Books: Angel Of The Anzacs: The Life Of Nola Luxford

Author: Carole van Grondelle

Victoria University Press $39.95

Reviewed by Margie Thomson


Nola Luxford was born in 1895 into an up-and-coming, middle-class, New Zealand family which eventually settled in Hawkes Bay in 1911. There she made her first forays as a socialite, developing some of the skills - piano-playing, elocution, drama and sheer social vivacity - that were to stand her in excellent stead from 1919 when she fled to the United States with her no-good first husband and began carving out a place for herself in Hollywood and the elite circles of New York.

While never achieving the top echelons of stardom, Luxford managed what thousands of similarly minded hopefuls in the Golden Age of Hollywood did not.

Through persistence, charm and talent she gained credited roles in many films in the silent era, some leading roles in lesser movies and, through dint of her extraordinary personality, a virtual constellation of friends and contacts, such as Zane Grey, which led to her often moving in illustrious circles.

She always kept up her contact with New Zealand, and around 1930 began more than 25 years of regular contributions to the popular pictorial Free Lance magazine in which she wrote about American life, movie stars - even an interview with Eleanor Roosevelt.

Later, moving to New York, she was a radio pioneer, broadcasting reports of the 1932 Olympic Games for NBC and becoming one of the first women network news announcers in America. She was an independent career woman before such people were commonplace, battling prejudice and recurrent poverty, and never afraid to break new ground.

It was during the war that she gained the moniker used in the title of this biography, running the Anzac Club which provided a friendly welcome to New York for many thousands of New Zealand and Australian servicemen.

For this she was almost half a century later granted a Queen's Service Medal, and it was at the ceremony for that, in 1989, that Carole van Grondelle met her and became fascinated by the 93-year-old in whose tiny yet stylish person it was still possible to trace the beautiful, vibrant woman of yesteryear.

Luxford isn't completely unknown to New Zealanders. In 1985 she was the subject of a documentary, Nola - Our Own New Zealand Girl, and a year later was featured by Television New Zealand in This Is Your Life.

But one of the things that sets this biography apart from those earlier attempts to acknowledge Luxford's life is that, until she met van Grondelle, Luxford steadfastly refused to speak about her personal life. When van Grondelle began spending time with Luxford at the old lady's Los Angeles home - talking, and spending many nights rummaging through the abundant paperwork kept by Luxford through many house moves and much personal tumult - it was obviously a case of "right person, right time." The fiercely private ("secretive" is the word van Grondelle uses on more than one occasion) Luxford was at last ready to speak about the shame of her parents' divorce (which in Hawkes Bay of 1919 was utterly scandalous and destroyed her family's social standing), her own disastrous first two marriages, followed by her third which, despite unusual beginnings, was the happy partnership for which she had longed all her life.

Van Grondelle appears to be the perfect biographer for Luxford: her tone is unceasingly warm and lively, her conscientious research translates smoothly into an easy, compelling read in which the decades, the places, the people and the social climate are deftly evoked. In the end, we envy van Grondelle her acquaintance with this extraordinary woman, but must simply be grateful that she was there in time to be told the story.

Luxford died two months short of her 99th birthday, in October 1994. She was, as one of her life-long friends said, a self-made woman. Her life is a great 20th-century tale.

* Margie Thomson is the Herald deputy books editor.