Tracing G.B. Stern and Clemence Dane
G.B. Stern and Clemence Dane were in Hollywood at the same time, and both were close friends of Noel Coward. Stern had married Coward’s army friend Geoffrey Holdsworth, and Dane was one of Coward’s theatrical ‘family’. Stern rented a house in Santa Monica and appears in Dane’s Hollywood diaries as a friend and together they discuss possible plots based on incidents in the lives of those they knew. I am reconstructing the friendship and work circle of Dane and Stern and their often uncredited contribution in film.
Her friendship circle starts with the invitation from David O Selznick to work with him. She meets and is struck by Selznick’s advisor Rosalie Stewart whom she gets to know well. She also works with George Cukor, Willis Goldbeck and D.W. Griffiths on film scripts, and socialises with American and writers and actors including James Whale, Violet Kemble Cooper, GB Stern, and Constance Bennett. While in Hollywood she meets up with Guthries McClintic, husband of actress Katharine Cornell who had played the lead in Dane’s Broadway success ‘Bill of Divorcement’ (1922) and Audrey Hepburn who later stars in the film adaptation Selznick makes of her play.
Gladys Stern was a friend of W. Somerset Maugham and stayed at his villa in the south of France. In the 1920s she invited authors of her acquaintance – Noel Coward, H.G. Wells, Rebecca West, Louis Golding and Sylvia Kaye-Smith – to her house, first in London and then in Liguria in Italy when she and her husband moved there. Stern’s comic dialogue and playful depictions of 20s flappers gave her works an immediate appeal and she wrote some of the script for Coker’s ‘Little Women’ (1933). She was later employed by Alexander Korda working for MGM in Britain during WW2. Throughout her life she continued to welcome authors to her home, including Maugham’s nephew Robin, building a network of influence which was significant in the interwar years.
Neither Stern nor Dane have a biography, nor did either leave an archive, and few of their letters survive. So I am researching the erasure of Clemence Dane and G.B. Stern from the film and literary history of the 20s and 30s.