Nona Kathleen Coxhead (1914 - 1998)
Nona's mother was actress Kathleen Ann Shaw, who had been born in Cooma, New South Wales in 1896. Her family had Irish roots with Kathleen's great-grandmother having sailed to Australia during the middle of the nineteenth century. Kathleen was the fifth and last child of Sarah Jane Scott and architect William Henry Shaw, who had married in 1884. Her siblings were Lillie (who had a twin that died shortly after birth), Evangeline and William Henry Fletcher. In 1914 Kathleen married Louis A. Reed in Sydney, who had the nickname of 'Podge'. On December 22nd, 1914, their daughter Nona Kathleen was born in Melbourne.
When Nona was a young child, her father Louis deserted the family and so her mother decided to take her to England to be educated. On September 14th, 1925, Kathleen became Herbert Mundin's second wife, having first met the young comic actor when he was appearing in an edition of Charlot's Revue in New York.
Although Nona liked Herbert and described him as being "excruciatingly funny", Nona also felt neglected by the newly-weds. 'Tommy' and 'Kam' - as they called one another - led a busy show business life in England, New York and Australia and often left her at school or with relatives.
Nona was a pupil at eleven boarding schools, in total, and during the summer vacations and some Christmas holidays, she was often looked after by school caretakers. In Freda Steel James's obituary of Nona, she wrote:
Lonely and rejected, she became an avid reader and observer of life. At one school, aged 12, she listed reading as her favourite hobby and claimed special time for it. This was granted on condition that she wrote a report on each book she read. That term she reported on 93 books.
Back in England, and after completing her education, blonde Nona began modelling for Norman Hartnell. She also performed in London and Paris as a dancer, creating her own innovative routines to the music of jazz artists like Duke Ellington.
Her 'snake's hips' dance was said to be especially popular and in 1936, interviewed by the Paris correspondent of the News Chronicle, Nona was quoted as saying:
Nona clearly enjoyed her time in Paris and even designed and made her own costumes and sang on French radio. Reuters reported that she'd refused an offer to appear in a Parisian revue as she felt the costume was "too scanty". After moving to Hollywood in May 1936, Nona was interviewed by Florida's Sarasota Herald. Under the headline, 'Four-Faced Dancer Of Movies Thinks Tap Craze Soon Will Die', the newspaper described how Nona:I originated the slow snake hips dance and I challenge any white girl to swing her hips as far as I can.
...specializes in what she terms "exotic" dancing, the kind in which undulating arms and swaying body are more important than triphammer feet.
About 1939, Nona set up home in New York and married Stuart Coxhead. Having honed her writing skills during the lonely school years in which she'd developed a love of books, Nona began her literary career, initially composing short stories. These were not especially well received but her first novel, Though They Go Wandering, which was published in 1945, did well and was followed the following year by The Heart Has Reason.
Above left Nona c.1945 and right in a sequinned dress that she danced in Paris nightclubs and designed herself
The Monkey-Puzzle Tree (Geis, $5.95), by Nona Coxhead, gets its title from a South American evergreen that the author claims monkeys find it a great bother to climb. I must confess to a parallel difficulty in beating my way through the dense cornfields of Miss Coxhead's novel.
These were followed by biographies of Amelia Earhart in 1970 and Greta Garbo in 1972. However, her account of the life of the pioneering female aviator was written under the pen name of Nevin Bell.
Since splitting up with Stuart Coxhead, with whom she'd had a daughter, Nona first married Paul Cerny, with whom she had a son, and then Stephen Bell. However, by the mid-Sixties Nona had separated from Bell and was at a low point in her life. It was then that she came across the metaphysical teachings of Ernest Holmes, who taught the system of constructive thinking, known as Science of Mind.
In 1968, Nona returned to England where she took over a small Science of Mind group that had been run by 94-year-old Dr. Winifred Layton Gaubert. She was ordained as a Minister of Religious Science and devoted herself to metaphysical teaching and authored a number of books on the mind, such as Mind Power in 1976.
However, Nona continued to write fiction in the form of short stories that were published in magazines, as well as in 1978, a best-selling novel in The Richest Girl in the World. In the following year on August 10th, Nona's mother Kathleen Mundin died at the age of eighty-three. Since the death of her husband Herbert forty years earlier, Kathleen had devoted herself to the Children's Cancer Fund of America, which she'd founded and served as president.
She began it in 1949, because a friend's child had developed cancer and there was little known then about the treatment of children with the illness. Only weeks before her passing, she'd been awarded a citation by the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in recognition of thirty years of fundraising for children suffering from cancer. Kathleen had organised annual events, including 25 Fan Balls and numerous backgammon and bridge tournaments.
In their own tribute published in the New York Times, the Children's Cancer Fund of America praised Kathleen's:
...dauntless spirit and dedication to the cause of children threatened or afflicted with cancer was to her a solemn duty, not just charity. We shall miss her executive ability and enterprise, but her memory will inspire others to continue the good work - (Richard T. Mayes)
Nona Coxhead at her typewriter in her office in Westport during the 1950s
Nona had a strong passion for the welfare of animals and at one time was an editor of Pet Fair magazine. In England she vigorously campaigned against the use of battery hens. Nona Coxhead died in London on July 16th, 1998 at the age of eighty-three.