5 Portraits of
European film stars and their strange stories.
“A girl should
be two things: who and what she wants.”
Coco Chanel
The idea of the silent film star
rescued from obscurity has been played out often since the arrival of sound in
cinema, when hundreds of actors discovered they were no longer wanted and sent
off to seek their fortunes elsewhere. It’s the motif in Sunset Boulevard, of Paul Auster’s Book of Illusions and I recall reading an Alfred Hitchcock and the
Three Investigators mystery with a reclusive genius who’d been wronged by the
studios, though that was years ago. The point to all these stories is that the
actors use their seclusion as a way to get attention. In the real world they
tended to vanish, and that was that.
Vera Voronina’s whole life is a
mystery. She existed – we have the photos to prove it – but who she really was
and what happened to her are unknown. All the records on her, such as they are,
say she was born in Russia in 1905, though the date always has a question mark
after it. Having acted in three films in Germany, she arrived in Hollywood in
1926, the publicity describing how she had escaped the Bolsheviks by the skin
of her teeth. Naturally there were references to her noble birth. She made four
films in the U.S and one in Britain. The best known of them, The Patriot, was directed by Ernst
Lubitsch and had Emil Jannings in the lead, and like Voronina, it has vanished
from sight. She left Hollywood, made four more films in Europe and that was the
last heard of her.
What actually happened may not
be that mysterious. As sound came in, foreign accents went out, even in Europe,
and she could have retired, married, taken on her husband’s name and lived out
her years in quiet domesticity. But tracking her down could be impossible. We
don’t know that Vera Voronina was her real name, when she was born or even that
she was Russian.
The photo incidentally is by
Eugene Richee, one of Hollywood’s top portraitists in the 1920s and 30s. I
thought I’d find a bit about him too but the one source who would know these
things, John Kobal, admitted in his book, The
Art of Great Hollywood Portrait Photographers 1925 - 1940, that Richee was
a bit of an unknown to him. Two riddles for the price of one.
In the early 1930s Hollywood
realized that its public loved a certain type of foreign woman. She was blonde,
sultry, mysterious, and Germanic. Everybody was out searching for the new Greta
Garbo, even MGM, which had Garbo under contract. Samuel Goldwyn took the credit
for discovering Sigrid Gurie. She was beautiful, blonde (or could be) and
Norwegian. She never quite lived up to Goldwyn’s hopes but then she was cast in
a string of ordinary films. The best known was Algiers (1938) in which she played someone called Inez. For all his
boasting, it didn’t seem to occur to Goldwyn to cast Gurie as a Norwegian, or
at least a Northern European. He was probably sitting at his desk in 1941 and
grumbling over her failure to overtake Garbo when the scandal broke.
Gurie was born in working class
Flatbush, Brooklyn. True, her parents were from Norway and they had moved back
there when she was three. Her passport acknowledged her dual citizenship and
she had spent longer in Norway than America, but that wouldn’t have satisfied
Goldwyn. He promptly dumped her, muttering at how he’d been fleeced.
So: here is Sigrid Gurie in The Adventures of Marco Polo. She is
playing Princess Kukachin, the daughter of Mongolian emperor Kublai Khan. MGM
had no problem casting her as a Mongolian but refused to recognize she was
Norwegian. Some people still think Samuel Goldwyn was a genius.
In the early 1920s aspiring
actress Kathe Dorsch was engaged to World War 1 fighter ace and morphine addict
Hermann Goering. She broke the engagement off, which sent Hermann into a tailspin.
How could any woman spurn one of the only living heroes of the war?
Fifteen years later, Ms Dorsch
was an acclaimed star of cinema, the stage and opera and Goering was the head
of the Gestapo. He was also still her friend and would do anything she wanted.
By now Jews could not marry non-Jews let alone leave Germany without a pass
officially signed by Goering. The actual number of passes Goering signed for
Dorsch isn’t known but the evidence suggests she frequently went to his office,
got what she asked for and saw that many of her Jewish friends and
acquaintances escaped to safety.
We could phrase that another way
and speculate on how many Jewish people Goering knowingly arranged safe passage
for except that it doesn’t exonerate him. If anything it shows what a fool he
was and how easily Kathe Dorsch could manipulate him: not so much Schindler’s List as Hogan’s Heroes.
On May 18, 1945 U.S Army
officers went to Leni Riefenstahl’s villa in Austria and arrested her, not to
face criminal charges but rather to assist them with their investigations.
Hitler had killed himself just over a fortnight earlier and Germany had
surrendered on May 8. They wanted information in order to draw up a list of
suspects and charges as quickly as possible. Riefenstahl was just one of
hundreds who would be brought in for questioning and she was an obvious target
as her friendship with Hitler had been well known since the international
release of her films Olympia and Triumph of the Will in the mid-1930s.
The man in charge of the arrest
team was Budd Schulberg, not yet known as a scriptwriter but well aware of
Riefenstahl’s reputation as a director. He would later say that he had been
given reels of footage and needed someone to help him identify people and
events. In the car, Riefenstahl began to talk, of her own free will, or more
accurately she began to complain. It wasn’t her fault. She’d done nothing
wrong. She knew nothing of the Final Solution. She was not a criminal, only a
film director. Back at headquarters she protested that had she said anything,
Goebbels would have had her sent to the gas chamber. Schulberg pounced. If she
knew nothing, how did she know about the gas chambers? The world's greatest female film-maker had just damned herself.
According to the caption on the
back, this wire photo was taken by Associated Press photographer James Pringle
at Riefenstahl’s villa as she was being arrested. Pringle’s World War 2 work is
well known but look at this image. This isn’t a woman facing interrogation for
one of the worst genocides in history. At this moment she still believes she is
a glamorous star and an internationally famous film director: so does Pringle.
In Viking lore a dead nobleman
or woman or great warrior was placed on a longship, it was set alight and
pushed out into the sea or the lake. Bear this in mind.
Like Sigrid Gurie, Danish born Gwili
Andre arrived in Hollywood on the tails of Garbo and Dietrich having either
been convinced or persuading herself that with the fashion for blonde Germanic
or Nordic women she was a natural star. Her acting career was not spectacular;
a handful of unremarkable films, but she did become reputedly the highest paid
model in the U.S in the 1930s. It was as a model that she was photographed by
Cecil Beaton, regarded then and today as one of the great fashion
photographers. Gravures from the 1932 Beaton sessions – this is one – are
relatively common, probably because they were cut from high quality mass
circulation magazines.
To be a highly paid model in the
era of Beaton, Steichen and Blumenfeld might strike some people as a dream come
true but we only have snippets of information about Andre and none of the
underlying causes behind what happened on the night in 1959 are ever
considered.
On February 5, after years of
reported alcoholism and frustration at her failed acting career, Andre gathered
together a bundle of press clippings, photographs and other souvenirs from her
career, piled them in the middle of her apartment and set them alight, then she
lay down. It was reported that only after her body was pulled out of the
apartment and identified did her neighbours have any idea of her past. The
comparison to a Viking pyre isn’t crass; it appears that was exactly what she
had in mind.
 |
| IDENTITY ISSUES |
No comments:
Post a Comment
Add comments here