The career of Carol Matthau, who has died age 78, gave her many vivid roles: as semi-debutante at the Stork Club; a teenage bride of the Pulitzer prize-winning author William Saroyan; an actor and author; and during a long and spirited marriage to the actor Walter Matthau, an A-list Hollywood wife.
Carol`s fabled wit, given full vent in a memoir, Among The Porcupines (1992) was feared and cherished: "I married Saroyan the second time because I couldn`t believe how terrible it was the first time. I married Walter because I love to sleep with him."


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Her mother Rosheen Doree, unmarried daughter of immigrant Jews in New York`s Lower East Side, was 16 when Carol was born. When the father abandoned Rosheen and her baby, she was pushed into a loveless marriage with philosophy professor. When a baby from that marriage was born, the philosopher demanded that the illegitimate child, Carol, be sent for adoption. Her mother walked out, found a job at a hat factory, and placed Carol in a foster home while she worked and saved money.
In 1933 Rosheen bustled into the foster home, collected Carol, and whisked her off to Park Avenue, where her new husband, Charles Marcus, lived in luxury. A co-founder of Bendix Aircraft Corporation, Marcus warmly welcomed his stepdaughter. Two years later he learned that his wife had hidden the existence of another daughter, Elinor, who had been left in a foster home when they married. With equal generosity Marcus welcomed his second stepdaughter to his 18-room apartment.

The transformation from the Lower East Side to Park Avenue was the stuff of immigrant daydreams. Carol Doree adopted her step-father`s name, and as Carol Marcus was sent to the exclusive private Dalton School in New York. Her golden blonde hair, and sharp, worldly humour, made her a favourite with the other socialites at Dalton, like Oona O`Neill, daughter of the playwright Eugene O`Neill.

Carol became friends with Gloria Vanderbilt, "little Gloria", object of the most famous custody case of the era. While still teenagers, as Truman Capote recalled in Answered Prayers, Carol was a fixture in café society, along with "Gloria and Honeychile and Oona and Jinx, slouched against El Morocco upholstery ceaselessly raking their Veronica Lake locks". In 1985 Carol`s son Aram Saroyan published Trio: Oona Chaplin, Carol Matthau, Gloria Vanderbilt, Portrait Of An Intimate Friendship, a vivid memoir of his mother`s world in café society.

In 1941 Carol was in Hollywood for the (first) marriage of "little Gloria". Her ever-ambitious mother introduced her to the bandleader Artie Shaw, who recognised the pouting 16-year old as Big Trouble. He passed her along to the writer William Saroyan, nearly twice her age, who was then at the height of his literary fame.

Their first marriage lasted for six years. A son, Aram, was born in 1943, and a daughter Lucy in 1946. Life with Saroyan was no honeymoon. He was an inveterate gambler, and emotionally and physically abusive. By the time they divorced in 1949, her children had seen her thrown down a flight of stairs and choked by an enraged Saroyan.

At their remarriage ceremony in 1951 Charlie Chaplin made a gracious speech about love. But within six months she again walked out o