Toni Mannix

Biography

Toni Lanier was a Ziegfeld Follies showgirl whose lasting notoriety came not as a performer but as the wife of a high-level studio executive and the mistress of a famous television star. Lanier appeared in the film version of Florenz Ziegfeld Jr.'s life, The Great Ziegfeld (1936), met MGM studio manager E.J. Mannix, and lived with him as mistress and later 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, around the time she married Mannix legally, she met George Reeves, soon to be world 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 Mannix wielded, never exposed the relationship outside the industry. In 1959 Reeves broke off the relationship with the eight-years-older Toni, leaving her both broken-hearted and angry. His suicide five months later shattered her and she remained devoted to his memory the remainder of her life (some have speculated that she or her husband might actually have murdered Reeves, but no credible evidence has ever arisen to support such a theory, while much evidence credibly undermines it). Mannix died in 1963, and Toni was left wealthy and lived comfortably until the onset of Alzheimer's Disease in her 70s. She died from complications of the syndrome in 1983.