Plus, nobody knew it, but my husband was a marquis, so I was a marquise while I was washing the toilets."Īfter securing her divorce, Davis moved to Los Angeles and married an actor, but the match was not meant to be, and she ended up back in Reno in 1951. And the woman couldn’t believe it, because I had very elegant clothes. "I discovered that the maid had quit, at the boarding house, and I asked if I could have the job.
What she ended up doing came as something of a surprise, even to her. Like many divorce-seekers, Davis needed to earn money to pay for her room and board. "There were four of five of us there, and some were from New York, others, someplace else, you know, from all over the country." And everything was so expensive that I just ended up living in a boarding house," she explained. "I started looking around at-we used to call them “society ranches” or something. Interviewed by phone in 2014 from her home in Las Vegas, she explained that she had fled Brazil without a lot of cash, which didn’t leave her with many options.
The first time was in 1947, when she was divorcing a Brazilian socialite she had met while working as a showgirl in the famous Copacabana nightclub in Rio de Janeiro. The options for short-term lodging during that period included something for every income level, from rooms in private residences and modest apartments to luxurious hotels and glorified dude ranches.īarbara Davis made the fateful trip to Reno twice. But to do that, one of the spouses had to travel to Nevada and become an official state resident, a process that at first took six months, but was eventually shortened to six weeks. Just about anyone could take advantage of the state’s multiple grounds for divorce. The industry was called “migratory divorce,” named for those who migrated to Nevada to untie the knot.
In this segment of Time & Place, historian Alicia Barber explains how the process worked for those who traveled to the Silver State to end their marriages.įor about sixty years, Nevada was the top destination for unhappy husbands and wives who wanted to end their marriages quickly. Decades before Nevada was known for its casinos, it was world famous for offering quick divorces.
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