Larraine Day passed away at 87

[zahavasdad]

Larraine Day (Wife of Leo Durocher) has passed away at age 87

[Brian McKenna]

A huge misjustice when Durocher was suspended in 1947. His personal life, whether it caused a stir or not, wasn't anyone's business.

[KCGHOST]

Day's first husband, Ray Hendricks, sued Leo for alienation of affection when she left him for Durocher. While such a thing is unheard of today it was not back then.

[Brian McKenna]

Found this: http://64.233.169.104/search?q=cache:-cPsb9JmRscJ:www.mirrorservice.org/sites/astro.temple.edu/~ruby/wava/powder/chap12.html+Leo+Durocher+larraine+day&hl=en&ct=clnk&cd=10&gl=us

The publicity man in the studio or in his own agency is quick to exploit anything that has a news or story angle from the actual life of the actor. Larraine Day, before her divorce and marriage to Leo Durocher, had never been able to get good publicity, because she was regarded as a "cold personality without sex appeal," "too nice," "too conven-tional"-in other words, a dud from the publicity angle.

Then she became notorious and front-page news as a possible bigamist in 1947 when she flew down to Mexico to marry Leo (The Lip) Durocher. She had obtained a California divorce from her hus-band, Mr. Hendricks, with the usual legal stipulation requiring a year's wait before she was free to marry again.

But the next day she flew to Mexico, obtained a second divorce, and married "Lippy" there. Now the "cold" personality became "hot." She had thrown over husband and children and risked a charge of bigamy, all for love!

Newspapers and fan magazines clamored for interviews. Typical of the way the movie columnists in the newspapers handled the actress's difficulties was the following: "Larraine Day in the seventh heaven of bliss because Leo Durocher is flying all the way from Havana on Wednesday, to fly back with her on Friday to Havana for her two weeks visit with him! If ever I saw love, this is it." 1 Earlier the same columnist wrote:

Larraine Day's telephone bill to Leo Durocher in Havana, and Leo's to her, are reaching an all-time fabulous high. "Leo's bill for 10 days," says Larraine dreamily on the set of Tycoon, "was $600! And I expect mine to be even higher." Love is an expensive commodity.

But was it really so expensive? Net gains were high even after the reported $600 phone bill. A trade paper had the following item in its gossip column:

. . . You're off the beam if you think that Larraine Day has been the butt of bad publicity in her current legal marital dif-ficulties. She's combing magazine interviews out of her hair - and her price for an outside picture [off the RKO lot] has gone to $150,000.2

At her own studio, her price per picture was said to have gone from $50,000-$60,000 to $100,000. Nor was the actress the only one to benefit. The studio immediately planned to release her latest picture, The Locket, ahead of its scheduled date to cash in on the publicity, and one executive is reported to have said, "It should increase the picture's box office take by $200,000." 3 A Brooklyn theater running a previous picture, Mr. Lucky, changed its billing to read, "Starring Mrs. Leo Durocher and Cary Grant." The studio even considered reissuing a two-year-old movie, Bride by Mistake, in which she had been featured. The Hollywood proverb that "The only bad publicity is no publicity" would seem to have con-siderable truth behind it, even if publicity alone is not generally sufficient to make a star.