85 upvotes, 2 direct replies (showing 2)
View submission: What's the longest unanswered question in your family's history?
My Aunt Lola was a Playboy Bunny at the first New Orleans club. When I was 11 or 12 years old (circa 1976), I was taken to meet her for the first time, as my parents lived on the opposite side of the country as their siblings. She taught me to eat oysters one night at Galatoire's. While the three of them went out on another evening, I stayed back in her French Quarter apartment and looked through her scrapbooks and wondered what an "orgy" was as there were wedding-like, engraved and embossed invitations to some. There were also tons of pictures of her and famous people: Bob Hope, Omar Sharif, Dean Martin...
40+ years later I was able to travel back East again to see her again and she told me tons of stories about her relationship with Jim Garrison and how much she hated Bob Hope "for what he had done to her." But she was still a discreet old broad who kept her cards close and wouldn't divulge much more.
A year or so before she died -- when my husband got seriously into Ancestry and we did the ubiquitous DNA samples -- a guy contacted me via that website as we had a cousin-like link. He had been adopted out of a New Orleans orphanage and what little evidence he could find indicated his mother was someone named Lila or something and the year of his birth coincided with her ending her employment at the Club. Sadly, all her scrapbooks were destroyed in Katrina. Up to her deathbed, Lola denied ever having children. I presented what evidence I had but she was adamant about staying tight-lipped and didn't want to know who the guy was or that he was to have her information.
She passed four or five years ago and I will never know if she had Bob Hope's love/rape child.
Edited for grammar.
Comment by looloose at 24/02/2025 at 19:13 UTC
15 upvotes, 1 direct replies
That's a great story, though somewhat sad. Are you still in contact with your cousin?
Comment by Eastern-Finish-1251 at 25/02/2025 at 19:19 UTC
1 upvotes, 0 direct replies
I’ve heard that, despite his family friendly image, Bob Hope was quite the hound dog. So something nefarious was certainly plausible.