Mary Nolan: The Ziegfeld Girl Hollywood Tried to Erase

In 1922, a newspaper columnist wrote that only two people in America could bring every reporter in New York down to the docks just to watch them leave the country. One was the sitting President. The other was a twenty-year-old Ziegfeld Follies dancer named Imogene Bubbles Wilson. Twenty-six years later, she was found dead in a three-room bungalow apartment, ninety pounds, with a child's poem and a handwritten note lying beside her that read simply, if this were only true. She went by at least...