Nina Pierson

Her life took a dramatic turn when she won a beauty contest judged by Rudolph Valentino. He helped her join the chorus of the show Artists and Models, and in 1924 she joined the Ziegfeld Follies. As a beautiful brunette, she attracted the attention of producer Florenz Ziegfeld, who was married to Billie Burke, and they had an affair. In 1931, she began dating millionaire Tommy Manville, who proposed with a thirteen carat diamond ring, but he kept postponing the wedding.

In July 1934, Nina married Paul Leviton, a French manufacturer, only to discover he was not the millionaire he claimed to be. She divorced him in Mexico in 1935 and received a $10,000 settlement. She then reunited with Manville, but he ended the romance in 1937. When she refused to leave their home, he had police forcibly remove her.

Soon after, she announced her engagement to Russian count Terence D'Abo, but that fell apart. Meanwhile, her ex-husband Leviton remarried and inherited five million dollars, prompting Nina to sue him, claiming their Mexican divorce was not legal. By this time she was addicted to sleeping pills and facing financial troubles. After breaking up with Terence, she got engaged to songwriter Clarence Moore, but then impulsively eloped with Percy Kirke, a British engineer, on April 21, 1938. They separated the next day and never saw each other again.

Tragically, on September 17, 1938, she died from an overdose of sleeping pills at age thirty-four. She was found in a Paris hotel room wearing a designer dress, surrounded by twelve empty champagne bottles. She was cremated and her ashes interred at Sparkman Hillcrest Memorial Park in Dallas, Texas.