Relative value

Every family has a few skeletons in the closet and mine is no exception, madness for example runs rife on my fathers side of the family though we don't talk about that. On my mothers side it's tragedy. This is polite speak for all manner of unfortunate ends; suicide, electrocution, deportation and imprisonment to name but a few, and we talk even less about those.

Many of the past generations of Robinson's had a look of madness about them, this one's tie pin hints at a musical bent. 

I am the result of a mixing of two of the great north Antrim Protestant families, the Robinson's and the Carlisle's. Like many Irish families we've been spread to the far flung corners of the earth. My mother used to say that the Robinson's spread faster than fleas and my father would whimsically retort that if the Robinson's were like fleas then the Carlisle's where like the black death.

The Carlisle's were an altogether better looking bunch but no less eccentric. This is my great uncle and namesake Robert Carlisle in about 1902 aged 10.    

My mothers side of the family tree were certainly the more glamorous of the two. Old Irish and before that Scottish with a thousand year old history. The Carlisle's were in Ireland eight hundred years before the Robinson's though my mothers generation saw the last of them in Ireland.

My Mother (middle) and her two sisters Nancy (right) and Jane (left) who died of cancer some years ago.

What remains of them now is down to my grandfathers brothers, John, Tom, William, Jim and Robert Carlisle (whom I'm named after) all of whom left Ireland before world war one. My great uncle William moved to America, married and had at least one daughter, Mary, who at 99, is still alive.

between 1930 and 1943 Mary Carlisle acted in at least 67 movies

Mary, my first cousin once removed, and a glamorous Carlisle if ever there was one, is one of only two surviving members of WAMPAS Baby Stars of 1932 she made a string of movies in the 30's and 40's and enjoyed a decade of stardom before retiring from the screen to work for Elizabeth Arden, managing the famous Beverly Hills salon for years. She was given a star on the Hollywood Walk Of Fame in Feb 1960.

Mary Carlisle top billed in the 1933 smash hit "girl of my dreams" titled here for the American market. Her co-star Buster Crabbe would go on to find fame in the role of Tarzan and later as Flash Gordon.

A couple of dozen bit parts (she played a honeymooner alongside Garbo and  Joan Crawford in Grand Hotel)  lead to a handful of staring roles and although cast alongside some of the leading actors of the day Mary would remain a star of the B movie. She worked with the legendary Cecil B. DeMille and made three movies with Bing Crosby, often cast as the pretty blonde she would become the original Hollywood dumb blonde.

In the heydays of Hollywood, collecting postcards of the stars was a popular pastime, here is my favourite of the hundred or so produced of Mary. Its a copy of the picture used by studios to promote her. 

These days Mary lives in almost total seclusion in Santa Monica and hasn't been seen in public in twenty years; something which is much more a Robinson trait than that of a Carlisle.