Dorothy Hale

Dorothy Hale (January 11, 1905 – October 21, 1938) was an American actress and socialite born Dorothy Donovan in Pittsburgh, the daughter of a real estate agent. After attending a convent and a drama school, she left home in 1919 to pursue a performing career. When her funds ran out, she returned home, but with the help of friends eventually secured a place in the chorus of a Broadway production of Lady, Be Good. Her Broadway work continued into 1925, when she appeared in the musical Bringing Up Father. Beyond these Broadway credits, her stage career consisted largely of several seasons with stock companies and work as a dancer and Ziegfeld girl.

While studying sculpture in Paris, Hale married millionaire stockbroker Gaillard Thomas, son of the prominent gynecologist T. Gaillard Thomas; the marriage was brief and ended in divorce. In 1927 she married Gardner Hale, a fresco, mural, and society portrait artist and son of William Gardner Hale. Through this marriage she moved in creative and upper-class social circles, socializing with artists Miguel Covarrubias, Rosa Rolanda, and Frida Kahlo, as well as photographer Nickolas Muray. Gardner Hale died in December 1931 when his car went over a cliff near Santa Maria, leaving Dorothy in severe financial difficulty.

In the summer of 1935, Hale and fellow New York socialite Rosamond Pinchot appeared together in Abide with Me, a psychological drama written by their mutual friend Clare Boothe Luce. The production was poorly received and closed quickly. Her film work included an uncredited role in Cynara (1932), obtained through an acquaintance with Samuel Goldwyn, and a minor role in Catherine the Great (1934), though her screen tests were considered unsuccessful.

Hale's personal life involved several notable relationships. Early in 1933 she and sculptor Isamu Noguchi took a Caribbean cruise, during which he was introduced to her wealthy New York connections, several of whom commissioned portrait busts. Noguchi began a portrait sculpture of Hale that was never completed, and its whereabouts remain unknown. In 1934, Hale and Luce accompanied Noguchi on a road trip through Connecticut in the Dymaxion car, a vehicle Noguchi had designed with Buckminster Fuller. The group stopped to visit Thornton Wilder in Hamden before traveling to Hartford for the out-of-town opening of Gertrude Stein and Virgil Thomson's Four Saints in Three Acts. She was also rumored to be romantically linked with Constantin Alajalov, a New York cover artist. By 1937, Hale was in a serious relationship with Harry Hopkins, WPA administrator and Franklin D. Roosevelt's chief adviser. Anticipating marriage, she moved into Hampshire House, a thirty-six-story apartment building at 150 Central Park South, but Hopkins ended the relationship abruptly. In 1938, Bernard Baruch advised Hale that at thirty-three she was too old to pursue a professional career and gave her one thousand dollars with instructions to buy a dress suitable for attracting a wealthy husband.

On the evening of October 20, 1938, Hale hosted an informal gathering at her apartment, telling guests she was planning a long trip. Among those present were Mrs. Brock Pemberton, Prince del Drago of Italy, painter Dorothy Swinburne, and Margaret Case, an editor at Vogue. After the party, Hale attended the theater with Mr. and Mrs. J. P. Morgan to see the play Oscar Wilde, then returned to Hampshire House at approximately 1:15 a.m. In the early morning hours of October 21, 1938, she died by suicide, jumping from her apartment window. Her obituary recorded her time of death as 5:15 a.m., while Luce recalled the time as approximately 6:00 a.m. She was found wearing a black velvet dress and a corsage of small yellow roses that Noguchi had given her.

Shortly after Hale's death, Clare Boothe Luce commissioned Mexican artist Frida Kahlo to paint a recuerdo, or remembrance portrait, of their mutual friend, paying four hundred dollars for the work. Rather than producing a conventional memorial portrait, Kahlo created a graphic narrative retablo depicting each stage of Hale's suicide — standing on the balcony, falling, and lying on the pavement below. The completed painting arrived in August 1939, having been shown in Paris in March of that year. Luce, deeply offended by the work, considered destroying it but instead had Noguchi paint out the portion of the inscription bearing her name. She left the painting in the care of Frank Crowninshield, and it was rediscovered by his heirs decades later. Luce subsequently donated it anonymously to the Phoenix Art Museum, which retains ownership, though the painting travels frequently in exhibitions of Kahlo's work. In 2010 it was included in the exhibition On Becoming an Artist: Isamu Noguchi and His Contemporaries, 1922–1960 at the Noguchi Museum in Long Island City, Queens.