CLUTCH OF DEATH.

Manawatu Times, Volume XLII, Issue 1734, 9 February 1921, Page 9

CLUTCH OF DEATH.

GAY CIRCLE SHATTERED, The suicide in Paris of Mrs Hallyo Whatley Peck caps the most startling series of tragedies within a single social set that has ever been recorded, comments the Paris correspondent of an American journal. Inside of one year seven men and women, all dazzling figures in AngloAmerican circles, moving in London, Paris and New York, have met sudden or violent ends. The first link in the chain of calamities was forged early in the year, when Gaby Deslys, stricken with cancer, lost every vestige of her famous beauty and died in a Paris nursing home. Dancer is Burned. Then Eva Lusdombe, one of the finest dancers of England, was burned to death in New York. A few months later her closest friend, “Babs” Taylor, was slain in her fashionable apartment by George Augustus Kelly in a fit of jealousy. While his sweetheart was dying in a, hospital, where she was taken after Kelly shot her, he turned his weapon upon himself and died a suicide. On the same day Miss Luscombe’s husband, who was the son of a baronet, fell dead,at his dressing table. "Babs” Taylor’s close friend, Phylliij Maude, a beautiful chorus girl, who had married the Marquis de Sain, died the same week in a Glasgow boarding-house. At one of her last appearances in London, Gaby Deslys played at the Globe Theatre in "Suzette,” with ‘'Babs” Taylor and Hallye Pock, whose death in Paris from an overdose of veronal obliterated from this life the last member of the tragic circle. A Famous Beauty. Mrs Peck was a beautiful woman about town, frequenting the best hotels and night clubs for some years, her bills being paid by a famous millionaire. In her heyday she had a house In exclusive Curzon Street, where her expensive parties were attended by famous people of art, letters and drama. Then fell the evil days, when she moved among the desperate gamblers and quickly sank from wealth to poverty. She was only 26 when she died. The early days of her married life were happy, but she estranged from her husband when she launched into the night life of the West End, dining at the Rltz, Savoy and Carlton, and finishing her nights in gambling dens. She once shared an apartment with Gaby Deslys, whose death great'* influenced her during the recent fnonths, though penury, and not grief at the loss of her many friends, caused her to take her life. She went to Paris after pawning her jewels with friends, and divorce proceedings were pending in Paris when she fell inextricably into the clutches of drugs. At the end of the summer she made her first attempt at suicide with veronal. Paris doctors saved her that time, though she hovered between life and death for several days. When she recovered she made a last futile attempt to restore her furs. Describing her later months as a “wounded butterfly’s last pathetic days,” one of her London friends has Just said:— "For many months Hallye was continually plotting and scheming to find a way out of her difficulties. And at the end, when she haxi decided upon death for herself, she spent weeks deciding how to distribute her remaining personal belongings. “She even arranged for her own fun'eral. Before she died she expressed she wish to have her remains cremated and the ashes scattered to the four winds. She bequeathed her maid to her friends, hoping that some of them would care for her sole remaining servant.”