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The Girl in the Copa Line. From modeling, Ann progressed to acting. In 1939, when Bill Woodward was a schoolboy at Groton, she was a showgirl in Noel Coward's girlshow, Set to Music. Later she had some minor success in radio soap operas, e.g., Joyce Jordan, Girl Interne, and in nightclubs.. One night in 1943 Ensign Bill Woodward, just out of Harvard and just sworn in for wartime service with the Navy, spotted a girl wearing a cat costume in the chorus line at the Copacabana. It was Ann, and it was love. After a two-week engagement, they were married in Tacoma, Wash. Bill went to sea duty (later he was one of 272 survivors of 916 aboard the torpedoed carrier Liscome Bay), and Ann moved in with her new in-laws.
The Woodwards were frankly disappointed with their son's wife, but accepted her "with reserve." Under the tutelage of Mrs. William Woodward Sr. (one of the Cryder triplets of New York), at whose balls guests are lighted up the stairway by a row of candelabra-bearing footmen, Ann met the family friends.
The girl from Kansas caught on fast. When Bill Woodward came home from the war, Ann led him rapidly away from the staid social world, in which his family had always moved, into gayer, more publicized spheres of international society. "Bill was brought up differently," says
Mrs. Pratt, his sister. "Ann loved the gay life, the excitement of being always on the go—and she drew Bill into it. He wasn't as enthusiastic about it as she was, but he went along with it." Amid the glamour, the Woodwards' domestic life was anything but serene. As Bill matured, he grew more attractive to women, and Ann, five years older and desperately hiding the fact, began to fade. There were frequent quarrels, embarrassing scenes, separations and reconciliations. Seven years ago the two seriously discussed divorce, but called it off for the sake of their two young sons. Bill was rumored to be enamored of an Italian princess at one time; Ann saw a lot of Aly Khan during one temporary separation in Paris. Each hired private detectives to shadow the other.
Suffering from an acute sense of insecurity and flickering suspicions, Ann Woodward sometimes created volcanic public scenes with her husband. In El Morocco one night, she scratched Bill Woodward's face until it bled, after he pulled out a handkerchief with a lipstick stain on it. At the Marquis de Cuevas' ball in Biarritz two years ago (TIME. Sept. 14, 1953), Ann, dressed as a red devil, reacted violently when she saw her husband dancing with Carmen Sainte, the beautiful Chilean-born wife of a big French rope-and-hemp man. During the dance, Mme. Sainte wrapped her enormous Spanish shawl around Woodward, and the two rumbaed together underneath. Ann fumed up to them, ripped off the shawl, tore Mme. Sainte's dress, slapped her face, slapped Bill, finally had to be forcibly restrained.
Emotional Dither. In spite of its Frankie-and-Johnnie mood, the marriage persisted. Two years ago Bill Woodward's father died. Bill inherited millions and the thoroughbred, Nashua, which the elder Woodward had intended to race in Britain. Bill decided to keep the colt in the