Beneath a headstone in Hollywood Forever Cemetery that reads “Princess Sylvia Georgiaze” lies a woman born Edith Hawkes in a rented terrace in Paddington, the daughter of a doorman. By the time she died in 1977, she had married five times, climbed from a London chorus line into the English peerage, become the widow of the most famous face of the silent screen, and briefly been the wife of Hollywood’s reigning king. She was born on April 1, 1904, at 112 Hall Place in West London, the elder of two daughters. Her father, Arthur Hawks, worked as a livery hand, a porter, and a doorman.
The family later moved to model dwellings near Marylebone, respectable but crowded housing for working people. Almost from the start, she began editing her own history. She traded the plain name Edith for Sylvia, shaved two years off her age, and when her first marriage certificate asked for her father’s rank, the servant was written down as a gentleman. Her one constant companion was her younger sister, Lillian Vera, known as Vera, who later married a British film producer.
Vera followed Sylvia through every marriage and across every ocean, the single person who knew the truth of her plain beginning. Leaving home young, by some accounts at 15, Sylvia found work first as a lingerie model, then in the London theater. She joined the Cochran dancers, the troupe run by impresario Charles Cochran, the London equivalent of the Ziegfeld girls. She debuted in 1924 in Midnight Follies, appeared in a Gershwin musical called Tell Me More in 1925, and performed in The Whole Town’s Talking.
For a time, she worked a comic double act billed as “Silly and Dotty” with young American songwriter Dorothy Fields. The West End chorus line was understood as a path upward. Wealthy and titled men came to watch, and some chorus girls left on their arms. Sylvia carried herself as though poverty had never touched her, smoothing away the accent of Paddington and the manners of the model dwellings.
Among the men who came to watch her was Lord Ashley, heir to one of the oldest earldoms in England. Anthony Ashley Cooper, eldest son of the ninth Earl of Shaftesbury, was warned that marrying a chorus girl would throw his life away. On February 3, 1927, he married her anyway, making the doorman’s daughter a titled woman overnight. The marriage lasted seven years and ended in a courtroom.
In his divorce petition, Lord Ashley named Douglas Fairbanks as the cause. Fairbanks, the swashbuckling hero of Zorro and Robin Hood, was the most celebrated leading man in American cinema and one half of Hollywood’s first royal couple with Mary Pickford. By the early 1930s, Sylvia and Fairbanks were entangled. On November 28, 1934, the marriage was dissolved, turning a private affair into an international scandal.
Mary Pickford filed for divorce in 1933 but let the matter sit for years. Only in January 1936 was it made final. On March 7, 1936, in Paris, Sylvia married Fairbanks. But Hollywood did not forgive her.
Doors stayed shut, invitations went missing, and she was treated as an intruder who had taken a place she had not earned. Still, of all five marriages, she would later call this one perfect. Douglas Fairbanks died of a failing heart on December 12, 1939, at his house in Santa Monica. He was 56.
His will, signed in November 1936, left half his fortune, reported at up to one million dollars, to Sylvia and nothing to Mary Pickford. He asked, without legal force, that she pass the money to his heirs or good works. Before the age of 40, she was independently wealthy. In the spring of 1941, she helped found the British Distressed Areas Fund with her sister Vera to raise money for refugees of the war in Europe.
It was one of the few clearly public-spirited acts recorded of her. On January 18, 1944, in Boston, she married again. Her new husband was Edward Stanley, the sixth Baron Stanley of Alderley, a genuine English peer serving in the Royal Navy. The marriage broke within a year or two and ended in a bitter divorce that dragged through claim and counterclaim.
She won a decree in January 1947, and the matter was settled the following year. In the summer of 1949, at a party at his agent’s home, Clark Gable saw Sylvia across the room. Gable, the biggest male star of the sound era, was a widower still mourning Carole Lombard, who had died in a wartime plane crash. People had noticed that Sylvia reminded others of Lombard.
Gable spent much of the evening at her side. On December 20, 1949, in the living room of a private house in Solvang, near Santa Barbara, a Lutheran minister married Clark Gable and Sylvia Ashley. After a honeymoon in Hawaii, Sylvia moved into Gable’s ranch at Encino. The house had been made by Carole Lombard, and Sylvia set about erasing her, painting the dead woman’s bedroom pink, the color Gable was known to dislike most, and hanging a crystal chandelier in a hunting man’s house.
The marriage curdled quickly. Gable wanted quiet and hunting. Sylvia wanted salons, shopping, a personal maid, formal dinners, and relatives who stayed for weeks. On an afternoon when she was lying in the bath, Gable walked in, said flatly that he wanted a divorce, and walked out.
She filed on May 31, 1951, on grounds of mental cruelty. The decree was made final on April 21, 1952. In private, Gable told friends he must have been drunk when he proposed and that he was relieved to have her gone. He changed the locks, fired her staff, and repainted the walls.
Sylvia refused to discuss the Gable marriage for the rest of her life. In 1954, she married a fifth time. Prince Dmitri Djordjadze was a Georgian nobleman living in exile, a hotel executive and former racing driver who had won the 24 Hours of Spa in 1931. The marriage gave her the actual title of princess.
Within about a year they were estranged, but there was no divorce. The legal bond stood for the rest of her life, meaning she died bearing the title. Settling in Los Angeles, she withdrew from public life. After the Gable divorce, she sold a large part of her belongings at auction, valued at around $250,000, but there was little of the famous husbands to be had, only a gong, a pair of guns, and a film prop shield.
In her final years, she was found to have bone cancer and grew increasingly reclusive. She died on June 29, 1977, at the age of 73. She was buried in Hollywood Forever Cemetery under the name Princess Sylvia Georgiaze, roughly 680 feet north of the grave of Douglas Fairbanks. She had chosen the highest title on offer for her headstone and chosen to lie within sight of the husband she called perfect.
She never wrote a memoir and never explained herself. The one statement she left standing was simple: “My marriage to Douglas Fairbanks was perfect. My other husbands, it would not be dignified to discuss.
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