Leonora Hornblow, 85, Novelist and Friend to Stars
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Leonora Hornblow, who died Saturday at 85, was a novelist and children’s book author. Hornblow was married to Arthur Hornblow, a film producer whose credits include “Gaslight” and “Bang the Drum Slowly.”
Hornblow will probably be best remembered as a footnote in the biography of other more famous friends, such as Frank Sinatra, Ronald Reagan, Bennett Cerf, Claudette Colbert, and Kitty Carlisle Hart.
“Easily the savviest broad in town,” Sidney Zion said, Hornblow was a denizen of the Stork Club and El Morocco,and the most exclusive private dinner tables, from Cole Porter’s to David Selznick’s. She was a frequently dropped name in Hedda Hopper’s column and others; she was also often referred to as Bubbles, a childhood moniker she loathed. “My heartbeat soon doubles/At the sight of dear ‘Bubbles,'” wrote Douglas Fairbanks Jr. Selznick, perhaps more wisely, had a gold pin made for her with the inscription, “NOTICE: MY NAME IS LEONORA.”
Raised in a mansion on Riverside Drive, Hornblow was an heir to the tobacco magnate and philanthropist, Leon Schinasi, who formally adopted her after marrying her mother in 1926. Growing up “miserable,” she once said, in Manhattan society, she wed film star Wayne Morris in 1938, when she was just 18.
Morris was flying high, just off a star turn as a boxer in “Kid Galahad” when the couple set up housekeeping in an airy, sprawling villa in the Hollywood Hills. An Associated Press profile of the newlyweds described the scene: “She is charming, slim, gracious, and apparently sensible beyond her 18 years. … In her quiet way she dominates the whole house and everything in it, including Wayne.” Her most prized possession was an old volume of Swinburne; his was a Wayne Morris fan club magazine. The marriage ended after 18 months.
Hornblow returned to Manhattan, with a baby son in tow, and established herself in a Park Avenue apartment. She found work as a fashion columnist at Liberty magazine and had no problem finding male companionship. She liked to refer to the eminent men in her life as “sequoias.” She dated John Gunther, the gregarious, prolific author of the series “Inside Asia,” “Inside Africa,” etc. She later told her son, Michael, “I had a very good war.”
In 1945, she married Arthur Hornblow. Arthur was an old acquaintance, having once brought his then-wife Myrna Loy to stay at the Schinasi family beach home on the Jersey shore, when Leonora was an adolescent. Leonora recalled that she was disappointed to find that Loy had married someone other than her “Thin Man” foil William Powell, and disliked Arthur because of it. He was indifferent to her. “Long after, he told me that he thought I was … the plain child of a beautiful mother,” Leonora recalled in a 1993 interview. “Fortunately for me, I improved.” They were wed at Bennett Cerf’s house. Twenty-five years later, the couple celebrated their 25th anniversary at the Cerfs; those in attendance included Pamela Harriman, Truman Capote, Bill and Babe Paley, and Sinatra, who sang “Thanks for the Memory,” with special words by Phyllis Cerf.
After their wedding, Arthur Hornblow took her back to Los Angeles, a city she detested and once described as “among the alien corn.” But as the wife of an MGM producer, she met everyone. Sinatra became a close friend, although she insisted they never dated; Hornblow was the only one permitted to call him “Blue.” Reagan was another intimate; Hornblow was a bridesmaid at his wedding to Jane Wyman. “Jane and Ronnie got married at the Wee Kirk O’ the Heather, a little chapel in Forest Lawn, the famous cemetery,” she recalled. “That was an omen – being married in a graveyard.”
Hornblow even appeared in a film, “Thunder in the East” (1952), as a Hindu maid, clad in a sari by Edith Head. Forty years later, she was still giggling about watching Alan Ladd climb onto a box to be tall enough for the love scenes with Deborah Kerr.
The years in Hollywood furnished Hornblow with plenty of material for her first novel, and she had no trouble selling “Memory and Desire” (1950), a racy tale that became a bestseller, published by Cerf’s Random House. “She gives the reader credit for having a little native intelligence, an amazing trait in an author,” the Los Angeles Times said.
Her second novel, “The Love-Seekers” (1957), was set in New York and was, if anything more explicit. The book “tells how love may be sought if you live in the 80s between Madison and Fifth, work for an interior decorator or some such, and are fond of s-x,” the Washington Post said in its “Fiction for Fun” column. Her agent, Irving “Swifty” Lazar sold the rights, but a film was never made.
Hornblow also collaborated with her husband on various productions, including the difficult “Oklahoma!” (1955). “My hair was black then, black-black; by the time the movie opened, it was well streaked with gray – and I was only the producer’s wife!” she recalled. “‘Witness [for the Prosecution]’ [1957] on the other hand, was sheer happiness.”
Their collaboration took a new direction after Arthur Hornblower retired in 1962 and the two began producing children’s books about odd animal behavior, an interest of Arthur’s. “Birds Do the Strangest Things,” “Insects Do the Strangest Things,” and so forth, up to “Prehistoric Monsters Did the Strangest Things,” all published by the Random House imprint Landmark. She also wrote “Cleopatra of Egypt,” a biography for young readers. Her success with children’s books may have owed something to her treating children with utmost respect. “I would rather walk naked down Fifth Avenue than patronize a child,” she once said.
Arthur Hornblow died in 1976, and Leonora lived in New York, cultivating notable friendships and working on a new novel. Titled “Listen to the Sad Songs,” it was a love story. Unfortunately, it was lost when her luggage was stolen at the airport. She rewrote it but was never satisfied with the result. In 2003, ill health forced her to move to North Carolina, where her son built her a house along the lines of her apartment. It retained the same decor she had at Park Avenue – collages by Gloria Vanderbilt, paintings by Sinatra, a collection of tchotchkes shaped like hands, and a Bactrian camel carved of smokey quartz willed to her by Porter.
Leonora Hornblow
Born June 3, 1920 in New York; died November 5 at Fearrington Village, N.C.; survived by her son, Michael, and three step-grandchildren.