My review of Elizabeth Wilson’s spy novel, The Girl in Berlin, is posted today at For Books’ Sake.

Many films of the silent era are now lost, but only one of them starred Greta Garbo. In 1993, a nine-minute reel from The Divine Woman (1928) was found at Moscow’s Gosfilmofond archive.

Philip J. Riley, a former musician, has published a series of books about vintage monster films, including another lost silent gem, London After Midnight (1927), starring Lon Chaney, also novelised.

Following the Chaney vehicle, Riley has reprinted Gladys Unger’s The Divine Woman with a short introduction, shedding new light on a long-forgotten story.

In 1928, MGM’s production chief, Irving Thalberg, commissioned Unger – author of the 1925 play, Starlight, on which Dorothy Farnum’s screenplay was based – to write a tie-in ‘novelette’ to accompany The Divine Woman’s cinematic release.

The story is loosely based on the early life of Sarah Bernhardt, the fabled actress who dominated the Parisian theatre during the later 19^th century.  Known as ‘the divine Sarah’, she died in 1923. Bernhardt was known for embellishment, so if the plot is mostly fantasy, this may not be a grave concern.

Perhaps more than any other movie star, Greta Garbo inspired not merely lust, or envy, but awe. She too was often described as ‘divine’.

Born in Stockholm in 1905, and ‘discovered’ by the Swedish film-maker, Mauritz Stiller, Garbo made her Hollywood debut at twenty, and quickly became the world’s most feted star. She played alongside her real-life lover, John Gilbert, in Flesh and the Devil (1927.)

Garbo’s austere beauty and melancholic persona were far removed from the flappers of the day – and yet, she captured the imagination. Her innate shyness only enhanced her mystique.

The narrative can be divided into three distinct episodes. In the first, the young Marah is brought from the provincial farm (where she was raised by her adoptive family), to Paris by a theatrical producer, Monsieur Carre, who introduces Marah to her real mother, the courtesan Rosine.

Next, the rejected daughter finds herself on the streets of Paris, where she falls in love with Lucien, a soldier.  She goes to work for Madame Pigonnier, an elderly seamstress. After hearing that he is to be dispatched to Africa, Lucien deserts the army and goes into hiding with Marah.

In the final chapters, Lucien is arrested. Alone again, Marah is drawn to the stage and quickly becomes the most popular actress in Paris. But she is privately unhappy and longs for Lucien’s return, though he feels that she has betrayed him.

This melodramatic storyline is typical of Garbo’s early films. However, The Divine Woman was directed by Victor Sjöström, edited by Conrad A. Nervig, and featured another Swede, Lars Hanson, as Lucien. This would have been very agreeable to Garbo, who was lonely in Hollywood. (Just four years earlier, Hanson had appeared in The Saga of Gösta Berling, Garbo’s breakthrough film with Stiller.)

A year after The Divine Woman, Garbo starred in Love, an adaptation of Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina. Unlike many silent stars (including John Gilbert), Garbo made a successful transition to sound in Anna Christie (1930.)

She became MGM’s highest-paid star, and was able to pick and choose her later roles: from historical figures like Sweden’s Queen Christina (1933) to literary heroines like Camille (1936.) In 1939’s Ninotchka, she played a rare comedic role to further acclaim.

In 1941, aged just 36, Garbo retired from the screen. Several comeback projects were mooted but never materialised. She later moved to New York and was dubbed the world’s most famous recluse, though she travelled quite widely.

Garbo had lasting relationships with both men and women, but never married and preferred to live alone. She died in 1990, aged 84, at a New York hospital. Her entire estate – amounting to about $32 million – was left to her niece, Gray Reisfield.

Five years later, after a convoluted legal battle, Garbo’s ashes were interred near Stockholm.

‘It is my hope to reconstruct this film using photographs, set stills and silent film titles,’ Philip C. Riley writes in his introduction to the book. The film in its entirety may have differed from Gladys Unger’s story to some degree, as Irving Thalberg had final approval. (For example, we know that the name of Garbo’s character, Marah, was later changed to Marianne.)

I had hoped for a more detailed commentary, and a greater number of pictures. Nonetheless, this book will certainly be of interest to Garbo fans, as well as those with an interest in silent movies and the romantic fiction of the era.

Garbo Forever website

The Divine Woman on Flickr

Garbo by David Robinson

Greta Garbo Signature Collection on DVD

BearManor Media

My tribute to Harper Lee – author of To Kill a Mockingbird – is posted today at For Books’ Sake.

This year marks the 5oth anniversary of Marilyn Monroe’s death. Of the many books that will be published about the legendary star in coming months, Michelle Morgan‘s fully revised and updated biography, Marilyn Monroe: Private and Undisclosed, will surely rank among the finest. You can read my review over at For Books’ Sake.

I consider the enduring appeal – and surrounding controversy – of I Know What the Caged Bird Sings, Maya Angelou‘s 1969 memoir of her childhood in the Deep South of America, over at For Books’ Sake

Nina Mae McKinney, who made her screen début in King Vidor’s Hallelujah! (1929) – one of the first Hollywood films to feature an all-black cast – was hailed by MGM’s Irving Thalberg as ‘the greatest acting discovery of the age’.

A vivacious beauty, Nina Mae had more in common with ‘It Girl’ Clara Bow or glamorous comedienne Carole Lombard than with the enigmatic Greta Garbo, to whom she was compared.

But like many other black actresses of her generation, McKinney was reduced to playing bit parts and never fulfilled her initial promise. Her subsequent career included roles in ‘race movies’ (films made outside Hollywood, for black audiences) and cabaret success in Europe.

The British film historian, Stephen Bourne, who has previously written about other black female stars of the early twentieth century – including Ethel Waters and Butterfly McQueen – has now investigated the life and work of Nina Mae McKinney in his latest book, The Black Garbo.

She was born in Lancaster, South Carolina in 1912. Her parents were among many black Southerners who migrated to New York, while the young Nina Mae was raised by her great-aunt. She came to the Big Apple as a teenager, and before long had joined the chorus line of a hit Broadway show.

It was there that she was spotted by King Vidor, the Texan-born director of silent classics like The Big Parade and The Crowd. ‘She was third from right in the chorus,’ Vidor said of Nina. ‘She was beautiful and talented and glowing with personality.’

16 year-old McKinney was a last-minute replacement for singer Honey Brown in Vidor’s first sound picture, Hallelujah! She played Chick, ‘a dancer and streetwise hussy of ill-repute,’ who seduces the sharecropper hero, Zeke (Daniel L. Haynes.)

As Chick in 'Hallelujah!' (1929)

Hallelujah! was considered so risky that MGM insisted Vidor invest his own salary in its production. Although marred by racial stereotyping, it was praised by critic Richard Watts Jr as ‘one of the great motion pictures’, and has more recently been selected for preservation in the US National Film Registry by the Library of Congress.

Langston Hughes, poet of the Harlem Renaissance, wrote in his short story, The Moon: ‘the first coloured movie star I fell in love with was Nina Mae McKinney, who was showing herself off in a picture called Hallelujah…(She)was so beautiful she made my heart ache.’

With Jean Harlow in 'Reckless' (1935)

In William Wellman’s 1931 film, Safe in Hell (aka The Lost Lady), Nina Mae took the role of a waitress who befriends a runaway prostitute (played by Dorothy McKaill).  In 1935, she played a singer in Reckless, a star vehicle for Jean Harlow. However, most of Nina Mae’s scenes were cut.

It has been observed that Harlow’s tough, sexy persona was strikingly similar to Nina’s in Hallelujah! But as Bourne admits, ‘No one would have called Jean Harlow the “white Nina Mae McKinney”.’

Like other black American stars, including Josephine Baker and Adelaide Hall, Nina Mae eventually tired of constantly facing discrimination, and tried her luck in Europe. In 1933, Charles B. Cochran – London’s answer to Florenz Ziegfeld – cast Nina Mae in a West End revue, and she followed this with a series of successful variety tours and even featured in some of the first BBC television specials.

Fayard Nicholas, who starred with Nina Mae in a short Vitaphone film, The Black Network, told Stephen Bourne in 1990, ‘She had the talent. She could sing, dance and wisecrack with the best of them, but she came along too early and there was no place for her.’

In an interview for the Sunday Dispatch, Nina Mae gave a hint of the prejudice she had encountered in New York. ‘Sometimes I’ve gone into a restaurant, and they say they’re full up. But I can see empty tables. It makes you feel’ – both hands touched her heart – ‘awful bad.’

In Alexander Korda's 'Sanders of the River' (1935)

Britain’s top film producer, Alexander Korda, cast her opposite Paul Robeson in Sanders of the River (1935.) Robeson later disowned the film, which ‘glorified the British Empire and colonialism.’ His near-naked appearance was humiliating, and Nina Mae didn’t fare much better. She was criticised for her jarring American accent and heavy make-up, unsuited to the character of an African tribal wife.

Nina Mae travelled as far as Australia to perform, though bouts of illness also hindered her career. But by 1938, she had returned to the US permanently. In the first of her ‘race movies’, Gang Smashers, she played a glamorous undercover detective. Her name was still famous enough to ensure billing over the title. Stephen Bourne considers the film ‘as good as any Hollywood crime drama.’

Throughout the 1930s, Nina Mae was romantically involved with her manager, Jimmy Monroe. They were married in 1940, but within a year they had divorced. Monroe went on to marry Billie Holiday, another ill-fated union.

When Lena Horne was signed to MGM in 1942, it must have seemed that black actresses were finally overcoming racism. But in fact, little progress was made. Nina Mae played Merle Oberon’s maid in Dark Waters (1944), a gothic melodrama. Her penultimate film role, in Elia Kazan’s race drama, Pinky (1949), she played Rozelia, ‘a razor-toting whore from the shantytown’.   Bourne notes that she was now overweight, and her looks were fading fast.

During the 1950s, Nina Mae attempted to revive her nightclub career. She became something of a regular feature in ‘Where Are They Now?’ items published in magazines like Ebony, Jet and Hue. Rumours spread that she was addicted to drugs and alcohol, and by 1960 she was seriously ill. When Nina Mae died in 1967, aged 54, her death certificate described her as ‘widowed’ and a ‘domestic servant’.

Bourne’s tale of ‘a star who should not have been forgotten’ is brief, and poignant. He takes a respectful approach to McKinney’s life and work, with references to leading black film historians such as Donald Bogle. This attention to detail helps to put Nina Mae back in her rightful place alongside other pioneering African-American stars of the entertainment world.

The Black Garbo: Nina Mae McKinney by Stephen Bourne is available now in paperback and on Kindle.

Watch Nina Mae McKinney on Youtube

My review of Enchantments, Kathryn Harrison’s novel about the fall of the Russian royal family, is published today at For Books’ Sake.

Secrets and Lies, the new memoir by Christine Keeler and co-writer Douglas Thompson, was published last month. However, it is essentially a reissue of her 2001 book, The Truth at Last. Apart from a new preface and postscript, some different photos, the content is mostly the same as before.

John Profumo – the government minister with whom Keeler had a fleeting, but notorious affair as a teenager – died in 2006. Next year will mark the fiftieth anniversary of the political scandal, and its reverberations on British society can still be felt today.

Keeler, now 70, gave an interview to the Daily Mail last month. She is rarely seen in public, but was involved in the production of a recent play, Keeler. Her iconic image has also been the focus of a recent exhibition, Christine Keeler: My Life in Pictures.

In 2010, Tom Utley declared, ‘If the Christine Keeler scandal broke today, she’d be on I’m a Celebrity!’ Writing for The Guardian about press super-injunctions, Roy Greenslade described Keeler as ‘the first kiss and tell’.

It’s a dubious claim to fame, and Keeler’s own view is rather more ambivalent. ‘You are deluding yourself if you think you can build a career from scandal,’ she reflects in her autobiography. ‘All that follows scandal is more scandal. Every time I thought it had gone away something would knock me back – there would be something in the papers, someone on the telephone or the doorstep.’

While Profumo was eventually forgiven for his transgressions, Keeler has been alternately patronised and ridiculed – but her memories are still compelling, a cautionary tale for those who play with power.  ‘It is hard, 50 years after the Profumo Affair, to review Christine Keeler’s memoir without fury,’ Tanya Gold commented in The Telegraph. ‘In the early Sixties there were girls you touched and girls you didn’t, and the girls who could be touched were, and all the time. But all adventuresses, or “tarts”, in Macmillan’s despicable phrase, come from such worlds…Keeler was too early for robust feminism, and when the story broke she went down for perjury, a luckless vessel for national prurience and lust, and fear of lust. This was Britain.’

‘I have no idea if Ward (the society doctor who introduced Keeler to Profumo) was a spy,’ Gold concludes, ‘but if so he was terrible at it, breaking his greatest asset, Profumo, by having Christine sleep with Ivanov, too. She also exposes Roger Hollis as a spy, and Peter Wright in Spycatcher agreed. So here is Christine, 50 years on, still wondering – what the hell happened?’

The speculation continues, and last month the composer Andrew Lloyd Webber told the BBC of his plans to write a musical based on the events of 1963. His perspective is more sentimental than Keeler’s. ‘I’m looking for a subject at the moment and I think I’ve found one,’ he said. ‘Stephen Ward really intrigues me and was a fantastically interesting character. The most popular man in London who ended up with absolutely nobody after the trial and everything. I kind of think he was the fall guy.’

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Mary Ann Anderson was a friend and business manager to the actress and film director, Ida Lupino, for over a decade. She has also contributed to two books on the star, and has now written a biography, Ida Lupino: Beyond the Camera, featuring rare photos, press clippings, and transcribed interviews.

Born in London in 1918, Ida was the daughter of the writer and music hall star, Stanley Lupino. She made her screen début aged 13, and flew to Hollywood soon after, stealing the show in Rouben Mamoulian’s The Gay Desperado (1936) and The Light That Failed (1939).

Early in her career, columnist Hedda Hopper advised her: ‘If you want to become a real actress, the first thing is to let your eyebrows grow, get your hair back to its natural shade, and scrub all that goo off your face. Otherwise, you’ll be just another starlet who fell by the wayside.’

Lupino’s first marriage, to actor Louis Hayward, collapsed amid the trauma he suffered while serving in the air force during World War II.

Her acting career was at its peak when she starred with Humphrey Bogart in They Drive By Night (1940) and High Sierra (1941). She also won the New York Critics Circle award for Best Actress in The Hard Way (1941); starred with John Garfield in Out of the Fog, Edward G. Robinson in The Sea Wolf (both 1941); with Jean Gabin in Moontide (1942); and as the novelist Emily Brontё in Devotion (1946).

She excelled at playing ‘hard-boiled’ characters. Of her role in High Sierra, one critic wrote, ‘Ida Lupino gives us the best moll I have ever seen’. In the preface to this book, Ida admitted, ‘I loved playing, sexy warm dames who are tough in life, who do not let life affect them, very much myself!’

Ida became an ambulance driver during World War II, and her efforts were showcased alongside other stars in Hollywood Canteen (1944). She went on to further success in Roadhouse (1948).

But her story doesn’t end there. While suspended from her studio contract after turning down a role, Ida became interested in directing. She and her second husband, Collier Young, formed an independent production company, Filmakers.

After the director of their first project, Not Wanted (1949), fell ill, Ida replaced him and went on to become Hollywood’s only female film director at the time. Not Wanted, the tale of an unwed mother’s plight, was followed by three more highly realistic films focussing on ‘women’s issues’: Never Fear (1949), which she directed from a wheelchair after an accident on the set; Outrage (1950), with Mala Powers as a rape victim; and Hard, Fast and Beautiful (1951.)

She directed and also starred in On Dangerous Ground (1952), followed by The Bigamist and The Hitch Hiker (both 1953), which the critic John Krewson described as ‘Lupino’s best film and the only true Noir directed by a woman.’ She co-wrote, and acted in Beware My Lovely (1952) and Private Hell 36 (1954.) The writer Richard Koszarski commented, ‘Her films display the obsessions and consistencies of a true Auteur.’

After Filmakers folded, Ida appeared in Robert Aldrich’s The Big Knife (1955), and directed episodes of some of the most popular television shows of the time, including Alfred Hitchcock Presents and The Twilight Zone. In 1966, Columbia hired her to direct The Trouble With Angels, starring Rosalind Russell as the Mother Superior of a girls’ boarding school.

Ida’s last major acting roles were as Steve McQueen’s mother in Junior Bonner (1972) and in an episode of the cult TV series, Charlie’s Angels. After her third marriage, to actor Howard Duff, ended acrimoniously, Ida faced financial problems before enjoying a revival when, in 1992, Louis Antonelli of The Director’s Guild restored her masterpiece, The Hitch Hiker.  

Though she has been hailed as a feminist icon, Ida lived and worked in a more conservative era. ‘Any woman who wishes to smash into the world of men isn’t very feminine,’ she said, wryly. ‘I retained every feminine trait while directing. Men prefer it that way.’ (Her film crews nicknamed her ‘Mother’.)

‘I have a very bad temper,’ she told Mary Ann Anderson. ‘I try to control it but there’s a little devil that comes out in me sometimes.’ Nonetheless, Anderson was able to gain her trust. Since Ida’s death in 1995, she has been celebrated in a TV documentary, an (unauthorised) biography, and numerous academic studies of the films she directed and starred in.

To capture Ida Lupino’s long and varied career in one short volume is not an easy task. Some topics are covered in more detail than others, and the structure is a little untidy. Nonetheless, Anderson’s personal insights are a valuable addition to the body of information available on one of the finest actresses of wartime Hollywood, and a pioneer in female-led, realist film-making.

Published by BearManor Media, Ida Lupino: Beyond the Camera is now available in paperback or on Kindle.

Watch Ida Lupino on Youtube

Find Ida Lupino on Amazon

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The House on Paradise Street is a wonderful new novel by Sofka Zinovieff, looking at love, politics and war in Greece, past and present, through the contrasting viewpoints of two women from the same Athenian family. You can read my review at For Books’ Sake.