“It is unforgivable that she is not billed as the number one star of my film. Marie Prevost is one of the few actresses in Hollywood who know how to underplay comedy to achieve the maximum effect. She stole every scene in my film.”
(Ernst Lubitsch, 1924)
Ernst Lubitsch, perhaps the greatest of the many competent film directors from Europe who made their way to Hollywood after World War One, did not endear himself to many with his comment. At the opening night party for The Marriage Circle, the stars with top billing on the film’s posters were far from happy.
Jack Warner, whose Warner Brothers studio had financed the production, told Lubitsch very bluntly that he, and he alone, decided who were, and were not, the stars of any Warner production.
Adolphe Menjou, a very popular actor of the 1920s and 1930s, whose name was most prominent on the posters, told Lubitsch that he should remember it was the Menjou name that would bring the paying customers to the movie theatre box-offices.
Florence Vidor, another of the “top-billed” stars of the film, was so offended that she threw a drink in the face of Lubitsch and left the party in a huff.
Only Monte Blue, the handsome young male lead of The Marriage Circle, agreed with Lubitsch. “I think Marie is sensational,” he said. “Working with her is like having a dream come true.” To a visibly angry Jack Warner he added, “I hope you will see that she and I appear in many films together in the future.” Years later Blue told a magazine writer that Warner made no reply before turning on his heel and leaving the party.
Lubitsch may have thought he was doing Marie Prevost a favor by pointing out that she had, as anyone who had seen the opening night of The Marriage Circle knew, indeed stolen every scene in which she appeared. Unhappily, history shows that it was from that day that her career began to go downhill.
Warner did not forget. Less than two years later, when her contract with his studio ended, he failed to pick up the option he held on her services for five more years. This, despite the fact that she had drawn critical acclaim for every role she played in the ten films she made under the Warner banner. Some of these were second-rate features that Warner had pushed her into, but however bad the film, Marie Prevost was continually praised by the public and film reviewers.
It was well known in the industry that her studio fan mail count was much higher than most of Warner’s well-established stars of that era. When her success story was printed in a Hollywood trade paper, Warner took out a full-page advertisement in the next issue naming eight stars he claimed were more popular with the public than Marie Prevost.
Monte Blue was teamed with Prevost in three more films, but all were second-rate. Blue, like Prevost, found his option at Warner’s was not picked up when the time came for renewal.
Blue’s career also started to slide, and by the early 1950s he was reduced to playing a clown in a touring circus. In a 1954 interview with Circus World he spoke of his days as a well-respected and popular actor. “Warner Brothers studio destroyed the careers of many people,” he said. “I vividly recall the lovely Marie Prevost, who could have been one of the world’s great comedy stars. But Ernst Lubitsch said the wrong thing at the wrong time and embarrassed Jack Warner. Warner never forgot things like that. After he dropped her contract, he interfered with her career at other studios and finally drove her to oblivion. I, too, was destroyed by Warner. After leaving the studio I found many directors were afraid to hire me. Warner drove me to where I am today.”
Marie Prevost was born Mary Bickford Dunn on November 8, 1898, in Sarnia, Ontario. There are many conflicting stories of her early days in Canada, most being the figments of imagination of different studio publicity writers.
Early Mack Sennett releases said she was of “Anglo-Irish” parentage, had a “French-Canadian” background, and, on one occasion, was of “Scottish-English” parentage. Her father, said Sennett, was “an amateur athlete of world class” and “a skier who had represented Canada at international meets.” Her mother, said Sennett, was “a former ballerina” who taught her daughter “grace and poise.” Universal studio releases said Mrs. Prevost was “an important business executive” who had taught Marie “her highly developed business sense to ensure she invested her earnings wisely.”
Marie was, according to Sennett, “educated at a convent in Montreal, Canada,” and it was there she achieved her “fluency in the French language.” In fact, apart from a few phrases which Sennett, himself from Montreal, taught her to drop into conversations with journalists, she knew no French at all.
Although there is no record of her ever having visited Montreal, Warner’s writers picked up on that angle, saying she was a champion swimmer in her home town in Quebec, Canada, and “still holds a number of Canadian diving records.” Warner even had his prop department make up some phony gold medals for her to display to visiting journalists.
Universal obviously read the early Sennett “Scottish” story and told the world that Marie Prevost “is one of only a few who know how to prepare the Highlands delicacy, haggis, the well-kept secret of the Scottish nobility.” It went on to say that she learned the secret “from her grandfather, the laird of a titled Scottish family.”
All this might have been a little confusing had it not been for a number of stories published in the Sarnia Observer, stories that are still maintained on microfilm in the Sarnia Public Library. They tell how Marie Prevost (then Mary Dunn) lost her father when she was only six. Arthur (Teddy) Dunn, a railroad car conductor working for the Grand Trunk Railroad, died, along with five other railway workers, when gas seeped into the St. Clair Tunnel that ran from Sarnia, Ontario, to Port Huron, Michigan.
Mrs. Dunn, the former Marion Bickford, was left to look after Mary and her four-year-old sister, Marjorie (usually known as Peg). A report on the aftermath of the tunnel tragedy, printed a year after the accident, told how the Dunns had moved to Alameda, California, to join Mrs. Dunn’s sister, Ethel. Mrs. Dunn had, said the story, “moved to give her family a better life.” Working as a waitress in the evenings and washing and ironing laundry for wealthy Sarnia families in the area “had proved too much.”
In a 1953 interview with the San Francisco Chronicle, Peg Dunn, then Mrs. Peg Halliday, said the family’s life in Alameda “was wonderful. We attended St. Mary’s School there and soon made new friends.”
Both girls changed their surnames to Prevost when their mother went to live with a bank manager, Eric Prevost, in Los Angeles. Mary changed her name to Marie, said Peg, “because it sounded better with the name Prevost.”
“Mr. Prevost was a wonderful man,” said Peg, “and we were all very happy. Marie went into Manual Arts High School when we moved, and I joined her there two years later.”
In 1913, when she was fourteen, Marie graduated with honors from high school. “Her excellent marks got her a good job as a clerk at a Los Angeles law firm,” Peg recalled. “She worked there quite contentedly for three years until the day her life changed. It was the day she first visited a film studio.
“The law firm she worked for represented Mack Sennett in many financial matters, and one day in 1917, when Marie was just eighteen, she was asked to take a contract to the Keystone Studio in Edendale for Sennett’s signature. Marie was waiting for Sennett when a fat man rushed over and pointed to Marie. “You,” he said, “stand over here, and when I give you a signal run to the table over there and sit down on the chair. And remember to smile for the camera.” Marie tried to protest, but the director, Ford Sterling, later to become more famous as one of Sennett’s Keystone Kops, refused to take “no” for an answer.
“Marie did what she was told. Nobody bothered to tell her that the chair and table would collapse when she sat down. I saw the scene many months later and Marie just bubbled. All you could see when the chair and table gave way were her legs waving in the air. Sterling shouted that it was a good take and without saying another word stalked off into a nearby building. Marie, rather red-faced, brushed herself off and waited for Sennett to see her.”
Sennett came down from the tower that he had built to oversee the entire studio lot, signed the contract, and handed it back to Marie who headed back to Los Angeles on a streetcar. “She told me she giggled all the way back,” said Peg. “But she still had no thoughts of acting as a career. She thought her experience was fun, but that was the end of it.”
Next morning Marie was called into the office of the law firm’s senior partner. He looked serious. “I don’t know what escapade you got up to yesterday,” he said, “but you had better get back to Edendale immediately. Mr. Sennett says he needs you urgently.”
“Marie was afraid she was going to lose her job,” said Peg. “She sat poker-faced on the streetcar until she reached the studio, very frightened.”
Marie Prevost told what happened next in an interview with the Motion Picture World in 1923. “I asked for Mr. Sennett and was ushered in right away. He looked very stern as I walked into his office. I was ready to cry. Suddenly, he smiled. ‘I want your signature today,’ he said. ‘Sign right here.’ I suddenly realized the paper he pushed in front of me was a contract. I was to be one of his Sennett Bathing Beauties. Best of all I was to be paid $15 a week. I signed without reading a word. Fifteen dollars was a lot of money.”
“Mama was not very pleased when Marie arrived home and told her story,” said Peg. “There were a few tears but Marie finally got her approval when Mr. Prevost said he thought the industry was a respectable one and Mr. Sennett an honourable man.”
Two weeks later Mr. Prevost had a heart attack and died. Marie’s $15 suddenly became very important. “Mama had to get a job in a flower shop and we had to move out of the bank house into a smaller home. It was a sad time and yet in memory it was a wonderful time because I was so glad for Marie,” said Peg.
As one of Sennett’s Bathing Beauties, Marie had little opportunity to show if she had any acting ability. “We took part in a different film every day,” Marie told the Motion Picture World. “Usually we were just in the background, occasionally we were given small parts, but most of the time we were photographed romping around on the Venice beach, which was near Edendale.”
Sennett first realized he had a potential star on his hands when he and the girls were “mugging” for the camera on Venice Pier. “He told us to do anything funny we could think of,” Marie recalled. “He was dressed in a swimming costume, making faces, and generally adding to the scene. As I was one of the few Bathing Beauties who could swim and dive, he asked me to pretend to fall off the pier and wave my arms and legs until I hit the water. That didn’t sound too funny to me so I pretended to slip and pushed him off the pier instead.
“Everyone looked horrified. They thought I’d be fired. But the camera kept rolling and when he climbed back on the pier he walked up to me and said, ‘Marie, your salary is increased to $25 a week.’ From then on I got lots of funny things to do in dozens of Keystone films.”
Marie Prevost
In his autobiography, Sennett claims to have watched Marie do her “collapsing table and chair” routine from his tower. “When I saw those gorgeous legs waving in the air I knew I had another Bathing Beauty,” he recalled. But he claimed not to realize the “legs girl” and the “girl with the contract from his lawyer” were one and the same until he saw, next morning, all the film that had been shot the previous day.
Whether this story is true or not is put in doubt by his memory of how the name Marie Prevost came into being. “I thought Mary ‘G’unn [not Dunn] was no name for a beautiful girl,” he said, “so I decided to call her Marie Prevost.” Since the original contract with Marie is made out in her Prevost name and signed Marie Prevost, this memory of Sennett’s seems not to ring true. “It is absolute rubbish,” said Peg in a 1963 interview. “We had used the name Prevost for several years before Marie met Sennett. And she was Marie Prevost all through high school.”
Shortly after Marie became a Sennett Bathing Beauty, he hired another girl from Manual Arts High School. Phyllis Haver and Marie had become great friends at school, and at the Sennett studio they became inseparable. There is nothing in files on Sennett at the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences in Los Angeles to suggest Marie had anything to do with the hiring of her friend, but Peg Halliday could never be convinced. “It was too much of a coincidence for it to happen without a push from Marie,” she said.
Marie loved her stay with Sennett. “We had a lot of fun,” she recalled in a 1925 interview. “Making comedies in those days was sheer enjoyment. The more crazy things we could invent the more Mr. Sennett loved it. He was a gentleman and a ‘gentle man’ at all times.”
In 1919 Marie convinced Sennett to give her sister, Peg, a contract with Keystone. “It was nice of Marie,” said Peg in the 1968 interview, “but I wasn’t really interested. It was fun, but I didn’t have the inventive mind that Marie had. I played a lot of small parts in Keystone comedies but I was glad when the contract expired. I think Sennett was glad when I told him I didn’t want a new contract. I’m quite sure, by that time, he realized I had absolutely no talent.”
Marie Prevost received her first fan mail after she made Her Nature Dance in 1917. The two-reeler gave her screen credits for the first time. “There had been lots of mail addressed to the Sennett Bathing Beauties, and occasionally some ‘to the girl with curly hair who wore a bathing suit with stars on it’ or something like that. But even if the studio could have identified us, all the mail went to a central office where secretaries sent out group photographs to the writers,” she told Photoplay in an interview. “When the first letter came addressed to me I was so excited. I still have it and wouldn’t part with it. In fact, I kept up a long friendship with the writer by mail, and only after four years did I discover he was sixty-eight, married, with seven children and six grandchildren. But it was a beautiful letter, that first one. You remember things like that.”
Sennett, in his memoirs, called Marie Prevost “the most talented actress I ever discovered.” In a later chapter he remembers vividly the day she came running to him in tears. It was 1919. “My husband has left me,” she said. “Husband?” I said, “How can you have a husband? You aren’t even married.” “Yes, I am,” she said. “I’ve been married six months and we haven’t even had a honeymoon. Now he’s left me.”
When Sennett had calmed her down and got all the facts, he discovered she had been married secretly one night after a party to a socialite named Sonny Gerke. “I always called him Gerke the Jerky,” said Sennett. “He must have been to leave a lovely girl like Marie.”
Marie told her sister the full story of her marriage in 1924. “I should have realized what he was like,” she said. “Immediately after the wedding he said he had to go home to his mother because she was expecting him. He promised to find a way to break the news to his mother before too long, but he never did.”
In a 1954 interview, Sennett suggests that he, Marie, and the two witnesses at the wedding were the only ones who knew she was married. He added: “I suppose Gerke the Jerky must have had some idea, too!”
Marie told Sennett that Sonny had never dared tell his mother that he was married to an actress, much less a Sennett Bathing Beauty, and when she visited the Gerke family mansion in Los Angeles her occupation was never mentioned. So when Mrs. Gerke was out exercising her poodles one day and saw Marie being hauled out of a bar by what appeared to be police officers, she failed to see the camera hidden behind a truck, and immediately thought the worst. Returning home she told Sonny that Marie must never again darken their doorway. That was the end of the marriage. That night Marie received a phone call from Sonny telling her the marriage was over and she must never again contact him.
“Sonny couldn’t get a divorce because his mother didn’t know he was married and Marie was afraid to get one in case the publicity ruined her career,” said Peg. “So they stayed married until 1923 when she wanted to marry Kenneth Harlan, an actor who had worked with her.”
In 1919, Marie was offered a $750-a-week contract by William Randolph Hearst, who was assembling a group of players for his new Cosmopolitan Production Company. “It seemed like a fortune,” Marie told Photoplay, “but I didn’t think I was ready. I had made nine films, all two-reelers, and here was Mr. Hearst talking about five- and six-reelers. I wasn’t stupid enough to think I was as good an actress as others he had hired so I went to Mr. Sennett and asked for his advice. He said he would let me out of my contract if I wished, but felt I would be wise to wait until I had more experience. I told him I would turn Mr. Hearst down, so he immediately told me he was raising my salary to $250 a week.”
Her contemporaries at Keystone at the time included Gloria Swanson, Bebe Daniels, Charlie Chaplin, and her good friend Phyllis Haver. Sennett’s records show Swanson was earning $65 a week, Daniels only $45, Haver $125, and Chaplin, who had yet to create his “little tramp” character, took home $185.
In the Photoplay story Marie gave the following as an example of Sennett’s refusal to waste not one single foot of film more than was absolutely necessary. “We were filming around a Hollywood pool when our prop man slipped and fell in,” she said. “King Baggott, who was directing, was a good swimmer so he dived in to save the prop man, who was obviously drowning. Unfortunately, Baggott hit his head on the bottom of the pool and lay there unconscious. I have always been a good swimmer so I jumped in to get him to the surface while others rescued the prop man. It all ended happily. Baggott had a headache for a few hours, the prop man needed an hour to recover, and a few of us got very wet, but that was all. Next day, Sennett, when he heard what had happened, watched the rushes of the scene — camera operators always kept their cameras running — and rewrote the rest of the script so the rescue, which looked very funny, could be used in the film.”
Sennett added more to the story many years later. “I was more than a little embarrassed when the story got out,” he said. “Only a week earlier we had sent out a press release saying Baggott was a champion diver!”
Perhaps realizing that Prevost’s days with Keystone were numbered, Sennett gave her the lead role in a 1919 five-reel comedy. Yankee Doodle Dandy in Berlin, subtitled The Kaiser’s Last Squeal, was directed by Richard Jones. The film was a box-office success, and paved the way for her to leave Keystone for Universal Studios. Phyllis Haver had moved out a few months earlier, and Marie felt the atmosphere on the Sennett lot was no longer that of one big happy family.
“A lot of the fun had gone,” she told Photoplay. “Now everything was ruled by money. Money was the bottom line and we no longer had the time to think up ideas or improvise. So when King Baggott, by then a major director, convinced Universal to offer me a thousand-dollar-a-week deal, I went to Mr. Sennett and told him it was time for me to move on. He was very kind. ‘All my stars leave me eventually,’ he said, perhaps a little wistfully. ‘But I wish you well.’”
The majority of film histories of the silent era list Marie Prevost’s first film away from Sennett as a comedy, The Ole Swimmin’ Hole, at Universal. “That is quite incorrect,” said Peg in 1968. “It was me who played the lead opposite Charles Ray in that film. It was my one and only big role and Marie got it for me as part of her Universal deal. Charles Ray, a fine actor, was very patient with me, but I really couldn’t act. The film was a success mainly because of Mr. Ray. I wasn’t offered any more roles and that was the end of my career.”
Marie Prevost’s first film at Universal was a romantic comedy, Kissed, in which she received top billing over Lloyd Whitlock, Frank Glendon, and Lillian Langdon, all big names in the 1920s and 1930s. The film established her as a star. Universal had to hire a special secretary just to answer Marie’s mail and send out photographs that Marie signed in every spare moment between shooting.
Two more films directed by Baggott in 1921 cemented her popularity with audiences all over the United States. Every film she made was a moneymaker. Many years later, when Universal was rescued from near bankruptcy by the musical films starring Winnipeg-born Deanna Durbin, Carl Laemmle, Jr., son of the founder of Universal, told the Los Angeles Times: “So what else is new? Back in 1921 another Canadian girl did the same thing! Remember Marie Prevost?”
Apparently the reporter did not remember and figured his readers wouldn’t either, because he added, as a footnote: “Marie Prevost was an actress in silent films who did not survive the move into sound. She committed suicide in 1939.” He was wrong on three counts. She did survive to become a very successful performer in the sound era, she did not commit suicide, and she died in 1937.
Jack Warner had been watching her rise to fame at Universal, and when her two-year contract was due to expire he invited her to sign with Warner Brothers.
“Marie was, by this time, deeply involved with a young actor named Kenneth Harlan,” said Peg in the 1968 interview. “Her final film at Universal, in 1922, was The Flapper in which she and Harlan played the leads. When Warner said he would sign both she and Harlan to $1,500-a-week contracts, Marie was delighted. The contracts were for two years and Warner’s had an option for five additional years at $3,000 a week.
Jack Warner loved publicity. It never mattered to him whether the people he publicized knew what he was doing or whether the facts of the story were correct. All that concerned Warner was that another of his stars was in the headlines. When Prevost and Harlan arrived at the studio and requested side-by-side dressing rooms, Warner decided he had a story to tell. “They will be married on the set of The Beautiful and the Damned,” he announced. The public loved the story. Thousands of letters and hundreds of gifts for the “bride and groom” arrived at the studio. Warner was in seventh heaven. Until the bombshell landed!
MARIE PREVOST WILL BE A BIGAMIST
IF SHE MARRIES KENNETH HARLAN
This was the headline in the Los Angeles Mirror that faced Jack Warner when he arrived at the studio. The story told of Marie’s 1918 wedding.
An irate Warner called Marie into his office for an explanation. Her story failed to pacify him. Despite the fact that the wedding publicity story was his own creation, he fired the publicist he had made write the story. He threatened to cancel the contracts of both Marie and Harlan, but wiser and calmer studio lawyers made him withdraw this threat. They pointed out that Warner himself was totally responsible for the bad publicity.
No one ever discovered who tipped the Mirror to the wedding, but Peg Halliday is convinced it was Mack Sennett. “He was like an old woman at times,” she said. “If he was peeved at something or someone he would react like a jilted suitor.”
When he calmed down, Warner pulled a lot of strings to get the Prevost-Gerke marriage annulled quickly. The fuss soon died down and the moralists who had deluged newspaper editors with letters were silenced. The wedding of Prevost and Harlan did take place, but it was not the big event that Warner had planned.
Sonny Gerke never became involved in the divorce, which was granted on the grounds of desertion. He and his family had left Los Angeles several years earlier and “Marie believed they were living in Europe,” said Peg.
For two years the marriage was happy. The couple bought a large home on seven acres of land in the Hollywood Hills. Their careers continued to rise despite Warner’s resentment of everything they did that was successful. Frustrated, he announced cancellation of several films scheduled for Prevost and Harlan. Harlan was given inferior parts on the Warner lot and Marie was offered to small studios on a loan basis.
Marie Prevost (left), Ford Sterling, and Mae Griffin.
“Marie was devastated,” said Peg Halliday. “Warner refused to talk to her or Harlan. She was given no part in the selection of scripts, no control over who was to star with her, or which studio she was to be loaned to. It became an effort for her to go to work. What had been fun was now almost torture.”
Despite her fears, Marie’s success continued. Red Lights, produced by Sam Goldwyn for Hearst’s Cosmopolitan Studio, brought her so much mail that she had to hire two secretaries to cope with the avalanche. The Wanters, another big success, produced by Louis Mayer at First National, was so annoying to Warner that he recalled her to the Warner lot and ordered Ernst Lubitsch, in a memo, to “give her something to do that won’t create such a fuss.”
But The Marriage Circle, written by Paul Bern, gave her a chance to succeed beyond all her wildest dreams. Warner was furious when he came back from a four-week overseas vacation to find the film was tailor-made for Marie. Lubitsch said many years later that “Warner threatened to fire me, fire Bern, fire everyone. It made me doubt his sanity when he announced he was going to burn every reel of the film. We talked him out of that, but he used to stand in the shadows of the set and if Marie made a good take he would send his secretary over to me to demand I shoot the scene again. I did what he said, of course, but it was always the best take I used. He had a wonderful star and he wanted to destroy her career.”
It was the scene at the first night party for The Marriage Circle that probably dictated the rest of her career. “Warner sent her to Principal Pictures, a very small production company, for a run-of-the-mill drama, and followed this with three more badly scripted films,” said Peg. “But Sam Goldwyn, who didn’t like Warner, fooled him. He sent Warner a third-rate script with the title Tarnish. When Warner saw how poor it was he agreed it was ideal for Marie, and the contract was signed. Goldwyn then produced the real script, a blockbuster by writer Frances Marion. Warner was furious but could do nothing and Marie had another big hit.”
Lubitsch, solidly entrenched at Warner’s by the profitable films he was making, told Jack Warner that he intended to star Marie in two more films, Three Women, with Ronald Colman, and Kiss Me Again. When Warner refused, Lubitsch pointed out that his contract gave him the right to select any Warner contract player for his films.
Three Women is still acclaimed as one of Lubitsch’s finest films. It made Marie Prevost a major box-office attraction.
Although Warner received $5,000 a week for her services from Sam Goldwyn and other studios, he refused to hand over one extra cent to Marie. “Your contract says $1,500,” he said in a memo. “And that is what you will get.”
In 1926 Marie and Kenneth Harlan were both advised by Warner that he did not intend to pick up their options. Phyllis Haver told a fan magazine in 1937 she believed this rejection caused the first rift in the Prevost-Harlan marriage, and this was the trigger that led to Marie’s downfall. “In 1927 Harlan was drinking and staying out all night,” she said. “He lost thousands of dollars gambling and more than once forged Marie’s name to a cheque when he ran out of money in his own account.”
Harlan was one of the few actors who fought and beat Warner’s blacklist. He moved into sound with ease and retired in 1940 a wealthy man. In the eleven years that followed his divorce from Prevost, Harlan went through six more marriages and six more divorces. He later operated a theatrical agency and owned and operated a very popular Hollywood restaurant.
In November 1927 Marie was shocked to hear of her mother’s death in a New Mexico car accident. “Mama and actress Vera Steadman were driving from Los Angeles to Florida to see me, as my husband and I were living there at the time,” said Peg Halliday. “Al Christie, who owned, with his brother Charles, the Christie Studios, offered to drive them across country as he had to oversee some shooting plans in Jacksonville. The accident was nobody’s fault. The axle broke and the car crashed. Vera and Al were not badly hurt. Mama died instantly. Marie took this as just one more slap in the face from a cruel world.”
Two weeks before Christmas, Marie was again in shock. “She was driving to a friend’s home for dinner when a young girl walked in front of her car,” said Peg. “She was able to put on the brake and the girl was only bruised, but for a year she wouldn’t drive. When she had to go to the studio she went by streetcar. Imagine, earning more than a thousand dollars a week, riding on a streetcar!”
In 1929 Marie filed for divorce from Kenneth Harlan. The news media had a field day. Marie was in the headlines, but in a way she didn’t like.
“Only one good thing came out of the court hearings,” said Peg. “A witness brought in by Marie’s lawyer to explain why she was never at home, as Harlan had alleged, told how Marie spent most evenings, many nights, and every day when she wasn’t filming, working as an unpaid nurses’ aide at a Los Angeles hospital.”
Nurse Evelyn Walker said, “She was there from eight in the morning to ten at night whenever she wasn’t wanted at the studio. She did every job she was asked, no matter how dirty or disagreeable. Few of the patients knew who she was but everyone loved her. We called her ‘the angel.’ She told me helping others helped her forget her own troubles.”
Harlan, who did not attend the hearings, or contest the divorce, perhaps read in the papers that the judge, in granting the divorce, called him “a cruel, uncaring, and uncivilized man.”
Marie consoled herself with work at the studio and the hospital. Her best friend, Phyllis Haver, now only rarely making films, had time to help her get through the tough times.
But this major prop in her life was removed late in 1929 when Haver married a New York millionaire and left Hollywood for good. “For several years they kept in touch,” said Peg, “but making films kept Marie busy and Phyllis seemed so happy in her marriage that the two just drifted apart. It was the beginning of the sound age in Hollywood and Marie, like others, wondered how the public would react when they heard her voice. She saw many old friends released from their contracts by the studios, and she knew her own career was slipping. She made only three films after the divorce and these were with independent companies.”
It was Cecil B. DeMille who came to her rescue. He planned to make The Godless Girl in 1929 as his first venture into sound film. The list of stars signed was impressive, including Noah Beery, Eddie Quillan, Dick Alexander, Lina Basquette, and George Duryea. “One day the phone rang in her home,” said Halliday. “It was DeMille. ‘I’ve been trying to find you,’ he said. ‘I have a fine role for you in my new film. Are you available?’ Of course she was thrilled and DeMille was so delighted with her performance that he blew up her role. She got nine weeks work at $2,000 a week. Her voice came through extremely well. It was a major film, a twelve-reeler, and the reviewers singled her out and praised her role as a reformatory prisoner.”
Two more films came along the same year, The Flying Fool and Divorce Made Easy. But the parts were getting smaller and the money she received was getting less with each film.
By 1936 Marie was existing on handouts from friends. She had sold the home she bought in Malibu after her divorce and moved into a small apartment at 6230 Afton Place, close to the Hollywood studios.
“I wrote her several times in 1936 but never got anything more than a brief postcard in reply,” said Halliday. “She sent me a card at Christmas with a note telling me to go and see her latest film, 13 Hours By Air. I did go, but was shocked to find she had only a tiny part as a waitress in one scene. Not even a speaking part. I told my husband we should drive down to see her in the new year and I wrote asking when would be a good time to visit.”
The Hallidays never did receive a reply. And they never again saw her alive. On January 23, 1937, Harry Jenks, manager of the apartment block in which Marie lived, received a number of complaints from other tenants that Marie’s dog had been barking for hours. He found a note on the door that read: “Please do not knock on this door more than once as it makes my dog bark. If I am in, I will hear you. I am not deaf.”
When his repeated knocks were unanswered, and the dog continued to bark, the manager used his passkey to open the door. Getting no answer when he called he looked in the bedroom. “There she was,” said Jenks, “lying face down on the bed. I touched her and she was very cold, so I called a doctor at once.”
The newspaper headlines next day screamed “Silent Star Suicide.” But this was quickly toned down when an autopsy suggested she had simply starved herself to death trying to get her weight down to a level producers would accept.
An undelivered promissory note was found on a table beside her bed. It read: “Joan Crawford, I.O.U. $100. Thank You. Marie Prevost.” It was dated January 21, 1937.
Joan Crawford gave a brief statement to reporters. “We were good friends,” she said. “She had only to ask and I would gladly have given her help, money, or other assistance that she needed. She was a wonderful friend and a great comedy actress.”
Phyllis Haver, unable to reach Los Angeles from her New York home in time for the funeral, told the New York Times that she was “shocked and saddened. I had no inkling of her need. I am ashamed to say that after my marriage I isolated myself from those who mattered most.”
A magazine story some months later revealed that she had sent 1,000 red roses to the hospital in which Marie had continued to work as a volunteer. “They are to be distributed to those persons in the hospital who have no flowers and few friends with a card saying they came from Marie Prevost,” she said.
In addition, she sent $5,000, asking that a room be named after Marie and the money used to buy whatever equipment was needed to make older people in the hospital more comfortable.
A brief graveside ceremony was all Peg Halliday wanted for her sister, but Joan Crawford, who had purchased the cemetery plot and had paid for all costs of the funeral, had different ideas. “I offered to pay,” said Peg in 1968, “but she wouldn’t consider it. She seemed to think she was in some way responsible for Marie’s death and was inconsolable. She had to halt shooting for two weeks because she was too distraught to be on the set.”
The funeral at Hollywood Memorial Cemetery, from which all press were excluded, drew many of the film community’s elite. “They were all there,” said Peg Halliday. “Joan, of course, and Barbara Stanwyck, Mack Sennett, King Baggott, Douglas Fairbanks Jr., Franklin Pangborn, Lewis Milestone, Wallace Beery, Clark Gable, Andy Devine, Ralph Bellamy, Fred MacMurray, Robert Young, Mervyn LeRoy, and so many more that I can’t remember. But where were they when she needed them? And where was I?”
Marie’s gravesite is marked with a simple bronze plate bearing her name and date of birth and death. Few stop to read it. Very few of today’s tourists who flock daily to the cemetery even remember her name.
The vaults of Hollywood film studios probably contain prints or negatives of many of the films in which Marie Prevost appeared. Only three have been considered worthy of release on videocassette. The Marriage Circle, the Lubitsch silent that angered Jack Warner in 1924, is available for film buffs. So are two sound films, The Flying Fool, in which she starred with William (Hopalong Cassidy) Boyd in 1929, and The Sin of Madelon Claudet, which won Helen Hayes an Oscar in 1931.
The home in which she lived in Sarnia was pulled down years ago to make way for widening of the road. But the apartment block in which she died in Hollywood is still standing. Today’s tenants are either young performers looking for that elusive break, or older actors who have dropped out of the limelight.
There is an interesting footnote to the Marie Prevost story. In 1977, when evaluators were listing the contents of the home of Joan Crawford, who had died several weeks earlier, a locked box, when opened, was found to contain hundreds of IOUs from more than twenty different Hollywood personalities of the past who had fallen on hard times. Crawford, often maligned in news stories and later in a book written by her own daughter, had quietly handed out more than $50,000 to performers in need. Thirty of the IOUs, totalling more than $3,000, were signed by Marie Prevost!