BY PIERCE BROSNAN
I write this from my home in Los Angeles—Malibu, more specifically. I’ve spent the morning painting. I like to paint every morning when I’m home, as I am now—enjoying a bit of down time before I leave in a few weeks for a film in Italy. I can hear my wife, Keely, downstairs. She’s probably reading the New York Times, the print version, which we just can’t seem to shake.
I close my eyes and try to imagine this city of Los Angeles roughly eighty years ago—this would be in 1936—and a scene found over the hill from here, on the southern edge of the San Fernando Valley in what was then the sleepy little suburb of Studio City.
On a tree-lined street, in an ordinary house, a forty-three-year-old man is walking around his property. He’s handsome—Irish American, with a strong nose and high forehead, his short black hair combed back. The man steps into his studio, just as I’m in mine, and dips his hands into a bucket of clay. He begins to sculpt a mythical creature—a satyr of sorts. His wife keeps her own company inside.
Watching him, it would be hard to guess that just a few years earlier this man—Rex Ingram—was Hollywood’s hottest director. He was responsible for some of the silent film era’s biggest commercial and critical hits, with his wife and creative partner, Alice Terry, as their star. Bringing an artist’s sensibility to what was a new directing style, he lit up movie marquees and popular magazines across the country, launching silver-screen stars like Rudolph Valentino and Ramon Novarro, and making himself and his movie executives wildly wealthy along the way. But here he is, alone in his studio.
I suppose—you go up, you come down.
From my window, I stare out at a wide expanse of blue ocean. Ireland feels a long way away. It’s not easy getting here; this I know. Certainly, ending up as he did in Los Angeles, it had been a long journey for Rex. There were incredible highs and some lows too, and at least four remarkable films to show for it, but overall, it was a long journey indeed.
REGINALD INGRAM MONTGOMERY HITCHCOCK—later to be known as Rex Ingram—was born in Dublin in 1893. I myself was born only an hour’s drive north in Navan, County Meath, more than half a century later. Navan was then a little rural town on the banks of the River Boyne and worlds apart from the city. Not that any of this matters much: I realize Rex is the star of this story, and even though we are both Irish, both in the business of film, and both artists independent of that work (for Rex, in sculpting, and me, painting)—I’m only supporting.
The Hitchcock family was middle-class Protestant. Living there in the Dublin neighborhood of Rathmines, they represented what’s known as the Ascendancy, a privileged class of Protestants carrying the British flag, as it were, among us Catholics. His mum, Kathleen, was culturally refined, demure, and warm. His father, Francis, stern and demanding, was a divinity scholar at Trinity College preparing for a career in the Church.
When Rex was three, his brother, Francis, was born. Two years later, his father got a job as a curate and the family moved to the countryside in Tipperary. Now this was rural for sure—and young Rex and Frank, as his brother was called, took to the outdoors, riding horses and trampling over hill and stream. You could do this then in Ireland. In fact, this was one’s childhood when I was a boy.
Myself, I was an only child. My father left us when I was an infant. (In fact, I only met him once in my life, when I was thirty-one years old and shooting Remington Steele.) My mother then went to England to make a better life for us both. If she had not had the courage to do that, I wouldn’t be the man I am today. But it came with the price of loneliness and separation. My grandparents took care of me.
I too was raised in that pastoral Ireland. I lived across the river from town, and I remember great access to the forest and woods. Grandfather had built our house on the banks of the Boyne. He was a gentle man by the name of Philip. Together we would walk hand in hand up the dirt road on a summer’s evening, the sunlight dappling through the over-canopied trees. He would every now and then stop and look for the “little people.” He loved to show me where they lived. Yes, they were real to me as a boy—part of what I call Irish dreamtime. We had a plot of land my grandparents would let out to a family of tinkers, as we called Irish travelers then—old Ma Crutchie was their matriarch. The family had a painted wagon and a couple of horses, and old Ma would fix our pots and pans and sharpen knives. Her two boys taught me how to make bows and arrows, and off I went into the woods each day. This was the late 1950s, so one can only imagine the country life for Rex some fifty years earlier. A young boy with a great deal of dreamtime—and you wonder what filled his head.
In 1903, when Rex was ten, his father was again promoted, now to rector, and the family moved to Kinnitty, a postcard-perfect town in the central part of the country with more green hills to explore, and an abundance of castles and mansions to spin romance around. Living with a rector, naturally there was a lot of religion in the home. But Francis also encouraged the arts—readings and performances of Shakespeare and the classics—while Kathleen played piano. It was a good deal more than I got. Young Rex would sit sketching and doodling for hours, developing skills that would figure in the notoriously detailed storyboards he created for his films years later. These delicious details, by the way, and many others, come courtesy of the wonderful biographer Ruth Barton, whose masterful Rex Ingram: Visionary Director of the Silent Screen, is considered the last word in all things Rex.
As a boy I too loved sketching, from very early on. Acting came much later. My first performances, when I think on it, were really at St. Mary’s church. It was there I made my first communion and, in some ways, my first public appearance—as an altar boy serving mass. Certainly, there were the Christian brothers in their black soutanes of holiness and despair. They could be cruel. But to serve communion was a joy for me. My grandmother would plaster my hair down with Brylcreem, the radio playing Chuck Berry in the background, and down the road I would go, over the bridge and up into town. Mass on a Sunday morning dressed in my red cassock, white shirt, and white plimsolls, the smell of the incense in the church, along with the sound of the choir, would fill me with the greatest of comfort. Those days as a boy have stayed with me.
Rex’s experiences with the Protestant church were no doubt also profound. Despite what seems a pleasant enough home life, Francis was intense and demanding—and apparently he and his eldest never much got along. In 1905, when he was twelve, Rex’s parents sent him to St. Columba’s College, a boarding school just outside Dublin. This is often how it goes in Ireland. Life in the countryside was isolated, sheltered—adults kept everything from you. If somebody was having a baby, they’d spell it out. Rosie’s having a B-A-B-Y. But you were king of the mountain with fields to roam. And then it was off to a traditional private school and hardly enough room to breathe.
St. Columba proved a bad fit for Rex. Socially, Rex was considered a bit of an outcast. He preferred drawing to studying and produced a trove of illustrations of lavishly dressed women. It’s hard to imagine that going down very well in a turn-of-the-century all-male boarding school. Like Rex, I didn’t take much to formal education. It can be difficult for an artistic soul—the life of an outsider. But in those early drawings of Rex’s, you can see a flair for extravagance that, so much later, his film fans would come to appreciate.
Rex’s school woes were greatly compounded by the sudden death of his beloved mother, in the fall of 1908. The two had been extremely close, and she was a lifelong shield of warmth and affection against his father. Rex was devastated. It was a terrible loss. My own grandparents had passed away by the time I was seven, so I know something of a child’s heartache. That coming Easter, in very much a mutual decision, Rex left St. Columba’s. He would return home to figure out his next steps, a state of affairs he commemorated with this grim poem:
I am going back to father.
Back to dear old Dad.
Although I made him sorry
I now will make him glad.
As for me, my last few years in Ireland were spent with my Aunt Eileen in a house in town, number 2 St. Finian’s Terrace. I remember these as happy times. Eileen had a son and a daughter who were teenagers—Donal and Ann. I was seven. I always received great presents from my mother at Christmastime should she not be with us. I loved to skate and had the best pair of roller skates on the street. They were called GoJos with black rubber wheels. I was the fastest kid in the neighborhood with my GoJo skates. On a weekday, Eileen would bake the most magnificent soda bread. When I came home from school it would be sitting on the windowsill cooling. Then she would slice off a chunk and put lashings of butter on it, which I would then dunk in the sugar bowl and wash down with a glass of milk from the local cows.
But the little house on St. Finian’s was bursting with all of us: Eileen and her own children, and then two lodgers to whom she rented a room upstairs. My bed was at the end of that room, with a shiny green curtain around it. Eileen would pin newspapers to the curtain as to block out the light when the lodgers would come in at night. This tiny space was all mine, and I would gaze at those papers, imagining a life beyond. For me it would be London. But Rex, he fantasized most about South America, and even tried to teach himself Spanish. He was also entranced by the Arab world, which would figure prominently in his later films.
Don’t we take our leaving in stages? Whether it be from a place or a person—it begins in the imagination. The morning I left Ireland it was gray and wet. I was by then eleven. The date was August 4, 1964—the same day that Ian Fleming died, ironically. My dear Aunt Eileen packed my tiny cardboard suitcase, and I wore a gray V-neck hand-knitted sweater with a tartan bowtie. In one hand a set of rosary beads and in the other an aspirin bottled filled with holy water. Eileen cried when we parted; she knew I was never coming back. But I was to be with my mother at last. And I could not have been happier.
My Uncle Phil drove me to Dublin airport in the rain, where we met a priest at the bar having a pint. We struck up a conversation with the man of God, who said he would take care of me on the flight. The plane was a twin-engine prop. When we landed in London, the priest disappeared, and I just followed the crowds to the gates. Customs asked me if I had anything to declare. I said no. I could see my mother through the glass, waiting.
FOR REX, AS it turned out, his father had a friend in New Haven, Connecticut, who could set him up with a job. Both Francis and Frank hated for Rex to leave, but they knew there was no holding him back. “My mind was made up. I was going to try my luck in the United States,” he would write in his memoirs. (He titled them “A Long Way From Tipperary.” Curiously, they were never published.) Just nineteen, Rex boarded the SS Celtic in late June 1911. It was his own sad farewell, a scene that Rex would recall emotionally: “My brother . . . just clung to my arm and bit his lips to keep from crying.”
Rex couldn’t have realized he would never see Ireland again.
He landed in New York about a month later and found his way up to New Haven, where his dad had arranged work for him at the dockyards as a night messenger. He started his shift at 6:00 p.m., bringing a sandwich in his pocket for dinner. It must have felt romantic to a romantic young man, but it was likely tough too. The characters at the docks were a colorful bunch, visitors from the world over—a rollicking cast of misfits.
One such regular was a girl named Daisy who apparently reminded Rex of his mother and with whom he instantly fell in love. This would become a pattern for our man. Although not yet twenty, he pestered Daisy to marry him. She refused over and over and ended up leaving the docks altogether. But Rex’s ruminations over his mother loomed large, and throughout his life he often compared girlfriends and prospective lovers—unfavorably—with her.
Back home in Ireland, Francis was unamused by his son’s debauched dockside adventures. If Rex pressed for marriage, his father pressed for college and eventually won out. Rex had heard about a university right nearby with a good reputation. It was called Yale, and in 1912 he enrolled in the fine arts school there.
One of his teachers at Yale, the famed sculptor Lee Lawrie (perhaps best known for the sculpture of Atlas that stands at the front of Rockefeller Center), would become a lifelong mentor. The two men would correspond throughout the next thirty years and collaborate in the promotion of Rex’s most famous film. Rex made lots of friends at Yale and wrote and drew illustrations for the humor magazine. Foreshadowing his imminent rise as a master storyteller, one fellow student recalls him “spending the whole afternoon regaling me with the wildest and most varied tales, all stories created on the spur of the moment.” But in barely a year, Rex had dropped out. The culprit? The strange and blossoming world of motion pictures.
There are chance meetings that can change the direction of your life. As Rex had initially wanted to be a sculptor, I once wanted to be a painter. I left school in London at age sixteen with nothing but a cardboard folder full of drawings and paintings. After pounding some pavement, I found work as a graphic artist in an advertising shop called Ravenna Studios, just off Putney High Street. There I was in a room working alongside three other artists. It was a low-slung room, sort of retro 1950s, not unattractive, with windows all down one side. I spent my days drawing straight lines, making cups of tea, and watering the spider plants. I was quite happy. Like Rex, I was pursuing an artistic life. And then one day, I was hanging up my coat, and there was this coworker, Alan Porter, from the photography department. We were talking about movies, because I loved the movies, and Alan said I should come to these actor workshops at the Oval House. And that was it—my chance meeting.
For Rex, his chance meeting was over Christmas break from Yale in 1913. A classmate took him back to his Long Island home and introduced him to Charles Edison, son of the inventor and movie pioneer Thomas. Conversations with the younger Edison stoked Rex’s passion for movies, and that was it—he was off. He and his Yale friends began to frequent the nickelodeons. His first movie love was Man’s Genesis, made by D. W. Griffith.
Soon, Rex wanted not just to watch films but to make them. He got a job with Edison Studios in the Bronx, in what was then a young, freewheeling industry. The kid was handsome, so it should come as no surprise that with his sharp eyes and soft features, he was quickly thrown in front of the camera as an actor. Rex had done some writing too, and he was further tasked with helping shepherd through some scripts. A strong young man, he was also put to building sets. The movie industry was like this—fast, frenzied, and—for a restless Irish lad looking to make his mark—wide open.
During a busy year or so with Edison, Rex appeared in a string of long forgotten films, with titles like The Necklace of Ramses, Witness to the Will, and Borrowed Finery. He wrote scripts too.
A whirlwind, those first years in film. I remember mine. After the fractured childhood, fighting your way through whatever calamity was thrown upon you—by nature, by your parents, by your lack of parents—and trying to work your way through the pain, until suddenly you arrive at a place where you belong. And where you are going to do something big.
Rex was soon to give up his dream of becoming a professional sculptor. It was not easy, and part of the decision was certainly driven by economics. As he wrote to his Aunt Lizzie in 1913, “I can make enough to live in a kind of way in this [movie] business—I could not at sculpture.” A few months later, he left Yale.
It is worth noting that by the time Rex took leave of Yale, he had already managed to piss off most of the people he was working for. Rex just couldn’t help but rile his directors and executives. It might have dashed all his hopes, but then another chance meeting intervened, this time with the famous director D. W. Griffith, who wrote a letter of reference for Rex that he could take around to studios outside the Edison orbit.
These are the steps and half steps and steps backward that would mark what was, for a good while, a fairly steady climb. Rex landed at Vitagraph, a top-notch studio, and there he kept acting. This seems to have been unfortunate. Because while Rex had the looks, he was clearly self-conscious on screen. Whether by his own design or not, he was frequently cast as an artist and often a sculptor, as in films like The Spirit and the Clay and Eve’s Daughter. But despite his real-world experience, Rex struggled to give a convincing performance. And then, in 1914, World War I came along. Thousands of his fellow twentysomethings were sent off to the front lines, and Vitagraph, hit by the wartime economy, as many studios were, had to let Rex go.
A year later, his younger brother, Frank, was sent into battle. This while Rex was looking for a new movie studio to put him in front of the camera. And thus played out the divergent journeys of the Hitchcock brothers, a pattern that would last their whole lives. Frank—rooted, disciplined, and a realist; Rex—restless, rebellious, and a fantasist. As if to thumb his nose at his disapproving father, Rex now legally changed his last name to Ingram, in honor of his late mother.
Rex ended up getting a job at Fox, where he was assigned to work with directors on sharpening up unwieldy scripts. It might be hard to imagine that a studio would hire a director, cast, and crew, build sets, scout locations, and design costumes without a final shooting script in place, but it happened then and it happens now. Still, despite his first steady paycheck, Rex wasn’t interested in coasting along as a master script doctor. He was ready to direct. And when Fox told him to stay in scripts, he walked away, a decision that he would recall ruefully. “And so ended one of the happiest associations of my life,” he wrote. “One from which I learned more than any other in my motion picture career.”
Still just twenty-three, Rex next set his sights on Universal, then led by the formidable Carl Laemmle. He persuaded Laemmle to give him a shot as a director and quickly set out to make his own script that he’d been kicking around, a Pygmalion-like tale called The Great Problem. Rex soon made clear to his crew the obsessive attention to detail that was to prove paramount for him. He re-created New York’s famed Bowery slum on a Universal lot, making sure that everything from the fire escapes to the natural stench were authentic. Rex fans will notice too that one of the waiters in a restaurant scene is a dwarf, or little person. This was a character type that for some reason endlessly fascinated him and would turn up in his films throughout his career.
The Great Problem was released in April 1916, and the reviews were not kind. “A consistently commonplace scenario,” wrote Variety. But in those days, turnaround times were fast, and sour reviews could be quickly steamrolled by better ones. So Rex just threw himself into his next project, a story called Yellow and White, a wild tale of “white slavery” that jumped between China and America. Here, to achieve the authenticity he craved, Rex and his crew visited real opium dens and rented some of the pipes they saw being used, and Rex even bought and smoked some opium himself. Reviews for the film, retitled Broken Fetters, were better, with particular praise for the quality that would propel Rex forward from here on out—his detailed and florid visual style, and beautiful camerawork.
AT THIS TIME, the fast-changing movie business was making its biggest move yet—uprooting itself from the east to the west coast, to what would soon become Hollywood. Carl Laemmle put his vast empire, which included the young director Rex Ingram, onto train cars and headed three thousand miles across the country. In California, the wild and open landscapes, the craggy rocks and wide sandy beaches, offered up visual and aesthetic possibilities Rex had never imagined—a different kind of dreamtime.
My mind was blown too when I first got off the plane in Los Angeles in 1982. Because anything did seem possible. Any stigma of being Irish, or not-British, simply evaporated into the blueness of the California skyline. My late wife, Cassie, and I stayed on North Havenhurst, in the shadow of the Chateau Marmont and just around the corner from Schwab’s deli, where I ate my first LA breakfast. I rented a lime green Pacer from Rent-A-Wreck—the right bumper hanging off and a pillow cushion on the seat so the springs didn’t go up my ass. It didn’t matter. I felt lucky.
The first two films Rex made in his new Southern California home—The Chalice of Sorrow and Black Orchids—starred Cleo Madison, an actress whose career Rex would help launch. Critics were enraptured. A true contrarian, in both films Rex resisted the uplifting endings that were in vogue at the time. If a character needed to lose a lover or a fortune or to simply die off—so be it. Rex didn’t have patience for the all-tied-up-in-a-bow happy ending. Critics noted this tendency, but they seemed to forgive him because of the films’ rich production values and imaginative narratives. A twisted love story, Black Orchids featured violent duels and ruthless killings, dungeons, a strong erotic undercurrent, and even an ape. Despite its strange and saucy content (or perhaps because of it), it opened on New Year’s Day, 1917, to immediate success.
Rex Ingram was now a full-fledged A-list director, and Universal rewarded him with a whopping $300-per-week salary. At the same time, he’d further developed his prickly reputation. He went on to knock out a few lighter films for Universal and demonstrated a flair for creating drama and emotion with his use of lighting. Still, his stubbornness and his temper were continuing to cause trouble. That same year, Carl Laemmle fired his hot-tempered star.
At that time, Rex also suffered another bitter breakup. Cleo Madison had introduced him to a visiting Nebraska girl, an aspiring actress named Doris Pawn. Rex invited Pawn to his house for dinner. In his typically rash and impulsive romantic style, he ended the meal by asking her to get married. Strange? Perhaps even more so because not long after the dinner, they actually tied the knot. Almost as quickly, Rex became bored by her. “We had little in common,” he wrote. “She was beautiful to look at but I could not just sit and admire her all evening.” Then, bang—divorced.
Something of a roller coaster—as I said, you’re up and then you’re down. As these shenanigans were taking place, Rex’s brother, Frank, was off fighting Germans on the front in Europe and earning distinctions for bravery. Inspired, or maybe ashamed of his own luxurious life, Rex finally decided to enlist. He tried to join the U.S. Signal Corps, but his citizenship papers were a mess. And so he enlisted instead with the Royal Flying Corps Canada, which was then part of the British Empire. Here things get murky. By some accounts Rex learned to fly, possibly becoming a flight instructor, and maybe even being badly wounded in a training accident. But the records are not clear.
What is known is that he was discharged in late 1919 after the war ended, and he returned to Hollywood that year with a host of injuries and, apparently, his money just about gone. Friends nursed him back to better health and helped him find physically untaxing, low-level work on sets. He made a half-hearted attempt to win back his estranged wife, Doris, but she would have none of it.
While Rex’s adeptness at pissing people off never left him, neither did his uncanny knack to pull himself out of professional misery.
It’s worth noting here that Hollywood and the movie business was an empire being built almost entirely by immigrants, men and women who had recently arrived in our country and who were in fact looking to reinvent themselves. For Rex, not yet thirty, it was not far from the rollicking cast of characters he had first found in the New Haven dockyards—perhaps not misfits, but outsiders nonetheless. One of those figures was fellow Irishman and cofounder of Universal P. A. Powers, from County Waterford. Powers helped Rex to direct two films back at Universal, The Day She Paid and Under Crimson Skies, which together showed the town he had not lost his touch. Around the same time, Rex met an actor who would play a starring role in the next few years of his life, a handsome young Italian immigrant named Rudolph Valentino.
On the heels of his latest two films, the studio Metro Pictures offered Rex a stage adaptation called Shore Acres. He chose to film it in Laguna Beach, because it reminded him of Ireland. He was also determined to cast a beautiful girl he had worked with once before, Alice Taaffe. In his work as a sculptor, Rex often created busts and even full figures inspired by people he met. As part of his courtship of Alice, Rex would ask her to model for a head he was sculpting, but she declined. Camera shy, only after much persuading did she even agree to appear as an extra in the film. But the two seemed to get along. So much so that on his next outing, Hearts Are Trumps, Rex pushed to make her the star. He also assembled a creative team that would prove vital in the coming years—ace cameraman John Seitz and editor Grant Whytock. The pair would remain Rex’s go-to team for his finest films, both for their skills and for the fact that they were among the few crew in town who could actually get along with him.
Directing Alice on set one day, Rex had a thought and tossed her a blonde wig. She didn’t see the need for it but agreed under pressure to put it on. They both ended up admiring how pretty the brunette looked as a blonde. It was a look she would keep throughout her career. But there was something else about Alice that the perfectionist Rex didn’t entirely appreciate: her last name, Taaffe. From now on, he told her, you’re Alice Terry. Terry was his mother’s mother’s name.
Hearts Are Trumps won warm reviews and strong box office. And, crucially, it turned a Metro studio powerhouse named June Mathis into a believer in all things Rex. Mathis had worked on the script for the film and would champion Rex for the next picture under her wing—the one that would become Rex Ingram’s masterwork.
THERE WAS A bestselling book in 1921: the multigenerational antiwar epic The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse by Vicente Blasco Ibáñez. June Mathis urged Metro to buy the rights and was then asked to write the script and oversee production. She chose Rex to direct.
Mathis and Rex also pushed the studio to allow the very green actor and dancer Rudolph Valentino to take a leading role. Mathis offered him an impressive $100 a week, a windfall for the young man. Rex successfully fought for Alice Terry, now his lover, to play a leading role. Another Rex Ingram discovery—a Mexican actor named Ramón Samaniegos, later Ramon Novarro—plays an extra.
Nearly everything about Horsemen grew wildly out of control: massive and lavish sets, ferocious battle scenes, and a notoriously demanding twenty-eight-year-old director led to a production that lasted an ungainly six months—unheard of in that era. About twelve thousand people worked on the film, and there were single sets that cost as much as many of the studio’s entire films. Officially, the final budget was $650,000, a staggering amount at the time and a Metro record.
Rex put his artistic talent to work creating detailed storyboards for key scenes. Coming on the heels of the Great War, Horsemen featured full-pitch battle scenes with hundreds of extras that shocked many viewers for their raw power. To achieve these effects, Rex let loose the camera department, sometimes deploying more than a dozen cameras for a single scene.
And for many viewers, there was one scene that stole the movie and made a superstar of Rudolph Valentino. A smoldering Valentino, whip in hand, seizes his partner on the dance floor of a raucous saloon and dances a tango with her that melts the screen. If you haven’t seen the actual scene, you have seen imitations and parodies, so it is surely lodged in your consciousness. Audiences devoured the film. President Warren Harding requested a private viewing. Horsemen made a tidy fortune for Metro, Rex, and its top stars, grossing about $4 million. This was the pinnacle, the high-water mark for this Irish lad who had arrived on our shores barely a decade earlier.
It was at this time that the press started to focus on Rex’s art world background and his time at Yale. He was becoming known as a “sculptor of the screen,” an image that Metro worked hard to promote. The studio commissioned Rex’s former mentor, Lee Lawrie, to make a sculpture of the four horsemen of the apocalypse—exhibiting the piece at the premiere and using the image in the press. Yale was more than willing to embrace its celebrity alum (never mind that he’d dropped out), bestowing on the director an actual fine arts degree. Rex himself saw a very clear connection between the influence of sculpture and his work in film: “As time went on I began to realize how valuable my training in the art school was going to prove.” Indeed, even then, during his directorial prime, Rex still found time to keep up on his sculpting.
How he managed, I can’t say. For me, I’m drawing all the time and, when on set, will cover my scripts with sketches. But I am rarely painting. That is for home, for the recovery. My painting comes from a need to make something beautiful, and it gives meaning to my time between acting, between making movies. But Rex was different.
At this point, professionally speaking, Rex could write his own ticket. But he and Valentino had predictably quarreled on the Horsemen set, as Rex’s rough and controlling style rankled the young heartthrob. Filmmaking is in fact a far cry from sculpting. Given how many people actually share in the production, it demands almost unceasing collaboration. There are directors like Rex (and I have worked for them) who are just so incredibly specific in their vision—unwavering. I have the greatest admiration for that, although I am not of that cloth. I feel it’s essential to always try to keep your ego in check, to be generous of heart. Though of course that is easier said than done. Rex was an artist, in his studio or on a film set, a true artist of chisel and hammer and clay. He seems to have wanted that control always. But in Hollywood, I have to say, it helps to get along.
In the end, Metro was able to keep their lucrative team together, Rex and Valentino, along with Alice Terry, for at least another film. Rex was also able to keep together the key crew that had crafted so much of Horsemen’s visual power.
Next up was a picture called The Conquering Power, and Rex’s fighting with Valentino continued. To complicate matters, there were rumors of a possible love triangle involving the Metro exec June Mathis, Valentino, and Rex—this though Rex was still very much involved with Alice Terry. In the end, both Mathis and Valentino decamped for rival Paramount, leaving the star director on his own. Metro’s publicity machine put a clever spin on the departure: “Ingram was a very independent Irishman.” But surely it must have hurt.
To close out the frenetic year, Rex took on the duel-filled, swashbuckling adventure story The Prisoner of Zenda. Perhaps missing Valentino, he was eager to groom another Latin heartthrob, and so he coached Ramón Samaniegos, that extra from Horsemen. Formerly a singing waiter, Samaniegos restyled himself Ramon Novarro, played a sexy villain in Zenda, and another star was born. Zenda was a clear winner, both at the box office and in the press. But the most memorable event surrounding the film was personal. One Saturday after shooting, Rex and his star, Alice Terry, quietly walked off set and decided to get married. They spent the next day watching movies and then jumped right back into production on Monday. They wouldn’t announce the event until after the film was finished and they were on their honeymoon.
Rex’s marriage would last the rest of his life. But though he and Alice seemed to keep a fairly stable series of homes, it’d be hard to call theirs a storybook romance. Long separations were frequent. Rex’s memoirs tell stories about romps with prostitutes, and he wrote of Alice that “my feeling for her was platonic.” As for Alice, she told a biographer that “we were very good friends.” Friends said they seemed to enjoy each other’s company, got along well, and that each provided a sounding board for the stresses of Hollywood. Alice was sweet, capable, and levelheaded—a calming force for the anxiety and rages that often overcame Rex.
Soon after their marriage, in 1921, the two also began to talk openly and with studio heads about their desire to move to Europe and set up a studio in the South of France. Was Rex done with America? Or was he just a restless soul? He claimed to crave greater autonomy from the studios, and he hungered to shoot in southern European and northern African locations. Surely this was part of it. But there is to Rex the aura of the perpetual outsider. His tribe was nomadic. I am not exempt from this. I love to work as an actor, and part of that is you pack your bags and hit the road. Because after two or three months here at home—yes, even with the blue Pacific and my painting—I need to get onto a movie set or I lose the thread of who I am. For Rex, well, he had been in Hollywood an awfully long time. And given that his earning power was now huge, it was the right time to push.
In the breakneck pace of the silent era, Rex and Alice decided to make just a few quick films before the move. Where the Pavement Ends was another hit. But while making the film, he was dealt a bruising blow. Rex had been expecting to direct the big-budget Ben-Hur, but his former partner, studio exec June Mathis, held the keys to that one, and she chose a lesser-known director. Rex was crushed. Adding salt to the wound, Novarro, the star he had created, would be cast in the lead. Rex was so enraged that crew noticed he began drinking heavily, unusual for him. Too broken up inside, he was unable to finish Pavement, and Alice was brought in to close it. Rex made a vow: one more film, and he was done with Hollywood.
It was 1923, and for his final American-based film ever, Rex set his sights on the French Revolution epic Scaramouche. For his last hurrah, Rex worked in perfect sync with his cinematographer and editor, and showed himself to be at the height of his powers. Not only did Scaramouche score with viewers, but many critics praised it for a new level of visual artistry. But despite this success, Rex was weary of Hollywood, and, to a degree, of directing as well. Still a young man, he found himself at a crossroads. He bought a house, an old Moorish villa in faraway Tunis, and in March of that year declared that he was quitting filmmaking altogether to focus solely on sculpture. Was this ever really Rex’s intention, or just a fantasy? Lord knows, a long, hard production will plant dreams of escape. But in the end, Rex and Alice would set sail for the South of France—a place of true enchantment.
REX MOVED TO Europe in part to be closer to home. Political violence was shaking Ireland and Britain at the time. Rex’s father, a Protestant minister, had found himself in the crossfire. Rex had wanted to visit him and Frank in Ireland for several years, but work commitments never allowed. By 1924 Reverend Hitchcock had finally had enough, and he fled Ireland for a parish in southern England. Rex’s brother, Frank, soon followed. Rex and Alice stopped in England to visit them—the first encounter between father and son in thirteen years.
At this point, Rex needed a physical film studio to use as a base. He found the perfect location in southern France. Victorine Studios, on a hill overlooking Nice, had been built a few years earlier but was run-down and in receivership. Rex rented it and set out to craft the studio of his dreams.
He brought over to Nice his core production team and as many additional players as the studio would send. For the first production at Victorine, Rex wanted to make maximum use of the Mediterranean setting. Novelist Vicente Ibáñez, author of Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, had written the romantic Great War espionage tale Mare Nostrum (Latin for “our sea”). But Victorine’s crude and deteriorating facilities proved a tough fit for Rex, leading to near-constant production hurdles, delays, and budget overruns. The oceanic melodrama required two submarines and a huge water tank to shoot battle scenes.
It was a high-stress production, but Rex also found himself the object of attention from a number of Europe’s movie luminaries and his studio something of a global salon. Many would make the pilgrimage to Victorine and his sets, eager to see the working methods of the famously prickly but charming Irishman—Henri Matisse, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Charlie Chaplin, European royals, Douglas Fairbanks, Mary Pickford, and a parade of others.
What they saw was a stubborn, obsessive go-it-aloner who would do anything to craft a perfect shot. French filmmaker Jean de Limur observed that “Rex was quite stubborn . . . Nobody could cross him. He was his own producer.” On the other hand, Rex’s overbearing style was a relief to some on the team. “Rex knew what he wanted and visualized it. Most of the film directors of those days made their films without a real script, but Rex Ingram knew what he was going to shoot,” noted actor Andrews Engelmann. Rex held such clout with the studio by now that he was even able to retain a tragic ending to the film, continuing to buck the wider trend of tidy, pat endings served up to the moviegoing masses.
Mare Nostrum took more of Rex’s time than any other film he made. Over the course of the fifteen-month production he shot more than a million feet of film. When it came out at last in 1926, it won strong reviews, and French audiences were so smitten that they made Rex a Chevalier of the Legion of Honor. Victorine also suddenly became available for sale, and Rex, by now extremely wealthy, bought it up. He paid $5 million and said he would lease it back to what was now Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer for productions. But buying such a complex foreign property would end up backfiring, as the investment over time would become a knotty mess.
By the late 1920s, Rex, sometimes accompanied by Alice or friends, sometimes alone, would travel throughout North Africa whenever he had a chance. Rex found Algeria and Tunisia as magical as he had imagined when he was a boy, and he grew extremely fond of Arab cultures and the Islamic faith, coming to feel that life in the West was decadent and suffering under the self-inflicted blows of the Depression. Finally, he officially converted to Islam, rejecting the faith of his father and family to embrace what he saw as a beatific spiritual outlook. He even adopted an Arabic name, Ben Aalem Nacir ed’ Deen. In his memoirs, he spells out his attractions to Arabs and Islam: “The desert nomad can pack all his earthly goods in a couple of camel bags. He is richer, more free and happier than the richest man in the world.”
But material matters also consumed Rex. Although his next film, The Garden of Allah, was a modest success, it was a struggle for Rex in many ways. He was plagued with health problems, including chest pains and stomach ulcers that had dogged him for years and were getting worse. Just before making it, his longtime cameraman and editor both told Rex they were through with him and Victorine, and returned to Hollywood. Strife on the set led to widespread sour feelings.
He also had a visit from his father while shooting, which can’t have helped. Reverend Hitchcock was alarmed at his son’s drift into Islam and wanted to advise him on some of the religious aspects of the film. Perhaps tellingly, Rex would produce during this time one of his most enigmatic sculptures—a sleeping Christ in the arms of Buddha. His father was said to detest it.
After this film, MGM told Rex it wouldn’t be renewing his contract unless he returned to America, but Rex refused. At the same time, Rex’s ownership of Victorine was also proving enormously costly—in 1930, he was forced to sell it at a loss.
It is a capricious game, filmmaking. Now isolated, without the studio he had built, shunned by many of the industry’s top players, and financially troubled, Rex nonetheless tried to carry on. Alice, though, had lost her appetite for acting. She could not reconcile herself to the era of talking films and called it quits.
Unmoored, Rex plunged ahead with one last film. He cobbled together funds to make his first and only talkie, Baroud. Unable to find a leading man (and maybe to save money as well), Rex decided to take the lead himself. The rest of the cast was a mishmash of unknowns speaking in multiple tongues (which mattered in talkies) and seemingly disconnected from one another. Rex found it hard to radically alter his directing style to accommodate synced sound, and the bumpy results show up on screen. By the end, for various reasons, Rex was unable even to finish Baroud, and Alice had to step in again to direct. The film, retitled Love in Morocco for American audiences, was a flop, both critically and in theaters, and Rex’s performance was panned as well.
Rex had finally reached the end of his career. While Alice returned to the United States to visit her ailing mother, Rex spent the next few years exploring North Africa. He returned to California in 1936, and the couple settled in their house on Kelsey Street, in the Valley. Was he home? To some degree, I think, more so than in Ireland or England. But then Rex really seemed to live in his art.
Rex’s time in the San Fernando Valley in the late 1930s and 1940s was marked by some socializing and a good bit of travel around America, as well as sculpting and writing. That is in fact where we found him at our open, puttering about the studio, his hands deep in clay, while inside Alice kept her own company. In 1939, he had a novel published, Mars in the House of Death. No one seemed to give it much notice. But in that same year a far more successful book came out, James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake. Rex must have been delighted to see a reference in it to “Rex Ingram, pageant-master.”
When the United States entered the Second World War in 1941, Rex became a naturalized U.S. citizen and offered up to the authorities his knowledge of the Arab world should it be desired. The timing strikes a chord in me. I myself decided to become an American citizen the night of the “hanging chad,” Election Day, 2000. My wife, Keely, and I rode our bikes down to the local polling station that evening. Al Gore was ahead. Keely voted as I stood outside the box, the silent partner with no vote. By the time we rode home twenty minutes later, George W. Bush was on his way to becoming president. I remember Keely saying, “We’re going to war.” That night was a turning point for me. After twenty years of paying taxes and living an American life, I needed to have a voice. So for Rex, what with the Second World War, and himself growing older, maybe that is some of what he was feeling.
Although he was not quite fifty, his health was getting worse. Along with his stomach issues, Rex suffered from high blood pressure. He kept a low profile, though Hollywood nobility like John Ford counted themselves among his friends, and sculpted more or less full time. He kept in touch with Lee Lawrie, who would later write that Rex’s “discerning judgment on the Fine Arts used to astonish me.” And he stayed in close contact by letter with his father and brother, still in England. Neither was physically well—his brother, Frank, wracked by war injuries, and his dad by old age. He frequently sent them money and well wishes. He also still nurtured dreams of returning some day to visit Ireland. “I must go,” he wrote them, “having been away since 1911. Maybe the three of us could meet in Dublin.” But it was not meant to be. He sailed to see them both in a joyous reunion in London, in 1947. From London, he returned to Egypt and Morocco, but his health was getting worse, and he was beginning to suffer heart attacks. In 1948, he struggled to make his way back home to Los Angeles.
In early July 1950, Alice took him into the hospital for some heart tests. On her birthday, July 24, Rex told her to go shop for something pretty for herself. When she got home, the hospital called. Rex was unconscious. Alice rushed there, and he died soon after she arrived. He was fifty-seven.
THE GREAT FILMMAKER Erich von Stroheim called Rex “the world’s greatest director.” Directing legend Michael Powell (whose career, incidentally, Rex had helped launch) once admitted, “Rex was all-powerful and acknowledged no master.” By the time of his mid-1930s suburban exile, it would have taken Rex’s giant Auburn 851 Supercharged Speedster barely twenty minutes to get to most of the big movie studios. But by then his film career had crashed to a halt. Despite his massive talent, his obsessive perfectionism and contrarian creative style had finally pushed him out of Hollywood’s innermost sanctum.
Fair enough, I suppose. Remington Steele also drove an Auburn Speedster what seems to me like a long time ago. We are all allowed to stay at the table only so long. But still, and most important, by then Rex Ingram—a wanderer, a restless soul, a true artist—had left his mark on Hollywood and at a time when Hollywood was just discovering who it was and what it could become. So it is a shame that his life and work are not better remembered.
Of course, I realize that this may be something of a sad ending. And having lived in Hollywood now for over thirty-five years, I know well enough that sad endings are not welcome. Better to say, wasn’t it grand—for an Irish boy, the son of a minister, raised in the little town of Kinnitty—wasn’t it one hell of a life? And it was. But still—it was sad too. And Rex, likely, would not have wanted it told otherwise.