Peggy Hopkins Joyce (May 26, 1893 – June 12, 1957) was an American actress and celebrity, famed as much for her several marriages to wealthy men, colorful divorces, scandalous affairs, and generally lavish lifestyle as for her work on stage or screen. Born Marguerite Upton in Berkley, Virginia, she was known as "Peggy", a traditional nickname for Margaret or Marguerite. "Hopkins" and "Joyce" were the surnames of her second and third husbands, respectively (of six overall). She debuted on the Broadway stage in 1917 in the Ziegfeld Follies. In 1923 she caused a sensation in the Earl Carroll racy production of Earl Carroll's Vanities. In 1933, she played herself in the movie International House, which contained some good-natured joshing about her love life. She owned the Portuguese Diamond, one of the most expensive in the world that she later sold to Harry Winston and which is now on display at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C. Her name was frequently incorporated into song lyrics of the 1920s and 1930s to invoke images of excess and naughtiness. For example, "I've Got Five Dollars" by Richard Rodgers and Lorenz Hart includes: "Peggy Joyce has a business/All her husbands have gold..." In Cole Porter's "They Couldn't Compare to You" (from Out of This World), the god Mercury sings of his affairs with women real and fictional through history: "... When betwixt Nell Gwyn / And Anne Boleyn / I was forced to make my choice, / I became so confused / I was even amused / And abused by Peggy Joyce..." Peggy Hopkins Joyce died in New York City in 1957.
References
Gold Digger: The Outrageous Life and Times of Peggy Hopkins Joyce by Constance Rosenblum (2000) Henry Holt & Company (ISBN 0-8050-5089-2)
Disambiguation
Zora Neale Hurston refers to Peggy Hopkins Joyce in her essay"How it Feels to be Colored Me". Hurston compares her own positive self-image to Joyce as "aristocratic" and says that Jocye has "nothing on me". Hurston, and presumably also Joyce, is then "the eternal feminine with its string of beads."
