C Unto the Second Generation
It’s likely you have heard of Hilda Ferguson, even possible you vaguely remember her. But it is not likely you have heard of Yolande Ugarte, who did do a bit in a Broadway show which ran about a week.
This is the story to date of Yolande Ugarte, and so it must also be to a degree the story of Hilda Ferguson, because Yolande, now in her 20’s, seemed compelled by a strange destiny to follow in the footsteps of her mother, Hilda Ferguson.
During the first 17 years of her life, Yolande led a sheltered existence with relatives in Baltimore. She went to school, had puppy-love crushes. And, like many girls of her age, she dreamed of the stage.
She had a vague notion that her mother, whom she hadn’t seen for years, had something to do with Broadway. Beyond that she knew little about her. The mother’s name was seldom mentioned where she lived.
One summer Yolande entered a beauty contest. She was chosen to represent Baltimore in the annual Atlantic City competitions. Her guardians hated to see her go, but her youthful, understandable enthusiasm overcame all objections.
Many Broadway producers visited the resort town the week “Miss America” was chosen. Among those seeking new faces for shows were Earl Carroll and Nils T. Granlund.
Yolande Ugarte is an attractive girl: tall, lissome, with nut-brown hair. The producers were much taken with her possibilities. They thought there was something vaguely reminiscent of Hilda Ferguson about Yolande. Granlund, who had been Hilda’s press agent 15 years before, told her so.
“Hilda Ferguson? Why, I believe my mother used that name,” Yolande replied.
He hired Yolande as a dancer in his new cabaret, the Midnight Sun. He changed her name to “Hilda Ferguson.” She was startlingly like her mother and Broadway was thrilled when Granlund introduced her as “Hilda Ferguson.”
The original Hilda Ferguson was a dainty, devastating beauty, born in Baltimore as Hilda Gibbons. At 15, she eloped with and married a young Honduran medical student, Ramond Ugarte. Yolande was born the next year.
Hilda and her husband separated soon afterward. Hilda came to New York and baby Yolande was left with relatives, with whom she lived thenceforth.
They still tell stories about the wide-eyed Hilda Ferguson, strange in New York, only 17, still naïve, though a grass widow and a mother.
It took her little time to make the grade. She became a “Follies” girl. Ziegfeld featured her as one of his most beautiful. Then started the hectic career that to Broadwayites made the name “Hilda Ferguson” symbolize an era. Hilda came to Broadway in 1921, shortly after the beginning of Prohibition. Churchill’s, Rectors, Reisenweber’s, Bustanoby’s, the Café de Paris, were fresh, green memories.
The speakeasies were getting going. The first of the bootleggers, later to inspire a bloody generation of crime, were feeling their way in wholesale law violation.
In this changing world, the girl decided to cast her lot.
Her tinseled career, running a parallel course with Prohibition, came to an end on a hospital cot two months and two days before Repeal.
During her short lifetime, Hilda went the pace with men and liquor. Young millionaires and old ones, powerful figures of the underworld and of politics were on the roster of her admirers. Her life reads like a history of America’s crazy years.
She was a flat-mate of Dot King when the mysterious slaying of that youngster, kept by a Philadelphia financier, rocked Manhattan.
Hilda, questioned by police, denied she knew a thing about it.
She was engaged to Aaron Benesch, multi-millionaire Baltimore furniture king, only to lose him to Helen Henderson, another glamorous show girl.
She was the sweetheart of Enoch (Nucky) Johnson, Atlantic City overlord, and was featured by him in an elaborate show in Atlantic City’s Silver Slipper, a night club he bought for the sole purpose of providing a stage for his current reigning favorite.
He gave her a $12,000 mink coat and a Rolls-Royce. They lived in half the second floor of the Ritz-Carlton.
She lost him to Kitty Ray, who claimed she was the ex-wife of Macoco, millionaire playboy of the Pampas, though he denied they ever wed.
Arthur Hammerstein was one of her most ardent admirers. Then it was rumored Hilda would marry Howard Lee, rich society scion.
She was questioned by police when “Tough Willie” McCabe, ex-bodyguard of Arnold Rothstein, was cut up in the “61 Club” stabbings. To General Sessions Judge Freschi, she exclaimed: “My dear, I was in the ladies’ room.”
The judge replied: “It’s very nice to be called ‘my dear.’ I don’t know whether I like it or not.”
He held her in $5,000 bail. She spent the night in Harlem Prison until she was bailed out the next day by “Feets” Edson, another colorful Broadway mobster.
“I put up the bail,” Edson said, “because she used to work for me.” Hilda had appeared in the Club Abbey, another resort of pungent Broadway memory, where Larry Fay was later killed.
She had refused to talk after Dot King was slain. She kept mum when police grilled her about Willie McCabe. Broadway said: “Hilda knows how to keep her mouth shut.”
So she forfeited the $5,000 bail for failing to appear.
When third-degreed about her dressing-room mate in The Music Box Revue—who was thought to have landed her job because her father was warden of Leavenworth Prison, where Nicky Arnstein, husband of Fannie Brice, star of the show, was on the rock pile—Hilda again “knew nothing.”
She started her own little brownstone-front upstairs speakeasy. The opening was all New York in one place. It was soon the scene of raids and battles.
When she went to Europe to duck a judgment she resented, for $270 for ten pairs of specially built shoes, she traveled incognito, with her Rolls-Royce, two maids and 27 trunks.
Though she never earned more than $150 a week, Hilda once walked into Texas Guinan’s, and bought a bracelet off Tex’s arm for $25,000 in big bills, just to “burn up” Kitty Ray, who was sitting a few tables away with “Nucky” Johnson.
She was 29 when she died, in New York Hospital, of peritonitis.
Many of her friends are still on Broadway. At least one gentleman with whom she was known to be close cracked a bottle of champagne for her daughter.
A girl who also succeeded Hilda in the affections of “Nucky” Johnson worked at the same club with her daughter until she left to get married. With a subtle touch of irony, fate had decreed that this girl, Virginia Biddle, should dance next to Yolande Ugarte, Hilda Ferguson’s daughter!
Hilda, Junior, after sweeping Broadway’s most ardent off their feet, eloped with Frank Parker, radio tenor. The marriage, a stormy one, lasted all of two years, after which the pair took their troubles to court.
The court decision which severed their ties only brought more squabbles in its wake. For, when Hilda, Junior, became the constant companion of Duncan McMartin, Canadian multi-millionaire, and McMartin’s wife inferred she was the cause of their separation, Parker hailed Hilda back into court.
He told the judge she was holding him up to so much ridicule he thought alimony payments should be stopped. The judge said Frank was no candidate for a monastery either, and ordered the payments to go on, with an urgent reminder to get the arrears up to date.
As these lines were written McMartin settled with his wife, obtained a divorce and married Hilda.