Draft:Aileen Hamilton

Aileen Hamilton
Hamilton in 1924
Born	Aileen McLellan Hunter (1902-01-04)January 4, 1902 Bristol, England, G.B.
Died	June 6, 1993(1993-06-06) (aged 91) California, U.S.
Occupations	Screenwriter dancer actress singer costume designer
Years active	1914–1957
Known for	Christmas in Connecticut Slightly Dangerous Little Nellie Kelly The Adventures of Robin_Hood (TV series)
Spouse	Burton Laffe ​ ​ (m. 1942; died 1948)​
Relatives	William McLellan Hunter (father) Elsie Emily Hunter (mother) Ian McLellan Hunter (brother)

Aileen McLellan Hunter (4 January 1902 – 6 June 1993), known professionally as Aileen Hamilton, was a naturalized American screenwriter, dancer, actress, singer and costume designer, credited for writing the story behind the highly successful 1945 film Christmas in Connecticut. Starting out as a professional dancer while still a child in England, Hunter went on to appear in London’s West End and, after emigrating to the US, starred in a series of Broadway revues throughout the 1920s. She was described in 1927 as “one of Ziegfeld’s protégés."

Early Life

Aileen Hunter was born on 4 January 1902 in Bristol, England, to Elsie Emily Hunter (née Stevenson) and William McLellan Hunter, a steamship captain, all hailing from Bristol's Clifton area. Aileen was christened on 2 February, 1902, at Kingsdown St. Matthew’s Church in Cotham, Bristol. She had a younger sister, Alison, b.1867 in Bristol, a child actress and later costume designer, and younger brother Ian McLellan Hunter, born Aug. 8, 1915, in London, a well known screenwriter of over 20 films and TV series, and credited for Roman Holiday, the story and screenplay which he fronted for blacklisted writer Dalton Trumbo, although according to Hunter he was directly commissioned by Paramount to rewrite the final version of Trumbo’s screenplay himself.

Aileen’s parents, William & Elsie Hunter, were married in 1900 at Clifton Holy Trinity Church and in 1901 lived at 28 Ravenswood Rd, Clifton, Bristol, where Aileen was born the following year. In 1909, age 7, Aileen reportedly made a tour of China, Japan, India and Arabia, and was greatly inspired by the rhythmic motions of the native dancers of India. She and her sister Alison were listed in the 1911 census among six girl boarders, ages ranging 5-11 where Alison was the youngest, at a private school in nearby Cotham, Bristol, run by joint principals Ethel May & Constance May Gittins. By 1912 Aileen, age 10, was performing in a charity dancing program at Bristol’s Victoria Rooms as one of 40 or so pupils of the Misses Edythe & Muriel Parnall of Clifton. Two years later Aileen and 150 other children performed there again under the same tutelage, where it was reported, “Aileen Hunter delighted the audience with Valse Bluette, a charming example of toe-dancing, of which this clever child, who is only twelve years old, is a skilful exponent.” The latter was her first reported public solo performance. Five months later she was one of 45 artists dancing and performing twice a night in a revue at the Derby Grand Theatre in aid of the War Relief Fund where, as a principal artist, it was reported she “delights her audience with her graceful tip-toe dancing.”

Professional career

In 1917, at age 15 and still a minor, she was performing professionally at London’s Alhambra Theatre, still using the name Aileen Hunter, having already danced with the Danish-British ballerina Adeline Genée, and Serge Morosov, a dancer with the Russian Ballet and a leading teacher in London. At that time Aileen’s father was a prisoner of war in Germany.

According to a note on the ship’s manifest in 1919, when Aileen’s mother and siblings emigrated aboard the S.S. Lapland from Southampton to New York (October 22, 1919 – November 3, 1919) to join their father, both she and her mother had already previously entered the US in November 1912. The manifest lists the occupation of both girls, aged 17 and 14 respectively, as “domestic” and their father as living at 141 Broadway, NYC. The 1920 census lists the entire family reunited in a Manhattan apartment at 324 W. 83rd Street, with Aileen’s occupation as waged “actress” in the “stage” industry, age 18. Between August 16 and November 1920, after a run in Atlantic City, Aileen performed in The Lady of the Lamp at the Republic Theatre under her new stage name Aileen Hamilton.

Details in her father's 1922 passport application indicate he, William McLellan Hunter, although born in Bristol, England, became naturalized a US citizen on June 11, 1896, having lived in the US since 1890 at Sea Bright, NJ. It also claimed that from 1896 to 1919 he lived in London, though his permanent domicile remained as 320 W. 83rd St, NYC. While traveling extensively as a steamship captain he returned periodically to his wife in Bristol, where Aileen and Alison were born. He had never previously owned a passport but was now requesting one in order to travel on Sep. 23, 1922 aboard the S.S. Vestris to Buenos Aires to inspect steamers on behalf of his employer, Lloyd Royal Belge Steamship Co, S.A., of 10 Pearl St, NY. The passport photo omitted Aileen since by this time she was a busy working adult, already living in NY under her stage name Aileen Hamilton, had previously performed in The Lady of the Lamp and just finished as a “lady of the ensemble” in Good Morning Dearie, a musical comedy at Broadway’s Globe Theatre (276 performances: November 1, 1921 to August 26, 1922). She was also already rehearsing as a “specialty dancer” in a musical number called “The Flirting Salesmen” with Joseph Niemeyer in Little Nellie Kelly (November 13, 1922 to July 7, 1923), another musical comedy at the Liberty Theatre, also on Broadway. A year later she played Señorita, a Spanish dancer, in the revue The Grab Bag, back at the Globe Theatre (October 6, 1924 to March 14, 1925), which subsequently went on tour to venues including Werba’s Brooklyn Theatre, the Lyceum Theater in Rochester, NY in 1926, and two Theaters named Majestic in Cedar Rapids, IA, and Buffalo, NY.

The following year, by April 1927, Hamilton had traveled back to Europe to appear in a highly popular and somewhat risqué revue entitled Women and Sport at the Palace Theatre in Montmartre, Paris. Here her co-star and dancing partner was the much celebrated French prize fighter and World War 1 hero Georges Carpentier, who made his stage debut as both singer and dancer. It was reported that many thousands of British people went over to Paris for Easter and tried in vain to get seats. Over 6,000 were turned away from the first five performances. Femmes et Sport, as it was billed locally, was described elsewhere as, “typically Parisian, with the chorus conventionally nude in some of the scenes.”

In January 1929 Hamilton appeared in a short-lived Vaudeville style revue at the Fox Theater in Washington D.C. called Dr. Jazz, in which she “steps around in weird contortionist fashion in her eccentric dance”, while others performed songs and comedy acrobatics. At this time Hamilton is also acknowledged for off-stage work as the Costume Designer for the 1930 Ginger Rogers film The Sap from Syracuse.

Writing debut and influencers

Later in 1929 she went to Mexico, accompanying her good friends Ben Hecht, his wife Rose Caylor, and Charles MacArthur, a group of highly successful journalists, authors, playwrights and Hollywood screenwriters. They were there to collect material on the revolutionary fighting for their new play The Moon-Shooter, eventually released in 1935 as the film Once In A Blue Moon. These four were among many Americans, including Charles Lindbergh and his soon-to-be wife Anne Morrow, trapped at this time in Mexico due to the revolution. Finally railroad communication was re-established and Hamilton was able to return to New York to begin rehearsals for a new musical comedy set to open that Spring.

Return to New York

On June 20, 1934, after Women and Sport closed, she returned from France on the steamship S.S. Paris from Le Havre, back to New York, arriving June 26, traveling on "father’s papers" as "Aileen Hunter (Hamilton)" with an address at 36 W.59th St, NYC. The 1940 census, finds her rooming in rented accommodation with Helen Salter at 35 Underhill Road, Ossinning Town, West Chester, New York. Salter later witnesses Aileen’s marriage in Los Angeles.

Hollywood career

Between 1935 and 1941 she had another spell abroad, and returned to Beverly Hills from England around July 1941 to live with her brother, where they co-wrote the story Nothing Ventured. They sold it for $20,000 to MGM, who later released it as Slightly Dangerous, starring Lana Turner, Robert Young and Walter Brennan.

In 1941 a newspaper reminds its readers Hamilton was "the gal who starred… in…Femme et Sport, some years ago".

In 1943 Hamilton sold the story of Christmas in Connecticut to Warner Bros., who announced Bette Davis as the female lead in February 1944. Two months later Davis was replaced by Barbara Stanwyck. The film opened in New York on July 27, 1945 and achieved immediate success.

Inspiration for her original story

According to advertisements contemporaneous to the film’s launch, the credits appeared as, "Screen Play by Lionel Houser and Adele Commandini • From an original story by Aileen Hamilton". There has been much analysis of the Hamilton's inspiration behind the story but the most popular theory behind her Elizabeth Lane character is that it was based at least in part on Gladys Taber, who wrote the ubiquitous monthly column Diary of Domesticity in Ladies Home Journal from 1937 to 1957. She also had a column in Saturday Evening Post, both magazines in the Curtis Publishing fold, and was so widely published it was reported that for 50 years her work could be found in nearly every US household. In the film the column’s title was slightly altered to Diary of a Housewife. Like the fictional Elizabeth Lane, Taber lived her summers in a vintage Connecticut farmhouse from 1933 and full time from 1935. She commuted to New York City to teach creative writing and US living skills to new migrants at Columbia from 1921 to 1926. By this time both Hamilton and her brother were scriptwriters with noted success under their belts and periodically lived at the same address. Her brother’s background had been in publishing, as a cub reporter on the New York Daily Mirror, owned by William Randolph Hearst, and in the same stable were Good Housekeeping, from 1905, and Cosmopolitan from 1911, both of which carried popular cookery columns. It is acknowledged that Hearst’s own life story was the main inspiration for Charles Foster Kane, the lead character in Orson Welles's film Citizen Kane (1941), while Hearst’s lifelong marriage to the New York vaudeville performer Millicent Willson, and simultaneous long affair with the film actress and comedian Marion Davies, publicly demonstrated his penchant for show women like Hamilton herself. It was a badge of honor to be a working show girl at a time when one of their own had married such a wealthy media tycoon and socialized with a First Lady. Willson was frequently joined at charitable events by First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt, who also wrote for Ladies Home Journal, during the Great Depression, and some of these notable parallels have subsequently been opened up for discussion with regard to the Hamilton's inspiration.

TV series

1958 advertisement featuring the series' alternative title, The Adventures in Sherwood Forest.

In 1956 Hamilton is credited as co-writer for Series 3, Episode 8 of The Millionaire: The Joey Diamond Story, a 30-minute drama airing that year on Oct 31.

Hamilton is credited for writing Series 7, Episode 12 of Lux Video Theatre, a 60-minute television adaptation of Christmas In Connecticut hosted by Ronald Reagan, airing December 13, 1956, and the screenplay for Series 2, Episode 28 of The Adventures of Robin Hood, starring Richard Greene, entitled The Borrowed Baby, airing April 8, 1957. [16] Sixteen episodes of the latter were co-written by her brother, Ian McLellan Hunter, and his friend and lifelong collaborator, Ring Lardner, Jr., both former cub reporters on the New York Daily Mirror, though pseudonyms were used due to both being on the Hollywood blacklist.

Marriage

On Dec. 31,1942, Aileen Hamilton married Burton Laffe (1907-1948), from NY, a divorcé five years her junior, in Beverly Hills. The marriage certificate describes Laffe as Business Manager at Catalina Hospital. Her handwritten details read: "Aileen Ham" (her stage name Hamilton incomplete and crossed out) "Hunter", "from England; residence 923½ N. Wetherly Dr., L.A; Screen Writer; mother: Elsie E. Stevenson; father: William McLellan Hunter; witness: Helen Salter", who was her old roommate in West Chester, NY, listed in the 1940 census.

Aileen Hamilton died 6 June, 1993 at the age of 91.

External links

• Aileen Hamilton at the Internet Broadway Database
• Aileen Hamilton at IMDb
• Aileen Hamilton at the TCM Movie Database