The Times Great Women's Lives

by Sue Corbett

  She was born Virginia Katherine McMath in Independence, Missouri, an only child, and owed her early success in show business to the shrewd guidance of her formidable mother, Lela Rogers, who later became a Hollywood scriptwriter. It was mother who decided that she was not ready to sign the film contract of a child actress. The name Ginger was given to her by a cousin, Helen, who could not say her “v”s. Because of this, Virginia became Dinda and then Ginger.

  Her professional debut still came at the age of 14, as a dancer with Eddie Foy’s troupe at Fort Worth, Texas. She went on to win a charleston contest, and thus launched her professional career. She worked extraordinarily hard as a young girl, criss-crossing the country in trains with her mother, performing in theatres, clubs and on the New York stage, living out of suitcases in hotel rooms. It was this discipline which gave her the strength to shoulder such an extraordinary workload later in Hollywood. She appeared in some nine films in 1933 alone.

  Having formed a Vaudeville act, Ginger and Pepper, with her first husband, Jack Pepper, and appeared in several short films, she arrived on Broadway in 1929 when she played the second female lead in the musical Top Speed and went into another Broadway show, George Gershwin’s Girl Crazy. The Gershwins had written “But Not For Me” especially for her and she opened the show with the lovely “Embraceable You”. During rehearsals, the producers were dissatisfied with this last number and called in the expert help of Astaire, then starring on Broadway with his sister Adele. Astaire watched the routine in the theatre lobby and said: “Here, Ginger, try it with me.”

  In 1930 she made her first feature film Young Man of Manhattan, singing and wise-cracking as the girlfriend of Charles Ruggles and uttering a famous line: “Cigarette me, big boy.” After serving an apprenticeship in broad comedy she switched with immediate success to musicals. She was the social climbing Anytime Annie in 42nd Street (1933) and had a strong supporting part as a wisecracking bottle blonde in Gold Diggers of 1933 (1933), a Busby Berkeley extravaganza and her first real break.

  One day on set she was handed the opening song, “We’re in the Money”, and told to learn it by the evening, ready for the next day’s shooting. She went into a corner and after three hours had become so confident that she started improvising on the lyrics with nonsense words: “Er’way in-hay the oney-may.” Darryl Zanuck stopped to listen and was so impressed that he insisted she do it exactly the same way to open the film. This is how the film starts, the camera zooming in on Rogers wearing nothing but a coin-specked gold bikini.

  She first appeared with Astaire in Flying Down to Rio (1933). The nominal female lead was Dolores del Rio and Astaire was making only his second film but Fred and Ginger stole the picture. They were paired again in The Gay Divorcee (1934) and while Rogers continued to make a string of excellent non-musicals, her international popularity rested on her work with Astaire.

  In films like Top Hat (1935), Follow the Fleet (1936), Swing Time (1936) and Shall We Dance (1936) the couple gave cinemagoers some of their happiest moments. With banal plots, usually Astaire in romantic pursuit of Rogers, they were the sheerest escapism and at the same time consummate art, even if Rogers’s feet were often raw and bleeding by the time the demanding Astaire decided that a take was good enough to print.

  Despite the inevitable speculation, their partnership in fact never strayed from a professional footing. They rarely saw each other on a social basis, and Astaire’s wife, who insisted on coming on to the set, would sit on the sidelines and knit. She would also vet scripts with Astaire to make sure there was no kissing between Astaire and Rogers. Ginger was mildly amused by this, and by the fact that critics never quite judged her on the same level as Astaire as a dancer. Her favourite cartoon had a couple commenting on a poster for Astaire: “Sure he was great, but don’t forget Ginger Rogers did everything he did, backwards and in high heels.”

  After playing real-life dancers in their ninth film, The Story of Vernon and Irene Castle (1939), Astaire and Rogers went their separate ways. Wanting to prove herself as a dramatic actress, Rogers found no difficulty striking out on her own and during the 1940s she was one of America’s highest-paid women. Notable among her films during the period were the comedy Bachelor Mother (1939), with David Niven, as a shopgirl who finds an abandoned baby, and the drama Kitty Foyle (1948), for which she won her only Oscar as a proud young Irish salesgirl who marries above her class and comes to regret it.

  In 1943 she played the title role in Roxie Hart, sporting a bubble cut for a boisterous piece about a showgirl taking a murder rap. After Kitty Foyle, her best juvenile role was in The Major and the Minor (1942), a comedy about a girl posing as a child to travel half-fare. It marked the American directing debut of Billy Wilder.

  Rogers remained a star until the mid-1950s, though her films became gradually less distinguished. Replacing Judy Garland, who withdrew through illness, she partnered Astaire again, in the MGM musical The Barkleys of Broadway (1949). The reunion proved popular with the public but the film was not up to the standard of their 1930s work.

  In 1952 she played opposite Cary Grant and a chimpanzee in the Howard Hawks comedy Monkey Business, and the pick of her later roles was as the gangster’s moll in Tight Spot (1955), with Edward G. Robinson. Her last film appearance was as Jean Harlow’s mother in Harlow in 1965.

  Long before this she had been trying to widen her options through television and the stage. A bizarre and forgettable television project was a live BBC musical, Carissima, transmitted in 1959, in which she neither sang nor danced. She was luckier in the theatre, taking over from Carol Channing in the Broadway production of Hello Dolly! (1965) and starring in a London production of Mame (1969) for which her fee of £250,000 was the highest then paid to an artist in the West End. In the late 1970s she had her last incarnation as a revue artist touring America and appearing at the London Palladium. She published her autobiography, Ginger: My Story, in 1991.

  Like her mother, Ginger was a devout Christian Scientist. This gave her an almost puritanical streak in some respects, a determination never to let her standards slip, or to be influenced by Hollywood habits of which she disapproved. For example, in keeping with her Christian Science faith she never drank, and though she threw many Hollywood parties, they were teetotal affairs.

  Her five marriages all ended in divorce and there were no children. Her second husband was the actor Lew Ayres; her third, Jack Briggs; her fourth another actor, Jacques Bergerac; and her fifth, William Marshall, an actor and producer.

  Ginger Rogers, actress and dancer, was born on July 16, 1911. She died on April 25, 1995, aged 83

  ALISON HARGREAVES

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  THE FIRST WOMAN TO CONQUER MOUNT EVEREST SOLO WITHOUT SUPPLEMENTARY OXYGEN

  AUGUST 21, 1995

  Alison Hargreaves was always determined to meet the toughest challenges head on. It was this that drove her forward to earn both a place in the record books and an international reputation as a superlative mountaineer. In May this year she became the first woman and only the second person ever to conquer Everest solo, without supplementary oxygen. Undeterred by the long-frozen corpses of two previous climbers which she passed on the way, she braved night-time temperatures dropping as low as minus 30 degrees centigrade and an agonisingly rarefied atmosphere to make her ascent to the roof of the world.

  “There is no gain without risk,” Hargreaves said. She climbed not because of some deep-rooted death wish, but because she loved mountains with a passion. “Most climbers,” she said, “enjoy living more than normal people because they have so much to live for.”

  Hargreaves joked that she had an ego as big as Mount Everest, but she firmly counteracted the opprobrium of those who accused her of selfishly putting her career as a climber before her duties as a mother. She felt that by going out to tackle challenges she had more to offer than if she had settled to be a housewife. “By climbing I can give my children 100 per cent rather than be a frustrated mother at home,” she said. It was
with her children in mind that she balanced her ambition with an eminently practical caution, showing herself wise enough to turn back even when much effort and money had been invested in a trip.

  In 1994 her first attempt on Everest was abandoned just 1,500ft from the summit because of threatening weather conditions. It felt, Hargreaves said, “as though someone had scraped away everything inside and left me empty”. When on a second attempt she finally achieved her goal on May 13 this year she once more proved her devotion to her children in a radio message transmitted amid tears of joy and exhaustion from the summit: “I am on top of the world and I love you dearly.”

  First introduced to rock climbing at Belper High School in Derbyshire, by the age of 14 Hargreaves was travelling all over Britain in search of testing rock faces. At 18, instead of following family tradition and going to Oxford to read mathematics, she outfaced parental disapproval and announced that she was going to move in with her boyfriend Jim Ballard, an amateur rock climber who was later to become her husband. Together they set up an outdoor equipment business in Matlock.

  By 21 Hargreaves was building up a formidable stamina by running for two hours every day up the steep hillsides of the Derbyshire Peak District, and by 1986, when she travelled to the Himalayas for the first time, she knew that she had made the right decision and that she wanted to become a professional mountaineer.

  Hargreaves was five-and-a-half months pregnant when she tackled the 4,600ft north face of the Eiger. But her first child, Tom, was in the end nearly born out in the wilds of Derbyshire when Hargreaves’s waters broke while she was out bouldering with her husband. After that her life calmed a little as she settled into a four-year career break. She had a second child, Kate, in 1991. During these years she enjoyed taking up a very different sort of challenge as chairman of the local playgroup, yet she still kept herself in peak physical condition, running early in the mornings before the household had arisen.

  In 1993 the family sold their home and business to finance a trip to the Alps where they travelled and lived in an old Land Rover so that Hargreaves could climb. There she broke previous records by becoming the first person to climb solo, and in one season, the classic six north faces of the Alps: those of the Eiger, Matterhorn, Dru, Badile, Grandes Jorasses and Cima Grande mountains.

  With this first major achievement under her belt, she returned to Britain, and bought a house at Spean Bridge in Inverness-shire, in the shadow of Ben Nevis. But it was not long before Hargreaves was off again to make her famed ascent of the 29,028ft Everest, from which she returned back to base camp on May 16 this year.

  Most mountaineers would have hung up their crampons for a while, but not Hargreaves. By June 12 she had set off for the Karakoram range, ready to conquer the Himalayan K2, which at 28,244ft is the second highest and technically the most difficult mountain to climb in the world. It has a reputation for unreliable weather and terrible storms.

  There have been hundreds of ascents of Everest, and comparatively few fatalities. But, since the first conquest of K2 in 1954, out of just 113 confirmed ascents there have been 37 deaths. The body of Julie Tullis, the first and only British woman to climb the peak, is buried in the snow up there, after she died in a blizzard in 1986.

  It is little wonder that K2 has been called the Savage Mountain. But Hargreaves was hopeful. If she had succeeded on K2 she already had plans under way to go straight on to Kangchenjunga, the world’s third highest peak on the Sikkim-Nepal border. Hargreaves set out to climb K2 via its southeast ridge without bottled oxygen, fixing ropes, high-altitude porters or fixed camps. She reached the summit with two other climbers on August 13 but, on her descent, was overcome by a fierce storm. Exactly how she died remains unclear.

  She is survived by her husband, and by their son and daughter.

  Alison Hargreaves, mountaineer, was born on February 17, 1962. She died on August 13, 1995, aged 33

  PAT SMYTHE

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  INTERNATIONAL SHOWJUMPER WHO WAS THE FIRST WOMAN TO WIN AN OLYMPIC MEDAL IN THE SPORT

  FEBRUARY 28, 1996

  In international showjumping, one of the few sports in which men and women come together on level terms, Pat Smythe was the world’s most successful woman ever. Lieutenant-Colonel Sir Harry Llewellyn, an Olympic gold medal winner, described her as “an all-time great, the best lady rider I have ever seen”.

  With Prince Hal and Tosca in particular, two difficult and temperamental horses, bought for a song, she had an amazing run of successes. This led to other people sending her their horses to jump, including Lord King of Wartnaby; the Hon Dorothy Paget, the eccentric racehorse owner, and Robert Hanson, master of the Grove and Rufford Hunt and father of Lord Hanson.

  But Pat Smythe was not one of today’s sponsored sports stars. In order to get into showjumping, pay her horse’s keep and show entry fees, she worked weekends and in school holidays, milking cows, repairing farm walls and selling vegetables.

  She became a household name because, during her 17 years at the top, television seemed besotted by showjumping. At the start of her international career the sport was still largely dominated by the officers of such smart pre-war cavalry schools as Saumur, Tor di Quinto and Fort Riley. They rode big horses and they rode in uniform. The TV audiences warmed to the fresh young woman in black coat and cap, riding a pony-size horse, yet still able to beat the men on big occasions — even to beat them with ease.

  Smythe won grand prix events on her own horses in more countries than any man or woman has done since. She won in the United States, France, Belgium, Spain, Portugal, Italy, Switzerland, The Netherlands, and Denmark. In Australia, South Africa and South America she won grand prix events on borrowed horses that she had first seen less than a week before. In 1956 she was the first woman to ride in the showjumping at the Olympic Games and the first to win a medal, a bronze. Women had previously been banned by the Olympic authorities on the ground that it was not fair to them to compete against the men. Indeed in her early days Smythe sometimes inadvertently caused embarrassment. “Sorry about this, we were not expecting a woman rider to be as good as you,” said Mr Justice Wylie, chairman of the Royal Dublin Horse Show, presenting her with the prize for the show’s most successful international rider — the prize was a silver cigar box.

  Yet Smythe had neither the strong leg nor strong back thought to be essential for a leading rider at international level. Her gift was rather the rapport she developed with each and every horse. Horses were treated as friends with whom to co-operate for the best results, and never as machines to be booted into the winning slot. Horse and rider blended with a harmony seldom seen in top sport. Together they would saunter into a big arena, always at the walk, and not looking at all like winners. But Smythe seemed to imbue her mounts with her indomitable will to win.

  Her favourite was Prince Hal. She saw him finishing last in the Kim Muir Chase at the Cheltenham Gold Cup meeting. It was love at first sight. Closer inspection revealed a bowed tendon. Amazingly in the circumstances, she and her mother reckoned they could get the horse sound and turn him into a showjumper. They paid £300 for him. He won them thousands in return. On the North American jumping circuit, Smythe was to win all five international events at Harrisburg on Prince Hal. The headlines in the local paper ran: “One Girl Beats All the Americans.” Smythe repeated the performance on the same horse at the even more competitive Brussels International.

  She was brilliant on the big occasions. She won the Gold Buttons of Algiers on Prince Hal, Africa’s most coveted showjumping prize. But perhaps the most memorable aspect of this win was the outstandingly high quality of the competition. Smythe beat three men who between them had taken four Olympic gold medals and one world championship.

  Prince Hal was at the height of his powers at the time of the 1960 Rome Olympics. Smythe was near to tears when she was picked for the team without him but the team trainer, Colonel Jack Talbot-Ponsonby, declared that he would not have “a thin-skinned broken-down racehorse
on his team”. A Weedon cavalryman of the old school, his idea of an Olympic horse was one that looked like a pre-war officer’s charger. Smythe had the last laugh. Riding Prince Hal at the very next show after the Rome Olympics she beat both the gold and silver medallists in a major event.

  There is always danger and sometimes damage when competing at the highest level on a fiery, difficult horse. On Tosca’s first international abroad, at Nice, Smythe took a crashing fall. She lay on the ground motionless and spectators wondered if she was still alive. She did not jump again at that show. But four months later horse and rider took the most important national title of them all, the Leading Showjumper of the Year championship at Wembley. And for two years they were to be the biggest money-winners in British showjumping.

  Smythe took four individual European titles. She was the first woman to win the famous international, the Hickstead Derby, riding Robert Hanson’s Flanagan. Lord King’s Mr Pollard finally won her the Queen Elizabeth Cup, after a string of seconds on other horses. On two of the four occasions that she won the Royal International Show supreme championship it was on the Hon Dorothy Paget’s Scorchin, a horse she was later to drive to a Ralli cart round the Gloucestershire roads near her home.

  However, though showjumping was Smythe’s career it was not one that dominated her life. In her spare time at international shows she would be polishing up her languages, visiting an incredible number of local sights, and in the evening in the hotel she would strum local songs on her guitar, while everybody joined in the singing. She also became a bestselling author of children’s books, as well as spending the latter years of her life working for the preservation of rare animals and the environment.

  Pat Smythe was born in Barnes. Her childhood was in many ways difficult, especially during the Second World War. Her father, a civil engineer Major Eric Smythe, was already an invalid by 1939 and her mother had to give up her job schooling horses for the polo proprietor, Billy Walsh, to nurse him herself. He died in 1944.