BRIEF LIVES

Portraits of forgotten stars who died young

“One short sleep past, we wake eternally,
And Death shall be no more; Death, thou shalt die.”

John Donne

The history of the silent cinema is littered with young corpses, especially suicides. A very few achieved a kind of immortality through dying: Rudolph Valentino springs immediately to mind, but for most who died young, death brought more than a figurative long silence. They were soon forgotten. It is unfair to expect people born decades after they died to remember who they were, but fame, we are told, is somehow eternal. And we are so often being asked to imagine perpetually sunlit fields where the dead stars wander in a kind of bliss, pausing only to look down upon us indulgently. Among these portraits Pearl White’s is the only name I was familiar with before I bought the photo. Saying that, the image I had of her was of a woman tied to rail tracks as the steam engine bore down, and I cannot remember I saw that in one of her films or got it from Rocky and Bullwinkle. One’s memory doesn’t have gaps so much as rough patches, don’t you find? In any case, Ms White’s story is sad and we should not make light of it. In the early years of silent film she did her own stunts. Having been a bareback rider in the circus she didn’t think much of jumping from heights and rolling out of moving vehicles but she broke bones in the process, with the result that she took to painkillers and alcohol, with the extended result that she died from liver failure aged 49. 

Who today knows anything of Lillian Hall Davis? Not me – at least, not until I found this photo, yet we read that for a time she was one of budding director Alfred Hitchcock’s preferred actresses and starred in his third and fifth films, The Ring and The Farmer’s Wife; films that British cinephiles hold as keys to understanding everything he did that followed.

Some of us can imagine a suicide’s final minutes; the preparation and the execution. What remains utterly mysterious are the days leading up to that; the bleakness, the compact someone makes with themselves. Lillian Hall Davis’s death was particularly horrible. She slashed her wrist and her throat then put her head in a gas oven. Such determination is terrifying.

In the early 1920s Bruno Kastner was a huge star in Germany, with women. Men found it hard to reconcile his attractiveness with his self-evident anti-masculinity. I mean to say; what are the frauleins thinking when a fellow doesn’t have biceps and can’t down three beers without needing a bathroom break? Like Lillian Hall Davis, he was a victim of a sudden shift that saw him regarded as Germany’s most popular cinema hero one year and then a couple later being reduced to selling photo opportunities for a few pfennigs. In Kastner’s case the cause was self-evident. He stuttered, which obviously was an issue when cinema turned to sound, and a source of great humour to the beery chaps when they gathered at the bar after a day blasting at quail with shotguns. One of his last films was Angst, based on a Stefan Zweig novel, and in a scene that could have belonged in the Zweig inspired Grand Budapest Hotel, in 1932 he travelled up to the resort of Bad Kreuznach with its gingerbread houses surrounded by forest, booked into a hotel and hanged himself. 

If you tell Americans that in the early 1920s Gösta Ekman was the biggest star in Swedish cinema, they’ll probably laugh and say, ‘yeah, right. Swedish cinema.” The phrase “1920s Swedish cinema” may not mean much to most Americans but there are some – usually thin, pallid young men with skin conditions – who know that in the 1920s Swedish cinema was everything Hollywood was supposed to be. While Chaplin was pumping out one-reel soufflés, the Swedes were filming two hour long epics. When the Americans imagined the emotion expressed in a starlet’s batting eyelashes said it all, the Swedes were dredging the human soul for every bit of squalor they could find. What would you expect? This was the land of the sunless winter. Henrik Ibsen and Hedda Gabler were neighbours just across the border. Ekman was an artist. He made that clear to the point he was willing to neglect his family for his art. In 1926 he went to Germany to star in one of the expressionist classis, Faust. While working long hours, he started taking cocaine to deal with fatigue. Twelve years later he died of a heart attack after years struggling with chronic addiction. He was 48 years old. Tears of a clown.

In late September of 1912 a funeral procession trundles through the streets of Paris. The coffin is covered in wreaths but it is considered “tenth class”, or ‘very simple’ in Parisian terms. Among the mourners at the head are a Rothschild, a Baron Ceccaldi and several others whose surnames are enough to impress the reporters gathered on the sidewalk. Some of the press have already filed stories expressing outrage that the police would dare question France’s most exemplary citizens on this sombre day. As for the raids on the drug dens; why implicate the nation’s best names when, clearly, her demise was her doing?

Inside the coffin is Pierrete Fleury, 22 year old aspiring dancer who, it is true, wasn’t a household name until today. What went on in her house in Le Vésinet, a wealthy suburb on the outskirts of Paris, has scandalized a city that likes to think it has seen it all. For months a procession of limousines drove out to the house and unloaded their human contents on the steps. Once inside, the sons of France’s finest indulged in behaviour that appalled the staff. Opium, cocaine, sex, more opium, more cocaine, more sex: the place must have resembled a Normandy farmyard at feeding time. Let’s not hold back on Pierrete; she and the other dancers living at the house had instigated this scenario but just a couple of days ago, one of the male staff members alerted that she hadn’t answered the maid’s knocks, took a ladder and climbed up to look in her window. Her cold body lay on the bed, her face wrapped in an ether soaked sheet. Technically it was filed as accidental suicide. As usual, the Government vowed that no one would be spared in its efforts to put an end to these notorious drug dens.

It is tiresome to read yet another claim that the behaviour of Someone Cyrus or Someone Kardashian is liberating for women, especially when it’s a woman writing. Said perp should have to spend a week, at least, walking around with a placard that reads: ‘Culturally speaking, I’m really uneducated’.

Diana Karenne, (born Leucadia Konstanti in Danzig, 1888), was a star of Italian, French and German films in the 1910s and 1920s. Her artistic control extended to directing and producing and she organized her own promotions down to designing the posters. Add to that the detail that she often played a woman with a pragmatic attitude towards her lovers and we have the makings of a feminist icon – except we don’t. Where in all the guff about post-modern feminism are the discussions about women like Karenne and Fern Andra? If the Ms Someones have it so difficult today, what was it like back then, when women couldn’t even vote? Well, there is a situation with Ms Karenne that some posing as feminist intellectuals could have a problem with, but only if they wanted to. In the 1930s, when Germany was the centre of Europe’s film industry, Ms Karenne moved to Berlin and continued her success until she married and moved with her husband to Aachen, where she turned her attention to painting and poetry. In July 1940, she was badly injured in an Allied air raid and died a few weeks later. Aachen is a spit away from the Dutch and Belgian borders. Would things have been different had she been in Holland or Belgium when the bombs hit? Maybe, but the overriding sense is that she has simply been forgotten. Besides which, it is easy to blame the Germans, but we on the winning team still have a problem admitting that our bombs and our actions needlessly killed innocent people.  

On March 3 1908, 34 year old Lily Hanbury gave birth to a stillborn child and two days later she died from complications. These are the empirical facts. The actual facts are that her death was horrific. We have no idea what it is like to first realize the child you are carrying has died and then for you to suffer the physical and emotional consequences, attended to by witless doctors in a grubby London hospital.

Ms Hanbury was born into an acting family. Indeed, those of us who remember Edward Fox shooting watermelons in The Day of the Jackal might also recall his brother James in the fabulously unwatchable Performance and pause to realize there is a direct family connection going back to Ms Hanbury, and beyond.  The point was made at the beginning that people who believe that fame brings immortality are buying an illusion, yet one of the great things about the internet is the way that small groups whose interests are too peripheral to even be considered niche can find support. Maybe the notion that a handful of people can not only perpetuate the memories of Edwardian actresses but provide the rest of us with solid information is something anyone born in the age the internet can’t appreciate. We who are toppling towards our dotage can only express our gratitude, but there is a curious aspect to all of this. Investigating the not so obscure 19^th century French photographer Etienne-Jules Marey recently, I was struck by how many websites simply cut and pasted the same (unverified) information. With the great forgottens like Ms Hanbury however we find people who are passionate and want to share their discoveries. They put up photos, old reviews and newspaper articles. In the process they bestow upon her a kind of eternity.

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BRIEF LIVES

ASTRAL PROJECTIONS

Three German Silent Film Actresses and their fates

“What is fame? The advantage of being known by people of whom you yourself know nothing, and for whom you care as little.”

Lord Byron

Fern Andra was born in Watseka, Illinois in 1893. Unless you live in Watseka, most likely you have never heard of it, being one of those small towns on the Midwest plains that get no attention from anyone except comedians. Her career as a performer began when she was four years old, walking the tightrope in a travelling circus. Go forward twenty years and she has moved to Berlin, about as existentially remote from Watseka as Antarctica is geographically. She is acting in films like Homunculus and Der Frauspekulant but more than that, a lot of the films she is appearing in she is also writing, directing and producing. The titles mean nothing to me (Drohende Wolken am Firmament: Threatening Clouds in the Sky) though they have a suitably sturm und drang ring to them. So we come to this portrait, which at first glance looks like a fashionably polite exercise in soft erotica, which any studio might turn out. But look at the bottom right: ‘Atelier Fern Andra’.  She is also running a photographic studio, and as this makes clear, taking and controlling the distribution of her own portraits.

Her obituary in the New York Times of February 12, 1974, states that during World War 1 she was a spy for the Allies, was arrested but released on the orders of Kaiser Wilhelm. The evidence may prove a little less melodramatic but the basic facts may be accurate. Mata Hari is the best known of a number of performers who doubled as spies. 

With this skeleton of background information at hand, you’d think that one place to look for some information about Ms Andra would be the numerous feminist film books out there. Here is a woman who set out on her own path during the earliest days of cinema, but: The Red Velvet Seat; women’s writings on the first fifty years of cinema? Nothing. Weimar Cinema? Zilch. Nordic Exposures? Likewise, nada. Even Kevin Brownlow’s The Parade’s Gone By, admittedly by a man and focused on Hollywood but still one of those books anyone interested in silent film agrees is indispensible – zero. Could it be that too many of the women who have written about early cinema from a feminist perspective have been as vacuously middle class as the men they dismiss for being just that? It isn’t hard to make the charge stick. There’s loads of material and reconsiderations of some obvious names like Greta Garbo but little on others you’d expect, who took risks and challenged the orthodoxy. 

Part of the problem may be, as it so often is, bad timing. We read that in the early 1920s Fern Andra was one of the most popular actresses in Germany, but by mid-decade her star was waning. We also read that in 1925, about the time these portraits were taken, she was married to Kurt Prenzel, middleweight boxing champion of Germany, who valiantly protected her from a dog as she stepped out from an automobile. It turns out the dog was rabid and the press feared Herr Prenzler’s ‘stellar’ career was threatened as a result. It wasn’t. He went on to fight such ring legends as Roxie Allen, Joe Kubiak and Jerry Kucella (won 8, lost 23). He comes across as a man whose lifestyle was more interesting than his sporting prowess. Maybe the Germans thought the same of Ms Andra: wonderful to look at, difficult to watch. She wisely dropped the first of her four husbands and went to London before returning to America, where she had to start again. It looks like she turned up in Hollywood around the time of the transition to sound, and like hundreds of others discovered the rules had changed. To have her star fading on one side of the Atlantic and barely glimmering to life on the other was bad enough, but if both the Americans and the Germans thought of her as a foreign actor she had little in the way of an identity to promote. The red carpet, such as it was, was pulled out from under her feet. Perhaps, had she stayed in Germany, we would know her now as a fearless pioneer in cinema, Instead, she is forgotten.

From what I read of Mia May, her popularity rivalled that of Fern Andra in the early 1920s but it was of an entirely different nature. Her husband, Joe May, pumped out dozens of short, dramatic two-reelers featuring Mia as the plucky heroine.  Mostly they had colourful titles like Die Silhouette des Teufels (Shadow of the Devil) and Die Herren der Welt (Mistress of the World). The German audiences lapped them up but, like cats at a bowl of milk, once a film was finished all they cared about was when the next one was ready. The Mays’ best known is an epic silent serial known as The Mysteries of India, with a script by Fitz Lang. 

Yet, when you look through enough of the postcards in the Ross Verlag catalogue, you come away thinking that no one played up to the publicity machine with more vigour and joie de vivre. Most of the actresses who sat for the German photographic studios were (or allowed themselves to be) portrayed as living in a haze of glamour and sophistication. Mia May, on the other hand, appeared to understand she was only an actress and played that for all it was worth. Among the thousands of film star portraits produced during the 1920s, hers remain some of the most striking. At the bottom of all of them is the logo with ‘May’ in a cross, framed within an octagon, a reminder that she and her husband controlled what images Ross Verlag received.

A previous post described how their daughter, Eva May, committed suicide in 1924 and the tragedy led to Mia May retiring from acting. That decision made, she might have missed the life but she never returned to it. Joe May was Jewish and around 1934 the couple left Germany for America. They joined that group of German émigrés/refugees that included Lang, Berthold Brecht and Billy Wilder but May’s films seldom made a big impression.  In Hollywood she opened a restaurant, the Blue Danube. Its failure preceded difficult years for the Mays. By 1948 Joe was pawning Mia’s jewellery to make ends meet. He died in 1954, Mia May in 1980. She was long forgotten by then.

The stories of Andra and May are variations on a commonly accepted understanding. Fame and its side benefits are constructions that have little to do with talent. The machine of publicity has an engine operating on principles that no one really understands. Pola Negri’s story is another type. Celebrated in Germany before she arrived in Hollywood, little of her work in Europe or America stands today as cinematically brilliant. Granted, ‘classic’ is applied to any film older than ten years, there’s nothing in her resumé to suggest she played any great and memorable roles. Yet the image of Pola Negri remains vivid. Hers is a face of the silent era as identifiable as Chaplin’s tramp. Her early life reads like the most depressing Russian realism - born into poverty, father disappeared when she was young, two sisters died in childhood - but the woman who sails into New York in 1922 is depicted as possessing all the exotic and decaying glamour of Eastern European royalty.  

More interesting than her filmography then is the way the publicity machine built up around her worked. American papers were reporting her imminent arrival even before her ship left Europe. When it docked and she was settled in her hotel, reporters asked her about the rumoured clause in her contract that insured Paramount for one million dollars against her marrying. “I live only for my art.” She apparently replied, acknowledging something everyone already took for granted. “I shall not marry for three, maybe four years.” The statement not only implied she was keeping an eye out for suitors but the press would too. Her repeatedly broken engagements to Charlie Chaplin and romance with Rudolph Valentino were gifts to the newspapers.

On June 30, 1927, the New York Times reported that Pola Negri had been bitten by a spider. Fascinating. These days celebrities have publicists whose job is to keep their client’s name in the media, so toss off every detail they can. In 1927 the publicist worked for the film studio not the star. The important issue was not that Ms Negri had been bitten by a spider but that as a result filming had been held up for a day. It is possible that the story was fictitious and intended to hide some deeper problem with the contract or her behaviour.  Whatever the truth, the story tells us a lot about how the studios were learning how publicity really worked. The studio had invested too much in her to risk the audience losing interest. If nothing was happening in her world this week then a spider bite could be regarded as potentially life threatening.  

So why did Pola Negri go on to the closest thing the cinemas offers in the way of immortality while Fern Andra and Mia May sank? The paradox was that by taking control of their own images, Andra and May had no recourse when those stated to fade. Maybe because of her horrid childhood, Ms Negri understood more keenly the value in placing her image in the hands of the studios. It may have been a concoction but it was one she approved of and turned out to be more enduring than one she may have devised herself.

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AMERICAN STARS AND BARS

Hollywood in the 1920s

 “We didn't need dialogue. We had faces!”

Gloria Swanson as Norma Desmond in Sunset Boulevard, 1950

 There are people who insist that the 1920s were Hollywood’s first and last golden age and everything that came after was an anticlimax. They aren’t talking about the films, a lot of which are now unwatchable except as curiosities, (Seriously, who actually laughs at Charlie Chaplin films these days?) but the stars. Hollywood’s concept of glamour was still evolving and it fell to the stars to set the rules. They didn’t have a Hays Code to impose a sterile creativity on films, the gossip magazines didn’t intrude deeply into private lives except through very subtle innuendo and it was still possible to be scandalous. A woman who smoked, drank and went through several husbands in as many years was dangerous, in a glamorous way of talking.  

Gloria Swanson’s most famous role was as Norma Desmond in Sunset Boulevard, where she played the public persona of Gloria Swanson the silent movie goddess; isolated, imperious and trapped in a fantasy entirely constructed by popular culture. “I am big. It's the pictures that got small,” she says with something between a sniff and a snarl. Perhaps, but as Sunset Boulevard made plain, worshipping the past is another way of consigning it to oblivion.

 What’s left to say about this man? No other actor from the silent era has had his mythology analysed in such minute detail and by corollary, the known facts about his life. Still, when you look at his films now the effect they had at the time becomes a wonder. Was it really true that women fainted in their seats when he batted his eyelids on screen? Watch one of his films now and it’s not mere cynicism to think that says less about Valentino’s screen presence than it does about a psychic emptiness in American women’s lives. And suddenly it makes sense that a generation on, their daughters needed to swallow a handful of pills just to push a shopping trolley down an aisle.

 Speaking of oblivion and lost classics (which we are) Kenneth Anger’s Hollywood Babylon was once essential reading and still ought to be. Written in a tone of bitchy mock outrage, it wallowed joyously in the sordid gossip we might have missed. Here’s one story Anger didn’t cover but only because it came to light after the book was published. At the beginning of the 1930s Howard Hughes and Billie Dove were an item until he suddenly called things off. People speculated – he was one of the world’s richest men, she considered the world’s most popular actress - but neither Hughes nor Dove made any public comment. Some time after disease obsessed Hughes’ grotesque death in 1976 a friend named William Haines spilled the juice. One weekend golf pro (We’ll get to that.) Roy Wilder told Hughes that he had been treated for the pox, the next weekend Hughes discovered Wilder and Dove testing the suspension in the back of his Rolls Royce saloon. He – Hughes - swore never to touch the actress again. What does this story tell us? Well, it’s revealing that Dove’s infidelity bothered Hughes’ neurosis more than his emotions - how very Hollywood - and interesting, I suppose, that behind the glamorous façade of their relationship, Dove needed more than the man who had everything could give her. And then there is the golf pro. In the depths of the Depression some men could do quite well for themselves without having what anyone else would call a real job. That’s heartening. But what’s really telling is that when the ‘truth’ finally comes to light we’re mostly unimpressed. It seems trivial. Are we really more sophisticated or just inured by decades of trashy behaviour by the glamorous elite?

Here’s another detail about Billie Dove. When Harlem jazz singer Eleanor Harris needed a pseudonym she took the first name of her favourite actress and her acknowledged father’s surname and became Billie Holiday. If you ever had to sum up the image of America in the 1920s with a single photo, this one of Billie Dove would suffice. Tackily glamorous, ditzy and excessive, a woman who doesn’t have time to stop and think, forget about settling down. Odd really that she is almost forgotten these days.

 If you were white and had a gift, Hollywood had a place for you. It didn’t care where you came from. One of the rewards of becoming heavyweight champion was that studios would quickly turn up offering a handsome cheque for a film guaranteed to be forgotten within days of its release. Jack Dempsey’s credits include KO for Cupid, Society Knockout and Health Farm Wallop, though the clips available for The Prizefighter and the Lady suggest he wasn’t just a monosyllabic piece of window dressing. Throughout his reign as champion he was close to Hollywood, having married Estelle Taylor who appeared in films such as The Ten Commandments and The Whip Woman (The plot doesn’t meet expectations). This Ross Card is dated between 1925 and 1926, when Dempsey was touring Europe. You can guess the photographer was German. The Americans preferred Dempsey to look fierce and unkempt and wouldn’t have approved of their hero with slick backed hair and in evening clothes.

 The Sheik (and his son) was just one of dozens of oriental fantasies produced during the silent era but it was also the most popular, generating parodies from the moment it was released. In 1927 Bebe Daniels starred in She’s a Sheik, which only slightly changed the standard plotline of a beautiful woman needing rescuing from a desert tent Like several other actresses here she started out very young, playing her first role before the cameras when she was seven and appeared alongside Harold Lloyd in some of his comedies when she was fourteen. Her career was erratic, dropped by a studio and picked up by another that made her a star again before interest waned and another studio came along. In 1921 she was briefly jailed for accumulating unpaid speeding fines and on her release made The Speed Girl, about a woman whose love of fast cars couldn’t be restrained by the law. Press photos show an orchestra serenading Ms Daniels from outside her cell.

 When Drew Barrymore started going off the deep end in the 1990s gossip columnists were relatively gentle - gossip columnists being the type who watch a car crash and shout, ‘someone should call an ambulance!’ - because, they reminded us, she was John Barrymore’s grand-daughter, so what did you expect? Barrymore (John) was a notorious drunk in an era when it was still possible to eke out a little sympathy and be acclaimed as a genius by excess in itself, but was he a great actor? Well he was one of the first who was identified by playing Shakespearean roles on film, even if those films are usually and wisely brushed off as pretty ordinary. Barrymore’s decline was rapid and has been blamed on tainted bootleg liquor he drank during Prohibition. His most infamous role was played after his death when someone stole his body from the funeral home and planted it in his old buddy Errol Flynn’s house. It’s another one of those stories with so many culprits sworn to by so many ‘who were there’ that it begins to sound like you couldn’t care less. 

 Speaking of Hollywood Babylon, this brings us to Clara Bow and a story that in 1927 she bedded the entire University of Southern California football team including one Marion Morrison, who for obvious reasons would change his name to John Wayne. During her relatively brief acting career Clara Bow was the subject of an encyclopaedia’s worth of sex rumours; the football team story seems one of the mildest. Why? It seems she never cared too much for Hollywood’s pretensions or her public image. She was an early sex symbol but of a particular kind; frank and down to earth without much hint of feminine weakness. In other words, the all American girl was capable of expressing her own sexuality. That, you think, is what really offended certain sensibilities.  

 While John Wayne was still running up and down a football pitch, in the 1920s there were two great stars of the western, Tom Mix and Hoot Gibson, and both could claim to have been real cowboys, or as close as a man could get without wearing a six gun and a tin star. Gibson had been a champion rodeo rider before heading to Hollywood with the idea of becoming a stuntman. Soon enough he was starring in such forgotten films as The Four Bit Man, The Rattler’s Hiss, Ridin’ Wild and 40 Horse Hawkins. When John Ford was just starting out as a director, Hoot Gibson was one of his preferred actors. Even though Gibson made a relatively straight transition to sound, Ford discovered Wayne, who had everything Gibson did save the authentic background.

 Clara Bow and John Wayne in a sweaty locker room, John Barrymore’s corpse in Errol Flynn’s living room, Gloria Swanson going through husbands like they were cheeses in a Parisian fromagerie; thank the lord for Mary Pickford, who bought some dignity and taste to the scene. Her star burned as brightly as Bow’s, she was equal in her independence and set on getting things her way yet was protected from gossip and manufactured scandal. If you are wondering why, this photo says a lot. Does she look like the type to take on a football team? Stories suggest she wasn’t quite the ever gracious and elegant society queen she was portrayed as but like Bill Clinton and John Gotti she was adept at deflecting her accusers.

 And speaking of political leaders with squalid reputations, and Italian crime bosses, this brings us to Anita Page. One measurement of a star’s value was the amount of fan mail received each week and at the end of the 1920s Page was getting it by the truckload. One of her most ardent worshippers was Italian Prime Minister Benito Mussolini. Though Page responded to his letters and received an offer of marriage, it soon became inappropriate for her publicity machine and she was asked to stop. Mussolini didn’t however and it later emerged that Page’s mother was regularly sending him signed photographs, no doubt hoping her daughter would marry into power and respectability. But this is not the strangest story of Page’s life. In 1933 she retired from acting – she was 23 years old – and quickly vanished from public consciousness, until 1996 when she started appearing in a series of trashy horror films. Journalists lined up to interview one of the last surviving actors of the silent age and she was happy to oblige. Now in her nineties, cocooned in an LA bungalow, attended to by a retinue of pretty gay actors and wrapped in 1920s gowns, she was Norma Desmond in the flesh.

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AMERICAN STARS AND BARS