Up Here In Heaven

She was a winner who became the doggies dinner,
She never meant that much to me
Oh, poor Marie.

Nick Lowe: ‘Marie Provost’.

It’s not the fact that eighty-five years after I quit this mortal coil I’m pretty much all but forgotten outside of a few silent movie obsessives. I mean, after all, I’m hardly alone on that score. Five gets you ten even the most ardent of fans would struggle to recall the likes of Flo Vidor, Malcolm St. Clair, Monte Blue or the wonderful Harrison Ford, a swashbuckling hero long before his namesake cut a dash as Indiana Jones. No, it’s not the thought that although we lit up the screen for most of The Roaring Twenties, we’re now barely a footnote in cinematic history, consigned to the roles of mere bit part players where once we were headliners. It’s the fact that I’ll forever be remembered as the dame who was eaten by her dog, and all the result of some fag underground film maker and a small time English song hack, the self styled Jesus Of Cool. So thanks Mr. Anger for spreading your lies and malicious tittle-tattle. Hollywood Babylon indeed! And as for you Mr. Lowe, you didn’t even have the decency to get my name right. It’s Marie, and not Mary (as you pronounce it), and the surname’s Prevost. It’s an E, not an O, you cheap Limey bastard. I took the big sleep on the twenty first day of January, and not July twenty nine! And as for being a winner who became the doggie’s dinner, the police report clearly stated that my cute little dachshund “ had chewed up [my] arms and legs in a futile attempt to awaken [me]”. In other words, the poor little thing was trying to help his momma, not eat her for lunch! Oh, and for the record, they found me in an apartment building Cahuenga Boulevard and not some ‘cheap hotel out on Hollywood West’. Granted, the joint had seen better days, and most of the clientele looked as if they’d just stepped out of a Charles Bukowski novel on their way to audition for a bit part in a Tom Waits tune but hell, they were a lot like me; folks down on their luck just hanging around waiting for the good times to return. Which is why I figure it’s time to straighten out a few points, iron out some creases, and smooth over a couple of rough spots. After all, up here I’m just like all the others, neither here nor there, but just hangin’around with nothin’ much to do ‘cept think about you and how you’ll never know the real me. So why not pour yourself a cool one, settle back a while, kick your heels in the sandpit of life and allow me to set the record straight. Then afterwards we can all get back to doing what we do best. Oh and Ken, I know you’re deep down there dancin’ with The Devil (who, believe me, is nowhere near as cool as you made him out to be with your Scorpio Rising and dime store hippie spiritualist crap), but you’re still around Nicky boy, so take heed when I tell you that my, were you wide of the mark! Okay, enough fat chewing. Let’s dim the lights, draw back the curtains, and commence with the show. Roll ‘em Mr.Projection Man…

For starters I was born Mary Bickford Dunn on November 8th 1898 in Sarnia, a hick town on the outskirts of Ontario, which is in Canada and not The Bronx, all you subscribers to the theory that, like Johnny Gilbert, that pretty boy lush who Anger reckoned was competing against me in a drink to the death marathon (for the record I beat him hands down by a good nine months, which is a lot of bourbon in anyone’s book) meant that when The Brothers Warner invented sound my New York honk somehow didn’t match my pretty girl next door looks. So let’s put that one to bed right away. Fact was, by ’27 I was seen by many of the suits in the front office as trouble with a capital T, a little too feisty and opinionated for their liking, and someone who maybe needed taking back a peg or two. So a quiet word in the sound recordists ear, a little fiddling with the levels, and Bob’s your uncle – my dulcet tones are transformed into a barely audible growl, allowing the boys at PDC to pull my contact from underneath me and consign me to bit parts in Poverty Row second stringers. And all this for someone who had worked with the likes of Lubitsch and DeMille.

But I’m racing ahead a bit here which, come to think about it, is the story of my life. I was at the tail end of an education at a Catholic convent, which was pretty good training when you think were I eventually ended up, when daddy big sixed it, leaving mommie, little sis’ and me all on our own-e-oh. So we did what lots of poor folks did during the war, and moved to Colorado. Now they say there’s lots of things to do in Denver when you die, but not too much while you’re alive, which is why we ended up in The City Of Angels. I found work as a secretary at The Sennett Studio, which was nowhere near as glamorous as it sounded, Hollywood being little more than a village back in those pioneer days. I may not have been too hot as a typist but I was always something of a looker, and it wasn’t too long before Uncle Mack hauled me out of the pool and shoved me in front of a camera, saying how much he dug my ‘French Look’, whatever that was. Who knows? The only Paris I’d heard of at the time was some place in Texas.

Boy, those were the days! The film industry was still in its infancy, populated by mavericks and chancers, the field was wide open, and the town was positively awash in liquor and joy powder, while the blurb for Men And The Bedroom Window promised a chance to catch “beautiful jazz babies, champagne baths, midnight revels and petting parties in the purple dawn”, all for the price of a ticket in the cheap seats. Hell, Doug Fairbanks starred as a bombed out of his skull private eye by the name of Coke Ennaday in the now totally forgotten Mystery Of The Leaping Fish. And you think Dennis Hopper was the first cokehead to put drugs in the movies? In 1916 Aleister Crowley hit town and noted that the natives were “cocaine crazed lunatics”, which was pretty fresh coming from some would be aristocratic Limey who sold Devil worshipping to gullible hedonists with way too much free time and easy money on their hands. Before long I was a Sennett Beauty, one of many out of towners who became Sunshine Girls via Uncle Mack’s infamous casting couch, braving the harsh California sun and surf, pulling provocative poses with a bunch of unknowns; Gloria Swanson, Mabel Normand, Carole Lombard and a hot-footed hoofer who went by the name of Joan Crawford. I was by far the best of the bunch, and yet they all went on to varying degrees of immortality while my legend was allowed to go rusty before being consigned the scrapheap. I made my debut in 1915 in a blink and you’ll miss her moment two reeler entitled Those Bitter Sweets, which some hack screenwriter must have figured was a cool play on words. Yeah, right. In those days studios churned out movies back to back, and a couple of weeks later I had a walk on part in the instantly forgettable His Father’s Footsteps. But it was the following year that things really started to happen after I landed the part of Celeste in Unto Those Who Sin, a role that demanded I be both sexy and comedic in equal measure, a challenge I took to like a duck to water. By now I’d climbed on board the treadmill and duly churned out film after film for the next three years; long forgotten gems with suggestive titles such as A Scoundrels Toll, Secrets Of A Beauty Parlour, Uncle Tom Without A Cabin and the truly gut wrenching Love, Honour And Behave, in which I played a wayward newlywed. Oh the reckless innocence of those pre-Hays Code days, before a few high profile scandals (Wally Beery and Roscoe Arbuckle, hang your heads in shame) ushered in a period of sexual austerity (at least on screen) and a former Postmaster General with a crooked grin and a liking for big studio backhanders was elected the guardian of the nations morals.

There’s was a saying at the time which went “start with Sennett then get rich somewhere else”, which is exactly what I did. I married Sonny Gerke in the fall of ’19, who described himself as a socialite although he was never very sociable to me, dumping me after six months, although our separation wasn’t made legal until ’23 for fear that it might damage my good girl reputation. My God! If only they’d known. I mean, come on! This is the era of prohibition, rum runners and speakeasy’s. LA was wide open, and every night was party night. I was a flapper, and hell, did I spread my wings. Guess that’s when I first got a taste for the hard stuff.

I began to get bored with the Sennett quickies, but by then the publicity machine had moved into overdrive, I was posing for a lot of cheesecake and getting my mug in the fan mags, and Irving Thalberg rescued me from the nightmare of wacky slapstick and signed me to Universal. The first thing he did was ship me out to Coney Island and get me to burn my bathing suit in front of a crowd of day-trippers. It was supposed to convey the fact that I was through with being a bathing beauty, although I fear the symbolism was somewhat lost on the pleasure seekers from Rockaway. At least that was the plan, although on my return to Hollywoodland I discovered I’d been cast in exactly the same kind of flicks I’d been grinding out for Sennett. So Moonlight Follies begat The Dangerous Little Demon which spawned The Married Flapper that gave birth to Red Lights, a bunch of titles that pretty much say it all as to how the studio saw me. The only thing worth shouting about amongst all this dross was my move to Warner’s and The Beautiful And The Damned, in which I finally bagged a lead role, despite the fact that F. Scott thingamajig described it as “by far the worst movie I’ve ever seen in my life – cheap, vulgar, ill constructed and shoddy”. Well get you Mr.Fitzgerald! As one lush to another I can tell you how wrong you were, as obviously you’d never seen me portraying Valerie Winship in Being Respectable. Christ, what a stinker! And to top it all, the bastards credited me as Mary Prevost. I know Uncle Mack came up with my non-de-plume, but it was Marie, you cheap Hollywood bastards. Still, it went down well with the punters and I got to star with Ken Harlan. Now there was a leading man, and boy did he lead me astray, to the point where I fell head over heels in a mighty big way. He was one of those actors who were more popular than matinee idol, but he made a decent living through most of the ‘20’s. As soon as I’d annulled Sonny Boy (who still hadn’t told his mommie that he’d married me on account of how she disproved of actresses) Ken and me got hitched, and for the first time in my life I was truly happy although, just like in the movies, something had to come along and spoil the party.

Mommie Dearest died in ’26. A car accident. She was on her way to Florida with a small time screenwriter name of Al Christie, who had a thing about her, although I’m not sure she felt the same. Tragic. Even now I find it hard to talk about, although I bump into her at least twice a week. Let’s just say that, despite our differences regarding my somewhat bohemian lifestyle, I always thought the world of her, and her passing hit me real hard. It’s no secret that I liked a tipple now and then, but her sudden and unexpected demise pushed me over the edge. Booze stopped being a social lubricant and became an emotional crutch, making me prone to periods of intense melancholy, a long dark tunnel that would swallow me up for days on end. I began to turn up late on set, hollow eyed and frazzled, missing cues and ignoring direction. In short, I became a regular pain in the ass. Kenny, God bless him, tried to help, but his solution stretched no further than the let’s party, have a good time, and it’ll all seem better in the morning variety. So we did. But it didn’t. Get better, that is. I was just coming to the end of a run of films featuring Monte Blue as my leading man, a wonderful set of light comedies directed by Ernest Lubitsch, the best of which, The Marriage Circle, got me rave reviews for my portrayal of Mizzi, a bored Austrian housewife married to a dull college professor who ends up flirting with her best friends husband. It did great business at the box office and should have catapulted me into the big league. I could have been a contender, up there with Jean Harlow, Clara Bow or Theda Bara (whoever heard of a name that was an anagram for Arab Death? I mean, come on! She may have oozed vamp on the screen but in reality she was plain ordinary Theodisia Goodman, a meek ‘n mild tailor’s daughter out of Chillcothe, Ohio), but the bathtub gin and Mississippi moonshine began to drag me down. That and the binge eating, which saw my weight fluctuate dramatically. I became like a steeplechase jockey, alternating between periods of lavish gluttony and monastic fasting, oiled with liberal doses of whatever booze I could lay my hands on. It was bad for my image and even worse for my liver.

Jack Warner finally cut me loose at the tail end of ’26. He said I was too much of a Jazz Babe and that besides, that era was coming to an end and the public were tired of all the unbridled hedonism. The war was long over and the economy was heading for a fall, although even he couldn’t have seen that one coming. So I drifted over to The Producers Distributing Corporation and knocked out a few more rib ticklers with Harrison Ford, who for a short time became something more to me than just a leading man. Harlan read about it in the gossip columns and dumped me in ’27. My lawyer made a big deal of his own philandering, telling the press that “Harlan furnished her no amusement; stayed out late at night, and was unreasonably jealous”. Furnished me no amusement? I remember liking that one at the time. Pity my public didn’t buy the same line. Instead they turned against me. I lost my Flapper figure and my big comeback film of ’29 bombed, lost in The Crash. It must have been the only flop in DeMille’s long and illustrious career, and it marked me out as box office poison. By the end of the decade I was scuffling for bit parts, back at Warner’s as a contract player, eating my meals at The Old Timers Table, hangin’ out with the sad weary faces who loved to tell tales about the good old days. The New York Times even did a feature on me, although the reporter was a louse and the article nothing short of a hatchet job.

“A few weeks ago, Marie Prevost sat down at the table. The siren of Mack Sennett days had been successful with a reducing course and had got herself a job as a contract player. She was put to work almost immediately, in a small part in The Bengal Tiger…Miss Prevost is unbilled…she has only three lines to say, and those short ones. But she is back at work, skipping arc light cables and dodging camera dollies on the set once more…A few more parts of a few lines each and the studio might find bigger and better things for her to do”.

Like hell it would. Warner’s had hit pay dirt with hard-boiled crime movies. This was the era of Humphrey Bogart, Jimmy Cagney, George Raft and Eddie Robinson. I may have fancied myself as a good actress, but I was no gangsters moll, no Mary Astor or Barbara Stanwyck. By the summer of ’35 the parts had all but dried up and I’d pretty much slipped down the stakes into yesterday’s news. I was reduced to living in a crummy little one-roomed apartment, existing on a diet of cheap bourbon and fading memories, with only a scrapbook of old press cuttings and a cute little doggie to keep me company. You know the rest. My heart finally gave out as a result of too much booze and not enough food. I was 38 years old. The police broke the door down after I’d been lying there for a couple of days (not the “two or three weeks” Mr. Lowe would have you believe) after a combination of the dog’s incessant yapping and the smell of decay had started to grate on the neighbours nerves. All I had left to show for a twenty year career in the movies was $300, most of which ended up in the pocket of my sister. Hollywood legend would have it that Joan Crawford stumped up for my funeral, but the truth is I was buried in a pauper’s grave, location unknown. All that remains is a star on Hollywood Boulevard with my name engraved on it, there to be walked on by Japanese tourists who have no idea who the hell I ever was, and probably wouldn’t care if they did. F. Scott Fitzgerald once said that there are no second acts in American life, and you know what? He was right. After all, if anyone would know, it was he.

So there you have it. My story, for what it’s worth. But at least I’ve had the opportunity to put the record straight and tell you a little about myself. Maybe you still don’t give a damn about Mr. Lowe’s “mysterious angel of the silver screen”, but believe me, I’m nothing like the legend would have it. Come to think of it, neither were Olive Thomas, Art Accord, Barbara La Marr, Leo Maloney, Alma Rubens, or Juanita Hansen, all matinee idols of varying degrees who never got to see The Crash Of ’29. But enough of this depression-era stuff. I’m done now, so I’ll bid you farewell and get back on my cloud. Where I am you can’t buy souvenirs and there are no day passes to past lives, but who’s complaining? It’s really very clean and they let all religions in, including Scientologists, although we don’t celebrate birthdays or Christmas, which I guess kinda makes us all Jehovah’s! Who’d have thought it? Still, at least up here in Heaven I’m so very, very high.

“All the adventure, all the romance, all the excitement you lack in your daily life are in – PICTURES! They take you completely out of yourself into a wonderful new world – OUT OF THE CAGE OF EVERYDAY EXISTENCE! If only for an afternoon or an evening – ESCAPE!!”
Hollywood box office advertisement circa 1923.