Billie Dove by Alfred Cheney Johnston
 |
| Billie Dove c. 1920s Photo: Alfred Cheney Johnston |
Billie Dove was one of the greatest stars of the silent days of Hollywood. At the end of the 1920s she was voted, with Clara Bow, as America's most popular actress, and at the box office exceeded even the drawing power of Mary Pickford, Gloria Swanson and Greta Garbo. The singer Billie Holliday named herself after her.
Billie Dove was born Lillian Bohny in New York City in 1903. (Her brother, Charles, became a cameraman in Hollywood.) Her parents were Swiss immigrants. She visited Switzerland as a child, and spoke German before she spoke English. Her parents were Lutheran and their church organised sports events; the girls on the basketball team called her "Billie". The family lived far from the theatre district, but nearby was an open-air movie house, known as an Airdome. Here she was entranced by serials and was smitten by Bobby Harron in The Birth of a Nation.
"I had always liked the movies," she told the film historian William Drew. "All of the girls wanted to be in the movies. I didn't want to be. I knew I was going to be. I'm not psychic, but there have been instances in my life when I have been absolutely sure of something and this was one of them."
A neighbour worked as an extra at Fort Lee, across the Hudson from New York City, and Billie's mother had her registered at the studios. One of her first appearances was in Joan of Plattsburg (1918), a Mabel Normand picture. The director instructed her to rush up to her brother and kiss him. She couldn't wait for the picture to come out so she could surprise her friends. As it happened the surprise was hers; the cameraman had merely photographed her legs.
Billie was an exceptionally beautiful girl, and was in great demand as a model by such eminent artists as Charles Dana Gibson, Howard Chandler Christy and James Montgomery Flagg, who called her "The Dove" because she was so lovely yet so shy. "Billie Dove" soon became her professional name.
The impresario Florenz Ziegfeld saw her portrait in an advertisement and called her for an audition. Still determined to break into pictures, Billie haughtily informed him that she had no interest in being a chorus girl, so Ziegfeld gave her a featured role. Her timing could not have been more propitious. Eddie Cantor, the star of Ziegfeld Follies of 1919, had gone on strike with many of the girls and Ziegfeld had to replace them in a hurry.
She had legions of admirers. Marion Davies, mistress of William Randolph Hearst and another Follies veteran, introduced her to Howard Hughes, a multi-millionaire industrialist, movie producer and aviation enthusiast who was still only 22. The tall, gangly young man simply stared at her. "I thought, `Good God! is this the guy they're talking about who's making Hell's Angels?' I was glad when he left the table."
Dove only realised he was serious when he appeared at every nightspot she went to. "Then I got to know him and found out that he was brilliant, charming and had a lovely sense of humour." Willat, however, refused to give Billie Dove a divorce - "I was very much in love with my wife," he said. "She was a great girl. My friend [Hughes] decided he wanted her,and he had so much more money than I did and I think she did much better. She never married him of course. It was better for her but worse for me, because she had so much to do with helping me."
In 1930, in one of the most extraordinary transactions in Hollywood history, Hughes paid Willat $325,000 in thousand-dollar bills to give Billie a divorce. "I begged Howard not to," said Billie Dove, "but there was nothing I could do once he gave the money to Irvin. I felt like I'd been bought and sold."
Dove had become dissatisfied with her pictures at First National. Howard Hughes bought up her contract but her first picture for him, The Age for Love (1931), was an embarrassing flop. She was happier with Cock of the Air (1932), which exploited her talent for comedy. Alas, the Hays Office found it too risque and insisted on savage and damaging cuts, and this flopped as well. Some historians consider that Hughes ruined her career.
Comments
Post a Comment