- Born
- Died
- Birth nameAileen Bisbee
- Height5′ 4″ (1.63 m)
- Aileen Pringle's favorite film was a mid-1920s silent based on a book by Elinor Glyn: Three Weeks (1924), sort of a "Lady Chatterly's Lover". She recalled in a 1980 telephone conversation: "The film was in good taste; some people thought the book was trashy". Anita Loos wrote in "A Girl Like I", the first volume of her autobiography, vaudeville comic Joe Frisco telling Glynn: "Leave me get this straight. You want to find some tramp that don't look like a tramp, to play that English tramp in your picture. But take it from me, that kind of tramp don't hang out in Hollywood". Aileen had spent her 20s married to Charles McKenzie Pringle, the son of Sir John Pringle, a Jamaica landowner and a member of the Privy and Legislative Councils of Jamaica. Aileen lived in Jamaica until she went on stage with George Arliss. When she began divorce proceedings against Pringle in 1926, Hollywood gossip columnists speculated she would marry H.L. Mencken. She did not remarry until 1944 when she became the bride of James M. Cain, author of "The Postman Always Rings Twice". I opened my 1980 telephone conversation with Aileen by mentioning that the day before I had been reading her correspondence with Mencken at the New York Public Library. "But all the letters were destroyed", she said. I knew that Mencken had asked for all of his letters to her back at the time he became engaged to Sara Haardt. Aileen was the only woman who received such a request from Mencken at that time. "It was your letters from the late '30s and '40s I was reading", I told Aileen. "In one of them Mencken was urging you to write a book. Did you ever finish it?" "No. I got married instead." In a 1946 letter she wrote to Mencken. "If I had remained married to that psychotic Cain, I would be wearing a straitjacket instead of the New Look."- IMDb Mini Biography By: Dale O'Connor <daleoc@worldnet.att.net> (qv's & corrections by A. Nonymous)
- SpousesJames M. Cain(August 12, 1944 - September 4, 1946) (divorced)Charles Benjamin Moses Mckenzie Pringle(1916 - September 13, 1933) (divorced)
- Was a member of the Algonquin Round Table.
- Greta Garbo was her tennis partner.
- She claimed that Louis B. Mayer spitefully burned the prints of her films in 1952 because television had no interest in silent films.
- Louella Parsons reported that Pringle had lightened her hair color due to a growing preference for blond leading ladies (November 15, 1929). One of Pringle's trademarks during the zenith of her career was her dark hair.
- Romantically involved with H.L. Mencken before his 1930 marriage to Sara Powell Haardt.
- [her brief eulogy on the death of Mary Pickford in "Films in Review"] So, she was human after all!
- [on the passing of one of her contemporaries] I avoided having lunch with her sixty years ago. I'm running out of people to hate.
- [In a 1985 interview on the secret of her longevity] If you think it's because I behaved myself when I was young, you're dead wrong.
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