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HARRY, Loulette (Torset) 1917-1949

HARRY

Posted By: K.L. Kittleson
Date: 11/22/2014 at 11:40:20

Love Born in War Torn Paris
Ends in Death for Loulette

On April Fool's day, death wrote the final ironic paragraph here in the story-book life of pretty little Loulette Torset of Paris, who followed her true love to Iowa and chose death by her own hand rather than give him up.

It was "lof at first sight", she had said, when she met the northeastern Iowa soldier during World war II while she was singing in a top cabaret on the Champs Elysees and he was serving with OSS in Paris.

But after she followed him to this country last October, he suggested postponing the wedding date and, finally, told her that he had changed his mind completely and it might be better if she returned to Paris.

Obviously, Loulette, who loved America almost as deeply as she loved "Deeck," couldn't have borne the humiliation, the separation and the pain.

So Wednesday evening in her lonely room at the home of Mr. and Mrs. Donald E. Roehr, 254 Western Avenue, she took every drug she could lay her hands on and went to sleep for the last time.

She left a note in her quaint broken English pleading that "God and Dick will forgive me."

A stranger in a strange land, she never knew how many friends called the hospital, how many paced the hospital corridor, how many kept the lonely vigil while Loulette made the difficult journey to the only peace she had ever known.

Little Loulette, born Loulette Torset on a farm near Paris and who lived in the famed Pigalle section of the world's most fascinating city, was no angel, no plaster saint. Loulette with the daffodil hair, carefully peroxided, the bright lips with a professional application of lipstick, the sparkling eyes outlined in mascara, probably knew most of the answers. Nobody will deny that.

She began a career as a ballet dancer at the age of 16, turned to singing and acting in Paris theaters, loved radio work and making French movies p where she became a starlet.

She tried her hand at dubbing in French sound tracks for Paramount and 20th Century Fox films sent abroad and she was well known in Paris as a "diseuse" a talk singer, who made good in night club work.

A friend of Dick's told him about her and he went to see for himself.

"When Deeck come in my night club, I lof him." Loulette once said candidly. "He go to Germany and Belgium and he come back weeth face all dirty - I lof him." "If he come back weeth no arms - leg cut off - I lof him!" She was triumphant in her passionate French emotion.

But Dick, back in this country grew leary of a fourth marriage. "I couldn't go through another marriage and divorce," he said. "It's just one of those things. People change."

But Loulette had always felt she'd love an American. Her mother, now deceased, had married an American navy man and Loulette's stepfather now lives in retirement in Maryland. "In my heart," said Loulette, "I know someday I would marry American too." It took a long time for her to realize that her heart was wrong.

For months after she came, she sat alone all day, knowing nothing of the language and few of the people. Then gradually, the charm of her Gallic personality drew an ever-widening circle of friends.

The Amvet home gave her a job as hostess and the Jamvets, it's small band, worked with her, teaching her American songs and rhythms so that she might become a featured entertainer.

She found it more difficult than she had ever believed possible. French music has a different pattern, many English words were strange. She tried "My Darling" and "So Tired," but words like "fluttered" and 'melted" were puzzling and, French-like, she ran the phrases together.

She was discouraged, but not licked. Nobody who had lived through the German occupation, been fired on in Paris streets and known the horrors of waiting and hoping and being hungry could be licked by a catchy song.

But it was the loneliness, the not being able to make oneself understood in tongue-twisting English, the days of waiting for a call from Dick, who travels for an oil company and is home only during
weekends.

Perhaps Loulette sensed, too, that many of her new friends, although entranced by her charm and her accent, treated her like a trained monkey on a stick. Many there were, too who meant to offer her the hospitality of their homes—and their friendship—but their lives were filled with other things. Hers wasn't.

She would have been surprised to know how many of them took a part of the blame themselves when she died. Probably, too, it would have gratified her sense of the dramatic. She had threatened to do away with herself before — but those she told had only laughed. Nobody thinks it's very funny today.

A French war bride, whom she met recently and to whom she clung as the only touch of a dead past, says, "She was the most unhappy person I have ever known."

Somebody else must have known that too. But she hadn't heard from any of her new friends in the last few days. She couldn't know how many of them will never forget the appeal of her brown eyes - with the terror behind them - and the way she tilted her curly head to better understand their foreign tongue.

Now it's too late. Loulette was a stranger - and the door was locked.

[Waterloo Daily Courier, Sunday, April 3, 1949, Waterloo, Iowa]
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Funeral services will be Tuesday at 10:30 a.m. at Locke Funeral Home for Miss Loulette Harry, who committed suicide last Thursday at the home of Mr. and Mrs. Donald E. Roehr, 254 Western Avenue where she roomed. A Catholic priest will officiate at the service and burial will be at Calvary Cemetery. [Waterloo]

Source: Waterloo Daily Courier, April 4, 1949
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NOTES:

Gravestone inscribed:
"In Memoriam -- Loulette Harry 1917-1949"
See photo of tombstone on link below her photo.

Photo of her tombstone on Findagrave
 

Black Hawk Obituaries maintained by Karen De Groote.
WebBBS 4.33 Genealogy Modification Package by WebJourneymen

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