Michael G. Ankerich - Mae Murray: The Girl with the Bee-Stung Lips

MAE MURRAY

THE GIRL WITH THE BEE-STUNG LIPS

Michael G. Ankerich

Foreword by Kevin Brownlow

Copyright 2013 by The University Press of Kentucky

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17 16 15 14 13 5 4 3 2 1

Frontispiece: Mae Murray in 1925. Courtesy of Eric T. Rebetti.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Ankerich, Michael G., 1962
Mae Murray : the girl with the bee-stung lips /
Michael G. Ankerich ; foreword by Kevin Brownlow.
p. cm. (Screen classics)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-8131-3690-5 (hardcover : alk. paper)
ISBN 978-0-8131-3691-2 (pdf) ISBN 978-0-8131-4038-4 (epub)
1. Murray, Mae, 18851965. 2. Motion picture actors and
actressesUnited StatesBiography. I. Title.
PN2287.M83A55 2012
791.43028092dc23

[B]

2012034642

This book is printed on acid-free paper meeting
the requirements of the American National Standard
for Permanence in Paper for Printed Library Materials.

Manufactured in the United States of America.

For Eve Golden
A Haughty Dowager with a Heart of Gold

Research can be disturbing. You expect to read an uplifting story of ambition and artistry, and you instead find yourself enmeshed in a psychiatric casebook. We demand too much of artists, even when we know their personalities are in sharp variance to their art. One great nineteenth-century painter was so abusive to his models that he used to throw them down the stairs, yet we all gasp with admiration at the delicacy and humanity of Edgar Degass work.

Mae Murray wasnt violent, but she makes you think Sunset Boulevard was a documentary. When she saw the picture, she is supposed to have said, None of us floozies was that nutsand I wish she had, because at least it shows a sense of humor. However, the rigorous work of Michael G. Ankerich indicates that Murray never made this remark, leaving us with someone who may have had charm, but who seems to have been bereft of humor, who may have been self-enchanted but was never self-effacing.

When I heard about this book, I wondered who had had the nerve to tackle it. Murray has come to represent a high-water mark of camp in silent films, exceeded only by Theda Bara. The temptation for a biographer to slip into full Hollywood Babylon mode, conducting his research by what Kenneth Anger himself attributed to mental telepathy, mostly must be fierce.

But we are in good hands. Michael Ankerich has a guarantee attached to his name. He managed to record a series of interviews with silent film players just before it was too late.Cunning), who has never been interviewed before, his dislike for the press stemming from a custody battle that marred his childhood. Ankerich also tracked down the relatives of Murrays brother, who also spoke for the first time. Their comments are of exceptional interest because the existence of a brotherlet alone twowas unknown.

He has also quoted from archive interviews recorded with Mae Murray herself. Inevitably, we have to ask whether all this hard work was worth it. Was she any good as an actress or a dancer?

Writers who have been unable to see the films and have merely glanced at stills tend to dismiss her acting as a series of poses. Yet her motion picture career lasted over ten years, so audiences must have been fascinated even if a few critics were not. Among her devotees I was intrigued to find the great French filmmaker Abel Gance, director of La Roue (1922) and Napoleon (1927), who said, I must confess that I have a profound admiration for Mae Murray. She is absolutely delicious, and her films give me a keen pleasure.

Unhappily, she did not often work with exceptional directors. Her finest surviving film is The Merry Widow (1925), directed by Erich von Stroheim, in which she plays opposite John Gilbert. There is no doubting her talent here; she dances well and acts brilliantly. Stroheims wicked and highly censorable view of Central European aristocracy is counted among the great classics of the cinema.

However, the harshest critic of any star is usually her cameraman. He is the one to whom dissatisfaction or displays of temper are most likely to be directed. Yet Charles Rosher, who was the first cinematographer to win an Academy Award (for 1927s Sunrise) and who had photographed her Lasky pictures, thoroughly admired her. He said she had a fluttery, nervous, intensive method of playing that brought out the best in everyone who worked with her, imbuing them with a sense of accomplishment. Director Robert Z. Leonard and Murray, his wife, broke their contract with Lasky at the same time and asked Rosher to join them. He didnt approve of breaking contracts. And so he stayed on. Lasky gave him the next Mary Pickford picture in appreciation of his loyalty, and so Mae Murray inadvertently triggered a celebrated partnership.

In 1964, when I heard that Mae Murray was in the Motion Picture Country Home at Woodland Hills, California, I took my tape recorder I had just started interviewing veterans of the silent era and was nervous at the thought of encountering Sunset Boulevard types. To my relief, I seldom did. But now I have read Michael Ankerichs book, I greatly regret missing that once-in-a-lifetime chance on that distant afternoon to come face to face with a quite extraordinary talent.

Kevin Brownlow
London, 2011

. Ankerich, Broken Silence and Sound of Silence.

. LArt dAbel Gance, Mon Cine 140 (October 23, 1924): 15.

. Unpublished interview with Charles Rosher, early 1930s.

How are you going to introduce me? the woman in the blonde wig and picture hat asked through her red bee-stung lips. She lifted her head and waited for him to speak.

It was in the early 1960s, and Miles Kreuger had collected the former star from the ramshackle Royalton Hotel on Forty-Fourth Street in Manhattan half an hour before. They were now seated around a microphone at the WBAI-FM radio station, where Kreuger was preparing to interview her live in five minutes. He had had difficult guests in the past, but this one was making him particularly nervous. Kreuger was accustomed to taping his interviews, rather than chatting with his guests live over the airwaves. This subject, however, had kept postponing the interview, and he now had no choice but to put her on live. Kreuger had been so distracted by pinning her down to an interview that he had given little thought to how he would introduce his subject.