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March 13, 2008

One Hairstyle, Three Memoirs: Alma Rubens, Colleen Moore, Louise Brooks

Alma Rubens, Motion Picture Magazine,
Sept 1925.

I don't know about you, but I needed some relief from the endlessly grim news out of Israel.

So: I took a break, bounced around the internet looking for some new information about Alma Rubens, subject of our popular profile: Alma Rubens: Dope Fiend, But Not a Jewess, and found this magazine cover featuring Alma Rubens when she was still a Hollywood star—before her tragic spiral into addiction and self-destruction.

Notice Alma's modern hairstyle: The Bob. This “modern” cut was first popularized in Hollywood by the great silent star Colleen Moore in her film Dinty, 1920. But it wasn't until Flaming Youth, 1923 that The Bob swept the nation.

Colleen Moore and director Mickey Neilan on location, Dinty, 1920.

Until then, the long elaborately curled tresses of Mary Pickford and Lillian Gish and every major Hollywood star were viewed as the desired American look, certainly a Victorian ideal of purity and innocence celebrated in the films of D.W. Griffith and all his imitators. It was Griffith who gave Lillian Gish and Collen Moore their first jobs in motion pictures.

Moore, fifteen-years old, came to Hollywood in 1917 under a six month contract to D.W. Griffith—as a favor to Moore's uncle, Walter Howey, a powerful newspaper editor with the Chicago Examiner. Howey had been able to get Griffith's The Birth of a Nation and Intolerance past the local city censors. When Griffith asked Howey how he could repay him, Howey answered: “Well, I have a niece who wants to get into pictures.”

An obscure Hollywood factoid: In 1928 two of Uncle Walter's reporters, Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur, wrote a play about him called The Front Page. The play became the basis for four motion pictures, the best adaptation being His Girl Friday 1940, starring Rosalind Russell and Cary Grant as Walter Burns the charming but hard-boiled Chicago newspaper editor who will do and say anything to get a story. Hecht and MacArthur went on to become the two best Hollywood screenwriters—ever.

Anywhoo, back to hair.

Colleen Moore, in her fine autobiography, Silent Star, describes the hard work young female stars went through in order to maintain their elaborate tresses.

Griffith Studios, as well as the others, was strictly do-it-yourself. That included fixing our own hair—washing it, drying it (by hand—hair driers hadn't been invented yet), and putting it up in curlers and rags to make those beautiful long curls that were the current style.

Hairdressing at home and at the studio was arduous enough. On location it was a trial. You had to round up a washtub from somewhere, get a pitcher for rinsing (many, many rinsings to get the bar-soap out of your hair and the shine back in—shampoo hadn't been invented yet, either) and, if you were lucky, someone to help you. Also, plenty of towels. And, of course, on the dusty desert it was not only a trial but an oft-repeated one.

The desert did have one advantage. It was dry. Mary Pickford used to tell me about the problem she had once when she was making a picture on location in a humid climate. Her hair, which was as straight as mine was naturally, would start to droop after a while, so shooting would stop, Mary would put her hair up in curlers and rags, and then the whole company would just sit there for an hour while it dried, so she could go before the camera once again in those famous curls.

Mary Pickford, her cascading curls defined her image.

Lillian Gish, the Victorian ideal. Birth of a Nation, 1915.

Moore felt trapped in the demure ringlets and gingham dresses that she sensed were quickly going out of fashion. When Moore read the sizzling novel Flaming Youth, then learned that it had been optioned for film, she clearly saw her route to stardom.

I begged for the role, but the New York office said I wasn’t the type, I was better in costume parts. I was frantic for fear they’d give the part to someone else.

Colleen’s mother came to the rescue with a simple but brilliant idea, a makeover:

She said, ‘Why don’t we cut your hair?’ I was elated. She picked up the scissors and, whack, off came the long curls. I felt as if I’d been emancipated. Then she trimmed my hair around with bangs like a Japanese girl’s haircut. Five days later I had the part.

And a star was born.

After screening Flaming Youth, F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote:

“I was the spark that lit up Flaming Youth, Colleen Moore was the torch. What little things we are to have caused all that trouble.”

Colleen Moore

Three years later, Louise Brooks took The Bob to the next level, molding the cut into a sleek, futuristic black helmet.

Louise Brooks

Here's a short clip of Colleen Moore in “Ella Cinders,” 1926. Ella wants to be a Hollywood star, thus she follows eye exercises in a self-help book. Notice the split-screen special effects. Moore is magnetic, lively and absolutely charming.
At the height of her career she was making $12,500 a week.

Louise Brooks in her most famous role as Lulu in “Pandora's Box,” 1928, produced in Berlin and directed by G.W. Pabst. Whereas Moore danced lightly across the silver screen, an all American girl, desirable but decent, Brooks smoldered, relentlessly burning with amoral sensuality. Brooks made two great films, then self-destructed,
a dipsomaniac, a nymphomaniac and, um, a misanthropomaniac.

Recommended Reading:

Moore's autobiography is one of the best Hollywood memoirs I've ever read. She writes beautifully and articulately about every aspect of her long and incredibly successful career. Moore was smart. She saved her money and wrote a best-selling book for women about investing in the stock market. Moore also devoted herself to building the most elaborate, exquisitely detailed doll house in existence.

You can pick up used copies of Silent Star here.

Louise Brooks authored a fascinating book of essays about her life and Hollywood. Frequently illuminating, often infuriating, it's nevertheless a captivating memoir that reveals Brooks as a brilliant but undisciplined woman. Her fall from grace—she was never a big star—is vividly etched between every line. In life, Brooks lacked all remorse, empathy, or ability to love. Brooks claimed that she never read any of her film scripts. Of course not. She didn't have to. Brooks played Brooks. Plot didn't matter.

You can order used copies of Lulu in Hollywood here.

Alma Rubens: Silent Snowbird was originally serialized in 1931 as a lurid true confession in newspapers as “This Bright World Again.” Probably ghost written, suffering from some melodramatic touches, and Ruben's stuttering desire to cast herself in the best light, this is still an absolutely fascinating document. It's filled with horrifying details of Ruben's narcotic addiction and her penchant for violence. The most powerful section—clearly authentic—is devoted to her forced eight month confinement in a California mental institution. This is a vivid portrait of hell on earth where patients are routinely beaten and sexually abused, where nurses sell liquor to alcoholic patient-prisoners, and where corrupt physicians peddle narcotics to their addicted patients. It's a snake pit, pitiless and horrifying. Seraphic Secret writes about this book in detail here.

You can order used copies of Silent Snowbird here.

Colleen Moore, Motion Picture Magazine.

Louise Brooks, Motion Picture Classic Magazine.

Seraphic Secret Hollywood Profiles

Theda Bara: The Vamp Adopts the Troops

Movie Magazines: They Don't Print 'em Like They Used To

Alma Rubens: Dope Fiend, But Not a Jewess

Wallace Reid: Hollywood Shooting Star

Olive Thomas: Hollywood's First Suicide

Mary Pickford: The Greatest Movie Star

Seraphic Secret Chats with Actress Coleen Gray about John Wayne, Howard Hawks, and Stanley Kubrick

Louis B. Mayer Goes to Shul

Susan Peters: The Great Unknown and Tragic Actress

The Blond Machine Gun: Jean Harlow

Peg Entwistle & The Hollywood Sign

Brigitte Bardot & Sean Connery in Shalako—Sorta

Michael Kidd: The Last Dance

Let's not forget Anna May Wong, a great actress in silent
and sound films—with a great Bob. Photo circa 1929.

And of course the magnificent Dutch actress Truus van Aalten,
who was enormously influenced by Colleen Moore.

Posted by Robert J. Avrech at March 13, 2008 09:03 AM

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