Trader Horn's Goddess

Edwina Booth who thrilled cinemaddicts of 1931 as the blonde goddess of Trader Horn reemerged in last week's news in strange contrast to the vigorous, vibrant creature the public remembered on the screen. She has been bedridden and confined to a dark room for two years, the result, she claims, of some tropical disease which she contracted while producing the picture in Africa. Would the courts, she pleaded, compel Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, Trader Horn's producers, to give her $1,000,000 in a hurry so that she could get treatment in the School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine in London? Her plea brought out her obscure history before & after the flamboyant acclaim of 1931.

Her full name is Constance Booth Woodruff Schuck--Booth for Edwin Booth, a distant relative; Woodruff for her elderly father, Dr. James Lloyd Woodruff, a Los Angeles and Pasadena family doctor; Schuck for Anthony G. Schuck, a second-string cinema director who had their marriage annulled when she returned from the production of Trader Horn in Africa. In 1928 Edwina Booth, a lithe, lively, insistent blonde, was earning an occasional $7.50 per day as a Hollywood extra. Director W. S. Van Dyke of M-G-M wanted "a milk-white blonde with a brunette's temper, or better yet a redhead's." He recalled that Edwina Booth had "a temper like a spanked cat." She got the job and a contract for $100 per week. Options increased this to $150 a week at the end of a 20-month contract.

The Trader Horn company sailed for Africa with only two other women in the party, the wife of Harry Carey (Trader Horn) and a script girl. Because the blonde goddess of African natives had to be tanned, ambitious Miss Booth sunbathed herself naked on the deck while the ship sailed down the blazing Red Sea to Mombasa on the African East Coast. To protect themselves from sunstroke Director Van Dyke and others of the company wore red underwear.

First scenes were acted at Murchison Falls, 150 mi. up the Nile from Victoria Nyanza. Miss Booth acted in a skimpy garment made of monkey fur. Elephant grass cut her bare feet and legs, the sun blistered her bare thighs, arms and back; African insects gouged her everywhere. The heroine rejoiced when a cloudburst destroyed the camp, two hippopotamuses trampled the debris, and Director Van Dyke ordered the company to move to the Belgian Congo.

In the Belgian Congo the dread tsetse fly, transmitter of African sleeping sickness, was a menace. The cinemactors protected themselves by anointment with a foul-smelling oil which repelled the tsetse flies. Miss Booth, however, contracted malaria and dysentery, fell from a tree and almost fractured her skull, suffered a sunstroke. When she returned to Hollywood, her young husband, who had remained behind, got their marriage annulled. Wife of one of the Trader Horn actors sued her for $50,000 for alienation of affection. And M-G-M doctors took her in charge. Uncertain were they whether her debility was due to disease contracted in Africa or to a neurotic temperament. Before she finally collapsed she acted in three more pictures for independent producers. Since then she has been on Dr. Woodruff's hands. He is destitute. The Motion Picture Relief Fund contributes money for the young woman's support. Friends send baskets of food and money for medicine. Only time she leaves her room is when she is carried or wheeled to a beach. Always, indoors or out, she wears a veil over her eyes. Her doctor-father and medical consultants* believe that Edwina Booth suffers from some little-known African ailment contracted "on location." They also believe that the doctors of the U. S. schools of tropical medicine (Tulane, Harvard, Columbia) know less about such things than do the staff of London's School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine who are regularly in touch with cases from Great Britain's African possessions. Last week Edwina Booth's plea to the New York Supreme Court to speed up her damage suit against M-G-M was on the ground that, practically penniless, she needed money to travel to London for treatment./-

*Notable among them was Dr. Arthur Torranee, a small, high-pressure preacher-medico-explorer-publicist who travels under auspices of the Royal Society of Tropical Medicine & Hygiene. /-Because statutes of limitations kept her from action in California, she sued in New York.

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