Clara Lane, Matchmaker for Half a Century, Dies

Clara Lane, the whiskey-voiced matchmaker who reigned as Cupid’s queen for nearly 50 years, has died in a Glendale hospital, it was learned Tuesday.

The self-styled “merchant of loneliness,” who once estimated that she had brought together more than 25,000 couples, was 85 when she died Monday.

At one time, her ads (usually accompanied by her photo) ran in hundreds of newspapers across the country. They trumpeted, “You Don’t Have to Spend Another Weekend Alone!”

Any many who paid her $350 fee never did again.

She was an earthy, corpulent woman who made prospective love a lifelong labor after moving from her native Iowa to New York and eventually to Los Angeles.

“I had a restaurant in New York,” she told The Times in 1958, “and read tea leaves. I was amazed how many people were lonely.”

She began to introduce her customers and soon realized that there was more money to be made from selling love than in serving liver.

She opened the first of her pioneering Friendship Centers in New York in the late 1930s, and they spread across the country. Where there once were 22 with 10,000 members nationwide, they had dwindled to only one at her death.

She had just completed her autobiography, tentatively titled “Cupid Was My Business,” at her death. Her biographer, Margaret West, said Miss Lane believed that computer dating was an improvement over her own service and had probably contributed to the decline in Friendship Centers.

Phone Greeting

Late in her life, she was interviewed in her Los Angeles office overlooking Pershing Square, where, wearing a blonde wig and bright red fingernail polish, she answered her own phone with the greeting she had perfected over the years:

“How old are you honey and what are you looking for?”

Most of her callers were men seeking to fill up those lonely weekends, and while she never made marriage a condition of utilizing her service, she always maintained that she “didn’t run no meat market.”

Beyond the $350 fee required to join her social introduction clubs and receive her match-up letters, an additional $250 was charged if the introduction ended in marriage.

She estimated that half of her patrons eventually paid that fee.

Her customers, she maintained, were generally satisfied, although she did delight in telling of the man who wanted a refund because he no longer liked the woman he had married.

“How long you been married?” Miss Lane asked.

“Nineteen years” was the reply.

“Honey, you got your money’s worth,” Miss Lane answered, hanging up.

Stayed Married

Clara Lane herself said she was married at 17 and stayed married for nearly 60 years.

“He got emphysema just after we got married,” she said in 1982.

“I thought he’d die, but he didn’t, so I ended up supporting him all those years.”

He did die in 1979.

“It was probably just as well. He hated California,” she said.