Social media is really a marvelous innovation. Imagine my delight when I was minding my own business in early May and Blythe K. materialized, making a comment that she had known Jeanette MacDonald, and had, in fact, sat on her lap as a child. Never one to shy away from striking up a conversation with someone I don’t know, I sent her a message and, as she familiarized herself with the efforts of The JAM Project, she responded to me, telling me that she had a gold compact that had belonged to Jeanette, with her initials on the back, and she’d like to send it to me.
I was floored. What?! I didn’t even know this woman! I asked her if she was kidding. She responded, “No. My memories are enough. It sits in my drawer. She’d be pleased to know someone who loves her has it. I love her too…but I sat on her lap.”
I think this is the part where I mention that I’ve spent a lot of time in my conversations with Blythe slack-jawed and not able to believe my own stupid luck. When I was able to formulate a coherent response to this last message, I asked if I might call her, to chat with her and hear the story of the childhood lap-sitting (HOW IS THIS EVEN FAIR, UNIVERSE?) as well as how she came into possession of such a treasure. She responded affirmatively and gave me her number. I called her that evening and sat, spellbound, as she told me about her grandmother, a Philadelphia native and friend of the MacDonald sisters, as well as her own encounters with the clearly-adored woman she still refers to as “Miss Jeanette”. Anecdote after anecdote painted a now-familiar picture of an exquisitely beautiful human being whose warmth and grace illuminated everything she touched. Ask pretty much anyone who ever met her and that’s what you get. Read the stories in the Golden Comets of the 1940s when Marie Waddy Gerdes was president; the star meeting fans at the stage door and remembering their names; the concert artist asking teenage girls how they’re getting home, making sure they will be safe in unfamiliar cities; meeting them for ice cream; wiring ahead to let them know when her train is getting in, to give them the chance to come and meet her; inviting them to her Bel Air home when they had occasion to visit California and driving them back to town afterwards. This is Jeanette. This is, consistently, Jeanette. All warm friendliness with a ready smile and quick, bantering wit, never too far gone into the stratosphere to be one of the gals, but too extraordinary to truly pass as a mere commoner.
The difference, with Blythe, is that her recollections are from the perspective of a child. She was three when they met, and later four, and seven and eight and lastly, she was fifteen. Many of the details of her knowledge came from later (read: adult) conversations she had with her grandmother, whose pre-Hollywood-yet-enduring-through-Hollywood friendship status meant that she knew all about the MacDonald status quo. In this first conversation, after hearing another episode of how sweet Jeanette was with this young girl, I made the observation that encounters with little Blythe were probably a real gift to the childless soprano, saying, “You know how badly Jeanette wanted to have children, and couldn’t.”
Her response caught me totally off-guard: “Well you know how badly Jeanette wanted to be with Nelson, too!”
Holy hell. Hoooooooly hell. I squeaked, found my voice, and replied, “Oh really, what do you know about all of that?”
And she told me. Boy, she told me. We were on the phone over two hours, that first night. As our conversation was winding down, I asked if she’d consent to a formal interview, because hers is a story that needs to be shared. I told her I wanted to interview her for my blog, and to use her as a source for my eventual, someday, MacDonald book. She jumped on board with me immediately, and at the end of May, we had another long phone call, this time done in a more formal interview style, which I taped and have transcribed. I don’t think I can adequately express my gratitude to her for allowing me the privilege of sharing her memories. She’s never been interviewed before, she’s never talked to anyone connected with the MacDonald/Eddy story, other than people she knew in her own life. Her recollections are fresh, yet blessedly familiar. She is a brand new source, in the year 2017. With everything else that’s come to light for us in the past couple of years, I’ve learned not to be surprised. Thank you so much for this, Blythe.
I want to also thank Angela for her support on this quest, for helping me formulate interview questions, being the double-checker for my currently overworked brain, and for pow-wowing with me to make sure that when this interview was executed, it was as complete as humanly possible.
Here is our interview, done May 31, 2017:
KG: I’d like to start with a little background on your grandmother and how she came to know the MacDonald sisters and family.
BK: Grandmother was telling me that she met the MacDonald girls in, I think, the second or third grade. They kind of hung around together because they didn’t live too far from each other and they spent a lot of time together and played at each other’s homes.
KG: Which sister was the closest to her age?
BK: She was between Jeanette and Blossom, a little older than Jeanette. According to my grandmother, Jeanette was a bit of a brat. She was the young one, she was beautiful and everybody had a tendency to spoil her. Anyway, they grew up together and I know that Miss Jeanette was at Grandmother’s wedding, and Grandmother was at her wedding. Grandmother was not real happy with Gene, she never would tell me why, ‘cause those were adult things, but she didn’t like him. I think that was the only time she ever saw him, I’m not sure. But anyway, as I say, they grew up together – not best friends, because eventually Jeanette moved away and when she got into movies she kind of drifted across the country, but she’d drop by to see Grandmother [when she was home] and one particular time she did, I was there.
KG: When were you born, if you don’t mind my asking?
BK: 1942. [The first time I met her] I was about three years old and an adorable child, I have to say. I remember her walking in, and I remember this because she was so beautiful, with this gorgeous red hair and this wonderful smile and kind, oh my God, she was kind to me. And she bent down and said, ‘Hi, Sweetheart,’ and she picked me up and carried me over to a chair and sat down with me on her lap and sort of chatted with me – a few things you would say to a child – and Grandmother, of course Grandmother insisted I call her ‘Miss’ Jeanette because she was an adult and I wasn’t, but Miss Jeanette would not let me call her Miss MacDonald. And Grandmother said Miss Jeanette sang, and I said, ‘Will you sing for me?’ and she said she would – and she did!
KG: Oh, gosh. What did she sing?
BK: She sang Sweethearts to me, because she had just called me Sweetheart. And it was good, it was wonderful. I can still hear her. I wish I could have been around her more, but of course she was in Hollywood and didn’t get around to us all that often. She was nice, she was gentle, and my childish memory is that she smelled good. And, you know, she spent more time talking to Grandmother, but she didn’t ignore me! I could tell by the way that she had her arm around me while I was on her lap and she’d squeeze my arm occasionally – she knew I was there.
KG: [Unintelligible flailing of someone who can’t believe that this conversation is actually real life right now.] Tell me about the compact.
BK: Well, I was sitting on her lap, this would have been when I was about three or four years old, and her purse was next to us on the sofa, and like any child I was interested in the purse, so I went into her purse and there was this shiny gold compact with all these glittery stones on it. So I pulled it out…and I started chewing on it. And she looked at me and said, ‘Oh, do you like that?’ and I said, ‘Yes. Pretty,’ and she said, ‘Well, you can keep it.’ So she let me have it but she made my grandmother remove the powder from it because if I was going to put the thing in my mouth, she was worried that I’d swallow the powder and get sick. She would have been a really good mother. So Grandmother took the powder out, and I got to keep the compact. Another day she was there, I was interested in her nail polish; she had nail polish in her purse, so she pulled it out and put some color on some of my fingers and oh, I was so proud! She had a handkerchief in there, nail polish, lipstick and a compact, I loved it, but Grandmother about had my head and gave me a talking-to about the privacy of pocketbooks. Miss Jeanette may have thought it was okay from her point of view, but she never argued when Grandmother reprimanded me, that wasn’t done. But she was so into the child – not ignoring my grandmother or anything, but unlike so many adults who are like, ‘Alright, kid, go,’ – she wasn’t at all like that. And of course Grandmother would remind me if I was interrupting too much – and she was correct in that. I loved the relationship that I had with Miss Jeanette. Everybody behaved themselves. Everybody was a lady, everybody was nice. It was just cool.
KG: What do you remember most about her at that time, being so little?
BK: What I remember most is how good she smelled, how beautiful her hair was and how soft her voice was. She talked to me like an adult. She talked to me, softly, like an adult. No baby talk. Of course, nobody ever did that with me. But when I say she was kind – she was this beautiful, beautiful woman, and whenever I saw her she was always fixed up very nicely. The first time I sat on her lap, I reached up and grabbed her hair and pulled it out of the hairdo – and she was fine! My grandmother was like ‘Oh, MY GOD!’ and Miss Jeanette was like, ‘It’s fine! It’s just hair, I can do it again!’ She was a real sweetheart. And she felt good – she didn’t grab you and hold you, she held you gently. There was an essence about her, an aura, as they would say today, that drew me to her. I was very sad when she died; very, very sad. I have great memories. Oh, and I met the sisters, too; Elsie and Blossom.
KG: What did you think of them?
BK: I liked them fine. Well – I really liked Blossom. She was really fun, she was a nice person. They both looked like Jeanette – I mean, you could tell they were sisters. They weren’t as beautiful as her, but they had a familial resemblance. Jeanette was tiny, though. She was tiny, she was small-boned. She was a little lady.
KG: Did you ever meet Gene Raymond?
BK: No. But I did meet the other one.
KG: Nelson?
BK: Yes.
KG: Tell me about that.
BK: When I was a little bit older, about seven [note: 1949], she came down [to Florida] with her co-star, Nelson Eddy. That’s how she introduced him to me. “This is my co-star.”
KG: [laughing] Her co-star. Oh, I see.
BK: What else was she supposed to call him? She’s not going to say my lover in front of a little girl! They were very appropriate with a little girl around. When she introduced me, I made to shake his hand and he picked my hand up and kissed the back of it and I thought I had grown up! I was grown up, now – if it had been up to me I never would have washed that hand. I thought he was wonderful. I could tell he had a sense of humor, whenever someone said something he’d kind of have a smile on his face, he was jokey, he’d kind of smirk.
KG: He twinkled. His face twinkled.
BK: Yes. Right. But whenever he spoke to her it was so kind, so gentle. And his arm was always around her. Around her shoulders. Around her waist. Always around her. They were very casually dressed, very relaxed. She had sandals on, if I remember correctly—yes, she did, I remember, because her toenails were painted such a bright red and that fascinated me. So they went in and hugged Grandmother and had a seat on the sofa and he had his arm around her, he’d rub her arm, and the two of them sat there and looked at each other and I thought what are they looking at each other for? Of course, I’m seven years old, what do I know?
KG: So they were very comfortable, then, being in their relationship in front of her?
BK: Oh, yeah. My grandmother did not judge her friends. She approved of their relationship, she said ‘I tried to talk her into divorcing that clown!’ There was just this feeling between them that even as a child, I sensed. I can close my eyes and see how they were. They were always smiling at each other; they looked at each other like ‘Oh my God, I love this person.’ That didn’t happen a whole lot in what I knew; these people were obviously very fond of each other. So Miss Jeanette was talking about flowers, which she just loved, and I happened to mention there was a place nearby called Sunken Gardens, and she thought that she and Mr. Eddy and I should go down there, so we did, we went to the garden, and I was having a good time skipping along and I would hear Miss Jeanette behind me, ‘Don’t go too far, now don’t go too far! Blythe, please don’t go too far,’ and I would turn around to talk to them and they’d be walking along slowly, talking and holding hands. I thought grown up people holding hands was kind of neat. We spent probably an hour or an hour and a half there, she was explaining all the plants to him. Even as a child, I could sense a gentleness there, between the two of them, he was kind of like…kind of protective, of her. Oh, and then I wanted an orange from a tree and it was too high for me to reach, so he picked me up and said, ‘Don’t let anybody catch us, I don’t know if we can do this or not!’ And here’s Miss Jeanette saying, ‘Oh, we’re going to get in trouble!’ And then there was a part where I was walking in between them, holding their hands.
KG: Oh, my God. That’s wonderful.
BK: And when I got tired – Sunken Gardens is big – he’d pick me up and carry me for a bit and then put me back down. And finally it was time to go, and so that was that afternoon. It was a lovely afternoon.
KG: Did you stop anywhere else on your way home?
BK: We stopped to get some ice cream. We stopped at one of the places on 4th Street that had – at that time – ice cream.
KG: You got ice cream with Jeanette. Of course, you did, that’s what one does with Jeanette. Oh. My. God.
BK: She liked peach ice cream, that was her favorite. He liked chocolate, so he got chocolate and I got chocolate and we had the ice cream and went on home. They stayed for a little while longer and I left the room because you don’t want a kid around when you’re going to talk grown-up talk. That happened a couple of times when I was really small, you know, I don’t know what they were discussing but I have a feeling it was something to do with Nelson and/or Gene, you could kind of hear the voices, Grandmother’s particularly. I’m just so sorry that everything I had from back then [except the compact] got destroyed in that hurricane, because when I was small, she sent me a couple of birthday cards. Anyway, I thought Nelson Eddy was great. He was very kind to me, very kind to a child and very kind to her, to Miss Jeanette. That was the only time I ever saw him. When they went to leave, he picked me up and he said, ‘It’s been nice meeting you, little one,’ and he kissed me on the cheek. And Miss Jeanette looked at me and said ‘Now aren’t you a lucky girl?’
KG: I think it was mighty nice of her to share her man with you!
BK: [laughing] Yeah, thank you so much for sharing your man with this kid. She was laughing when he gave me that little kiss. At the time, I thought she meant I was lucky because he was this great movie star but now…
KG: That was something I wanted to ask you – you’re telling me this story recalling your memories as a child, from a child’s perspective. Now, as an adult, looking back, are you able to describe that relationship differently? In terms of romantic, or—well it seems pretty clear they were more than just friends.
BK: In retrospect, I could see that these were two people who cared deeply about each other, who related in the gentlest way. My father didn’t beat my mother or scream at her or anything else, but he certainly didn’t treat her the way Nelson treated Jeanette! One thing I thought was amazing was how much they enjoyed being at Grandmother’s house, they enjoyed me, they enjoyed each other. They weren’t in any hurry to go anywhere, they spent a lot of time with us that day. They’d talk to Grandmother and then every now and then they’d lean their heads together and talk amongst themselves. I remember her soft voice and his soft voice and I thought I was in heaven – it was warm and affectionate toward me, toward each other, toward Grandmother. It wasn’t like a couple of married people being like, ‘Oh Geez, we have to stop in for this visit.’
KG: So they were really happy to have this time to spend together.
BK: Right! Oh, yeah. Very much so. I think by the time I was nine I’d realized that.
KG: I think those moments of relaxation where they could be together were really rare for them.
BK: Especially a trip to Florida!
KG: I really think that you were probably more of a gift to them than you realize, certainly more than you realized as a child, because of how very badly they wanted to have children.
BK: Not only that, I think that with a child there, and paying attention to me – it’s more fun for two people in love with each other than sitting around talking to an adult. They could use that toward this little kid – and me in my total innocence, I thought he was handsome and she was gorgeous and I’d just died and gone to heaven, which I probably had. But I think that was relaxing, too. They didn’t have to be ‘on’ like they would in a crowd.
KG: Did your grandmother know anything about Jeanette having been pregnant?
BK: All she told me was that she had lost several children. She left it at that. And, as a cardiac nurse, I can tell you that those miscarriages were the best thing for her – she never could have carried to term, because of her heart, because of the amount of fluids her body would have taken on, she would have died of a heart attack.
KG: I just think it’s so awesome that you know firsthand that their love story is indeed true.
BK: Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. No doubt about it. I don’t know how anyone could think there was [a doubt]. Nelson aside, this passionate redheaded woman is married to …to this? Come on.
KG: What else do you know about Gene Raymond?
BK: Miss Jeanette never mentioned him in my hearing, ever.
KG: That’s interesting.
BK: As a matter of fact, when I got to be about seven or eight, I remember hearing my grandmother discussing them with my grandfather, and making little comments about Gene, and I knew they were insulting; I didn’t know what they were, but I knew they were insulting. And Grandmother told me when I saw Miss Jeanette again not to mention Gene. My feeling about that is that she was there to forget him, don’t want to think about him. How a woman so kind and so beautiful could have been so unhappy in her marriage – it breaks my heart.
KG: All in all, what was your grandmother’s opinion of Gene?
BK: I asked her about their wedding, because I wasn’t around then. Was she pretty – yes. Was he handsome? And she said no. She said Gene was like a colorless Nelson Eddy. And she didn’t speak about him much after that. Later, I learned that she didn’t like him because of the way he treated her – he treated her like a trophy wife. She looked good on his arm and that was about the size of it, and that pissed Grandmother off. She never saw this herself, but she heard about it from people who knew both Jeanette and Gene. She tried to talk Miss Jeanette into divorcing him, but that didn’t work, and what was the point? As to whether she was abused or not, she didn’t say. But I knew Grandmother well enough to know her tone of voice [when she talked about him]. It’s bad enough that your husband is out being unfaithful to you, but when he’s out being unfaithful to you with a man—!
KG: Adds insult to injury.
BK: God, I guess! But maybe it wasn’t so bad, maybe his liking men saved her from a lot of problems.
KG: Can you tell me anything else about your grandmother attending Jeanette’s wedding?
BK: She said it was gorgeous, everything was perfect, but Jeanette didn’t look all that buoyant. She did for the pictures, she was JEANETTE for the pictures. But when the cameras weren’t on, she was subdued. Brides aren’t subdued! Not unless they’re that kind of person anyway, which she wasn’t.
KG: What did your grandmother think of Nelson Eddy?
BK: She seemed to like him very much. She met him at their wedding. And she said – now, a lot of this information I got when I was older, I wasn’t asking these questions when I was seven! – she said he was very gracious to what he called the non-Hollywood people that Miss Jeanette knew. She really liked him. So when Miss Jeanette and Nelson Eddy came down that time I met them, Miss Jeanette said she was bringing a guest and Grandmother said she hoped it wasn’t that Gene person and – it wasn’t!
KG: So when you saw them at your grandmother’s house, that was in Florida.
BK: Yes.
KG: Did she ever tell you how they happened to be in Florida together? Did their professional plans converge there or…?
BK: She didn’t say, but my feeling was they were on vacation together down there and she wasn’t about to talk about that! There is probably a great deal I could have gotten out of my grandmother but I trusted her discretion about her friends.
KG: Did your grandmother ever mention anything about Jeanette’s earlier relationships? Jack Ohmeis, Irving Stone, Bob Ritchie?
BK: The only one I heard her talk about was Ritchie.
KG: What did she think of him?
BK: She thought he was a con man. A con artist. He used her.
KG: My impression there is that it was romantic at first and devolved into a convenient arrangement that kept other people away from her. She wore a ring on her engagement finger that she actually bought herself, but people assumed it was from him and that she was off the market to other suitors.
BK: Yeah. Yes. And I can see her in my mind’s eye – she was just a beautiful woman. A beautiful woman. They’d have been on her like fleas on a dog. You know, I don’t think she would have been less in love with Nelson if Gene had been a real man to her – which he wasn’t – but I do think she’d have been less unhappy. If he’d been a husband to her, emotionally and physically – but he really wasn’t. He liked guys.
KG: Did your grandmother know that he liked guys?
BK: Mm-hmm!
KG: Did she talk about that?
BK: The only thing she would say was that he was ‘funny’ – she meant it in the same way she meant it when she talked about someone else we knew, and that’s what ‘funny’ meant. She would say, ‘Charlie’s kind of funny, the same way Gene Raymond is funny.” And I knew how Charlie was funny!
KG: Do you think she and Jeanette discussed this about Gene?
BK: Oh, I do. I think they discussed a lot. Of course, I wasn’t around for that.
KG: Oh, of course, but I was wondering if you found out later that this was something they talked about.
BK: I do think so, because of the way she said his name and the way she referred to the marriage. You knew that they had discussed it. I mean, Grandmother was not around the two of them enough to come to the conclusion on her own that he was gay. They day they got married – Grandmother never met Gene again, I don’t think, she didn’t see him.
KG: So her whole opinion on Gene would have been based on what Jeanette was telling her.
BK: Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. Jeanette was her friend! She wasn’t going to say, ‘Are you kidding me?’ – she might have asked her what the hell she was thinking, though.
KG: How did she find out they’d gotten engaged?
BK: She got an announcement.
KG: And what did she think about that?
BK: She was happy for them because she hadn’t met Gene yet! Meeting him turned her off. Grandmother was kind of snobby about who hooked up with her friends, none of them were ever good enough. She said he was a watered-down Nelson. He did poorly resemble Nelson, but he was a real creep-o, from what Grandmother related later.
KG: I can tell you he went through her money like it was water. We have stacks of their financial records and he’s spending it as fast as she can put it in.
BK: Oh, yeah. And if not physically, he was probably verbally abusive to her. A man like that would be – and when I say ‘a man like that’ I don’t mean a gay man. I mean a man who is so inferior in talent and notoriety to his wife – he would absolutely have to assert his manhood somehow. The groping thing you see in pictures is him saying ‘This is MY trophy.’ One thing I’ve noticed in the pictures, is that Jeanette – oh, I’m going to call her Jeanette, I’m old enough to call her Jeanette and Grandmother’s dead, so Jeanette – if you look at the pictures of her with Gene and the pictures of her with Nelson, and she’s laughing, the laugh is different. With Nelson it’s full blown, head thrown back laughing. With Gene it’s laughing…kinda-sorta. She’s being kind to her husband, or she’s laughing so she doesn’t get yelled at later. It just doesn’t look like the wholehearted laugh that you see when she’s laughing with Nelson.
KG: When was the last time you saw her?
BK: When I was about fifteen [approx. 1957 or early 1958]. She was singing in Philadelphia – I think she had a concert, I can’t even remember what it was, but anyway, I went, and I thought well, I’ll go backstage and say hi. So I remember walking into the backstage area and she looked up and – ‘BLYTHE!!’ – I was fifteen! She hadn’t seen me in years! I was just thrilled that she remembered who I was, even though, God knows, I’d changed! And she recognized me immediately! I was thrilled, so thrilled.
KG: So did she come rushing over and hug you?
BK: Oh yes! But! She said, ‘Excuse me,’ to everybody who was around her. Didn’t shove them and push them aside. That was another thing that I always liked when I saw her; she was polite, she was gracious. When she was there, and that time she and Nelson were there [at Grandmother’s], everything was ‘Thank you so much, we really appreciate it.’ Most people would say, ‘Geez, how lucky are you to have me in your house?’ But that wasn’t the way she was. When I was with her, this last time I saw her, she did say that she had to say hello to these people – but she took me by the hand and dragged me around with her. She didn’t abandon me off in a corner. She was letting me know that she needed to do this but I was to stay with her. So I did, and we spent an hour or so in her dressing room, drinking—I drank soda, she drank coffee.
KG: She did drink coffee!
BK: Uh-huh.
KG: Huh. That’s really hilarious, because people used to insist that she didn’t. No coffee or tea or alcohol.
BK: This was at night, she was probably tired and still had a long rest of the night to go. And …she was drinking coffee. Why would anybody care—why would that even become a debate?
KG: It’s the Clara and Tessa sideshow.
BK: [sigh] Oh. Mm-hmm.
KG: When did your grandmother pass away?
BK: In the eighties.
KG: So you would have had a lot of chances to talk to her as an adult, then.
BK: Oh yes, I got a lot more of her impressions then.
KG: Was your grandmother aware that Jeanette and Nelson had been dating and had, in fact, become engaged during Rose Marie?
BK: That I don’t know. I do know that she knew they were together, a lot. And when I say together, I mean in the most intimate way. Physically. She knew that.
KG: So she knew they were sleeping together.
BK: Oh yeah, oh yeah. I finally got her to tell me that a lot later.
KG: Oh, please tell me!
BK: Well I think I said something about the fact that I’d heard that they were lovers, and she said yes, that was true, and I said, ‘Oh my goodness, what do you think of that?’ and she said, ‘None of my damn business, Jeanette was happy!’ Back then, if you were lovers, it meant you were in love as well as the physical. And I’d get to a certain point in my questioning and Grandmother would say, ‘That’s personal.’
KG: Well, from what we know…
BK: It doesn’t take a rocket scientist, with those two.
KG: No, it certainly doesn’t.
BK: Let me tell you something, nowadays, lovers in Hollywood are nothing but slags and whores, going from man to man to man and woman to woman to woman, but these two were not like that. She was raised to be a lady.
KG: You know, that’s something I feel all the time, working this intimately on someone’s life like this – it’s so wonderful to find that they are everything you hope they are. She was not perfect, she made a variety of decisions for which I’d like to go back in time and shake her, but man she was wonderful.
BK: She was perfect, to me. I was a child and she was beautiful and gentle and that’s the way I always remember her and I don’t want to remember her any other way, and I won’t! I’ve met the woman. She held me. She kissed me. She sang to me. She was a fairy princess, as far as I was concerned. I think the one word that sums up who she was is the old Southern term lady. Miss Jeanette was a lady. That doesn’t mean she was stiff and cardboard, but she knew how to act in public. She knew how to treat people. She was a lady. I can’t remember ever hearing her say, in my little girl ears, anything bad about anybody, not even Gene. She did to my grandmother, but it was not for the ears of children.
KG: Did you say you have a picture of her?
BK: There was one of her standing in front of my grandmother’s house. I’ll have to look and see if I can find it, it may have been destroyed in the hurricane that ruined so many of my things.
KG: What was your impression of Jeanette’s health when you knew her? Was she healthy, was she active?
BK: Well – she wasn’t sick. I got the impression when I saw her at fifteen that she was a little frail. Her heart was giving her problems, then.
KG: It’s so amazing to be able to talk to you and to be able to share your story. This is going to mean a lot to a lot of people. One of the best things about it, if I can be perfectly frank with you, is that it’s not trashy. It’s not sordid. There’s no scandal here.
BK: Well you don’t get trashy in front of a child!
KG: I’m so excited to be having this conversation, I can’t even tell you. It’s so cool.
BK: I’ll tell you, I think that Miss Jeanette would be so glad that you’re happy that I’m sharing this with you. She doesn’t have children, she doesn’t have family. Her memory can live on this way.
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The Case for Jeanette and Nelson 