What a life Corinne Griffith.

I used to buy photographs and magazine covers of Corinne Griffith on Ebay –– what a beauty! Unfortunately, not many people remember her today, even in vintage film circles. Perhaps her faded luminary is due to the limited accessibility of her surviving work. TCM occasionally airs The Divine Lady (1928), but admittedly, the film is most appealing for its exorbitant ship-to-ship combat footage rather than its orchidaceous leading lady. Lewis Milestone's The Garden of Eden (1928), a romantic comedy mirroring Lubtisch-like sophistication with eye-popping production design by William Cameron Menzies, features Griffith at her most enchanting, and anyone curious about her will want to see it. Going further, Black Oxen (1923), based on Gertrude Atherton's science fiction novel of the same name, deals with themes of rejuvenation and deserves to be commercially available in complete form. Others are out there, but most people will never have the chance to see them.

That said, Griffith certainly had a thronging and successful life. Unlike many of her peers, she was an exceptionally shrewd businesswoman who started buying municipal tax-free bonds from the first day she began to earn and made millions in real estate. By the 1950s, she owned tons of property in the Los Angeles area and waged a spirited campaign against income tax. Sadly, some of her financial astuteness gets outweighed by implausible claims she made in the 1960s. But absurdities aside, Griffith headed her own production unit at First National from 1922 to 1930, wrote half a dozen books (with Papa's Delicate Condition adapted to the screen in 1963), and even wrote the lyrics to the fight song of the Washington Redskins, "Hail to the Redskins," during her marriage to franchise owner George Preston Marshall. At the time of her death, she was among the wealthiest women in the world.