A False Lead on Mrs. F. E. Woodbury

While researching the story of Hal Roach’s first marriage, I encountered a story that appeared in many American newspapers in late 1915.

The earliest example in my databases was in the 1 October Reno Gazette, shown here. Its headline then was: “She Gets Rich by Swapping / Now She Has Bank Account”.

That article showed a photograph of Helen G. Woodbury taken in Calumet, Michigan, probably in the 1890s. That picture was labeled “Mrs. F. E. Woodbury.”

The story, datelined Los Angeles, started: “‘David Harum’ has been outdone by a woman.” David Harum was a bestselling novel by Edward Noyes Westcott published in 1898, largely a character study of a sharp deal-maker. A movie adaptation had been released earlier in 1915.

According to the article, “Mrs. F. E. Woodbury” had “started to barter ‘for the fun of it,’” trading her imported gowns for a piano, a dentist’s kit, bird specimens, paintings, and eventually real estate—$22,000 worth of new property in all.

The story ended:

She is at present in charge of a hotel here, but intends soon to raise hogs and alfalfa on a southern California ranch.

Appearing in the season when Helen G. Woodbury Roach filed for divorce, the story didn’t seem out of character for a person of whims. She wasn’t “at present in charge of a hotel,” to be sure, but she was found the following year to have invested a lot of money into a restaurant and hotel. So I put this article into my research file on Hal Roach’s first wife.

To be safe, I went looking for the original Los Angeles story. And I found it—sort of.

Almost exactly the same text had appeared on the front page of the Los Angeles Daily Herald on 20 September. The two big differences were:

• The earlier story described the trading of “Mrs. E. F. Woodbury” instead of “Mrs. F. E. Woodbury.”
• The Herald ran a different photograph of a different woman.

A little more digging, and I learned that Mrs. E. F. Woodbury was the former Joan Meta Hadenfeldt (1873–1969), second wife of Elmer Franklin Woodbury. She had sung in vaudeville, married in 1904, and was the second or third queen of the Rose Parade in Pasadena.

The Woodburys were in the hotel business. Elmer started by owning a restaurant in his home state of Maine. In 1908 “Mr. Woodbury and his charming wife” were managing the Hotel Pepper in Los Angeles, according to the Hotel Bulletin. That article said of Elmer, “As a hotel manager he is one of the greatest publicity getters whom I have ever seen.”

The 25 Feb 1909 San Francisco Call stated Woodbury had just bought the St. Mark Hotel in Oakland, adding:

For many years the new manager was connected with the Cadillac hotel of New York and the Brighton Beach hotel. He came to California three years ago and has been in charge of the Maryland and Casa Grande hotels in Pasadena.

In September 1911, the New York Times reported that Woodbury had overextended himself in buying “the Hotel Belleclaire, at Broadway and Seventy-seventh Street,” assuming its debts. He declared bankruptcy in New York but bounced back on the west coast.

On 11 Sept 1915, less than a week before Joan Woodbury appeared on the front page of the Los Angeles Herald, a big advertisement in the paper’s evening edition announced that she and Elmer were opening a new “Apartment Hotel” called the Stratford. They continued to advertise in that newspaper for weeks.

Thus, it appears that a Los Angeles news story about Mrs. E. F. (Joan) Woodbury trading goods, played ginned up to publicize her husband’s new venture, was distorted outside the city into a story about Mrs. F. E. (Helen) Woodbury. Somehow Helen’s old photo got attached. And since those latter articles appeared far from Los Angeles, neither Mrs. Woodbury saw them and asked for a correction.

Contrary to that news item, Joan Woodbury didn’t leave the hotel business to run a ranch. In fact, in 1920 Elmer purchased a twenty-year lease on the Hotel Richelieu in San Francisco. That year’s US Census listed Joan as his assistant manager.

The same census also found the household included four-year-old Joan Elmer Woodbury and her eighteen-year-old governess, Marie Sandow. Five years later, Elmer and Joan Woodbury divorced. Five years after that, Elmer married Marie as his third wife.

As for little Joan Woodbury, she started performing in motion pictures as early as The Half Breed, produced in 1922 by Oscar Morosco (formerly producer of L. Frank Baum’s stage musical The Tik Tok Man of Oz). She returned to the screen in the late 1930s and performed in many B westerns over the next decade.