The Christmas Album

[moira finnie]

Thank you, Nan. I was quite surprised by these stories too since this ongoing interest wasn't the kind of thing normally associated with such an internationally known sophisticate.

[mongoII]

Terrific and heartwarming stuff for the holiday season, Moira. I never knew of these events.
Thanks.

[Rita Hayworth]

Noel Coward is an very generous man that we all should emulate this holiday season and that article that you posted the Importance of Happiness is an inspiring thing to read and I wanted to say thanks for posting it and reminding us the good things in life.

Thanks again, Moira!

[JackFavell]

An outstanding Christmas Album entry, Moira. Thanks for posting about the Master and his less well known generous and caring side. Makes us feel grateful for what we have at this time of year.

[moira finnie]

I'm so glad that you enjoyed this revelatory piece on Noel Coward, friends!

[moira finnie]

Our second day of browsing through classic Hollywood holiday cheer reveals a not-so-casually posed Marian Marsh (1913-2006), an actress whose angelic face might have been a model for the celestial messenger found at the top of a Christmas tree. Here, however, the gamine film star seems to be dwelling on more worldly matters, perhaps suggesting that these toiletries she is displaying might be an ideal gift for m'lady--especially if one were lucky enough to have someone as lovely as Miss Marsh gazing at you so bewitchingly.

My awareness of this actress, whose best film work came in the pre-Code era, began a few years ago, when first viewing one of the best movies about journalism, Five Star Final (1931). Marsh played a character who ultimately confronts a tabloid newspaper editor, brilliantly played by Edward G. Robinson in what should have been an Oscar-worthy performance. His actions have destroyed her family's life by dredging up the past to increase circulation. Barely eighteen at the time of the Mervyn LeRoy-directed production, Marsh went from a radiant girl on the eve of her wedding to a righteously vengeful specter in the course of the cruel yet fascinating story. Her cathartic moment was heightened by the contrast between her diminutive stature and the scalding grief that erupts from her in the movie's climax when she wields a loaded gun in the rag's offices.

Perhaps her work in the latter film had benefited from her experiences in another film just before this electrifying movie was made. In Svengali (1931), Marian received the acting guidance of John Barrymore, whose first remark upon meeting the teenager chosen by Jack Warner and Darryl Zanuck for the role of Trilby in the durable George Du Maurier potboiler was reportedly to ask if anyone had ever told her that she looked like the actor's then-wife, Dolores Costello. Replying that she had heard that comparison before, Barrymore inquired who had remarked upon the resemblance. "The butcher on Vine Street, who gives me liver for my cat," replied Marsh, perhaps guilelessly. Her down-to-earth retort appears to have elicited a laugh from The Great Profile, who was said to have been on his best behavior during the film's production. (The twosome were almost immediately paired again in The Mad Genius, another Warner Bros. film again exploiting the ghoulish aspect of Barrymore's highly theatrical talent in contrast to what was often described as Marsh's "doll-like" mien, this time set in the ballet world rather than the concert hall).

The 5'2" youngster had followed her sister, Jean Fenwick, into show business and their success during the transition from silents into talkies also prompted a brother, Anthony Marsh, to pursue a career in the movies. All three had been born in the West Indies, where their German-born father had a chocolate factory. Marian, christened Violet Ethelred Krauth at birth, became the best known of the siblings, starring in several roles at Warner Brothers with Warren William, where she was particularly good when giving a subversively funny yet appealing spin to her roles as unwilling innocents in the naughty Under Eighteen (1931) and in Beauty and the Boss (1932), when she blossomed under the snappy direction of Roy del Ruth. Unfortunately, few comedic roles followed, though the saucy blend of awareness and the virtue of inexperience she projected could often be detected in that beguiling half smile that Marian wore in repose quite naturally in many of her roles.

Instead, Marsh continued to be seen opposite some of the screen's most demonic (and very good if typecast) actors such as Boris Karloff, with whom she shared the screen in the entertainingly Gothic The Black Room (1935) and Peter Lorre, whose Raskolnikov redeemed himself for her turn as Dostoyevsky's touchingly poignant prostitute, Sonya, in Joseph von Sternberg's adaptation of Crime and Punishment (1935). Once Marsh's days as a player under contract were behind her, films made at smaller studios, notably Columbia, Monogram, and PRC, rarely highlighted the contrast between her physical delicacy and luminous presence with her playfulness and intelligence. There were occasional exceptions in "B" films as well, notably her role as a struggling woman in the midst of the Depression in The Man Who Lived Twice (1936) at Columbia and a proto-noirish Youth on Parole (1938) from Republic Pictures. "I loved acting," Marsh once explained years later, "but I had become a professional because we needed the money. In 1938 I married a businessman and just drifted away from acting."

Marian, who made a total of forty-one movies between 1929 and 1942, had made her first noticeable splash into Hollywood's talent pool in a bit part in Howard Hughes' Hell's Angels (1930), when she appeared as "Marilyn Morgan," in a small part as a girl selling kisses at a bazaar. Hughes, who escorted Marsh to the opening day of the Agua Caliente races on Christmas Day, 1932, added her to the long string of young women the quirky millionaire was photographed with during his lifetime. According to the actress, however, there was no romance, though that never stopped the press from speculating on the young woman's alleged beaus.


Above: Marian Marsh was off to the races with Howard Hughes on Christmas, 1932, south of the border in Agua Caliente.

It was only in recent years, after the death of Ms. Marsh in her sleep in 2006, that what may have been a real life romance came to light again. Letters of exceptional tenderness, written by actor Edmund Lowe to the actress in 1935, were apparently kept by Marian Marsh all through the years of her marriage to stockbroker Albert Scott, the birth of her children, a divorce, a second marriage to business man Clifford Henderson, widowhood, and a long old age. Written a year after the death of Lowe's wife, Lilyan Tashman from cancer and three years before Marian married, they seem to indicate an enchantment that only lasted a few months, or perhaps weeks.

These missives, cards accompanying flowers, and brief mentions in newspaper clippings noting the couple's brief appearance and tentative romance on the edge of Hollywood's spotlight have emerged from the Marsh estate, and are now up for the highest bidder. I can't help feeling a bit sad for both Lowe and Marian to have us peruse these ephemeral remnants of their relationship. However meaningful this momentary enchantment may have been to each of them, it seems that its significance must have resonated with the woman, whose secret smile continues to hint at an interior life that we can only guess at.

To see more about the ephemera mentioned, please click on the gently-worded fragment of one note pictured below from the actor to the elusive and lovely figure of Marian Marsh:


Sources:
Lamparski, Richard, Lamparski's Whatever Became of....?, (Three Rivers Press, 1989)
Mank, Gregory William, Hollywood Cauldron, (McFarland, 1994)
Mank, Gregory William, Hollywood's Hellfire Club: The Misadventures of John Barrymore, W.C. Fields, Errol Flynn and the Bundy Drive Boys, (Feral House, 2007).
Strangeland, John, Warren William: Magnificent Scoundrel of Pre-Code Hollywood, (McFarland, 2010)

[Bronxgirl48]

Beautiful presentation on Noel Coward, moira. Love your seasonal Joan Bennett avatar. Very interesting piece on winsome Marion Marsh. I've only seen two of her films, SVENGALI and THE BLACK DOOR, but there's just something about her that's memorable, a kind of waif-like but not cloying, haunting sweetness, plus a timeless luminosity. I can't see her and Edmund Lowe as a couple, though, lol....

Knitty, I love your avatar too, so adorable!