Mae Murray: The Girl with the Bee-Stung Lips

By Michael G. Ankerich and Gina Athena Ulysse

This story of a silent-film star’s rise and fall offers “a lesson about those heady days of early Hollywood and the transience of fame” (Library Journal).
 
Renowned for her classic beauty and charismatic presence, Mae Murray rocketed to stardom as a dancer in the Ziegfeld Follies, moving across the country to star in her first film, To Have and to Hold, in 1916. An instant hit with audiences, Murray soon became one of the most famous names in Tinseltown.
 
But Murray’s moment in the spotlight was fleeting. The introduction of talkies, a string of failed marriages, a serious career blunder, and a number of bitter legal battles left the former star in a state of poverty and mental instability that she would never overcome.
 
In this intriguing biography, Michael G. Ankerich traces Murray’s career from the footlights of Broadway to the klieg lights of Hollywood, recounting her impressive body of work on the stage and screen and charting her rapid ascent to fame and decline into obscurity. Featuring exclusive interviews with Murray’s only son, Daniel, and with actor George Hamilton, whom the actress closely befriended at the end of her life, Ankerich restores this important figure in early film to the limelight.
 
“If Billy Wilder hasn’t made the definitive movie about the delusions of stardom in Sunset Boulevard, Murray’s story, a blend of absurdity and pathos, would make a terrific one.” —TheWashington Post
 
Includes photos

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Jan 4, 2013
• ISBN: 9780813140384

Book preview

MAE MURRAY

MAE MURRAY

THE GIRL WITH THE BEE-STUNG LIPS

Michael G. Ankerich

Foreword by Kevin Brownlow

Copyright © 2013 by The University Press of Kentucky

Scholarly publisher for the Commonwealth,

serving Bellarmine University, Berea College, Centre

College of Kentucky, Eastern Kentucky University,

The Filson Historical Society, Georgetown College,

Kentucky Historical Society, Kentucky State University,

Morehead State University, Murray State University,

Northern Kentucky University, Transylvania University,

University of Kentucky, University of Louisville,

and Western Kentucky University.

All rights reserved.

Editorial and Sales Offices: The University Press of Kentucky

663 South Limestone Street, Lexington, Kentucky 40508-4008

www.kentuckypress.com

17  16  15  14  13     5  4  3  2  1

Frontispiece: Mae Murray in 1925. Courtesy of Eric T. Rebetti.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Ankerich, Michael G., 1962–

Mae Murray : the girl with the bee-stung lips /

Michael G. Ankerich ; foreword by Kevin Brownlow.

p.     cm.— (Screen classics)

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-8131-3690-5 (hardcover : alk. paper) —

ISBN 978-0-8131-3691-2 (pdf) — ISBN 978-0-8131-4038-4 (epub)

1. Murray, Mae, 1885–1965. 2. Motion picture actors and

actresses—United States—Biography. I. Title.

PN2287.M83A55 2012

791.43’028’092—dc23

[B]

2012034642

This book is printed on acid-free paper meeting

the requirements of the American National Standard

for Permanence in Paper for Printed Library Materials.

Manufactured in the United States of America.

For Eve Golden—

A Haughty Dowager with a Heart of Gold

Contents

Foreword

Introduction

1. Untangling Mae Murray’s Tangled Beginnings, 1885–1899

2. Dancing into the New Century, 1900–1907

3. Ziegfeld and the Millionaire, 1908–1911

4. Life Is a Cabaret, 1912–1914

5. From Footlights to Kliegs, 1915

6. The Disillusions of a Dream Girl, 1916

7. Ready for My Close-ups, Mr. Lasky!, 1917

8. The Delicious Little Mae, 1918–1919

9. On with the Dance, 1920

10. Strutting Like a Peacock through Tiffany’s, 1921–1922

11. Mae the Enchantress, 1923–1924

12. The Merry Widow and the Dirty Hun, May 1924–March 1925

13. From Merry Widow to Gay Divorcée, 1925

14. Princess Mdivani, 1926

15. The Lion’s Roar, the Baby’s Cry, 1927

16. A World of Cheap Imitation, 1928

17. The Sound of Bee-Stung Lips, 1929–1931

18. Oh, Brother!, 1932

19. From a Prince to a Toad, 1933

20. Losing Koran, 1934–1940

21. Outliving Fame, 1941–1957

22. Self-Enchantment, 1958–1960

23. A Star in Twilight, 1961–1965

Epilogue

Acknowledgments

Professional Theater

Filmography

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Foreword

Research can be disturbing. You expect to read an uplifting story of ambition and artistry, and you instead find yourself enmeshed in a psychiatric casebook. We demand too much of artists, even when we know their personalities are in sharp variance to their art. One great nineteenth-century painter was so abusive to his models that he used to throw them down the stairs, yet we all gasp with admiration at the delicacy and humanity of Edgar Degas’s work.

Mae Murray wasn’t violent, but she makes you think Sunset Boulevard was a documentary. When she saw the picture, she is supposed to have said, None of us floozies was that nuts—and I wish she had, because at least it shows a sense of humor. However, the rigorous work of Michael G. Ankerich indicates that Murray never made this remark, leaving us with someone who may have had charm, but who seems to have been bereft of humor, who may have been self-enchanted but was never self-effacing.

When I heard about this book, I wondered who had had the nerve to tackle it. Murray has come to represent a high-water mark of camp in silent films, exceeded only by Theda Bara. The temptation for a biographer to slip into full Hollywood Babylon mode, conducting his research by what Kenneth Anger himself attributed to mental telepathy, mostly must be fierce.

But we are in good hands. Michael Ankerich has a guarantee attached to his name. He managed to record a series of interviews with silent film players just before it was too late.¹ Actresses spoke to Ankerich who had spoken to no one else, and for that, he deserves a special place in film history. True to form, this book includes several unique interviews. Perhaps the most remarkable is with Murray’s son, Koran (Daniel Michael Cunning), who has never been interviewed before, his dislike for the press stemming from a custody battle that marred his childhood. Ankerich also tracked down the relatives of Murray’s brother, who also spoke for the first time. Their comments are of exceptional interest because the existence of a brother—let alone two—was unknown.

He has also quoted from archive interviews recorded with Mae Murray herself. Inevitably, we have to ask whether all this hard work was worth it. Was she any good as an actress or a dancer?

Writers who have been unable to see the films and have merely glanced at stills tend to dismiss her acting as a series of poses. Yet her motion picture career lasted over ten years, so audiences must have been fascinated even if a few critics were not. Among her devotees I was intrigued to find the great French filmmaker Abel Gance, director of La Roue (1922) and Napoleon (1927), who said, I must confess that I have a profound admiration for Mae Murray. She is absolutely delicious, and her films give me a keen pleasure.²

Unhappily, she did not often work with exceptional directors. Her finest surviving film is The Merry Widow (1925), directed by Erich von Stroheim, in which she plays opposite John Gilbert. There is no doubting her talent here; she dances well and acts brilliantly. Stroheim’s wicked and highly censorable view of Central European aristocracy is counted among the great classics of the cinema.

However, the harshest critic of any star is usually her cameraman. He is the one to whom dissatisfaction or displays of temper are most likely to be directed. Yet Charles Rosher, who was the first cinematographer to win an Academy Award (for 1927’s Sunrise) and who had photographed her Lasky pictures, thoroughly admired her. He said she had a fluttery, nervous, intensive method of playing that brought out the best in everyone who worked with her, imbuing them with a sense of accomplishment.³ Director Robert Z. Leonard and Murray, his wife, broke their contract with Lasky at the same time and asked Rosher to join them. He didn’t approve of breaking contracts. And so he stayed on. Lasky gave him the next Mary Pickford picture in appreciation of his loyalty, and so Mae Murray inadvertently triggered a celebrated partnership.

In 1964, when I heard that Mae Murray was in the Motion Picture Country Home at Woodland Hills, California, I took my tape recorder and went to see her. I got no further than the foyer. No one but relatives, said a nurse firmly. I am ashamed to say that I felt a sense of relief. Rosher had warned me of her mental condition, and I had read the newspaper reports of her equally fragile physical state—how she was found wandering in St. Louis and was delivered to the Salvation Army.⁴ I had just started interviewing veterans of the silent era and was nervous at the thought of encountering Sunset Boulevard types. To my relief, I seldom did. But now I have read Michael Ankerich’s book, I greatly regret missing that once-in-a-lifetime chance on that distant afternoon to come face to face with a quite extraordinary talent.

Kevin Brownlow

London, 2011

Notes

1. Ankerich, Broken Silence and Sound of Silence.

2. L’Art d’Abel Gance, Mon Cine 140 (October 23, 1924): 15.

3. Unpublished interview with Charles Rosher, early 1930s.

4. One newspaper headline was Valentino Beauty Loses Her Way.

Introduction

How are you going to introduce me? the woman in the blonde wig and picture hat asked through her red bee-stung lips. She lifted her head and waited for him to speak.

It was in the early 1960s, and Miles Kreuger had collected the former star from the ramshackle Royalton Hotel on Forty-Fourth Street in Manhattan half an hour before. They were now seated around a microphone at the WBAI-FM radio station, where Kreuger was preparing to interview her live in five minutes. He had had difficult guests in the past, but this one was making him particularly nervous. Kreuger was accustomed to taping his interviews, rather than chatting with his guests live over the airwaves. This subject, however, had kept postponing the interview, and he now had no choice but to put her on live. Kreuger had been so distracted by pinning her down to an interview that he had given little thought to how he would introduce his subject.

"I’m going to say you were in the Follies of 1908 and . . ."

She stopped him midsentence as he scribbled notes. "Oh, honey, don’t mention the Follies, she said in a childlike tone. That was so long ago."

"Well, then I’ll say you made your film debut after appearing in the Ziegfeld Follies of 1915."

"Why don’t you just take out any mention of the Follies altogether, she suggested. Now, what does it say?"

OK, I’ll start by saying you were a star in silent pictures and . . .

Oh, honey, she interrupted. Please don’t refer to me as a silent picture star. I made thirteen talkies.

"She appeared with John Gilbert in The Merry Widow," Kreuger suggested.

The former star lifted her head higher and, through pursed lips, voiced her objection. With outstretched hand, as if she was pointing to a marquee, she said, "Oh, honey, you should say, ‘Mae Murray in The Merry Widow with John Gilbert.’ I was the star of the picture; he was my leading man. Why don’t you say this: the merry widow of the silent screen."

And so it was. A compromise was reached only seconds before going on the air.

When I set out to document the life story of Mae Murray, I was met with raised eyebrows and a number of interesting reactions. Several questioned how a true accounting of her life could be written if no one had uncovered her birth certificate to find out exactly when and where she was born. Such a book would not be complete without input from her son, who had remained silent since the battle for his custody in the early 1940s.

Silent film historian Kevin Brownlow, long fascinated by the star, said this about tackling Mae: I will be most interested to know what sort of character you make of her. Perhaps the most ominous warning came from Duke Dukesherer, who chronicled the history of Playa del Rey, where Mae built her castle on the beach when she was living the life of a princess. He said simply, Be careful; she can absolutely entrance you, even from the grave.

Almost half a century after her death, Mae Murray has the ability, as she did almost a century ago, to spark interest and wonder in those who encounter her in her surviving films. Her image is used today on greeting cards and in books to epitomize the reckless Jazz Age.

To get an idea of how a movie star should appear and behave in the silent era, look no further than Mae Murray. Like other extravagant Hollywood movie actresses of the 1920s (Gloria Swanson, Mary Pickford, Norma Talmadge, and Pola Negri, for example), Mae was intoxicated on money, power, and fame. From the height of her fame in the 1920s, when she was earning $7,500 a week (almost $92,000 in 2010 dollars), to her pitiful existence in the 1960s, Mae, while only five feet, three inches tall, was hard to miss. She developed an image and stuck with it. With her famous Cupid’s bow lips, shadowed eyelids, and tousled blonde mane, no one could look past her without first noticing her exaggerated appearance.

Who could wrap themselves so luxuriously in ermine or parade around in expensive beaded gowns like Mae? Who could affect such a pose while cameras rolled?

The pose that Mae perfected constantly got her into trouble with critics, who summed up her acting ability as a series of poses and close-ups. She was referred to as the Ziegfeldian Nazimova. Yet she was proud of her carefully crafted image and boldly took on her critics.

She was first and foremost a Broadway dancer, she was fond of saying. True, she was one of the finest of her generation. Dancing, she often said with pride, brought her closer to God and to the person she was meant to be. I’ll be dancing to my grave, she often said.

Columnist Harry Carr, one of her harshest critics in the 1920s, routinely panned Mae’s performances for their artificiality. Avowedly and intentionally so, he wrote. Carr held the belief that Mae’s sense of self—however selfish it might have come across on the screen—was the key to the success she enjoyed with her fans, who thought she could do no wrong.

She came about the nearest to knowing what pictures are for, and what they are all about, of anyone who ever tried to figure them out, Carr wrote in 1924. "That is to say, she was purely pictorial. She told stories in pictures. Other stars and other directors tell stories that are not of pictures at all; but are, in fact, stories of imagined words.

You can say this for Mae Murray: She has shown more genuine brains and showmanship in exploiting Mae Murray than anybody ever has shown in exploiting anything else in the motion picture business.¹

Writer Adela Rogers St. Johns agreed. She has that precious instinct for dramatizing herself, her personality, her beauty, and it is second nature to her, she wrote in 1924.²

Perhaps Mae’s artificial air came from her belief that movie stars of her generation existed in a realm of their own—not quite human, not quite god. She was from the era of celebrities who created an illusion, an aura of mystery, however artificial, around their origins and their personal lives. The problem with Mae Murray is that she became trapped in her own illusion. Vanity became her lifelong companion. Her flares of temperamental outbursts—and there were many in her life—came when the reality of life penetrated the fragile bubble of fantasy she created for herself.

Consider the world she created with director Robert Z. Leonard, her third husband. At first, Mae hated Hollywood and vowed to return to New York and the stage the minute her contract was finished. She warmed to the movie industry, however, when she worked for Leonard, an actor turned director who understood her eccentricities. He directed his wife in almost twenty-five features. They were a business match made in heaven. By forming their own unit at Universal and their own production company, Tiffany, the two maintained control over what they brought to the screen. These arrangements also allowed Leonard to control his sometimes emotionally uneven wife by essentially allowing her to have her way in creating her screen image. Mae was free to live in a Cinderella-like world both on and off the screen.

Reality invaded Mae’s fantasy world when the director and his Cinderella joined MGM in 1924 and the two fell under the control of studio chief Louis B. Mayer, who had big plans for Mae. The Leonard marriage fell apart. Mayer gave Mae the starring role in The Merry Widow. Under the direction of Erich von Stroheim, who did not bow at her feet, all hell broke loose. Unable to have full control over her role, Mae unleashed a temperamental fury the likes of which Hollywood had not seen. The set became a battleground. The autocratic von Stroheim held firm, and in the end, he was able to pull from Mae the best performance of her career. Ironically, The Merry Widow marked both her greatest triumph and the beginning of her sharp descent.

With Leonard out of the picture, Mae, by now an aging movie queen with $3 million in the bank, was unleashed to unravel on her own. She turned her back on MGM and Louis B. Mayer, a ruthless Hollywood executive who could hold a grudge like no other. With this connection to the Hollywood good old boys’ network, Mayer, as he similarly did with John Gilbert, Erich von Stroheim, and Francis X. Bushman, predicted her professional demise.

Prince David Mdivani, one of the infamous marrying Mdivani brothers, jumped into Mae’s life and dismantled one of the most successful actresses of the silent screen. After he had gone through her fortune, Mae found solace by retreating deeper into a world where she was protected from life’s harsh realities. Here, she was the only star, the only princess, the only Cinderella. Unfortunately, there was room in her own world for no one else—not her family, and not even her own son.

The challenge that a biographer has, when confronting a subject as complex and contradictory as Mae Murray, is to penetrate imaginary and sometimes delusional worlds and uncover and reveal the true personality in unvarnished truth. After spending several years (or more) with a subject, it is also satisfying to come away from the experience with genuine affection for the person. With Mae Murray, that was not always easy.

As I was nearing the end of my research for this book, I spent some time at Mae’s final resting place at Valhalla Cemetery in North Hollywood. As I sat beside her marker, I put together a mental picture of all the pieces of Mae’s life in front of me. How could I fit the puzzle pieces into an image that would, for the first time, show a true portrait of her life? The final picture, I promised her that day, would not always be flattering, but it would be fair.

It was Mignon Rittenhouse, writing for the New Movie Magazine in 1931, who drew from Mae the key to understanding her complex and peculiar nature. When Mae sat for that interview, her film career was in shambles and her fourth marriage was disintegrating. Frustrated and exhausted by life, Mae, in a rare moment of self-reflection, opened up as she never had, and as she never would again.

I am not a realist by nature, and for me to try and become one would only make me acutely unhappy, Mae explained.

All my life I have tried to rise above external situations, if they were unsatisfactory. And often they have been. Since I was thirteen and first went on the stage, I have lived as much as possible in a world of fantasy—seen only those things in life I have wanted to see—avoided the things which would pull me down and make me miserable.

My dreams have always been a jump ahead of the interesting events which have befallen me. I think my dreams have actually made them possible. When grief has come for me, I have been able, because of the imaginary world I built for myself, to climb out of its reach mentally—to protect myself to the happy ending.³

That imaginary world is how Mae Murray thrived—and survived. The happy ending was beyond her reach.

1

Untangling Mae Murray’s Tangled Beginnings

1885–1899

Carol Lee, writing for Motion Pictures magazine in 1917, found extracting biographical data from stage and film star Mae Murray akin to trying to chain butterflies.¹

To begin with, everything, or nearly everything that has been written about her, is wrong, Delight Evans, writing for Photoplay, warned her readers in 1920. "They say she is Irish. She isn’t. They have said she cultivates persistently the mental attitude of a boarding school child who only went to a theatre once or twice—and then to see Julia Marlowe and E. H. Sothern in their Shakespearean repertoire.

They say she has a perpetually innocent and injured expression with which she seems to say: ‘Where do babies come from?’ They are all wrong. Mae Murray was really born Mae-somebody-else.²

That is the way Mae wanted it.

As far as she was concerned, she was birthed and nurtured under the warmth of the Broadway footlights. If interviewers wanted to waste her time—and theirs—she had fun making up her past. When she entered show business, she gave Portsmouth, Virginia, as her birthplace. Then she became creative and allowed her public to speculate.

One writer noted that she was from Portsmouth society. She was born in Louisville, Kentucky, and her ancestors have been governors, congressmen, and colonels, another writer speculated. She was raised in seedy boarding houses in Chicago, guessed another. She was from Virginia and crept into New York like a mouse, another said.

Mae herself occasionally offered varied possibilities. I was brought up by my great-grandmother. I was raised in European convents. I was an only child. My father was an artist and we lived mostly at sea in a lovely boat.

Robert King, Mae’s nephew, the son of her brother, William, chuckled over his aunt’s imagination. My father would put all that in the category of bullshit, he told me in 2010.³

The fanciful beginnings that she invented and embellished over her life were just that—inventions. The truth of her origins, which she kept secret even from her son, was too painful for someone who chose to live in a world that she carefully created for herself. She chose not to make those painful years part of her selective memory.

It was an astute writer of The Blue Book of the Screen (1924) who thought that it would be impossible for one to imagine that Mae Murray had been born any other place but New York City. In her exotic roles on the screen, she is the spirit of the Great White Way.⁴ Maybe—but first, she had to survive a miserable childhood marred by poverty.

In the middle of the nineteenth century, thousands of Germans left their homeland during a period of unemployment, political unrest, and religious oppression and made the transatlantic journey to the United States in hopes of a better life. In the 1840s many of the immigrants settled in New York City in an area known as Kleindeutschland, Little Germany, or Deutschländl. By 1880 more than 370,000 immigrants called the German settlement their home.

Although they arrived hoping for a better life than the ones they had left behind, many found themselves swallowed up by unimaginable squalor and despair. Throughout Manhattan’s Lower East Side, which encompassed Little Germany, immigrants crowded into city block after city block of tenements, or residential warehouses, which over time became a chief source of urban social evils—ill health, immorality, and poverty.

Criminals, prostitutes, and paupers multiplied while immigrant families found it impossible to maintain healthy homes. Overcrowding, contaminated water, windowless bedrooms, and deplorable sanitary conditions made the Lower East Side ripe for tuberculosis, diphtheria, typhoid, and scarlet fever. Rates of infant mortality there were among the highest in the Western world.

Lower East Side, New York City, mid-1880s. Author’s collection.

It was into this environment that Mae Murray was born.

Her parental grandparents, George Peter and Anna Maria Geier Koenig, immigrated to the United States in the 1840s and eventually settled on East Sixth Street in the middle of Little Germany. George found steady work as a tailor, and Anna stayed busy birthing and raising her brood of children: William George, Pauline, William, and Joseph Peter.⁵

Mary Koenig, Mae’s mother. Courtesy of David King.

Less is known about Mae’s maternal grandparents, Louis and Gertrude Muller (Miller). Louis immigrated to the United States from France, and Gertrude was a native New Yorker. Their daughter, Mary, sometimes called Mamie and Mabel, was born in July 1866.⁶

On May 31, 1884, Joseph Koenig married Mary Miller. Joseph was twenty-one, Mary eighteen.⁷ Within months, the couple was expecting a child. Joseph left his job as a waiter (probably bartender) and went to work as a gilder for his brother, William, who was a lithographer.

The couple lived for a time in Joseph’s room on East Fourteenth Street, but they soon found a flat in a five-unit tenement at 214 Broome Street so they could be near Mary’s parents, who lived four blocks up on Essex Street. It was there that midwife Caroline Herschel brought a little blonde-haired, blue-eyed girl into the world. The date was Sunday, May 10, 1885.⁸ They named her Anna Mary, after her mother and paternal grandmother. Her birth certificate mentions that Mary had previously borne two children but only one was living, lending credence to the possibility that Anna Mary had a twin who died in childbirth.

While Anna Mary was still an infant, a series of tragedies struck the Koenigs. Her grandfather, George, died in October 1886 after an extended illness. He was buried in the Lutheran cemetery in Brooklyn in a family plot that his wife, Anna Maria, had purchased just a month before her husband passed away. A year later, William, Anna Maria’s son, died after a long bout with pneumonia. His three-month-old daughter, Pauline, died of marasmus less than two months later.⁹

In the middle of the family’s struggle, little Anna Mary’s family continued to grow. In November 1889, her brother, William Robert, was born. Another brother, Howard Joseph, followed in January 1894.

As an adult, Mae Murray gave almost no information about her childhood or her family. If questioned by the press or her friends, she would invent tales about living here and there. The stories rarely mentioned her parents, only her grandmother, and never her two brothers. Bits of information that she gave over and over had the ring of truth, however. First, she wanted to be dancer from the time she could put one foot in front of the other. Second, she frequently referred to a lonely and unhappy childhood. Third, she learned to dance in the streets.

My greatest ambition was that someday I might become a great dancer, she wrote to her fans in 1920. We children used to give amateur performances and I always assumed the title of stage manager. It was glorious fun and the sheet we used for a curtain seemed so real. Later, of course, I took up dancing seriously.¹⁰

Another favorite tale was the inspiration given her as a young girl by a neighborhood organ-grinder.

I knew in some subconscious way that hand organs were made to follow and I accordingly proceeded to follow the old man and the old woman and the little monkey that accompanied them. My first dancing lesson was the one I took when I watched the ancient monkey doing his funny steps. Somehow those steps didn’t seem to be interpreting the spirit of the dance that the organ ground out.

Suddenly my feet began to move. I didn’t know it was dancing, but the crowd gathered, and when the air was done and the applause loud and long, the old woman was keen enough to see that I had made a hit, and accordingly she handed me the cap that the monkey had formerly passed, and she was so pleased with the box office receipts that she and her husband invited me to lunch with them.¹¹

Anna Mary, the future Mae Murray, eager to break from her dismal home life, went with the couple. That lunch was a quaint one, black bread and cheese, sandwiches and beer, which I did not like. But I loved the music that was hidden in that wheezing hand organ, and I had no idea of ever returning home. I was rescued by a search party late in the afternoon, and carried home to my mother.¹² Perhaps running away was the only way the little girl could escape from her bleak and lonely home life.

I know the horrors of solitary confinement, Mae later recounted, for I was a victim of it when I was a child. I wasn’t spanked or scolded like other children. I was simply ostracized in the home circle. No one spoke to me, and no one noticed me when I spoke. Very walls of silence were built up, and I could not have been more cut off if I had been behind prison bars.¹³

Over time, the Koenigs moved from the Lower East Side to a tenement on Eighty-Ninth Street, in Manhattan’s Yorkville, an ethnically diverse neighborhood with a large population of Germans. The family managed to scrape by on Joseph’s meager earnings as a bartender. While the move from Little Germany to Yorkville signaled for many the beginning of better days, the plight of the Koenig family spiraled downward with Joseph’s worsening alcohol addiction. The family focus turned not to better days but to mere survival.

In May 1896, Anna Mary, not quite eleven years old, was devastated when her father, at only thirty-three, died of acute gastritis complicated by years of alcohol abuse.¹⁴ Three years later, his brother, William George, died at forty-six of nephritis, again brought on by alcohol addiction. The sad disease of drink was a family curse that later consumed the lives of Mae’s brothers, William and Howard.

After her husband’s death, Mary Koenig went to work as a housekeeper for Harry Payne Whitney, the son of William C. Whitney, a former U.S. secretary of the navy and member of one of the city’s most prominent families. It was through Mary’s work at the Whitney’s Fifth Avenue mansion for Whitney’s wife, the former Gertrude Vanderbilt, that little Anna Mary discovered that there was another world outside her sad and lonely life in a cramped Eighty-Ninth Street tenement apartment. She felt reason for hope.

Peter Joseph Koenig, Mae’s father. Courtesy of David King.

Early Mae Murray publicity photograph. Courtesy of Caroline Rupprecht.

2

Dancing into the New Century

1900–1907

Fifteen-year-old Anna Mary Koenig danced her way into the new century and never looked back. It was through dancing that she was able to forget her dreary beginnings.

Dancing, of course, is second nature to me, she later said. I have danced since my birth—almost—and I can imagine myself dancing to the brink of the grave. It spells the joy of living to me. In dancing I can lose myself from the sorrows of the world.¹

The teenager began hanging around stage doors with my wistful little soul in my eye, she said. I wanted to see how they did what I wanted to do.²

Her mother and grandmother objected to Anna Mary’s interest in the theater. From their perspective, as the Victorian era passed into history, there was something immoral about theater people, something a bit sleazy about the entertainment profession. Still, the teenager continued to return to the theater, meeting those who worked in the make-believe world she wanted to be part of. Disobedient? Of course it was, she later said. I never really wanted to be disobedient. I wanted to dance, that was all. And my people said, ‘She shall not dance.’³

While Anna Mary defied her family by pursuing the stage, the Whitneys took notice of her brother, William, whose short stature made him the perfect size to race thoroughbreds. They offered to help train him as a jockey and make him part of the family’s profitable horse racing operation. Mother Mary was all in favor, thinking it provided him the possibility of a lucrative future as well as a male influence for her fatherless son.

In the early years of the twentieth century, for reasons not entirely known, the Koenig family fell apart. Mae went her own way, severing connections with her mother and her two brothers, William and Howard. For her, it was a complete break. Mae later told a reporter that she had been an only child and that her mother had disappeared to unknown places in Europe, leaving her grandmother in charge. She remained close to her grandmother, her father’s mother, who, approaching eighty and in ill health, had little control over the headstrong teenager.

Mae, age fourteen. Author’s collection.

Anna Mary’s talent for dancing, coupled with her beauty and enthusiasm, made her prime material for the stage. The world of musical comedy, which was rapidly expanding on Broadway and across the country, provided anyone who was talented—and persistent—a chance to thrive.

By 1903, over 25 percent of the productions playing in New York and on the road were musicals. The public was fascinated by the descriptions being given the productions: extravaganzas, spectacular fantasies, burlesque revues, vaudeville farce, and comic opera.⁴ In them, the soon-to-be star cleared her head of the past.

Part of her cleansing involved shaving off a couple of years from her age and giving

Reviews for Mae Murray

[Keith Altomare · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

This woman as suggested was the reference in sunset Blvd. A terrific experience.

[knahs_1 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Fascinating and well researched book on silent film star Mae Murray (best known for 1925’s The Merry Widow). For a woman who was always vague in interviews and during her lifetime changed her year of birth from 1885 to 1906 as she got older, author Ankerich did a fantastic job of tracking down and finding out the facts about Murray’s life. The book included interviews with Murray’s son and nephews, neither of whom had an intimate relation with her. Murray’s life could be the model for Norma Desmond in Sunset Boulevard and it is just too bad that this talented lady could not move on with her life and live in the present. The book presents a good look at the silent film industry and life in vaudeville after the studio system blacklisted Murray. Her decline and loss of fortune to a fortune hunting husband is detailed and Murray’s constant court battles. One thing you can say for Murray is that she always thought of herself as a star. The book contains some fantastic photographs, a complete filmography, and list of theatrical work and lets you know what happened to all of the principal individuals in Murray’s life. Recommended for any fan of silent films or early Hollywood history.