The wedding of Martha Morris, dubbed the “Cinderella Bride” by the Torrance Herald, to Swiss industrialist Roland DeVigier in 1951 sounds like one of those modern-day I’m-gonna-marry-a-prince movies on the Hallmark Channel. At first, anyway.
The 16-year-old Morris lived with her parents, Mr. and Mrs. Charles Ray Morris, on 215th St. in the Harbor Gateway section of the Los Angeles city strip, a few blocks east of Western Ave., the Torrance city limit. She attended Torrance Elementary and Torrance High School before transferring to St. Anthony High School in Long Beach.
Her life changed one day during October 1951, when she became acquainted with Roland DeVigier at the Torrance Grill, a cafe/soda fountain at 1500 W. Carson St. (The building at the southwest corner of Carson and Denker Ave. currently houses Circus Donuts.)
The 28-year-old Swiss businessman was not literally a prince, but an executive vice president of Avcor Inc., then the world’s largest manufacturer of heavy concrete manufacturing equipment. The company had plants all over the world, including the one where DeVigier was working at 1400 West 260th St. in Harbor City when he met Martha.
According to the Herald, DeVigier was struck immediately with Morris’ vivaciousness upon first meeting her. After a whirlwind courtship, Morris agreed to marry him.
The couple traveled in DeVigier’s powder blue Cadillac to Quartzsite, Arizona, where they were married in a civil ceremony on Nov. 11, 1951.
After the ceremony and dinner at the Westward Ho Hotel in Phoenix, the couple boarded a plane for Chicago, and another one for New York a few days later. They were accompanied by Martha’s sister, Mrs. Dudley Gray, wife of the noted Torrance lawyer.
In addition to a varied and distinguished legal career, Dudley Gray also is known as the man who later transported a courthouse building in pieces from Council Bluffs, Iowa and had it painstakingly reconstructed as a legal office complex in Torrance in the early 1980s. It still stands on Crenshaw Blvd. just south of the 405 Freeway.
From New York, the newlyweds and Mrs. Gray boarded a plane to Paris on Nov. 19. It had been decided that a more formal wedding was appropriate, so the pair echoed their first humble ceremony with a full-on formal wedding at Notre Dame Cathedral attended by the bridegroom’s parents from Switzerland.
The bride wore a $700 wedding gown (about $8,500 today) and a 100-year-old DeVigier family heirloom necklace at the Notre Dame ceremony held on Nov. 22, Thanksgiving Day.
Everyone returned to California on Nov. 24, and were the stars of the party at a lavish reception held for them at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles.
A lengthy honeymoon was planned after that, including a trip to South America followed by visits to Italy and the DeVigier home in Switzerland. The couple also bought a 1.5-acre plot of land in Palos Verdes Estates, where they planned to build their home.
And then, it all went south. Roughly three weeks after the initial wedding, Martha DeVigier flew to San Francisco, where she filed for a legal separation on Dec. 3. Citing “extreme cruelty,” the filing asked for a $10,000 a month allowance and $75,000 to cover legal fees.
Her husband flew to San Francisco in an attempt at reconciliation, but it didn’t happen. The couple did get back together briefly a few days later after Martha withdrew the demands in her lawsuit, but this attempt to save the marriage also didn’t last.
On May 16, 1952, Roland DeVigier sued his estranged wife in a Riverside court for an annulment of their wedding, claiming that she had deceived him and had no intention of living up to her vows.
DeVigier claimed that he had unknowingly entered into a “kissless marriage,” and the court agreed, granting him the annulment and bringing the matter to an end.
Martha’s brother-in-law Dudley Gray, who was serving as her attorney, revealed that she had moved to Oklahoma and was attending high school there to avoid publicity.
She already had received plenty of it, as the Cinderella story had been picked up and followed by newspapers nationwide.
A 1953 photo shows Martha as a Narbonne High School student. As there are no further mentions of her in the local papers, it appears that she lived up to what she told the Torrance Herald during the episode:
“I just want to go back to school and live the life I was living before all this happened.”
Sources:
Los Angeles Times archives.
Torrance-Press Herald archives.
