Archival Adventures - Episode 10: Ann Eve Moss Papers (Ms1990-028)
Channel: VTLibraries
Date: 2021-06-04

On this episode, we explore the Ann Eve Moss Papers (Ms1990-028).

Ann Moss, nee Dressler, was born in New York City in 1903. She took singing and dancing lessons in high school and began performing on the professional stage by the time she graduated. She married Harry Moss, a theatrical agent, in 1922. She spent the years between 1922 and 1930 as a Ziegfeld Follies chorus girl in such productions as The Three Musketeers, Garrick Gaieties, and Funny Face. Moss also modeled for New York Daily News advertisements. In 1927 she gave birth to her only daughter, Marilyn (later known as Alwyn). In 1928 she refused to audition in the nude for producer Earl Carroll's show Fioretta, brought charges against Carroll before Actor's Equity, the theater union, and won the case in January 1929.

In the late 1930s Moss traveled to Europe, the beginning of a series of trips abroad throughout the remainder of her life. Upon her return to the U.S. she launched into her writing career, and completed the first draft of the novel Catha's Sister , based on her experiences on the stage. When her marriage ended in the early 1940s, she became a freelance secretary. Her employers included Erich Fromm, Rollo May, Countess Mona Bismarck (for whom she later worked full time as an administrative secretary on her estate in Capri, Italy), and Paul Pierre Matisse, son of the painter, for whom she worked in Nice, France. During this time she also worked on another novel, A Widow's Odyssey (unpublished). Other, shorter works include children's books The Friends of Tinkle Rescue Club and The Runaway Balloon (unpublished). She moved to Nice in the mid-1960s and returned the United States in 1975, settling in Greensboro, North Carolina. In 1981 she moved to Floyd, Virginia, to live with her daughter, and in 1984 moved to a retirement community in Blacksburg, Virginia. She died five days before her 85th birthday in March 1988.

Materials in the collection include photographs, playbills, news clippings, and other memorabilia from Moss's early career as a chorus girl for the Ziegfield Follies, as well as manuscript copies of her unpublished novels.