Margerie Bonner, born February 17, 1905, moved through Hollywood like someone who knew the back hallways as well as the lights. She was the younger sister of silent-film star Priscilla Bonner and stepped into the business herself under the slightly different spelling “Marjorie.” Her screen time was real if not headline-size: she appeared in big studio productions such as The King of Kings (1927), The Sign of the Cross (1932), and Cleopatra (1934). By the late ’30s the camera had mostly turned away, and she was working behind the scenes as a personal assistant to actress Penny Singleton—still in the industry, just in a quieter key.
Everything in her life seems to hinge on one street corner. On June 7, 1939, she met British writer Malcolm Lowry in Los Angeles while he was deep in the second draft of Under the Volcano. They married in 1940 and drifted north to a beach shack in Dollarton, near Vancouver. There, Bonner became the kind of partner literature rarely credits: she wrote scripts for CBC Radio, collaborated with Lowry on an unrealized screenplay of Tender Is the Night, and—while he fought his demons at the desk—she kept producing her own work. In the 1940s she published three novels: the mystery-leaning The Shapes That Creep (1944) and The Last Twist of the Knife (1946), and a more expansive, tragic book, Horse in the Sky(1947). Another novel, The Castle of Malatesta, stayed in manuscript form.
Her most lasting legacy is braided into Lowry’s masterpiece. Bonner didn’t just keep the roof steady while he wrote; she edited Under the Volcano line by line, constantly asking him to tighten, simplify, cut. People close to the book have long believed she helped shape the character of Yvonne, the consul’s wife, and in her patient, unsung labor you can feel the spine of the novel being held straight.
After Lowry’s death in 1957, Bonner returned to Los Angeles and devoted herself to preserving what he left behind. She co-edited his unfinished novel Dark as the Grave Wherein My Friend Is Laid in 1968 and later edited Psalms and Songsin 1975.
Lowry’s death has remained a foggy, argued-over thing. The official verdict was “death by misadventure” after a mixture of gin and sodium amytol. Later biographers and scholars have pointed out conflicting accounts and raised questions, but no definitive public conclusion beyond the original verdict has replaced that record. Bonner’s own story sits in that complicated space—part witness, part editor, part maker of the conditions that let a towering book get written at all.
She died September 28, 1988, remembered less for her roles onscreen than for the fierce, practical intelligence she brought to writing and to the messy work of loving a genius without letting the pages drown in his excess.
