Fifty years ago today - Monday 5 January 1959

The Vancouver Sun - Monday 5 January 1959

Silent Screen Idol
     Romantic idol of the silent screen, Ramon Navarro, was arrested by Los Angeles police for drunk driving after running through a red light.
     Police said the 59-year-old actor, who was freed on $263 bail, was "abusive" and failed to pass sobriety tests.

Released 100 years ago today - 23 October 1908 (USA)

Romance of a Jewess

Stars: Florence Lawrence, George Gebhardt, Gladys Egan

Director: D.W. Griffith

Writer: D.W. Griffith

Genre: Drama/Short

American Mutoscope & Biograph

Time: 10 min

Rating: Not Rated

Status: Survived

Plot

Ruth Simonson, with her father, is seen kneeling at the bedside of her mother, whose sands of life are rapidly

ebbing. Realizing her end near, Mrs. Simonson takes from her neck a chain and locket and places it around the neck of her daughter, Ruth, with the prayerful injunction that she be ever guided in the path of prudence and virtue by this memorial. Commending her to the care of her father, the old lady goes to meet her Master in the Great Beyond. Two years later we find Ruth assisting her old father in his pawnshop. Mr. Simonson, although a money-lender, is benevolent in nature and his many deeds of munificence have endeared him to all who know him. Hence, when the local schatchen appears with Jacob Rubenstein, a wealthy suitor for his daughter's hand, it was his desire for her future happiness that induced him to look with favor on him. Ruth, however, had given her heart to Sol Bimberg, an impecunious bookseller in the neighbourhood. While Mr. Simonson has no aversion for Sol, ...

This Day 50 years ago – Saturday 5 January 1957

 DOCTOR DISPUTES STORY

'Kidnapped' Actress Found; Claims Pair Assaulted Her

   INDIO, Calif. (BUP)—Actress Marie (The Body) McDonald told Los Angeles police today she was criminally attacked by two men who she said kidnapped her Thursday night from her San Fernando Valley home.

   She told officers questioning her at a hospital here about her 24-hour disappearance that the two men, a Mexican and a Negro, abducted her under threats to harm her three children.

   She said they forced her to perform unnatural sex acts while she was held in a Los Angeles house, blindfolded "with a sack over my head."

   An examining physician at the hospital later disputed Miss McDonald's claim she had been raped.

BLACK EYE

   The 32-year-old blonde movie queen was found wandering dazed and Incoherent along U.S. highway 60.70 in the desert early today by a truck driver.

   Hospital attendants reported her face was bruised as from a beating, she had a black eye and portions of two front teeth were missing.

   Kept under sedation Friday night, the actress recovered suf­ficiently today to relate to officers her lurid tale of being kidnapped from her palatial home, attacked and then dumped from a speeding ear by her assailants.

HAD $167

   Clad only in a nightrobe over pajama tops, she was found by truck driver Richard D. Corn. 38. He turned her over to police whom she told that she had been beaten raped and robbed of a 22-carat diamond ring.

   Deputies said however that she had $167 in cash in her robe pocket.

   The FBI said it would not enter the case because there was "no evidence of interstate transport."

   Police said they didn't know how to treat the case.

PHONED FRIENDS

   They pointed cut that Miss McDonald had telephoned three times to friends while she claimed she was being held cap­tive but hadn't phoned police.

   They also said that clipped newspaper sections from which a kidnap note had been fashioned, and a tablet of writing paper similar to that to which the note was pasted were both found in the actress' home.

This Day 50 years ago - Friday 4 January 1957

Actress Missing, Feared Kidnapped

   HOLLYWOOD (BUP) — Beautiful actress Marie (The Body) McDonald disappeared from her $65,000 Fernando Valley home early today in night clothes and police feared she was kidnapped.

   Police indicated they had identified two men as the suspected kidnappers.

   Two Federal Bureau of Investigation agents were called into the case, on "stand-by" until the 24-hours required by federal law has passed and provided for their entry into the case.

   A trail of anonymous threatening telephone calls and a kidnap note were left behind by the supposed kidnappers, believed by police to have abducted the blonde, 32-year-old divorced mother of three children shortly after midnight this morning.

   "We are compelled by the set of circumstances to treat the disappearance as a bona fide kidnap," said Los Angeles police Chief William Parker. "From all we know at this time it would appear that she left the premises with someone she knew."

   However, the Los Angeles Herald-Express said the actress telephoned the newspaper's Hollywood columnist, Harrison Carroll, at 4 a.m. saying she had been kidnapped by two men.

   'Tonight at my home these two men came in and abducted me. They drugged me. They gave me a shot of something... They carried me miles." the actress was quoted as saying.

   "They arc in the next room. They think I'm asleep. That's how I happened to get hold of a telephone ... They wanted “my ring and money.”

The Vancouver Sun

Obituaries: Virginia Grey, Dies at 87

VIRGINIA GREY

Actress longed for major role that never came

   Virginia Grey, who has died aged 87, spent a career before the cameras hoping for a role that would catapult her to international stardom; but she never showed the spark which launched her contemporaries Ruth Hussey and Laraine Day, and had to content herself with second lead ingenues.

   In more than 100 films she had supporting roles to such stars as Joan Crawford, Betty Grable, Susan Hayward, and even the Marx Brothers (in The Big Store, 1941). Off screen she attracted publicity by dating Clark Gable; she gave him a dachshund. But although she waited patiently for his divorce from Rhea Langham to come through, Gable married Carole Lombard instead. Heartbroken, Virginia Grey vowed never to let herself become too close to a man again and, although George Raft became a figure in her life she never married. Pressed to talk about her affair with Gable in 2003, she replied simply: "I adored him; I always will."

   Virginia Grey was born in Hollywood on. March 22,1917 the daughter of Ray Grey, an original Keystone Cop who became Universal Studio's comedy films director; among her babysitters was the actress Gloria Swanson. After Ray's death in 1925, Virginia's mother became a film cutter at the studio.

   When her mother heard that the studio was planning to remake Uncle Tom's Cabin in 1927, she encouraged young Virginia to do a screen test, which won her the role of Little Eva. Parts followed in Heart to Heart, with Mary Astor (1927); Jazz Mad, with Marian Nixon and George Lewis (1928); and The Michigan Kid (1928).

Daily Telegraph

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

TV actor Buddy Ebsen of Beverly Hillbillies dies at 95

   OBITUARY/LOS ANGELES — Buddy Ebsen, the loose-limbed Broadway dancer who achieved

stardom and riches in the television series The Beverly Hillbillies and Barnaby Jones, has died, a hospital official said Monday. He was 95.

   Ebsen died early Sunday at Torrance Memorial Medical Center in Torrance, Calif., said Pam Hope, an administrative nursing supervisor.

   Ebsen and his sister, Vilma, danced through Broadway shows and MGM musicals of the 1930s. When she retired, Ebsen continued on his own, dancing with Shirley Temple and turning dramatic actor.

   Except for an allergy to aluminum paint, he would have been one of the Yellow Brick Road quartet in the classic The Wizard of Oz. But after 10 days of filming, Ebsen, playing the Tin Man, fell ill because of the aluminum makeup on his skin and was replaced by jack Haley.

   Television brought Ebsen's amiable personality to the home screen, first as Fess Parker's sidekick in Davy Crockett.

   As Jed Clampett, the easygoing head of a newly rich Ozark family plunked down in snooty Beverly Hills, Ebsen became a North American favourite. While scorned by most critics, The Beverly Hillbillies attracted as many as 60 million viewers on CBS from 1962 to 1971.

   "As I recall, the only good notice was in the Saturday Review," Ebsen once said. "The critic said the show possessed social comment combined with a high Nielsen, an almost impossible achievement in these days. I kind of liked that."

   The show was still earning good ratings when it was cancelled by CBS because advertisers shunned a series that attracted primarily a rural audience.

   Ebsen returned to series TV in 1973 as Barnaby Jones, a private investigator forced out of retirement to solve the murder of his son Hal, who had taken over the business.

   Barnaby Jones also drew critical blasts. But Ebsen's folksy manner and a warm relationship with his daughter-in-law, played by Lee Meriwether, made the series a success.

   Ebsen, who was six foot three, jerked sodas until he landed a chorus job in the 1928 Whoopee, starring Eddie Cantor. The dancer sent for his sister Vilma and they, formed a dancing team that played vaudeville, supper clubs and shows such as Flying Colors and Ziegfeld Follies.

   A screen test led to an MGM contract for the dance team, and they were a hit in Broadway Melody of 1936.

   Buddy's style was far removed from that of the reigning dance king of films, Fred A e. The angular Ebsen moved with a smooth, sliding shuffle, his arms gyrating like a wind-blown scarecrow. He made a charming partner with the tiny Shirley Temple in Captain January.

   His other films of the 1930s included Banjo on My Knee, Four Girls in White, Girl of the Golden West (Jeanette MacDonald-Nelson Eddy) and My Lucky Star (Sonja Henie). His first dramatic role was in Yellow jack with Robert Montgomery. Ebsen's later films included Attack, Breakfast at Tiffany's, The Interns, Mail Order Bride, The One and Only Genuine Original Family Band. In 1993, he made a cameo appearance as Barnaby Jones in the film version of The Beverly Hillbillies.

--- ASSOCIATED PRESS