Remembering Ann Marsters, well known gossip columnist who spent laters years in Galesburg

Long before there was TMZ and about one million other websites devoted to all the Hollywood buzz, movie and show biz gossip was a hotly-shared commodity. While Louella Parsons and Hedda Hopper were the two undisputed queens of the gossip game, many others were ready to deliver all the scoop that was fit to print. They ranged from Sheila Graham to James Bacon to various others. One of them, working out of Boston and then Chicago, was the prolific Ann Marsters.

Marsters not only enjoyed a long journalism career, it’s also interesting about where she ended up. Her final years—actually, over 20 of them — were not spent in Beverly Hills, nor on the French Rivera but in Galesburg, Illinois.

Ann Pierce Marsters was born in Somerville, Massachusetts, on March 1, 1912.  Her father was Ernest R. Marsters; her mother was the former Edith Bonnell.  As a girl, Ann attended the Cambridge-Haskell School and the Child Walker School of Art in Boston.

From early in her life, Ann seemed to be drawn to the footlights. A 1925 Boston newspaper mentions her appearing in a local revue titled “The Vanity Case.”  The following year she appeared in a one-act play at an outdoor theater in Boston.

But, it seems, Ann’s focus changed. She seemed to turn to the world of print. According to one later biographical piece, the young Marsters often played hooky from school in order to sell stories to the “Boston American” newspaper. Since the “American” was part of the Hearst Syndicate, Marsters’ work appeared in various newspapers around the country.

One of her first big stories occurred in 1934, when she offered up, for the society columns, a newsy story on the marriage of young multimillionaire John Jacob Astor III to Miss Ellen Tucky French.

Very soon, though — and quite interestingly — Marsters found herself with her most regular byline on the sports page.  In 1934, she interviewed Harvard football coach Eddie Casey; in 1935, she chatted with boxing champ Max Baer.

As Marsters’ career endured, her métier began to change; she switched from sports to stars. Around 1935, she began making frequent trips to Hollywood to interview the likes of Gary Cooper and Shirley Temple and then Bette Davis, Mickey Rooney, Barbara Stanwyck, Clark Gable, Jimmy Cagney, Jean Harlow and Deanna Durbin.

Around 1939, after about four years with the “Boston American,” Marsters decamped to Chicago, joining the staff of the “Chicago American” newspaper, another Hearst publication.  Marsters profile grew by quantum leaps by this time.  Soon her name was at top of a major weekly newspaper feature carried from coast-to-coast.  “Ann Marsters’ Hollywood Notebook” was a full newspaper page of “insider” pics and lots of newsy bullet points about your favorite stars:  Claudette Colbert, Mary Martin, Sterling Hayden, Frederic March…

In 1946, Marsters began helming her own celebrity interview show over WGN radio.  Then, by 1947, Marsters career transitioned again.  For the second part of her career, she mainly functioned as the “American’s” film critic.

In late 1948, Marsters walked down the aisle with Sabie LaVigna, then a Chicago dance instructor, later the head of his own Chicago-based modeling school and agency.

In her role as film critic, Marsters frequently found her reviews excerpted in advertisements.  Over the years, she sang the praises of such films as “Lawrence of Arabia,” “Guys & Dolls,” and “Roman Holiday.”

Sadly, in December of 1968, after several years of poor health, Ann’s husband, Sabie, passed away. Shortly after his passing, Marsters announced her retirement from the daily news biz. And, one year after that, she announced her remarriage.

It was Marsters second marriage that brought her to Galesburg. That move was, of course, covered in the press.  In August of 1969, the “Chicago Tribune” reported:  “(Ann Marsters) is taking an extended leave from her duties with Chicago Today. Ann will marry Galesburg industrialist Stewart S. Battles in October.”

Stewart S. Battles was, by this time, the retired head of Galesburg’s Midwest Manufacturing Company, a maker of kitchen equipment, which was later purchased by Admiral.

Along with his business acumen, Mr. Battles had a knack for marrying quite well.  His second wife — they married in 1952 — was the one-time silent film star Sally O’Neil who had enjoyed a short but prolific career in early Hollywood. Battles and O’Neil were married until O’Neil’s death in Galesburg in June of 1968. O’Neil is buried in Galesburg’s Memorial Park Cemetery.

It is believed that not long after Sally’s passing, while on a visit to Chicago, Battle and Marsters crossed paths.

Then, in October 1969, Marsters and Battles were wed in a private ceremony in a Chicago chapel at the corner of Michigan and Delaware.

Though based mainly in Galesburg, settling finally in a home on the city’s Fair Acres Drive, Mr. and Mrs. Battles did travel often, dividing their time between Chicago, Florida and the West Coast. In 1970, a Miami newspaper noted Ann Marsters Battles had secured herself a literary agent and was at work on various fictional pieces. It also noted that she was writing ad copy for a “VIP pants-hanger, a made-in-Galesburg family product, which Ann says, will take the petulance out of pants-hanging.”

A year later, in December 1972, the “Galesburg Register-Mail” reported that Mrs. Battles had been appointed to the advisory panel on cinema for the Illinois Arts Council, a state agency of which the downtown Galesburg Civic Art Center was an affiliate.

When not involved with all those endeavors, the new Mrs. Battles busied herself on the golf course, a sport at which she was quite adept.  Ann often competed in local tournaments and did quite well.

One of Ann’s new stepgrandchildren was Brenda Battles Woodman, who was in her adolescence when Ann joined the family. Brenda remembers a slight, tiny woman who was always good to her and a wonderful hostess even if she was completely un-domestic. Woodman remembers, with a chuckle, “Christmas dinners would be some meatballs she bought and heated up.”

Woodman also remembers the extraordinary Christmas cards that her new stepgrandmother got every year, pouring in from a who’s who of Hollywood legends. “She also had hundreds of pictures of her with various movie stars. She decorated the room in the house she used as an office with them.”

For several decades, Stewart Battles had suffered from poor health. He passed away at his home in Galesburg in April of 1984. He, too, is buried in the city’s Memorial Park Cemetery.

Around 1985, Ann married again. This time, she married fellow Galesburg resident Alexander E. Paul. Paul —whose real last name was Palukaytis, but had been Americanized — held several jobs while residing in Galesburg including playing oldies on a local radio station and even, for a time, teaching a business course at Carl Sandburg College.

Once wed, Paul moved into Ann’s Fair Acres home, where they were sometimes visited by Paul’s adult son, Gary.  His new stepmom regaled him from time to time with stories of her heady Hollywood past and her interviews with the likes of Temple, Grant and Tracy as well as relating how she had once been one of the first to visit the legendary San Simeon estate of Randolph Hearst.

Says Gary, “She was good for my dad and, later, he was very good to her.”

Alex and Ann resided in their Fair Acres home until Paul’s death in November of 1990. By that time, Ann was suffering from Alzheimer’s. Gary oversaw the sale of the Fair Acres house in 1991 and then the necessary move of his stepmother to Galesburg’s Marigold Nursing Home.  

Ann Marsters passed away at Marigold on Aug. 21, 1997, at the age of 85. After crematorium, her remains were returned to Galesburg and buried in same plot as her late husband Stewart Battles, a plot that also contains the remains of Sally O’Neil.

Ironically, in a life that was so well documented in the press, via her own byline or the byline of others, no obituary was ever printed about Ann at the time of her death. Additionally, no on-site stone or marker in the cemetery records her death or designates her final resting place. Thankfully, though, the advent of the internet and the widespread digitization of newspapers and other one-time ephemera has, belatedly, allowed for the life of Ann Marsters, of Chicago, Hollywood and Galesburg, to be rediscovered.

Cary O’Dell is from Galesburg and now lives in Virginia and works for the Library of Congress. 

This article originally appeared on Galesburg Register-Mail: Acclaimed gossip columnist Ann Marsters spent final years in Galesburg