It Girls & $#!t Editing: a review of Dangerous Curves Atop Hollywood Heels.

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From Tue., 24 July through Wed., 15 August, I read, thanks to inter-library loan, Michael G. Ankerich's Dangerous Curves Atop Hollywood Heels: The Lives, Careers, and Misfortunes of 14 Hard-Luck Girls of the Silent Screen (Duncan, OK: BearManor Media, 2011; ISBN: 978-1-59393-605-1; trade paperback; 405 pps.). The front and back covers are reproduced below.









I was hoping for an interesting book looking at some relatively obscure or now-forgotten starlets from the silent film era with insightful things to say about how the American movie studios treated their actresses even before they attained the peak of their power in the 1930s and 1940s in spite of the Hays Code, with perhaps a bit of the sass and snap, if not vitriol, of the Hollywood gossip magazines of the 1950s so beloved by James Ellroy; what I got was an amateurishly written and indifferently edited (I wasn't the only one to note this failing) collection of stand-alone, sub-Nostalgia Illustrated essays, with nearly a hundred pages of filmographies of the "hard-luck girls" featured in it.

Each essay begins with a two-paged flash-forward of an incident from towards the end of each actress's life, after their movie careers have hit the skids (or, in one or two cases, were cut cruelly short), before plunging into a chronological biographical account; in all cases, Ankerich repeats the incident that opens each essay in the proper sequence, usually adding nothing to the initial account. Ankerich also is overly in love with his title, given how often he repeats the "dangerous curves" portion of it, apparently out of the mistaken belief that he has to beat the audience about the head and shoulders in order to sell the joke.

Given that there is no overarching thesis to unify the fourteen portraits, it doesn't make sense to do what the author or his editors should have done and attempt to suture them together after the fact; instead, I offer a list of the actresses featured herein with selected highlights of their lives and careers:

1. AGNES AYRES: According to the date of birth given for her (April 4, 1892; p. 24) and her date of death (December 25, 1940; p. 43), she was 48 when she died; however, the actress turned gossip columnist Hedda Hopper said that she was 42 (a fact, amazingly enough, that Ankerich acknowledges in a footnote; p. 43 and p. 45, note #67). Her second movie was a Charlie Chaplin vehicle (His New Job, a.k.a. Charlie's New Job: 1915), in which Gloria Swanson also had a bit part.
   
   Ayres is most remembered today for being the female lead in the movie that launched Rudolph Valentino's career as "the world's greatest lover," The Sheik (1921), which Ankerich calls "a much tamer tale than the racy [eponymous] book by E[dith] M[aude] Hull" (p. 30); Ankerich omits to note, as the Wikipedia entry for the novel does not, that "This book has attracted some controversy due to its depiction of a strong, self-sufficient woman being tamed and subdued by a man who rapes her repeatedly." (Shades of James Bond's treatment of Pussy Galore in the 1959 novel Goldfinger, wherein Bond "cures" Pussy of her lesbianism by raping her.) She reprised her role in the 1926 sequel, The Son of the Sheik, likewise based on a Hull novel, although the novel was The Sons of the Sheik.
   
   Ayres was the mistress of Paramount producer Jesse L. Lasky, who rescued her from churning out one- and two-reelers for Vitagraph (p. 23; 26); she would later have an affair with the director Lewis Milestone while he was shooting All Quiet on the Western Front (p. 39).
   
   In the 1930s she was reduced to giving "beauty demonstrations" in department stores, as her movie roles were bit parts (pps. 41-2), and she had "lost her fortune in the stock market crash of 1929" (p. 39). She lost custody of her daughter to her ex-husband Manuel Reachi (whose first name is misspelled -- twice -- as "Manual" on p. 35), and apparently never regained custody, as she died of a cerebral hemorrhage "without ever regaining consciousness" before the thirteen-month period of paternal custody had elapsed (p. 43).
   
   She appeared in three of Cecil B. DeMille's films (p. 32): Forbidden Fruit, The Affairs of Anatol (both 1921; p. 50), and The Ten Commandments (1923; p. 52). She also appeared in four movies directed by William C. DeMille, Cecil's older brother: Bought and Paid For, Clarence (both 1922; p. 51), The Marriage Maker (1923; p. 52) and Don't Call It Love (1924; ibid). Other highlights of her movie career are The Story Without a Name and The Guilty One (both 1924), and the first movie adaptation of the 1922 play The Awful Truth, released in 1925; this play, by Arthur Richman, would be more memorably remade in 1937 by director Leo McCarey, and is notable for being the movie in which Cary Grant's light comic persona was first developed and presented to the world.
   
   
2. OLIVE BORDEN: Aside from some continuing, unresolved mystery about her real identity (is she or is she not Sybil Tinkle? and boy, doesn't that sound like the name of a minor Bond girl? -- pps. 68-9; p. 76, note #23), and the fact that, in some of pictures she sort of looks like Mackenzie Phillips and in others like Maggie Gyllenhaal (she's the lady in the middle picture on the back cover above), she doesn't seem terribly memorable: she died in a mission at the age of 41 on October 1, 1947, in the arms of her mother (p. 75)
   
   She appeared in some silent movies directed by Howard Hawks (Fig Leaves; 1926), John Ford (3 Bad Men; 1926), and Raoul Walsh (The Monkey Talks; 1927) -- the last of which sounds like the most interesting of the three, as Ankerich describes it as "a drama focusing on the trials and tribulations of a trio in a small wagon circus, Olive plays a tightrope walker who is almost killed by an aggressive monkey" (p. 65); although her career-defining role was the titular character in The Joy Girl (1928), directed by Allan Dwan. She had a four-year long affair with the actor George O'Brien, the star of the classic 1927 F.W. Murnau film Sunrise, and was apparently one of the great loves of his life (p. 75).
   
   This essay also has the first appearance in this book of the forgotten slang term "s.a." for "sex appeal" (quoted in a Variety article from November 9, 1927; p. 65; p. 76, note #13), as well as the unknown-to-me organization called Wampas (Western Association of Motion Picture Advertisers), who named various actresses profiled herein (including Borden) as a Wampas Baby Star (p. 61). Wampas should not be confused with the French comic book villain Wampus.
   
   
3. GRACE DARMOND: Born in Toronto, Darmond's main distinction appears to be "the other woman" who came between Valentino and his blushing bride, Jean Acker, on their wedding night, when Acker had a moment of buyer's remorse and fled before her marriage to "the world's greatest lover" could be consummated (p. 85; pps. pps. 89-91); Darmond also became addicted to morphine when it was given to her to enable her to keep working on the film The Valley of the Giants (1919; p. 89) -- a common story for silent movie actors, based on the prevalence of it here. She appeared in a 1921 serial called The Hope Diamond Mystery, with Boris Karloff (p. 92).
   
   
4. ELINOR FAIR: William Boyd -- the man who would later bowdlerize Clarence E. Mulford's Hopalong Cassidy character on the silver screen (much to the disgust of one of his later writers, Louis L'Amour) -- proposed to her during the filming of the 1926 Cecil B. DeMille movie The Volga Boatman (p. 113); they were married for three years (they had a girl who died in infancy), and Boyd's next wife, Grace Bradley, wrote in her biography of her husband, Hopalong Cassidy: An American Legend, "'Bill said she...had mental problems, and I later learned she had a reputation for being promiscuous'" (p. 115).
   
   Fair's career effectively tanked after 1927, although she had a bit part in Josef von Sternberg's 1934 movie The Scarlet Empress and in Frank Capra's 1934 movie Broadway Bill; she "descended into an alcoholic stupor and an emotional haze" (p. 118) and died in a hepatic coma in a hospital in Seattle in 1957. She reached out to an old chum, gossip columnist Hedda Hopper, who apparently blew off her plea for help in finding her husband a job (p. 119).
   
   
5. JUANITA HANSEN: The flash-forward opening of this essay reveals that Juanita Hansen, once a (Mack) Sennett Bathing Beauty and movie serial "queen," spent Christmas of 1936 in jail (calling to my mind a Howling Diablos song, "Christmas in Jail") on drug charges, "accused of something she'd preached against for almost two decades" (p. 129). Yes, Hansen is yet another movie star who became addicted through her work ("A sniff of heroin was all she needed to get through the demanding stunts required of her in The Lost City, which she filmed during the day. With the help of the white powder, Juanita was able to get through Rough-Riding Romance and focus on the serial"; p. 134) and, later, for relief from the pain caused by an accident with a malfunctioning shower head in a hotel room (pps. 142-43), prompting a relapse (she was cured of her addiction by mid-1923, shortly after the actor Wallace Reid succumbed to his [p. 140], but became briefly addicted again after the accident in June 1928 [pps. 142-44]). She was arguably the first celebrity to be obliged to turn her drug addiction into a source of income, lecturing on "the horrors of narcotic slavery," to quote the purple prose from an advert for one of her lectures (p. 145).
   
   Aside from that, the most interesting thing about this essay to me was the assertion, "When she got to Winnipeg [in late 1921], Juanita...found a dealer who sold her a bag of cocaine. In every town and city from Winnipeg to San Diego, she found an easy fix" (p. 139), giving the lie to the wishful thinking of so many people who were alive in the 1920s that that narcotics were only to be found in really big cities such as New York, Chicago or Los Angeles. (Nice to learn that Dashiell Hammett's stories weren't entirely fanciful.)
   
   Hansen's movie career doesn't appear that interesting to me: her debut was in the 1914 film The Patchwork Girl of Oz, and "she was elevated to a supporting role" in The Magic Cloak, another Oz movie released the same year; she worked with another Sennett Bathing Beauty, Gloria Swanson; and starred in such serials as The Secret of the Submarine (1915), "a story of political intrigue leading up to World War I about attempts to keep a submarine from falling into enemy hands" (p. 130; p. 149), The Brass Bullet (1918), and The Lost City (1920), in which she played "Princess Lola...from the South African province of Wanda" who was "kidnapped and...held prisoner in the jungle, given the choice of either marrying her kidnapper or becoming a slave" (pps. 135-36).
   
   
6. WANDA HAWLEY: Hawley -- who began acting under the name Wanda Petit in 1917 (p. 160) -- was born Wanda Pittack, and is another actress with a confused identity (she "gave her name as Selma on her passport application," which was "the name of an older sister"; p. 156; p. 174, note #1) whose personal notoriety came to overshadow her acting career; she fled to Europe with her business manager, Jay Stewart Wilkinson, early in 1923, to escape a blackmail scandal and the divorce proceedings threatened by her husband, Allen Burton Hawley, but initiated by her (pps. 168-69; incidentally, note #30, on p. 175, cites an article in the Los Angeles Times on 9 February 1923, headlined "Film Vampire Asks Divorce", leaving me to wonder when "vamp" came into widespread usage to distinguish a type of seductress from an undead creature of the night; this might have been a quirk of the paper's editors, as Theda Bara's character in 1915's A Fool There Was -- which was based on an eponymous 1909 play which in turn was based upon Kipling's poem "The Vampire" -- was called "the vamp," which would come to be her nickname).
   
   She appeared with Douglas Fairbanks in Mr. Fix-It (1918), Gloria Swanson in For Better, For Worse (1919) and The Affairs of Anatol (1921; Wallace Reid and Swanson were the leads; p. 163), Harrison Ford in Her Beloved Villain, "a light comedy based on the French farce La Veglione (ibid; incidentally, the silent movie actor Harrison Ford is of no known relation to the modern actor of the same name); for 1921's The House That Jazz Built, she had to "endure three hours in the make-up room each morning in preparation for her role as a housewife whose weight doubles" (p. 163).
   
   She was also the female lead in at least a couple of desert romances in the vein of The Sheik, 1922's Burning Sands opposite Milton Sills (for which performance she was panned by contemporary reviews; p. 165), The Young Rajah of the same year, opposite Rudolph Valentino (for which she also got poor reviews; ibid), and in Fires of Fate for London's Gaumont Studios in 1923, opposite Pedro de Cordoba, playing an Arab prince, and Nigel Barrie, playing the terminally ill British officer who rescues her from the prince's clutches (p. 169).
   
   Hawley was reduced to giving department store beauty demonstrations, as her career was effectively over by 1926, although she had two last-gasp appearances in 1927 and 1931, respectively (pps. 171-72; p. 184). She gave an interview in 1923 denouncing the current fantasy of "'the Sahara sheik as the lover par excellence'"; irritatingly, Ankerich cites the name, author and date of the article, but not the publication in which it appeared (p. 169; p. 175, note 34). Hawley also revealed in this interview that she had been wooed by an eighty-year-old sheik, Prince Sacchuini (p. 169).
   
   
7. NATALIE JOYCE: A cousin of Olive Borden and, like her cousin, a WAMPAS Baby Star of 1925, Joyce's movie career may have ended in obscurity, but at least she "bowed out while she still had her sanity" (p. 187), apparently at the rather sexist advice of Howard Hawks to "'Get married'" (p. 193). She was the female lead in a number of silent westerns: Whispering Sage (1927), opposite Buck Jones, one of the 492 people killed in the Cocoanut Grove fire in 1942; The Circus Ace (1927) and Daredevil's Reward (1928), both with Tom Mix, the latter of which Ankerich characterizes as "one of Mix's greatest successes" (p. 191); and Law of the Plains and The Man From Nevada, both opposite the future Captain Marvel, Tom Tyler (1929 for both). She was also one of the many girlfriends of Victor McLaglen (The Informer; Gunga Din; Fort Apache; She Wore a Yellow Ribbon; Rio Grande) and Robert Armstrong (King Kong, Son of Kong [both 1933]; G Men, with James Cagney) in a 1928 comedy A Girl in Every Port, about which Ankerich writes, "Most of the attention from the public and critics went to Louise Brooks as Marie, the girl in France" (p. 192).
   
   The only other item of interest in this brief entry is the short paragraph recounting that, "In May 1929, Natalie and actress Mildred Harris were question [sic] by authorities looking into the death of their friend, dancer Delphine Walsh, who succumbed following an illegal abortion. Natalie told investigators she had not seen Walsh in over a year" (p. 193). Natalie Joyce is the third actress on the back cover of the book (the far right photograph).
   
   
8. BARBARA LA MARR: The first actress pictured on the back cover (far left), Barbara La Marr had the distinction of having been sent home by the chief juvenile officer of Los Angeles in January 1914, when she was 18 (and still known as Reatha Dale Watson), because "she was too beautiful to be alone in Los Angeles"; Ankerich also unlimbers an unfortunately all-too-typical example of his trite writing here: "In the early 1920s, Barbara was living life in the fast lane that seemed to follow one dangerous curve after another" (p. 201). She lived her life with even more gusto than the characters she portrayed on screen, frequently declaring, "'I take my lovers, like roses, by the dozen'" (ibid); she acquired her stage name when she replaced the lead in a western, a "Miss Marr," who had fallen from her horse: after successfully finishing the scene on horseback, she was dubbed "La Marr" (p. 205).
   
   La Marr appeared in 1921's The Three Musketeers with Douglas Fairbanks, 1922's Arabian Love with John Gilbert (with whom she had an affair), The Prisoner of Zenda with Ramon Novarro (then billed as Ramon Samaniegos, a credit closer to his birth name of José Ramón Gil Samaniego), 1923's The Eternal City (which was "one of the first [U.S.] films to be shot abroad" and which featured a cameo by none other than Il Duce himself, Benito Mussolini, who was quite smitten with La Marr; pps. 213-14), 1924's Thy Name is Woman (again with Novarro), The Shooting of Dan McGrew and The White Moth, which was based on one of her poems (and for which Variety called her "'the great undressed'"; p. 218). Ankerich filled in La Marr's background here by interviewing her adopted son, Donald Gallery.
   
   
9. MARTHA MANSFIELD: Probably most famous for being the female lead opposite John Barrymore in 1920's Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, she died when the costume that she was wearing for her role in The Warrens of Virginia was ignited by a discarded cigarette; she was 24 when she died. The Warrens of Virginia was supposed to be her star-making vehicle.
   
   
10. MARY NOLAN: Born Mary Imogene Robertson, she performed in the Ziegfeld Follies as Imogene "Bubbles" Wilson, and for movies made by the German studio UFA as Imogene Robertson; she went to Europe to follow her rotter boyfriend, the drunk, physically and verbally abusive -- and very much married -- vaudeville actor Frank Tinney. Her notorious private life tended to steer studios away from her, although she would star in Lon Chaney's West of Zanzibar (1928) and in John Gilbert's final silent film, Desert Nights (1930; pps. 262-63).
    
    A one-time model for artists such as James Montgomery Flagg (the artist who designed the "I want YOU" recruitment poster featuring Uncle Sam pointing at the viewer), Norman Rockwell and Charles Dana Gibson (creator of "the Gibson Girl"), Mary Nolan died at the age of 42 in 1948, either a suicide or a victim of an accidental overdose of Seconal (pps. 254-55; pps. 271-72).
    
    
11. MARIE PREVOST: A one-time Sennett bathing beauty, Marie Prevost, who hailed from Sarnia, Ontario (just across the St. Clair River from Port Huron, Michigan, about an hour's drive away from me, traffic permitting), died of heart failure caused by acute alcoholism and malnutrition at the age of 38; her body wasn't discovered until a couple of days after her death, when neighbors were alerted by her incessantly barking dog. (The dog, Maxie, apparently tried to revive her by nipping on her; p. 300.) Her one-time chum, Joan Crawford, paid for her burial plot and funeral service (p. 301); unlike many of the other actresses profiled here, her funeral was actually well-attended by Hollywood stars (p. 302), but it would've been more touching if any of them could've been arsed to help her after she hit the skids.
    
    Studios chivvied her about her weight; after looking at the photos of her here showing her at her "chunkiest," I wished that I could revive these moguls only to pimp-slap them and send them back to the afterlife with my curses ringing in their ears. She was paired with Harrison Ford in a number of films, including the wedding farce Up in Mabel's Room (1926).
    
    
12. LUCILLE RICKSEN: A child of Danish immigrants whose exact date of birth is a mystery, Lucille Ricksen, born Lucille Erickson, was a child model (frequently a nude model) who began playing adult roles with Judgment of the Storm (1923) when she was still 12 (pps. 330-31); she fell ill in 1924, most likely at least partly from exhaustion ("She completed an astonishing 10 feature films in a little over seven months"; p. 334), had to face the death of her mother ("two days away from her 45th birthday"; p. 335) in February 1925, and died herself at the age of 14 on March 13, 1925, either due to "a nervous breakdown brought on by overwork," "anemia and a lung condition," "pulmonary tuberculosis" (which is the cause of death given on her death certificate), or "a botched abortion" (p. 336; pps. 338-40).
    
    
13. EVE SOUTHERN: Sort of a precursor to Shirley MacLaine, in that she believed in reincarnation (she claimed that she had been Mary, Queen of Scots in a past life), Eve Southern was just 16 years old when she appeared in the infamous orgy scene in D.W. Griffith's box office flop Intolerance (how bad was Intolerance? so bad that I didn't watch enough of it to see the orgy scene); she was later named "the Golden Rule Girl by a committee for Near East Relief in 1924....Eve's photograph appeared in papers around the country in connection with International Golden Rule Day (December 7)" (p. 354), and was selected by the director Josef von Sternberg for his never-completed/never-released film The Sea Gull, later retitled A Woman of the Sea (pps. 354-55). Her next role, "as Princess Sonia in Resurrection (1927), based on Leo Tolstoy's novel of the same name," was left "on the infamous cutting room floor" (p. 355); she wouldn't catch a break until Douglas Fairbanks's 1928 film The Gaucho, wherein she played the good girl opposite Lupe ("Mexican Spitfire") Velez's bad girl. She also played opposite Gary Cooper in Morocco (1930).
    
    
14. ALBERTA VAUGHN: A comedienne whose big turn here is her arrest for public drunkenness in 1945 (although, in the profile's opener, Ankerich gives the year as 1946 [p. 373]; the next reference to it [p. 382] gives the year as 1945, as does the article from the Los Angeles Examiner cited in note #27, p. 386), where she did one of her bits that made her an audience favorite in the 1920s. Her older sister, Adamae Vaughn, would also appear in movies (the sisters played together in 1929's Show of Shows); in the 1960s and 1970s, it was rumored that she ran a brothel out of the house that she rented, a rumor confirmed by Ankerich in a conversation with the house's owner, Keith Szarabajka (pps. 384-85).