The Adored One
The life and career of Lillian Lorraine, starlet of the early Ziegfeld Follies, followed the spectacular arc of so many starlets. A beauty, she rose to fame young, partly through an affair with her producer, only to find herself drinking too much and relying on the wrong men. Susanne Dunlap’s The Adored One follows Lillian from 1906, when she arrives in New York as a teenager seeking fame, to 1912 and the end of her relationship with Florenz Ziegfeld. Ziegfeld, forty-six years old to her fifteen at the start of their affair, comes to control all aspects of Lillian’s life. He not only promotes her career, he holds all of her money and decides where she lives and what she wears. His “adoration” and his control, presented as love and care, isolate her from her few friends and provoke her to self-destructive rebellion. Her nights fueled with alcohol and dancing and sex, she damages her career and becomes a tabloid favorite.
I could have wished for more detail of the Broadway life of the 1910s, such as we get on Lillian’s first visit backstage: “Wax, sawdust, sweat, mold, and something the paint and upholstery gives off–those are the smells that hit you when you walk onto a stage in an empty theater… We’d entered through the stage door, passing dark dressing rooms… I peered in one where a light was still on and saw a half-naked actress engulfed in the arms of a man wearing work clothes.” It is, however, the actress’s engulfing, reckless vulnerability that is Dunlap’s real subject, more than the stage on which she performs. And to her credit, Dunlap’s Lillian is never dazzled by her own fame and is no victim. She stumbles, and fails, and rises to try again.
