Instead, here's a story from the SYRACUSE HERALD-JOURNAL, August 18,1975.
Iris Adrian
Independence marks career, private life
By JOAN E. VADEBONCOEUR
BURBANK, Calif. – She was a starlet at Paramount with Jean Harlow and later appeared with Carole Lombard in a dud called “Rhumba.” She was in the “Ziegfeld Follies of 1931” and worked for George Kaufman on Broadway.
Her name was Iris Adrian Hottstetter, but the last was quickly dropped when she entered show business. “Father was the only mistake Mother ever made. She had a grand time,” said her daughter over lunch at the Walt Disney Studio,
Abandoning her self-confessed laziness, the actress had just completed a small role in “The Apple Dumpling Gang” as “Poker Polly.” It was her second for the studio the first being “Scandalous John.”
“I don’t know what ‘Poker Polly’ was—an ex-poker player who worked in a saloon, I guess. Anyway, she was a shady lady. I didn’t look like somebody’s nice wife. I’m always a shady lady. No, wait, I’ve been a good wife five times.”
With that, she laughed. Miss Adrian has tripped to the altar four times, but insists on counting only two marriages—her first and her current one to a scout for the Chicago Bears pro football team.
“Once I married a man who told me he had $60 million, but he was always borrowing my money. I got a divorce,” she said. “I never let anyone have my money. It was too hard to get. I was always getting divorces with Jerry Geisler (famed Hollywood divorce lawyer). I’d get to the altar and come home and find something wrong and I’d call Geisler.”
She continued, “If I’d come home and he’d say, ‘Dust,’ I’d say, ‘You dust it.’ Cooking’s an insult. All that togetherness is for the birds. My husband and I get along because Fido’s self-concerned and me— I’m awfully concerned with Iris Adrian.”
The veteran performer also doesn’t travel because she’s tired of packing and unpacking.
She went all over the world as a supporting comedian to Jack Benny and used to do his radio show. “He gave me my 60th birthday party,” she explained. “It was on stage. There was no one in the world he didn’t like. And he loved being Jack Benny.”
From short films made in Brooklyn to five-a-day vaudeville to films has been a long haul. “Films are easy to do,” she contended. “I turned down a tv series. Who wants to get up at 6 in the morning?”
Iris Adrian doesn’t have to get up before the sun. When she says she has money, it’s an understatement. She invested in California real estate. Still, she bemoaned, “Taxes have doubled and repairs have tripled and I’ve spent 25 years as a landlady. You can’t make any money at it how.”
But the salty-speaking comedienne made it when it was possible and now her wail is, “I’ll never outlive my money. Time is the only thing I’m worried about.”
Childless, Miss Adrian whips out her own baby pictures if asked about offspring. “They’d only be over there chanting it up in India,” she complained.
Instead, she befriends the raccoons that live near her house. “Four come down every night. They eat a package of fig newtons every night. They’re getting very expensive now. I keep thinking I’ll go down to the wholesale place to buy them. Since knowing my racoons and. one possum, I can’t stand fur coats any more,” she explained.
transcribed by Yhtapmys
- IRIS AND JACK.JPG (247.6 KiB) Viewed 6064 times