Mae Murray (born Marie Adrienne Koenig; May 10, 1885 – March 23, 1965) was an American actress, dancer, film producer, and screenwriter. Murray rose to fame during the silent film era and was known as "The Girl with the Bee-Stung Lips" and "The Gardenia of the Screen".
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Wednesday, September 22, 2021. 10:00. AM.
Mae Murray - Actress, dancer, film producer & screenwriter .
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1. Profile :
Died March 23, 1965 (aged 79), Woodland Hills, Los Angeles, California, U.S.
Resting place Valhalla Memorial Park Cemetery
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Occupation Actress dancer film producer screenwriter
Years active 1916–1931
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Spouse(s)
1.William M. Schwenker Jr. (m. 1908; div. 1910)
2.Jay O'Brien (m. 1916; div. 1918)
3.Robert Z. Leonard (m. 1918; div. 1925)
4.David Mdivani (m. 1926; div. 1934)
Children 1
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2. Introduction :
Mae Murray (born Marie Adrienne Koenig; May 10, 1885 – March 23, 1965) was an American actress, dancer, film producer, and screenwriter. Murray rose to fame during the silent film era and was known as "The Girl with the Bee-Stung Lips" and "The Gardenia of the Screen".
Mae Murray is now largely remembered for her imperious offscreen personality and her gradual loss of touch with reality, rather than for the fact that she had a major Hollywood career spanning more than a decade. A skilled dancer, she usually had a dance sequence in each film. It is difficult to assess her screen persona from her often bizarre publicity stills. In the early 1920s, theatre owners give glowing accounts of her films in the pages of Moving Picture World. Though a fair number of her films survive (see below), most are in European archives and few people have seen them. However, her most famous film, The Merry Widow, does air occasionally on Turner Classic Movies.
The five foot four inch (5' 4") tall, blue eyed 110lb. Mae Murray started her career dancing with Vernon Castle in the 1906 Broadway play "About Town." After the run of the show she became a a Ziegfeld Chorus Girl, then a " Ziegfeld Girl" in 1908 portraying one of the " Nell Brinkley Bathing Girls" and by 1915 was one of the star performers, she stayed with the Follies off and on until 1916. Reportedly, Mae went to Paris to study the popular dances of the day and made a name for herself while there, when she returned, the nightclubs quickly started billing her and her ballroom dances. In 1916 Murray went on to become a movie star. She began her movie career with the film "To Have and To Hold" and would gain the nickname "The Girl with the Bee Stung Lips." In 1918 she would be paired up with Rudolph Valentino in two movies and later with John Gilbert in the movie titled "The Merry Widow" which made her a Hollywood celebrity. Murray was reportedly the creator of the dance "Cinquante-Cinquante." Mae would eventually get married to Robert Leonard in 1918-? and Prince David Mdivani in 1926-1933. Her movie career faded due to an "unattractive" voice in the Talkies( Pictures with sound) as well as her divorce from her 4th husband "prince" David Mdivani.
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3. Early life :
Murray was born in New York City, the second-oldest child of Joseph and Mary (née Miller) Koenig. Her maternal grandparents had emigrated from France while her paternal grandparents had emigrated from Germany. She had two brothers, William Robert (born November 1889) and Howard Joseph (born January 1884).
The family eventually moved to an apartment in the Lower East Side. In May 1896, Joseph Koenig, Murray's father, died from acute gastritis due to his alcoholism. To support the family, Mary Koenig took a job as a housekeeper for Harry Payne Whitney.
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4. Career :
4.1. Stage :
Murray began acting on the Broadway stage in 1906 with dancer Vernon Castle. In 1908, she joined the chorus line of the Ziegfeld Follies, moving up to headliner by 1915. Murray became a star of the club circuit in both the United States and Europe, performing with Clifton Webb, Rudolph Valentino, and John Gilbert as some of her many dance partners.
Murray and Monte Blue in Broadway Rose (1922)
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4.2. Films :
Murray made her motion picture debut in To Have and to Hold in 1916. She became a major star for Universal, starring with Rudolph Valentino in The Delicious Little Devil and Big Little Person in 1919. At the height of her popularity, Murray formed her own production company with her director, John M. Stahl. Critics were sometimes less than thrilled with her over-the-top costumes and exaggerated emoting, but her films were popular with movie-going audiences and financially successful.
In 1925, Murray, Leonard, and Stahl produced films at Tiffany Pictures, with Souls for Sables (1925), starring Claire Windsor and Eugene O'Brien, as the first film made by Tiffany. For a brief period of time, Murray wrote a weekly column for newspaper scion William Randolph Hearst.
At her career peak in the early 1920s, Murray, along with such other notable Hollywood personalities as Cecil B. DeMille, Douglas Fairbanks, William S. Hart, Jesse L. Lasky, Harold Lloyd, Hal Roach, Donald Crisp, Conrad Nagel and Irving Thalberg was a member of the board of trustees at the Motion Picture & Television Fund – a charitable organization that offers assistance and care to those in the motion picture and television industries without resources. Four decades later, Murray herself received aid from that organization.
In the early 1920s, Murray was painted by well-known Hollywood portrait painter Theodore Lukits. This work titled Symphony in Jade and Gold (The Actress Mae Murray) (1922, private collection, northern California) depicted Murray nude, gazing in a mirror. It was exhibited at the Pacific Asia Museum in 1999 and two other venues as part of the exhibition Theodore Lukits, An American Orientalist.
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4.3. Decline :
Murray appeared in the title role in the Erich von Stroheim-directed film The Merry Widow (1925), opposite John Gilbert. When silent films gave way to talkies, she made an insecure debut in the new medium in Peacock Alley (1930), a remake of her earlier 1921 version Peacock Alley. In 1931, she was cast with newcomer Irene Dunne, leading man Lowell Sherman, and fellow silent screen star Norman Kerry in the talkie Bachelor Apartment. The film was critically panned at the time of release and Murray made only one more film, High Stakes (1931), also with Sherman.
Murray, 1926
A critical blow to her film career occurred after she married her fourth husband, David Mdivani, a Georgian man of minor aristocratic roots, whose brothers Serge and Alexis married actress Pola Negri and the heiress Barbara Hutton respectively. The couple married on June 27, 1926, and Mdivani became her manager, suggesting that his new wife ought to leave MGM. Murray took her husband's advice and walked out of her contract with MGM, making a powerful foe of studio boss Louis B. Mayer. Later, she would swallow her pride and pleaded to return, but Mayer would not rehire her. In effect, Mayer's hostility meant that Murray was blacklisted from working for the Hollywood studios.[5]
Meanwhile, in 1927, Murray was sued by her then-masseuse, the famous Hollywood fitness guru Sylvia of Hollywood, for the outstanding amount of $2,125; a humiliating and detailed court case followed.
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4.4. Later years :
In the 1940s, Murray appeared regularly at Billy Rose's Diamond Horseshoe, a nightclub which specialized in a "Gay '90s" atmosphere, often presenting stars of the past for nostalgic value. Her appearances collected mixed reviews: her dancing (in particular the Merry Widow Waltz) was well received, but she was criticized for her youthful costumes and heavy makeup application, trying to conceal her age. In 1946, she taught ballroom dancing to young teenagers at a dance studio in Los Angeles. It was located on Crenshaw Blvd., near 48th Street.
Murray's finances continued to collapse, and for most of her later life she lived in poverty. She was the subject of an authorized biography, The Self-Enchanted (1959), written by Jane Ardmore, that has often been incorrectly called Murray's autobiography.
On the evening of February 19, 1964, 78-year-old Murray was found disoriented in St. Louis, thinking that she had completed a bus trip to New York. Murray explained to a Salvation Army officer that she had become lost trying to find her hotel, which she had forgotten the name of. She also refused bus fare back to Los Angeles as she claimed to have a ticket for the remainder of the journey in her purse, "if she could find it."
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5. Personal life :
In September 1908, in Hoboken, New Jersey, while she was appearing in the Follies of 1908, Murray married William M. Schwenker Jr. (born 1885), the unemployed son of a brewery-supply dealer, who cut off his son's allowance upon news of the wedding; they divorced in 1910. On December 18, 1916, she married former dancer and future Olympic bobsled champion Jay O'Brien. He had been married to Irene Fenwick.
After divorcing O'Brien in 1918, Murray wed movie director Robert Z. Leonard on August 18, 1918; they divorced on May 26, 1925.
Murray married her fourth husband, David Mdivani, on June 27, 1926. They had one child, Koran David Mdivani (1926-2018), before divorcing in 1933. Koran was later raised by Sara Elizabeth "Bess" Cunning of Averill Park, New York, who began taking care of him in 1936, when the child was recovering from a double mastoid operation (Cunning's brother Dr. David Cunning was the surgeon). When Murray attempted to regain custody of her son in 1939, Cunning and her other brothers, John, Ambrose, and Cortland, refused, according to The New York Times, at which time Murray and her former husband, Mdivani, entered a bitter custody dispute. It finally ended in 1940, with Murray being given legal custody of the child and the court ordering Mdivani to pay $400 a month maintenance. However, Koran Mdivani continued to live with Bess Cunning, who adopted him in 1940 under the name Daniel Michael Cunning.[9] Reportedly, Mdivani had managed to drain nearly all of Murray's money.
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Death :
Many years later, Murray moved into the Motion Picture House in Woodland Hills, a retirement community for Hollywood professionals. She died there on March 23, 1965 at the age of 79. She is interred in Valhalla Memorial Park Cemetery, North Hollywood, California.
For her contribution to the motion picture industry, Mae Murray has a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame at 6318 Hollywood Blvd. She was one of three actresses (Pola Negri and Theda Bara were the others) whose eyes were combined to form the Chicago International Film Festival's logo, a stark, black and white close-up of the composite eyes set as repeated frames in a strip of film.
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6. Filmography :
Year Title Role Notes
1916 To Have and to Hold Lady Jocelyn Lost film
1916 Sweet Kitty Bellairs Kitty Bellairs Lost film
1916 The Dream Girl Meg Dugan Lost film
1916 The Big Sister Betty Norton Lost film
1916 The Plow Girl Margot Lost film
1917 On Record Helen Wayne Lost film
1917 A Mormon Maid Dora
1917 The Primrose Ring Margaret MacLean Lost film
1917 At First Sight Justina Lost film
1917 Princess Virtue Lianne Demarest
1917 Face Value Joan Darby Writer (story)
1918 The Bride's Awakening Elaine Bronson
1918 Her Body in Bond Peggy Blondin Alternative title: The Heart of an Actress Lost film
1918 Modern Love Della Arnold Writer (story) Lost film
1918 The Taming of Kaiser Bull Miss America Short, Lost film
1918 Danger, Go Slow Mugsy Mulane Writer, Lost film
1919 The Scarlet Shadow Elena Evans Lost film
1919 The Twin Pawns Daisy/Violet White Alternative title: The Curse of Greed
1919 The Delicious Little Devil Mary McGuire
1919 What Am I Bid? Betty Yarnell Alternative title: Girl For Sale Lost film
1919 The Big Little Person Arathea Manning Lost film
1919 The A.B.C. of Love Kate
1920 On with the Dance Sonia
1920 Right to Love Lady Falkland
1920 Idols of Clay Faith Merrill
1921 The Gilded Lily Lillian Drake
1922 Peacock Alley Cleo of Paris Incomplete
1922 Fascination Dolores de Lisa Lost film
1922 Broadway Rose Rosalie Lawrence
1923 Jazzmania Ninon
1923 The French Doll Georgine Mazulier
1923 Fashion Row Olga Farinova/Zita (her younger sister) Lost film
1924 Mademoiselle Midnight Renée de Gontran/Renée de Quiros
1924 Circe, the Enchantress Circe (mythical goddess)/Cecilie Brunne Alternative title: Circe
1925 The Merry Widow Sally O'Hara
1925 The Masked Bride Gaby Lost film
1926 Valencia Valencia Alternative title: The Love Song
1927 Altars of Desire Claire Sutherland
1930 Peacock Alley Claire Tree
1931 Bachelor Apartment Mrs. Agatha Carraway Alternative title: Apartamento de Soltero
1931 High Stakes Dolly Jordan Lennon
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7.
A superstar from day one of her career, "the girl with the bee-stung lips" was never forced to "pay her dues." The glamorous Mae Murray's first footfall on stage stopped the Ziegfeld Follies. She proceeded to reach the pinnacle of silent cinema superstardom, performing in more than 40 popular programmers. Her performance in Erich von Stroheim's l925 "The Merry Widow" boasted the largest box office for any studio that year, and would remain the most successful film either artist ever made.
Yet, despite the position she held so long and the consistent profitability of her films, Mae's career would topple shortly after her triumphant "Merry Widow," and her legacy would be scant. Probably no giant of the silent era is so forgotten today as Mae Murray. Those few who have heard of her generally know only of her Prima Donna temperament and her excesses as silent movie royalty. Others may be aware of Murray's post-stardom uncertain sense of reality and pathetic misadventures, possibly a model for the Norma Desmond character in "Sunset Boulevard." (Commenting favorably on the film and Gloria Swanson's performance as Norma Desmond, Mae added that "None of us floozies was that crazy!").
The Silent Musical :
Mae Murray's acting gifts were meager, counted as excessively histrionic even by critics of the period. As a dancer; however, her stature stands among the greatest in entertainment in a category almost overlooked today, the silent movie musical. These musical photoplays were usually constructed on a framework of light romance or comedy set in exotic locales or historical settings. Elaborate decor and magnificent costumes enriched the visuals.
A memorable musical score was performed in urban movie palaces outfitted with large orchestras. Smaller venues had giant Wurlitzer organs with elaborate sound effects invented just for silent theatres, and small town piano accompanists, like their larger counterparts, took advantage of the special theater arrangements the studios provided with the reels. (Simpler versions of the sheet music were retailed for home use, adding yet another revenue stream.)
The most important component is often the dance. In virtually all of her films, Mae showcases exciting dance numbers, the most enduringly popular of which is Franz Lehar's "Merry Widow Waltz," in which Mae is accompanied by matinee idol John Gilbert. This, the most famous of her many terpsichorean extravaganzas, set off a craze that endured for decades, and even today remains a staple in dance academies around the world.
Many Hollywood legends of the silent period were superlative dancers and used the popular format of the silent musical to further their careers: Rudolf Valentino (whom Mae personally selected to appear in her early films); Jeanne Eagles; the love pairing of Greta Garbo and John Gilbert; and newcomer Joan Crawford who later recounted hours spent on the MGM lot carefully studying Mae as a model for her own early dance vehicles and her need to create a unique stellar image.
Biography
Virginia-born Mae Murray was dancing in New York vaudeville when discovered by no less than Irving Berlin. He suggested to Vernon Castle, headlining for Ziegfeld, that Castle consider the gorgeous petite blonde as substitute for his under-the-weather partner.
Contemporary reporting praised the stand-in's show-stopping performance, and Mae's hoofing that night in 1906 transformed her life. She immediately became accustomed to her own celebrity, the companionship of high society, and the attention of millionaires anxious to be seen with the latest toast of Manhattan on their arms. Mae soon accepted one, briefly, as the first of various husbands and paramours.
Pre-sold for Hollywood, Mae's career opened with a series of melodramas in the mid-teens, but an image quickly developed that was far removed from that genre as the exotic, glamorous vamp became her new persona -- a gorgeous blonde seductress, one of the earliest sex goddesses of the screen.
Soon, Mae's 1918 marriage to director Robert Z. Leonard was a significant career boost, establishing a creative duo that brought consistent success for both during the next seven years, under the imprimatur of Tiffany Studios producing for MGM. The team delivered one profit-making film after another. Mae became a defining example of silent movie excess. She was promoted in all the fan-zines flaunting the lifestyle expected of cinema royalty, spending her millions on jewelry, motorcars, race horses, couture -- all the accoutrements of a 20's movie queen.
At the top of the MGM lot, Mae's demands and high-handed behavior were rapidly becoming an impediment to production, noteworthy being well-publicized outbursts on the set of "The Merry Widow" where she walked off the set calling von Stroheim a "dirty Hun." (In point of fact, Mae was herself of Austrian descent.)
Repeatedly all would be forgotten when studio bean counters tallied profits from her work, in particular those from "The Merry Widow."
However, the relentlessness of Mae's terrible judgment was inexorably rising. She divorced, Leonard, her reliable creative partner to marry bogus royalty. Mae, like Pola Negri, bottom-fished. The superstars succumbed to the seductions of two of the "marrying Mdivani" trio, whose own father admitted that he was the only Prince to ever inherit a title from his sons. As the Princess Mdivani, Murray turned over the management of her career to her prince. Virtually no successful screen work ever followed.
Mae Murray's filmography concludes with two sound failures produced by RKO. (In these, a capable voice proves equal to sound, but the films otherwise present Mae disastrously -- badly photographed low-budget productions, clearly showing her age.)
The royal marriage failed when Murray's millions were gone, and the "girl with the bee-stung lips," passed into obscurity except for occasional pathetic reports of erratic behavior and misfortune. Her biography, penned by Jane Ardmore, appeared in 1959: Mae Murray: the Self Enchanted; Image of an Era. Reportedly it sold poorly.
Mae Murray died of heart failure in 1965 at the age of 76 (based on an 1889 birthdate). She left only a trunk containing clothing and keepsakes.
Available Video :
Available on VHS are an atypical non-musical, "The Mormon Maid," the masterwork "The Merry Widow," the dated programmer "Mademoiselle Midnight," "Show People" (cameo appearance only) and the two early talkies, "Bachelor Apartment" and "High Stakes," which are both light comedies. Guard against poor prints.
End note: Several of Mae's other works remain in archival collections, for the most part overseas. The names, stills and synopses available on the Net and elsewhere in the US make one wonder if some of these productions may not yet showcase the star that Murray unquestionably was.
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Tribute by Artemis Willis :
Actress Mae Murray’s famous epithet, “The Girl with the Bee-Stung Lips” describes far more than her cupid-bowed mouth; it evokes something unusual, distracting, and for some of her fans perhaps even overwhelming. Also known as “The Gardenia of the Screen,” Murray’s presence can be considered excessive and baroque, pleasurably perfuming and intensifying audience experience beyond whatever movie happens to encircle her. Critics of Murray’s abilities consider her actions (vamping villains at midnight) silly and her presentation (bee-stung lips on an 1840s girl from Utah) incongruous (Slide 2002, 259). But a force of nature is not necessarily natural, and Murray’s fans reveled in her colorful performances.
Lantern slide, Mae Murray in What Am I Bid? (1919). Courtesy of the Museum of the Moving Image.
Indeed, an acting style as gestural as Murray’s is anything but naturalized, as in merging with an ensemble or submitting to a role; it is a hallmark of the nineteenth century melodramatic repertoire. Further, Murray’s signature dance narratives actually conjoin stage stardom of the late 1800s with the foundations of movie stardom in the early 1900s by existing without as well as within the text. Apart from personal taste–predilections for exaggeration or realism–French Surrealist writer Jacques Rigaut was simply intoxicated by something alogically sublime: “Her little laugh you’ll never control, her latest lies, her next lies, her gowns, her exasperating childishness, her ultimata about a glove or stroll, things you’re unaware of…or an extravagant reward, of vice, I’m in love with Mae Murray (Rigaut 2000, 205).”
Lantern slide, Mae Murray in Face Value (1918). Courtesy of the Museum of the Moving Image.
Born in Portsmouth, Virginia, Murray (née Marie Adrienne Koenig) learned to dance in Chicago, where she was employed by a number of nightclubs as a chorus girl. In pursuit of the dream of stage stardom, she moved to New York, changed her name to Mae Murray, and immediately found work as a dancer. Her Broadway debut in 1906 was the result of an emergency substitution for Irene Castle, co-star of Vernon Castle, in Irving Berlin’s first musical, “About Town.” Joining the chorus line of the Ziegfeld Follies in 1908, by 1915 Murray had become a headliner. Shortly thereafter, Adolph Zukor signed her to a screen contract with Paramount.
Lantern slide, Mae Murray in The Bride’s Awakening (1925). Courtesy of the Museum of the Moving Image.
John Gilbert, Mae Murray, and Roy D’Arcy in The Merry Widow (1925). Courtesy of the Museum of the Moving Image.
Released in 1916, Murray first film, To Have And To Hold secured her status as a movie star (“Mae Murray Makes A Good Movie Star”), generating a string of box office hits, including the De Mille-directed The Dream Girl (1916) and A Mormon Maid (1917), in which she played alongside then-actor Frank Borzage. Her second husband Robert Z. Leonard, with whom she joined Universal to open her own production unit, Bluebird, directed most of Murray’s films in the 1910s. In films such as Her Body in Bond (1918), Leonard created a dance prologue in which she performed as Pierrette, replacing the expository approach of intertitles with pantomime. Perhaps because many of her films contained dance sequences designed for her, such as The Delicious Little Devil (1919) with her former onstage dance partner Rudolph Valentino, Murray was one of the first actresses to demand live mood music on her sets (as well as the ubiquitous soft focus required of so many actresses).
In 1922 Murray and Leonard signed with Louis B. Mayer to make films for MGM under the Tiffany label, producing eight elaborate showcases for Murray’s extravagant and florid performance style. After Circe the Enchantress (1924) Murray and Leonard parted. [See Mae Murray, Interview, December, 1959, Columbia University Oral History Project, 1227-1228, where she says she named the company after her Tiffany ring, about which “I had my own way,” but complains about being called “hard to handle” in her account of the move from her company to Metro Goldwyn Mayer.
Mae Murray (a/w/p) The Merry Widow (1925). MoMI
Mae Murray, The Merry Widow (1925). Courtesy of the Museum of the Moving Image.
The unquestionable apex of Murray’s cinematic oeuvres was the 1925 von Stroheim masterpiece, The Merry Widow, in which she famously waltzed with leading man John Gilbert. Critical and popular reception for the film was superlative. In addition to praising artistic choices, such as the colors in the wedding sequence at the film’s end, the New York Times identified a new dimension to Murray’s range in this “fantastic affair:”
Mr. von Stroheim also is to be credited with having elicited from Mae Murray the best acting she has done in the last few years…Here she is not the spinning top she was in other features directed by Robert Z. Leonard, but almost a restrained actress, who gives a splendid account of herself in every situation. She illustrates her grief and her joy, her contempt and her admiration in telling style (“Mae Murray Charming in The Merry Widow”).
Murray made three more films for MGM before marrying her fourth husband, David Mdivani, a specious ‘Prince’ who coerced her into remaining in Europe, effectively nullifying her contract with the studio. After another divorce, which ended in a bitter custody battle in which she eventually lost her son, Koran Mdivani, Murray’s career began to deteriorate. She acted in a few low-budget talkies in the early 1930s, and in 1934 returned to Broadway briefly to perform in The Milky Way. In the 1940s she made regular appearances in the Times Square establishment, Billy Rose’s Diamond Horseshoe, where her act included dancing the Merry Widow Waltz.
Mae Murray (a/p) advertising slide Fascination (Tiffany Productions, 1922)
Lantern slide, Fascination (Tiffany Productions, 1922). Courtesy of the Museum of the Moving Image.
Apart from collaborating with Jane Ardmore on her aptly entitled biography, The Self-Enchanted (1959), Murray’s final decades were spent in eccentric reverie and abject poverty [See 3 pages from her unpublished memoir “Life Stories.” EDs.]. Wandering from coast-to-coast, she was occasionally discovered absently humming the Merry Widow Waltz on a Central Park bench. Like Blanch Dubois and Norma Desmond (a character considered to be inspired in part by Murray) her lyrically lavish imagination, which for the French Surrealists once evoked something of the uncontrolled, had suffused her own perception. As she introduced herself to a doctor at her final residence, the Motion Picture House and Hospital, “I’m Mae Murray, the young Ziegfeld beauty with the bee-stung lips – and Hollywood is calling me (Marion 1972, 297).”
Lantern slide, Mae Murray in The Big Little Person (1919). Courtesy of the Museum of the Moving Image.
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