Cecil B. DeMille's Hollywood

48. The Golden Bed

48 Famous Players-Lasky for Paramount release. A Cecil B. DeMille Production. Director: Cecil B. DeMille. Scenario by jeanie Macpherson, from the novel Tomorrow's Bread by Wallace Irwin. Art director: Paul Iribe. Photography: J. Peverell Marley. Film editor: Anne Bauchens Length: 8,584 feet (nine reels). Cost: $437,900.66. Released: january 19, 1925. Gross: $8 I6,487.88 Cast: Lillian Rich (Flora Lee Peake), Vera Reynolds (Margaret Peake), Henry B. Walthall (Colonel Peake), Rod LaRocque (Admah Holtz), Theodore Kosloff (Marquis de San Pilar), Warner Baxter (Bunny), Robert Cain (Duc de Savarac), julia Faye (Mrs. Amos Thompson), Robert Edeson (Amos Thompson), jacqueline Wells Dulie Bishop] (Flora as a child), and Charles Clary Games Gordon) DeMille's last film for Paramount before he set up his own studio, The Golden Bed, is best remembered for the perhaps apocryphal story about a bit player who came to the director in later years and said, "Mr. DeMille, you probably don't remember me. I was a harlot in your Golden Bed."! The plot is full of the kind of "red-earth-of-Tara" stuff about doing anything and everything to save the old family homestead, represented by the infamous golden bed. Flora Lee Peake manages to maintain her exotic lifestyle for a time on money her blindly adoring husband has pilfered from company funds. Finally, she gets her comeuppance, and hubby sees the light and marries the sister who has loved him long and from afar. The highlight of the film is the "candy ball," one of DeMille's most erotic sequences, with doting young men biting strategically placed marshmallows from the glittering gowns of Flora Lee's beautiful girlfriends ; but beyond all of the melodramatic and glitzy trappings, The Golden Bed has a haunting quality that is ultimately quite affecting. Henry B. Walthall, who plays the aging Colonel Peake, gained lasting fame as the "Little Colonel" in D.W. Griffith's The Birth ofa Nation (Epoch Producing Corporation, 1915). A fondness for the bottle led him 197 198 / Cecil B. DeMille's Hollywood quickly to the world of bit parts and character roles. In The Golden Bed and films like One Clear Call (Louis B. Mayer-First National, 1922) and Judge Priest (Fox, 1934), Walthall's later parts often drew heavily on the audience's association with his characterization in The Birth ofa Nation. Warner Baxter, who plays Bunny, had been in films for eight years when he made The Golden Bed. He had a checkered career in silent films, starring in the first screen versions of The Awful Truth (Peninsula-P.D.c., 1924) and The Great Gatsby (Famous Players-Lasky,1926), as well as numerous program pictures. His greatest success came with talking pictures when he won an Oscar for his role as the Cisco Kid in In Old Arizona (Fox, 1929) and created the quintessential stage director, Julian Marsh, in 42nd Street (Warner Bros., 1933). For his next picture, DeMille wanted to make a screen adaptation of Marie Corelli's 1895 novel The Sorrows ofSatan; or The Strange Experience of One Geoffrey Tempest, Millionaire. Famous Players-Lasky acquired the property for him, and DeMille planned to shoot the picture in Europe. On December 2, 1924, Adolph Zukor asked Jesse Lasky to open negotiations with DeMille on a new contract; then on December 18, DeMilie received what he called an "ultimatum" from Paramount sales head Sidney R. Kent. "It is not your [cash] advance that we object to so much as the added expense caused by your separate unit from which we feel you get no return commensurate with the expense it costs us," Kent wired from New York. "Mr. Zukor feels that this must be taken off our backs.... Zukor' s [position] must be the general basis on which we meet. ... Appreciate position you placed in by sailing withoutdefinite plans ... but if you would not be interested in any proposal after you reached here, very likely you would not desire sail anyway."2 Despite their differences, DeMille was confident enough that a deal would be worked out that at the end of December he started east by train with his wife, Jeanie Macpherson and her mother, Mitchell Leisen, and cameraman J. Peverell Marley on what was intended to be the first leg of a working vacation in Europe to prepare for making The Sorrows of Satan. Butnegotiations did not go well, and on January 9, 1925, DeMille's contract with Famous Players-Lasky was terminated with sixty-days...