Lillian Gish

The great twin tragedies of the fate of silent films in the modern era is indifference and ignorance. And for those who have seen clips from silent films, they invariably view muddy, degraded prints projected at the wrong speed, hence the jerky motions that give the impression that all silent films are bad slapstick.

Of course, we all owe a great debt to Robert Osborne and TCM for programming so many fine silent films. At last, film lovers have the opportunity to screen a varied selection of silent films and appreciate the great craft that was abruptly short-circuited with the advent of talkies. The best silent films were a universal language in which image, motion and emotion were paramount.

Silent movies were shot and duplicated on fragile nitrate stock. In the few original prints I’ve been fortunate enough to screen the images are just stunning. The screen glows with a liquid, silvery radiance that’s impossible to duplicate on modern film or tape. The finest silent film players were geniuses who conveyed a world of emotion through the most subtle means.

The great director King Vidor, (1894-1982) whose career spanned eight decades—from early silent movies right into the sound era—directed Lillian Gish in a 1926 silent version of La Boheme.

At this point in her career, Gish was so powerful that she had contractual approval over script and director. The intensity of her work ethic, the dedication to her craft simply awed Vidor as he noted so many years later in his excellent 1952 memoir, A Tree is a Tree.

The title is very funny, an insider Hollywood joke. It’s a quote from a penny pinching studio executive who famously said: “A rock is a rock, a tree is a tree. Shoot it in Griffith Park!” Hence, in early films, Los Angele’s Griffith Park was used as a location for cowboy movies, Civil War movies, New York’s Central Park, the Scottish Highlands, Versailles—you name it, Griffith Park served as a default location.

Director King Vidor

Here, Vidor describes how Gish rigorously prepared for and played her dramatic death scene in La Boheme:

When she arrived on the set that fateful day, we saw her sunken eyes, her hollow cheeks, and we noticed that her lips had curled outward and were parched with dryness. What on earth had she done to herself? I ventured to ask about her lips and she said in syllables hardly audible that she had succeeded in removing all the saliva from her mouth by not drinking any liquids for three days, and by keeping cotton pads between her teeth and gums even in her sleep.

A pall began to settle over the entire company. People moved about the stage on tiptoe and spoke only in whispers. Finally came the scene where Rudolph carried the exhausted Mimi to her little bed and her Bohemian friends gathered around while Mimi breathed her last. I let the camera continue on her lifeless form and the tragic faces around her and decided to call “cut” only when I saw that Miss Gish was forced to inhale after holding her breath to simulate death. But the familiar movement of the chest didn’t come. She neither inhaled nor exhaled. I began to fear she had played her part too well, and I could see that the other members of the cast and crew had the same fears as I. Too frightened to speak the one word that would halt the movement of the camera, I wondered how to bridge this fantastic moment back to the coldness of reality. The thought flashed through my mind, “What will the headlines say?” After what seemed many, many minutes, I waved my hand before the camera as a signal to stop. Still there was no movement from Lillian.

John Gilbert bent close, and softly whispered her name. Her eyes slowly opened. She permitted herself her first deep breath since the scene had started; for the past days she had trained herself, somehow or other, to get along without visible breathing. It was necessary to wet her lips before she could speak. By this time there was no one on the set whose eyes were dry. The movies have never known a more dedicated artist than Lillian Gish.

Lillian Gish, on her deathbed in La Boheme.

Miss Gish did not work with King Vidor again until 1946 when she played Mrs. McCanles in David O. Selznick’s Duel in the Sun. There’s a lovely and touching moment in the film when Jennifer Jones says to Gish: “I’ll be a good girl—I want to be like you.”

Whenever I’m in production, working with actors, deep in my heart I too hope that they want, consciously or not, to be like Lillian Gish.

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

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

Silent Star Madge Bellamy

During the first week of production, one of the featured actresses—not Ellen—knocked on my hotel door and asked if she could discuss her role with me.

Of course I sat down with the actress—a recognized and respected talent—and we discussed her role, the character’s history, motivation, and dramatic arc. The actress relentlessly probed every single line of dialog. She challenged me to defend all the hard decisions I’d made in writing the character.

I kept saying:

“I think you do this because…”

“I think you feel this because…”

“I think the big turning point is when…”

The Actress kept saying:

“I feel that I do this because…”

“I feel that my character experiences this because…”

”I feel that my character…

I short: I was thinking and she was feeling.

The great liberal, conservative divide as applied to a film.

It was a long night, but because film is a collaborative craft, and because I respected the actress and she—I think—respected me, we each made concessions, and ultimately the character that emerges in this fine and touching film is richer, more complex than I originally imagined. The actress turned in a stupendous performance. After a few days of watching rushes, I took the actress aside and said:

“You’re making me look good.”

“Honey, I’m just doing my job,” she purred.

Which brings me to Madge Bellamy.

Madge Bellamy, studio publicity photo

A huge Hollywood star in the early 20’s, most of Bellamy’s early, silent work has been lost. But you can still see her in starring roles in John Ford’s Iron Horse (1924) and Maurice Tourneur’s Lorna Doon (1922). In the sound era, Madge’s most famous role is as Madeleine Parker, in White Zombie, with Bela Lugosi (1932), a cult classic.

Tragically, Madge was one of the most self-destructive Hollywood stars of all time. In a town where players excel at self-annihilating behavior, that’s quite a distinction. In 1943 Madge stalked and shot her former lover, Stanwood Murphy. The massive publicity and resulting scandal destroyed her already sputtering career. Regarding the shooting Madge said: “I only winged him, which is what I meant to do. Believe me, I’m a crack shot.”

Madge Bellamy, cover of Photoplay Magazine,
January, 1929

But for now, let’s leave scandal behind and focus on how Madge learned to act in motion pictures as revealed in a fascinating interview from Photoplay Magazine, Oct. 1927.

Madge had the unfortunate reputation of being a dumb actress—probably because she made a series of disastrous career choices and insulted so many powerful Hollywood moguls. She walked out of L.B. Mayer’s office just as he announced that he wanted to cast her in the starring role of his next film. Madge explained that Mayer didn’t stand up to greet her like a proper gentleman.

Big mistake.

However, as you can see from this excerpt, Madge Bellamy was bright and articulate. Unfortunately, then and now, beautiful women are often ruthlessly stripped of their brains by bright people who should know better.

“Acting,” for instance. “I always thought that acting was a question of emotions—that you felt a scene and played it as you felt it.”

“Well, I was wrong about that. Acting is a matter of intelligence and observation. You don’t have to feel an emotion to portray it. You must observe how other people express their emotions.”

“Mr. Dwan [Alan Dwan, the great, pioneering director] and I had an interesting conversation on the set this morning. I had been playing a sad scene and when I finished, Mr. Dwan asked me what I had been thinking about. And I told him I had been thinking about something sad. ‘Well,’ said Mr. Dwan, ‘you should have been thinking of the muscles of your face.’”

“Now I see what has been wrong with me. I have been trying to feel emotions and express them. I have never thought much about the technique; I simply wanted to be sincere. That was a mistake.”

“So I have been sitting here practicing with the muscles of my face. Look!” And Miss Bellamy drew here eyebrows. Instantly, the tears slowly rose to her eyes.

“See, I am crying and yet, I am not thinking of anything sad. It’s just a muscular reaction.”

Adoring crowds line up to see Madge Bellamy in Ankles Preferred (1927)

Madge Bellamy authored a fascinating if deeply eccentric autobiography, A Darling of the Twenties, published in 1989, a few months after her death. Silent film scholar Kevin Brownlow’s introduction is free of star-worship and highly informative. Unfortunately, new copies of the book are impossible to find, but used copies, usually cast-a-ways from public libraries, are readily available on the internet. Madge’s autobiography is filled with fascinating details of her years in early Hollywood, and illustrated with dozens of rare photos from Madge’s personal collection.