Hollywood Friends
Greta Granstedt

Eraine Granstedt was modeling at San Francisco Art Association in the summer of 1926. Eraine
had already lived longer and harder than most nineteen-year-olds. So much so that she had
abandoned her given first name and the infamy it carried.

She was born Irene Granstedt, and grew up twenty miles south of San Francisco in Mountain View,
California. In the summer of 1922 she leapt from obscurity to the front page of the tabloids.
“Schoolgirl, 14, Shoots Sweetheart!” Irene, said the papers, was having a troubled relationship with
her boyfriend, Harold Galloway, seventeen. She borrowed a gun from a friend and, later that
evening, pointed it at Harold. He grabbed her hand. The gun went off. Now Harold lay dying, his
guts stewing with peritonitis, while Irene languished in custody. For weeks the headlines
expounded the story of the murderous maid and her dying beau, with side bars cursing the collapse
of society this calamity exemplified. But Harold failed to die. Irene got off with juvenile detention
and banishment from Mountain View.
Yola D'Avril

Date of Birth: 8 April 1907, Lille, France


Date of Death: 2 March 1984, Port Hueneme, California, USA
Barely a year later, she made the headlines again. Lying about her age to the judge, she had married Robert Bleibler, twenty, of
Menlo Park. The marriage was annulled in less than a year. Meanwhile, Harold Galloway, who had fully recovered, was being
sought for statutory rape of his new fifteen-year-old girlfriend in San Mateo. Harold was a slow learner.

Irene went to San Francisco. The crowd she mingled with might later have been called beatniks or hippies. In 1926, they were
bohemians. She remarried, again with short success.

Now she was Eraine, the model. She was single again and living on Hyde Street with her brother Theodore, who was now going by
Theo.

One of the most popular weekend binges was a round trip to Los Angeles on one of the huge steamers, the Harvard or the Yale.
They were the fastest ships on the water at the time and were elegantly arranged with staterooms, fine dining, ballroom, and
orchestra. One could leave Friday evening, dance all night each way and return to work Monday morning exhausted. In the early
summer of 1927, Bessie and Eraine booked passage to Los Angeles. They were only going one way, however, with no plans to
return.

It must have been a long and magical night. When they arrived, Eraine was no more. It was Greta Granstedt, the young starlet
from Sweden, that stepped from the ship, and went straight to Hollywood for thirty-some years of bit-part roles.

www.gcrg.org/bqr/13-2/bessie.html

Date of Birth:13 July 1907, Scandia, Kansas
Date of Death:7 October 1987, Los Angeles, California, USA

Spouse:
Howard Thomas (1965 - ?)
Major Lawrence Wright (January 1944 - 1946) (annulled)
Max de la Vega (1938 - July 1942) (divorced)
Marcel Olis (1934 - ?) (divorced)
Ramon Ramos (November 1933 - 1934) (divorced)
? (c. 1923 - ?) (annulled)
? ( ? - ?) (divorced)
Monte Blue
Alice Terry

Born: Alice Frances Taaffe
Date of Birth: July 29, 1899 Vincennes, Indiana


Date of Death: December 22, 1987 California
Renee Adoree