Mae Murray: The Girl with the Bee-Stung Lips

6. The Disillusions of a Dream Girl

6 The Disillusions of a Dream Girl 1916 When actress Madge Bellamy arrived in Hollywood after a stint on the New York stage, she was ready to turn on her heel and catch the next train home. “I was frightfully disappointed and disillusioned,” she said. “I had it built up in my mind that it was as large as New York, and you can imagine coming from all those tall buildings to one street of one-story buildings.” Eleanor Boardman, covered in soot from the cinders that blew in her face on her train ride from New York, stepped out of the station and was overwhelmed by the fragrance of orange blossoms. When Lina Basquette’s family moved to Hollywood in the late 1910s, their bungalow was across the street from “weeds and cow dung.”1 The Hollywood into which Mae Murray twirled in late 1915 was still a sleepy little Southern California village. Pepper trees, evergreens, and eucalyptus shaded narrow lanes. Orange groves filled the air with perfume. Ranches still encompassed miles in every direction. One-story, ranch-type houses, later known as California bungalows, dotted the streets. The center of town was at the intersection of Cahuenga and Hollywood boulevards. “Beyond Cahuenga there wasn’t much except the rambling Hollywood Hotel,” said writer Scoop Conlon. “No Beverly Hills, no Bel Air, no Westwood; nothing but ranches until one reached—by streetcar—the tiny beach towns of Santa Monica, Ocean Park and Venice, which spread along the Pacific Ocean. They were as sleepy and peaceful as Hollywood. Time was not the essence in those halcyon days.”2 Then, while Hollywood slept, the gypsies came with their cameras and turned their barns into movie studios. Movie-struck people, lured by the promise of gold at the end of their camera lenses, flooded the area by the 48 Mae Murray thousands. In 1915 there were 12,000 engaged in making movies in Hollywood ; by 1917 the number had risen to 20,000.3 Mae firmly believed—and expected—that Zukor would arrange for a brass band to welcome her to Hollywood. “I remember the day I agreed to go to Hollywood,” she wrote. “I walked down Broadway [New York], my head thrown back looking at the clouds and imagining I would dance Mae, shortly before making her first film. Courtesy of Eric T. Rebetti. The Disillusions of a Dream Girl 49 around them in Hollywood where a great band would play for me and yards and yards of carpet would be thrown across the ground for my toes to touch. I could follow my own fantasies over that carpet to the tune of that blaring band.”4 As it turned out, there was no red carpet for her tiny feet to tread and no brass band to announce the arrival of Hollywood’s latest star. When I got to Los Angeles, I was waiting as the train slowed up. No band. I didn’t hear one. Finally I got to the little vestibule, before you get off, and there was a man standing with red roses. I peeped out and he said, “You’re looking for someone?” I said, “Where’s the band?” When I think of it now, how naïve! He said, “No band. I’m here to escort you to the studio.” I said, “No red carpet?” At least that would have meant I was something. He said, “No, I wasn’t told to bring a red carpet.” I felt like just getting on the train and going straight back [to New York]. I felt they had fooled me. Very disappointing , soul-searing for a youngster.5 The driver took her into Hollywood. They passed a large orange grove at the corner of Hollywood and Vine and came to a stop at the corner of Selma and Vine, the nondescript Lasky Studios, which bore no resemblance to the ornate New Amsterdam Theatre. Jesse L. Lasky welcomed her to the studio and assigned her to her first picture, To Have and to Hold (1916). A disappointed Mae had been led to believe in New York that she would be assigned Sweet Kitty Bellairs, based on the popular book that had been turned into a Broadway musical in 1904. To Have and to Hold takes place on the high seas, with Mae playing Lady Jocelyn Leigh, a ward of England’s King James I, who joins a shipment...