Jessie Reed

Reed first gained attention in show business with the Shubert production "The Passing Show of 1917" in New York City, followed by "The Passing Show of 1918." She performed at the Winter Garden in the Sigmund Romberg musical "Sinbad," starring Al Jolson. Florenz Ziegfeld hired her for his "Midnight Frolic" at the rooftop garden at the New Amsterdam Theatre, where she appeared alongside W.C. Fields, Fanny Brice, Will Rogers, and Eddie Cantor. In the summer of 1919, she appeared in the Ziegfeld Follies with Bert Williams, cast as "Barcarolle" in the production number "A Pretty Girl is Like a Melody." She became a favorite model for photographers Alfred Cheney Johnson and Edward Thayer Monroe, and was featured in Vogue Magazine. In 1923, she was cast as a dancer in the film "Enemies of Women." She continued as a Ziegfeld Girl until the mid-1920s.

Reed was notorious for her multiple marriages to well-to-do men. Her first husband was Texas vaudeville performer Ollie Debrow, whom she married in 1912 in Houston. They had a daughter in 1913. In 1916, Debrow shot and killed a young chauffeur named Leslie Nash outside a theater in San Antonio, claiming Nash was having an affair with Reed. After a much-publicized trial and a hung jury in June 1917, Debrow was acquitted in a retrial a month later. Reed divorced him in October 1917.

Reed moved to New York earlier that year with her friend Nora Reed, and perhaps adopting Nora's last name as a stage name, she became known as Jessie Reed. Her second marriage to "Dashing Dan" Caswell, a wealthy Ohio real estate developer's son, lasted from November 1920 to January 1922. She then married William Tandy Young, Jr., an advertising executive, in 1924, divorcing in 1927. In 1928, she married Leonard Minor Reno, a publishing executive and World War I flying ace; they divorced in 1935. After that, she worked as a hostess at nightclubs in Chicago. By 1940, she was reportedly ill and broke, and the Ziegfeld Club raised money for her. She died of pneumonia at the Chicago Osteopathic Hospital and was buried at Mt. Olivet Cemetery. Her obituary appeared in the New York Times, Washington Post, and Variety.