Hollywood Bowl Press Release

Travel Host Magazine, Nov-Dec 2005

Violet Parkhurst From Journalist To Painter
by Peggy Kinstler

"I have been so lucky," says Violet Parkhurst. And she's just talking about her years as an artist... Here's a lady, known today for her paintings of the sea and the coast, who set out in the world in the late 1940s with a scholarship to study in a museum in Rio de Janeiro. "I fell madly in love with a Brazilian boy, so I learned the language." Her museum scholarship seemed tame compared to trips up the Amazon with its jaguar hunts and strange new sights. She didn't abandon her artistic side while on this adventure, however, keeping a journal and painting the life she saw: the natives, the fruit markets, and huts. After returning home to Hollywood, she saved all her allowance money, "so I could go back and complete the scholarship." But then she met a Brazilian newspaper man who was amazed that she could speak Portuguese. After reading the journal, he asked Violet to write a book on the Amazon adventure and he would have it translated and published. "I could speak the language but couldn't write it at that time." The result was "Jaguar by the Tail."

Next, Violet Parkhurst became a foreign correspondent. "Hollywood was anxious to open up South America [for their films] and three magazines asked me to be their foreign correspondent. This is also how I became a blonde... I looked too Brazilian and they wanted me to look more Hollywood." Being a blonde suited Violet and she kept the look: "The boys I liked as a brunette, I got as a blonde." Ronald Reagan and Clark Gable, two of her story subjects, also became personal friends. "Clark Gable and I started going out to lunch... he wanted to be on the cover all the time and I did get him a lot of press. I think that's why he liked me so much. I dated him on and off for four years.

"Reagan and I became real good friends. I'd get him in all my magazines. After he got into politics, he invited me to everything. I was flattered." Even many years later when the Ronald Reagan Library was dedicated, Violet was on the guest list of 2000, which included dignitaries from around the world. "He never forgot his old friends; he is a most wonderful person." How did she get from the movie world to painting the sea? "When I came home from Brazil I bought a 28-foot sailboat and planned to go around the world, first picking up my boyfriend in Brazil. I got as far as the Panama Canal all by myself, but they wouldn't let me through because my boat had to be loaded on a big one and they were all full. So I sold the boat and that was the end of that love affair. But it was the beginning of my love of the sea." Violet never did complete that museum scholarship in Rio, but, as on that first Amazon trip, she always painted. Eventually everything else became secondary and she became a full-time painter... a painter of the sea.

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