“She walks like a man. She talks like a man. God, she even dresses like a man.” - Helen Lynd
In The Purple Menace and the Tobacco Prince, sultry torch singer Bizzy Holt finds herself the objet d’lust of two fabulously wealthy socialites during the Roaring Twenties: cigarette scion Wright Williams and Lucy Allard, blueblood heiress of the Allard Chemical empire. The real-life inspirations for this love triangle are Broadway chanteuse Libby Holman, tobacco heir Z. Smith Reynolds, and the woman who was arguably Libby's one true love, Louisa d'Andelot Carpenter.
Born on October 16, 1907, Louisa was the great-great-granddaughter of Éleuthère Irénée du Pont, the founder of DuPont. Her youth was spent in upper crust Delaware society riding and breeding horses, hunting fox and pheasants. Tall, blonde, and beautiful, Louisa Carpenter was the first woman Master of Hounds in America and would later become one of the nation’s first licensed female pilots.
Following a brief sham marriage to DuPont executive John Lord King Jenney, Louisa moved to New York City at the height of the Jazz Age. She quickly became a mover and shaker in Manhattan's café society, befriending fellow freethinkers Noël Coward, Jane Bowles, and Marion “Joe” Carstairs, a wealthy British boat racer known for her eccentric lifestyle, gender nonconformity, and hosting lavish parties attended by the likes of Marlene Dietrich and the Duke and Duchess of Windsor. Louisa counted among her lovers at this time such Broadway icons as Greta Garbo, Tallulah Bankhead, and Louise Brooks.
At a Manhattan horse show in 1929, Clifton Webb introduced Louisa to Libby Holman. The attraction was immediate, intense, and mutual. Louisa invited Libby to sail on her father’s yacht, the Galaxy, anchored off the north shore of Long Island. Arriving at the Carpenter family estate at Rehoboth Beach, Libby found Louisa on the Galaxy’s deck in snug white canvas boating trousers and nothing else. Their love affair began that afternoon.
Into the early '30s, the couple spent time together in New York’s theater circles, at the Carpenter’s Delaware home, and cruising Long Island Sound, with Louisa constantly vying against Smith Reynolds for Libby's affections. In 1932, the notoriously private Carpenter found herself thrust onto the front pages of the nation’s newspapers when Libby, by now married to Smith, was indicted for the murder of her husband in Winston-Salem.
As tabloid paparazzi swarmed, Louisa traveled to North Carolina to pay her lover’s $25,000 bail, wearing such masculine clothes that bystanders mistook her for a man. Louisa secreted Libby away to Delaware and sheltered her from the prying press aboard the Galaxy. Learning of Libby’s pregnancy and fearing a scandal, the Reynolds family convinced local authorities to drop the charges. In 1933, Libby gave birth to a son and named him Christopher. Libby and Louisa would lovingly raise the boy together.
Louisa devoted her later life to charity work, converting many of her family’s opulent houses into historical museums, orphanages and summer camps for children and adults with disabilities. In 1963, she founded the Springfield Foundation, an organization dedicated to providing housing for impoverished African-American Marylanders. On February 8, 1976, Louisa died at the age of 68 in a private plane crash near Easton, Maryland. The majority of her estate went to the Springfield Foundation.
-WEB3
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