Dorothy Page

Dorothy Page was born March 4 1904 in Northampton Pennsylvania As a college student in Pennsylvania she was picked by the Curtis Publishing Co to be a cover model for the Saturday Evening Post She married a medical student in 1925 and after he became a doctor they moved to Detroit his hometown to start his medical practice The Depression hit the US in the 1930s and many families needed extra income to survive so Dorothywho had majored in music in collegeauditioned for a singing spot in the Paul Whiteman band She got the job and was soon singing with Whitemans band on his NBC Radio show She became quite popular with audiences In 1935 she was a regular on the Paducah Plantation radio program of Irvin S Cobb That same year she was signed to a contract by Universal Pictures which put her in a lowerbudget musical with Ricardo Cortez called Manhattan Moon 1935 which clicked with audiences Her next film though King Solomon of Broadway 1935 was less successful and she was dropped by Universal A few years later she tried her luck in films again with a film for Republic Pictures Mama Runs Wild 1937 a Charles Ruggles Mary Boland comedy but in this film Dorothy didnt sing and the picture didnt do well critically or financially However B studio Grand National Pictures thought that Dorothy could save their studio which was on the financial ropes due to the disastrous Something to Sing About 1937 a milliondollar James Cagney musical that flopped bigtime and cost Grand National a fortune The studio signed Dorothy for a series of mediumbudgeted musical westerns with the gimmick of her being a singing cowgirl However medium budgeted for Grand National was very low budgeted anywhere else and the filmsthree in allwere not particularly successful as audiences didnt take to the idea of a singing cowgirl the way they had to a singing cowboy After the third film Grand National dropped the series and Dorothy as well and the studio soon went out of business Dorothy retired from acting to devote her time to her family Her first marriage having ended in a divorce she remarried again in 1939 to an attorney but he died of a heart attack in 1941 She soon remarried a third time to a rancher in Fresno California and moved there to help him run his ranching business for many years The 1950s were not good for her however Her marriage broke up and later she was diagnosed with cancer She moved to Florida after the divorce to be nearer to the hospital where she was receiving treatment for her disease but she succumbed to it in 1961