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When Irene and Billy Reardon sailed for Europe in 923, Robert Treman did not accompany them. There had been published rumors of the Tremans’ separation as early as mid-92, which were denied by both parties . In November of that year, Irene completely lost her temper with one reporter, winning her no friends in the press: “It’s a lie. We are as much in love as when we were married....I know your game.You understand nothing . I hate newspapermen and always have . . . you’re always stirring up mud in a clear puddle.” No one really knows what went on that summer of 923, but the papers were full of guesses. According to press reports, Irene arrived in Paris in early June (“to establish a legal residence,” one paper surmised, in anticipation of divorce proceedings), and Treman followed her to Europe, checking into the Hotel Claridge in London with his lawyer.Irene filed for her independence on July 4, after which she and her husband took off for a private weekend in Deauville to talk things out. While the proceedings were hanging fire, reporters besieged Irene’s friends to ask if she were going to marry Ward Crane: “That affair was dead and finished a year ago,” pooh-poohed an unnamed source. Friends and acquaintances were more than happy to dish dirt: the Treman family looked down on Irene and her animals, it was said, and the combination of a home-loving, old-fashioned husband and an ambitious career woman was bound to come to grief. In her memoirs, Irene’s chronology is charmingly vague. She claims that her tour with Billy Reardon was undertaken right after she discovered that Robert Treman had used all of her savings for Hol-Tre without her knowledge.Irene first thought of divorce while on tour.“Robert and I were only half married with this distance between us,” she wrote. “Occasionally he called or wrote, but that was all.” Her Paris divorce, she said, cost her “TO CHICAGO HIGH SOCIETY, SHE WAS A CHORUS GIRL” CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT  CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT 229 $3,000, and Treman showed up in court hoping to iron things out: “I convinced him it was hopeless.” It seemed to be all over by the end of July 923: Irene was granted a divorce, said her lawyer, Dudley Field Malone, on grounds of “incompatibility of temperament.” Robert Treman gave a gentlemanly quote to the press: “What can any man do when his wife is determined to divorce him? He can only give in gracefully. I thank her for the good times we had together .” But Irene continued to muddy the waters, perhaps in an effort to bedevil the press (or keep her husband on edge). Less philosophical than Treman, Irene claimed to be toying with him like a cat with a squeaky toy. “I’ve got to keep Bob guessing,”she said.“If it’s granted and I decide I don’t want it, all I have to do is write the judge a letter within 60 days and tell him so.” Sailing for the United States, she lied outright to reporters, claiming that she had neither filed for nor received a divorce. “I don’t see why the public should be interested in my affairs,” she snapped. “They should be discouraged rather than encouraged about following my matrimonial matters . I don’t give a darn what the people think.They can keep on quibbling for a month if they like as to whether or not I am divorced.”Finally fed up, Treman admitted that “I am not in the least anxious to see my wife again. All I ask of her is to leave me in quiet.” The nastiness of the Treman divorce lingered in Ithaca. Irene was painted by the local press as a flighty, imperious diva. A group of Cornell professors’ wives told of their shock when one of Irene’s monkeys invaded their tea party,and recalled Irene herself rising at the ungodly hour of noon and traipsing around in “a flaming pair of red Turkish trousers.” The Tremans’ well-stocked liquor cellar—during Prohibition—also got the town in an uproar. “I can imagine the elderly ladies of Ithaca sitting on their front porches,”wrote Irene,“nodding openmouthed and saying‘What else could you expect from an actress?’” As late as the 980s, bad feelings remained: a book about Ithaca’s first families is downright unpleasant about Irene. Hinting that she...

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