Acting Career and Personal Life
Arriving in New York City, Susann landed bit parts in movies, plays (such as The Women), and commercials. A year later, she landed a decent theatrical job playing a lingerie model, earning $25.00 a week. While in New York City, Susann met a press agent, Irving Mansfield (né Mandelbaum). The two dated despite the fact that Susann was not sexually attracted to Mansfield. In turn, Mansfield wooed Susann by placing items and photos of her in theater and society sections of New York newspapers. The ploy worked, and the couple married on April 2, 1939, at Har Zion Temple in Philadelphia.
After the wedding, Mansfield went on to manage Susann's career. Mansfield made sure Susann was placed in news columns, and she soon was a regular on The Morey Amsterdam Show. She then got a spot in the Broadway show A Lady Says Yes, starring Carole Landis and Jack Albertson. The following year, Susann wrote her first play, Lovely Me, for production on Broadway. It closed after only 37 performances.
Despite Mansfield's devotion to Susann, rumors of her infidelities surfaced throughout their marriage. One of Susann's first affairs was with actor/comedian/singer Eddie Cantor. Cantor hired Susann for a role in the touring production of the play, Banjo Eyes. Cantor dumped Susann after his wife discovered the affair and demanded that he quit the play. In 1942, Susann met comedian Joe E. Lewis and the two began an affair. Susann fell hard for Lewis which prompted her to write Mansfield a "Dear John" letter shortly after he was drafted by the United States Army in 1943. When Lewis learned that Susann and Mansfield separated and that Susann intended for her and Lewis to marry, he applied for a USO position, and was sent to New Guinea.
In late 1944, Mansfield and Susann got back together, and in 1946, the couple had a son whom they named Guy. At age three, Guy was diagnosed as autistic. The following year, Guy was committed to an institution where he remains to this day. Mansfield and Susann told no one of their son's true condition. The couple told friends that Guy was asthmatic, and placed in a school in Arizona for the healthy climate. For the rest of her life, Susann was tormented with guilt over institutionalizing her son.
Read more about this topic: Jacqueline Susann
Famous quotes containing the words acting, career, personal and/or life:
“It is probable that the principal credit of miracles, visions, enchantments, and such extraordinary occurrences comes from the power of imagination, acting principally upon the minds of the common people, which are softer.”
—Michel de Montaigne (1533–1592)
““Never hug and kiss your children! Mother love may make your children’s infancy unhappy and prevent them from pursuing a career or getting married!” That’s total hogwash, of course. But it shows on extreme example of what state-of-the-art “scientific” parenting was supposed to be in early twentieth-century America. After all, that was the heyday of efficiency experts, time-and-motion studies, and the like.”
—Lawrence Kutner (20th century)
“I am what is mine. Personality is the original personal property.”
—Norman O. Brown (b. 1913)
“The general review of the past tends to satisfy me with my political life. No man, I suppose, ever came up to his ideal. The first half [of] my political life was first to resist the increase of slavery and secondly to destroy it.... The second half of my political life has been to rebuild, and to get rid of the despotic and corrupting tendencies and the animosities of the war, and other legacies of slavery.”
—Rutherford Birchard Hayes (1822–1893)