| 7 June 35 | loses her heart as well as her appendix when hospitalized recently. Hugh B.”Bud” Ernst, radio announcer and entertainer and former movie cameraman, is in the same hospital convalescing from injuries received in an auto accident. The two meet and have “dates” riding around the corridors together in wheelchairs. |
| 12 June 35 | columnist Robert Coons reports: “.and here's Lyda Roberti who just celebrated a birthday anniversary, not knowing how old she is because her parents each insisted on a different year as the one in which she was born.” |
| 19 June 35 | Bud Ernst pilots Lili Damita and Errol Flynn to Yuma, Arizona, for their wedding. He is best man and plans to take Lyda and make it a double ceremony, but she is unable to get off work. |
| 25 June 35 | marries Hugh “Bud” Ernst in Yuma, Arizona. Ernst, an expert flyer, takes his plane out of a hangar in the afternoon, grabs her away from the studio where she is making a movie, and flies the two in his plane. The ceremony is performed by Justice E. A. Freeman, the “Marrying Justice in Yuma.” There is no honeymoon; the two return to Hollywood a few hours later. Ernst has to land the plane in darkness and on an unfamiliar field. They intended to return before sundown, but it is 8:30 p.m. before he arrives over Mines Field. He shaves some trees and high tension wires and eventually drops the wheels, not on the field, but on rough ground nearby. She is shaken by the landing. |
| 3 July 35 | Jack Oakie, who worked with her in The Big Broadcast of 1935, says she has one of the fastest wits he's ever come across. “One reason that we got along so well was just that we both liked laughs.” |
| 5 July 35 | is sent to hospital by a recurrence of a recent illness just as she is preparing a honeymoon trip to Panama and on to New York with her husband of one week. She will be confined to bed for ten days. |
| 10 July 35 | columnist Dan Thomas reports: “Blond Lyda Roberti and her brand-new husband Bud Ernst are too interested in each other to pay any attention to menus or a waiting waitress.” |
| 17 July 35 | in her penthouse apartment, she talks about her recent marriage, with her handsome 6'-4″ husband sitting on the sofa: “I am happy for many reasons, but one of the principal ones is that my marriage will end my loneliness. It is such a change to come home to my apartment and find someone here, someone with whom I can talk over everything, and laugh a little at things that have occurred during the day. The world moves very fast in Hollywood. There is a constant parade of personalities. It is very confusing. One meets many persons, but gets to know very few.I suppose it is true in any large city. There is nothing like a family to anchor one and give a feeling of 'belonging' in the world that surrounds. In my case, that is particularly true. My mother and father are far off in the Orient. I have a brother and sister in this country, but they live thousands of miles away. But how can a movie actress be lonely in Hollywood? I have been asked many times. That is simple. It takes a long time to make good friends and without good friends, one is lonesome.” |
| 19 August 35 | columnist James Aswell reports that Josephine Dillion, who used to be Mrs. Clark Gable and who coached him in camera prancing, is giving Lyda daily workouts in Thespian trickery |
| 6 September 35 | an unnamed travel agent tells about the difficulties of selling airline tickets to the stars, many of whom still prefer to travel by train and ship: “I stalked Lyda Roberti for eleven days. When I finally found her, she was gracious enough, but I lost her eventually. She and her husband, Bud Ernst, went East by boat.” |
| 36 | lives in a white-walled apartment with a blond cocker spaniel named Herman, a black and white coach dog called Adolph, a gray-haired housekeeper who goes by the name of Coulter, and a black-haired personal made, Sonia. There used to be a husband named Bud Ernst, but he doesn't live with her any more, and she's getting a divorce. Coulter used to cook for Lili Damita and prepares fancy foreign food. Sonia speaks Polish almost exclusively and whips together all of the cosmetics used by Lyda, who doesn't care for the manufactured brands. Sonia also causes no end of trouble-unknowingly insults people with her poor English, frequently goes into temperamental rages, and gets telephone calls mixed up, but Lyda keeps her just the same. |
| when not working, she plays tennis or goes apartment hunting, with no intention at all of renting. Her brother is her chauffer. She once tried to learn to drive and cracked into a lamp post on her third lesson. She hasn't been behind a wheel since. | |
| 27 May 36 | announces through her attorney, George Chasin, that she has parted from husband Ernst. Chasin says she expects to file suit for annulment shortly but refused to reveal on which grounds annulment would be sought. |
| 29 August 36 | is forced to withdraw from Wives Never Know at Paramount due to illness. She is replaced by Vivienne Osborne. |
| 17 September 36 | replaces the late Thelma Todd as Patsy Kelly's partner in the Hal Roach comedy series. With her thick Polish accent, she will portray a dizzy, word-juggling dame buffeted about by tough, wise-cracking Patsy, who has an accent herself, picked up on New York's East Side. She is happy about becoming the other half of a comedy team: “It eez vonderful. Seductive? I em not that. Comedy, that eez what I have wanted to play on the screen for three years. Instead, yes, they make me go around vamping. No, I didn't like that. Happy. I am that now. I weel show them I am funny. Patsy, she eez vonderful. She gives other people, what you say, the break. Mr. Roach, he eez vonderful. At last I can be funny instead of eye rolling at the men.” On losing her nationality she says: “Many times they tell me to learn English. But I don't vant to. I don't vant to. I think better it eez to stay as I am.” |
| November 36 | moves into a new house and has fun decorating it. The more colors in the living room, the better she likes it. She says she and the interior decorators never agree. She spends the first night sleeping on a camp cot; the new furniture hasn't arrived. |
| 15 November 36 | is such a hit in her first scenes in a Hal Roach-MGM feature production, that her option is picked up by the Hal Roach Studios |
| 19 November 36 | Jimmie Fidler reports: “Lyda Roberti was the big gasp at the very hotsy-totsy Trocadero night club a few evenings ago. She arrived here clad in an evening gown with a long train. When she danced, the train got in her way, and Lyda has no patience with things that annoy her. She did exactly what I will wager many another woman has lacked nerve to do, strode into the ladies' powder room, borrowed a pair of scissors, calmly snipped off the irritating train.” |
| 36 – 38 | is forced to curtail her film career because of frequent heart attacks |
| 31 January 37 | is secretly reconciled with her husband. They are afraid to announce the event because they're not sure it will last. |
| 31 January 38 | she and her husband are sued over a $122 grocery bill. Grocer William F. Webb claims he delivered the food to their Hollywood home last year and has not been paid. |
| 13 March 38 | suffers a severe heart attack during the night. Dr. Myron Babcock is called to her apartment and gives her heart stimulants, but to no avail. She dies with her husband, Hugh (Bud) Ernst, radio announcer, at her bedside. |
| 15 March 38 | a thousand or more gardenias and lilies cover her casket in a Hollywood mortuary. Four hundred persons pack the room. Floral tributes arrive from Lili Damita and Errol Flynn, Al Jolson, Patsy Kelly, Ginger Rogers, Jack Oakie, Wendie Barrie, Joe E. Brown, Hal Roach and Stan Laurel. Funeral services are conducted by Reverend Holmes. |
| as Lyda Roberti Ernst, she is interred at Forest Lawn Memorial Park, Glendale, Graceland section, lot 1628. Her headstone bears a line from Song of Solomon 2:17: “…Until the day break and the shadows flee away.” | |
| 28 May 38 | Jimmie Fidler reports: “I have often told you how superstitious these ladies and gentlemen of the grease paint are. Today I saw new evidence of it. I was talking on a Boulevard corner with Carole Lombard when Patsy Kelly drove by and Lombard said, 'I wouldn't be in her shoes for a million bucks. She used to co-star in comedies with Thelma Todd and Lyda Roberti, and they are both dead now.' And then in almost a whisper, she voiced one of the oldest superstitions of the theatre: 'Death always strikes three times.' I've been shuddering ever since.” |
| 16 June 38 | columnist Charles D. Sampas writes: “It's awfully hard to visualize Hollywood without Lyda Roberti-or don't you remember her in Roberta? |
| 1 June 39 | Ernst marries Gwynne Pickford, 24, daughter of Mary Pickford's sister Lottie. It is Pickford's first marriage. Their daughter Susan will be born on August 5, 1944, with their marriage on shaky ground. The couple will divorce and Ernst will marry three more times, twice to actress Betty Furness. He is producer of the '40s radio show Queen for a Day. |
| 11 April 50 | 39-year-old ex-Army flyer Bud Ernst phones Neil Maguire, Journal-American assistant city editor, from his staid East Side Westbury Hotel, upset over the crumble of his marriage to actress Betty Furness. Maguire tries to soothe Ernst by telling him to think things over and to call Betty, all the while scribbling a note telling a reporter to rush to the hotel. “I'm at the end of my rope. Get a reporter here in 10 minutes. Send up and you'll get a story.” After hanging up, Ernst places the muzzle of a new 20-gauge shotgun into his mouth and pulls the trigger. A clipping of a newspaper Broadway column reporting that Ernst and Furness are to be divorced is found in the room. There are two notes, one still in the typewriter. One asks that Miss Furness be notified. The other is to “Jack,” “I am tired of everything and I'm sorry for what I'm about to do.” |
| Betty Furness identifies the body of Bud Ernst, having been taken to his hotel by the police waiting for her on the set of “Studio One,” during which broadcast he killed himself. He had sent her a note, through the mail, which she received the day after his death, saying,”Sorry, Mommy.” | |
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show business reaction is unanimous sympathy for Furness. Ernst was generally considered erratic. He had a luncheon reservation at the swanky Colony for the next noon.
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Sources: Errol Flynn: He was my first and long-time friend in Hollywood, although it was this Benedict Arnold who practically forced me into my first marriage . . . . We certainly had memorable times together in my early days behind the fog, smog, and grog curtain of Hollywood. How many words would you like on the shock a man gets when his dear friend, a roistering, Falstaffian ruffian, suddenly goes out, buys himself a 16 double-guage shotgun, some cartridges, and blows the top of his head off. From Inherited Risk, page 105 |
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— Kathleen
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