Toni Mannix
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Toni Mannix (February 19, 1906 - September 2, 1983) was a minor Hollywood actress and dancer in the early talkies, and the wife of MGM head Eddie Mannix.
Born either as Camille Bernice Froomess or Camille Antoinette Lanier, "Toni Mannix" was a Ziegfeld Follies showgirl whose lasting notoriety came not as a performer but as the mistress and wife of a high-level studio executive and, later, the mistress of a well-known television star. She appeared in the film version of Florenz Ziegfeld's life, The Great Ziegfeld (1936), and met MGM studio manager Eddie Mannix. She lived with him as his mistress, and then as his wife, until his death in 1963.
As "Toni Mannix", she was well-known for her beauty, flamboyance, and sexual appetite, the latter of which was legendary. In 1951, not long after she legally married Mannix, she met actor George Reeves, soon to be famous as television's Superman. She and Reeves embarked on an affair under the approving eye of her husband, who had a new mistress of his own. Toni and Reeves were fairly public with their arrangement, but the press, out of respect for the clout Eddie Mannix wielded, never exposed the relationship outside the industry.
In 1959, Reeves, then 45, broke off his relationship with 53-year-old Toni, leaving her angry and broken-hearted. His mysterious death five months later was officially ruled a suicide, although serious questions have been raised about the circumstances under which he died. The novel Hollywood Kryptonite states as unsourced fact that Eddie Mannix ordered Reeves murdered. Although the 2006 film Hollywoodland uses this as one possible solution to the Reeves mystery, the film remains ambiguous about the truth. In any case, Toni was shattered by Reeves' death and remained devoted to his memory for the remainder of her life, reportedly building a shrine to him in her house.
Widowed in 1963, Mannix was left wealthy and lived comfortably until the onset of Alzheimer's disease in her seventies. She died from complications of the disease in 1983 in Beverly Hills, at the age of 77, having never remarried or had children.
