One of a short series of house-based local history—five stories touching on the perennial San Francisco themes of immigration, families, city-building, and self-making.
By Amy O’Hair
As a star-struck teen in Los Angeles during the Golden Age of Hollywood, Jane Wardy did more than just swoon over beautiful film stars from afar—she got herself into the intimate lives of three glamorous actresses, one after the other, devoting herself to being their constant companion. Two of those relationships ended with the death of her beloved.
Later in life, after the excitement was over, Wardy settled down in this house on Baden Street, and lived a more sedate existence—although she would then marry three men in succession before she died in her eighties.
Midwest Girl turned Model
Born in Ohio in 1909, her family moved to California in the 1920s. Jane completed two years of high school before launching into work—as a shop clerk and a store model. All her life, despite the capricious lives of her famous companions, Wardy always had steady work.
At the age of eighteen or nineteen she met and befriended the aspiring starlet and horsewoman Vonceil Viking, who had made a name for herself with a splashy stunt, riding her horse Broadway from New York to Los Angeles on a bet with an English aristocrat, the Marquess of Donegall—for an astonishing $25,000 (something shy of a half a million dollars now). More about this stunt here.
Viking arrived in Los Angeles after 120 days, and made national news.
On the strength of her daring exploit, Viking was given a film contract making ‘The Fighting Forester’ later that year. This photo of the crew (below) was taken during shooting. Viking is in the front row on the left.
Jane Wardy is a member of the crew, seated on the right in white shoes and flapper headgear. She is likely to have been on wardrobe duty, with her background in clothing. Her position in front suggests she was important to the film, though she looks a bit abashed. How Wardy came to meet Viking, or be hired on the set, I do not know. But they were close.
Others of note in the image above are: Director Joseph Levigard (1903-1931) seated at the center in the white shirt and no hat; famous stuntman Yakima Canutt to the right of Viking in a vest; and lead actor Edmund Cobb just above Viking.
Two publicity shots from the film show Viking and Cobb, and also Merrill McCormick, with makeup to darken his skin, and Bud Osbourne, an actor in westerns for many decades.
These movies, called “Poverty Row Westerns,” were budget productions that nonetheless had an audience in the numerous movies houses that dotted nearly every urban block in every city and town. It was a living, and it looks pretty thrilling. For Viking, it was fame doing what she loved, riding horses. For Wardy, it was being right in the midst of Hollywood glamor, companion to an exciting woman.
A Fateful Day on the Highway to Bliss
Wardy and Viking lived together in Viking’s large rented ranch in Laurel Canyon. They socialized at a Hollywood eating club where the casts and crews of westerns gathered—and the blond-haired Viking was known as the Queen of the Water Hole.
On a Monday in December 1929, Viking and Wardy got into a small sedan and headed out away from Los Angeles to Palm Springs on their way to a camping site; Viking was fond of camping and all things related to horses and the outdoors.
Viking drove the car. In Banning, twenty miles outside of Palm Springs, she tried to pass a slower car on the road, and got sideswiped. She was thrown from the vehicle and died, but Jane Wardy was unhurt.
So close were the two women that the articles about the crash misidentify Wardy as Viking’s sister or half-sister, even though there was no connection between their families. It was a fiction the women enjoyed, and which explained their constant companionship.
After this terrible loss, Wardy went back to live with her birth family back in the Monterey Park district of Los Angeles. She was twenty-one and working as a store model. According to newspaper items, her father, Harry Wardy, was the prosperous co-owner of a steel office furniture factory in Covina.
Life on the Sunset Strip
By 1934, Wardy had moved out of the family house once again, living in Hollywood near Hollywood Blvd and Vermont. At the time of the 1940 US Census, she was living as companion to Barbara Worth, another Hollywood actress, in a flat on Sunset Boulevard, while also working as a sales lady at a department store.
Worth’s career as an actress was largely over, although she would later work as a screenwriter. In her heyday during the 1920s and 1930s, she had made her share of “Poverty Row” westerns of the 1930s.
A New Companion
During the War, Wardy worked as an aircraft worker in 1942, and as a laboratory technician in 1944.[1] It was while doing war work that Wardy became companion to yet another glamorous actress, this time aging silent film star Marguerite de la Motte. De La Motte also worked in a war factory then.[2]
In 1943, Wardy testified at the hearing for De La Motte’s divorce from attorney Sidney H Rivkin. Wardy’s testimony backed up the woman’s claim that Rivkin was hot-tempered and impossible to please; De La Motte got her divorce settlement.
North to Frisco
After the War, Motte and Wardy moved together to San Francisco, living with Motte’s brother at 3061 Washington St, in Pacific Heights. Tragically, in January 1950, Motte died after surgery. Wardy is called Motte’s cousin in the newspaper report, another example of a fiction borne of sentiment.
Grief-stricken and perhaps at loose ends, Jane Wardy married a man named Roy G Johnson in Santa Barbara in October of that year. It was an impulsive act, and Johnson is never again associated with Wardy, nor lives with her.[3] Despite this short-lived, out-of-town marriage, Wardy goes on living in the Pacific Heights house in San Francisco, working at a large 24-hour pharmacy on Van Ness Avenue.
A New Partner, a New Business
A year or two after this, Wardy began working for Owl Drug Store, a prominent chain in the city then. She met a woman named Jennie E Henderson, who was then working as a housekeeper at a long-term care hospital. Soon the two women moved in together, first in an apartment at 400 Hyde at Ellis; by 1957, they had moved to a flat on Clement St across the street from Lincoln Park. By 1958 Henderson was also working for Owl Drug, as a bookkeeper.
The following year they started a new venture together—a café called Home Plate restaurant, at the corner of Bryant and 20th Street in the Mission, a nice location which has been bars and restaurants all through the century since its construction. Recently it was a Glossier pop-up store.
To finance the project, Wardy put property she owned in Arizona up for sale, an asset she may have acquired along the way, perhaps from Vonceil Viking, who was originally from New Mexico and may have bought property in Arizona with an eye toward establishing a ranch later, had her life not been cut short.
A Sunnyside Retirement
The restaurant project lasted until about 1963. Henderson went back to work as a hospital worker. Wardy had other plans. Her father had recently died, and perhaps this meant a bit of extra cash. By the end of 1964, she was the owner of the house on Baden Street, living by herself, in a house not an apartment, for the first time in her life.
But not for long. The next year she married the man who was her tenant in the downstairs flat, John Nelson Hanlon—who was some twenty-two years her senior. Jane took his surname.
John Hanlon was born in New Jersey; his father was a professor of mathematics there, though I wasn’t able to establish whether it was at Princeton University. The family moved to Berkeley early in the 1900s. Hanlon attended UC Hasting Law School and served in WWI in the Navy.
Most notably in Hanlon’s history was that he had once had a shot at being a screenwriter in Hollywood during the same years that Jane was active there. In the 1930 US Census, he was living in Hollywood and his occupation was “writer of stories,” with no income. By 1942, after the US joined the War, he was working at Los Angeles Power and Light.[4]
The history that John and Jane shared as part of the glory days of pre-War Hollywood may have served as a common touchstone for their bond in later life, even if they did not know each other at the time. They would have shared friends or acquaintances in the business, and common experiences, hopes, and dreams.
Soon John Hanlon became ill, and he passed away in January 1969. Jane remarried in 1971, a man named Frank Brooks, who was also older than she was, but not by the same large gap as with Hanlon. Brooks had lived on Hearst Ave in Sunnyside.
Jane and Frank sold the house on Baden Street in October 1971, retiring to Ventura. Frank died in 1974. Jane married again in 1975, to Harley Shoemaker, a man then 80 years old. She buried him in 1984. She lived to the age of nearly 82, and died in Ventura in 1993.
Life of a Star-Struck Girl
Jane Wardy had an exciting life—a series of intense relationships with glamourous women who were famous to one degree or another on the silver screen in the golden era of Hollywood films. Wardy’s attentive love and care gave in turn three starlets the support they needed in times of adversity. Two of those relationships ended with the death of her beloved, showing Wardy’s steadfast loyalty to the end. Although she attached herself to the unpredictable lives of film stars, she always made sure she was gainfully employed in whatever city of situation she found herself in.
Wardy’s life after the death of De La Motte was never as exciting as her youth, but she formed a partnership with another woman and together they ran a business for a few years. Finally, in her mid-fifties, Wardy had money and stability enough to settle down in a little house in a calm neighborhood, after half a lifetime in the shifting circumstances of rental apartments and the caprices of actresses in various states of distress. And yet she still had another chapter to write for her life, with three more committed relationships, this time with men.
Jane Wardy might have been a fantastic conversationalist, or talented in bed, or just able to make the person she loved feel wonderful, or all of that, because she was never without companionship. And I’m sure she had a lot of great stories to tell her friends.
One of a short series of house-based local history—five stories touching on the perennial San Francisco themes of immigration, families, city-building, and self-making.
ENDNOTES
- According to Voter Registration data. ↑
- “Marguerite De La Motte,” Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marguerite_De_La_Motte ↑
- California Marriage Index: Jane A Wardy and Roy G Johnson, 21 Oct 1950, Santa Barbara County. ↑
- WWII draft card information, Ancestry.com. ↑
