On November 29, 1931, Zachary Smith Reynolds married Broadway actress Libby Holman. The young tobacco heir had just spent the better part of a year following the starlet and torch singer around the world until she finally agreed to marry him.
The young couple wed in secret in the parlor of a Monroe, Michigan, justice of the peace. It took place just a few days after Reynolds’s first wife, textile heiress Ann Cannon Reynolds, was granted a divorce from him in Reno, Nevada, on the grounds of cruelty.
The marriage between Reynolds, age 20, and Holman, age 25, was a tumultuous one between two very complex individuals. The couple kept their marriage a secret until May 1932 when they claimed to have just been married in Honolulu.
The union wouldn’t last long, either. Reynolds died of a gunshot wound to head shortly after an argument at a 1932 party at the couple’s Winston-Salem estate turned violent. While Holman was indicted for murder, the case never went to trial. The charges were dropped and the death was ruled a suicide.
Visit: Winston-Salem’s Reynolda House, the estate where the shooting occurred, is now a museum of America art museum open to the public.