Pearl, Leo, and Yetta Metzner
In May 1902, Salome Carillion Metzner admitted her three youngest surviving children — Pearl (8), Leo (6), and Yetta (3) — to the Home, representing one of several multi-generational admissions from the same family. Salome was the niece of Esther and Rachel Carillion, the first two children admitted to the Home’s care in 1855.
Apparently Salome was separated from her husband, John B. Metzner, who one year later sued Salome for divorce on grounds of desertion. Two other children, Emanuel and John Bartlett, Jr., had both died on January 11, 1901, of unrecorded causes.
Unlike her siblings, whose father was John B. Metzner, Pearl’s father was Joseph Mott, and her birth resulted from a crime for which Mott was prosecuted. As the New Orleans Item (Feb. 13, 1894) reported the charges, “Mott took [Salome Carillion, then age 13] from her home and brought her to ‘Lover Lane’ at West End, where he accomplished her ruin, and a child was born. Shortly afterward Mott was married to another young lady and the information was filed against him.” One month later, Salome married John B. Metzner.
Drafted into the U.S. Army in June 1917, 22-year-old Leo Metzner was assigned to the 363rd Infantry Battalion of the 93rd Division. A case of the measles while sailing overseas, however, confined Metzner to a Glasgow hospital and saved him from the fatal combat that wiped out most of his unit. When he recovered, he served with the military police in England and France, before his discharge in October 1919. Thanks to Kenneth Marks, Metzner’s great-nephew, you can read the rest of Leo Metzner’s war story here.
Leo remained in the Home until September 1907, when he was discharged to his mother, who was earning money by working for a New Orleans lawyer. By 1917, Leo had moved to San Francisco where he worked as a salesman until he was drafted into the Army to serve in England and France during WWI. After the war, he sold paint and eventually became the owner of a chain of paint stores in Los Angeles. In 1921, he married Martha Heyman, with whom he raised a daughter, and later changed the family surname to Day. Leo and Martha celebrated their fiftieth anniversary two months before Martha’s death in 1971. Read about Leo and Martha’s fiftieth anniversary here.
When he wasn’t selling paint, Leo performed as a magician, serving as an officer of the Oakland Magic Circle, and passing along the tricks-of-the-trade to his daughter, Gloria. By age seven, Gloria made news as “the youngest working magician in the world.” Under the stage name Gloria Dea, she later took her magic act to The Hotel El Rancho Vegas, the Las Vegas Strip’s first casino resort. After retiring from magic in the 1940s, Gloria acted in several Hollywood movies before completely retiring from show business in the 1950s. Following her death at age 100 in 2023, which was reported by the New York Times, NBC’s Today Show honored Gloria’s career as a pioneering magician who followed in her father’s footsteps. You can watch the episode here.
Leo died at age 89 in 1984.
Leo (Metzner) Day and his daughter – a pioneering magician and a movie actor — who performed under the stage name Gloria Dea. This 1940s photo appeared in the 2003 Today Show episode that paid tribute to Gloria’s career. Thanks to Kenneth Marks for chronicling his family’s history on his website.
Pearl and Yetta (who was later known as Henrietta) remained in the Home until April 1908, when their mother, with the recommendation of the local B’nai B’rith Lodge, persuaded the board that she was able to take care of her three children. Just a few months earlier, 15-year-old Pearl made news when she delivered remarks at the Home’s anniversary celebration. As the Times-Picayune reported, “The Jewish Home is to be congratulated if little Miss Pearl is a sample of the splendid physical health of its wards, not to say of the manual training received by them, which was notably displayed before a large and enthusiastic assemblage.”
By 1913, Pearl had moved to San Francisco, where she married George Washington Adam Wuest, an advertising salesman. In 1918, a year after divorcing Wuest, Pearl married Kalman Farkas, a salesman, with whom she lived in New York until his death in 1925. Later the same year, Pearl married Joseph “Danny” Dannenberg, the publisher of the prestigious Hollywood movie industry magazine Film Daily, considered the “Bradstreet of filmdom.” Just six months into the marriage, Dannenberg died following surgery for appendicitis. As Dannenberg’s widow, however, Pearl was thrust into the Hollywood social scene, making news for hosting suppers and luncheons. In 1931, Pearl married George W. Weiler, but the marriage ended one year later when, as she “confided” in the “Snapshots of Hollywood” syndicated columnist, she “divorced the new husband in Mexico and had taken back her name of Dannenberg.”
Pearl’s 1932 marriage to Rowland G. Robbins, a wealthy cosmetics manufacturer, put her in the spotlight once again, ironically because of a Mexican divorce. Robbins’ first wife, musical comedy star Ruth Gillette, unsuccessfully sued Robbins for divorce, while naming Pearl as a co-respondent; as widely reported in the news, the Los Angeles judge rejected Gillette’s contention that the fraudulent divorce decree she obtained from Robbins in Mexico was void. Thereafter, Pearl and Robbins lived in Miami, Florida until Pearl’s death at age 48 in 1941.
Much less is known about Henrietta, who in 1920 was living in New Orleans with Pearl and her husband, Kalman Farkas. In 1924, in New York, Henrietta married Leonard James Bolatoff, a doctor, who later changed his name to Bolton. In 1930, they were living in Brooklyn, where he was practicing medicine in a hospital and Henrietta was working as a dictaphone operator. By 1940, Henrietta was divorced and living in New York with her mother, Salome, now a widow of her second husband, William Joseph Hippler, whom she married shortly after she retrieved her children from the Home.