The night before shooting was to start, a game of hide-and-seek was held during a party. Primula Niven (wife of David Niven) opened a door she thought led to a closet and fell down a set of stairs to her death.
In the final scene where Dolly makes her big speech outside of the jail, Ginger Rogers disliked what was written by the scriptwriters. She felt it lacked the integrity that Dolly clearly always had. She instead wrote her own speech the night before the scene was shot and used this.
Of all the post-Fred Astaire movies of Ginger Rogers to this point, this historical drama was her least successful both financially and critically. According to the June 23, 1947 edition of TIME magazine the picture had "trouble getting into some first-run theaters." Moreover, film reviewers largely felt that Ginger had been miscast. To quote film historian Hal Erickson, writing for All Movie Guide, "The usually ebullient Rogers seems encased in wax as Dolly Madison, the first lady of the United States in the early 19th century."
The first plot outline describes the future Dolly Madison as the daughter of boarding house owners in Washington, D.C.
Her father never ran a boarding house. Dolly's mother did that job briefly, after the death of her husband. The boarding house was in Philadelphia, then the nation's capital. It was there that Dolly met Aaron Burr and James Madison, when she was a young widow with a small son.
Only several years later, was Washington, D.C. completed. Madison became President Jefferson's Secretary of State. Dolley served as Jefferson's official hostess in the Executive Mansion because he was a widower.
"The Hedda Hopper Show - This Is Hollywood" broadcast a 30-minute CBS Radio adaptation of the movie on January 18, 1947 with Ginger Rogers reprising her film role.