Vernon and Irene Castle - Life Without Vernon

Life Without Vernon

On 3 May 1919, Irene remarried. Her second husband was a scion of Ithaca, New York's Treman family, Robert E. Treman. They resided in Ithaca's newly-cut Cayuga Heights subdivision, north of Cornell University. Irene starred solo in about a dozen silent films between 1917 and 1924, including Patria (1917), and appeared in several more stage productions before retiring from show business. Treman took Castle's money and lost it in the stock market. They divorced in 1923. She married two more times; the same year, she married Frederic McLaughlin (a man 16 years her elder), and two years after he died in 1944, she married George Enzinger (d. 1959), an advertising executive from Chicago. During her marriage to "Major" McLaughlin, who was the owner of the Chicago Blackhawks, she is credited with designing the original sweater for the Blackhawks Hockey Club. She had two children with McLaughlin, Barbara McLaughlin Kreutz (1925–2003), who was Dean of the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences at Bryn Mawr College, and William McLaughlin (1929–2012).

Castle mostly retired after William's birth in 1929, concentrating on animal rights activism. Around 1930, "the best-dressed woman in America" presented serialized, quarter-hour radio dramatizations of her European travels with her husband, bulldog Zowie and Walter ("father's coloured servant") around the capitals of Europe in "The Life of Irene Castle". Only one episode (episode #4) is known to exist.

In 1939, the Castles' life was turned into a movie, The Story of Vernon and Irene Castle, produced by RKO and starring Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers. Edna May Oliver played their agent, and Lew Fields was his 33 years younger self. Irene Castle served as a technical advisor on the film, but clashed with Rogers, who refused to short bob or darken her hair. Castle also objected to Rogers' inauthentic wardrobe demands and to white actor Walter Brennan playing their faithful friend and manservant Walter, since Walter was African-American.

For the rest of her life, Castle was a staunch animal-rights activist, ultimately founding the Illinois animal shelter "Orphans of the Storm", which is still active. In 1958, Castle appeared as a guest challenger on the TV panel show "To Tell the Truth".

Castle died 25 January 1969(1969-01-25) (aged 75) and was interred together with Vernon at Woodlawn Cemetery.