Ann Pennington – Silent Stars: Where Are They Now … 1932 Edition

This is part of a series showing what the silent stars featured in the 1917 Kromo Gravure Trading Card set were up to at the precise moment in time covered in a 1932 Motion Picture Magazine article, Stars Who Have Vanished by Jack Grant.

I've been using the IMDb, Wikipedia, my physical bookshelf, and especially the NewspaperArchive.com database to search out the rest of the story for each of these old time stars in attempts to see what became of them from 1932 until their deaths.

Ann Pennington

Stars Who Have Vanished, 1932: Famous little swimming and diving girl is now a star dancer in Broadway revues. As peppy as ever.

What I Dug Up: The New York Times obit of the 4' 11-1/2" Pennington, nicknamed "Penny" by friends and "Tiny" by herself, claims the Black Bottom dancer made her final show biz appearance during a 1946 vaudeville tour.

She turned up in the papers on multiple occasions after that when New York journalists would run into her at the track, seemingly always placing $2 bets.

Two very similar such reports, longer than others, were credited to Mel Heimer in 1949 and Phyllis Battelle in 1955.

Both writers detail Pennington's famed dimpled knees (unfortunately hidden in our Kromo Gravure card!) with Heimer reminiscing how Ann was his father's secret "other woman"--secret from Pennington, as Heimer's mother would often mock him over the crush--and Battelle gaining the courage to attempt a racetrack interview with the former Scandals star.

In reply to Battelle the still breezy but shy Pennington said, "Ah, honey, I'm not on Broadway right now, you know ... and I don't like to talk about myself when I'm not doing anything." Pennington did share her results at the track that day with Battelle though!

Ann Pennington died in 1971, age 77.

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