Lenore LaFount Romney (; November 9, 1908 – July 7, 1998) was an American actress and political figure. The wife of businessman and politician George W. Romney, she was First Lady of Michigan from 1963 to 1969. She was the Republican Party nominee for the U.S. Senate in 1970 from Michigan. Her younger son, Mitt Romney, was a U.S. senator from Utah, a former governor of Massachusetts, and was the 2012 Republican presidential nominee.
Lenore LaFount was born in Logan, Utah, and raised in Salt Lake City. She went to Latter-day Saints High School, where she developed an interest in drama and first met George Romney. She attended the University of Utah and George Washington University, graduating from the latter in 1929. She studied acting at the American Laboratory Theatre in New York, then went to Hollywood, where she became a bit player who appeared in a number of films with Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. Turning down a contract offer with them, she married George Romney in 1931. The couple had four children together; she was a stay-at-home mother, eventually living in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan, while he became a success in business and politics.
Lenore Romney was a popular first lady of Michigan, and was a frequent speaker at events and before civic groups. She was involved with many charitable, volunteer, and cultural organizations, including high positions with the Muscular Dystrophy Association, YWCA, and American Field Services, and also was active in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, of which she was a life-long member. She was an asset to her husband's 1968 presidential campaign. Although a traditionalist, she was an advocate for the greater involvement of women in business and politics.
In 1970, she was urged by her husband and state Republican Party officials to run against popular, two-term Democratic incumbent Senator Philip Hart. However, she struggled to establish herself as a serious candidate, apart from her husband, and failed to capture the support of conservatives within the party, only narrowly defeating State Senator Robert J. Huber in the party primary. Her difficulties continued in the general election, and she lost to Hart by a two-to-one margin. She returned to volunteer activities during the 1970s, including stints on the boards of the National Center for Voluntary Action and the National Conference of Christians and Jews, and gave speeches to various organizations.
Early life and education
Lenore LaFount was born on November 9, 1908, in Logan, Utah, the second of four daughters of Alma Luella (née Robison; 1882–1938) and Harold Arundel Lafount (1880–1952). Her father was born in Birmingham in England, and her mother, born in Montpelier, Idaho, was of colonial English ancestry (with more distant French roots). She had three sisters, one older and two younger. The family belonged to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints; her father had converted to it in England and then came to the U.S., while her maternal grandmother, Rosetta Berry, had been one of the Mormon handcart pioneers.Mahoney, The Story of George Romney, p. 70. Her father worked as a headphone manufacturer while her mother was prominent in local charities.Harris, Romney's Way, p. 57.
Lenore was raised in Salt Lake City, in a house located at Fifteenth South and Ninth East. She played the ukulele and was a member of the LDS girls club The Seagulls.Harris, Romney's Way, p. 54. She attended Latter-day Saints High School, where she had a strong interest in drama.Mahoney, The Story of George Romney, pp. 68, 71. In 1924, during her junior year, she and senior George W. Romney became high-school sweethearts.Harris, Romney's Way, p. 53. She was from a more assimilated Mormon family than his, which had struggled with financial failure and debt.Harris, Romney's Way, pp. 53–55. Although she was a "reach" for him in terms of social standing, he pursued her relentlessly from that point on, studying at a nearby junior college while she was a senior.
She graduated from high school in 1926 after only three years and attended the University of Utah for two years, while George went to England and Scotland to serve as a Mormon missionaryMahoney, The Story of George Romney, p. 74. (making her "promise never to kiss anybody" while he was away). At the university, she was a member of the Chi Omega sorority. In 1927, she was one of six attractive young women chosen to welcome Charles Lindbergh to Salt Lake City following his historic Spirit of St. Louis flight, and she was featured on the front page of the Salt Lake Telegram as a result.Mahoney, The Story of George Romney, pp. 81–82. Later that year, on the strength of his friendship with U.S. Senator Reed Smoot, Harold Lafount was appointed by President Calvin Coolidge to serve on the new Federal Radio Commission. The family moved to Washington, D.C., and Lenore transferred to George Washington University, where she graduated with an A.B. degree in English literature in June 1929 after spending only three years total in college.Mahoney, The Story of George Romney, pp. 90, 103. George returned from his missionary stint and soon followed her to Washington.
Acting career LaFount's mother wanted her to explore a theatrical career before marrying, and an aunt offered her further encouragement and assistance. LaFount thus moved to New York and enrolled in the American Laboratory Theatre to study acting, where she was taught Stanislavski's system under school co-founder Maria Ouspenskaya.Mahoney, The Story of George Romney, pp. 94–96. She found the experience inspiring. In student productions there, she starred in the Shakespearean roles of Ophelia and Portia and also appeared in roles from Ibsen and Chekhov plays. She received a performance award there in 1930. Talent scouts attending the productions were impressed, and she received an offer from the National Broadcasting Company to perform in a series of Shakespeare radio programs and from Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer to go to Hollywood under an apprentice actress contract. She decided on the latter, despite strenuous arguments against doing so from a threatened George, who had been visiting her on weekends. By then, he had a job with Alcoa, and arranged to be transferred to Los Angeles to be with her. In September 1930, the couple became engaged.
A slender woman with porcelain skin and naturally curly chesnut colored hair, LaFount earned bit parts in Hollywood.Mahoney, The Story of George Romney, pp. 97–98. These included appearing as a fashionable young French woman in a Greta Garbo film and as an ingenue in the William Haines film A Tailor Made Man.Harris, Romney's Way, p. 67. She also appeared in films that starred Jean Harlow and Ramon Navarro and was a stand-in for Lili Damita. Her trained voice made her valuable during this dawn of the talking pictures era, and she worked as a voice actor in animated cartoons, sometimes doing the parts of speaking cats and dogs. She appeared in a promotional film clip with Buster, MGM's star dog.Kranish; Helman, The Real Romney, pp. 12–13. George's long-time jealousy about her being in contact with other men became even worse as she met stars like Clark Gable, and in reaction to his attempts to control her, she threatened to break off their engagement.
After a few months in Hollywood, she had the opportunity to sign a three-year contract with MGM that was worth $50,000 if all the options were picked up. However, she was dismayed by some of the seamier aspects of Hollywood, including the studio's request that she pose for cheesecake photos and the constant gambling among the extras. She also found the long waits between shots unsatisfying as a thespian, and read Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky novels on the set to pass the time. Romney finally convinced her to go ahead with marriage and return to Washington, where he worked for Alcoa as a lobbyist,Current Biography Yearbook 1958, p. 367. earning $125 a month.
Although Lenore had been more independent than many women of the time, she later stated that she "never had any regrets about giving up movies." Another time she said that she had never had a choice of both marriage and an acting career: "In an acting career, I would have been upstaging him, and he couldn't stand that. It was never either and; it was always either or."Harris, Romney's Way, p. 68. George would later consider his successful seven-year courtship of her to be his greatest sales achievement.
Marriage and family Lenore LaFount married George Romney on July 2, 1931, in the Salt Lake Temple. Their wedding reception in the Chi Omega house at the University of Utah was attended by about four hundred guests.
In Washington, Lenore's cultural refinement and hosting skills, along with her father's social and political connections, helped George in his business career, and the couple met the Hoovers, the Roosevelts, and other prominent Washington figures.Mahoney, The Story of George Romney, pp. 102–105. George often called upon her to host short-notice parties. During 1933–1934, Lenore hosted a 15-minute weekly program, Poetical Hitchhiking, on Washington's famed radio station WRC where she selected and read the poems. (The staff announcer who introduced her was Arthur Godfrey.) She also directed student plays at George Washington University.
The couple's first child, Margo Lynn (known as Lynn) was born in 1935 after a difficult childbirth,Harris, Romney's Way, pp. 187–189. and Lenore became a stay-at-home mother. A second daughter, Jane, followed in 1938. In 1939, the family moved to the Detroit, Michigan, area when George took a job with the Automobile Manufacturers Association.Mahoney, The Story of George Romney, p. 109. They rented a house in Grosse Pointe, Michigan, for two years, then bought one in the Palmer Woods section of Detroit. The couple's first son, George Scott (known as G. Scott), was born in 1941. The couple longed for another child, but doctors told them that Lenore probably could not become pregnant again and might not survive if she did. By 1946, they had begun the process of adopting a war orphan living in Switzerland. However, Lenore became pregnant, and after a difficult pregnancy – lying still on her back for a month in a hospital during one stretch – and delivery, Willard Mitt (known as Mitt) was born in 1947.Mahoney, The Story of George Romney, pp. 104, 113.Kranish; Helman, The Real Romney, pp. 11–12, 14. After the birth she required a hysterectomy. Lenore would subsequently refer to Mitt as her miracle baby.
The family moved to affluent Bloomfield Hills, Michigan, around 1953. In 1953, Lenore suffered another health crisis when a blood transfusion of the wrong type put her life in danger, but she recovered.Mahoney, The Story of George Romney, pp. 166–167. In 1954, George was named president and chairman of American Motors Corporation. During this time a bad attack of bursitis left her with no movement in her left arm for five years, and the rest of the family took up her chores.Harris, Romney's Way, pp. 191–193. The couple spent summers at a cottage on the Canadian shore of Lake Huron. A slipped disk suffered there gave her further trouble, and that and the bursitis caused her to switch from golf to swimming as her main exercise.