Pepi Lederer was an American actress and writer. She was born in to a theatrical family, her mother, Reine Davies (née Douras) was a stage actress and the sister of actresses Rosemary Davies and Marion Davies, while her father, George Lederer, produced musical comedies. Her lucky or unlucky break came when her aunt, Marion Davies became the mistress of William Randolph Hearst ... and Hearst took responsibility for the well being of Pepi and her several siblings, so she spent a good deal of her youth at Hearst Castle.
She had ambitions to become an actress as well, but her aunt and Hearst were far more interested in the career of her brother and although she had a small part in the movie 'Her Cardboard Lover', and also a part in 'The Fair Co-ed' in 1927 (which was left on the cutting room floor), it was obvious that she wasn't going to make it. She then discovered
she was pregnant ... she had an abortion. She allegedly claimed afterward that she had been '
raped while unconscious drunk' .... She went to London in 1930, an ended up with a token job as a writer on one of Hearst's English magazines, 'The Connoisseur', but in 1935 she returned to New York with an English girl friend 'Monica Morris' .... Ms Morris was well known in
London lesbian circles. A friend told Brooks, “
My God, the Stage-Door Ferret! Don’t tell me Monica has latched onto Pepi!”. Apparently Monica had earned her nick-name because she was the most predatory among the group of girls who had fought over Tallulah Bankhead when she became a star of the London theatre in 1923.
Though she was considered a captivating girl, her acting ambitions were stalled in the blocks, and she had turned her
voracious appetite's, to sex, rich foods,
alcohol, and perhaps inevitably,
cocaine .... She was later exposed as a girl who had
swung both ways as she and screen goddess Louise Brooks were 'close friends' (she first met Brooks at San Simeon in 1928), and Brooks later claimed to friends, that they had been
romantically involved for a while.
Lederer also told friends she would never forget the look on her Aunt Ethel’s face when she opened a bedroom door to a Hearst house on Lexington Avenue, and found her in bed with a black actress, Nina May McKinney (the lead black actress in King Vidors 1929 film "Hallelujah").
By 1935, back in New York, her
drug addiction had overtaken her life, and her aunt Marion and Hearst had her
committed to a mental hospital to receive a 'drug cure' ..... while she was in their care, she
either fell while trying to escape,
or jumped out of a window, the fall killing her near instantly. Monica Morris was given $1,000 and deported from the US after the funeral (Mr Hearst got what he wanted in those days) ... Hearst newspapers reported that Lederer had been suffering from 'acute melancholia'.
Trivia:
- Nicknamed "Peppy" as a child for her mischievous and high-spirited personality.
- Pepi‘s sense of humor gave her every chance to expose a guests vanities while humoring the rest of the guests. Claire Windsor’s falsies and writer Elinor Glyn’s red wig would mysteriously disappear from their bedrooms while they slept.
- She would feed Louella Parsons an “exclusive” item that would appear in her syndicated Hearst column, and which would later have to be retracted.
- Her brother Charlie Lederer, became a well-known screenwriter.
Pictures:
Marion and Louise:
