Vancouver Sun - 1 December 2003

Mary Jolivet holds a photo of her late aunt, Rita Jolivet, who was a silent-screen star in the 1910s and '20s. She is looking for copies of movies featuring her aunt.

Family searches for a star

CONNECTIONS: A sensation on and off the silent screen, Rita Jolivet's descendants seek traces of her movies

BY JOHN MACKIE

VANCOUVER SUN

            Rita Jolivet's name has long 'shed from the public consciousness. But around the First World War, she was big news.

            Jolivet was a silent screen siren who starred in at least 18 Movies, including Cecil B. DeMille's The Unafraid. The same year it came out, she booked passage on the Lusitania, which was torpedoed by a German submarine May 7, 1915 and sank, killing 1,195 of the 1,959 people on board.

            Jolivet was among the survivors, and lived to marry and divorce an Italian count and then wed the wealthy scion of a Scottish family in the shipping industry.

            Rita and her husband lived in castles in Scotland and England, and also had residences in Paris and Monte Carlo, where she died in 1972 after lying about her age in a hospital and being given too much anaesthetic.

            Rita's brother Alfred moved to Vancouver in 1937, and the Canadian branch of the family last saw her during the Second World War. But her great-niece, Mary Jolivet of Vancouver, is very much intrigued by Rita's story, and has been searching high and low for any existing copies of her movies.

            You can find listings for them all over the Internet, but the only one she has been able to locate is The Unafraid, which is in the Cecil B. DeMille archives in Provo, Utah. But she has been unable to get the archives to make her a video copy of the film.

            Mary Jolivet read a Vancouver Sun story about the Association of Moving Image Archivists convention last week at the Hotel Vancouver, and wondered if any-one there knew of any existing Rita Jolivet movies.

            Unfortunately, AMIA's Laura Rooney says there is no master list of movies that still exist, although the AMIA, the Library of Congress and Rutgers University are working on one.

            Dennis Duffy of the Royal B.C. Museum in Victoria said it is anyone's guess whether the movies still exist, because they were made on nitrate film,

which often decomposes over time.

            Nitrate film also tended to catch fire when being shown: The projection booths in old movie theatres like the Orpheum were made like fireproof vaults, so that the fire would be contained in the booth and not spread to the theatre auditorium. Projectionists also had pails of sand to throw on the film when it caught fire, because mere water wouldn't put it out.

            Duffy said it's not surprising the DeMille archives won't make a copy of its 1915 film.

            "That's the nature of the archival business," he said. "Archives don't operate as lending libraries. They are unable to lend out their materials — there's rights issues and control and preservation issues.

            "We're in the same boat. If you want to see our collection of films about British Columbia, you've got to come to Victoria."

            In any event, Rita Jolivet sounds like a fascinating character.

            She was born in Paris in 1890, but spent much of her childhood in London.

            "The family was what they call a 'trans-manche' family, a trans' channel. family," explained Lawrence Jolivet, Rita's 85-year-old nephew and Mary's father, who lives in Victoria.

            "It means that you are equally at home in Paris and London. My grandfather was a wine merchant. He used Paris as a centre to purchase wine, and he had a house in London in which he sold it.

            "In those days you didn't have a shop, you used the dinner table of your house and entertained your customers.

            "His customers were the owners of large country houses in England, where they usually bought 2,000 or 3,000 cases of what they called claret, red Bordeaux or burgundy. These people, in their country houses, laid it down for their children. The old saying was that you never bought wine for yourself, you bought it for your children. Because you were drinking your father's wine.

            "In those days, [aristocrats] would have a house party of 25 people. Everyone drank like a fish, and they were there for a week. Each of the men polished off a bottle a night, so they'd go through a case of wine a night. There was a lot of volume of

Actress survives last-minute trip on doomed ship Lusitania

booze drunk in those days."

            The Jolivet family was quite artistic: Rita became an actress, and her sister Ines was a concert violinist. Alfred was the youngest, and became a stockbroker.

            "My father went through school in France, but he became very English," said Lawrence Jolivet. "My aunt became very continental and French, and so they didn't get on.

            "My father thought she was far too much of a self-aggrandizer. He thought she was far too flighty."

            Flighty or not, Rita was a hit on Broad-way when she made her debut in Kismet in 1911. She also became friends with theatre impresario Charles Frohman, a giant of the time. She made her screen debut in 1914 in the movie Fata Morgana.

            In May 1915, she booked a last-minute ticket on the Lusitania, apparently in order to see her brother before he was sent off to the front in the First World War. Frohman was also on board, along with her sister's husband George Vernon.

            According to a Lusitania Internet site, Rita was in her cabin on May 7 when a German torpedo hit the ship. She ran up on deck, where she put on a lifebelt and huddled with Vernon, Frohman and the ship's captain, Alick Scott.

            Frohman remained calm and soothed her nerves. Just before the ship lurched and sank, he quoted from James Barrie's Peter Pan: "Why fear death? It is the most beautiful adventure in life." It would become one of the disaster's most famous lines.

            The ship went down, and so did Rita. But she bobbed to the surface and clung to the side of a collapsible boat until she was rescued by the S.S. Westborough. But Frohman and Vernon both drowned. Her sister Ines was so distraught over the loss of her husband, she shot and killed herself later that year.

            Rita would re-enact her Lusitania experience in the movie Lest We Forget in 1918, but it bombed at the box office.

            On the personal side, Rita married the Italian Count Guiseppe de Cippico in 1916, but divorced him and married James Bryce Allan, of the Allan shipping line. Allan's mother was also a blue-blood, from the Coates cotton family.

            "He was a very meek, mild, quiet Scot, although he was extremely wealthy,' Lawrence Jolivet said

            "He was bowled over by Rita, who was very international and French, emotive and whatnot. The poor fellow didn't know what he was doing.

            "She had to live in a castle, she couldn't live in a house, so he bought her a huge place in Scotland called Ballikinrain Castle. It had 50 bedrooms and that sort of thing. You were piped into the dining room every night by a piper. They had 25 inside servants and 25 outside. There was a curling rink and 4,000 acres of shooting [land]. The usual Scottish-laird type of layout."

            Rita's last few films have French titles and were presumably made in Europe. The last one was Le Marchand de Bonheur in 1926. After that, she devoted most of her time to running the castle.

            "She was very amusing," said Lawrence. "But everything was a crisis. In Scotland at Christmas, oh, the organization that had to go on. This had to be done, that had to be done. And she insisted on having a French chef. To pull a French chef out of the south of France and stick him in a place in the depths of Scotland ... she went through chefs about one a fortnight."

            Following "the slump" in the 1930s, Rita and her husband downsized to Ince Castle, a smaller estate in Plymouth, England.

            "It was more modest, but was still a huge place," Lawrence said. "It was a square house with a turret in each corner of the square, and an internal courtyard. The original owner was supposed to have kept a different wife in each corner, that was the rumour. It was a very nice place — I think it had 15 bedrooms."

            During the Second World War, Rita and Allan moved to New York to look after the family interests. This was the last time Lawrence saw them in person, although he stayed in Rita's rent-controlled flat in Paris several times after-wards.

            "She kept a flat in Paris which she never used," he said. "She was very French, very parsimonious. It was opposite the Grand Palais on the Rue Franklin Roosevelt."

            Rita's husband died in Monaco in 1967.

            "He died very tragically," said Lawrence. "He was trying to start a car in Monte, and he poured some gas down the carburetor and the thing backfired, the petrol can caught alight and he went up in flames, like a monk."

            Rita died five years later at the age of 82, also in Monte Carlo.

            "She died because she lied about her age," Mary Jolivet said.

            "Being the actress that she was, she told them she was 20 years younger than she actually was. I think they gave her too much anaesthetic, and that killed her."

            Rita and her husband had no children. All Mary Jolivet has of her aunt are some old photos and some old newspaper clippings; she would love to find an old film that could give her some sense of what she was like.

            "I'm looking purely for sentimental reasons," she said. "She certainly was an interesting character."

jmackie@png.canwest.com 605-2126