Posts Tagged ‘Elizabeth Taylor’

Starr Faithfull, Andrew J. Peters, and the Scandals of Yesterday

Wednesday, June 8th, 2011

Today we come up on the 80th anniversary of an unsolved death that marked a major scandal for a prominent political figure. The badly bruised body of beautiful 25-year old girl washed up on the beach at Long Island, her liver showing traces of Veronal (the first commercially available barbiturate). The body turned out to be one Starr Faithfull, a “good time girl” well known on the Boston social scene.

That would be interesting enough. But it turned out that Starr Faithfull kept a diary, in which she described having an affair with a prominent political figure. The figure turned out to be Boston Mayor Andrew James Peters, who denied the affair, but who ended up paying $20,000 worth of hush money to Starr Faithfull’s father.

John O’Hara would later use elements of the story in his novel BUtterfield 8, though set in New York rather than Boston, which lead to Elizabeth Taylor’s Academy Award winning performance in the movie of the same name.

But the movie (I haven’t read the book) changes one very big detail: the first time she had sex with Peters, Starr Faithfull was eleven years old.

As to whether she was murdered or not, that remains unresolved to this very day…