"My father despised publicity," said Elizabeth Woodward Pratt. "As children, we were never allowed to be photographed." Her father, the late William Woodward, was a topflight U.S. banker, a figure in authentic Manhattan society and, as master of Belair Stud (Gallant Fox, Omaha), one of the most widely respected sportsmen on two continents. Last week the glare of worldwide publicity beat in a way it never had before on the Woodward family. Had the wife of William Woodward Jr. deliberately shot him in that darkened hallway in their Long Island home? Was it an accident? Was there a connection between his death and the gaudy life, so different from his father's, that Bill Woodward and his wife led? The story belonged more to her biography than to the dignified annals of the Woodwards.
The Farmer's Daughter. Ann Woodward was born nearly 40 years ago on a farm four miles west of Pittsburg, Kans. (pop. 20,000) and named Angeline Luceil (later Lucille) Crowell. At some time in her rise to fame and fortune she shucked seven years from her age, along with most other details of her ordinary but respectable past.
When Angeline was three, in 1918, the Crowell farm failed, and the family moved to another farm near Hugoton, Kans.
Four years later that farm failed, too, and the Crowells moved into Pittsburg. There, when Angeline was eight, her mother and father were divorced. Last week father Jesse Crowell, 64, a retired streetcar conductor in Gaylord, Mich., was amazed and "awful sorry" to learn that Ann Woodward was the daughter he had not seen or heard of in 23 years. "I taught her how to sit on a horse, and she later became a good rider," he recalled proudly. "I'm sure that was a great help to her when she began to associate with high society." For years he had been under the impression that his daughter was Actress Eve Arden (Our Miss Brooks).
After her parents' divorce, pretty Angeline and her mother stayed in Pittsburg, where Ethel Crowell (who was also a pretty blonde) taught social science in the high school, and was married and divorced a second time. During the Depression, Mrs. Crowell operated a four-hack taxicab company in Kansas City, and she and her daughter lived in a shabby apartment back of the taxicab office. Angeline was "shy and insecure," according to a cousin, and had one ambition that amounted to an obsession: to go to Hollywood and become a film star.
After graduating from Kansas City's Westport High School in 1932, the girl clerked in the Kansas City Junior League Thrift Shop, later worked as a salesgirl and a model in Harzfeld's specialty shop. In 1938 she changed her name to Ann Eden and went to New York in search of fame. She was a Powers model. ("An all-round, wholesome-looking girl," recalls John Robert Powers. "We don't get calls for them like that any more. Nowadays they want a cadaverous look.")