114. Southern Beauties
Maybe it’s the good food, outdoor lifestyle and sunshine and maybe it’s the ancestry that has blessed them with well-arranged genes. South Africa has produced a number of stunningly beautiful women who have also been talented actresses and dancers. I’ll deal with this over two blogs.
I’ll start in the 1800s. Some years ago, I was asked to write a treatment to be followed by a screenplay of the remarkable Jose Dale Lace, who was born Josephine Brink in 1869 on a farm near Richmond in the Cape Province. I have told her story in a previous blog, so I’ll confine myself to a brief outline of her life revealing why she is the first of my South African Beauties. She was the daughter of an Afrikaans farmer, who also became involved in Cape politics when there was an uneasy alliance between British and Dutch (later Afrikaners) who both occupied the Cape at the time.
Jose, as she was later known, was a beautiful but willful child, who constantly disrupted her brothers and sisters. Her father listened to the advice of the British Cape Agent General, Sir Charles Mills, who said there was nothing more capable of disciplining an unruly child than a good English school. Lady Emma Mills subsequently arranged for Jose to attend Catherine Lodge in Chelsea, London, where she stayed for four years.
The transition from a young Afrikaans farm girl to a stunningly beautiful English lady was astonishing. After a short while back in Cape Town and a failed engagement to a British army officer, she returned to Britain where she felt more at home. Because of her good looks and her veneer of Englishness she was accepted into a level of high society. She even dated Cecil John Rhodes back in England for a short while. It is rumored that he once mentioned marriage to her but never spoke of it again.
She then met Ernest Beckett Dennison, a banker and playboy from Yorkshire who was married to American heiress Lucy Tracy Lee. Coincidently, his family was prominent in Yorkshire banking around the same time that my great-grandfather or great-uncle Joseph Dresser acquired a West Yorkshire bank which had about 29 branches in Yorkshire. It was also known as the Dresser Bank in Thirsk, a small town where a number of my ancestors lived.
Jose became Ernest’s mistress in the expectation of the man leaving his wife – which in hindsight he had no interest in doing. Even when his wife died in childbirth, he still refused to marry Jose. In fact, he was a real cad – to use the expression of the time. He had a number of mistresses and was once engaged to another beauty, Eve Fairfax, commissioning the sculptor Auguste Rodin to sculpt a bust of her. Furthermore, he is reputed to have fathered Viola Trefusis after an affair with Alice Keppel, who was in turn the mistress of King Edward VII. Viola later caused an uproar by having a lesbian affair with Vita Sackville-West while both women were still married. They were also part of Virginia Woolf’s notorious Bloomsbury set.
Jose, despite having no previous acting experience, moved away from Ernest and landed a role in the latest Oscar Wilde play in London’s West End, ironically called “A Woman of No Importance.” Apparently, she was very good, but she had no interest in a career on the stage.
She then met an Englishman, John Lace, who was making a fortune from the gold mines in Johannesburg as well as a small diamond mine near Kroonstad. He was smitten with Jose and persuaded her to marry him, to which she reluctantly agreed. John soon realized that Jose was still hankering after Ernest, who by now had inherited the title of the 2nd Baron Grimthorpe. John gallantly agreed to a divorce and Jose moved in with Ernest again. She fell pregnant and produced a son, Lancelot, but Ernest still refused to marry her. Finally despairing of their relationship, Jose returned to South Africa.
John agreed to remarry her, and for a while she became one of the leading socialites in Johannesburg, famous for her bizarre behavior. She persuaded John to extend his name to Dale Lace, which sounded more fashionable than just Lace. She even had a coach drawn by four zebras with a coachman who would sound a bugle every time she left their palatial mansion, Northwards, on Parktown Ridge. Their bedroom had an adjoining bathroom that on the push of a button would swing into the bedroom. On one occasion John was showing a friend around the house. He pushed the button and the bath swung into the bedroom with Jose happily enjoying a bubble bath. She smiled at the visitor and said, “Now you know what’s underneath the Lace.”
Sadly, Northwards mansion burnt down and shortly thereafter John lost most of his fortune. Despite that, Jose remained with him for the rest of his life.
The second beauty to make a name for herself internationally was Juliet Prowse. She was born in Bombay, India, of an English father and South African mother. Her dad died when she was three and her mother returned to South Africa. Juliet started dancing at age four and by her early twenties was dancing at a nightclub in Paris when she was spotted by a talent scout and was given the role of Claudine in the movie “Can-Can.” Reviews said she was the best thing in it.
She danced a saucy cancan in front of Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev who declared the dance immoral – which gave her great publicity. She worked with Frank Sinatra as a singer/dancer. They were briefly engaged in 1962 but they broke up when she insisted on continuing her career. Later, she made the movie “GI Blues” with Elvis Presley and had a brief affair with him. She made a few more movies but never became a major star. Still later, she successfully headlined shows in Las Vegas and finally hosted the Championship Ballroom Dancing Competition for some years before dying at age 59.
My wife Hero, who was an accomplished Greek, Spanish and ballroom dancer, knew Juliet’s mother. We visited her at her home outside Jo’burg one afternoon but sadly we never met Juliet.
In my next blog I’ll deal with some other beauties that are currently having success internationally.
The outpouring of talent from South Africa never ceases to amaze me, with Elon Musk now grabbing the headlines with his Twitter takeover. It won’t be long now before ExoTech grabs headlines of its own. It may not be South African, but I won’t hold that against it. I’m confident that it will be so important to the entire future of digital communication that the headlines will exceed anything else that is happening at the time!
An ExoTech Ltd shareholder, Chris is currently authoring two of the four books to be published the day ExoBrain launches and has helped to create ExoBrain’s introductory video to the Confidential Technical Briefing. Chris has spent his working life in the film and television industry, starting with BBC Television in London, then ATV in Birmingham becoming, at the time, the youngest Studio Manager in Britain.
Later, in South Africa, he wrote and directed film and TV commercials, having four South African entries at the Cannes Advertising Festival. After a number of years of writing and directing or producing documentaries (eight international awards) and corporate videos, he concentrated on writing feature film screenplays (five screened) and television series (seven screened). He has a novel, ”Pursuit of Treachery,” with a literary agent and is currently obtaining finance for an action adventure feature film he has written and is co-producing. He is a published poet and has given many readings.