Actress Evelyn Keyes survived a slew of alcoholic husbands. Was she like them, or merely a child of one?
Co-Dependents of the Month:
Actress Evelyn Keyes, who played Scarlett O’Hara’s younger sister Suellen in “Gone with the Wind”and was involved with some, shall we say, very interesting men, dead at 91. Her first marriage to the “heavy drinking”Englishman Barton Bainbridge ended when he committed suicide. She married film director Charles Vidor in 1943 and divorced him two years later. Vidor was married four times. Her marriage to director John Huston in 1946 ended in 1950. Huston was married five times. She was, apparently, devastated and sought analysis, concluding that she “was always looking for the same man: a strong father figure.”She lived with the “flamboyant”(aka alcoholic) producer Mike Todd for three years before her last marriage, to bandleader Artie Shaw in 1957, which followed a familiar pattern. Shaw was a self-described “very difficult man”and married eight times. He often disparaged his wives publicly and when asked why he was estranged from his children he responded, “I didn’t get along with the mothers, so why should I get along with the kids?”Lucy Barry Robe in her magnificent “Co-Starring Famous Women and Alcohol” found that the odds of alcoholism in someone married and divorced four times are 85%. Indeed, why should Shaw get along with anyone”except those he intended to sweep off their feet? As for Keyes, one explanation is alcoholism. Another, however, is that her “strong father figure”was an alcoholic, which might explain her repeated involvements with likely addicts.