Mary Nolan: The Ziegfeld Girl Hollywood Tried to Erase

2 hours ago
7 min read

In 1922, a newspaper columnist wrote that only two people in America could bring every reporter in New York down to the docks just to watch them leave the country. One was the sitting President. The other was a twenty-year-old Ziegfeld Follies dancer named Imogene Bubbles Wilson. Twenty-six years later, she was found dead in a three-room bungalow apartment, ninety pounds, with a child's poem and a handwritten note lying beside her that read simply, if this were only true.

She went by at least three names over the course of her career, Imogene Bubbles Wilson, Imogene Robertson and finally Mary Nolan, and each reinvention followed the same pattern: real fame, a powerful man's violence, and a studio system that protected him instead of her.

Quick answers

Who was Mary Nolan? An American actress, model and dancer who rose to fame in the 1920s as a Ziegfeld Follies girl under the name Imogene Bubbles Wilson, later starred in German and Hollywood films as Mary Nolan, and whose career and health were destroyed by two abusive relationships with powerful men.

How did Mary Nolan die? She was found dead in her Hollywood apartment on 31 October 1948, aged 45, from an overdose of the sedative Seconal combined with alcohol, compounded by severe malnutrition. The coroner ruled it accidental, though some suspected suicide.

The girl every reporter came to see

She was born Mary Imogene Robertson in Louisville, Kentucky, on 18 December 1902. Her mother died of cancer when Mary was still young, and her father, unable to care for five children alone, placed her in a foster home. She left for New York as a teenager to be near her older sister Mabel, and was quickly discovered by magazine illustrator Arthur William Brown, who hired her as an artist's model.

Modelling led to the stage, and by the early 1920s she was performing in Florenz Ziegfeld's Follies under the name Imogene Bubbles Wilson, quickly becoming one of the most popular girls in the show. Columnist Mark Hellinger's assessment of her fame in 1922 has followed her into every retelling of her story since: "Only two people in America would bring every reporter in New York to the docks to see them off. One is the President. The other is Imogene Bubbles Wilson."

The affair that ended her Follies career

That fame collapsed almost as fast as it arrived. While in the Follies, Wilson began a relationship with Frank Tinney, a blackface vaudeville comedian already married to actress Edna Davenport and considered by his peers, including fellow comedian Joe Cook, the greatest natural comic America had produced. She later described the attraction with unusual honesty: "I was in love with Frank Tinney, the comedian, not Frank Tinney, the man." Tinney drank heavily and turned violent, and on 24 May 1924, after finding her at dinner with a male reporter, he beat her badly, knocked her to the ground and struck her across the head with a cigarette stand. He assaulted her maid, Carrie Sneed, in the same incident. Nolan attempted suicide afterward, and the press treated even that with open mockery, one columnist joking that reporters had told her to hurry up if she wanted her attempt to make the next morning's papers.

Nolan reported the assault to police days later, appearing before a magistrate with visible bruising across her head and body and Sneed alongside her as a witness. Tinney was arrested, and in court Nolan testified plainly: "Mr Tinney got angry. He accused me of being too friendly with the reporter." A grand jury declined to indict him anyway, apparently persuaded by his lawyer's argument that the whole thing had been a publicity stunt. Ziegfeld had warned her before to end the affair, and once the scandal became public and impossible to manage, he dropped her from the Follies entirely.

She tried to escape the story rather than fight it. She sailed for Europe that September, meant to appear in vaudeville, and reunited briefly with Tinney in London that October, only for his drinking and violence to resume by December. She finally ended things with him for good in early 1925. Tinney's own career never recovered either. His marriage collapsed, his health broke down under what was reported at the time as a nervous breakdown, and he died in November 1940 having never regained his footing in show business.

Reinventing herself in Germany

With her name too toxic for American stages, she moved on to Germany and adopted yet another identity, Imogene Robertson, hoping distance and a new name would let her start over. It worked better than she could have expected. She appeared in seventeen German films between 1925 and 1927, and her performance in Die Feuertänzerin impressed Universum Film AG enough that the studio offered her a contract worth $1,500 a week, a serious sum for the period. She kept working steadily in Germany for two years, earning consistently favourable reviews the entire time.

Mary Nolan is born

She returned to the United States in 1927 determined to leave both the Wilson and Robertson names, and everything attached to them, behind for good. As Mary Nolan, she signed with Universal Pictures in 1928 and found real success, including a memorable role opposite Lon Chaney in Tod Browning's West of Zanzibar that same year. For a moment, it looked like the reinvention had actually worked.

Eddie Mannix

It didn't last. Shortly after signing with Universal, Nolan began an affair with Eddie Mannix, a married MGM executive and studio fixer with a reputation that extended well beyond the movies he helped produce. Mannix used his influence to get her loaned out to MGM and to boost her career generally, and for a while the arrangement worked in both their favours.

It ended violently. Shortly after her 1929 film Desert Nights was released, Mannix abruptly broke off the relationship. Furious, Nolan threatened to tell his wife Bernice about the affair. Mannix responded by beating her unconscious. She later described him in stark, conflicted terms: "he had a dual personality like most men have. One I loved. The other I hated." The physical damage from that beating required six months of hospitalisation and, according to multiple accounts, as many as fifteen separate surgeries to repair the injuries to her abdomen. It was during that hospital stay that doctors began treating her pain with morphine, and she became addicted almost immediately.

Suing the men who broke her

Nolan spent years afterward unable to find steady film work, reduced to vaudeville dates at London's Piccadilly Theatre and singing in cheap roadhouses and nightclubs across the United States just to get by. In 1935, she finally sued Mannix directly, seeking $500,000 in damages for the assault and the career damage that followed it. The following year, she went after Tinney too, filing a separate $100,000 suit over the injuries from his 1924 beating, more than a decade after the fact.

MGM didn't let the case go quietly. The studio's head of publicity, Howard Strickling, was reportedly enlisted to leak damaging stories about Nolan's private life to the press, and a private investigator working for Mannix's side allegedly threatened her with arrest over morphine possession after visiting her home. According to later reporting, Mannix even had the Los Angeles Police Department help pressure her out of town on drug charges rather than let the case proceed. With a major studio's resources arrayed against a single actress with a known addiction and a fading career, the lawsuit went nowhere.

The slow unravelling

The years that followed were rough by any measure. She was jailed briefly in 1937 for failing to pay a dress bill. She married stockbroker Wallace T. McCreary in 1931, in a match with genuinely bad timing: he'd reportedly lost three million dollars in the market just a week before their wedding. They divorced within a year. She overdosed on sedatives at one point and spent roughly a year in psychiatric care afterward, and by the late 1930s she'd entered a home for struggling actors to recover from years of addiction and instability. Reflecting later on her nightclub singing work, she put it plainly: I don't like nightclubs, but I have to live. I'm not a singer, but I have to make a living.

A last attempt to tell her own story

She never entirely gave up on reclaiming her own narrative. In 1941, she published a series of confessional newspaper articles under titles like Real Life Follies of Bubbles Wilson, intended as the foundation for a full memoir. In the autumn of 1948, sensing her health was failing, she reached out to writer Jack Preston to help her finish the project properly. They worked together for a little over two months. That spring she'd already been hospitalised for a gallbladder condition and malnutrition, her weight down to around eighty pounds. The memoir was never finished.

Found on Halloween

Mary Nolan was found dead in her modest Hollywood bungalow apartment on 31 October 1948, discovered by her sister Mabel, with whom she'd been living. She was 45 years old and weighed roughly ninety pounds. The cause was later confirmed as cardiac arrest brought on by an overdose of the barbiturate Seconal combined with alcohol, compounded by the malnutrition that had plagued her final months. The coroner ruled the death accidental, though the note found near her body, "if this were only true," left enough ambiguity that speculation about suicide has followed the case ever since. Her funeral, held at a Los Angeles mortuary two days later, drew only a small handful of mourners and almost nobody from the film industry that had once fought reporters at the docks just to photograph her.

Among her few remaining possessions sold off after her death was an antique grand piano that had once belonged to Rudolph Valentino, purchased sometime earlier in memory of the silent era's other great tragic star. She was interred at Hollywood Forever Cemetery, initially in an unmarked grave.

Asked in April 1948, only months before her death, whether she'd change anything about how her life had gone, she gave an answer that reads as either genuinely at peace or heartbreakingly defiant, depending on how much of the rest of her story you already know: change it, why, she said, she'd had a beautiful life, and she'd never change it.

For another young star whose fame and fortune were stripped away by the men around her, read about Evelyn Nesbit and the Gilded Age scandal that shook America.

And for a strikingly similar arc a decade earlier, from celebrated beauty to forgotten obscurity, see Audrey Munson, America's first supermodel.