by Jackie Ganiy
It worked...for a while. Marie put out an album that year, The Body Sings, which sold well. She divorced Karl again for the last time, and a million-dollar settlement. In 1958, she played in the Jerry Lewis comedy, The Geisha Boy, wonderful as a temperamental movie star (not exactly against type). She returned to the Moulin Rouge Theater—formerly the Earl Carroll Theater—where she was fired while still a chorus girl. This time, she was the headliner, and felt well-earned triumph as the curtains rose to a roaring crowd. Harry Karl was in the house, with an agenda. He paid minions to shower her with eleven bouquets of red roses as she took her final bows on stage, and when she returned to her dressing room, there was a $10,000 mink coat and a Cartier watch waiting for her. Seriously? Didn’t she accuse him of kidnapping her the year before? Why did she divorce this guy again?
Marie could have had a long, enviable nightclub career, but she let go of the movie star dream, despite the profound frustration of it. She married two more men, Louis Bass and Edward Callahan, and if you’ve not kept count, that makes six marriages to five men in twenty years. That beats Liz Taylor’s record. Speaking of Liz, Marie dated Michael Wilding, who was married to Taylor at the time, but he would not leave her for Marie. Taylor dumped him for Mike Todd anyway, and the beat goes on.
In 1963, Marie did one last film, with another over-the-top, blonde dynamo—Jayne Mansfield. Promises, Promises was bad all-around, from the horrible set, to the tasteless, semi-pornographic end product. Jayne disliked Marie right away, probably out of jealousy (no one ever called her “the body”). Both stars were in their twilight years. Neither had been an A-lister, and both were reduced to doing semi-nude scenes while mugging outrageously for the cameras in an “independent” film that would be banned in several states upon release. Jayne thought Marie was getting special concessions and trying to upstage her (I’m sure she thought this about every actress she ever worked with), so she made Marie’s life a living hell on set. Marie couldn’t wait for the whole thing to be over.
Soon, it would be over for Marie. She had already tried suicide once, shortly after her second divorce from Karl. She was hooked on Percodan, and suffering from chronic insomnia. She had a nervous collapse while on a nightclub tour in Australia, and was committed to a psychiatric institution, from which she made a daring escape, claiming they were trying to brainwash her. Back in the 'States, she was arrested for trying to forge Percodan prescriptions, and placed on probation. She had bleeding ulcers, and her heart stopped during an operation to remove part of her stomach in an attempt to stop the bleeding. Unbelievably, she married for a seventh time, in 1964, to the co-producer of Promises, Promises (hmm, maybe she was receiving special treatment), Donald Taylor.
It was Taylor who found her slumped over her dressing table, dead from a overdose of either Seconal or Percodan, no one seems to know. She was forty-two. Her death was ruled an accidental suicide, but maybe Marie just got tired of it all. Taylor walked into that same room, and took a fatal overdose himself, two years later.
Marie desperately wanted to be a movie star, not just a novelty act. Too bad the drama in her real life far outweighed any performance she ever gave on film. The sad footnote to her legacy is that she is still remembered as “The Body,” and not as the pretty, talented and versatile human being who gave Judy Holiday a run for her money in Born Yesterday.
Margaux Hemingway
The camera soft-focuses on a beautiful woman, her silk scarf blowing in the wind, the hint of a seductive smile playing on her lips, as she dabs perfume from a large bottle to place behind her ears. Her face is arresting, her cheekbones chiseled and high on her face, her mouth seductive and her thick eyebrows lend an almost scholarly impression. Cut to the same girl, floating down a river in an evening gown, drinking champagne and laughing, beside a gentleman in a tuxedo. The message is clear. You too can feel beautiful and live a glamorous life. Just buy this perfume, and the world is your oyster. But for the girl in the ad herself, it was an illusion; a cruel lie that she would be unable or unwilling to overcome; a sentiment that would eventually destroy her.
Margaux, and her sister, Mariel.
Photos and videos of Margaux betray the striking similarity between her and her famous grandfather, Ernest Hemingway. She had the same intense eyes, the same thick, dark brown eyebrows, and the same thoughtful expression. With those, she also inherited his restless spirit, his love of alcohol and his clinical depression.
Born Margot Louise Hemingway in Portland, Oregon, she changed her first name to Margaux after learning that her parents, Puck and Jack, conceived her after downing a bottle of Chateau Margaux wine. She grew rapidly from her awkward stage adolescence, and into a statuesque, six-foot stunner by age fourteen. Her family, including baby sister Mariel and elder sister Joan, moved back to the Hemingway family farm in Ketchum, Idaho; where her grandfather shot himself in 1961. Her father, Jack, was as fanatical an outdoorsman as his father was, and life on the farm was paradise.
Her beauty got her discovered. During a trip to New York, while lounging in the famed Palm Court at the Plaza Hotel, she was seen by promoter Errol Weston. He saw her potential on the spot. Almost overnight, she had a million-dollar contract as the spokesperson for Faberge’s new perfume, Babe. It was the first million-dollar contract ever awarded to a model.
She moved in with, then married Weston, and hit the '70s disco party circuit. Studio 54 was a drug and celebrity infused, glittering den of iniquity that would spin anyone’s head, but Margaux had been a regular there since she was a kid, sailing right past the velvet ropes, mingling with the likes of Liza Minnelli, Bianca Jagger and Andy Warhol. She appeared on the covers of Vogue and Time, and amassed a vast collection of designer clothes—mostly gifts from her modeling gigs. She was one of the first supermodels to be known by her name, and not just her face.
With the fame and attention also came the drugs and alcohol. Because she was famous, her age was no problem when she wanted a drink. She used to say “I don’t need my ID. I have my eyebrows!” Studio 54 was well-known for its drug-friendly environment. It was the '70s! Literally everyone around her was doing them, including the rich and famous; her new “friends,” whom she desperately wanted to impress.
What she had working for her in this was her relation to one of the greatest American writers of the 20th century. Celebrities are drawn to other celebrities, especially those whose mythos dwarfs their own. Her grandfather’s larger-than-life legend went beyond his exquisite books and short stories. He was a towering figure: sportsman, adventurer, and an epic hellraiser. He was also an alcoholic, and to Margaux, living up to the name meant being able to drink herself into a stupor without it showing—partying all night at Studio 54, then ready and able the next day for those 6 AM photo shoots. A lot of substances are needed to accomplish that, even for the young. Margaux had a secret that made this lifestyle particularly risky. She was an epileptic, and had to take phenobarbital—a very powerful drug—to control her seizures. Alcohol and phenobarbital are a dangerous combination. Soon, she was also a coke fiend, and her marriage crumbled.
In 1976, she made her film debut in Lipstick, a slick mystery about a model who is stalked and raped by a psychopath. It also featured her baby sister, Mariel. The movie was terrible. The script, the direction, and the acting were all brutally panned by critics, and audiences stayed away. Mariel’s performance was the one bright spot in the film. Critics raved about the fourteen-year-old, predicting a successful career ahead for her. Margaux felt the public had tired of her, and now sought the next Hemingway to fetishize. “It was as if people were tired of me and gave her all the attention,” she said years later. The critics were right about Mariel. Her career took off, and she spent the next decade as an A-lister in Hollywood, while her sister spiraled into oblivion.
In 1979, Margaux married Venezuelan filmmaker, Bernard Foucher, and moved to Paris. Does it get more glamorous than that? A supermodel, a South American filmmaker, and Paris. Should have been bliss. It wasn’t
. They attempted a film project together, a documentary about her grandfather, which took four years of Margaux’s life, going absolutely nowhere. Frustrated and depressed, she divorced for the second time in 1985, and turned down a darker road towards dysfunctional alcoholism. She gained seventy-five pounds, often contemplated suicide, and wondered what she was going to do with the rest of her life. She might have died back then, if she hadn’t checked herself into the Betty Ford Clinic. She emerged from her twenty-eight-day stay confident that her life was back on track.
But the world had moved on. She was in her thirties, still ravishing, but in a town where youth is everything, she was over the hill. She had made one film since Lipstick, a French movie called Love in C Minor, which did nothing to further her career in America. Her options were limited, she owed money to the IRS, and she was in debt, so she decided to take Hugh Hefner’s offer, and pose nude in Playboy.
OK, so now that’s out of the way, where does an out-of-work actress go from there? Margaux couldn’t answer that. There were no offers, either for modeling or films, so she embarked on a spiritual journey that would take her from a shaman’s tent in the northwest, all the way to the shores of India. Things went badly in India, however, where her behavior became erratic in a culture with strict social guidelines. She spent time in an Indian jail before friends and family were able to bring her back to the 'States and hospitalize her. She was losing her grip on reality.
By the mid-'90s, she had alienated most of her family, and was living alone in a rented bungalow in Santa Monica. She had only been living there for three weeks when it all came to an end. On July 1, having not heard from Margaux for three days, her friend, Judy Stabile, went to the apartment to check on her. She got no response when she knocked, so she peeked in through the bedroom window, and saw a horrific scene.
Judy enlisted the aid of a nearby construction worker to break into the house. He took two steps in, then quickly stepped back out, saying the smell was overwhelming. They called police. The scene was more than a little strange. Margaux’s nightstand had been set up like a pagan altar, with human- shaped candles, pendants encircled by a white satin ribbon, and pieces of paper that had been crumpled into the shape of hearts. On the pieces of paper were written “love, healing, protection for Margaux forever.” Margaux’s body was badly decomposed, severely bloated, and her skin blackened and slipping. She had been lying in there with no air conditioning, in the Southern California early-summer heat, for three days. She was found thirty-five years—almost to the day—from her grandfather’s death. She was forty-one. The long goodbye was over.
The odds were stacked against Margaux. Her great grandfather, grandfather and uncle had all committed suicide. Mental illness and alcoholism were family traditions, never addressed, always swept under the great, all-encompassing fabric of the Hemingway legacy. Margaux based her self-esteem on her appearance, and when her looks began to fade, she had nothing else to hold onto, so she just fell. She kept on falling until she hit the bottom, and checked out with an overdose of phenobarbital.
The sad truth is, Margaux had really checked out years before. The woman found dead in Santa Monica barely resembled that girl who sold millions of bottles of perfume, and floated down a river in an evening gown, all those years ago.
Maybe she never really was that girl at all.
Lupe Vélez
Jimmy Durante, Lupe Velez, and the Mills Brothers in Strictly Dynamite (1934)
The elaborate bedroom was straight out of a Hollywood movie set. The floor covered in a thick, plush white rug; floor-to-ceiling mirrors on the walls; candles and flowers positioned to confer the hushed effect of a chapel. Two huge portraits of a beautiful woman hung across from each other, while a huge ten-foot wide bed, with massive black, silver and gold headboard, dominated the space. Above the headboard, a giant gilt crucifix. Lying in the bed, swathed in white satin sheets, full stage makeup, and a lovely formal gown, was the “Mexican Spitfire” of movies, Lupe Vélez. She looked ready for her close-up, Mr. DeMille—her last one. Decades later, a vile little Hollywood hanger-on would tarnish this image, with allegations of a vomit-laden trail leading from the bed to the bathroom, and a woman whose head was jammed down a toilet in a decidedly grotesque and unglamorous pose, drowned. It’s time to set the record straight.
Lupe was born in San Luis Potosi, Mexico in 1908. A gifted dancer, she adored performing from an early age. As a child, she sold kisses to men, in exchange for portraits of her favorite movie stars. In 1927, she moved to Los Angeles, and caught the eye of producer Hal Roach, who cast her in her first film, Sailors Beware. She followed this up with a breakout role in the Douglas Fairbanks adventure film, The Gaucho. At first, Douglas Fairbanks didn’t think she exuded enough spunk for the character, but when a stagehand stole her dog as a prank, the barely five-foot-tall actress severely beat him, and seeing this, Fairbanks he hired her on the spot. Gaucho made her a star.
Lupe wasted no time in living up to her various nicknames, which included The Mexican Spitfire, The Tornado, The Hot Tamale (racist, I know), The Hot Pepper, and the not-so-subtle Whoopee Lupe. Her temper itself was famous, as were her numerous and highly publicized love affairs. Her lovers included Charlie Chaplin, Douglas Fairbanks, Clark Gable, Tom Mix, John Gilbert (must have been on the rebound from Garbo), and many others. She had a reputation for outrageous public behavior, including violent public brawls with her love interests, and crude, cockfight-and-pornography punctuated private parties. She left scars on her lovers, both physical and mental, and crammed several lifetimes of baggage into her brief tenure on this earth. She said “I do not like to see any one man too often. The same face over and over. Pretty soon his nose begins to look like the nose of a dog to Lupe.”, and “People want to talk and I like to give them something to talk about.” Often compared to the other Latina Hollywood star, stoic Delores Del Rio, Del Rio’s classier image was a stark contrast to Vélez’s childish shenanigans and publicity stunts.
She went on to play exotic leads in several well-received films, including Resurrection, West of Zanzibar, The Half-Naked Truth, and (what else) Hot Pepper. She got involved with a very young Gary Cooper in the late '20s, and their public brawls made the headlines for three tumultuous years. Lupe proclaimed that Cooper had the biggest organ in Hollywood (and who would know this better?), but not the ass to push it in well.” This is blush-inducing stuff, people. Vélez was notoriously jealous, reportedly tailing Cooper wherever he went, and insisting on being on the set whenever he made a movie. In an act that gives Scent of a Woman a whole new meaning, she once unzipped his pants in public, went down on her knees and smelled his crotch, proclaiming she could smell another woman’s perfume. Cooper wanted to marry her, believe it or not, and all good Catholic girls want to get married (don’t they?), but his mother did not approve. Wonder why. When he finally married someone else, Lupe didn’t take it so well. She followed him to the train station, pulled out a pistol and shot at him, narrowly missing as he dove into to a car. Wow, spitfire indeed.
In 1934, Lupe licked her wounds by marrying male physical perfection personified, Olympic champion and Tarzan star, Johnny Weissmuller. She left her mark on this man as well, or should I say marks, as in scratches, bruises and bites. This girl needed to learn that passion is one thing; violent rage another thing entirely. Her appetite for sex was insatiable, and it has been said that she loved like a wild animal. Her sexual aggression knew no restraint, and she flirted with the description “nymphomaniac”. The marriage lasted five years, which is shocking in and of itself.
She began making a series of pictures called The Mexican Spitfire, which became the work for which she was best known. The series exploited her race and her reputation so overtly that it seems unlikely she would ever have been able to overcome the typecasting fallout, and be allowed to play different, more serious roles. As the popularity of the theme waned, she found herself on the far side of her thirties, no longer young by Hollywood standards, and dating a
smalltime Austrian actor who worked part-time dubbing French dialogue in films for Warner Brothers—quite a comedown from Gary Cooper and Johnny Weissmuller. His name was Harald Ramond, and she soon found herself pregnant with his child.
According to most written accounts, when Lupe informed Ramond about the pregnancy, he was cavalier and aloof, refusing to marry her. Lupe’s own suicide note served to skewer his reputation by leaving the world with the impression that he was a heartless cad, who abandoned her, and their child, to their fate. “To Harald. May God forgive you and forgive me to take my life and our baby’s, before I bring him up with shame, or killing him. Lupe”. However, Ramond told a newspaper years later, that Lupe had been the love of his life, and that he intended to marry her, but they had yet to set a date. Really?
I guess no one told Lupe. Despondent, and acutely aware that news of an illegitimate child would destroy what little remained of her career, she bid farewell to a few friends on the evening of December 14, 1944, then climbed the stairs to her lavish master bedroom suite. She lit candles, arranged flowers, dimmed the lights, dressed herself with great care, then descended into her massive bed, took seventy-five Seconal tablets, and died. She was thirty-six. Here’s where fact and myth diverges. In Kenneth Anger’s infamous slash-and burn, tell-all mess Hollywood Babylon, Lupe doesn’t actually die in her bed, but is suddenly awakened with violent nausea, and crawls, puking all the way, to her bathroom toilet, where she passes out with her head still inside the toilet bowl. Her housemaid discovers her the following morning, still as she passed out, with her head stuck in the toilet. Since the only accounting of this ever happening comes from Anger, and is not backed up by any official reports or eyewitness accounts, the only conclusion to be drawn is that Anger was mistaken (I’m being polite).