The Dark Purple Menace

Bizzy Holt, the sun around which not one, but two, millionaires revolve in The Purple Menace and the Tobacco Prince, is based on Broadway chanteuse Libby Holman. Considered by some to be the very first torch singer, Libby arrived in Manhattan at the peak of the Roaring Twenties, a time of Ziegfeld Girls and blue rhapsodies, flappers and flagpole sitters. Despite Prohibition, New York City was home to 32,000 speakeasies. It was a brash, brassy town that seemed to exist for the sole purpose of pleasing itself, not unlike Libby herself.

The Purple Menace herself

Libby seemed to take the titles of the songs she sang—“Love for Sale,” “Body and Soul,” “Moanin’ Low”—as personal mantras when she arrived in the Big Apple from Ohio. By all contemporary accounts, she was not considered traditionally beautiful. But, as Byron Fogg tells Wright Williams my new novel, “Sexuality is ten percent looks, ninety percent attitude.” And Libby had attitude to burn. She was recklessly seductive and unapologetically ambitious, and by the start of the Thirties, Libby was the brightest star on Broadway. Manhattan columnists dubbed her “the Statue of Libby” and said she was “the best of those female troubadours with voices of smoke and tears.” Her distinctive basso contralto, bee-stung lips, and unconventional looks led to Times critic Brooks Atkinson labeling her “the dark purple menace.” Songwriter Howard Dietz described her as a “sloe-eyed houri.” Vanity Fair said, “Libby exuded carnality. She was not a good actress, but she used her affectations—the hand on the curtain, the careless dropping of a handkerchief—with considerable dramatic skill, and when she sang of lost love, of misbegotten affairs and broken dreams, she was wholly believable. Her songs sounded like confessions."

By 1930, Libby had become the obsession of two millionaires: Z. Smith Reynolds, heir to the R.J. Reynolds tobacco fortune, and Louisa d’Andelot Carpenter, the great-great-granddaughter of E. I. du Pont de Nemours, founder of the DuPont chemical empire. A fierce rivalry between Smith and Louisa ensued, with Libby eventually marrying Smith and living with him briefly at Reynolda, his family’s sprawling estate in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, before Smith’s life was ended in a tragic mystery I wouldn’t spoil here, even if I could. You’ll have to read the book.

The emotional toll of Smith’s demise and the ensuing scandal haunted Libby until the end of her life. Depressed further over the loss of multiple people close to her, including her young son, Libby committed suicide by carbon monoxide poisoning in the front seat of her Rolls Royce in 1971 at age 67. In addition to her legacy of groundbreaking music and her scandalous private life, Libby’s most lasting contribution to society is arguably the strapless dress. Fashion historians point to a 1930 photograph of Libby as the earliest known public appearance of a strapless, sleeveless gown and credit her as the dress’s first high-profile wearer if not its outright creator.

"I'd strap you in beside me, in your strapless."

-WEB3