The rise and fall of Mae Murray
Silent movie stars seem to have been forever falling from grace. Hollywood Hubris ran rampant through the paradisic Beverly Hills in the Twenties, and none of them seemed to learn from the crash-and-burn antics of their contemporaries. The coming of sound is often invoked as the wrecker of many a liquid-eyed silent star, but many more were casualties of their own gilded ego-trips. Mae Murray is a perfect case in point. Christopher Raymond Brocklebank has her story.
Supposedly the model for the Norma Desmond character of Sunset Boulevard fame, Mae rose from a shady, poverty-stricken childhood to conquer Broadway in her teens and Hollywood in her twenties and thirties. Then along came a phony Georgian nobleman in 1925 who married her, wrecked her career, spent her fortune and left her destitute. Not that park-bench penury ever seemed to dent her eternally buoyant self-esteem and arrogance (depending on your level of empathy) and she lived by her own proclamation ‘Once a star – always a star!’ to the end of her sad days.
Born Marie Adrienne Koenig to Austrian-Belgian immigrants in ol’ Virginia in 1889, Mae eternally embellished the details of her childhood, muddying the truth with tales of being born at sea and of being raised in numerous convents where the nuns would whip her soundly for prancing through the gardens late at night holding aloft lit matches and wearing nought but gauze (she was, apparently, pretending to be a firefly).
The imaginative and luminous young Mae grew up beautiful and somehow made it to Broadway aged 17 in 1906 where she joined the chorus line of the infamous Ziegfeld Follies, rising swiftly to a headlining role. She danced with Vernon Castle and rapidly became a star of the NY supper club scene; a shimmering blonde Southern Belle, she danced like a dream and believed utterly in her own beauty and brilliance -curiously, she was never known as ‘Modest Murray’.
By her mid-twenties, she’d married and divorced both a stockbroker and an Olympic bobsled champion, getting out of both marriages with a vast settlement apiece and a well-established career. Being a gorgeous millionairess with hair the colour of desert sand, Murray was at some sort of an advantage, one might say, and made her next marriage to a top film director, Robert Z. Leonard, thus finding her real destiny as a queen of the screen. Film production hadn’t yet moved out West, and Mae made her east-coast movie debut in To Have and to Hold in 1916, followed by A Delicious Little Devil, co-starring, at her request, a brooding young Italian dancer she’d discovered called Rodolfo Guglielmi, later famously known as Rudolph Valentino.
Category: Pre-1930s, Vintage news, Vintage Style Icons
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Brilliant article. I am inspired to find out more about the mad Mae Murray now. Please can we have more about icons from the past- men too, like Douglas Fairbanks and Rudolph Valentino.
Interesting however I question the use of the word “Infamous” with regard to the Follies.
That word denotes something unsavory, does it not? My dictionary defines that word as having a bad reputation, which the Follies did NOT have. In fact, the opposite is true.
There’s a little too much poision in the writer’s writing for me to enjoy this piece, though I do love Mae Murray and how crazy she went (take THAT Lindsey Lohan!) And I take offense to not only the notion that silent stars had talkie myth syndrome, but that their ‘gilded egos’ did em in instead. More like sad sad circumstances when a grouping of people with family histories of alcoholism and mental illness are given lots of money and put in the spotlight (if you look at a lot of their blood descendants you can see just what I mean). Like now.
The 20s were the start but by no means an exception (Florence Lawrence to Marilyn Monroe to again Lohan…same ol same ol.) Someone said they were doing a new bio on Mae…I hope they do!