A few months ago I wrote a piece about Mary Duncan, who gave such astonishing performances in F.W. Murnau’s “City Girl” and Frank Borzage’s “The River.”
After she retired to Palm Beach in the early 1930s, she was known as Mary Sanford, and her movie career rapidly receded into the background.
There are very few people left from the era when Sanford, along with Marjorie Merriweather Post, ruled Palm Beach society, but I recently talked to another hardy survivor, Celia Lipton Farris. Farris came to Palm Beach in the late 50s, at a point when Sanford had already been here for 25 years.
I thought that since Farris had been in show business as well, the subject of their respective acting careers might have come up.
No such luck.
“We never talked about it,” Farris told me. “She never mentioned it. Her career wasn’t theater, or theater people. Mary didn’t care about her career. I really don’t think she cared. She liked to go on safari and go shooting. She was fun, a great personality.”
Curiouser and curiouser.