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
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