The Bennetts: An Acting Family

Chapter Eight. 1929–1930

1929–1930 121 ⟈ Chapter Eight 1929–1930 On January 20, 1929, Sarah Savina Armstrong, a twenty-eightyear -old Belfast housemaid, checked into London’s Royal Free Hospital. The following day, she gave birth to a robust and beautiful boy, whom she named Dennis Arthur Armstrong. The baby’s father was Arthur Hewitt, an English laborer, whom Miss Armstrong had met early in 1928. Both parents were of slender means. More than once, Hewitt promised to marry Miss Armstrong, but nothing came of it. Neither of them was in a position to support a child. The mother’s recovery was slow. Released from the hospital, she took the child and went to live at a YWCA in the Aberdeen Park section of London. While pregnant, she had stayed for a time with her sister, Lilian Nicholson. But Mrs. Nicholson was married and very concerned about maintaining her respectability; she declined to let Sarah and her baby recuperate at her home. Sarah Armstrong soon suffered a breakdown in health and placed her son temporarily with a London County Council–licensed foster mother. But she was told that the best thing in the long run would be to put Dennis up for adoption. In September 1929, Sarah Armstrong applied to the National Adoption Society in Baker Street. On January 9, 1930, she signed an agreement with the Society allowing them to place Dennis with a mother who was in a position to bring him up properly. Sarah Armstrong recovered her health and began to prepare for a nursing The Bennetts 122 career. It would be several years before she would have any idea what had happened to her child. ⟈ By early 1929, while Joan was in Hollywood filming Bulldog Drummond, Constance knew that her marriage to Philip Plant was doomed. He was drinking as heavily as ever, and she had long since wearied of his promises to stop. Her marriage had followed the pattern set by their courtship: high times punctuated by explosive fights and separations. Constance had relished her adventures in café society, but the drinking and nightlife that was so much a part of that world proved too great a temptation for Philip. Eventually, it was no longer realistic for Constance to participate in it and expect Philip to remain sober. They parted company. Philip moved into the exclusive Lancaster Hotel on the rue de Berri, while Constance moved to the Hôtel d’Iéna. On April 19, they signed a separation agreement. In it, both parties clearly stated that their marriage had produced no children. Constance stayed on in Paris through the spring. One of her close friends during this time was another resident of the Hôtel d’Iéna, Rita Kaufman Lowe, an American woman with a small boy, Albert, around five years old. Constance appeared to dote on Albert, and spent evening after evening in Lowe’s apartment, playing with him. She seemed downright wistful when she explained to Lowe how much she loved children, that she had never had one of her own, and that she desperately wanted one. Now that she and Philip were on the brink of a divorce, her chances of becoming a mother seemed more remote than ever. There was another reason for Constance’s eagerness to separate from Philip. She was entranced by someone else. When it came to divorcing their husbands, Mabel Morrison’s daughters hardly ever followed her example. Mabel left Richard because she sought peace, stability, and a new and productive path for herself. Constance, Barbara, and Joan almost always left one man because they had found another. During their years in Paris, Plant and Constance had occa- 1929–1930 123 sionally found themselves in the company of Gloria Swanson and her husband, Henri, Marquis de la Falaise de la Coudraye. At Paramount Pictures, Swanson had risen to become one of the world’s great box-office attractions in films such as Male and Female (1919), Don’t Change Your Husband (1920), and Zaza (1923). In 1924, while still under contract to Paramount, she had gone to France to film Madame Sans-Gêne, Victorien Sardou’s play about a French washerwoman elevated to nobility by Napoleon . For a major Hollywood star to appear in a European film was highly irregular. It was an extravagant production with, aside from Swanson, an all-French cast, to be filmed entirely on French locations. As the first American...