Mae Murray Totally Explained

Everything about Mae Murray totally explained

Mae Murray (May 10, 1889 – March 23, 1965) was an American actress and dancer, who became known as "The Girl with the Bee-Stung Lips" (External Link

) and "The Gardenia of the Screen."

Early life and rise to fame

Born Marie Adrienne Koenig in Portsmouth, Virginia, she first 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.
   Her motion picture debut was in To Have and to Hold (1916). She became a major star for Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, starring with Rudolph Valentino in The Delicious Little Devil and Big Little Person in 1919. At the height of her popularity, Mae formed her own production company with her director, John Stahl. Critics were sometimes less than thrilled with Mae's over-the-top costumes and outsized emoting, but her films were financially successful.
   At her career peak in the early 1920s, Murray, along with such other notable Hollywood personalities as Cecil B. DeMille, Douglas Fairbanks Sr., 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, Mae herself received aid from that organization.

Slow career decline

Murray's most-famous role was probably in the Erich von Stroheim directed film The Merry Widow (1925), opposite John Gilbert. However, when silent movies gave way to talkies, Murray's voice proved to be not compatible with the new sound, and her career began to fade. In 1931 she was cast opposite fellow silent screen star Norman Kerry in the talkie Bachelor Apartment. The film was critically panned at the time of release and both Murray and Kerry's careers in the new medium of sound sputtered further.
   Her career was injured even further when her fourth husband, "Prince" David Mdivani (a Georgian faux-nobleman whose brothers, Serge and Alexis, married actress Pola Negri and the heiress Barbara Hutton respectively), became her manager and suggested that his new wife leave MGM. Unfortunately, Mae took her husband's advice and unceremoniously walked out of her contract, making a powerful foe of studio boss Louis B. Mayer. Later, Mae would swallow her pride and plead to return; Mayer would have none of it. Eventually, Mae and David, who married in 1926, divorced; they'd one child, Koran David Mdivani (February 1927-). She was previously married to William M. Schwenker Jr. (1908-1909), stockbroker and Olympic bobsled champion J. Jay O'Brien (1916-1917), and the movie director Robert Z. Leonard (1918-1925).
   For a brief period of time, Murray wrote a weekly column for newspaper scion William Randolph Hearst.
   In the 1940's 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) being well received, but Murray refused to acknowledge her age, wearing heavy layers of makeup and fitting her mature figure into short skirted costumes with plunging necklines.
   In her later years a sort of dementia seemed to overcome her. Richard Griffith wrote in The Movie Stars, “Her appearance eventually became an outlandish caricature of the superstar, rather a dangerous caricature. She would walk down Fifth Avenue with her head bent back as far as it would go, as if gazing at the heavens. The concerned observer realized that she was trying to present a youthful chin line to passersby, and he hoped that she wouldn’t fall flat on her face at the next curbstone. She was said to have wangled invitations to charity balls, which she attended all the time, she'd command the orchestra to play the theme tune from The Merry Widow and waltz to it solo, compelling the paying customers to withdraw from the dance floor.”
   “And what has become of those beautiful young faces that graced the screen and our lives so long ago – if measured in time?” asked Francis Marion in Off With Their Heads. “Year after year the church bells have been tolling ….some lie in mausoleums, flower bedecked at Easter……others in graves that bear only their names, long forgotten by the public that once idolized them. Many are living, secure in their homes, with children and grandchildren. Quite a few are at the Motion Picture Country Home, where old friends meet to peer at faded photographs or to read aloud their favorable notices, the newspaper clippings yellowed with age. Here there's companionship, not loneliness…Mae Murray never knew that she'd found her way home; her disturbed mind was aware of nothing beyond her pitiful vanity. ‘Step aside, peasants! Let the Princess Mdivani pass!’ she demanded imperiously of the nurses who came forward to help her into the hospital. ‘Where are the cameras? Where are my flowers? I must be photographed with flowers! Get them before I’m surrounded by cameramen!’ A doctor came forward. ‘If you’re a Hearst reporter, be sure to mention that I’ve just finished my memoirs.’ She wheeled on the nurses. ‘Music! I always make my entrance with music! Have your orchestra play The Merry Widow Waltz. That’s the number I made famous.’ She held out her hand to the doctor. ‘May I introduce myself? I’m Mae Murray, the young Ziegfeld beauty with the bee-stung lips – and Hollywood is calling me.’ He caught her in his arms as she slumped forward. ‘Poor old thing,’ said one of the nurses...”
   Murray's only son, Koran David Mdivani, was raised by Sara Elizabeth "Bess" Cunning of Averill Park, N.Y., 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 be raised by Bess Cunning, who adopted him in 1940 as Daniel Michael Cunning.
   Murray's son married, in 1950, Patricia Ann Maloney of Cohoes, New York.Together, they'd two children, Pamela and Cynthia. Mae's great-granddaughter, daughter of Cynthia, is named Elizabeth Mae after her great-grandmother.

Retirement

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 written by Jane Ardmore that has often been incorrectly called Murray's autobiography.
   It has been speculated that the character Norma Desmond in the film Sunset Boulevard, a washed-up silent superstar living in self-delusion, was based on Mae Murray. Writer/director Billy Wilder, however, never revealed his inspiration for the character.
   She later moved into the Motion Picture House in Woodland Hills, a retirement community for Hollywood professionals.
   Mae Murray died at age 75. She is interred in Valhalla Memorial Park Cemetery, North Hollywood, California.

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