Crowned Heads, Page 2

  Barry waited for the tide of questions to ebb, then asked soberly:

  “Marion, you really want the story? The whole story?”

  “I want it.”

  “Then I’ll give it to you.”

  “Nice Barry.”

  “Nice Marion. But let me preface it by telling you three things. You won’t believe it all, even though my facts are unassailable. You’ll be flattered, because I’ve never told another person. And you’ll be very angry, because you can’t use it.”

  “Can’t use it?” Her nostrils widened; she tossed back her hair. “Then what good is it to me?”

  “I haven’t any idea. You asked me for Fedora stories, and I’m willing to give you a great one. But only here, and only now. Afterward you have to forget it. Otherwise you’d scoop my book.”

  Deflated, Marion drew back against the pillows in ill-disguised frustration. “Why tell me at all?”

  “I thought, out of the whole thing, you might glean a few little things you could use, the kind of ‘sidelights’ you were talking about. If we’re friends—and I hope we’re friends—I’m going to use you as my patsy. A dry run, if you like. Only a few people other than my editor know anything about what’s in this manuscript, and he thinks I made most of it up. Come on, don’t look so disappointed. You want to hear or not?”

  “I am disappointed—and yes, I do want to hear. Go ahead. Start.”

  “In twenty-five words or less—right? It’s not quite that easy. How much do you really know about her?”

  As a good newsperson, Marion thought she had done her homework well, having spent the afternoon going through the files her staff had brought in for an initial survey. “Well,” she began, “I know her father was a grocer and her mother was a milliner—”

  “Wrong on both counts. He was a schoolteacher, she was a washerwoman. Fedora told me so herself.”

  “On Crete?”

  “No. At the Louvre, thirty years ago.”

  “You’ve known her that long?”

  Barry nodded. “Right after the war. She was living in Switzerland with the Sobryanskis until after V-E Day, then she stayed in their Paris house, the one Cole Porter used to have, in Rue Monsieur. I was living around the corner, in Rue de Babylone, and I used to see her sometimes. One day she spoke to me in the Louvre. I never learned why, really. She’d come to see the ‘Mona Lisa.’ What does this line mean to you?” He quoted: “‘Rien d’ailleurs ne rassure autant qu’un masque.’”

  “‘Nothing provides as much assurance as a mask.’ Colette, isn’t it?”

  “Very good. Colette, yes. Fedora quoted it to me. That was her, you see; she, too, had a mask.”

  “You mean her need for privacy?”

  “I mean her whole life.”

  “What was true about her?”

  “Very little, actually.”

  Marion had the sense to realize that in Fedora’s case facts were of little consequence. For two reasons. First, it was not the reality of Fedora that mattered; nobody was ever much interested in her vital statistics. What was interesting was the myth, and few myths are made of facts. Second, the facts were mostly wrong to begin with. To prove the point, Barry went over the list he had taken from the New York Public Library, biographies ranging from ho-hum to what-else-is-new? They raked over the old stories and rumors—the double love triangles and mysteries, the character of the sinister Dr. Vando, the seemingly eternal presence of Mrs. Balfour, Fedora’s friendship for the Sobryanskis, mother and son, wife and husband—all relying heavily on early studio biographies based on information supplied after her meeting with Maurice Derougemont, and as he himself had later admitted to Barry,* they were as much a figment of his imagination as were the plots of the numerous pictures they made together.

  The one book doing any sort of justice to its subject was the well-known Arthur Tole biography,* a carefully written and annotated work with a good sense of place and time, and even of the woman herself. It was published the year following Fedora’s last, never completed, picture, The Dying Summer, and appeared to be as accurate as possible, at least regarding her films. Barry’s hard-cover copy was well worn, and from it he now drew out and handed to Marion a typewritten page, which reproduced the biographical material concerning Fedora’s films that is found at the end of the Tole book.

  It read:

  FEDORA FEDOROVNYA (Maria Katrin Fedorowich)

  Born November 7, 1895, Tiflis, Georgian USSR

  GERMAN-LANGUAGE SILENT FEATURES (Impro-Berliner Films):

  Der Grimme Sensenmann (released in USA as The Grim Reaper), 1916; Der Heirats-antrag (The Proposal), 1916; Die Zuchthäuslerin (Prison Woman), 1917; Zigeuner (The Gypsy), 1917; Auf Schlittschuhen (On Ice Skates), 1918.

  ENGLISH-LANGUAGE SILENT FEATURES:

  Zizi (A&B 1919), The Phantom Woman (A&B 1920), Palmyra (A&B 1920), Sorry She Asked (A&B 1921), Rumored Affair (A&B 1921), The Fatal Woman (A&B 1921), Thaïs (A&B 1922), Sins of the Mother (A&B 1923), Without Remorse (A&B 1924), Judith and Holofernes (A&B 1924), Impératrice (A&B 1925), Queen Zenobia (loanout, Par. 1925), A Woman’s Past (A&B 1926), Madame Bovary (A&B 1926, abandoned), Ophelie (A&B 1927).

  ENGLISH-LANGUAGE SOUND FEATURES:

  The Sorrows of Marta Lange (A&B 1928), The Red Divan (A&B 1929), Adrienne Lecouvreur (A&B 1929), Aphrodisia (A&B 1930), Theodora of Byzantium (A&B 1930), The Daughter of Olaf Ruen (loanout, MGM 1931), Elizabeth of Valois (A&B 1932), Tsarina (A&B 1932), Madagascar (A&B 1933), Andromeda (A&B 1933), Sappho (A&B 1934), Espionage (A&B 1934), The Travesty (A&B 1934), The Player Queen (A&B 1935), La Gioconda (A&B 1935), Tsigane: A Gypsy Story (A&B 1936), The Voices of Joan of Arc (loanout, RKO 1936), The Mirror (A&B 1937), The Three Sisters (A&B 1937), Madame de Staël (loanout, MGM 1938), Night Train from Trieste (A&B 1938), The Duchess from Dubuque (A&B 1938), The Miracle of Santa Cristi (Samuel L. Ueberroth Productions, released through UA 1955; cameo role), The Blue Nile (Samuel L. Ueberroth—Carlo Umberti—Illumina Productions, released by J. Arthur Rank 1957), Madeleine Pomona (MGM, filmed at Elstree Studios, London, 1959), From the Shores of the Caspian (Universal-International 1961), Ophelie (remake, Warner Bros. 1963), Mother Russia (Crown Films Ltd. 1964), The Lynx (Sagittarius Productions 1966), Monte Carlo Lady (Fox 1968), For Lovers Only (Columbia 1968), The Swag (Columbia 1969), The Dying Summer (MGM 1969, uncompleted).

  Marion hazarded that this information seemed accurate,* and that the book was a notably honest attempt to render a true picture of Fedora. Barry agreed only partially: the discovery that she was born not in Russia but in the Georgian Caucasus near the Black Sea was a clever piece of detective work on Mr. Tole’s part, but it still fell rather short of the mark. To hint at the quality of the other books, Barry pointed out that one listed her as a Pole, another as a Latvian, while a third gave her birthplace as Smolensk. So wide was the variance of “facts” concerning Fedora.

  The more realistic ones now offered by Barry were those, he said, he had ferreted out during his stay on Crete, this only fourteen months earlier. As he had stated, Fedora’s father was not a grocer but a schoolmaster, nor was her mother a milliner, but a laundress whose unfortunate illness and subsequent aging caused Fedora so to fear the ravages of time. True, the family was poor, but the young daughter never totted up accounts payable for cheese, as screen-magazine articles had reported. Nor was her name ever Fedorova or Fedorovskaya or Fedoro; it was Fedorowich. This was changed by the German film producer Improstein when he brought her to make her first films in Germany.

  Barry took exception to another oft-reported “fact.” It was not the famous director Derougemont who gave her the name Fedora. She was known as Maria Fedorovnya when she worked for Improstein in Berlin, but it was she herself who thought up Fedora as a first name. Derougemont’s only part in the matter was to suggest that she drop Fedorovnya, which people had trouble both pronouncing and spelling, and find a better marquee name.

  True, Barry said, that she went to St. Petersburg in her early teens, untrue that she b
egan as an actress at the Bureinsky Theater there. She was engaged not as a player but as a “helper of wardrobe,” as such people were called, and with the Peterhof Company. It was with them that she made her stage debut.

  Her German pictures, unfortunately, with the notable exception of her first, Der Grimme Sensenmann, have been lost or destroyed, but movie stills of the time show her as pudgy and sulky, with no more hint of the splendid creature she was to become than the caterpillar gives of the butterfly before spinning its cocoon. Improstein, who saw her at the Peterhof and encouraged her to come from Moscow to Berlin, said in his memoirs* that she was a docile cow, but one who gave sweet milk. She never, however, became one of that notorious stable of girls he maintained in the Tiergarten Allee—which was sportingly referred to as the “Augean Stables” because of both its ample size and the inability of the authorities to clean it out—but occupied quarters of her own choosing and financing while she undertook her first screen role, that of the barmaid in Der Grimme Sensenmann, released in America as The Grim Reaper.

  Barry showed Marion the photographs from this period, painstakingly assembled for the Tole biography, and she could easily trace the early emergence of the dainty butterfly from the stolid caterpillar. Fedora was no sylph, but little by little the fatty tissues disappeared, the eyes lost their puffiness, the mouth its rather ridiculous fruity shape. Improstein, presumably, had paid to have her teeth capped.

  “If you check the early fan magazines,” Barry noted, “they say she’d met Vando by that time. He was working on his experiments at the Bagratian Clinic outside Moscow, and it’s possible he’d already had something to do with the physical alterations.”

  “Did he operate on her eyes?”

  “Come off it—of course he didn’t. That’s the kind of show-business gossip that always attaches itself to people like Fedora.”

  The story of her next move, from Berlin to New York, was so at variance with reality that in talking about it Barry first reiterated the published “facts” and then told Marion the truth as he later had it from Fedora herself.

  “Actually, all the biographies agree in this, but none is correct. Here’s the way they tell it. After the Armistice, Derougemont arrives in Germany from France and goes to a party at Improstein’s house, where Zigeuner is being screened. He sees the lovely Maria Fedorovnya, offers on the spot to buy her contract from Improstein, who agrees to sell it to him. If you read his memoirs, Improstein says he later considered it the rashest and most ill-advised act of his career. Despite the fact that through his movie earnings at UFA he was later able to help finance the Weimar Republic, he was at the moment in financial trouble and he actually did sell her contract; but not to Derougemont, who had never been to Berlin at that time, and who, by the way, was not even the Frenchman he claimed to be.”

  “Maurice Derougemont wasn’t French? What was he?”

  “Hold your horses—that comes in a minute. Back to the fan mags. With the agreement in writing, Derougemont goes whooping off into the street, buys a fur coat and a dozen roses, presents himself at Maria’s door, flashes an engraved card and a dentist’s smile, and lays the coat at her feet, the roses in her arms, and the contract in her hand. He tells her to be ready and packed on the morrow, he books passage, first class, but with discretion, mind you—the staterooms are on different decks. There follows a merry transatlantic whirl. La Fedorovnya is a sensation on the dance floor and a celebrated guest at the captain’s table. She arrives in New York harbor gazing starrily up at the Statue of Liberty and doing cheesecake poses for a mob of press and photographers against the mahogany rail of the Hohenzollern—same coat, same contract, new roses.

  “She has a gay old time in Manhattan, including a trip to the zoo, where she wants to see ‘zee polar-r bear-r-rs—they remind me so uf home,’ then a nifty drawing room on the train and the trip to sunny Cal. Add more roses, more executives—the coat seems already to have been Hollanderized and gone to cold storage; no doubt the change in climate—and the script of Zizi is tucked into her little pink mitts. Buzz buzz buzz, and off to the studio for make-up and wardrobe tests and interviews, then into production, then to preview in Glendale, then to stardom, and there you have Fedora, born if not bred.”

  “None of that is true?”

  “A fiction from start to finish. Now I’ll tell you about Derougemont. Maurice Derougemont, you see, dear Marion, was not French at all, as he claimed to be, but American. He came from San Francisco and his name was Moe Roseman. When he met Fedora he was a two-bit shill in front of a burlesque theater in downtown Los Angeles. Sam Ueberroth, who later became Samuel L. Ueberroth, producer, was his sidekick, and with straw hats and snappy bow ties they hawked the charms of hula-skirted lovelies to be discovered inside. Moe was at that time seeing a good deal of Sam’s sister, Viola, who was a secretary at AyanBee, and it was through her that he first encountered Maria Fedorovnya. By the time Sam was making major films, Viola had attained a position of eminence as an important agent.”

  Barry had known Viola for years, and though she was occasionally faulted for her sharp tongue, he had found her profoundly loyal to her friends. He had importuned her to talk to him about Fedora, and she had adamantly refused. She did, however, recall for him the precise details of her and Moe Roseman’s initial encounter with Fedora. It had been on a Sunday, and Vi had expressed the wish to go to the beach. She and Moe caught the Venice Short Line from downtown; the car was hot and smelly, and bore only three passengers: a young couple and Fedora. Fedora was crying, and feeling sorry for her, Viola moved beside her to discover what the matter was. She met with a stream of what sounded like gibberish, but Moe recognized it as Russian. He could speak a little and thus a line of communication was opened. During the trip they talked, and he learned that she was an actress who had come from Berlin, where Abe Bluhm of AyanBee studios had offered her a contract. It was Bluhm who bought her contract from Improstein, and he then had left Berlin for Vienna, telling Maria to get to New York on the next boat. Which she did, but hardly in the manner described earlier. She traveled third class on the Kronprinzessin Carolina, was terribly seasick, and arrived sans fur coat and sans roses, to be taken in tow by a member of AyanBee Pictures’ office staff, who checked her into a cheap midtown hotel, where he left her for two days. She spoke hardly any English and the city terrified her.

  With the same paucity of fanfare, she was met in Pasadena by a man in a secondhand roadster, in which he drove her to a hotel—little more than a rooming house, really—on Melrose Avenue, and deposited her. A dapper fellow, the man wore a gray flannel suit and spats, which Fedora found odd, considering the hot weather. He also sported a gray felt hat with a natty silk band, the brim turned rakishly up on one side and down on the other. “What kind of hat do you call that?” she asked him in her broken English. “That?” he replied. “That’s a fedora. Why?” She shrugged and tilted her head critically to one side. “I like it,” she replied.

  No one at the studio seemed to know who she was or what was to be done with her. She languished for endless weeks, picking up her salary check on Fridays with the secretaries and the grips, and believing she had made a dreadful mistake. She had never seen the Pacific Ocean and made up her mind one Sunday to go unaccompanied to the beach. On the train she was drowned in a wave of self-pity and homesickness. Enter Moe Roseman and Viola. His American tongue fumbled over the Russian syllables of her last name and he said, half kidding, that she ought to get another one. “I have,” she said. “What?” he asked. “Fedora,” she said. “Fedora’s a hat,” he said. “I know,” she said. “I want to he a high hat.”

  So she had the name before she had anything else, except the face. Later, the “high hat” remark was misinterpreted as meaning that she wanted to be snooty, but at the time she meant only that she wanted to be important, famous. It did not take long, and both Moe Roseman and Viola Ueberroth were pivotally involved. Moe had been peddling a scenario around the studios, one which in fact Sam Ueberro
th had written. It was titled Zizi, and since “Fedora” had been put under contract personally by Abe Bluhm, Moe thought he sniffed possibilities at AyanBee. He and Vi tricked Fedora out in a glamorous outfit, borrowed some furs, a large dog, and an important-looking car. Sam, in a chauffeur’s uniform, drove Moe and Fedora to AyanBee, where Viola had telephoned down to the gate to have them passed onto the lot; the pass read “Madame Fedora and Maurice Derougemont.” Bluhm was still in Europe, and his partner, one Jake Amsteen, was minding the store, though the right hand of Bluhm never let the left one of Amsteen know when it was washing, or what. Though he knew nothing of Fedora, Amsteen was impressed. Moe used the French boulevardier’s accent he later became famous for, Fedora was charming, Amsteen was conned. “Derougemont” encouraged the mogul to look over the Zizi scenario, and a month later the picture went into production, Fedora starring, Moe directing. When Bluhm returned from Europe he was furious, since none of these proceedings had been made known to him, but when the picture was played in test dates, everyone started asking who Fedora was. They shortly found out. The picture made some money and its star created public interest, receiving sufficiently good notices to be given the important role in The Phantom Woman, which was directed by Moe Roseman, now known professionally as Maurice Derougemont. Together they did a number of her early American films. She rose to stardom at the same time as Talmadge and Normand, she was vamping along with Theda Bara and Valeska Suratt, she played Thaïs soon after Betty Blythe did Queen of Sheba, which Fedora far outgrossed, she worked cheek by jowl with Swanson, she beat Norma Shearer into talkies by one year. Barry now showed Marion some interesting documented facts in the Tole book. Shearer was listed as being seventy-four when the book was published. Swanson was seventy-seven. Normand had died forty-six years before at thirty-one, Talmadge had retired twenty-seven years before at thirty-three. Fedora’s birth date in the available studio biographies was given as June 1895; the date had been verified in yesterday’s obituaries.*