by Mark Bailey
Directing Alice on set one day, Rex had a thought and tossed her a blonde wig. She didn’t see the need for it but agreed under pressure to put it on. They both ended up admiring how pretty the brunette looked as a blonde. It was a look she would keep throughout her career. But there was something else about Alice that the perfectionist Rex didn’t entirely appreciate: her last name, Taaffe. From now on, he told her, you’re Alice Terry. Terry was his mother’s mother’s name.
Hearts Are Trumps won warm reviews and strong box office. And, crucially, it turned a Metro studio powerhouse named June Mathis into a believer in all things Rex. Mathis had worked on the script for the film and would champion Rex for the next picture under her wing—the one that would become Rex Ingram’s masterwork.
THERE WAS A bestselling book in 1921: the multigenerational antiwar epic The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse by Vicente Blasco Ibáñez. June Mathis urged Metro to buy the rights and was then asked to write the script and oversee production. She chose Rex to direct.
Mathis and Rex also pushed the studio to allow the very green actor and dancer Rudolph Valentino to take a leading role. Mathis offered him an impressive $100 a week, a windfall for the young man. Rex successfully fought for Alice Terry, now his lover, to play a leading role. Another Rex Ingram discovery—a Mexican actor named Ramón Samaniegos, later Ramon Novarro—plays an extra.
Nearly everything about Horsemen grew wildly out of control: massive and lavish sets, ferocious battle scenes, and a notoriously demanding twenty-eight-year-old director led to a production that lasted an ungainly six months—unheard of in that era. About twelve thousand people worked on the film, and there were single sets that cost as much as many of the studio’s entire films. Officially, the final budget was $650,000, a staggering amount at the time and a Metro record.
Rex put his artistic talent to work creating detailed storyboards for key scenes. Coming on the heels of the Great War, Horsemen featured full-pitch battle scenes with hundreds of extras that shocked many viewers for their raw power. To achieve these effects, Rex let loose the camera department, sometimes deploying more than a dozen cameras for a single scene.
And for many viewers, there was one scene that stole the movie and made a superstar of Rudolph Valentino. A smoldering Valentino, whip in hand, seizes his partner on the dance floor of a raucous saloon and dances a tango with her that melts the screen. If you haven’t seen the actual scene, you have seen imitations and parodies, so it is surely lodged in your consciousness. Audiences devoured the film. President Warren Harding requested a private viewing. Horsemen made a tidy fortune for Metro, Rex, and its top stars, grossing about $4 million. This was the pinnacle, the high-water mark for this Irish lad who had arrived on our shores barely a decade earlier.
It was at this time that the press started to focus on Rex’s art world background and his time at Yale. He was becoming known as a “sculptor of the screen,” an image that Metro worked hard to promote. The studio commissioned Rex’s former mentor, Lee Lawrie, to make a sculpture of the four horsemen of the apocalypse—exhibiting the piece at the premiere and using the image in the press. Yale was more than willing to embrace its celebrity alum (never mind that he’d dropped out), bestowing on the director an actual fine arts degree. Rex himself saw a very clear connection between the influence of sculpture and his work in film: “As time went on I began to realize how valuable my training in the art school was going to prove.” Indeed, even then, during his directorial prime, Rex still found time to keep up on his sculpting.
How he managed, I can’t say. For me, I’m drawing all the time and, when on set, will cover my scripts with sketches. But I am rarely painting. That is for home, for the recovery. My painting comes from a need to make something beautiful, and it gives meaning to my time between acting, between making movies. But Rex was different.
At this point, professionally speaking, Rex could write his own ticket. But he and Valentino had predictably quarreled on the Horsemen set, as Rex’s rough and controlling style rankled the young heartthrob. Filmmaking is in fact a far cry from sculpting. Given how many people actually share in the production, it demands almost unceasing collaboration. There are directors like Rex (and I have worked for them) who are just so incredibly specific in their vision—unwavering. I have the greatest admiration for that, although I am not of that cloth. I feel it’s essential to always try to keep your ego in check, to be generous of heart. Though of course that is easier said than done. Rex was an artist, in his studio or on a film set, a true artist of chisel and hammer and clay. He seems to have wanted that control always. But in Hollywood, I have to say, it helps to get along.
In the end, Metro was able to keep their lucrative team together, Rex and Valentino, along with Alice Terry, for at least another film. Rex was also able to keep together the key crew that had crafted so much of Horsemen’s visual power.
Next up was a picture called The Conquering Power, and Rex’s fighting with Valentino continued. To complicate matters, there were rumors of a possible love triangle involving the Metro exec June Mathis, Valentino, and Rex—this though Rex was still very much involved with Alice Terry. In the end, both Mathis and Valentino decamped for rival Paramount, leaving the star director on his own. Metro’s publicity machine put a clever spin on the departure: “Ingram was a very independent Irishman.” But surely it must have hurt.
To close out the frenetic year, Rex took on the duel-filled, swashbuckling adventure story The Prisoner of Zenda. Perhaps missing Valentino, he was eager to groom another Latin heartthrob, and so he coached Ramón Samaniegos, that extra from Horsemen. Formerly a singing waiter, Samaniegos restyled himself Ramon Novarro, played a sexy villain in Zenda, and another star was born. Zenda was a clear winner, both at the box office and in the press. But the most memorable event surrounding the film was personal. One Saturday after shooting, Rex and his star, Alice Terry, quietly walked off set and decided to get married. They spent the next day watching movies and then jumped right back into production on Monday. They wouldn’t announce the event until after the film was finished and they were on their honeymoon.
Rex’s marriage would last the rest of his life. But though he and Alice seemed to keep a fairly stable series of homes, it’d be hard to call theirs a storybook romance. Long separations were frequent. Rex’s memoirs tell stories about romps with prostitutes, and he wrote of Alice that “my feeling for her was platonic.” As for Alice, she told a biographer that “we were very good friends.” Friends said they seemed to enjoy each other’s company, got along well, and that each provided a sounding board for the stresses of Hollywood. Alice was sweet, capable, and levelheaded—a calming force for the anxiety and rages that often overcame Rex.
Soon after their marriage, in 1921, the two also began to talk openly and with studio heads about their desire to move to Europe and set up a studio in the South of France. Was Rex done with America? Or was he just a restless soul? He claimed to crave greater autonomy from the studios, and he hungered to shoot in southern European and northern African locations. Surely this was part of it. But there is to Rex the aura of the perpetual outsider. His tribe was nomadic. I am not exempt from this. I love to work as an actor, and part of that is you pack your bags and hit the road. Because after two or three months here at home—yes, even with the blue Pacific and my painting—I need to get onto a movie set or I lose the thread of who I am. For Rex, well, he had been in Hollywood an awfully long time. And given that his earning power was now huge, it was the right time to push.
In the breakneck pace of the silent era, Rex and Alice decided to make just a few quick films before the move. Where the Pavement Ends was another hit. But while making the film, he was dealt a bruising blow. Rex had been expecting to direct the big-budget Ben-Hur, but his former partner, studio exec June Mathis, held the keys to that one, and she chose a lesser-known director. Rex was crushed. Adding salt to the wound, Novarro, the star he had created, would be cast in the lead. Rex was so enraged th
at crew noticed he began drinking heavily, unusual for him. Too broken up inside, he was unable to finish Pavement, and Alice was brought in to close it. Rex made a vow: one more film, and he was done with Hollywood.
It was 1923, and for his final American-based film ever, Rex set his sights on the French Revolution epic Scaramouche. For his last hurrah, Rex worked in perfect sync with his cinematographer and editor, and showed himself to be at the height of his powers. Not only did Scaramouche score with viewers, but many critics praised it for a new level of visual artistry. But despite this success, Rex was weary of Hollywood, and, to a degree, of directing as well. Still a young man, he found himself at a crossroads. He bought a house, an old Moorish villa in faraway Tunis, and in March of that year declared that he was quitting filmmaking altogether to focus solely on sculpture. Was this ever really Rex’s intention, or just a fantasy? Lord knows, a long, hard production will plant dreams of escape. But in the end, Rex and Alice would set sail for the South of France—a place of true enchantment.
REX MOVED TO Europe in part to be closer to home. Political violence was shaking Ireland and Britain at the time. Rex’s father, a Protestant minister, had found himself in the crossfire. Rex had wanted to visit him and Frank in Ireland for several years, but work commitments never allowed. By 1924 Reverend Hitchcock had finally had enough, and he fled Ireland for a parish in southern England. Rex’s brother, Frank, soon followed. Rex and Alice stopped in England to visit them—the first encounter between father and son in thirteen years.
At this point, Rex needed a physical film studio to use as a base. He found the perfect location in southern France. Victorine Studios, on a hill overlooking Nice, had been built a few years earlier but was run-down and in receivership. Rex rented it and set out to craft the studio of his dreams.
He brought over to Nice his core production team and as many additional players as the studio would send. For the first production at Victorine, Rex wanted to make maximum use of the Mediterranean setting. Novelist Vicente Ibáñez, author of Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, had written the romantic Great War espionage tale Mare Nostrum (Latin for “our sea”). But Victorine’s crude and deteriorating facilities proved a tough fit for Rex, leading to near-constant production hurdles, delays, and budget overruns. The oceanic melodrama required two submarines and a huge water tank to shoot battle scenes.
It was a high-stress production, but Rex also found himself the object of attention from a number of Europe’s movie luminaries and his studio something of a global salon. Many would make the pilgrimage to Victorine and his sets, eager to see the working methods of the famously prickly but charming Irishman—Henri Matisse, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Charlie Chaplin, European royals, Douglas Fairbanks, Mary Pickford, and a parade of others.
What they saw was a stubborn, obsessive go-it-aloner who would do anything to craft a perfect shot. French filmmaker Jean de Limur observed that “Rex was quite stubborn . . . Nobody could cross him. He was his own producer.” On the other hand, Rex’s overbearing style was a relief to some on the team. “Rex knew what he wanted and visualized it. Most of the film directors of those days made their films without a real script, but Rex Ingram knew what he was going to shoot,” noted actor Andrews Engelmann. Rex held such clout with the studio by now that he was even able to retain a tragic ending to the film, continuing to buck the wider trend of tidy, pat endings served up to the moviegoing masses.
Mare Nostrum took more of Rex’s time than any other film he made. Over the course of the fifteen-month production he shot more than a million feet of film. When it came out at last in 1926, it won strong reviews, and French audiences were so smitten that they made Rex a Chevalier of the Legion of Honor. Victorine also suddenly became available for sale, and Rex, by now extremely wealthy, bought it up. He paid $5 million and said he would lease it back to what was now Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer for productions. But buying such a complex foreign property would end up backfiring, as the investment over time would become a knotty mess.
By the late 1920s, Rex, sometimes accompanied by Alice or friends, sometimes alone, would travel throughout North Africa whenever he had a chance. Rex found Algeria and Tunisia as magical as he had imagined when he was a boy, and he grew extremely fond of Arab cultures and the Islamic faith, coming to feel that life in the West was decadent and suffering under the self-inflicted blows of the Depression. Finally, he officially converted to Islam, rejecting the faith of his father and family to embrace what he saw as a beatific spiritual outlook. He even adopted an Arabic name, Ben Aalem Nacir ed’ Deen. In his memoirs, he spells out his attractions to Arabs and Islam: “The desert nomad can pack all his earthly goods in a couple of camel bags. He is richer, more free and happier than the richest man in the world.”
But material matters also consumed Rex. Although his next film, The Garden of Allah, was a modest success, it was a struggle for Rex in many ways. He was plagued with health problems, including chest pains and stomach ulcers that had dogged him for years and were getting worse. Just before making it, his longtime cameraman and editor both told Rex they were through with him and Victorine, and returned to Hollywood. Strife on the set led to widespread sour feelings.
He also had a visit from his father while shooting, which can’t have helped. Reverend Hitchcock was alarmed at his son’s drift into Islam and wanted to advise him on some of the religious aspects of the film. Perhaps tellingly, Rex would produce during this time one of his most enigmatic sculptures—a sleeping Christ in the arms of Buddha. His father was said to detest it.
After this film, MGM told Rex it wouldn’t be renewing his contract unless he returned to America, but Rex refused. At the same time, Rex’s ownership of Victorine was also proving enormously costly—in 1930, he was forced to sell it at a loss.
It is a capricious game, filmmaking. Now isolated, without the studio he had built, shunned by many of the industry’s top players, and financially troubled, Rex nonetheless tried to carry on. Alice, though, had lost her appetite for acting. She could not reconcile herself to the era of talking films and called it quits.
Unmoored, Rex plunged ahead with one last film. He cobbled together funds to make his first and only talkie, Baroud. Unable to find a leading man (and maybe to save money as well), Rex decided to take the lead himself. The rest of the cast was a mishmash of unknowns speaking in multiple tongues (which mattered in talkies) and seemingly disconnected from one another. Rex found it hard to radically alter his directing style to accommodate synced sound, and the bumpy results show up on screen. By the end, for various reasons, Rex was unable even to finish Baroud, and Alice had to step in again to direct. The film, retitled Love in Morocco for American audiences, was a flop, both critically and in theaters, and Rex’s performance was panned as well.
Rex had finally reached the end of his career. While Alice returned to the United States to visit her ailing mother, Rex spent the next few years exploring North Africa. He returned to California in 1936, and the couple settled in their house on Kelsey Street, in the Valley. Was he home? To some degree, I think, more so than in Ireland or England. But then Rex really seemed to live in his art.
Rex’s time in the San Fernando Valley in the late 1930s and 1940s was marked by some socializing and a good bit of travel around America, as well as sculpting and writing. That is in fact where we found him at our open, puttering about the studio, his hands deep in clay, while inside Alice kept her own company. In 1939, he had a novel published, Mars in the House of Death. No one seemed to give it much notice. But in that same year a far more successful book came out, James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake. Rex must have been delighted to see a reference in it to “Rex Ingram, pageant-master.”
When the United States entered the Second World War in 1941, Rex became a naturalized U.S. citizen and offered up to the authorities his knowledge of the Arab world should it be desired. The timing strikes a chord in me. I myself decided to become an American citizen the night of the “hanging chad,” Election Day, 2000.
My wife, Keely, and I rode our bikes down to the local polling station that evening. Al Gore was ahead. Keely voted as I stood outside the box, the silent partner with no vote. By the time we rode home twenty minutes later, George W. Bush was on his way to becoming president. I remember Keely saying, “We’re going to war.” That night was a turning point for me. After twenty years of paying taxes and living an American life, I needed to have a voice. So for Rex, what with the Second World War, and himself growing older, maybe that is some of what he was feeling.
Although he was not quite fifty, his health was getting worse. Along with his stomach issues, Rex suffered from high blood pressure. He kept a low profile, though Hollywood nobility like John Ford counted themselves among his friends, and sculpted more or less full time. He kept in touch with Lee Lawrie, who would later write that Rex’s “discerning judgment on the Fine Arts used to astonish me.” And he stayed in close contact by letter with his father and brother, still in England. Neither was physically well—his brother, Frank, wracked by war injuries, and his dad by old age. He frequently sent them money and well wishes. He also still nurtured dreams of returning some day to visit Ireland. “I must go,” he wrote them, “having been away since 1911. Maybe the three of us could meet in Dublin.” But it was not meant to be. He sailed to see them both in a joyous reunion in London, in 1947. From London, he returned to Egypt and Morocco, but his health was getting worse, and he was beginning to suffer heart attacks. In 1948, he struggled to make his way back home to Los Angeles.
In early July 1950, Alice took him into the hospital for some heart tests. On her birthday, July 24, Rex told her to go shop for something pretty for herself. When she got home, the hospital called. Rex was unconscious. Alice rushed there, and he died soon after she arrived. He was fifty-seven.
THE GREAT FILMMAKER Erich von Stroheim called Rex “the world’s greatest director.” Directing legend Michael Powell (whose career, incidentally, Rex had helped launch) once admitted, “Rex was all-powerful and acknowledged no master.” By the time of his mid-1930s suburban exile, it would have taken Rex’s giant Auburn 851 Supercharged Speedster barely twenty minutes to get to most of the big movie studios. But by then his film career had crashed to a halt. Despite his massive talent, his obsessive perfectionism and contrarian creative style had finally pushed him out of Hollywood’s innermost sanctum.