Louise Fazenda’s Good Deeds Live After HerTestimonials to Philanthropies of Comic Actress Come to Light After Her Funeral
Los Angeles Times, April 21, 1962 – Louise Fazenda, 67, was a zany screen comic in her day – and that was the way she chose to be remembered in her lifetime.
But Friday, Miss Fazenda, wife of producer Hal Wallis since 1927, was buried in Inglewood Park Cemetery. And no longer could she fend off the testimonials to her philanthropy which she shunned as long as she lived.
The stories came to light only after Miss Fazenda’s death.
In 1954, friends said, she read in the Times of a 5-year-old girl hospitalized after the death of her mother in the same auto accident. Miss Fazenda read of it and paid all the expenses.
Aided Law Students
A law student decided he’s have to drop out of school because his wife was expecting a baby. Instead, Miss Fazenda took up the bills.
Money wasn’t the beginning of the comedienne’s philanthropy.
“She used to go out to UCLA Medical Center, where she’d feed the young children, rock them and sing them to sleep,” a friend said. “More than once a doctor left the instruction: ‘Let the child spend some time with Louise Fazenda.’”
One who knew all Miss Fazenda’s charities was Mrs. Irving Asher, known by movie fans of another era as Laura La Plante.
Found Home for Poor
“She helped wherever she could,” said Mrs. Asher, “wherever she was – Hong Kong, London, anywhere – she always found the homes for the poor or for the children.”
“About a year ago,” she said, “there was a little boy who wouldn’t eat. The doctors were really worried about him. But Louise would run back and forth to her home, trying out different dishes, different flavors, and then coax him. He recovered.”
Not all of “her” children recovered. She spent hours with terminal leukemia patients, Mrs. Asher said.
Friday, some of Hollywood’s great names came to the services at Grace Chapel, directed by Groman Mortuary. Among them were Zazu Pitts, Joan Blondell, Hal Roach, William Demarest, Edward G. Robinson, Harry Warner, Harry Brand, and Y. Frank Freeman.
They could testify to her kindliness. But to others – children who were desperately ill or hungered for love – she will be a misty memory of a gentle woman who rocked them and loved them when they needed it.
