10 Fascinating Facts About Ursula Parrott, Forgotten Author of Ex-Wife
By Marsha Gordon | On February 11, 2025 | Comments (0)
Once the most renowned ex-wife in America, bestselling author Ursula Parrott (1899 – 1957) was routinely described as “famous” in her lifetime when the press covered her new books, Hollywood deals, marriages and divorces, and run-ins with the law.
As I detail in Becoming the Ex-Wife: The Unconventional Life & Forgotten Writings of Ursula Parrott, she published twenty books from the late 1920s through the late 1940s, several of them bestsellers, and over one hundred short stories, articles, and novel-length magazine serials.
Ursula Parrott piloted for the Civilian Air Corps during World War II; co-founded a weekly rural Connecticut newspaper with a group including American Newspaper Guild founder Heywood Broun and her literary agent George Bye; was an informant in a federal drug investigation; and travelled the world, including an extended story-collecting trip to Russia in the 1930s. And between all her writing and other adventures, she married (and divorced) four times.
Born Katherine Ursula Towle, she was raised and educated in Boston and spent most of her adult years living in New York City, where she set many of her stories.
. . . . . . . . .
Becoming the Ex-Wife by Marsha Gordon
is available on Bookshop.org & wherever books are sold
. . . . . . . . .
After making hundreds of thousands of dollars writing — during the height of the Depression no less — Ursula lost it all, ending up homeless in the 1950s. Like many other influential, bestselling women writers, she was unfairly pigeonholed and dismissed as a romance magazine writer and her death in 1957 transpired with little notice.
I still wonder why Ursula’s contemporary Jazz Age writer, F. Scott Fitzgerald, is so much more famous than she, something about which I wrote for The Conversation (Why have you read ‘The Great Gatsby’ but not Ursula Parrott’s ‘Ex-Wife’?) and led a webinar for the National Humanities Center (Why You Should Start Teaching Ursula Parrott’s Ex-Wife).
Not one of her twenty novels remained in print until McNally Editions republished her 1929 bestseller, Ex-Wife, in 2023; it has now been translated into and republished in Italian, Swedish, Spanish, German, and Dutch.
. . . . . . . . .
Katherine Ursula Towle’s Radcliffe College yearbook photo, 1920
Courtesy of Schlesinger Library, Harvard Radcliffe Institute
. . . . . . . . .
She Skipped Classes, Cheated on Papers,
and Almost Didn’t Graduate from Radcliffe College
Katherine Ursula Towle was one of seventeen girls from the 1916 class at Boston’s Girls’ Latin School to take honors in her Radcliffe entrance examinations, despite a lackluster work ethic and mediocre grades in high school. At Radcliffe, she was chronically late to classes but demonstrated intellectual promise on the rare occasions that she applied herself.
Midway through her studies, in 1918, the chairman of the academic board at Radcliffe sent her father a letter telling him that Katherine needed to get her act together. The chairman reminded Dr. Towle that “in order to get the degree from Radcliffe, a student must pass in at least seventeen courses with grades above ‘D’ in two-thirds of them.” In her freshman and sophomore years, Katherine had, in fact, earned Ds in German, history, botany, and even in her major —English.
Dr. Towle must have made his displeasure known, since his daughter turned things around enough to successfully earn her English degree on June 23, 1920. Still, Radcliffe’s 1920 yearbook reads: “I don’t suppose Katharine [sic] Towle is here; she is probably cramming at the Widow’s.” The class president also dedicated a bit of doggerel to Kitty (as she was nicknamed):
She cut classes all during the year,
Her finals then filled her with fear.
At the Widow’s she learned
What from profs, she had spurned,
A proceeding most queer.
“The Widow’s” was the nickname for Harvard graduate William Whiting Nolen’s “cram parlor,” which sold notes from classes and offered ghostwritten papers for Harvard and Radcliffe students. The Widow’s was an open secret, and Katherine’s use of it to make up for her inattention and truancy was publicly outed in her college yearbook.
She Wanted to Drop out of College to Become a Gynecologist
That Radcliffe degree was also nearly derailed by Katherine’s decision to drop out of Radcliffe in her junior year, during which she decided she wished to “go into medicine and specialize in obstetrics.”
“I always had the idea, after that obstetrical incident I ran into during the war,” she later recalled without specifying what the episode was, “that it was pretty awful for any woman to have to have a man doctor around during all that messiness. I still think that, too.”
Her father, however, “refused flat to let [her] go to medical college—said the profession was no place for women, that they lost all their delicacy and fastidiousness, and morals and what all.” Being a doctor was “not a modest occupation for a woman,” chides one of Ursula Parrott’s characters, no doubt in an echo of her father’s rejection of this career path.
Dr. Towle resorted to a bribe to convince his daughter to stay the course of her studies at Radcliffe: he bought her a new car and let her “keep it around college most of the time, and a few odds and ends like that.”
In retrospect, she was glad to have been steered away from a possible gynecological career despite the fact that she was onto something about women’s reliance on often unsympathetic men to deal with reproductive issues. It was something she repeatedly experienced and wrote about throughout her life.
. . . . . . . . .
Newpaper ad, 1929
. . . . . . . . .
Ursula Earned Her First Big Paycheck
as the Stock Market Crashed
After her first marriage to Lindesay Marc Parrott failed, Ursula quit her day job writing advertising copy for department stores and threw herself into writing a book, a very slightly fictionalized version of her travails. At first anonymously published, Ex-Wife came out in August 1929 and changed the course of her life overnight.
A tale from the trenches of marriage, infidelity, divorce, dating, and remarriage in boozy, dissipated Manhattan, Ex-Wife is a fascinating, very frank novel filled with infidelities (committed by both husband and wife), spousal conflict and the male double standard. It’s also about how women navigated the logistics of post marital life in 1920s New York.
The novel became a sensation and a bestseller, earning its young author her first big paycheck in October 1929, the very month the stock market crashed. Mercifully, it was too late for her to have invested in the market, which was on the cusp of sending the entire nation into fiscal collapse.
. . . . . . . . .
. . . . . . . . . .
Ex-Wife Led to Norma Shearer’s Only Best Actress Academy Award
Ex-Wife wasn’t just successful; it became a cultural phenomenon. MGM snapped up the rights to it, although they were forced by the Hays Office to retitle the adaptation The Divorcee (1930) to distance the film from the scandalous, censorable content of its source material (which included both a rape and a harrowing abortion scene).
Norma Shearer asked her husband, MGM’s boy wonder producer Irving Thalberg, to give her the female leading role. But Thalberg thought his wife wasn’t the right type for Parrott’s “very modern and unconventional heroine.”
The plucky Shearer hired then-unknown George Hurrell, a photographer newly arrived in Hollywood, to take a series of pictures of her in “a luxurious and revealing negligee” procured for the occasion. She left the photographs for her husband to discover on his office desk, later recalling “I had to prove to Irving that I could look sexy.”
The stunt worked; Shearer got the role and subsequently won her only Academy Award for Best Actress as a result.
Jimmy Stewart Got His First Leading Role Thanks to Ursula,
and F. Scott Fitzgerald Was Hired to Adapt One of Her Stories
In the early 1930s, Ursula had published dozens of shorts stories and novels, most of which revolved around successful career women and their failed marriages. Hollywood couldn’t get enough.
Her 1935 novel, Next Time We Live, was about two career-hungry characters, Cicely and Christopher, whose ambitions complicate their marriage and child-rearing. When Universal adapted it into a film in 1936 (the studio retitled it Next Time We Love out of concerns that audiences might mistakenly think the film was about reincarnation) they cast Margaret Sullavan as the complex, sympathetic wife and mother who wants more out of her life.
The Boston Globe reviewer was wowed by the film, especially the “superb performance of a young newcomer” whom the reviewer praised as worth watching for in future films: a young James Stewart in his first starring role.
As further proof of Ursula’s Hollywood status, in 1938 MGM hired F. Scott Fitzgerald to adapt one of her stories, “Infidelity,” into a screenplay. He worked on it for months but the censors stopped the project from going into production.
. . . . . . . . . .
Ursula in her Hollywood days, early 1930s
. . . . . . . . . .
Ursula Had No Love For Hollywood
When she made her first trip to Hollywood in April 1931, Ursula Parrott took the town by storm. “Of all the writers brought to Hollywood,” Mollie Merrick wrote in her Boston Globe column, “Ursula Parrott is perhaps coining the most money at the moment. That girl writes ‘em rapidly. They’re sold before she has had so much as a chance to jot the idea out sketchily on paper.”
Parrott also got in on the celebrity author act when she renamed Kansas City–born Betty Grable “Frances Dean.” The name didn’t stick, but Grable’s career under her birth name did. Parrott did not, however, enjoy being in Hollywood. In a letter to her agent, she complained that every morning she felt like she had “died and waked up in a sort of gaudy hell—what with all that California sunlight.”
She summed up her feelings about the town and its denizens with a perfectly New Yorker quip: “The best clothes, and the worst conversations in the world.”
Ursula and Her Son Were Carjacked by a Convicted Murder
In 1937, when her son Marc was thirteen, Ursula rented a car and drove from Tucson to Florence, Arizona, stopping in small towns along the way. As they were departing Nogales, a young man whom she later described as “nice mannered, wearing a brown suit and an olive drab hat, and about five feet ten inches tall” asked for a ride.
“I told him that I did not want to take him because my car was loaded with luggage,” she explained to the press, adding, “If I had been in the east I would never have taken him but he seemed a nice man and I relented.”
Once on the road, the man’s demeanor changed. He drew a gun to enact “a typical western holdup,” forcing Ursula and Marc out of the car. The man drove off with her purse and their luggage in the rental car, leaving mother and son to walk the highway until a passing motorist eventually picked them up.
The perpetrator of this carjacking was Johnny Quantrell, a convicted first-degree murderer serving a life sentence! Quantrell had just pulled off his fourth prison escape and was eventually captured and returned to jail.
Adding insult to injury, Ursula was sued for $1,600 by the rental car agency “because she could not return the automobile.” Despite newspaper headline proof of what happened, the agency charged that “Mrs. Parrott had refused to pay.” This was evidence—if any was needed—that trouble followed Ursula wherever she went.
She Sprung a Soldier from a Military Stockade
for a Night on the Town
A few days before New Year’s Eve 1942, while still married to her fourth and final husband (Fred Schermerhorn), Ursula liberated an army private from a Miami military stockade, where he was awaiting trial for a marijuana drug bust (Private Michael Neely Bryan had hidden reefer in a radio phonograph that Ursula had bought for him; he took it on a flight from NYC to Miami).
On the afternoon of December 28, 1942, at approximately 5:00 p.m., Ursula—wearing a bright yellow hat and driving a green Ford sedan—drove off the base with Bryan concealed in the back seat of her car.
Because Bryan had a pending marijuana charge in New York City, Ursula earned herself a federal indictment alleging that she “aided a private of the United States Army to desert, and did harbor, conceal and protect him in said desertion” and that “she did interfere with the armed forces by influencing Subject, Bryan, to disregard orders and instructions of the United States Army.”
These were serious accusations. The Los Angeles Times headline was appropriately dramatic: “Ursula Parrott Seized by Federal Agents.” After some crazy headlines and surprises (she was actually a paid informant, according to her FBI file), Ursula was acquitted of all charges in February 1943.
. . . . . . . . . .
Ursula in 1934
. . . . . . . . . .
Some Lost Ursula Parrott Manuscripts
Might be Out There, Somewhere
When Ursula’s life was falling apart in the late 1940s and early 1950s, she moved from hotel to hotel, often fleeing before she was confronted with bills she was unable to pay.
In 1949, she was staying at the Henry Hudson Hotel on 58th Street in New York City, just south of Central Park, where she ran up a hefty $1,746 bill. When she snuck out of the hotel, she left behind what was described as “a purely fictitious check for $1,500” and “six pieces of luggage—loaded with ‘miscellaneous valueless items’ including an old scale.”
She also left a note in which she announced that she was “walking out of here tomorrow afternoon you understand for 24 hours with a suitcase, hatboxes, leaving behind all manuscripts, heaps of clothes and so on.”
Ursula never stopped writing even as her publication fortunes fell, including a memoir in which she might have shared so many details about her life. Although the Henry Hudson Hotel management described the manuscripts she left behind as “valueless” when they were interviewed by the New York papers, I’ve fantasized that some hotel maid or policeman might have squirreled those manuscripts away somewhere. Perhaps they are just waiting to be discovered in someone’s closet, attic, or basement?
. . . . . . . . . .
The 2023 McNally edition of Ex-Wife
. . . . . . . . . .
Despite Her Famous Life, Not a Single
Newspaper Ran an Obituary for Ursula Parrott
When Ursula died in the fall of 1957 in the charity ward of a New York hospital (of what her son described as “a mercifully fast cancer”) not a single U.S. newspaper published an obituary — not even in her hometown of Boston, where she was buried in the family plot at Holyhood Cemetery. Walter Winchell dedicated a mere sentence to her demise, though he had given space generously to her setbacks in his column for years: “Author Ursula Parrott passed away in a local hosp last week.”
Ursula Parrott’s first obituary was published in July 2024, as part of the New York Times “Overlooked” series.
. . . . . . . . .
Contributed by Marsha Gordon. Marsha Gordon is Professor of Film Studies at North Carolina State University, a recent Fellow at the National Humanities Center, and an NEH Public Scholar. You can learn more about Ursula Parrott in Becoming the Ex-Wife: The Unconventional Life & Forgotten Writings of Ursula Parrott, which was reviewed in the The New Yorker, the New York Times, LA Review of Books, the New York Sun, and the New York Review of Books.
She has appeared on numerous podcasts to discuss Parrott’s life, including the Lost Ladies of Lit Podcast and the Bio Podcast with Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer Debby Applegate. Marsha is currently writing a biography of the pioneering Golden Age Hollywood filmmaker Dorothy Arzner.
Leave a Reply