The Long, Invisible Career of Dolly Jarvis
Proving success doesn't always mean a name above the title--or on the marquee at all
In a very true-to-me fashion, Dolly Jarvis first blipped on my radar when I was researching Wild Party girl Jean Lorraine. The two dancer-starlets appeared to have been friends (Lorraine rented from Jarvis’ mother) and both names appeared as ‘Pioneer Women’ in the cast list for Wells Fargo (1937). Perplexingly, taking a magnifying glass to the film’s crowd scenes has never helped me confirm if the Jean Lorraine in that film is the same that appeared in The Wild Party (1929), or if it was the plane-crash-surviving-dancer (Jean O’Rourke) who briefly used the same stage name. It’s fun that these girls are connected, though, and at least we can breathe easy with the certainty that there was only one Dolly Jarvis—who clung to Hollywood’s horns for quite awhile, getting lucky enough to never find herself bucked off.
Dolly didn’t have to search far for a stage name; she was born as Dorothy Natalie Jarvis on October 5, 1910, in Oakland, California (amazing just how many chorines were Bay Area-born). Her parents, prominent Oakland engineer William P. Jarvis and his bride, artist-musician Estelle Kleeman, were big enough news in the Bay Area to have every detail of their 600-head wedding published on the society page.1,2,3
