Winston and Weston Doty - Biography

Biography

Winston and Weston were born in Malta, Ohio, sons of Jack and Olive Doty. Their father was a stage and radio actor who had separated from his wife when the boys were fairly young.

The brothers lived with their mother in Chicago, Los Angeles and later in Venice, California. Between 1922 and 1924 Winston and Weston Doty appeared in a handful of silent film shorts and one full length feature, Peter Pan (1924). In 1930 Olive Doty was employed in Los Angeles as an investment manager while her boys clerked at a local grocery store after school hours. Later the twins enrolled together at the University of Southern California where they became popular members of the USC cheerleading squad.

On the night of December 31, 1933, the brothers attended a party at a friend’s house in Montrose, California with their dates, Mary Janet Cox of Venice and Gladys Fisher of Santa Monica. At midnight they called their mother to wish her a Happy New Year and not long afterwards perished when a deluge of water caused by heavy rains swept through the neighborhood killing some forty people. Of the four, the only one to survive was Weston’s date, Gladys Fisher. Winston and Weston were interred together at the Woodlawn Memorial Cemetery in Santa Monica, California. In April of the following year, Jack Doty died alone in his hotel room in Chicago at the age of forty-two.