Dorris Halsey, co-founder of the almost 50-year-old Reece Halsey agency which represented the likes of Aldous Huxley, Henry Miller and Upton Sinclair, died late last month. She was 81. Halsey died at her home in the Hollywood Hills, business partner Kimberley Cameron said. The apparent cause was a heart attack. The LA Times obituary reports that a memorial service was held for Halsey Blessed Sacrament Church, 6657 Sunset Blvd. on Saturday. There is also a guestbook available for mourners and well-wishers to sign.
Born Dorris Vilmos in Budapest, Hungary, on Jan. 11, 1926, she went to school in southern France at the start of World War II. When the Germans occupied France in 1940, Halsey was ordered to translate letters from French to German. “She then got involved in the French Resistance and helped smuggle information to them,” Cameron said this week. After imprisonment by the Germans, Vilmos made her way to Toulouse and later, California, where she met Reece Halsey. They married in 1952 and had three children. They started their own business in an office on Sunset Boulevard near their Hollywood home. Halsey continued to go to the office nearly every day until her death.