Nina Pierson

Short Biography

"Nina was born in 1904 in Spooner, WI, and was a schoolteacher in the Duluth, MN, area when singer Rudy Vallee saw her in Duluth and was so struck by her beauty that he arranged an interview with Ziegfeld sometime in the early 1920s. Nina was signed to a showgirl contract immediately and spent the mid-1920s in the Follies, both in New York and on the road.""She was never involved with Ziegfeld romantically (that I know of) but was in love with the New York playboy, Tommy Manville, for awhile, before marrying millionaire Paul Leviton in London in 1934. They divorced in 1935. Nina spent most of the 1930s in New York and traveling in Europe. Tragically, she died suddenly and unexpectedly of an embolism at the Hotel George V in Paris in the fall of 1938, age 34.""As an aside, once she was established in New York, she brought her younger sister, Vinnie Pearson (Nina changed the spelling of her name from "Pearson" to "Pierson") to live with her. Vinnie married the son of the Mexican Ambassador to the U.S., and, much later, Sir Eustace Tennyson d'Eyncourt, a British nobleman. Vinnie just passed away in 1999, age 92. She, too, was a real beauty, just like her sister."