Angel of the Anzacs: The Life of Nola Luxford
Victoria University Press, Wellington, 2001
What’s it about | What the critics said | Introduction
What’s it about
“Nola Luxford left New Zealand in 1919 for Hollywood. She was 23 years old and determined to distinguish herself after a family scandal in New Zealand. In Hollywood she appeared in films with Harold Lloyd and Katharine Hepburn. In the 1930s, she made her radio debut broadcasting reports of the 1932 Olympic Games for NBC, and eventually landed in New York as one of the first women network news announcers in America. It was here that Nola became famous for running the Anzac Club during World War II. Her extraordinary contacts in New York society meant that thousands of visiting Australian and New Zealand servicemen experienced the best of the city’s theatre, music, art and opera, for free. Nola was awarded the OBE, and earned the praise of Winston Churchill, Dwight Eisenhower and Peter Fraser. Angel of the Anzacs vividly recreates Nola’s triumphant public life, and also her deeply troubled personal life. Her hasty first marriage and escape to California, her years in Hollywood battling ‘the wolves of the picture game’, including the persistent advances of the writer Zane Grey, her efforts to rise above the stigma of her two divorces, and years of haunting poverty, form the subtext of Nola’s glittering career.”
What the critics said
“Van Grondelle’s Angel of the Anzacs: The Life of Nola Luxford is the epitome of an engrossing biography. It is scholarly but readable, generous but honest, unsensationalist but fascinating; full of famous names but not glitzy.” Chris Bourke, North & South
“Carole van Grondelle has produced a book in every way worthy of this marvellous woman. Angel of the Anzacs does everything a first-rate biography should do: it sets Luxford’s life in the context of its . . . time and its relevant places. It creates a vivid sense of character. . . It reveals itself to be the fruit of considerable research, reflection and understanding. And it is exceptionally well written.” Dr Michael King, Listener
“This biography signals the arrival of an important new New Zealand writer.” Mike Crean, The Press
“Van Grondelle appears to be the perfect biographer for Luxford: her tone is unceasingly warm and lively, her conscientious research translates smoothly into an easy, compelling read . . . In the end, we envy van Grondelle her acquaintance with this extraordinary woman . . . Her life is a great 20th-century tale.” Margie Thomson, New Zealand Herald
Introduction
In July 1989, a letter arrived in the mail at my home in Berkeley, California. It was from the New Zealand Consulate inviting me to the conferment of a Queen’s Service Order on a New Zealand woman, Nola Luxford, who lived in Los Angeles. I was a freelance journalist, and living in America while my husband was in graduate school. Although a New Zealander, I was unfamiliar with Nola’s name. The background papers that came with the invitation, however, were intriguing. Nola had won numerous honours for her work running a social club for Anzac servicemen in New York during the war, and the casual listing of the names Winston Churchill, Dwight D. Eisenhower, Laurance S. Rockefeller and Peter Fraser leapt out at me. I flew south on the appointed day.
Nola in the flesh did not disappoint. I had no idea of her age; later I learned she was ninety-three. She wore a stunning dress of cerulean blue silk with matching jacket; its style and cut suggested it came from a couture house in the 1960s. She was beautifully made up, and her dark hair still held a tinge of red in it. She possessed no fear of the microphone and spoke happily for some minutes of her pride in the Anzac Club and of the ‘world league of friendships’ that it had fostered. Astonishingly, there was no trace of an American accent; she still spoke with the same rounded BBC-style vowels that New Zealanders of a certain age and background possess.
At the reception afterwards, I interviewed Nola and gathered enough material for an article which was later published in the Dominion in Wellington. In it I described how Nola had acted in Hollywood silent films and then worked in early radio, broadcasting the 1932 Los Angeles Olympic Games, before moving to New York. I quoted a friend as saying that Nola was fifty years ahead of Barbara Walters, the famous American television journalist. Although impressed by Nola, my interest in her might have ended there had not another letter arrived in the mail a few weeks later. It was from a New Zealand man who had read my article and taken the trouble to find my address in America. He wanted me to know that Nola remained very much alive in the memories of people like him who had passed through New York in the war. Ron Macdonald was one of eighty Kiwis who had spent two weeks in New York in 1942 while their ship was repaired after attacks by German submarines in the Caribbean. ‘With little money or things to do, news of the ANZAC Club came as manna from heaven,’ he wrote, ‘and the woman who ran it all, Nola Luxford, as an angel of light.’ Best of all were the instant introductions she provided and the wonderful spontaneous encounters that resulted. ‘Nola Luxford was the originator of so many happenings and subsequent events that I think even she would be amazed to know about them.’
Who was Nola Luxford? How had this fey New Zealand girl come to live and work in Hollywood and New York? Even more tantalizing, how had she penetrated some of the most celebrated circles of her day?
If my journalist’s instinct for a good story was what fed my desire to record Nola’s life, it was also a giant leap of faith. Over the following two years, I made regular trips to Nola’s home. By day we talked, and by night I sifted through the vast collection of papers, photographs, albums and books that were piled haphazardly in her studio. Over subsequent years, in New York, Baltimore, Sydney and New Zealand, I visited libraries and archives, and met and corresponded with a number of Nola’s friends, relatives and admirers.
I soon learned that Nola had been a beautiful and accomplished actress in Hollywood in the 1920s and 1930s. A few years later her lively personality and honeyed voice saw her become one of the first women network news announcers in American radio. For more than twenty-five years, until the mid-1950s, readers of the popular New Zealand pictorial weekly Free Lance magazine enjoyed Nola’s insights into American life. Film stars and directors, opera singers and authors, kings and prime ministers and diplomats all featured in her interviews.
Nola’s celebrity status was confirmed with the Anzac Club. By World War II’s end, some 35,000 men had passed through its doors. Thanks to her extraordinary contacts in the city, and Nola’s genuine felicity and kindness, the Anzac visitors experienced the best of New York’s theatre, music, art and opera, for free. They were put up in the homes of New Yorkers and invited to dances and parties. They met girls, went sightseeing, toured nightclubs and generally took maximum advantage of the infinite variety for which New York was justly famous. The Anzacs adored Nola. Through her intervention, a vast metropolis was made instantly personable and accessible. The New York media crowned her ‘Angel of the Anzacs’, and Nola found herself listed in the World Who’s Who and in successive volumes of Who’s Who in New York.
Nola would have been content to leave the story there; for this book to be a tribute to a glittering career, a panegyric with pictures. But I was interested in reaching through the public sphere to the private realm, to move beyond anecdote to emotional truth. The book I envisaged would chronicle Nola’s search for success in America. It would chart the course of Nola’s career but also reveal the interior demesne of her heart. Mine would be an attempt to give shape and meaning to a life lived gloriously to the full – but seemingly without a moment’s pause for self-reflection. And it would be a book that connected Nola to the century her life neatly spanned, a twentieth-century portrait.
What I unearthed — and what I could never have imagined — was a tale of Odyssean proportions; a grand opera encompassing the full sweep of human emotions. There was rapture and thrill but there was also abandonment, betrayal, madness and despair. Nola survived an enfilade of blows; that she survived at all is a miracle. Naturally, Nola did not like to dwell on certain past events and she remained tight-lipped over personal details. She was silent about her childhood and parentage, and it was many months before I learned that she had been married three times and divorced twice. Piercing Nola’s cloak of secrecy proved to be a difficult and sensitive undertaking. My first breakthrough did not come till more than a year had passed. Nola had talked of keeping diaries but where were they? I searched fruitlessly until one day over lunch I concluded sadly that they must have perished in a laundry flood years earlier. At that, Nola led me to a bedroom and in a shoebox at the bottom of a wardrobe was a collection of diaries that dated back to 1920, her first year in the United States. I had passed the first test.
The second breakthrough came six months late. Nola was out, and I was working in the studio when Pat Kiely, a man who did gardening work for Nola, came by for a chat. He asked if I had seen the old trunk full of papers that was stored in a lean-to at the back of her property, hidden from view of the house. I was mystified. Pat led me down an overgrown path to a small garden shed. Inside was a jumble of tools as well as an upright leather traveling trunk with deep vertical drawers. A quick inspection confirmed that a stash of valuable material was stored inside. There were letters from Zane Grey, and dozens of files relating to her second divorce. Initially, Nola forbade me to look through the trunk (she was furious with Pat for showing it to me, and we both bore the brunt of her explosive temper), but four months before my return to New Zealand I plucked up courage and asked again if I might search its contents. This time Nola said yes. Together, we unloaded its drawers. After a while, Nola left me to it.
Why did Nola change her mind after a lifetime of scrupulous concealment? I believe that, in her heart of hearts, she wanted this book written and her real story told. Why else had she maintained such a collection of memorabilia — gathered, I later counted, through more than thirty-five shifts of address – if she did not believe in her place in history? Nola craved recognition but she also sought understanding. For it is only when one knows the obstacles she faced that one can begin to comprehend how truly impressive were her achievements.
Divorce was Nola’s torment. Her story first snaps into focus on a single day in April 1919 when her father disappeared from home with his young mistress. Nola’s panicked response to the scandal changed the course of her life. Paradoxically, and much as she hated him for it, Nola’s father catapulted her far beyond a life of comfortable banality in provincial Hawke’s Bay, to embrace a new beginning and forge a new identity in a foreign land.
The stigma of divorce — first her parents’ then her own — made Nola an outcast and exile and, like most exiles, she remained obsessed with the place and people she had left behind. In the United States, every new challenge was embraced with a backward glance, an eye towards home. How could she redeem herself? She felt driven to seek the respect and attention of the world as if, through noble actions, she could peel back the layers of ignominy, and take her place in the sun.
That Nola endured is a tribute to her will as well as to her great gift for friendship. There was a ‘joy inbred in her heart’, and she had the prodigious energy, determination and confidence to keep tilting into the wind. ‘You are a self-made woman,’ her life-long friend, Grace Blue, once said. ‘Nobody has ever done anything for you — you have had no fairy godmother or big breaks . . . You did it alone and it wasn’t easy!’