The Forgotten Flapper

A Novel of Olive Thomas (Forgotten Actresses, Book 1)

By: Laini Giles

Narrated by: Jen Taylor

A presence lurks in New York City’s New Amsterdam Theatre when the lights go down and the audience goes home. They say she’s the ghost of Olive Thomas, one of the loveliest girls who ever lit up the Ziegfeld Follies and the silent screen. From her longtime home at the theater, Ollie’s ghost tells her story from her early life in Pittsburgh to her tragic death at 25.

After winning a contest for “The Most Beautiful Girl in New York”, shopgirl Ollie modeled for the most famous artists in New York, and then went on to become the toast of Broadway. When Hollywood beckoned, Ollie signed first with Triangle Pictures, and then with Myron Selznick’s new production company, becoming most well known for her work as a “baby vamp”, the precursor to the flappers of the 1920s.

After a stormy courtship, she married playboy Jack Pickford, Mary Pickford’s wastrel brother. Together they developed a reputation for drinking, club-going, wrecking cars, and fighting, along with giving each other expensive make-up gifts. Ollie's mysterious death in Paris’ Ritz Hotel in 1920 was one of Hollywood’s first scandals, ensuring that her legend lived on.

©2015 Laini Giles (P)2019 Laini Giles

Very entertaining!

Well written and excellently performed! Olive appears so real — in both her natural life and afterlife. Really enjoyed it!

Baby tramp....

Olive was certainly one big Hobag. She'd sleep with a doorknob for God's sake..can't really discern what's true or made up for the sake of story. She was beautiful but was only good for a roll in the hay. No man would ever take her seriously as a girlfriend or wife. Too trampy and likes bad boys so deserved what she got in the end. It is too bad that such an immense percentage of her films have been lost ..It's difficult to really understand what this era of film was really like as so much of it is destroyed or lost..

Wonderful Look At Olive Thomas & Her Life

This was a wonderful book as seen through the eyes of the from the eyes of the formerly known Olive Thomas of the Silent Film Industry and silent films such as ‘The Flapper’. I don’t want to give away all of the plot and the twists and turns of the book, but Olive narrates the story from her current residence at the New Amsterdam Theater as a ghost or spirit (whichever you prefer) as she tells the story of her life as she came to be famous from where she came from, her times at the Follies at the New Amsterdam, her life and family including her marriages and nephew’s relationship and brother (specifically), her time in the movies, and her untimely passing as it is historically correct (there are different stories about her passing everywhere you look). It’s wonderfully told and is believable in it’s telling. It’s touching in the right parts and I was really touched by the way the story was set up before the “final” part of the ending , where an explanation of what happened to everyone at the end of their lives, respectively, in the future is told. Definitely worth a listen if you are a fan of this time period or anything to do with Olive Thomas or the Follies. The Author was influenced by Kenneth Anger’s two Books both named ‘Hollywood Babylon’ and ‘Hollywood Babylon Il’ it said in the postscript, and I also read them as a young kid, as my mother had copies of both books and now I own my own set. They got me interested in Hollywood history, especially from the early 1900’s to the 1960’s. I would recommend those books as coffee table books as they have incredible photos inside them and the stories are not incredibly in depth, per se, but they were more Hollywood “know facts”/ true crime stories of the time the books were written. Copyright 1975 and 1984, respectively. I don’t ever write recommendations for books and I’ve read some wonderful books by fabulous and very famous artists, but there was something about this book that I just really was particularly fond of.

Great

The reader was absolutely wonderful. Great story plot and loved the real and fake characters