Libby Holman helped popularize songs that that became standards, such as "Body and Soul."
This singer was born Elizabeth Lloyd Holzman at home in Cincinnati, Ohio, on May 23, 1904, to middle-class parents of German Jewish descent.
Libby was not raised in the Jewish faith. Her parents--Alfred Holzman (a lawyer/stockbroker) and Rachel (Workum) Holzman, a schoolteacher--had converted to the Christian Science church.
In 1923, after completing a major in French in three years, Libby Holman was the youngest woman to graduate from the University of Cincinnati.
At nineteen, she moved to New York with with a goal of making it on Broadway.
In 1925, she landed her first significant role in the play The Sapphire Ring and soon after joined the road company of The Greenwich Village Follies. Her big break came in Richard Rodgers and Lorenz Hart’s musical revue, The Garrick Gaieties (1925), which ran over 211 performances.
Her nearsightedness provided an unexpectedly alluring stage persona, while her palate, an eighth of an inch askew, helped produce her throaty sound.
Holman, a celebrity, landed roles in Merry-Go-Round (1927), Rainbow (1928), and Gambols (1929).
In 1929, she sang “Moanin’ Low” in Clifton Webb’s The Little Show.
During this period, Clifton Webb introduced Holman to Louisa Carpenter, a millionaire member of the du Pont family. By the time Howard Dietz and Arthur Schwartz’s Three’s a Crowd opened at the Selwyn Theater on October 15, 1930, Carpenter and Holman had become inseparable lovers (her bisexuality became the talk of Broadway, only the first of many tabloid scandals she inspired in the thirties). Costarring with Fred Allen, Holman sang “Give Me Something to Remember You By” and “Body and Soul.”
Zachary Smith Reynolds, heir to the R.J. Reynolds tobacco fortune, began, followed Holman’s career. An aviator, he flew from city to city courting her attentions until November 16, 1931, when, just days after his divorce from Anne Cannon was finalized, the two were married by a justice of the peace in Monroe, Michigan. The famously ill-fated marriage ended tragically at the Reynolds estate, “Reynolda,” near Winston-Salem, North Carolina.
On July 5, 1932, Reynolds was shot in his bedroom. He died the next morning in the hospital, a coroner declaring the death a suicide.
Two grand juries approved murder charges against Holman, who had been with Reynolds at the time of the shooting, and against Ab Walker, Reynolds’s best friend.
Holman went into hiding with Louisa Carpenter, and eventually the case was dropped through the influence of the Reynolds family. When Holman gave birth on January 9, 1933, to Christopher “Topper” Reynolds, it brought a new heir to the R. J. Reynolds tobacco fortune and became one of the biggest news stories of the year, later inspiring two Hollywood scandal films: Reckless, starring Jean Harlow (1935), and Written on the Wind (1956).
