Excuse the corny blog title, and let’s get to it: who was shortlived “platinum blonde” cutie Loretta Sayers? Let’s dive in:

⁣⁣⁣Sayers, born in Seattle on February 23, 1911, later moved to Larchmont, New York and was described as a young debutante when Columbia took notice of her and whisked her off to Hollywood. ⁣⁣⁣⁣⁣⁣⁣⁣The June 1931 issue of Silver Screen Magazine notes Sayers possessing a “convent and private school background”, without elaborating further. (However, as I’ve discovered, many a young actress (such as Adrienne Dore, for example) embellished their histories with false stories of attending convents. Maybe Loretta was telling the truth. Who knows!)

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Sayers started out on Broadway in her teen years; Playbill credits her with appearances in She’s My Baby (1928) and Boom Boom (1929).⁣⁣⁣⁣⁣⁣⁣⁣
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According to the ye olde publicity biography, Sayers was discovered by a Columbia talent scout in New York, 1931; within the year, she was starring opposite Buck Jones in B westerns, her first appearance being in The Fighting Sheriff (1931). Little was said about her role in this picture; however, she garnered praise for her performance as Jack Holt’s gold-digging leading lady in Fifty Fathoms Deep (1931).

“Loretta Sayers is thoroughly hateful as Pinky Caldwell’s deceitful wife. Although new to the screen, she has mastered a difficult assignment; she plays an unsympathetic character with conviction.”

The Dispatch (Moline, Illinois) October 17, 1931

New Movie Magazine also calls Sayers’ performance “sufficiently hardboiled”. Other appearances that year include a secretary in the Betty Bronson vehicle Lover Come Back (1931), and an uncredited role as “Peggy” in Arizona (1931) with Laura La Plante and John Wayne.

A blonde herself, Sayers soon found herself stuck with Harlow’s “platinum blonde” tag, fad of the year, and continued to bounce around B pictures. She made two more films with Buck Jones, The Deadline (1931) and High Speed (1932).⁣⁣⁣⁣⁣⁣⁣⁣ The latter is nothing special, with Buck in an out-of-place role; Photoplay succinctly refers to it as “the usual auto racing yarn”.
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By the next year, she was relegated to middling Vitaphone comedy shorts, and remained in such throughout the middle of the decade. The first of these was a female lead in the Bert Lahr short Hizzoner (1933), which was promptly panned by Motion Picture Herald: “Another of RKO’s so-called Musical Comedies with no music. The one plain fact is Bert Lahr trying to imitate Joe E. Brown. If you bought them for musical comedies, cancel them, I’m telling you.” Another issue of the same publication refers to it as “poor comedy, or rather, just plain poor.”

1934 had Sayers in Nervous Hands, a fare so obscure Google recommends nothing but hand tremor remedies upon a simple search. Next came the role of Dottie Glutz in the entertaining Mushrooms (1934), opposite Harry Gribbon as a mushroom obsessed professor. (You can catch this one on Volume One of the Vitaphone Comedy Collection, 1932-1934.)

Sayers bowed out of Vitaphone comedies for at least a couple of years after the early Bob Hope two-reeler Double Exposure (1935) which Motion Picture Herald again dismissed as “not so hot”. Right before its release, Sayers made a quick Broadway comeback as “Kitty” in The Body Beautiful, which ran a whopping four times, closing after a day’s engagement at the Plymouth Theatre. Again, reviews were bunk; the Daily News had nothing positive to say. Critic Burns Mantle wrote it was “something of a bust” and called it “a cheap little theatre story”. Ouch!

From there, back to Hollywood; Sayers had one more uncredited role as “Woman with Baby” in the full length drama Wings Over Honolulu (1937), starring Wendy Barrie and Ray Milland. I may or may not have been reduced to stitches upon reading one of IMDB’s user reviews for this film, which called Wendy Barrie “mannered and shrill, the poor man’s Katharine Hepburn.”

1938 saw Loretta Sayers’ final hurrah, again in a Vitaphone short, as the “second blonde” in Stocks and Blondes, and that was it on celluloid from Loretta Sayers. ⁣⁣⁣⁣⁣⁣She later went back east to the legitimate stage with featured roles in Personal Appearance (1939) and The Little Dog Laughed (1940).

As for her personal life, Sayers was married at least twice; a few papers list her being engaged to famed “Pennies from Heaven” composer Arthur Johnston in 1937, but I don’t think this came to fruition. Newspaper reports link them as far back as 1933, but I can’t locate any record of the two together. Given it’s only newspaper gossip, I’ll stick with the two simply having an on-and-off romance that never culminated in marriage. Furthermore, Sayers is listed as “single” on ship manifests from 1938 and on the 1940 census, where she’s living in New York with her mother, Vera.

⁣⁣Sayers did marry Louisiana aviator and oil businessman Richard Van Conover later the same year, 1940:

Interestingly, Conover’s first wife made big headlines when she sued him for divorce and won alimony in 1939, after he “blackened her eyes and broke her jaw”…sounds like a winner, doesn’t he? See for yourself:

According to this first article, Conover held interest at the Chapel Theatre in Great Neck, where Loretta just so happened to be playing in Personal Appearance that same summer…hmmm…

Loretta’s marriage was short-lived, as she was widowed only five years later in 1945. Richard van Conover died at the young age of thirty nine in Los Angeles. The case thickens: his cause of death was listed as a subdural hemorrhage, resulting from being hit over the head with a bottle sometime in 1932:

Despite this, Conover’s death was attributed to only a “short illness” in the papers.

Loretta Sayers Conover remarried to an R.A. Golter the next year, 1946, and from there, not much from her. The two were married well into the sixties, and presumably until one of them passed.
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Loretta Sayers (as Loretta S. Golter) passed away on September 14, 1999, at the ripe age of 88 in Mission Viejo, California.

Not much else to say other than I hope she enjoyed her life, and she surely left an impact both on film and stage. Cheers, Loretta!