Matilda Clough, Who Amused the Stars for Flo Ziegfeld, Dies

Florenz Ziegfeld did two things for Matilda Clough when she first began working in his office at age 21.

When introduced to her, he immediately renamed her Goldie, beseeching nobody in particular: “God Almighty. Who would name a kid Matilda?”

Thus edited, he hired her as his private secretary.

That was in 1923 and she was to remain with the flamboyant entertainment entrepreneur until his death nine years later.

For Mrs. Clough, a widow who died April 3 in Santa Monica Hospital at the age of 87, the decade of the 1920s was the most enchanting of her life.

For $35 a week (“big money” in those days, she recalled in a 1976 Times interview), she chatted with Fanny Brice, Marion Davies, Eddie Cantor, W. C. Fields, Will Rogers, Fred and Adela Astaire, Helen Morgan and all the rest of the Follies stars who went in and out of Flo Ziegfeld’s office each day.

When not on the phone or typewriter, she helped arrange the burgeoning collection of carved and molded elephants he kept in his office (“Mr. Ziegfeld thought elephants were lucky”) and sorted through vases of flowers, plucking out the red ones (“Mr. Ziegfeld didn’t like red and wouldn’t have anything red around”).

Part of her job was to keep half the entertainment world amused each day as they waited for Ziegfeld to appear in his office in the New Amsterdam Theater on West 42nd Street.

Customarily, Mrs. Clough remembered, he wouldn’t arrive “until 4 or 5 in the afternoon. He stayed in bed and called on the phone and dictated letters. He would say the same things over and over again.”

After Ziegfeld’s death, Mrs. Clough became a theater manager in Times Square and then moved to Los Angeles with her second husband. Here she became an assistant to the president of Radio Recorders, a Hollywood studio.

In April, 1976, she was honored by the Southern California Floral Assn. as “Secretennial Rose Queen,” in honor of the organization’s bicentennial celebration.

Her apartment was heaped with flowers in all manner of array.

There even were red ones.