Year of Ann Dvorak: Day 15

I love magazines and have since I was a kid and dreamed of owning vintage copies of Life and Look. I felt as if I discovered my own hog’s heaven when I stumbled upon place in Anaheim called the Book Barron which had a whole large room devoted to old back issues of periodicals. In fact, that’s where I found my first magazine with Ann Dvorak on the cover sometime back around 1998. Sadly, the Book Barron is only an online entity now, but I still have that copy of Motion Picture with Ann on the cover and have acquired many, many more in the ensuing years.

He is a sampling of some of the Dvorak magazines in my collection. You might notice a couple of things. 1) The foreign magazine market sure seemed to pay more attention to Ann than those in the States. 2) There sure are a lot of issues with Maurice Chevalier on the cover from The Way to Love.

The issues of Motion Picture and Movies pictured here are in fact the only two American magazines I have found. One of the key things to realize about the career of Ann Dvorak is that she skipped town on her Warner Bros. contract before she had a chance to become a big star. Even though she worked at the studio for a few years after returning from this extended honeymoon, Warner Bros. never really promoted her career, which might explain why she did not get on the cover of titles like Photoplay and Modern Screen (as far as I know).

If these magazines are any indicator, it sure seems like Ann had a decent following outside the U.S., not to say anything about Chevalier’s popularity.