by Mark Bailey
St. Columba proved a bad fit for Rex. Socially, Rex was considered a bit of an outcast. He preferred drawing to studying and produced a trove of illustrations of lavishly dressed women. It’s hard to imagine that going down very well in a turn-of-the-century all-male boarding school. Like Rex, I didn’t take much to formal education. It can be difficult for an artistic soul—the life of an outsider. But in those early drawings of Rex’s, you can see a flair for extravagance that, so much later, his film fans would come to appreciate.
Rex’s school woes were greatly compounded by the sudden death of his beloved mother, in the fall of 1908. The two had been extremely close, and she was a lifelong shield of warmth and affection against his father. Rex was devastated. It was a terrible loss. My own grandparents had passed away by the time I was seven, so I know something of a child’s heartache. That coming Easter, in very much a mutual decision, Rex left St. Columba’s. He would return home to figure out his next steps, a state of affairs he commemorated with this grim poem:
I am going back to father.
Back to dear old Dad.
Although I made him sorry
I now will make him glad.
As for me, my last few years in Ireland were spent with my Aunt Eileen in a house in town, number 2 St. Finian’s Terrace. I remember these as happy times. Eileen had a son and a daughter who were teenagers—Donal and Ann. I was seven. I always received great presents from my mother at Christmastime should she not be with us. I loved to skate and had the best pair of roller skates on the street. They were called GoJos with black rubber wheels. I was the fastest kid in the neighborhood with my GoJo skates. On a weekday, Eileen would bake the most magnificent soda bread. When I came home from school it would be sitting on the windowsill cooling. Then she would slice off a chunk and put lashings of butter on it, which I would then dunk in the sugar bowl and wash down with a glass of milk from the local cows.
But the little house on St. Finian’s was bursting with all of us: Eileen and her own children, and then two lodgers to whom she rented a room upstairs. My bed was at the end of that room, with a shiny green curtain around it. Eileen would pin newspapers to the curtain as to block out the light when the lodgers would come in at night. This tiny space was all mine, and I would gaze at those papers, imagining a life beyond. For me it would be London. But Rex, he fantasized most about South America, and even tried to teach himself Spanish. He was also entranced by the Arab world, which would figure prominently in his later films.
Don’t we take our leaving in stages? Whether it be from a place or a person—it begins in the imagination. The morning I left Ireland it was gray and wet. I was by then eleven. The date was August 4, 1964—the same day that Ian Fleming died, ironically. My dear Aunt Eileen packed my tiny cardboard suitcase, and I wore a gray V-neck hand-knitted sweater with a tartan bowtie. In one hand a set of rosary beads and in the other an aspirin bottled filled with holy water. Eileen cried when we parted; she knew I was never coming back. But I was to be with my mother at last. And I could not have been happier.
My Uncle Phil drove me to Dublin airport in the rain, where we met a priest at the bar having a pint. We struck up a conversation with the man of God, who said he would take care of me on the flight. The plane was a twin-engine prop. When we landed in London, the priest disappeared, and I just followed the crowds to the gates. Customs asked me if I had anything to declare. I said no. I could see my mother through the glass, waiting.
FOR REX, AS it turned out, his father had a friend in New Haven, Connecticut, who could set him up with a job. Both Francis and Frank hated for Rex to leave, but they knew there was no holding him back. “My mind was made up. I was going to try my luck in the United States,” he would write in his memoirs. (He titled them “A Long Way From Tipperary.” Curiously, they were never published.) Just nineteen, Rex boarded the SS Celtic in late June 1911. It was his own sad farewell, a scene that Rex would recall emotionally: “My brother . . . just clung to my arm and bit his lips to keep from crying.”
Rex couldn’t have realized he would never see Ireland again.
He landed in New York about a month later and found his way up to New Haven, where his dad had arranged work for him at the dockyards as a night messenger. He started his shift at 6:00 p.m., bringing a sandwich in his pocket for dinner. It must have felt romantic to a romantic young man, but it was likely tough too. The characters at the docks were a colorful bunch, visitors from the world over—a rollicking cast of misfits.
One such regular was a girl named Daisy who apparently reminded Rex of his mother and with whom he instantly fell in love. This would become a pattern for our man. Although not yet twenty, he pestered Daisy to marry him. She refused over and over and ended up leaving the docks altogether. But Rex’s ruminations over his mother loomed large, and throughout his life he often compared girlfriends and prospective lovers—unfavorably—with her.
Back home in Ireland, Francis was unamused by his son’s debauched dockside adventures. If Rex pressed for marriage, his father pressed for college and eventually won out. Rex had heard about a university right nearby with a good reputation. It was called Yale, and in 1912 he enrolled in the fine arts school there.
One of his teachers at Yale, the famed sculptor Lee Lawrie (perhaps best known for the sculpture of Atlas that stands at the front of Rockefeller Center), would become a lifelong mentor. The two men would correspond throughout the next thirty years and collaborate in the promotion of Rex’s most famous film. Rex made lots of friends at Yale and wrote and drew illustrations for the humor magazine. Foreshadowing his imminent rise as a master storyteller, one fellow student recalls him “spending the whole afternoon regaling me with the wildest and most varied tales, all stories created on the spur of the moment.” But in barely a year, Rex had dropped out. The culprit? The strange and blossoming world of motion pictures.
There are chance meetings that can change the direction of your life. As Rex had initially wanted to be a sculptor, I once wanted to be a painter. I left school in London at age sixteen with nothing but a cardboard folder full of drawings and paintings. After pounding some pavement, I found work as a graphic artist in an advertising shop called Ravenna Studios, just off Putney High Street. There I was in a room working alongside three other artists. It was a low-slung room, sort of retro 1950s, not unattractive, with windows all down one side. I spent my days drawing straight lines, making cups of tea, and watering the spider plants. I was quite happy. Like Rex, I was pursuing an artistic life. And then one day, I was hanging up my coat, and there was this coworker, Alan Porter, from the photography department. We were talking about movies, because I loved the movies, and Alan said I should come to these actor workshops at the Oval House. And that was it—my chance meeting.
For Rex, his chance meeting was over Christmas break from Yale in 1913. A classmate took him back to his Long Island home and introduced him to Charles Edison, son of the inventor and movie pioneer Thomas. Conversations with the younger Edison stoked Rex’s passion for movies, and that was it—he was off. He and his Yale friends began to frequent the nickelodeons. His first movie love was Man’s Genesis, made by D. W. Griffith.
Soon, Rex wanted not just to watch films but to make them. He got a job with Edison Studios in the Bronx, in what was then a young, freewheeling industry. The kid was handsome, so it should come as no surprise that with his sharp eyes and soft features, he was quickly thrown in front of the camera as an actor. Rex had done some writing too, and he was further tasked with helping shepherd through some scripts. A strong young man, he was also put to building sets. The movie industry was like this—fast, frenzied, and—for a restless Irish lad looking to make his mark—wide open.
During a busy year or so with Edison, Rex appeared in a string of long forgotten films, with titles like The Necklace of Ramses, Witness to the Will, and Borrowed Finery. He wrote scripts too.
A whirlwind, those first years in film. I remember mine. After the fractured childhood, fig
hting your way through whatever calamity was thrown upon you—by nature, by your parents, by your lack of parents—and trying to work your way through the pain, until suddenly you arrive at a place where you belong. And where you are going to do something big.
Rex was soon to give up his dream of becoming a professional sculptor. It was not easy, and part of the decision was certainly driven by economics. As he wrote to his Aunt Lizzie in 1913, “I can make enough to live in a kind of way in this [movie] business—I could not at sculpture.” A few months later, he left Yale.
It is worth noting that by the time Rex took leave of Yale, he had already managed to piss off most of the people he was working for. Rex just couldn’t help but rile his directors and executives. It might have dashed all his hopes, but then another chance meeting intervened, this time with the famous director D. W. Griffith, who wrote a letter of reference for Rex that he could take around to studios outside the Edison orbit.
These are the steps and half steps and steps backward that would mark what was, for a good while, a fairly steady climb. Rex landed at Vitagraph, a top-notch studio, and there he kept acting. This seems to have been unfortunate. Because while Rex had the looks, he was clearly self-conscious on screen. Whether by his own design or not, he was frequently cast as an artist and often a sculptor, as in films like The Spirit and the Clay and Eve’s Daughter. But despite his real-world experience, Rex struggled to give a convincing performance. And then, in 1914, World War I came along. Thousands of his fellow twentysomethings were sent off to the front lines, and Vitagraph, hit by the wartime economy, as many studios were, had to let Rex go.
A year later, his younger brother, Frank, was sent into battle. This while Rex was looking for a new movie studio to put him in front of the camera. And thus played out the divergent journeys of the Hitchcock brothers, a pattern that would last their whole lives. Frank—rooted, disciplined, and a realist; Rex—restless, rebellious, and a fantasist. As if to thumb his nose at his disapproving father, Rex now legally changed his last name to Ingram, in honor of his late mother.
Rex ended up getting a job at Fox, where he was assigned to work with directors on sharpening up unwieldy scripts. It might be hard to imagine that a studio would hire a director, cast, and crew, build sets, scout locations, and design costumes without a final shooting script in place, but it happened then and it happens now. Still, despite his first steady paycheck, Rex wasn’t interested in coasting along as a master script doctor. He was ready to direct. And when Fox told him to stay in scripts, he walked away, a decision that he would recall ruefully. “And so ended one of the happiest associations of my life,” he wrote. “One from which I learned more than any other in my motion picture career.”
Still just twenty-three, Rex next set his sights on Universal, then led by the formidable Carl Laemmle. He persuaded Laemmle to give him a shot as a director and quickly set out to make his own script that he’d been kicking around, a Pygmalion-like tale called The Great Problem. Rex soon made clear to his crew the obsessive attention to detail that was to prove paramount for him. He re-created New York’s famed Bowery slum on a Universal lot, making sure that everything from the fire escapes to the natural stench were authentic. Rex fans will notice too that one of the waiters in a restaurant scene is a dwarf, or little person. This was a character type that for some reason endlessly fascinated him and would turn up in his films throughout his career.
The Great Problem was released in April 1916, and the reviews were not kind. “A consistently commonplace scenario,” wrote Variety. But in those days, turnaround times were fast, and sour reviews could be quickly steamrolled by better ones. So Rex just threw himself into his next project, a story called Yellow and White, a wild tale of “white slavery” that jumped between China and America. Here, to achieve the authenticity he craved, Rex and his crew visited real opium dens and rented some of the pipes they saw being used, and Rex even bought and smoked some opium himself. Reviews for the film, retitled Broken Fetters, were better, with particular praise for the quality that would propel Rex forward from here on out—his detailed and florid visual style, and beautiful camerawork.
AT THIS TIME, the fast-changing movie business was making its biggest move yet—uprooting itself from the east to the west coast, to what would soon become Hollywood. Carl Laemmle put his vast empire, which included the young director Rex Ingram, onto train cars and headed three thousand miles across the country. In California, the wild and open landscapes, the craggy rocks and wide sandy beaches, offered up visual and aesthetic possibilities Rex had never imagined—a different kind of dreamtime.
My mind was blown too when I first got off the plane in Los Angeles in 1982. Because anything did seem possible. Any stigma of being Irish, or not-British, simply evaporated into the blueness of the California skyline. My late wife, Cassie, and I stayed on North Havenhurst, in the shadow of the Chateau Marmont and just around the corner from Schwab’s deli, where I ate my first LA breakfast. I rented a lime green Pacer from Rent-A-Wreck—the right bumper hanging off and a pillow cushion on the seat so the springs didn’t go up my ass. It didn’t matter. I felt lucky.
The first two films Rex made in his new Southern California home—The Chalice of Sorrow and Black Orchids—starred Cleo Madison, an actress whose career Rex would help launch. Critics were enraptured. A true contrarian, in both films Rex resisted the uplifting endings that were in vogue at the time. If a character needed to lose a lover or a fortune or to simply die off—so be it. Rex didn’t have patience for the all-tied-up-in-a-bow happy ending. Critics noted this tendency, but they seemed to forgive him because of the films’ rich production values and imaginative narratives. A twisted love story, Black Orchids featured violent duels and ruthless killings, dungeons, a strong erotic undercurrent, and even an ape. Despite its strange and saucy content (or perhaps because of it), it opened on New Year’s Day, 1917, to immediate success.
Rex Ingram was now a full-fledged A-list director, and Universal rewarded him with a whopping $300-per-week salary. At the same time, he’d further developed his prickly reputation. He went on to knock out a few lighter films for Universal and demonstrated a flair for creating drama and emotion with his use of lighting. Still, his stubbornness and his temper were continuing to cause trouble. That same year, Carl Laemmle fired his hot-tempered star.
At that time, Rex also suffered another bitter breakup. Cleo Madison had introduced him to a visiting Nebraska girl, an aspiring actress named Doris Pawn. Rex invited Pawn to his house for dinner. In his typically rash and impulsive romantic style, he ended the meal by asking her to get married. Strange? Perhaps even more so because not long after the dinner, they actually tied the knot. Almost as quickly, Rex became bored by her. “We had little in common,” he wrote. “She was beautiful to look at but I could not just sit and admire her all evening.” Then, bang—divorced.
Something of a roller coaster—as I said, you’re up and then you’re down. As these shenanigans were taking place, Rex’s brother, Frank, was off fighting Germans on the front in Europe and earning distinctions for bravery. Inspired, or maybe ashamed of his own luxurious life, Rex finally decided to enlist. He tried to join the U.S. Signal Corps, but his citizenship papers were a mess. And so he enlisted instead with the Royal Flying Corps Canada, which was then part of the British Empire. Here things get murky. By some accounts Rex learned to fly, possibly becoming a flight instructor, and maybe even being badly wounded in a training accident. But the records are not clear.
What is known is that he was discharged in late 1919 after the war ended, and he returned to Hollywood that year with a host of injuries and, apparently, his money just about gone. Friends nursed him back to better health and helped him find physically untaxing, low-level work on sets. He made a half-hearted attempt to win back his estranged wife, Doris, but she would have none of it.
While Rex’s adeptness at pissing people off never left him, neither did his uncanny knack to pull himself out of professional m
isery.
It’s worth noting here that Hollywood and the movie business was an empire being built almost entirely by immigrants, men and women who had recently arrived in our country and who were in fact looking to reinvent themselves. For Rex, not yet thirty, it was not far from the rollicking cast of characters he had first found in the New Haven dockyards—perhaps not misfits, but outsiders nonetheless. One of those figures was fellow Irishman and cofounder of Universal P. A. Powers, from County Waterford. Powers helped Rex to direct two films back at Universal, The Day She Paid and Under Crimson Skies, which together showed the town he had not lost his touch. Around the same time, Rex met an actor who would play a starring role in the next few years of his life, a handsome young Italian immigrant named Rudolph Valentino.
On the heels of his latest two films, the studio Metro Pictures offered Rex a stage adaptation called Shore Acres. He chose to film it in Laguna Beach, because it reminded him of Ireland. He was also determined to cast a beautiful girl he had worked with once before, Alice Taaffe. In his work as a sculptor, Rex often created busts and even full figures inspired by people he met. As part of his courtship of Alice, Rex would ask her to model for a head he was sculpting, but she declined. Camera shy, only after much persuading did she even agree to appear as an extra in the film. But the two seemed to get along. So much so that on his next outing, Hearts Are Trumps, Rex pushed to make her the star. He also assembled a creative team that would prove vital in the coming years—ace cameraman John Seitz and editor Grant Whytock. The pair would remain Rex’s go-to team for his finest films, both for their skills and for the fact that they were among the few crew in town who could actually get along with him.