Ursula Parrott

Ursula Parrott (March 26, 1899 – September 1957), was a prolific modern novelist, screenwriter, and short story writer whose sensational first novel, Ex-Wife, was a Jazz Age best seller. Adapted for film as The Divorcee, it starred Norma Shearer. Exploring divorce, abortion, infidelity, changing ideas about marriage, and the disastrous effects of the new morality on women, Ex-Wife created a scandal because of its frank depiction of young working women in a New York City drenched in cocktails and Scotch. From 1930 to 1936, Parrott sold the rights to eight novels and stories that were made into films. and her mother was Towle's second wife, Mary Catherine Flusk, who also gave birth to Ursula's older sister, Lucy Inez Towle. Towle's first wife, Elizabeth Mooney, had died shortly after giving birth to a daughter, Margaret. Parrott's older half-sister would later adopt the name Madge Tyrone.

Parrott attended Girls’ Latin School in Boston and Radcliffe College, a small women's liberal arts college in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Ursula married three other men, Charles T. Greenwood, a prominent New York banker, in 1934; John Wildberg, an attorney, in 1937; and Air Force Major Coster Schermerhorn (grandson of Charles Coster) in 1945. She ran in high literary circles and was even rumored to have had an affair with F. Scott Fitzgerald. Her biography makes no such claim. It does note that Fitzgerald was happy to work on the screenplay of "Infidelity," based on one of Ursula's short stories. At the trial, she was found innocent. There was another arrest over $1,000 worth of silverware taken from a house where she was a guest. That, too, blew over. "Although she’d published twenty-two books and over fifty stories, the New York Times still reminded its audience of her identity by saying she was the author of Ex-Wife," noted Paris Review critic Michael LePointe in 2019.

Lindesay Parrott outlived his ex-wife. He apparently did not get to know his son, Marc. A well-known foreign correspondent, he had a small obituary in The New York Times in 1987.

In 1988, Marc Parrott, a retired schoolteacher and librarian, died in Honolulu at the age of 64. He left behind his wife, two sons, and a grandchild. He had written a rueful, affectionate afterword to the republication of Ex-Wife, which astonished him, since it had been so long forgotten, vividly describing his mother's workaholic lifestyle.

Career Parrott's Ex-Wife, her first novel, was published anonymously in 1929.

An overnight success, it sold more than 100,000 copies in nine editions. The New York Mirro r’s serialization of the “book everybody is talking about” coincided with the stock market crash and the start of the Great Depression. MGM paid $20,000 for the film rights;

Financially, Parrott was most successful between 1929 and 1940, during which she became a sought-after Hollywood screenwriter, wrote more novels, and many short stories. Her son estimated that she earned around $700,000 ($ in dollars) during that period of time.

Novels Ex-Wife, Jonathan Cape & Harrison Smith (1929); re-issued with a foreword by Alissa Bennett and afterword by Marc Parrott, New York: McNally Editions, (2023) Strangers May Kiss, Johnathan Cape & Harrison Smith (1930) Love Goes Past, Jonathan Cape & Harrison Smith (1931) The Tumult and the Shouting, Longman Green (1933) Dream Without Ending, Longman Green (1935) For All Our Lives, Dodd, Mead (1938) Heaven's Not Far Away, Dodd, Mead (1942) Navy Nurse, Dodd, Mead (1943) Even In One Hundred Years, (1944)

Film Adaptions Next Time We Love There's Always Tomorrow (1956 film) The Divorcee Strangers May Kiss Love Affair (1932 film)