The Showgirl and the Tobacco Heir

On November 23, 1931, 20-year-old Zachary Smith Reynolds of Winston-Salem, North Carolina, was divorced from his first wife. Six days later he married his second wife, Broadway showgirl Libby Holman, and six months later he was dead from a gunshot wound that may or may not have been self-inflicted. This was a tragedy, magnified in the media by the fact that Smith was the youngest son of tobacco magnate R. J. Reynolds.Today we tell that story.