After much arguing, Griffith grudgingly agreed to raise the character’s age from twelve to fifteen, while still insisting that she play the part as a child. Lillian wasn’t convinced she could pull it off: “Virgins are the hardest roles to play. Those dear little girls — to make them interesting takes great vitality.” But seven years together had given the director full confidence in her abilities: “I gave her an outline of what I hoped to accomplish, and let her work it out in her own way. When she got it, she had something of her own.”

Sometimes events that look like setbacks prove to be fortuitous. On the way home from being fitted for her costumes, Gish collapsed with Spanish Influenza, a deadly pandemic then spreading throughout the United States which ultimately killed over thirty million worldwide. By the time she rallied and recovered, her already svelte frame had degenerated so dramatically that her costumes had to be refitted. But in hindsight, this pathetic and emaciated look proved perfect for the role.

Rehearsals for Broken Blossoms began just as the clangor of America’s church bells announced Armistice Day (the end of World War I), and lasted for a magisterial six weeks. “Everything was planned and timed to the second,” Gish said. “We were craftsmen. We weren’t allowed the luxury of improvisation. But we tried these things out in rehearsal. If it was good, Griffith said, ‘Keep that in’.” There were no scripts to reference, no pages of dialogue to remember. If words were required, the actors made them up on the spot. “In the end,” Gish said, “the cutter would come in with his little paper and take down what we were saying, because later on they would become subtitles.”

The reason for their intricate preparations lay in the nature of silent film — every emotion was translated into a very subtle pantomime. Karl Brown, Griffith’s young boy Friday, remembered how, “A simple scene, apparently meaningless in itself, possibly a mere ‘bridge’ to carry the story from one phase to another, would be tried two, three, five, or a dozen different ways to settle at last into the one pattern that would work for everyone concerned: camera, setting, lighting, the placing of props, everything.” This allowed the principal photography of Broken Blossoms to be completed with astounding alacrity — eighteen days all told, with many of those night shoots. “Griffith conditioned her to the part she was to play,” said Broken Blossoms’ cameraman, Billy Bitzer, “and once she had the action in mind, she wouldn’t forget or deviate by so much as a flicker of the eye.”

Much of that footage was imbued with a previously unfathomed beauty due to a happy accident of fate. One day Lillian Gish went to the Hoover Art Company, a local Hollywood photography studio, and asked them to take a picture for her passport. She expected to sit for the usual head-and-shoulders mug shot, but what she received was destined to change the face of moviemaking.

When she later proudly showed the result to D. W. Griffith, he was deeply impressed. “Her eyes were alive with beaming life,” remembered production assistant Karl Brown about that luminous photo. “Her dimpled smile was so real and so rounded that you could reach right into the picture and touch it, while her lips were incomparably delicious just to look at. Her hair was in glowing tendrils, so alive that it was actually real, and not a picture at all.”

Griffith promptly hunted down and hired the previously unknown photographer, Hendrik Sartov, and gave him a single job on Broken Blossoms. “All Sartov had to do was make close-ups,” says Brown, “nothing but close-ups. . . The magic lens that performed his miracles was quite long of focus, six or eight inches, and in order to make a full-head close-up he had to back away over almost to the other end of the stage, while his lens shade seemed eighteen inches long. Specially made, of course, and specially mounted.”

When Brown finally snuck a closer look at this magic lens, he couldn’t believe his eyes. It was

nothing in the world but a yellowed old spectacle lens with all its imperfections on its head. It wasn’t much more than the bottom of a beer bottle, and its great virtue was that it was full of all the bad faults that optical scientists had been working for decades to eliminate. It could form an image, yes, but only in the middle part. From that one inch or so of recognizable image, the rest splayed out like a raw egg dropped on the kitchen floor. And this image part was all loused up with chromatic and spherical aberration.

However, if you’d stop it down far enough [cinematographer-speak for using more light and then contracting the lens iris to compensate, the same way your pupils shrink when exposed to bright light -- LG] these defects would diminish. . . Adjust the stop until the two aberrations can be just barely sensed but not actually seen, make your exposure, and what you get is pure peaches and cream.

In the wake of Sartov’s uncredited work on Broken Blossoms, film cinematographers the world over strove to emulate his wonderful diffusion effect. Some pulled pantyhose over their lenses to soften the image, others smeared a thin layer of Vaseline on the glass. By the 1930s, just in time for Hollywood’s Golden Age, many had perfected ways to trick the camera lens into taking years of wear and tear off a starlet’s face, thus giving audiences prodigious helpings of cinematic “peaches and cream.”

While Sartov did much to make Gish look younger, it was in the memorable nuances of her performance that she really managed to bring off the illusion. The most famous of these is now known as “The Smile.” In the story, Gish’s monstrously cruel father, sick of her incessant gloom and despair, orders her to give him a smile. Griffith and his cast thought long and hard about some meaningful response Gish could give her father in that moment, some bit of pantomime that could expose the depths of sorrow permeating her soul. But it was Gish who came up with the answer, a perfect gesture that has since gone down as an iconic image in the annals of filmmaking. As she explains it:

Suddenly it came to me: in the midst of the scene, and while the camera was grinding, I lifted my hand, spread my index and second fingers, and pushed up the corners of my lips into a ghastly, fixed-mouth smile.

“Mr. Griffith leapt to his feet,” Gish remembers, “and shouted: ‘Hold it!’ We did the scene many times until he was satisfied, and then he said to me: ‘Lillian, that is the only original piece of acting I have ever seen in the pictures’.” Griffith would have Gish repeat that ineffably sad and pathetic gesture at several points in the film. (So much for Gish’s claim that, “We weren’t allowed the luxury of improvisation.”)

Just as The Smile became a universally known shot depicting sorrow, the famous “Closet Scene” from Broken Blossoms became a benchmark for scenes of sheer terror in cinema. Its preeminence in that regard would not be seriously challenged for over forty years, until Hitchcock gave us the “Shower Scene” in Psycho. In the movie, Gish’s father has dragged Gish home and is preparing to horsewhip her. Terrified, she dives into the closet and locks the door against him, listening in raw terror to his angry ravings before completely falling apart as he begins battering down the door with a hatchet, Shining-style.

On the day it was to be shot, Griffith ran Gish ragged until 2 a.m., trying to get her into an exhausted state conducive to losing herself in the moment. What he didn’t know was that she had been rehearsing the scene in private “almost without sleep” for three days and nights, striving to come up with the perfect pantomime for terror, some action or gesture that would pierce the audience like a knife in the heart:

I worked that out myself. I never told Griffith what I was going to do. You see, if I had told him, he’d have made me rehearse it over and over again; and that would have spoilt it. It had to be spontaneous, the hysterical terror of a child.

Well, when I came to play the scene in front of the camera, I did it as I planned — spinning and screaming terribly (I was a good screamer; Mr. Griffith used to encourage me to scream at the top of my voice). When we finished, Mr. Griffith was very pale.

It remains, for all the advances we’ve had in technology, an electrifying scene. “I have seen every actress of America and Europe during the last half-century,” the famous stage actor Rudolph Schildkraut said at the time. “Lillian Gish’s scene in the closet, where she is hiding in terror from her brutal father, is the finest work I have ever witnessed.”

Normally during a shoot, Griffith’s highest praise after a scene was to murmur with soft content, “That is very fine.” But on this night, after Lillian Gish had screamed for long minutes like a banshee and twirled around in the enclosed closet space like a feral animal, Griffith’s response was a shocked “My God — why didn’t you warn me you were going to do that?” One suspects that he said this with a huge smile, for cameraman Billy Bitzer reports that, while Gish was immersed in her throes of terror, he snuck a glance over at Griffith, who was “leaned forward in his director’s chair, relishing every moment of it.”

Broken Blossoms debuted at New York’s George M. Cohan Theatre on May 13, 1919, and the accolades for Lillian Gish were off the charts. The critic covering the premiere for The New York Evening Telegram wrote that, “Miss Lillian Gish, as the girl, is so sweet and charming, and withal so touching that the presentation actually moved spectators to tears.” The Tribune added that, “Her work is so tender, so convincing that there comes a time when you just can’t watch any longer.” The Morning Telegraph spoke for many when it declared that “She gives a performance so finished and so appealing and pitiful it will be recorded among the remembered characterizations in this uncertain art of the unspoken drama.”

It was a triumph, undoubtedly — but also a double-edged sword. “Life is just one long photograph and interview,” the private, retiring actress glumly complained about her post-Blossoms tidal-wave of publicity. Magazines heralded her as “The Madonna of the Shadows,” “Queen of the Silent Drama,” and “The Duse and Bernhardt of the Screen.” Within a few years D. W. Griffith was all but forced to shoo her out of his company, graciously encouraging her to make her fortune with other directors while she was still a hot property. This she reluctantly did, but other directors found her to be too settled in her Griffith-tutored ways and somewhat snobbish about it. What John Nolte calls the “self-consciously showy” School of Acting Affectation (think late Meryl Streep and Al Pacino) actually started ninety years ago with Gish — contemporary reviews from the 1920s frequently accuse her of “playing Lillian Gish” instead of the character, and of using “repetitious mannerisms.”

Everyone wanted her to repeat her Broken Blossoms formula, to the point where critic Herbert Howe wrote in Picture Play magazine that, “When Lillian Gish now appears you know she is due for a beating. . . A Society for the Prevention of Screen Cruelty to Lillian Gish should be organized. This fragile, spiritually illumined girl is a fine tragedienne, ever emotionally true. It is a mistake to let her droop, forever a broken blossom.” Another magazine’s editor joked that “an optimist is a person who will go to the theater expecting to see a D. W. Griffith production in which Lillian Gish is not attacked by the villain in the fifth reel.”

And then there were the changing times. Actress Colleen Moore remembers how “There was a tendency for people and critics during the 20s to believe that anything that came to prominence in the teens was hopelessly outdated and old-fashioned.” The Los Angeles Examiner noted in a review of a lesser Gish film that “People are sick of her in vine-clinging, tragic attitudes. They want something different. We are living in the twentieth century.” James R. Quirk, publisher and editor of Photoplay, put it even more cuttingly: “Even as Hester Prynne in The Scarlet Letter, she proves conclusively that babies are brought by storks.”

She was approaching forty when the advent of sound soured her on acting in movies, and she turned to a successful stage career. Gish only did motion pictures intermittently after that, but worth mentioning is her standout performance as shotgun-wielding Rachel Cooper protecting God’s children from Robert Mitchum’s iniquitous preacher in Charles Laughton’s masterpiece Night of the Hunter (1955). She remained a staunch Republican her entire life, standing by actors like John Wayne in support of the House Un-American Activities Committee, publicly supporting Presidents Eisenhower, Nixon, and Reagan, and being on the right side of most issues. When once questioned about feminism she replied, “I’m not a feminist. I like to think I used common sense most of the time.” My kind of gal.

Lillian Gish died in her sleep in 1993, having lived for 99 years — from President Grover Cleveland to President Bill Clinton. Her first film was made in 1912, and her last seventy-five years later, in 1987. In her foreword to The Films of D. W. Griffith, Gish wrote of her generation that “We are the first to leave a living record of our people, life-style, and certainly our history.”

I give the last word on Lillian Gish to Albert Bigelow Paine, the notable Mark Twain scholar who, in 1932, penned the first full-length biography of the woman who made Broken Blossoms so unforgettable: “To say that [Gish’s acting] is spiritual only partly tells the story. It is that, but it is something more. It has a haunting, eerie quality that has to do with elfland, and lonely moors — the face that seen by the homing lad at evening leaves him forever undone. Scores of men and women, too, have written of it, have felt its strangeness. Some have tried to write of it lightly, but underneath you feel the magic working. They have glimpsed Diana’s silver horn, and they are forever changed.”

Next week, we conclude our study of Broken Blossoms with a cage-fight death match: the critical mores of past audiences versus those of modern deconstructionist academics.

Previous posts in the series “D. W. Griffith, Lillian Gish, and Broken Blossoms”

Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3

FURTHER READING and VIEWING

The Dorothy and Lillian Gish Film Theater and Gallery at Bowling Green State University, Ohio. Bowling Green State has long been a friend of popular culture. They have what must be the biggest pop-culture library and archive in the world (housing, among much else, a complete collection of my own literary journal, The Cimmerian), and visitors to their campus can also check out the cool theater dedicated to the Gish sisters, complete with displays of historical artifacts from their lives and careers.

Lillian Gish fulfills a dream of ballet. An old video from May 13, 1984: “Legend of stage and screen, Lillian Gish, appears with Patrick Dupond and fulfills a lifelong dream at the Metropolitan Opera Gala, celebrating 100 years of performing arts at the Met.” She always wanted to be in a ballet, and at ninety she finally did it.

An excerpt from Albert Bigelow Paine’s 1932 book, Life and Lillian Gish. Other biographers criticize this early treatment of Gish’s life for its “enpurpled prose” and its slavish adherence to the Gish legend (with her assistance — unlike many stars, Gish rarely shied away with cooperating with projects concerning her life and work). Me, I like the graceful period language, grammar and sense of decorum that permeated much of that era’s writing. Here’s pages 79-99 from the book, covering Gish’s early career with Griffith, and transcribed and presented by CinemaWeb: The Independent Resource for Independent Film and Video.

“How can I ever repay you?”

Replied Rabbi Myers: “I have a daughter who would like to get into pictures.”

Rudolph Valentino at the height of his fame.

True to his word, Griffith extended a helping hand to Carmel, Rabbi Myer’s striking and talented daughter. Carmel Myers (1899 – 1980) appears fleetingly as a dancing girl in Intolerance and after production wrapped, she was signed as a contract Griffith player. A few months later, the future star Colleen Moore arrived in Hollywood, also under exclusive contract to Griffith.

Myers and Moore became close friends. In her excellent memoir Silent Star, Colleen Moore remembers that a club for young actresses—Our Club—was organized as a means of mutual support. The young actresses would lunch on Sunday, discuss movies, books, “boys” and generously feed one another tips on what roles were available at which studios. Myers was an active member.

A typical meeting included: Anita Stewart, Patsy Ruth Miller, Helen Ferguson, Billie Dove, Virginia Zanuck, Gertrud Olmsted, Julanne Johnston, Clara Horton, Ruby Keeler, Loretta Young, Aline MacMahon, Ruth Roland, Carmelita Geraghty, Pauline Garan and Ann Harding. Mary Pickford was godmother to this extraordinary gathering of up and coming stars.

Carmel’s biggest break came when she was chosen to play the wicked Iras in the huge and deeply troubled MGM production of Ben Hur,1925.

The rabbi’s beautiful daughter was frequently cast as the sexy vamp in silent films. She starred and worked with some of the best known stars of the time: John Barrymore, Mary Astor, Rudolph Valentino, Norma Shearer, Adolph Menjou, Eleanor Boardman, Lon Chaney, and Joan Crawford. Carmel made the transition to sound quite nicely, and as she grew older eased gracefully into character parts. But when the roles got too small she shifted into real estate—always a smart bet in Los Angeles—and launched her own perfume company. In 1951 Carmel starred in her own TV show for one season.

But let’s rewind to 1918, when Myers was an emerging Hollywood star. In the comprehensive Valentino biography, Dark Lover, author Emily W. Leider reports that the young, incredibly handsome dancer and aspiring actor Rudolph Valentino—real name, Rodolfo Alfonso Raffaello Piero Filiberto Guglielmi di Valentina d’Antonguolla—was struggling for a foothold in Hollywood. Back in Italy, Valentino’s beloved mother had just died and Valentino was mired in a black depression.

He sat in his small apartment and wept. His financial situation was precarious. Never smart about money, Valentino’s Mercer car had been repossessed because the future star could not afford the monthly payments. Rudy was forced to walk and take streetcars to the endless rounds of casting sessions. Valentino (1895 – 1926) who, in The Shiek, 1921 was transformed into the world’s greatest lover, was lonely, isolated and yearning for love.

Carmel Myers, the rabbis beautiful daughter.

Leider narrates Valentino’s brave but naive attempt to court the Jewish beauty:

Carmel Myers, a teenaged star who picked him to play her boyfriend in two romantic comedies, says he tried to date her but was stymied by her overprotective mother, a rabbi’s wife. When informed by her mother that Carmel was too young to go out with men, he said, ‘Madame Myers, when I want something I never let anyone stand in my way.’ And Mama asked him, ‘Even if the person standing in your way weighs two-hundred and fifty pounds.’

Deadpans Carmel, “I never did have dinner with him.”

Of course, the rebbetzin (Yiddish: rabbi’s wife) did not block Rudy’s path because of Carmel’s tender age. Carmel was 19-years old in 1918, an appropriate age for dating. The truth is that Mama Myers would not allow her daughter to date a non-Jew. American Jews were assimilating at a frightening rate, especially in Hollywood, and Mama was determined that her daughter choose a Jewish husband and raise a Jewish family. Mama got her wish. Carmel Myers was married three times—all Jewish men.

In 1919 Rudy impulsively married actress Jean Acker—a lesbian—who, on their wedding night, locked him out of her bedroom. The marriage was never consummated. They divorced in 1921. Next, Valentino married Natacha Rambova—real name: Winifred Kimball Shaughnessy—the flamboyant costume designer. Rambova was domineering, artistically uncompromising, and she seriously damaged Valentino’s career. They divorced in 1925. A year later, in August, while in New York, Valentino, the most popular male star in the world, was hospitalized with appendicitis and gastric ulcers. Peritonitis set in and the 31-year old star star died.

Over 100,000 people lined the streets of New York for Rudolph Valentino’s funeral. Agatha Hearn, a New York woman and mother, shot herself while clutching a batch of Valentino photos. In London, a young actress named Peggy Scott, surrounded by photos of Valentino, ingested poison and left a note saying: “With his death my last bit of courage has flown.”

A second funeral was held in Los Angeles. Among the numerous mourners weeping at Valentino’s grave was Carmel Myers.

© Robert J. Avrech

Flags and bunting graced every building and sound stage. There was band music and rows of picnic tables groaning under the weight of food.

L.B. Mayer, a man without a birth date

Every MGM star was expected to attend and pay homage to America-and to L.B. Mayer. For in Mayer’s mind, the two were inseparable. All complied, except Greta Garbo, a woman far too narcissistic to lavish attention on any country or person other than her own mirrored island.

Though Yiddish was his first language, L.B. Mayer delivered a rousing Fourth of July speech. Mayer could be a forceful English speaker, mixing deeply personal anecdotes—usually about his beloved mother—and soaring rhetoric about his adopted home, America.

To date, every Mayer biographer and film writer with whom I’m familiar repeats the familiar anecdote in which Mayer “claimed to have lost his birth certificate” when crossing from Europe to America. The quotation marks tell us—with a condescending wink and nudge—that Mayer fibbed in order to adopt July Fourth as his birthday, thereby conflating his identity with America’s.

However, the truth of Mayer’s birth date can best be appreciated and understood within the context of the Eastern European Jewish culture from which the junk man turned film pioneer emerged.

L.B. Mayer, real name Lazar Meir, was born in Minsk, today the capital of Belarus, but at the time part of the Russian Empire known as The Pale of Settlement where Jews were forced to reside by the viciously anti-Semitic Tzar.

For the most part, Jews of the Pale lived in grinding poverty and the constant threat of pogroms—state sanctioned murder, pillage and rape by the Cossacks. But in spite of their oppression and status as second class citizens, these Jews were overwhelmingly pious and ritually observant, preserving Judaism thorough faith in the G-d of Israel, adherence to the Torah and the study of Talmud.

This was a culture steeped in preserving Jewish traditions, traditions where Biblical and Rabbinic literature is marked by an absence of birth dates.

In the Bible we are informed that men and women lived for a specific number of years—and there is considerable Rabbinic debate at to what constitutes a year in the Biblical age. In addition, the great Rabbinic sages are, at best, recorded as living during the reign of whichever King was, at the time, ruling.

Crucial to understanding life in The Pale, is an awareness that birth certificates were avoided by Jewish families because the Tzar used this information to draft Jewish children—as young as 12-years old—into the Russian army for a period of twenty-five years. The goal being to rid the child of his religious identity and convert him to Christianity.

Studying Jewish tombstones that were documented before the onslaught of the Communist bulldozers in Eastern Europe, there is a marked absence of birth dates. Most often the name of the deceased—for instance, Jacob son of Aaron, no family names—is inscribed, accompanied with a biblical inscription, usually from King David’s Psalms, and finally, the yahrtzeit, the date of death. It is rare to see a birth date chiseled into the stone.

Most Jews confined to The Pale marked their birthday through an association with a specific Jewish holiday.

As an example, my paternal grandfather, Rabbi Samuel Avrech, also from The Pale, told me that he was born “… sometime around Chanukah.”

In contrast, I tell people that I was born in the year of All About Eve.

L.B. Mayer, like every pioneering Jewish mogul, was anxious to shed his Jewish identity. These rags to riches studio chiefs were unable to reconcile Judaism with their aspirations to be real Americans.

And so, it seems more than likely that rather than admit to a vague birth date—associated with an ancient Jewish festival—Mayer crafted the lost birth certificate story, thereby avoiding what he viewed as his embarrassing Jewish heritage.

In any case, L.B. Mayer, the man who invented the star system and who headed the most powerful studio in Hollywood, was intensely patriotic—he emigrated to America from Saint John, New Brunswick, Canada—and insisted that MGM films reflect his deeply held values.

Every Hollywood studio produced thousands upon thousands of still photos as a means of promoting their stars. There were basic, canned poses used over and over again: Starlets in swimsuits, swashbuckling actors with swords, a male and female star locked in a passionate embrace. There were also photo sets celebrating Christmas, Thanksgiving and New Year’s Day.

And there were Independence Day stills.

To jaded eyes, these photos appear artless and heavy-handed. To be sure, the great glamor photographers George Hurrell and C.S. Bull did not snap the shutter for these novelty poses.

But to me, studio produced July Fourth pictures represent a genuine love of America and the values of democracy, liberty and freedom. These are refreshing images, free of tedious, post-modern irony, images that speak deeply of Hollywood’s Golden Age and it’s place in the American grain.

Always an explosive performer, Joan Crawford celebrates liberty.

Copyright © Robert J. Avrech

In 1923, Colleen Moore’s starring vehicle, Flaming Youth was an international box office hit that ushered in the era of the Flapper. The Jazz crazy kids wore their galoshes unbuckled causing the rubber tongue to flap. Thus: Flappers.

 
Colleen Moore, studio portrait in the Stars and Stripes.

I’m waiting for that particular fashion statement to reappear.

Colleen Moore, born Kathleen Morrison, (1900-1988) and her husband John McCormick embarked on a grand tour of Europe to promote Flaming Youth, Colleen’s career, and enjoy a belated honeymoon.

Colleen’s look, specifically her Bobbed haircut, was a global fashion rage. Contrary to popular opinion it was Moore who pioneered the severe cut—not Louise Brooks. It is sad and certainly a skewed vision of film history that the current Louise Brooks cult has spread like a virus, whereas Moore, a far more important figure in motion pictures, is virtually forgotten.  George Cukor, a director who knew something about Hollywood stardom, was utterly baffled by the post-modern Brooks fever. When queried about the star of Pandora’s Box, Cukor forcefully exclaimed: “Louise Brooks? She was nothing!”

Anyhoo.

From where did the idea for this cubist haircut originate, so markedly different than the opulent Victorian tresses in favor at the time? Moore explains that her mother copied the look from a favorite childhood Japanese doll.

The new hairstyle sent a fascinating and complex message: this young lady is independent, plucky, fiery yet down-to-earth, tom-boyish but completely feminine; she’s the decent and adorable girl next door who is a boy’s best friend and then KABOOM! the love of his life.

Never a great beauty or a smoldering presence, Moore presented a new female paradigm: cute, feisty and refreshingly devoid of a self conscious sexuality. The surprising Bob helped cement Moore’s image as the modern American woman, and it changed the trajectory of the young actress’ career from feature player to star. At the height of her stardom Moore earned $12,500.00 a week.

The haircut also gave birth to a new product that is still with us: The Bobby Pin.

In Dublin, a celebrity starved crowd of 10,000 frantic fans broke through a police cordon and grabbed at Colleen who was wearing a stunning cape covered with intricately stitched tiny feathered plumes. Finally, McCormick lifted Colleen on his shoulders and carried her to the car where she arrived “looking like a plucked chicken.”

In Switzerland the mayor of Zurich arranged a dinner party in Colleen’s honor. An orchestra was present to play the the American national anthem.

Colleen describes the scene in her superb memoir Silent Star:

We’d no sooner sat down than the mayor, with a small bow to me, signaled the orchestra, who started playing “My Country,’Tis of Thee.” We all got up and stood very silent. When we sat down again, I said to the mayor, “That was the English national anthem, ‘G-d Save the King.’”

I should have kept my mouth shut. The mayor sent for the orchestra leader, spoke a few words to him in German, and no sooner had we started the soup course than the orchestra struck up again, this time with John Philip Sousa’s “Stars and Stripes Forever.” The Mayor stood up, beckoning to all of us, saying excitedly, “Stehen sie auf, bitte—everybody please stand up.”

We all stood, the orchestra finished, we sat down, and the American consul and I burst out laughing. When the mayor asked what we were laughing about, like an idiot I said, “That wasn’t our national anthem. That’s a march.”

The mayor, red in face, sent for the orchestra leader, spluttering German at him. The leader turned to me and asked the name of our national anthem. I said, “The Star-Spangled Banner.”

He returned to the bandstand, the mayor watching him with an eagle eye. A few moments later the orchestra struck up “Yes, We Have No Bananas,” the mayor rose, saying, “Stehen sie auf, bitte,” and a tableful of by-now bewildered guests stood at attention once again. When we sat down, I smiled at the mayor and said, “That was lovely.”

In 1930, Soviet director Sergei Eisentstein arrived in Hollywood to set up several projects. The talented propagandist met everybody in the business, partied like one of the Communist hacks in Ninotchka, but, naturally, got stuck in development hell, and returned to mother Russia without a deal. Studio heads were baffled by his adaptation of Dreiser’s An American Tragedy. Eisenstein said a great deal about Hollywood and the decadent capitalists he encountered. He judged Marlene Dietrich dull, Greta Garbo stupid. But Collen Moore, rhapsodized Eisenstein, was the only intelligent woman he met in Hollywood.

Colleen Moore, Desert Flower, 1925

Colleen’s first husband, studio executive John McCormick, was, in many ways, responsible for steering the meteoric rise of her flapper film career. Unfortunately, he was also an alcoholic and frequently abusive.

Director Mervyn LeRoy in his fascinating autobiography Take One, describes a terrifying night when McCormick, on a bender, tried to hurl Moore out of a N.Y. hotel window. LeRoy—from an assimilated Jewish San Francisco family whose last name was probably Levine—saved Moore’s life by smashing McCormick over the head with a chair. The gallant and properly violent LeRoy—at the time a top “comedy constructor” for Moore—remained as her protector the entire night, the two of them aimlessly walking the streets of New York.

In Hollywood past and present, major movie stars have major tzuris.

In fact, Moore and McCormick’s troubled relationship inspired George Cukor’s top-notch insider Hollywood drama What Price Hollywood in 1932 as well as the three versions of A Star Is Born.

Colleen Moore, Her Wild Oat 1927.

Tragically, Flaming Youth, is presumed to be a lost film. Perhaps, somewhere in an archive in Eastern Europe, lies a decaying copy of this legendary motion picture. I wouldn’t be at all surprised.

And as an example of how a lost film suddenly shows up—in this case Czechoslovakia—a Colleen Moore movie, Her Wild Oat, long considered lost, has been rediscovered and expertly restored. This article is an interview with archivist and historian Joseph Yranski who met Colleen Moore in the early 1970s, and remained friends with her until her death in 1988. Yranski was indirectly responsible for the rediscovery of Her Wild Oat.

Colleen Moore and the six-year-old Mickey Rooney in Orchards and Ermine, 1927

On DVD you can see Colleen Moore in Orchids and Ermine, 1927. Colleen plays a shop girl, a flapper, who’s looking for a sugar daddy. But she’s got to remain an innocent at heart, meaning she has to fall in love for the sake of love—not money. There’s romance, mistaken identity, and of course true love triumphs in the end. It’s a screwball comedy before screwball comedies were invented in the 30’s. Moore is magnetic as a gold digger who’s not as avaricious as she should be. A classic.

Colleen Moore in the dog house, in Ella Cinders, 1926.

Ella Cinders was probably Colleen Moore’s best role. In this spin on the Cinderella story, and much like Mabel Normand’s The Extra Girl, 1923, Moore plays a young girl in a dead end life who dreams of stardom, wins a beauty contest and goes to Hollywood. Once there, our heroine discovers that the contest was a scam. But with determination and talent Ella makes it in the movies and, natch, finds true love. This film is absolutely charming and Moore is delightful. Lombard before Lombard, Lucy before Lucy. You can get a DVD of the film here.

The Scarlet Letter, 1934, starring Colleen Moore and Alan Hale, 1934. This is a sound film, late in Colleen’s career. Moore was primarily a comedian but here she was trying to broaden her horizons as an actress. I haven’t yet seen this film so I’m clueless. But anything with Colleen Moore is interesting.

Broken Hearts of Broadway, 1923, was produced just before Moore broke through as a major star. Colleen plays the role of Mary, an aspiring actress who arrives in New York, all young and wholesome. Will she betray her friends for fame and fortune? This is a lovely show-biz morality tale, and Moore, as always, is genuine, vivacious, and utterly magnetic.

Reel Baseball/The Busher is a collection of baseball-themed silent movies. Colleen Moore co-stars with Charles Ray in The Busher, 1920, about a small town pitcher who is brought up to the big leagues but can’t quite make the grade. Colleen plays Mazie, his local sweetheart. Charles Ray was briefly a star of the silent era who specialized in playing rural heroes. On screen Ray was a one dimensional performer who relied on an aw’, shucks grin and a standard check list of hick mannerisms which appealed to audiences—for a short window of time.

Off-screen Ray was hugely tempramental, and according to Adolpf Zukor’s memoir had an inflated sense of his own importance. Ray spent his fortune lavishly and went bankrupt when he produced and financed his own pictures. Eventually, Ray devolved into alcoholism and uncredited walk-ons.  In 1935, Ray published a collection of short stories titled Hollywood Shorts, Compiled From Incidents in the Everyday Life of Men and Women Who Entertain in Pictures. Anthony Slide, in his seminal volume Silent Players, reports that, “…an undercurrent of anti-Semitism is evident in a number of stories, suggesting that Ray blamed his downfall on Jewish studio bosses.” Impoverished, Ray died from an infected tooth in 1943 at the age of 52.

I saw The Busher on TCM—I have a TCM addiction and I am powerless to control it—about a year ago. Moore, was not yet a star, just another feature player trying to claw her way from the middle ranks. But as soon as she appears on-screen—behold!—a refreshing, exuberant presence. The petite and vivacious Moore just blows the eager-to-please Charles Ray off screen.

Colleen Moore as Mazie on Charles Ray's lap in The Busher.

Fortunately for Colleen, the black and white film stock of the time never registered that one eye was brown, the other blue. She would have looked cross-eyed.

John Gilbert, who rose to be the first million dollar contract matinee idol at MGM, has a supporting role in The Busher as the spoiled rich kid who’s vying for Colleen’s affections over Charles Ray’s salt of the earth hero. Tragically, Gilbert, talented but immensely self-destructive, had a tortuous love affair with the great narcissist Greta Garbo—she left him stranded at the altar—and then, with the coming of sound his career crashed and burned in a terrific orgy of booze and babes.

After her retirement from motion pictures in 1935, Colleen Moore dedicated herself to an ongoing project: building the world’s most dazzling and elaborate doll house, actually a fairy castle. She toured with the fairy tale house to raise money for children’s charities.

The house is an engineering marvel. It has its own miniature sophisticated lights and wiring, a self-contained plumbing system, and a Lilliputian library with books signed by some of the greatest authors of our time. Every single detail of the castle is simply breath taking.

The fairy castle is on permanent exhibition in Chicago’s Museum of Science of Industry. Here’s the homepage.

Moore also wrote a best-selling volume: How Women Can make Money in the Stock Market.

Colleen Moore was Mervyn Leroy’s champion in Hollywood. She also mentored the luminous teen-age Loretta Young, and wisely cast an inexperienced but jaw-droppingly handsome Gary Cooper in his first starring role opposite Moore in Lilac Time, 1928. Moore believed that LeRoy, an incredibly bright, energetic, and creative young man, would develop into a fine director. She was right. LeRoy was known—before Orson Welles—as “The Boy Genius.” So let’s close with LeRoy’s warm words about this important actress and Hollywood icon:

Colleen Moore was a remarkable girl who grew into a remarkable woman… and became, next to Mary Pickford, the biggest silent film star of them all.

Later, she would retire from the screen at the height of her fame, marry well, and spend the rest of her life doing important civic works in Chicago, writing books, raising her stepchildren, and doting on her grandchildren. She was never anything but a lady, throughout her career and her postcareer life.

Her fame, however, never went to her head in any way. Perhaps because of her affluent background, she was never spoiled by her wealth., never seduced by her notoriety, never changed by her success. She was always sweet—in the best sense of the word—and kind and pleasant to everyone she met. I doubt that there was a man who worked on her pictures who was not platonically in love with her.

Links:

The Colleen Moore Project

Colleen Moore: Century Baby

Another Colleen Moore Site

Copyright © Robert J. Avrech