Jack Warner - Personal Life

Personal Life

On October 14, 1914, Warner married Irma Solomons, the adolescent daughter of one of San Francisco's pioneer Jewish families. Irma Warner gave birth to the couple's only child, Jack M. Warner on March 27, 1916. Jack Warner named the child after himself, disregarding an Ashkenazi Jewish custom that children should not be named after living relatives. Although his son bore a different middle initial, he "has been called Junior all his life". The marriage ended in 1935, when Warner left his wife for another woman, Ann Page. Together, Warner and Ann had a daughter named Barbara. Irma Warner sued her husband for divorce (a scandalous move at the time) on the grounds of desertion. Jack's older brother, Harry, reflected the Warner family feelings about the marriage when he exclaimed, "Thank God our mother didn't live to see this". Warner married Ann after the divorce. The Warners, who took Irma's side in the affair, refused to accept Ann as a family member. In the wake of this falling out, Jack's relationship with his son, Jack Warner Jr., also became strained.

In the late 1950s, Warner was almost killed in a car accident that left him in a coma for several days. On August 5, 1958, after an evening of baccarat at the Palm Beach Casino in Cannes, Warner's Alfa Romeo roadster swerved into the path of a coal truck on a stretch of road located near the seaside villa of Prince Aly Khan. Warner was thrown from the car, which burst into flames upon impact. Shortly after the accident, his son, Jack Jr., joined other family members in France, where the unconscious studio head was hospitalized. In an interview with reporters, Jack Jr. suggested that his father was dying. Then, during a visit to his father's hospital room, the young man offended Ann Warner, whom he largely blamed for his parents' divorce. When Warner regained consciousness, he was enraged by reports of his son's behavior, and their "tenuous" relationship came to an end. On December 30, 1958, Jack Jr. was informed, by Jack Sr.'s lawyer Arnold Grant, that the elder Warner had released him from the company. When he attempted to report for work, studio guards denied him entry. The two men never achieved a reconciliation, and Jack Jr. is not mentioned in his father's 1964 autobiography.

Warner made no pretense of faithfulness to his wife, Ann, and kept a series of mistresses throughout the 1950s and 1960s. The most enduring of these "girlfriends" was an aspiring actress named Jackie Park, who bore a "startling" resemblance to Warner's second wife. The relationship was in its fourth year when Ann Warner pressed her husband to terminate the affair. Although Ann did once have an affair with studio actor Eddie Albert in 1941, she was much more devoted to the marriage by contrast. In the 1960s, she insisted that, despite his reputation for ruthlessness, Jack Warner had a softer side. In a note to author Dean Jennings, who assisted Warner on his 1964 autobiography, My First Hundred Years in Hollywood, Ann Warner wrote: "He is extremely sensitive, but there are few who know that because he covers it with a cloak."