On Wednesday March 16, 1932, Ann Dvorak wrapped up shooting on Love is a Racket and was allowed to leave Warner Brothers early. The next morning she hopped a plane to Yuma, Arizona and by the afternoon had become Mrs. Leslie Fenton. The couple then traveled to Agua Caliente, a resort in Tijuana, Mexico for a brief celebration. When reports started surfacing that a small plane had crashed near El Centro, the worst was feared, but the happy couple finally arrived safe and sound back in Los Angeles by night’s end.

Dvorak had briefly met Leslie Fenton on New Years’s Eve and a month or so later was cast opposite him in The Strange Love of Molly Louvain. At the time of their nuptials, the couple had known each other less than three months. Fenton was ten years her senior and had walked out on a very promising film career in 1929 in order to travel abroad. Three months after their wedding day, he would convince his impressionable bride to do the same, irritating her bosses at Warner Bros who had just finalized the purchase of her contract from Howard Hughes.

Although Dvorak returned to Warner Bros in mid-1933 and would act in films through 1951, the momentum her film career had in 1932 would never be equaled. While a European honeymoon sounds dreadfully romantic, I sometimes cannot help but rail at Leslie Fenton and his influencing Ann to thumb her nose at the Brothers Warner. Who knows what film roles she would have gotten had she just played nice for a couple of years! As for the Fenton union, it would last until 1946 when the divorce was made final after a two year separation.

This concludes This Day in Ann Dvorak History.