In order to pay tribute to Dorothy Provine, who passed away this week at the age of 73 (according to the IMDb; I've seen her age listed as 75 as well.), I went to the Paley Center for Media today and watched two episodes of 'The Roaring 20's'. (I would have watched the only other one that they had in the library, but it was on tape and not digital; I would have had to access that from a different terminal.) There were no episodes from her other TV show, 'The Alaskans', which I would have liked to see, nor anything from her guest work on such shows as 'Hawaiian Eye' and '77 Sunset Strip'. (In two episodes separated by several years - "Downbeat" and "Upbeat" - Miss Provine's character of Nora Shirley participated in a crossover between '77 Sunset Strip' and 'Bourbon Street Beat'.)
Dorothy Provine played Delaware "Pinky" Pinkham on 'The Roaring 20's', a flapper entertainer at the Charleston Club in Manhattan, but who also performed in burlesque houses like B.F. Keith's Palace. And it was during her rendtion of "Ain't We Got Fun?", dressed like a hobo, that I had an idea for a "Theory of Relateeveety".
Prohibition ran from 1920 to 1933, but since the show is called 'The Roaring 20's', we'll limit the range of the series to the decade from 1920 to 1930. Allowing that Prohibition was underway for about a year (Everybody seems to have become comfortable with the situation), I'm thinking that Pinky was the same age as Miss Provine when she filmed the series. So Pinky Pinkham was 23 in 1921, and that means she was born in 1898.
It'll be my contention that when she was 15 or 16 years old and before she was professionally known as "Pinky", Delaware Pinkham had a child out of wedlock and either gave it up for adoption, or gave it to a family member to raise.
A child that young having a child of her own is not unheard of. (Consider Nancy from the 'Doctor Who' episodes "The Empty Child" and "The Doctor Dances".) By the age of 15, Pinky could have already embraced the easy morals that would come to be associated with the following decade.
Whether Pinky had any relationship with the child once she gave it up is as unknown as the actual truth to this theory. But either way, the child - a daughter who was given the name of Daisy and raised in Greenwich, Connecticut, - grew up to have the same natural talent as her birth mother. (And we got to meet her in the TV series 'Dead Like Me'.)
In her adopted family (or in her foster family if she was raised by a family member), there was another girl whom Daisy considered to be her own sister. (They may have been half-sisters.) During the course of the series, it was suggested that Daisy's sister had been killed by an abusive husband/boyfriend/lover.
Whether she was adopted by a family named "Adair", or it was a stage name she took upon starting her own career, Daisy Adair headed west when she came of age to seek out a career in the movie business.
Sadly, Daisy's life was short-lived. She died at the age of 25, a year after Prohibition ended. (The cause of death was asphyxiation due to smoke inhalation; she would tell people she died giving head to Clark Gable during the making of "Gone With The Wind".) After death, she became a reaper, collecting the souls of those who were about to die violently. Well into the Aughts of this millennium Daisy Adair was still reaping souls.
It is unknown if she ever learned the truth of her birth and that her mother was the entertainer known as Pinky Pinkham.
As always, this is all pure conjecture.....BCnU!
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