In truth, his name was Jacob Krantz, the son of a kosher butcher, born and raised in the mean streets of New York’s Lower East Side.

Cortez worked as a runner on Wall Street while training to be an actor at night.  Soon his good looks afforded him an opportunity to break into the young but flourishing movie business. Paramount groomed the tall and handsome Cortez by giving him bit parts, and then moving him up to more substantial roles.

One of the more interesting glimpses into Cortez’s career and character comes from a 1965 interview Cortez granted to silent film historian Kevin Brownlow, published in The Parade’s Gone By. Brownlow was seeking information regarding director D.W. Griffith. Cortez had starred in Griffith’s The Sorrows of Satan (1926).

Said Cortez:

I recall vividly making the The Sorrows of Satan. He [Griffith] took an awfully long time. I went to California for eight weeks and made Eagle of the Sea while he kept going with Lya de Putti, Adolph Menjou, and Carol Dempster.

Griffith was a strange sort of man—very quiet. There seemed to be an invisible barrier around him. You couldn’t get near him. I was under the impression that he was a very lonely man—although I got to know him quite well. I felt terribly sorry for him and would visit him at his hotel—the Astor.

He would go out for a walk, and end up at the Pennsylvania railroad station, where he’d sit on a bench and just watch people.

During the making of the picture, I was playing in one of the attic scenes. We’d been working for six weeks, not getting very far, and for just thirty seconds I lost my temper.

He had said, “If you knew anything about acting you wouldn’t do that.”

“I don’t know a thing about acting,” I snapped, “which was why I wanted to be directed by you.”

Cortez was a leading star for a brief period during the silent era. His dashing good looks and Latin lover image catapulted him into competition with other Latin lovers of the era such as Rudolph Valentino, Ramon Navarro and Antonio Moreno.

In fact, Cortez was chosen to star opposite a new foreign actress studio chief L.B. Mayer brought to MGM and was grooming for stardom—Greta Garbo.

The Torrent, Garbo’s first American film, is the only film where Garbo takes second billing, under Ricardo Cortez.

At the time, Cortez, 26, had been working non-stop in the movies for over four years. His stardom was such that he was considered a threat to Valentino. Cortez resented new comer Garbo from the beginning. He was deeply annoyed at being made to work with a “chubby, dumb Swede” who barely spoke a word of English.

Ricardo Cortez and Greta Garbo in The Torrent. Cortez treated her with disdain
and she almost sailed back to Sweden in despair.

The Torrent was a hit and Garbo clicked with the public—big time. Garbo never again took second billing, and as we all know, she went on to become one of the most popular actresses in the world. Soon, Garbo had the clout to choose her own leading men, and Cortez never appeared in a Garbo film.

Cortez should have heeded the first rule I learned when I came to Hollywood as a wide-eyed screenwriter. My agent took me to lunch and advised: “Be nice to everyone in the business, because the kid answering the phones will be running a studio in a few years.”

Cortez was married in 1926 to the deeply troubled actress Alma Rubens. For a brief period, 1910-1920, the lovely, doe-eyed Rubens was one of the biggest stars of the silent cinema, but like so many early stars who came from broken homes and impoverished backgrounds, Alma had a self-destructive streak a mile wide. She succumbed to drugs—cocaine and heroin—and her marriage to Cortez was a nightmare unfolding in slow motion.

In my Big Hollywood profile of Alma Rubens, I quoted from Ruben’s lurid but historically important 1930 confessional This Bright World Again, serialized in newspapers and tabloids, in which the bitter actress outed her estranged husband:

Many persons who have followed my career on the screen and stage mistake me for a Jewess. This belief perhaps was strengthened when I married Ricardo Cortez, my third husband, the only one I ever really loved, and whom I am now trying to divorce.

Although I didn’t find it out until almost a year after our marriage, Ric, instead of being a gallant Spanish caballero which I believed him, was the son of a kosher butcher, with a shop on First Avenue, New York City. His real name is Jacob Krantz.

Alma Rubens. Her marriage to Cortez lasted a short time.
Rubens was a drug addict given to erratic and violent behavior.
She died in 1931 at age 33, a casualty of narcotics and fast-living.

Obviously, Rubens (her father was probably Jewish) was attempting to damage Cortez’s career. But by this time, sound had arrived and Cortez, with his unmistakable New York accent, had been carefully shifted by the studios from Latin lover—the public didn’t buy that story for long, anyway—into urban leading man roles. And the anti-Semitism that Ruben’s felt sure would hurt her husband’s Hollywood career never materialized.

America is far more tolerant country than many would have us believe.

Cortez’s portrayal of detective Sam Spade in the original Maltese Falcon (1931) is an absolute stunner. Cortez is more dangerous and sensual than the lip-curling and deeply mannered Bogart. There’s a great moment when Cortez suspects leading lady Bebe Daniels of stealing money and hiding it under her clothing. Casually, with an amused but sharp-as-dagger delivery, he orders Daniels to strip naked. The delight he takes in the bad girl’s oh-so-shocked expression is just priceless. He’s playing a game with her, but she knows it’s a game with deadly consequences. It’s a beautifully modulated performance—one minute silken, the next steel—and Cortez is in charge of every inch of the frame.

Ricardo Cortez and Bebe Daniels, The Maltese Falcon, 1931.

On TCM a few months ago—G-d bless Robert Osborne—I was lucky to catch a little known Cortez film, Symphony of Six Million, AKA Melody of Life, (1932). Cortez plays a brilliant Jewish surgeon—is there any other kind—from the Lower East Side, who, in his drive to build a “Park Avenue practice” abandons his family and his Jewish roots.

Irene Dunne co-stars as Jessica, a love interest from the old neighborhood who—get this—walks with a limp and teaches blind children braille.

Sheesh, talk about stacking the deck against the beautiful and haughty WASP babe with whom Cortez takes up.

Anyhoo: Irene Dunne, with her lilting Kentucky accent, doesn’t even try affecting a Noo Yoik accent. She was too smart an actress. But Dunne, doing Jewish, sorta, well, it’s priceless.

Keep in mind that Hollywood, for the most part, did not make movies about Jews. Okay, there was The Jazz Singer, (1927) but really Jolson transcended ethnic boundaries. He was an entertainer—in black face.

Ricardo Cortez and Irene Dunne, Symphony of Six Million, 1932.
The title refers to the six million people in New York City, not to the
Holocaust, which had not yet taken place.

The studio heads, all Jewish, generally shunned movies with authentic Jewish themes, especially after The Motion Picture Code went into effect. The moguls were deeply self-conscious about their humble Jewish roots and wanted, more than anything, to be full fledged Americans. For most Hollywood Jews—and for a vast number of American Jews—this meant shedding their Jewish identity, especially the religious Orthodoxy of their parents.

Which makes Symphony of Six Million so unusual. It’s the only Hollywood film I have ever seen where a Pidyon Ha-Ben, the Redemption of the First Born ceremony, is enacted. Although some of the Jewish characters are cringe inducing stereotypes, so were all ethnic groups portrayed in movies in those days. But what’s lovely and unique here is that the Jewish characters are depicted lovingly as decent, hard-working people struggling upwards in the Goldenah Medinah, the Golden Country. The film comes down squarely on the side of old-fashioned values, where ritual, tradition and loyalty to family and friends take precedence over the blind stampede to assimilation.

Cortez appeared in over 100 films starring opposite Hollywood’s leading players: May McAvoy, Louise Dresser, Adolphe Menjou, Betty Bronson, Lois Wilson, Lon Chaney, Bebe Daniels, Kay Francis, Barbara Stanwyck, Mae Clarke, Mary Astor, Helen Twelvetrees, Joan Crawford, Loretta Young, Carole Lombard, and Bette Davis.

As he aged, Cortez was downgraded from leading man to character actor. His last appearance was in a 1960 episode of Bonanza, El Toro Grande, where Jacob Krantz AKA Ricardo Cortez played—you guessed it—a Mexican, Don Xavier Losaro.

In the mid-thirties, Cortez realized that good roles were getting harder to secure, and so he tried his hand at directing. He helmed seven B movies between 1939 and 1940, but was dissatisfied with the work.

Cortez retired from the film business before he was relegated to a has-been status—smart move—and returned to Wall Street where he built a successful career.

His many fine performances and long list of credits should afford Cortez a prominent place in the pantheon of great Hollywood actors. But I’m afraid that our celluloid memories are tragically short and Ricardo Cortez is all but forgotten.

Ricardo’s younger brother was cinematographer Stanley Cortez, (1908 – 1997) whose best credits include The Magnificent Ambersons (1942), The Night of the Hunter (1955), and The Three Faces of Eve (1957).

Near the end of his career, a Hollywood committee approached Stanley Cortez proposing to honor him as a prominent Hispanic American in the film industry. With some amusement, Cortez explained that he was Stanislaus Krantz, a Jew who felt it would be easier to move upwards in American society—as a Hispanic.

Both brothers are buried in Jewish cemeteries.

Poster for The Torrent starring Ricardo Cortez and
Greta Garbo. The only film where Greta Garbo gets
second billing.

Copyright © Robert J. Avrech

Many persons who have followed my career on the screen and stage mistake me for a Jewess. This belief perhaps was strengthened when I married Ricardo Cortez, my third husband, the only one I ever really loved, and whom I am now trying to divorce.

Although I didn’t find it out until almost a year after our marriage, Ric, instead of being a gallant Spanish caballero which I believed him, was the son of a kosher butcher, with a shop on First Avenue, New York City. His real name is Jacob Kranz. — Alma Rubens

Alma Rubens, silent film star turned hopeless drug addict, penned a fascinating, lurid confessional, This Bright World Again, serialized in newspapers in 1931.

Her insistence of her non-Jewish roots comes early in Chapter One. She wanted to get the Jewish thing out of the way—fast. She assured her readers that she was of French and Irish ancestry, reared as a strict Catholic. Alma was educated at the Sacred Heart Convent in San Francisco.

But the truth is her father was Jewish. According to halachah, Jewish law, matrilineal descent decides who is a Jew and who is not. Thus, Rubens was not Jewish. But she certainly went out of her way to deny her father’s Jewish roots.

Rubens, in a nasty move for the times, outed her husband Ricardo Cortez. No doubt, Alma wanted to damage his fast rising career as a handsome leading man. Cortez, now sadly forgotten, played private eye Sam Spade in the original The Maltese Falcon (1931) and he is perfect. Cortez is far more dangerous and charming than the mannered, lip-curling Bogart.

Ricardo Cortez as Sam Spade in The Maltese Falcon, 1931

There’s another Cortez film, practically unknown—I caught it on TCM, G-d bless Robert Osborne—but truly amazing, Symphony of Six Million, (1932) where he plays a brilliant Jewish surgeon—as if there’s any other kind. And Irene Dunne, not yet a star, is cast as, get this, a Jewish girl from the Lower East Side who faithfully loves the Cortez character though he gradually abandons his medical practice to the poor Jewish community for the “Park Avenue trade.” Dunne’s got a limp and she teaches blind kids. Obviously, not the bad girl of the story. Viewer whiplash sets in for yours truly watching Dunne do Jewish with that subterranean Kentucky shicksah twang. It’s the only Hollywood film I’ve ever seen that has a Pidyon Ha-ben, a Redemption of the First Born ceremony, in the storyline.

Though melodramatic and at times stiff, Symphony of Six Million—the title refers to New York’s population—is well worth seeking out and screening. It’s Hollywood dealing affectionately with Judaism, immigrant Jewish characters and culture.

Interpolation:

Not too many years later, prominent Jewish movie moguls Irving Thalberg, L.B. Mayer, Paul Bern, Harry Cohn and the Warner Bros. stifled genuinely Jewish narratives, and such stories almost disappeared from American movies. This ethnic black-out neatly coincided with The Production Code.  Hollywood Jews were running scared, anxious to be perceived as loyal Americans, not clannish Jews, and the self-censorship of the Hays Office over issues of sex and race bled directly into the insecure Jewish psyche of the secular, assimilationist Hollywood Jewish elite.

End Interpolation:

Alma Rubens is truly a lost star of the silent screen, but her memoir, almost certainly ghost written, is absolutely riveting. Now, it’s been edited by Gary D. Rhodes and Alexander Webb and published as Alma Rubens, Silent Snowbird.

Translation:

Silent = silent films.

Snowbird = female cocaine addict.

As Rhodes and Webb write in their splendid introduction:

By 1918, actress Alma Rubens was a noted screen personality. By 1920, she was a major star. By 1929, she was hospitalized for drug abuse. By 1931, she was dead from its effects. Little more is generally said of Rubens, one of the great female stars of the emergent feature film industry of the 1910’s and one whose popularity continued over a fifteen year period.

Rubens, exquisitely doe-eyed and dark-haired, broke into the film industry in 1914 with appearances in two three-reelers, The Narcotic Spectre and The Gangster and the Girl. In 1915 Rubens starred in The Lorelia Madonna produced by Vitagraph. Rubens got strong reviews for this film and producers noticed. D.W. Griffith cast her in Intolerance (1916) as one of the girls of the marriage market in the Babylonian sequence—I can’t pick her out. She also worked with cowboy star William S. Hart in The Cold Deck (1917).

From these associations, Rubens was offered a contract with Triangle, the studio formed by D.W. Griffith, Mack Sennet, and Thomas Ince. Rubens starred in films opposite Bessie Love and Douglas Fairbanks. Ironically, the three actors appeared in one of the most notorious pictures of the silent era, The Mystery of the Leaping Fish (1916) in which Fairbanks is a cocaine using detective named “Coke Ennyday.”

From 1918 until 1925 Alma Rubens became a Hollywood star before stardom was understood, before Hollywood celebrity was common. She was comfortable in front of the camera and didn’t display the formal stiffness that characterized so many early film stars. In a way, Alma was the girl next door. Except she was drop-dead gorgeous, sensuous without the threatening Theda Bara vamp thing that was all the rage at the time.

Interesting to note that Bara was promoted as the exotic Egyptian-born daughter of a French actress and an Italian sculptor. In fact, Bara was a smart, hard-working Jewish woman from Cincinnati: Theodosia Burr Goodman.

Rubens starred in Humoresque (1920), according to the silent film historian Kevin Brownlow, the “first [Hollywood] Jewish classic,” produced and financed by William Randolph Hurst’s Cosmopolitan Pictures. The movie was directed by the twenty-seven year old Frank Borzage, an Italian-American from Salt Lake City. Borzage, one of Hollywood’s finest directors, was a former Shakespearean actor who toiled for a time as an extra at Universal, and was then signed by Thomas Ince as a leading man. Gradually, Borzage found his way to the director’s chair. The script, based on a Fannie Hurst novel, was penned by the great screenwriter Francis Marion.

Adolph Zukor, the head of Paramount, despised the finished film and could not understand why anybody would want to see a movie about, what he perceived, as lower-class Jews. As Brownlow reports in Behind the Mask of Innocence, Zukor wrote to screenwriter Marion: “If you want to show Jews, show Rothchilds, banks and beautiful things. It hurts us Jews—we don’t all live in poor houses.” Humoresque was almost shelved, but when finally released, it proved to be a popular sensation, a big money-maker, and Rubens was catapulted to the deadly Hollywood stratosphere.

Typical of so many Hollywood actresses—the Gish sisters, the Talmadge sisters, and countless others—Alma Rubens was impoverished and fatherless for most of her childhood.

Her love life was a series of disastrous, ill-considered marriages. She married stage actor Franklyn Farnum in 1918. He was 20-years her senior. The marriage lasted about two weeks. He was, she said, drunken and violent. In 1923 she married Dr. Daniel Carson Goodman, but they separated after a few months. He too, she charged, as physically violent and mentally abusive. While working for Fox in 1926, she married the handsome leading man Ricardo Cortez—the only Hollywood actor ever to get credit above Greta Garbo, in The Torrent, 1926.

Ruben’s mother, Teresa, was a powerful influence who manged to sock away money and buy some valuable real estate. Rubens, in her memoir, admits that if not for her mother’s wise investments, all her Hollywood earnings would have gone into her veins.

Alma Rubens, glamor portrait

Rubens claims that her addiction to morphine began in 1923, after marriage to Dr. Daniel Carson Goodman, screenwriter and head of production for Hearst’s Cosmopolitan Pictures. Rubens has just signed a contract for a thousand dollars a week.

Then came an illness, painful and nerve-wracking, though of short duration, but which proved to be the ultimate stumbling block upon which my career was wrecked.

It marked the beginning of my addiction to the use of narcotic drugs.

So, what exactly was the nature of Ruben’s illness?

Ruben’s goes on to explain:

My first shot of morphine, administered to ease my suffering, was given me by Dr. A., now one of the leading gynecologists in the country and a professor in one of our great universities.

Later, when my husband learned the exact nature of the treatment for my womanly weakness—the use of morphine—he called in another great physician, Dr. B., who said it would be a crime to operate on a girl of my tender age—and conceded that his contemporary’s treatment was a most proper one.

Womanly weakness.

There is no further explanation.

But a friend who is a physician has this compelling diagnosis:

Rubens may have been referring to Endometriosis, a gynecologic condition where there is thought to be hormonally responsive tissue within the abdomen (endometrial fragments, hence the name), which can become extremely painful at different times during a woman’s cycle.

In the days before hormonal therapy injections, and even now, when hormones don’t work, narcotics were often prescribed.

The definitive surgical therapy—drastic, last resort, but 100% curative—is ovarian removal, but completely understandable why physicians would be reluctant to perform this on so young a woman.

We know that Rubens was first arrested for narcotics possession as early as 1919, so clearly she was using before she was given her first shot of morphine in 1923 as she claims.

Okay, addicts lie. They like to blame others for their addictions. No surprise there. But let’s give Alma the benefit of the doubt. Maybe she was just partying like so many Hollywood starlets then and now, and only seriously got hooked later on.

Rubens blames only herself for becoming a “dope fiend.”

A weak, worldly girl, who hadn’t sufficient will power to cast aside the treacherous needle; the insiduous [sic] liquid, responsible for my loathesome [sic] yearning.

Shockingly frank about her frequent violence, Rubens stabs a physician with a pen knife as he attempts to treat her. When she comes home from a sanitarium, pretending that she’s cured, she snarls to her mother and Cortez: “You’re both fools. I’m still an addict. And now I’m going straight to hell.”

Rubens marches right into her bedroom and shoots up with narcotics she purchased from a corrupt sanitarium physician.

Talk about a full service treatment center.

The actress tracks down a black maid she recently fired for dishonesty from her Beverly Hills home. Rubens trades a $4,000 mink coat for a few day’s supply of dope. Rubens catches the look of perfect revenge on her former maid’s face as the exchange is finalized. Soon, Rubens is handing over expensive evening gowns, sable and ermine capes, silk lingerie and fine jewelry. Most of the time, Rubens sadly admits, she gets just enough narcotics to get through a few days.

Alma Rubens, studio portrait

There are wild, public incidents. Frequent violent outbursts. There’s a loud, drunken orgy in a hotel room. Court orders to have Rubens committed are filed by Ruben’s mother. Counter appeals are filed by Alma. At last, an ambulance pulls up to her ranch, Rubens is strapped into a strait jacket and whisked away for a “cure.” Before you know it Rubens escapes and hides away in a cheap hotel with a supply of dope, bathtub gin, and some bad boy junkie she picked up in Chinatown. Reporters from The New York Times—what, you expected The National Enquirer?—get wind of her addiction, and like jackals track her descent.

It’s a life so out of control that when she writes about the fist sized infected abscesses on her thighs, I literally shivered. Reading the memoir I had a hard time believing that this was taking place in the roaring twenties and not today, in the Hollywood Hills or Malibu.

Of course, like so many true confessions, much of what Alma writes is self-serving, and the reader has to pluck kernels of truth from some pretty sensational fiction cooked up by professional ghost writers anxious to sell a sordid yarn in order to boost newspaper circulation. But the core of the memoir reeks of truth—she’s a sad, desperate Hollywood type I fully recognize—and Rubens pulls no punches as she details a harrowing plunge into addiction and moral chaos.

Alma’s addiction became public knowledge in 1929 and film roles dried up. She played Julie in the 1929 part-talkie Show Boat. But really, it was all over. Her angelic looks were ravaged by drugs and hard-living.

In 1930 she was arrested in San Diego with narcotics found sewn in the lining of an evening gown. She had purchased the dope in Mexico and tried to smuggle it back into America. Rubens claimed that she was framed.

A few weeks later, Alma Rubens (February 19, 1897- January 22, 1931) died of drug-induced pneumonia. She was 33 years old.

Alma Rubens IMDb

Copyright © Robert J. Avrech