protector “Dodo” is actually the boy’s stuffy old uncle, but this is not the main plot.

Since writing effective comedy was never as easy as turning out melodrama, it is not surprising that many early ’30’s films in which the modish term “gold-digger” was tossed about in the dialogue were no more than soap operas, in which the fortune-hunting heroine was either exposed or she repented or both. Yet since such characters were not necessarily courtesans or even promiscuous, merely designing, they seem to belong here as gold-diggers who took themselves seriously. A prime example was THE DEVIL’S HOLIDAY (’30), in which Nancy Carroll as a scheming manicurist marries a scion of wealth (Phillips Holmes), leaves him for the price offered by his family, but when he loses his mind, decides she loves him, after all.

Perhaps because ’29 and ’30 saw so many backstage films, musical or otherwise, that reviewers were begging for mercy, ’31 and ’32 saw none at all.

Thus during those years gold-diggers’ connection with the theatre, if any, was tenuous at best; even if they had once been in show business, they were in no hurry to get back to it. Perhaps they may be regarded as the “purest” professionals, not just chorus girls between jobs.

The earliest talkie example of this seems to be the farcical THE LIFE OF THE PARTY (’30), co-starring Winnie Lightner (an energetic low comedienne in the Betty Hutton style) and Irene Del Roy as two pals of the kind later played by Joan Blondell and Glenda Farrell who start out in a music store but parlay the interest of a French dress designer (male) into a trip to Havana. Pretending to be wealthy widows, they mistake a millionaire Smith for a poor one, become involved in a race in which Winnie must ride Charles Butterworth’s horse and so on. According to the “Times”, Butterworth stole the film.

On a far more sophisticated level were two witty gold-digging comedies, one based on a story, one a stage hit, both by Zoe Akins. Directed by George Cukor, GIRLS ABOUT TOWN (’31 – note the playful tone of that phrase compared with the guilt-laden implications of LADIES OF LEISURE, THE PURCHASE PRICE and other dramas of kept heroines) starred the brunette Kay Francis and the blonde Lilyan Tashman (even more svelte and chic than they had been in THE MARRIAGE PLAYGROUND two years earlier) as apartment mates who live quite luxuriously off the fat-heads of the land as paid dinner companions of visiting Babbitts, giving as little as possible in return for their glamorous evenings on the town.

Kay, however, falls for Joel McCrea, and that plot turns into a kind of happily resolved, if unconvincing, CAMILLE or THE EASIEST WAY. A high point, anticipating the catty wit of Cukor’s THE WOMEN, is the scene in which the girls attempt to raise cash by auctioning off their gowns and jewels. Most amusing is Tashman’s involvement with Eugene Pallette as a penny-pinching copper king whose wife, Lucile Gleason, frankly envious of the gold-diggers’ life, wonders if it is too late for her to try.

“Since the world began, half the female population has always been working women. The other half has been working men,” announced the opening subtitle of THE GREEKS HAD A WORD FOR THEM (’32), the definitive gold-digging comedy, which on Broadway had been called THE GREEKS HAD A WORD FOR IT. Ever suspicious of an unidentified “It” in a title, United Artists (or was it Samuel Goldwyn himself’?) only made it sound more incriminating, because what word for “them” would occur to most people?

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