In Obscurity
Hillside Memorial Park in Los Angeles, California © 2001 by Albert L,. Ortega
[Gladys Georgiana Greene]
October 17, 1901–June 19, 1991
On-screen, Jean Arthur, with her infectious laughter and a husky adolescent voice that would crack in mid-sentence, projected a pleasing mix of vulnerability and buoyant forthrightness. Off camera, however, she was extremely independent, unusually private, and quite eccentric. Frank Capra, who directed her in several 1930s big-screen comedy classics, observed, “Never have 1 seen a performer plagued with such a chronic case of stage jitters. . . . When the cameras stopped she’d run to her dressing room, lock herself in—and cry.” When asked in 1966 why she had abandoned Hollywood, Jean snapped, “I hated the place—not the work, but the lack of privacy, those terrible, prying fan magazine writers and all the surrounding exploitation.”
Born in Plattsburg, New York, Jean moved with her family frequently during her childhood (her father, a commercial artist, kept going from job to job). By the early 1920s she was a model in New York City; this job led to a screen audition with Fox Films in Hollywood. After a few days starring in The Temple of Venus (1923), however, she was replaced. Jean said later, “That is where and why I developed the most beautiful inferiority complex you’ve ever seen.”
Nevertheless, she persisted in the movies. In 1928 Jean signed a contract with Paramount Pictures and married photographer Julian Anker. The union, however, was annulled after one day. In 1929, she appeared in her first all-talking picture, the Philo Vance whodunit The Canary Murder Case. But in 1931, after getting 14 unremarkable screen assignments in a row at Paramount, the disheartened Arthur returned to Manhattan. In 1932 she made her Broadway debut in Foreign Affairs and married Frank Ross Jr., a young actor with whom she had teamed on-screen in Young Eagles (1930).
Back in Hollywood, Jean joined Columbia Pictures, but it was not until The Whole Town’s Talking (1935), opposite Edward G. Robinson, that she made a real impact, displaying a light comic touch that would blossom in subsequent years. In the late 1930s, she was paired with Gary Cooper in Mr. Deeds Goes to Town (1936) and The Plainsman (1937), with Cary Grant in Only Angels Have Wings (1939), and with Jimmy Stewart in You Can’t Take It with You (1938) and Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (1939). Despite these high-caliber entries, Jean didn’t receive her first (and only) Academy Award nomination until The More the Merrier (1943). By then, she’d gained an industry reputation for being temperamental on the movie set and exceedingly aloof with the media.
Eric Linden and Jean Arthur in The Past of Mary Holmes (1933).
Courtesy of JC Archives
Arthur allowed her Columbia Pictures contract to expire in the mid-1940s. She hoped to become a full-time independent producer, but The Devil and Miss Jones (coproduced with RKO Studios in 1943) was her only such venture. Next, Arthur planned a Broadway return, but left the comedy Born Yesterday (1946) before it debuted. (Her understudy, Judy Holliday, became a great hit in the successful production.) In 1948 the mercurial Jean returned to movies in Billy Wilder’s A Foreign Affair, in which glamorous Marlene Dietrich stole the show. The next year, Arthur divorced Frank Ross. She went back to Broadway in a 1950 revival of Peter Pan with Boris Karloff and in 1953, made her final motion picture—the classic Western Shane.
Subsequently, Jean Arthur became even more private—if that was possible! She broke her retirement in 1963 by appearing in a college campus production of Saint Joan. She made her TV debut on a segment of the Western series Gunsmoke and was then lured by her producer-friend Ross Hunter into headlining The Jean Arthur Show, a television sitcom, which lasted just 12 episodes in 1966. Her last Broadway venture, The Freaking Out of Stephanie Blake (1967), about an old lady from Illinois who gets turned on by pot, was canceled after a few performances because of Arthur’s ill health.
From 1968 to 1972 Jean taught drama at Vassar College and then joined the faculty at the North Carolina School of the Arts, but she eventually returned to her coastal retreat in Carmel, California. She tried the stage one more time, but shortly withdrew from First Monday in October, a comedy about Supreme Court justices that costarred Melvyn Douglas.
Now completely retired in Carmel, Jean moved to a smaller place there facing the Pacific Ocean. She devoted herself to her pets and her garden. Occasionally, she could be seen strolling alone along the beach or making unconsciously imperious entrances into local shops.
In the spring of 1989, Jean suffered a stroke that left her an invalid. On June 19, 1991, she died of a heart attack at Carmel Convalescent Hospital. At her request, there were no funeral services. Her ashes were scattered at sea off Point Lobos.
Until the end, Jean remained firm about not granting interviews. When begged by a Los Angeles TV host in the mid-1980s to do a live interview for his program, the everelusive Arthur ended the matter with, “Quite frankly, I’d rather have my throat slit.”
[Agnes Hinkle]
April 4, 1896–December 25, 1940
Fate can push an individual into stardom and just as quickly yank that stardom away. That tough truism is just as appropriate to the world of 1930s Hollywood as it is today.
Agnes Ayres was born in 1896 in Carbondale, a small town in southern Illinois. By the time she was 16, her family was living in Chicago. One day in late 1914, a girlfriend suggested they tour the local Essanay Films studio. Agnes’s impressive profile and petite figure were noticed by a staff director. She was placed in a crowd scene of a silent feature that was currently being shot, receiving three dollars at the end of the workday. Agnes was asked to return for more assignments, and she did. By 1916 she and her mother had moved to New York City so Agnes could pursue an acting career. (Agnes had married an army captain, Frank P. Schuker, during World War I, but the couple quickly separated and finally divorced in 1921.) Now single, she received her big break when Vitagraph Pictures star Alice Joyce noted a strong resemblance between herself and Agnes. Ayres was hired to play Joyce’s sister in Richard the Brazen (1917). Agnes played in 25 productions at Vitagraph before deciding to try Hollywood.
Paramount executive producer Jesse Lasky saw Agnes on-screen in 1920 and quickly arranged an introduction. Although he was married and had children, Agnes soon became his mistress. Lasky starred her in the Civil War tale Held by the Enemy (1920), and she received good reviews for her performance. The prestigious studio director Cecil B. DeMille was persuaded to give her leading roles in The Affairs of Anatol (1921), Forbidden Fruit (1921), and the Biblical epic The Ten Commandments (1923). Agnes played opposite the very popular Wallace Reid in four features, including Clarence (1922). She became entranced with the handsome star and, despite the fact that he was married, paid long and frequent visits to him at home. Finally, Reid’s wife threatened to throw acid in the actress’s face if she returned again, which effectively ended the romantic relationship.
Ayres’s professional peak came in Rudolph Valentino’s The Sheik (1921); she played the terrified English heiress he carries into his desert tent for nights of passion. (In the sequel, The Son of the Sheik [1926, also starring Valentino], she would play the young hero’s mother.) By 1923, her romance with Lasky had ended. Without her industry mentor, she no longer received the best scripts or the choice of the lot’s top directors. Agnes was not in trouble financially, however, because she had invested wisely in real estate. She married Mexican diplomat Manuel Reachi in mid-1924 and they had a daughter in 1925. The couple divorced in 1927.
During the remainder of the Roaring Twenties, Agnes’s screen career declined, with her last important movie role being the second female lead in Frank Capra’s The Donovan Affair (1929). At the time she was worth over $500,000, but in the big stock market crash of October 1929 she lost everything, including her real-estate holdings. Now penniless, she played vaudeville, touring in “one-night stands.” Returning to Hollywood in the mid-1930s, the former star (who was now well into her thirties), announced, “I’m still young and I see no reason why I can’t get to the top again.” But times had changed, and the only work Agnes could get was bit roles.
The realization that her screen career was finished greatly depressed Agnes, and she was soon committed to a sanatorium for emotional problems. In 1939 her ex-husband, Manuel Reachi—now a film producer—gained custody of their daughter. The severely despondent Agnes died of a cerebral hemorrhage on December 25, 1940, in West Hollywood, long forgotten by her once adoring public.
[Theodosia Goodman]
July 29, 1890–April 7, 1955
In the silent movie A Fool There Was (1915), Theda Bara says—via title cards—“Kiss me, my fool.” The New York Dramatic Mirror raved about her, “Miss Bara misses no chance for sensuous appeal. She is a horribly fascinating woman, cruel and vicious to the core.” With this trend-setting movie, Theda became a full-fledged movie star. She was the first of a new type of leading lady to grace the screen, the “vamp”—short for vampire. The moniker suited her typical screen role: a conniving, predatory woman who drains the emotional life out of her male victims.
Born in Cincinnati, Ohio, in 1890 (some sources say 1895), Theda was the daughter of a Jewish tailor and his Swiss wife. Upon graduating from high school, Theda moved to New York to pursue a theatrical career. With her blond hair dyed black and exotic makeup that used shades of indigo to give her a pallid complexion, the somewhat plump, five-foot, six-inch actress was cast in a version of Molnar’s The Devil (1908). She toured in The Quaker Girl with future gossip columnist Hedda Hopper in 1911, and by 1914 was back in New York, where she came to the attention of film director Frank Powell. Although she admitted later that her “mind was set emphatically against it,” she accepted movie work because of her then-uncertain finances.
With the release of A Fool There Was, Theda’s stardom was ensured. She helped filmmaker William Fox build the fledgling Fox Film Corporation through her string of silent-screen hits—all generally variations on her innovative vamp role. The studio publicity department created an alluring background for Theda, insisting that this fabricated star was the daughter of an eastern potentate—and that her surname was an anagram for “Arab.” When she starred in Cleopatra (1917), she caused another typical Bara furor by displaying more of her shoulders than movie censors of the time thought appropriate. Late in 1917, by which time Theda and Fox Films had relocated to the West Coast, Bara announced grandly, “During the rest of my screen career, I am going to continue doing vampires as long as people sin. For I believe that humanity needs the moral lesson and it needs it in repeatedly larger doses.”
Nevertheless, both studio and star realized that she could only repeat her vamp impersonations profitably so many times. When she was cast as the title character of Kathleen Mavourneen, however, Irish groups picketed the 1919 film for presenting a Jewish girl—the queen of vamps, no less—as an innocent Irish lass. Later that year, when Theda demanded a salary raise from $4,000 to $5,000 weekly, film mogul William Fox refused—he thought she had become passé, and besides, he already had a successor to Theda in contractee Betty Blythe.
Former silent-film vamp Theda Bara at a Hollywood party in 1933, seated with Baron De Schaunsee (left) and Yeachel Lewis.
Courtesy of JC Archives
When no satisfactory movie offers were forthcoming, Theda returned to the Broadway stage in The Blue Flame (1920), a supernatural melodrama that closed after only 48 performances. The next year, in Connecticut, she married her longtime film director, the English-born Charles J. Brabin. She retired from the screen only to make an inconsequential comeback in The Unchastened Woman (1925). Her final forays into the film world were in two Hal Roach shorts in 1926. One of them, Madame Mystery, featured a heavily made-up Theda forced into satirizing her old vamp image.
Thereafter, Theda passed her time as a Los Angeles society matron. In the 1930s she tried a few local stage comebacks. She wrote an autobiography called What Women Never Tell, but couldn’t find a publisher. She sold her life story to Columbia Pictures in the early 1950s; they never filmed it. In 1954, when she contemplated a return to the stage in East Coast summer stock, the project fell through.
Later on in 1954, Theda was diagnosed with abdominal cancer. She entered California Lutheran Hospital on February 13, 1955. On April 7 she died, nearly forgotten by the motion-picture industry she had helped to popularize. She was buried at Forest Lawn Memorial Park in Glendale, California. Her husband died on November 3, 1957.
[Josephine Constance Woodruff]
September 13, 1909–May 18, 1991
As Nina, the sumptuous White Goddess of the African Jungle in Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer’s Trader Horn (1931), Edwina Booth gained cinema immortality. This career-making part, ironically, also proved to be her professional undoing. She made a few other motion pictures and then disappeared from the industry entirely. For decades, her whereabouts remained an intriguing mystery, arousing the interest of movie aficionados around the world. It was rumored that she had died, and her demise was actually reported on various occasions. On May 18, 1991, however, the truth was revealed at last. She had succumbed to old age in a Long Beach, California, convalescent hospital. “This time she really did die,” remarked her brother, Booth Woodruff.
Edwina Booth and Duncan Renaldo in Trapped in Tia Juana (1932).
Courtesy of JC Archives
Edwina was born in 1909 in Provo, Utah, under the name Josephine Constance Woodruff. By 1928 she was in Hollywood, appearing first in Nancy Carroll’s Manhattan Cocktail (1928), and the next year in Our Modern Maidens (1929). The latter picture, starring Joan Crawford, was made at MGM. That high-class studio was embarking on a campaign to find a fresh face to play the unusual heroine of its pending jungle epic Trader Horn. Twenty-year-old Edwina was hired for the key part. On May 1, 1929, the cast and crew of the adventure film arrived in East Africa. The production suffered seven months of nightmarish torment under horrific conditions: hostile natives, fierce animals, bizarre tropical diseases, and primitive sound equipment. By the time everyone had returned via boat to New York, MGM studio head Louis B. Mayer had screened the sent-ahead footage. He thought the project was a mess and had the cast fired. But other MGM executives convinced their second-incommand, Irving Thalberg, to salvage the sinking production. So, for nearly a year thereafter, the picture went through extensive reshoots in both Los Angeles and Mexico. It was conducted under very hush-hush conditions, since MGM feared adverse reaction if it was generally known that the resulting movie had not been entirely filmed in the African wilds. After a then-exorbitant production cost of $1,322,000, Trader Horn finally debuted in February 1931 to critical enthusiasm. It earned a sizeable profit for the time of $937,000.
Meanwhile, Edwina Booth reteamed with her Trader Horn costar Harry Carey in two hastily assembled serials—The Vanishing Legion (1931) and The Last of the Mohicans (1932)—and made a low-budget feature, The Midnight Patrol (1932). By the time of the latter’s release, Edwina was confined to bed; it would take her more than five years to recover from the tropical maladies she had contracted while filming Trader Horn in Africa. Booth sued Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer for over a million dollars, alleging that the studio demanded she sunbathe nude on the ship’s deck on the 10-day voyage from Naples to Mombassa. Once in Africa, she claimed, they had failed to provide her with adequate protective clothing for the lengthy jungle stay. Her lawsuit charged that her array of ailments had been caused by the tropical sun and bites from unidentified jungle insects. The high-profile case was eventually settled out of court with the actress receiving an undisclosed payment.
Once she recovered, Edwina understandably never returned to the entertainment profession (although she continued to receive fan mail for almost 60 years). She devoted most of her energy to working for a Mormon temple in Hollywood. She married Rienold Fehberg in 1969, who died in 1984. When she died at the Medallion Convalescent Hospital in Long Beach in May 1991, she was survived by her brother, a sister (Betty Benson), and two stepdaughters (Judy and Dixie). A private funeral service was held on May 22, 1991.
With her death, the decades-old mystery of the elusive Edwina Booth, the radiant star of Trader Horn, was solved at last.
August 25, 1905–September 27, 1965
This petite, vivacious redhead with bobbed hair, cupid’s lips, and the oh-so-playful pout was the essence of the Roaring Twenties—the “It Girl” herself, the “Brooklyn Bonfire.” Most of all, she was the energetic jazz baby who symbolized a madcap era in American history. Yet, later in life, she admitted sadly to a friend about her years of fame, “It wasn’t ever like I thought it was going to be. It was always a disappointment to me.”
Clara Bow, the “It Girl,” in a 1920s pose.
Courtesy of JC Archives
Clara had a very unpleasant and impoverished childhood in Brooklyn, New York, moving with her family from one slum building to another. Her mother, Sarah, who suffered from epilepsy and had periodic episodes of promiscuity, had lost two previous daughters in childbirth. The ordeals had permanently damaged Mrs. Bow’s physical and mental health. Once, when Bow was a teenager with dreams of becoming a movie star, she awoke to find her mother hunched over her with a butcher knife in their tenement apartment, ranting, “You’d be better off dead than an actress!” Clara claimed she never slept a full night through thereafter.
As for her worthless father, Robert, he was an unemployed waiter at the time of her birth and soon abandoned the family, although he later returned. When Clara was still a youngster, he began sexually abusing her. Pathetically, Clara was so desperate for paternal love that despite his treatment of her—and his later financial leeching off her—she remained loyal to him. (Throughout the years, Clara generally supported her father and often provided him with a place in her household to live. He would die in 1959.)
In 1921, Clara borrowed a dime from her dad to enter a movie-magazine contest and won a screen test. She made her screen debut in Beyond the Rainbow (1922), although most of her scenes ended up on the cutting-room floor. (After she became famous, the sequences were restored and the picture reissued, to capitalize on Clara’s fame.) In 1923—the same year her mother died in a state mental hospital—producer B. P. Schulberg (who charmed Clara and used her financially and sexually) brought her to Hollywood to make pictures. Many of her early efforts were forgettable, but she made an impression playing a spirited flapper in The Plastic Age (1925).
By the time of It (1927), Schulberg was entrenched at Paramount Pictures and Clara was a top star at the box office. It was the pinnacle of her movie career; she was the idol of shopgirls and the fantasy of men around the world. Studio chief Adolph Zukor would recall later that she “was exactly the same off the screen as on. She danced even when her feet were not moving. Some part of her was in motion in all her waking moments—if only her great rolling eyes.”
Clara’s popularity rose with the World War I epic Wings (1927), in which she played a live-wire Red Cross worker. She made her talkie debut in The Wild Party (1929) and the critics forgave her Brooklynese speaking voice. She was earning good money—over $2,800 a week—but she had no business sense, and failed either to invest her earnings or to demand the higher salary she could have easily gotten from Paramount. Meanwhile, whenever the pressure got too severe, she had a nervous breakdown.
Over the years, those in the industry were well aware of Clara’s free-living, freespending habits. She had affairs with a succession of her leading men, including Gary Cooper, Eddie Cantor, Gilbert Roland, and Harry Richman, as well as other nonactors, including playboy director Victor Fleming. Al Jolson even joked on radio about Clara “sleeping catercornered in bed.” The studio did its best to downplay her gambling binges, her passionate indiscretions, and her abortions in Mexico. But then all hell broke loose, and all the studio’s efforts were for nothing.
On January 13, 1931, Clara charged Daisy De Voe, her former secretary (who had been a studio hairdresser previously), with criminal counts of embezzlement (of several thousands of dollars) and blackmail. Going on the offensive, the brassy Daisy told the world—in detail—about the wild life that her former employer was enjoying. When the notorious trial ended, Daisy received a relatively minor sentence and served only a year in prison; Clara’s public reputation had been all but destroyed. A still bewildered Clara asked the presiding judge, “My best friend, Daisy was. Why did she have to do me like that?”
The trauma of this major scandal caused the unstable Clara to suffer several nervous breakdowns, and she was ordered by her physicians to recuperate at a sanatorium. Meanwhile, the studio dropped her contract. New film deals were “pending,” but instead Clara married cowboy actor Rex Bell in Las Vegas and the couple moved to his ranch in Spotlight, Nevada. Throughout this period, Clara, who was never slim, gained and lost weight. She made a brief comeback attempt with an excellent performance in Call Her Savage (1932) and another in Hoopla (1933). By this time, however, moviegoers had found new screen idols, and Clara was considered passé.
Bow lapsed into private life. She and Rex had two children, Rex Jr. and George. At times Clara, who was five feet, three-and-a-half inches tall, saw her weight mushroom to nearly two hundred pounds. After Bell retired from moviemaking, they opened a Hollywood restaurant, but that enterprise failed. Later, they sold the ranch in Spotlight and moved to Las Vegas, where Bell ran a Western apparel store. Clara was in the entertainment limelight for the last time in 1947, when she was the mystery voice on Ralph Edwards’s Truth or Consequences radio quiz show. In 1954, Bell became the lieutenant governor of Nevada; he was reelected in 1958. Clara’s mental health remained precarious, and she hated being in the limelight that her husband’s political career demanded of her. (Because of this, she and Bell separated and lived apart.)
In the mid-1950s, Bow was hospitalized in the Los Angeles area, where she now lived. She later retreated to a modest Culver City bungalow with a live-in nurse companion. Although she and Bell now rarely saw one another, they never divorced. He died in July 1962 of a heart attack while seeking the governorship of Nevada. Clara emerged from her seclusion to attend his funeral at Forest Lawn Memorial Park in Glendale, California.
By 1965, Clara was living the barren life of a recluse. In a wistful moment, she told the still-intrigued press, “We had individuality. We did as we pleased. We stayed up late. We dressed the way we wanted. Today, stars are sensible and end up with better health. But we had more fun.”
Shortly before midnight on September 26, 1965, while watching a vintage movie on TV, Clara died of a heart attack at her Culver City bungalow. She was buried at Forest Lawn Memorial Park in a vault next to her husband’s. At the service, Ralph Edwards read from Kahlil Gibran’s book The Prophet. Among those who paid their final respects to Clara were old pals like Jack Oakie, Richard Arlen, Harry Richman, and (Slapsie) Maxie Rosenbloom.
Whitney Bolton of the New York Morning Telegraph offered a fitting final tribute to Clara: “She had fright in her, this girl. She had defiance that was a flower of fright. She had a kind of jaunty air of telling you that she didn’t care what happened, she could handle it.” Bolton also recollected that he had encountered Bow on the Paramount lot in the late 1920s. He had asked her, “Miss Bow, when you add it all up, what is ‘It’?”
Clara thought for a moment and replied, “I ain’t real sure.”
[David (Lewelyn) Wark Griffith]
January 22, 1875–July 23, 1948
It is truly ironic that one of the pioneers of American filmmaking died in semi-obscurity, long ignored and forgotten by the motion-picture industry he had helped to found.
D. W. Griffith was born in La Grange, Kentucky, in 1875. At age 16, he went to work as a newspaper reporter, and later turned to acting. When a play (A Fool and a Girl) he had scripted failed, he transferred to the new medium of silent “moving pictures” in New York City, first as an actor, and then, in 1908, as a director.
As Griffith grew to understand the medium, he experimented with innovative techniques like fade-outs, rapid cutting, and close-ups. He used these techniques in his several milestone films, which included two major spectacles: The Birth of a Nation (1915) and Intolerance (1916). He developed or fostered the careers of many talents, among them Mary Pickford, Lillian Gish, and Richard Barthelmess. In 1919, he joined with Pickford, Douglas Fairbanks, and Charlie Chaplin to form United Artists Pictures. He made his last great pictures in the 1920s: Way Down East (1920), Orphans of the Storm (1922), America (1924), and Isn’t Life Wonderful? (1924). But then everything turned sour for him. He had to abandon his film studio and go to work for other moviemakers to pay off his heavy debts. Losing his creative control signaled his ultimate downfall.
Hollywood’s switch to talkies in the late 1920s accelerated Griffith’s further decline, as did his refusal to keep up with changing public tastes and industry techniques. His first all-talking movie, Abraham Lincoln (1930), was considered stilted and old-fashioned; his study of alcohol abuse, The Struggle (1931), was dismissed as simplistic and full of archaic Victorian sentimentality. By 1933, down on his luck, the penniless former trailblazer had to sell his interest in United Artists, the studio he had helped to found. In 1935, he received a special Academy Award for his “distinguished creative achievements as director and producer.” But it was an empty gesture; the demoralized director needed work, not a trophy.
Filmmaking pioneer D. W. Griffith.
Courtesy of JC Archives
Griffith became Hollywood’s forgotten man. He went back to New York, hoping to find someone to produce plays he had written. No one volunteered. Returning to California, he supervised a few crowd scenes for the Clark Gable vehicle San Francisco (1936) and did similar “supervisory” chores on One Million B.C. (1940).
Ignored by the movie business he had helped to build, the proud director with the hawk-nosed profile became more alcoholic, embittered, and lonely. He was a pathetic sight walking along Hollywood Boulevard, forcing a jaunty gait and swinging his cane as if carefree, stopping to tell any willing listener about his former glory days. Long divorced from his first wife, actress Linda Avidson (whom he continued to support in a very comfortable style), in 1936 he wed Evelyn Marjorie Baldwin, a very young actress. But that marriage ended in divorce in November 1947, attributed by his spouse to his heavy drinking and reckless behavior.
In 1948, Griffith was living alone at the once-classy Hollywood Knickerbocker Hotel at 1714 Ivar Street. During the morning of July 23, Griffith was in his small room when he suffered a cerebral hemorrhage. He managed to reach the lobby, where he asked for assistance, and then collapsed beneath the lobby’s chandelier. He died later that morning at Temple Hospital without regaining consciousness.
When it was too late to help, three hundred of Hollywood’s elite turned out for a lavish memorial tribute to D. W. Griffith. His longtime coworker, director and actor Donald Crisp, eulogized bitterly: “It was the fate of David Wark Griffith to have a success unknown in the entertainment world until his day, and to suffer the agonies which only a success of that magnitude can engender when it is past.”
Griffith’s body was taken back to Kentucky for burial at the Mount Tabor Cemetery in La Grange. The master film innovator left a relatively meager estate of less than $25,000, besides a few motion-picture properties.
The prophetic Griffith remarked once, “Movies are written in sand: applauded today, forgotten tomorrow.” He might have added, so are the geniuses who founded the American film industry.
[Hedwig Eva Mari Kiesler]
November 9, 1913–January 19, 2000
If ever there was a truly great screen beauty, it was Hedy Lamarr. At five feet, six inches, weighing 120 pounds, and with dark brown hair and piercing blue eyes, she was the epitome of the movie goddess. Imported from her native Austria in 1938 by MGM, Hedy had already made a name for herself in the shocking 1933 European release, Extase (Ecstasy), in which she cavorted through a nude scene at a swimming hole. The sheer daring of that highly risque (for its time) performance paved the way for Lamarr’s later international fame.
On the downside, the furor over Extase would haunt Hedy for the rest of her long life, as did her breathtaking looks. Billed and stereotyped by Hollywood as “the most beautiful woman in the world,” her screen assignments usually called for her to pout and look bored on camera. Few ever got to know the real Hedy, a woman angered by the repetitiveness of her screen career and frustrated by her six marriages and divorces. Beneath the surface, Hedy was a self-willed, highly intelligent person who wanted to expand beyond the confines of her sexpot image. But that recognition only came belatedly in her final years—by which time she had long withdrawn from the limelight.
Hedy was born in 1913 in Vienna, the daughter of a Jewish banker. As a teenager, she longed for self-expression and turned to show business as an outlet. She got a role in the 1930 film Geld auf der Strasse. By 1931 she had moved to Berlin, where she had stage roles and made two additional movies. It was in the 1933 Czech entry Syphonie der Liebe—better known as Extase— that she ran naked through the woods and splashed in a small lake. The daring scenes intrigued the filmgoing public, but not viewers in Germany; Adolf Hitler’s Third Reich banned the picture because Hedy was Jewish.
It was also in 1933 that she wed Fritz Mandl, a very wealthy—and much older—Austrian munitions manufacturer. He attempted to buy and destroy all copies of the racy Extase, without success. Soon tiring of being a trophy wife and upset by her husband’s politics, Hedy divorced Mandl in 1937 and settled in London, away from Hitler’s advancing armies. There she was introduced to MGM studio czar Louis B. Mayer. During the course of a transatlantic voyage to New York City, he offered the gorgeous actress a seven-year contract. Now renamed Hedy Lamarr (after the beautiful American actress Barbara La Marr, who had died young from a drug overdose in 1926), her Hollywood debut was made on loan to another studio. Algiers (1938, costarring Charles Boyer) was a big hit, and it cemented Hedy’s standing as a screen siren.
Hedy Lamarr, the star of Dishonored Lady (1947).
Courtesy of JC Archives
In 1939, Hedy married screenwriter Gene Markey, who was between movie-star wives (married earlier to Joan Bennett, he would later wed Myrna Loy). That union lasted just 14 months. In 1941, the year she appeared in Come Live with Me and H. M. Pulham, Esq., she adopted a baby boy named James.
Tortilla Flat (1942) presented Lamarr opposite Spencer Tracy in a high-class production, but another 1942 release, White Cargo, ridiculously cast her as a sleazy temptress and signaled the end of MGM’s interest in her. By now, the studio was convinced Hedy was too exotic and too wooden to become a great actress, and focused its attention on their contract star Lana Turner, the “Sweater Girl.” In 1943, Hedy wed her third husband, actor John Loder. They would have two children, Denise and Anthony.
By the time Lamarr’s MGM contract ended, she was earning $7,500 a week. She formed her own production company and played the femme fatale in the middling Strange Woman (1946) and Dishonored Lady (1947), the latter featuring her then-husband. By July 1947, however, she and Loder had split. Thereafter, her career was in the doldrums until Cecil B. DeMille cast her in the box-office bonanza Samson and Delilah (1949) as the famed Biblical temptress who snips Victor Mature’s locks. In contrast, a terrible role in the Western Copper Canyon (1950) and another as the straight woman to Bob Hope in the comedic My Favorite Spy (1951) just about ended her Hollywood career.
In 1951 Hedy married nightclub owner Ernest Stauffer, but that union fell apart in less than a year. Her fifth marriage was to Texas oil baron Howard Lee. She made a few unremarkable pictures overseas and returned to Hollywood for The Female Animal (1957). Two years later, she and Lee divorced. Her sixth and final wedding ceremony was with Los Angeles attorney Lewis W. Boies Jr. in 1963; the marriage lasted only two years.
Picture Mommy Dead (1966), a low-budget shocker, was to have featured Lamarr in a comeback performance, but the studio replaced her with Zsa Zsa Gabor. The week before the cast substitution, Hedy had been arrested on a shoplifting charge. The ex-movie star spent five hours in detention before being released. Although the charges were dropped, Hollywood was shocked and wrote her off. Badly in need of funds, Hedy agreed to do her (ghost-written) autobiography, but later had a change of heart and tried to halt its publication, suing her collaborators on the book for misrepresenting her life. She lost the case and in 1966, Ecstasy and Me, a lurid account of her life and relationships, arrived in stores; it was considered outrageous for its day.
After the late 1960s, Lamarr more or less dropped out of the news. Then, in 1991, she was accused of shoplifting $21 worth of merchandise from a drugstore near her home in Altamonte Springs, a suburb of Orlando, Florida. She claimed that she was innocent and it was all a mistake, based on her absent-mindedness and poor eyesight (she was legally blind at the time). The charges were dropped eventually, but the damage had been done. The supermarket tabloids depicted Hedy as destitute, and the messy episode caused the ex-celebrity to retreat further into seclusion.
On the plus side, Anne Macdonald’s 1992 book Feminine Ingenuity finally acknowledged publicly that back in 1941, Lamarr had invented a sophisticated and unique anti-jamming device to foil Nazi radar during World War II. She and her partner, the composer George Antheil, patriotically took their patented device to the War Department, which rejected its use. Years later, when the patent expired, a big corporation adapted the Lamarr-Antheil invention, which finally saw use on U.S. ships during the Cuban blockade of 1962. Variations of Hedy’s device are still utilized today to speed satellite communications around the globe. A disgruntled Lamarr told the press in 1992: “Never a letter, never a thank you, never money. I guess they just take and forget about a person.” In March 1997, she was awarded a prize for “blazing new trails on the electronic frontier” at the Computers, Freedom, and Privacy Conference in San Francisco. One of her sons, Anthony Loder, accepted the award on Hedy’s behalf. The reclusive Lamarr provided an audio message of thanks to the attendees.
By the mid-1990s, Hedy had become almost completely cut off from the world. Her failing eyesight became even worse, and she was unable to get around easily. She hardly ever went out, not wishing the public to see what time had done to her movie-star looks. Reportedly, she had few friends and rarely saw any of her children.
On January 19, 2000, Hedy (by then a great-grandmother) passed away in her sleep. Contrary to rumors, she did not die destitute. She left an estate worth more than $3 million to her daughter Denise (a cosmetics salesperson in Seattle, Washington) and her son Anthony, who lives in Los Angeles. Her adopted child James—who was estranged from Hedy—was not mentioned in the will. In late 2000, James, a 60-year-old retired policeman in southern California, brought action against his mother’s estate, claiming he and his parent had reconciled before her death and alleging that he was her natural son.
Not long before Lamarr’s death, Vanity Fair magazine published a page of the onetime femme fatales responses to questions they had recently asked her. She displayed a wit the public saw too little of during her heyday. When asked what she would change if she could alter one thing about herself, she quipped, “My nail polish.” And her response to what situations cause her to lie, she said, “When I am tired of standing.” But she could be serious. Her biggest dislike was snobbery; her greatest achievement was “having been a parent.” When asked what her life’s motto was, the glamour girl responded, “Do not take things too seriously.”
Thus spoke the legendary Hedy Lamarr, who Hollywood never took seriously enough.
January 2, 1886–December 27, 1938
How indicative of Hollywood that its very first movie star—from the pioneering silent days—would end her days neglected by everyone. Feeling totally rejected by the industry she helped to bolster, she killed herself by eating ant paste.
Florence Lawrence was born in 1886 in Hamilton, Ontario, where her mother, Charlotte A. Bridgewood (whose professional name was Lotta Lawrence), managed a traveling stock company and was raising her two boys on her own. At the age of three, Florence made an impromptu stage debut, singing “Down in a Shady Dell.” Thereafter, billed as “Baby Florence, the Child Wonder,” she insisted on being part of her mother’s productions.
By the summer of 1906, Florence and her mother were in New York City seeking Broadway work. Stage parts proved elusive, but Florence (and her parent) were hired—because the young talent could ride a horse—by the Edison Company for a one-reeler silent picture, Daniel Boone; or, Pioneer Days in America (1907). This job led to work at the Vitagraph Company, where the main actress was Florence Turner. (In those early moviemaking days executives avoided promoting players by name, worrying that they would then demand huge raises. Thus Turner was known merely as “the Vitagraph Girl.”) Being ambitious, Florence Lawrence soon left Vitagraph by convincing D. W. Griffith to hire her at Biograph, where she became known as “the Biograph Girl.” In 1908, she married the actor-director Harry Salter.
Even though she was a popular, hardworking screen player, Biograph refused to meet Florence’s requested salary and fired her in 1909. Thinking audiences would accept a substitute, they cast another performer as their new “Biograph Girl.” Moviegoers, however, observed the difference and wrote strong letters of protest to the studio. Biograph did not rehire Lawrence, but Carl Laemmle’s Independent Motion Picture Company (IMP) jumped at the chance. Florence became the “IMP Girl.”
In February 1910, newspaper stories (of unknown origin) insisted that the former Biograph Girl had died in a St. Louis streetcar accident. Laemmle shrewdly had Florence arrive in that city by train; crowds quickly recognized her and swamped the actress. The event proved that she was indeed a recognizable personality, worshipped by her large coterie of fans.
Lawrence made dozens of short movies for IMP in 1910. By 1912, she and Salter had a deal with Carl Laemmle to create their own company, with studios based at Fort Lee, New Jersey. Florence used the sizeable profits resulting from this venture to buy a 50-acre estate in Westwood, New Jersey.
While filming Pawns of Destiny (1915), Lawrence was burned coming down a staircase during a tricky fire scene. When she returned to the set a month later, she had facial scars, a back problem that would become chronic, and badly frayed nerves. Nevertheless, Florence completed her studio contract, then collapsed. She soon divorced Salter, whom she blamed for forcing her to do the dangerous stunt in the first place.
Exhausted by these various stresses, Florence remained away from filmmaking for two years. In 1916, she made her first long feature, but the strain was too much. She had a relapse and was bedridden, suffering from complete paralysis, for four months.
In 1921 Lawrence married a car salesman, Charles B. Woodring, and attempted a screen comeback. However, the industry had greatly changed during her “retirement.” She went to Hollywood for the first time, having always worked in pictures in other parts of the country, but her vehicle, The Unfoldment (1922), went unnoticed by the public. Frantic for screen work by the mid-1920s, Florence had her nose shortened, hoping to incite a fresh career; she continued to receive only small roles. She next operated a beauty-supply business in the late 1920s, but this too failed. She and Woodring divorced in 1931 and the next year, she wed Henry Bolton. That union ended five months later after he physically abused her.
In 1936, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer made the gesture of hiring one-time stars for bit roles (at $75 per week). This created a lot of publicity for the studio. Among the veterans hired was Florence, who by now was reduced to sharing a small West Hollywood apartment on Westbourne Avenue with two female acquaintances.
On December 27, 1938, convinced the public had long forgotten her, Florence did not appear at the studio for her afternoon call. Instead, at her apartment, she combined cough syrup with ant paste and drank the lethal mixture. Her screams led to an ambulance being summoned and she was rushed to a Beverly Hills hospital. She soon died there.
Ironically, the first movie star the public knew by name was buried at Hollywood Memorial Park in an unmarked grave.
Fortunately for moviegoers, the trailblazing Miss Lawrence has been rediscovered in recent years. First she was the subject of a full-length 1999 biography by Kelly R. Brown. Then, in mid-2000, came The Biograph Girl, a novel by William J. Mann. This novel explored the fictional premise that Lawrence had not died in 1938 and was still alive, living in a nursing home in Buffalo, New York. Also in mid-2000, the Silent Movie Theatre in Los Angeles held a two-day retrospective of Florence Lawrence’s work, showing 10 of her short subjects made for D. W. Griffith.
[Gladys Marie Smith]
April 9, 1893–May 29, 1979
In the early twentieth century, Canadian-born Mary Pickford became “America’s Sweetheart,” a smiling “good girl” with golden-brown curls. The petite miss (barely five feet tall) reigned supreme in an age when the movie industry was primitive, naive, and optimistic. As it gradually became more hardened and cynical in the 1930s and beyond, Mary slowly retired into obscurity at her legendary estate, Pickfair, in Beverly Hills. When she passed away, a frail and detached woman of 86, her death reminded the world of the bygone era when she and her partners at United Artists Pictures—Charlie Chaplin, Douglas Fairbanks Sr. (her second husband), and D. W. Griffith—had so dominated the American motion-picture business.
Mary Pickford was born Gladys Smith in Toronto, Canada, in 1893, the oldest of three children of an Englishman named John Charles Smith and his Irish wife, Charlotte (Hennessey) Smith. When Mary was four, her father died; her mother had to run a penny-candy concession stand and take in sewing to make ends meet. Because money was so short, Gladys had only six or seven months of formal schooling as a youngster. At age five she made her stage debut, with her sister Lottie, in The Silver King at the Toronto Opera House. Realizing that there was money to be made in show business, Charlotte Smith became an overnight stage mother and supervised her daughter’s career up until her death in 1928.
Between 1901 and 1906, Gladys (billed as “Baby Gladys Smith”) and her family were on the road, touring with American theater companies. Soon the family’s sights were set on Broadway. Charlotte negotiated an audition for Gladys with the austere stage impresario David Belasco. He cast her in The Warrens of Virginia (1907) and gave her the stage name of Mary Pickford.
While with the show in Chicago, Mary saw her first movie, but never thought she would have to stoop to working in the “flickers.” Needing work in 1909, however, she went to American Mutoscope and Biograph Company on Manhattan’s East 14th Street, where the esteemed director D. W. Griffith hired her at $5 a day. She took any part offered. Before long, she was earning $175 a week—a very high salary in those days.
By 1913, Mary was making features for Paramount Company-Famous Players. It was for Tess of the Storm Country (1914) that she was publicized as “America’s Sweetheart.” She reached a professional peak with Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm and The Poor Little Rich Girl, both issued in 1917, and both showcasing the quite adult Mary as a youngster. Meanwhile, while employed at the Biograph Studio, she had met actor Owen Moore; they were married in 1911. Her career soon outshone his.
Always astute about the financial side of moviemaking, in 1919 Mary formed United Artists Pictures with Douglas Fairbanks Sr., Charlie Chaplin, and D. W. Griffith. It was a trailblazing concept at the time for actors and directors to be in charge of a studio. The following year, she divorced Moore and on March 30, 1920, married Fairbanks, the screen swashbuckler and comedian. Contrary to their initial fears, the legal union of Douglas and Mary only served to enhance their fame. When they toured in the United States and abroad, fans mobbed them everywhere. Fairbanks built Pickford a splendid 50-room mansion overlooking a 15-acre estate in Beverly Hills. When it was finished, Pickfair became the prized destination for visiting celebrities from all over the world.
Although Mary attempted to break out of her typical screen persona with costume dramas such as Dorothy Vernon of Haddon Hall (1924), the public demanded that Mary continue to play the waif. She obliged for a while. She and Fairbanks made only one feature together, the talkie The Taming of the Shrew (1929).
Mary won an Oscar for Coquette (1929) and made a few more feature films, but after Secrets (1933), she retired, insisting, “I wanted to stop before I was asked to stop.” (There were several aborted comeback efforts, but it was always another actress who finally played the part because Mary backed out of the project or someone more appropriate became available.) With their careers faltering, Mary and Douglas both sought consolation elsewhere. Douglas fell in love with British musical-comedy actress Sylvia Hawkes, who was then married to Lord Anthony Ashley. After a round-robin of divorces, Fairbanks married Sylvia. (He would die in 1939.) In June 1937, Mary wed Charles “Buddy” Rogers, 11 years younger and a foot taller than the petite movie star. He had costarred with her in My Best Gal (1927). In the 1940s they adopted two children, Ronald and Roxanne.
As time passed, Mary withdrew more and more from the movie colony that she had once ruled into a private world of alcoholism and bittersweet memories. After a 1965 trip abroad, she literally took to her bed, insisting that she had worked since she was five years old and now wanted a very long rest. Her husband became the major buffer between her and reality, constantly apologizing for, explaining away, and bringing messages to the outside world from “dear Mary.” Infrequently, she would roam the mighty halls of Pickfair at night. Certain house rules completed the surreal environment. When guests came by, they could speak to Mary only through a house phone. Newspapers brought to her had every potentially disturbing article clipped out. Her daily diet reportedly consisted largely of almost a quart of whiskey.
In early 1976, the nearly forgotten Mary was persuaded to accept a special Academy Award “in recognition of her unique contributions to the film industry and the development of film as an artistic medium.” For the March 29, 1976, Oscar show, Mary’s segment was pre-taped at Pickfair. Mary, with wig slightly askew, accepted her statuette and murmured a few words. The highly publicized event proved to be scary rather than the intended affectionate nod to an industry pioneer.
Mary Pickford and her husband, Buddy Rogers, pose at the stables of their palatial Beverly Hills home, Pickfair, in the 1940s.
Courtesy of JC Archives
In her remaining years, Mary grew more sickly and distant, finding escape in drink and the Bible. Pickford finally died of a stroke on May 29, 1979, at Santa Monica Hospital. She left an estate estimated to be worth $50 million. Much of it went to her charity, the Mary Pickford Foundation, which supported various aspects of the picture industry. She is buried at Forest Lawn Memorial Park in Glendale, California, in an outdoor garden near the Mystery of Life section. Her mother, brother, and sister are buried there as well.
Two years after Mary’s death, Rogers married Beverly Ricondo, a real-estate agent he had known for a long time. Rogers would pass away on April 21, 1999. Pickfair was eventually purchased by Pia Zadora and her then-husband, Meshulam Riklis, for $7 million. The original main house was torn down to make way for a new showcase home. No sooner had construction been completed—after six years—than the couple divorced. The past was gone, making way for a new future.
[Margaret Teresa Yvonne Reed]
August 27, 1916–October 19, 1994
Over the decades, this raucous entertainer played in vaudeville and starred in movies, on radio and TV, and at nightclubs. Funmeister Milton Berle once ranked her as one of the four funniest women in the world. Within the entertainment industry and to the public, she was lovingly known as Miss Big Mouth because of her expressive way of mugging. But Martha Raye was far more than “just” a brash, exuberant, and always expert clown. She had a marvelous singing voice, a shapely figure, and legs that rivaled those of the more famous Marlene Dietrich. On the downside, Maggie (as friends called her) had very bad luck in choosing her mates, and often turned to drink to escape her problems. And ironically, in some people’s minds the worst mistake Raye ever made was giving her time, love, and devotion to entertain (and nurse) the troops on the front lines during the Vietnam War. For her selflessness, she received the designation of honorary Marine Lieutenant Colonel and was officially allowed to wear the Green Beret symbol. Yet this branded her as a hawk on the home front. In politically liberal Hollywood, Martha was passed over repeatedly for work because of her Vietnam War activities.
The future star was born in a charity hospital in Butte, Montana, in 1916. Her Irish-born parents, Pete and Peggy, were minor vaudeville singers who were struggling through a Midwestern tour at the time. Within a few years, little Margaret (the first of three children) was part of the act. She grew up on the road, and always claimed that she picked her stage name of Martha Raye out of a phone book.
Martha was on Broadway in the short-lived revue Calling All Stars (1934) before turning to club work. Playing in Los Angeles, she was spotted by film director Norman Taurog, who cast her in a Bing Crosby vehicle (Rhythm on the Range, 1936) that he was currently directing. On camera she sang “Mr. Paganini,” which would become her trademark number. With her vocals and slapstick work (including a hilarious drunk routine), Martha made a big hit with moviegoers in this Western comedy, and she was signed to a Paramount Pictures contract. During the next five years she cavorted through numerous popular vehicles, often teamed with Bob Hope. In 1940, deemed “overexposed” by the studio that had tossed her into film after film, she was let go.
Martha Raye and her pet, Blanca, greet the public.
© 1991 by Albert L. Ortega
In the early 1940s Martha bounced around from studio to studio and worked freelance. During World War II, she went on a North African USO tour along with Kay Francis, Mitzi Mayfair, and Carole Landis. Long after the others returned to Hollywood, Martha stayed on to entertain and often nurse the soldiers. Her rewards included an honorary captainship and yellow fever, which she contracted somewhere along the way. In 1947, the lofty Charles Chaplin hired Martha as one of his leading ladies for Monsieur Verdoux. She received strong reviews, but the public was put off by the black comedy itself.
When not making films, Raye headlined in clubs, did TV (her well-received Martha Raye Show was on the air from 1953 to 1956), and got married and divorced. Her first trip to the altar was with Paramount Pictures makeup artist Buddy Westmore in 1938; they divorced months later. That same year, she wed composer and arranger David Rose, but by 1941 they had parted. A far happier, if very complex relationship, was her 1942 marriage to the expert dancer Nick Condos (of the Condos Brothers). Their child Melodye was born in 1943. Even after they divorced in 1953, Condos would remain her business manager. In 1954, Martha tied the knot with dancer Edward Begley. In 1956 they divorced; that same year, she took an almost-fatal overdose of sleeping pills. After she began dating her bodyguard Robert O’Shea, his wife sued Martha for alienating the affections of her husband. The suit was settled out of court and Raye and O’Shea became man and wife in 1958. That marriage lasted just four years.
In 1962 Martha costarred with Doris Day and Jimmy Durante in Billy Rose’s Jumbo. During the making of the elaborate screen musical, she attempted suicide again. After her Vietnam tours, where she was twice wounded by enemy fire, “Boondocks Maggie” (as the troops affectionately called her) spent several months on Broadway (and on tour) starring in Hello, Dolly! In April 1969, at the Academy Awards, she received the Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award for her “devoted and often dangerous work in entertaining troops in combat areas almost constantly since World War II.”
To keep herself busy, Raye appeared on a TV children’s show (The Bugaloos), participated in another Broadway revival (No, No, Nanette), and became part of a successful TV series when she took over for Nancy Walker as the comedic foil on Rock Hudson’s detective show McMillan (1976–77). When asked why, after all these years, she still kept working so hard, Martha said, “My husbands cost me a fortune, and I’m not getting residuals from my old movies, but that’s not why I’m working. I’m working because I’d die if I didn’t.”
Having done several very lucrative Polident denture commercials, Martha returned to touring, first in the ensemble revue The New 4 Girls 4 and then in a road company doing the musical Annie. The death of her ex-husband Nick Condos in July 1988 sent her into an emotional tailspin, which was aggravated by her ongoing clashes with her daughter, Melodye.
In January 1990 Raye suffered a stroke, which left one side of her body paralyzed and caused her famous wide mouth to droop noticeably. Her recuperation was hindered by her refusal to do the prescribed physical therapy and by her ongoing depression. By this time, Martha’s fans were petitioning Congress to award the Medal of Freedom to the ailing entertainer. Meanwhile, Martha was having constant court skirmishes with her daughter over TV-commercial commissions supposedly due to Nick Condos.
Then, in 1991 the Bette Midler movie-musical For the Boys opened (and sank). In many respects, the plot was based on Martha’s wartime entertainment efforts. Because Raye and Condos had once met with Midler about having Bette star in Maggie, a screenplay about Raye’s USO touring, Martha was bitter about the new film, which was done without her consent or financial compensation. In June 1991 the entertainer endured a second stroke.
In the summer of 1992, the wheelchairbound Martha was introduced to Mark Harris, a one-time singer, garment industry designer, and cosmetologist. On September 25, 1991, just weeks later, the 42-year-old Harris and 76-year-old Raye were married in Las Vegas. Martha spent most of the wedding night at the Desert Springs Hospital with severe abdominal pains. When they returned to Los Angeles, shocked relatives and friends were amazed at how fast Mark had taken charge of Martha’s life, including her business affairs. As for Raye, depicted by the media as a pathetic invalid whose mind wandered from the effects of her strokes, she claimed to be happy for the first time in years. She didn’t seem to mind that her spouse was apparently using his new status as “Mr. Raye”—and the funds that came with it—to build a new career for himself.
Martha’s daughter Melodye retaliated by petitioning the court to have Raye declared incompetent because of her several strokes. A temporary conservator was appointed. By the end of the year, Mark had filed a claim against Bette Midler and others regarding For the Boys, and soon thereafter he and Raye reaffirmed their marriage vows in the presence of Hollywood friends.
In April 1992 Martha suffered another stroke while visiting in Las Vegas, followed by yet another one in June. Harris continued to throw lavish parties with and without Maggie present. When asked by the media if she felt her husband was taking advantage of her, she vehemently denied it. In October 1993 part of a toe on her left foot had to be amputated; later her left leg was removed just below the knee. During this critical period, it was announced that President Clinton had finally awarded Martha the long-sought Medal of Freedom. Meanwhile, Raye had been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease.
In January 1994, the court dismissed Martha’s suit against Bette Midler and others over For the Boys. The next month, a part of Raye’s right leg had to be amputated. On October 19, 1994, at 1:35 P.M., Martha died of pneumonia at Cedars-Sinai Hospital in Los Angeles. Reportedly, Melodye had not been allowed in the room to see her mother that day because of orders left by Mark Harris, who was out of town at the time.
Funeral services were held at a memorial chapel in Santa Monica, California, on October 20. The next day, Melodye discovered that the pine coffin exhibited at the funeral had not contained her mother’s remains. The body had been already sent on to Fort Bragg in North Carolina and buried in the military cemetery there. (Supposedly, Martha was buried with a bottle of vodka.) A marker would be placed on the grave inscribed: “Martha Raye, Civilian.” In 1997, veteran entertainer Steve Allen and others saluted Martha at the Friars Club. The honorary Oscar she had once won was presented to the club by her estate.
Raye’s will left Melodye $50,000; Raye’s husband Mark Harris received the rest of the $2.4 million in assets. He used some of the money to back his own cabaret act.
Years earlier, Martha Raye had observed, “Few people actually know me or take me seriously. I thought success in show business was the answer to everything. It isn’t. I don’t know what is.”
[Edith Norma Shearer]
August 15, 1902–June 12, 1983
For many fans throughout the decades, Academy Award-winning Norma Shearer is Hollywood’s ultimate movie star. Her participation in a motion picture, or arrival at a social function, gave it Class with a capital “C.” On camera, Norma excelled at sophisticated drawing-room comedy (Private Lives, 1931), and could sashay effectively through costume drama (Marie Antoinette, 1938) or biting social commentary (The Women, 1939) with equal aplomb. The dark-haired actress was not a raving beauty and she had a troublesome physical defect, being walleyed. But with careful lighting, she could glow with a well-bred radiance that substituted for sex appeal.
Norma Shearer, the young star of After Midnight (1927).
Courtesy of JC Archives
During the 1930s, Norma reigned as Hollywood’s first lady. Her consort for much of that time was MGM’s executive producer, Irving Thalberg. But unfortunately, there is always an end to every royal regime. In Norma’s case, it was not the “happily-ever-after” portrayed in most of her pictures. Her final years were marked by failing health, mental instability, and (the worst fate of all for her) being forgotten by those she loved best—her adoring fans.
Norma was born on August 15, 1902 (not 1900 or 1904 as often given, and not on August 10 as sometimes is listed) in a suburb of Montreal, Quebec, the daughter of a Scottish construction-company executive and an Englishwoman whose forebears had been in the clergy. She had an older brother, Douglas, and sister, Athole. A frail child, Norma was persuaded by her mother to become a pianist, as she had some musical talent. Then, after Norma won a beauty contest at age 15, her mother guided her toward amateur theatricals.
In early 1920, Mr. Shearer’s business was doing poorly, and Mrs. Shearer escorted her children to New York City to seek their fortune. Stage work failed to materialize, but the Shearer girls found work as extras in silent movies, including D. W. Griffith’s Way Down East (1920). (Athole would soon abandon her show-business career, and later marry and divorce director Howard Hawks; Douglas would go on to create and supervise the MGM sound department, in the process winning many Academy Awards for his achievements.)
After a few years of tiny film parts and modeling assignments, Norma was signed by moviemaker Louis B. Mayer and his new second-in-command, Irving G. Thalberg, for their growing film company (soon to be called Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer). Shearer traveled to California with her mother and sister in early 1923. During this training period, she made several pictures with fellow studio employees Lon Chaney and John Gilbert, including He Who Gets Slapped (1924). On September 29, 1927, Norma (now converted to Judaism) married Thalberg at his Beverly Hills home in a lavish ceremony. Their son, Irving Jr., was born in 1930, and their daughter, Katherine, in 1935.
Norma proved she could make the transition to talkies with The Trial of Mary Dugan (1929). She received an Oscar for The Divorcee (1930). Now earning $6,000 weekly, she had first choice of MGM’s roster of new screenplays and costars. She gathered more Oscar nominations: A Free Soul (1931), The Barretts of Wimpole Street (1934), Romeo and Juliet (1936), and Marie Antoinette (1938). After Thalberg’s premature death in 1936 from heart and other ailments, Norma considered retiring but then charged ahead with more pictures, such as Idiot’s Delight (1939) with Clark Gable. She entered her “Merry Widow” social period, dating the likes of George Raft and Mickey Rooney.
In 1942, proving that times were indeed changing, three of MGM’s legendary mainstays (Greta Garbo, Joan Crawford, and Norma Shearer) left that glamorous studio. Also that year, Norma married Martin Arrouge, a ski instructor several years her junior. For years, they lived in the spacious Santa Monica beach home she had once shared with Thalberg; in 1960 they moved to more modest West Hollywood digs. Until the mid-1960s, Norma and Martin continued their regimen of skiing, traveling, and increasingly infrequent entertaining.
By 1967, Norma was experiencing the same sort of anxiety attacks that had caused her sister to suffer several nervous breakdowns. Shearer underwent shock treatment to help her “make the adjustment” to her diminished lifestyle and social influence. Ironically, Norma was enduring the same twisted fate—albeit to a lesser degree—as the character Norma Desmond in Sunset Boulevard (1950), a role Shearer had been offered and rejected. The former star became suicidal, and in 1970, attempted to throw herself from a window on the top floor of a Los Angeles high-rise but was stopped in time.
Norma spent many months at a private sanatorium. Although the shock treatments reduced her depression, they also impaired her memories of current events and the world around her. Her past became more real than her present. In the late 1970s, having already undergone corrective surgery once, Norma’s eyesight began to fade again. She clung to earlier times when life had been fulfilling, and kept searching in the present for ties to the long-dead Irving Thalberg.
By September 1980, the frail, withered Norma, whose hair had turned snow-white, was a permanent patient at the Motion Picture Country House in Woodland Hills, California. Shearer’s splendid domain had now shrunk to her small room (D133) in the hospital wing. Infrequently lucid, she generally remained wheelchair-bound or resting in bed. When she made contact at all with those about her, it was only to repeat the query, “Are you Irving?” Irrational and confused, she would sometimes wander the hospital corridors dressed in her nightgown and bathrobe, not sure how to find her way back to her little room. In June of 1983, Norma contracted bronchial pneumonia. She died at about 5:00 P.M. on June 12, 1983. She was buried at Forest Lawn Memorial Park in Glendale, California, next to Thalberg in his marble pavilion. At last, she had come home.
