Who was Sarett Rudley?

As previous posts on this blogspot have shown, I like nothing better than delving into records. In my first job as a junior civil service clerk in the old Ministry of Transport. I was fascinated by the files going back to the setting up the regional roads office and delighted in burrowing into the old correspondence - something I might go into on another occasion. One can imagine what a boon the Internet and search engines from Lynx through to Google turned out to be.

The World Wide Web also introduced me to the Internet Movie Database (IMDb), now owned by Amazon, but founded and still managed by a Brit. Just occasionally, the excellent Independent obituaries (which sadly did not survive the cull when the paper went online only) provided snippets about screen actors which were not already recorded on the IMDb so I became one of the many contributors to IMDb. I also signed up to the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography's (ODNB) daily extract from its extensive archive.

It was an ODNB update which started me on the Sarett Rudley hare. Felicity Anne Cumming (I link to the Indy's obit since the ODNB is a subscription service, albeit a free one) was an adventuress who, it was noted, was first married to Richard Mason. He wrote three romantic novels on which successful films were based, The World of Suzie Wong being the one that provided him with a pension for life. The IMDb has no references to Mason marriages. but I recalled an Indy obit and managed to find it from a back issue (it is no longer accessible online). The obituarist Jack Adrian (probably a fellow-author, Chris Lowder, using one of his pseudonyms - just the first in this saga!) recorded that Mason was married three times but tantalisingly gives no names. When all else fails, try Wikipedia - and, sure enough, there is an entry for Mason which lists Cumming as his first wife, Margot (Maggie) Wolf as his widow and mother of his two children and, in between, Sarett Rudley, with whom he went "to raise sheep on an estate in Wales".

The description of Ms Rudley as a writer of television teleplays for Alfred Hitchcock Presents was intriguing (we are now two degrees of separation from Anne Cumming). There are no biographical details for her on IMDb. She suddenly appears as a screenwriter in 1956, adapting other people's original material, until 1959 when she signs off with an original screenplay - perhaps a leaving gift from the Hitchcock production team? That would fit with a departure for Britain in the late '50s, especially as she also has a 1958 credit for a contribution to ABC's Armchair Theatre. In 1968, she contributed to Journey to the Unknown, described on IMDb as an English series, shot by MGM in the US company's Borehamwood studios, but featuring American actors in the leading parts. A 1989 credit proved to be misleading, because it was a remake of an earlier Hitchock episode. So Sarett Rudley effectively disappeared after 1968.

She almost came from nowhere - but not quite. In 1949, a well-meaning but unfortunately untheatrical "colour problem" play was put on in Brooklyn. How Long Till Summer ran for just seven performances. The authors were Sarett and Herbert Rudley. Herbert Rudley had a long career on stage starting in 1926 and became a stalwart character actor on screen until 1983. He had no other writing credits of any kind that I can discover, so presumably the play was virtually all Sarett's work. Herbert Rudley was actually born Herbert Shapiro and adopted his mother's maiden name as his own fairly early in his stage career. (Obviously Jewish names were out in those times. For instance, Emanuel Goldenberg changed his name to Edward G Robinson. English and French surnames were OK, other continental European monickers a bit dicey.)

It turns out that a Sarette (sic) Tobias became Rudley's mistress in Hollywood while he was still married to Ann Loring, causing an interesting court case. IMDb lists Sarett Tobias as a screenwriter with two credits to her name in 1945 and '46.

A bit more digging turned up a 1948 marriage between Rudley and Tobias, which had not been listed on IMDb previously. That led to a date and place of birth: 26th September 1917 in Colorado Springs, which ties in with a US census return of 1940 showing a Sarett Tobias, the wife of a medical doctor in Los Angeles.

From the time her earlier surname appeared, a faint bell rang. Was there not a leading character named Tobias in a major film? Eventually it came to me: Sarah Tobias was the victim in The Accused, written by veteran journalist turned screenwriter Tom Topor. Pure coincidence, or had the author met the former Sarett Tobias?

So I have clearly identified the second wife of Richard Mason with the (bored?) young housewife and mother in Los Angeles who took to writing screenplays. But where did she come from? Here is where it gets murkier. There is no Sarett listed among the Colorado births, but there is a Sarah Rude of the right birthdate. She takes a couple of journeys by sea (as shown in passenger lists) with her mother, travelling under her maiden name of Teichman, then nothing.  This is almost certainly the same person, but I cannot make the Milton Tobias connection.

And what became of Sarett Mason? Presumably she returned to the States - or did she go to Italy? Jack Adrian reported that Richard Mason remained on good terms with both his first two wives. There is more to discover there.