Death of Dolores

This spring there was a novelty to be seen at a north London amusement park. It was no great success, but cockneys with a sixpenny bit could get into a tent and gawp at a gaunt, hollow-eyed woman with stringy dark hair sitting in a barrel. She was billed as "The Fasting Woman." Last week the bony body of the Fasting Woman lay behind a screen in the charity ward of a London hospital. A card was clipped over her bed: "NORINE LATTIMORE. . . . Born: Doughty St., London 1894. . . . Cause of death: cancer. . . ." Thus ended the career of Dolores, for nearly 25 years London's best known artists' model.

In the art world Dolores got her start with stocky, tousle-haired Jacob Epstein for whom she posed for a long series of John Singer Sargent painted several por traits of her before he died. Many times she posed for Augustus John, Sir John Lavery, and Christopher Richard Wynne influenced by Futurism and the first to renounce it. Even snobbish Philip de Laszlo decided that Dolores was as important a figure as the princes, promoters and prelates to whom he normally devotes his easels.

But the life of Dolores was not all posing for artists. She was the daughter of an obscure Lancashire actor. Her unfortunate mother trouped provincial music halls for years, finally died of cancer too. Three men committed suicide on Dolores' account. When she was a handsome overdeveloped child of 15 one John Wadham, secretary to the aristocratic Caroline, Lady Gordon Lennox, took poison. The next suicide was that of Lieut. Frank Amsden, her first husband. In 1929, Frederick Atkinson, a painter and writer of flamboyant verses, did away with himself after friends finally convinced him of Dolores' persistent infidelities.

Between love affairs Dolores was duped into a bogus marriage with an Egyptian magician, known in the music halls as Osiris, who deserted her. Her other husbands were Capt. Harry Sadler and George Livermore, both of whom had to divorce her. After the suicide of Artist Atkinson she appeared briefly in a melodrama based on her own career, and wrote her autobiography. Excerpt:

"One vernal spring morning Prince Hitendra of Cooch Behar asked me to marry him, but I was so startled at this unexpected proposal that I forgot I was already married, and told him bluntly I could never marry a black man." Later she changed her mind and married a U. S. Negro named George Lattimore.

Once again last week news of Norine Lattimore caused painful embarrassment for another Dolores, who a decade ago used to stalk handsomely about the stage of the Ziegfeld Follies disguised as a white peacock.* There was some excuse for the confusion. Both were famed at the same time. Both were tall, beautiful and British. Both had been models and neither was christened Dolores. But Kathleen Marie Rose, the Dolores of the Follies, has never caused a suicide, slept on a park bench, married a Negro, done a fasting act in a barrel. On her retirement from the stage she married an art collector named William Tudor Wilkinson, today lives comfortably in Paris.

*The New York Times telescoped the careers of the two Dolores in its obituary, ran the photograph of the Follies one.

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