Canadian Beauty : Corona Paynter, 88; Ziegfeld Follies Girl

Corona Paynter, who made a professional pilgrimage from a beauty contest in her native Canada to a luncheon at New York’s Waldorf Astoria Hotel, where she was discovered by the legendary Florenz Ziegfeld, died Tuesday at St. Vincent’s Medical Center in Los Angeles.

Her death at age 88 reduces the number of surviving Ziegfeld Girls across the country to about 30, said Bernice Dee, president of the California chapter of the Ziegfeld Club.

“We have about 10 here (in the West), another 10 in Florida and 10 in the headquarters club (New York),” Dee said.

A Ziegfeld Girl from 1919 to 1921--one of the dozens of beautifully voluptuous young ladies who danced and swayed behind such Ziegfeld stars as Fanny Brice, Eddie Cantor, Chick Sale and W. C. Fields--Miss Paynter had come to New York City after winning the Vancouver contest and was pondering career opportunities.

Accepted Job Reluctantly

In a 1974 interview with The Times, she recalled that she had gone riding in Central Park one morning in 1919 and was still dressed in her equestrian clothes while having lunch, when Ziegfeld approached her table and offered her a job in his follies. She accepted--albeit reluctantly--and quickly found herself working for $50 a week, adorned in a robe fashioned from yards of crushed velvet.

That 1919 follies also featured the song “A Pretty Girl Is Like a Melody.” It became forever associated with the Ziegfeld era.

Miss Paynter left the follies in 1921, said her daughter, Joy Gross, to appear in a London revue. Newspaper clippings of the time referred to her as “The Most Beautiful Showgirl in London.”

She returned to New York, where she was featured in “The Greenwich Village Follies” from 1921 to 1922, and then left show business in 1924, the year she married Morris Green, producer of the Greenwich revue. Her final credit was the Broadway production of “The Tantrum,” also in 1924.

She made one film, the William Fox silent production of “Every Mother’s Son.”