Biographie

25 septembre 1926 · Altus, Oklahoma, États-Unis

16 mai 2000 · Costa Mesa, Californie, États-Unis (non divulguée)

Willia Dean Doughty

Second/third husband, Albert Pearlson, was an attorney. Among his clients were Frank Sinatra, Anna Kashfi, Jean Spangler, Edmund Purdom, Dorothy Arnold, and Mrs. Charles McKay, who sued Joan Crawford, claiming Crawford violated her right to privacy when she watched Mrs. McKay undergo "shock" treatments as preparation for her role in Possessed (1947) (Crawford denied she was present; the case was settled out of court for $200,000). Pearlson was engaged to Vi Athens before his first marriage to Best.

Married Albert Pearlson the first time in Las Vegas hours after he proposed, yet they never lived together, and he obtained an annulment. A month later, he followed her to her parents' home in in Houston, TX, and re-proposed. They returned to Califonia, and were married by Superior Judge Edward Brand. No stranger to celebrities, Brand oversaw the divorce proceedings between Mary Castle and William Grant, and Broderick Crawford and Kay Griffith; the child-custody cases between Bette Davis and Gary Merrill, Anna Kashfi and Marlon Brando; married Anthony Quinn and Jolanda Addolori, and Buster Keaton and Eleanor Keaton, and Robert Walker and Barbara Ford.

Had a daughter, Dru (b. June 5, 1957).

Acquitted in the stabbing death of her 5th husband, Willis Hunt, Carole Landis's second husband. Her daughter testified that the couple was arguing over disciplining her when Best slapped her, ripped the telephone out of the wall, then yelled at Hunt "I want to kill you!" Best's attorney claimed Hunt was "drunk and unstable", and picked up the butcher knife Best killed him with. Best and Hunt had been engaged briefly in 1946.

In 1944 she was chosen to be one of Samuel Goldwyn's famous Goldwyn Girls.