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 The don't make them like they used to
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| 570 Lexington, an Art Deco designed by Cross & Cross and built between 1929 and 1931. 1:45 PM. Photo: JH .570 Lexington was constructed originally for the headquarters of the Radio Corporation of America (RCA) but deeded to General Electric before it was completed. The building's crown is supposed to represent radio waves and is lit from within at night. When it was inaugurated in 1931, its opening was planned and executed by Edward Bernays, one of the first men to create the field of public relations and propaganda using the psychoanalytical ideas of his uncle Sigmund Freud. Bernays is credited with coining the term "public relations." The night of the opening of the building, it was Bernays idea that when the switch was flicked to light the tower, it was arranged that at the same moment lights would go on all over America, which was still largely unelectrified, creating a national sensation. Bernays's seminal work, "Manipulating Public Opinion," promoted the idea of protecting societies from the "herd instinct" by manipulating mass thought. Ironically, his work became a much annotated bible of Hitler's propaganda minister Josef Goebbels, who employed it in the planning of the project which became known as "Kristallnacht" or "the Night of the Broken Glass," which ignited Hitler's evil "Final Solution." Ironically the intention of Bernays, who was Jewish, was to prevent people like the Nazis from destroying societies. As a side note, the other leader in creating public relations who was Bernay's peer was a man named Ivy Lee who transformed the public image of first John D. Rockefeller from Robber Baron to public spirited philanthropist. Many New Yorkers and readers of the NYSD today know Lee's great granddaughter, the artist Rachel Hovnanian.
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Cobina Wright Jr. was a household name in America in the 1940s not unlike the way Kim Kardashian is a household name today. Although thanks to the bigger hype of cyber media, Ms. Kardashian's fame is worldwide. And, it was a far far different world, still a world of manners and morals. Where the Kardashians move in the groove created by Paris Hilton, Cobina's peers and contemporaries were Brenda Frazier and Gloria Vanderbilt.
The similarities between these girls began, as they always do (with few exceptions) in the world of hyper-celebrity with M-O-T-H-E-R. Cobina's mother, aka Cobina Wright Sr. was a very successful stage mother. So successful that she milked a career, first in show business and then in news print, of her own out of her daughter's brief but glittering rise to fame. Cobina's father, who evidently loathed the idea of his daughter's celebrity, was dispensed with.
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| Cobina Wright Jr. on the cover of Life in 1941 when she was 19 years old and a budding starlet on the 20th Century-Fox lot. |
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She was born in 1921 just as the Roaring 20s were getting under way. By the time she reached her majority, the Second World War was changing the world forever. Her fame came in Hollywood where she was a starlet signed with 20th Century-Fox trading on her "society" background. It was the kind of career Gloria Vanderbilt might have entertained briefly had she not embarked on her first marriage when she was 17.
There was nothing remarkable about Cobina Jr. in that sphere of the movie colony – except her authentic social background which made her a cut-above her celluloid peers, and even enviable. She wasn't extraordinarily beautiful and her talent was never considered a factor. She had a mother who had a talent for chutzpah and as the daughter, Cobina was compliant and willing enough to follow through however diffidently. After she married in the mid-1940s, she eventually put all that ballyhoo, and Hollywood too, behind her.
She lived much of her adult life in California where she was known to friends as "a wonderful gal, fun, caring, a great mother, honest and with an incredible sense of humor." The loss of her brief film career mattered not to her. This obituary from the London Daily Telegraph (there was none in Los Angeles), like all of their obituaries, marks the highlights of an interesting life.
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Cobina Wright, who has died aged 90, was the stunning American cover girl and actress whom the young Prince Philip fell for in Venice in the summer of 1938.
She was born on August 14 1921 in New York City, where her father, William May Wright, was a successful stockbroker. Her mother, also Cobina Wright, was an opera singer and actress notorious for her social ambition: Hardy Amies quipped that she took her alpenstock with her to parties.
By the mid-1930s Cobina Sr's hopes were firmly pinned on her beautiful young daughter, whom she frantically set about grooming for a film career capped by a spectacular marriage. When Mr Wright complained about what he saw as the "prostitution" of their daughter, his wife promptly divorced him.
By 1938 Cobina Jr, pushed along by her mother, was already under contract with 20th Century Fox, while also modeling and singing in nightclubs. That summer her mother took her to Venice, and at Harry's Bar she met Prince Philip of Greece. She later recalled that, on seeing the handsome young prince, her mother had "shoved" her into his arms.
The period before their meeting had been a particularly traumatic one for Prince Philip, who was still mourning his 26-year-old sister Cecile and her family, who had died in a plane crash the previous November, and also his much-loved uncle and guardian George Milford Haven (Louis Mountbatten's less flashy elder brother), who had died that spring aged 44. |
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| A studio publicity shot of Cobina. |
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Invited to Venice by his "Aunt" Aspasia of Greece (who had lived there ever since the death of her husband, King Alexander, Philip's first cousin, from blood poisoning after a monkey bite), the young prince relished the opportunity to let his hair down after such a harrowing year. His father had pleaded with Aspasia beforehand to "keep him out of girl trouble", as he still had the entrance exams to Dartmouth to pass; yet Aspasia's daughter, Alexandra, later remembered that he "gallantly and impartially" squired a succession of "blondes, brunettes and redhead charmers".
He was showered with invitations from Venetian society hostesses, and at each gathering, wrote Alexandra, "there was invariably some lovely young thing in tulle or organdie" to whom Philip offered a ride home. "No need to keep the driver, Auntie Aspasia," he would say, "I'll take over. The boatman's had a long day." Aspasia complied on condition that he came back within 20 minutes. Eventually, though, Cobina began to stand out from the rest, and Philip begged his aunt to be allowed to stay out in the boat a little longer. "Very well," she agreed. "But you are to cruise round and round the island and don't stop the engine! I shall be listening." After three or four circuits the engine suddenly went silent and remained so for the next five minutes. When eventually they returned, Philip sheepishly explained that they had had "trouble with the sparking plugs".
Cobina was two months younger than Philip (they both turned 17 that summer) and extremely pretty: tall, slim and blonde, with huge blue eyes and a radiant smile. He was, by common consent, "astronomically good-looking". Even if their initial meeting had been engineered by Cobina Sr, there was evidently a strong mutual attraction.
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| The bride Cobina, age 24, at her wedding to automobile heir Palmer Beaudette. |
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Over the next three weeks Philip escorted Cobina around Venice, before following her back to London for another week with her there, "dining, dancing, and walking London's streets, hand in hand".
When mother and daughter left for America, he vowed to follow, and was said to have cried as he kissed the younger Cobina goodbye. Cobina's friend, Gant Gaither, the Broadway producer, later maintained that Philip then wrote her "impassioned love letters. He said he planned to woo her to marriage, no matter what. He desperately wanted to marry her, but [in the end] Cobina Jr just wasn't all that interested." Other friends later speculated that she did not want to go out with someone chosen for her by her pushy mother.
Back in New York, however, Cobina Sr's promotion of her daughter continued unabated, and, thanks to her efforts, in 1939 Cobina Jr was awarded the title of Miss Manhattan and named the "most attractive girl of the 1939 season".
When Bob Hope used her as the basis for a spoilt character called Cobina on his radio program, Cobina Sr filed a suit against him that was settled out of court. Cobina Jr then became a regular guest on his programme, alongside Jerry Colonna, Brenda Frazier and Vera Vague.
In 1941, still under contract to 20th Century Fox, and by then residing in Beverly Hills, Cobina Jr appeared in a number of films: "Small Town Deb," with Jane Withers; as Jessica Gerald in "Murder Among Friends," in which subscribers to a $200,000 insurance policy die one by one; "Moon Over Miami" (1941), about sisters Kay (Betty Grable) and Barbara (Carole Landis), who arrive in Miami from Texas looking for rich husbands; in "Week-End in Havana" (with Cesar Romero, Alice Faye and Carmen Miranda), about a shopgirl who falls for a shipping tycoon; and as one of the early murder victims in "Charlie Chan in Rio."
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| Cobina's mother, Cobina Wright Sr. with Lady Mendl (Elsie de Wolfe -- then age 82) with Tony Duquette at the opening of Tony's first art exhibition in West Hollywood in 1947. |
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The next year she made a further two films: "Right to the Heart," with Brenda Joyce; and director Gregory Ratoff's "Footlight Serenade," with Betty Grable, John Payne, Jane Wyman and Victor Mature.
In November 1941, meanwhile, soon after featuring on the cover of Life magazine, Cobina had married 28-year-old Corporal Palmer T Beaudette, the scion of a wealthy automobile family from Pontiac, Michigan. He could not stand Cobina's mother, and after a series of rows retired his wife from the screen in 1943.
Cobina Snr went on to appear in a bit-part in The "Razor's Edge" (1946), based on the story by Somerset Maugham, but she became far better known in the 1950s as a syndicated gossip columnist and society hostess — her parties attracting the likes of Marilyn Monroe, Mary Pickford, Douglas Fairbanks Jnr, the Duke and Duchess of Windsor, and the Mountbattens. Cobina Jnr was often there too, minus her husband, but like him, had by then taken to the bottle.
Following Palmer Beaudette's death in 1968, she discovered that his share of his father's estate reverted, under his father's will, back to his brothers and sisters, and she was left all but penniless, a shock that hampered her own recovery from alcoholism. She did eventually manage to make progress, however, and subsequently devoted much of her time to volunteering in programmes for recovering alcoholics. She also served until recently on the board of the National Council on Alcoholism. |
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| The teen-age Gloria Vanderbilt on the arm of George Montgomery, flanked by 20-year-old Cobina at a Hollywood premiere in 1941. Photo: AP. |
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Cobina was often pressed on the subject of her romance with Prince Philip, most recently by the author Philip Eade for his book "Young Prince Philip" (2011), but she refused to go into any detail about their relationship, beyond that which she had already volunteered to the American Town and Country magazine in 1973: "I met him [Philip] in Venice and he followed me to London."
She also revealed that in her bedroom she kept three photographs of "the three loves of my life" — one of them being Prince Philip. They were still "good friends", she said, and wrote to each other often.
By a quirk of fate, Prince Philip's son Prince Andrew was romantically linked to Cobina's daughter, Cobina Caroline (nicknamed CC III), before his marriage to Sarah Ferguson in 1986.
Cobina Wright is survived by two sons and a daughter, and a stepdaughter from her husband's first marriage.
Cobina Wright, born August 14 1921, died September 1 2011. |
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