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Mae Murray
ca. 1920
Born	Marie Adrienne Koenig May 10, 1889(1889-05-10) Portsmouth, Virginia, U.S.
Died	March 23, 1965 (aged 75) Woodland Hills, Los Angeles, California, U.S.
Occupation	Actress, dancer, film producer, screenwriter
Years active	1916–1931
Spouse(s)	William M. Schwenker Jr. (1908–1909) Jay O'Brien (1916–1917) Robert Z. Leonard (1918–1925) David Mdivani (1926–1934)

Mae Murray (May 10, 1889 – March 23, 1965) was an American actress, dancer, film producer, and screenwriter. Murray rose to fame during the silent film era and was known as "The Girl with the Bee-Stung Lips" and "The Gardenia of the Screen".^[1]

Early life and career

Born Marie Adrienne Koenig in Portsmouth, Virginia,^[2] she first began acting on the Broadway stage in 1906 with dancer Vernon Castle. In 1908, she joined the chorus line of the Ziegfeld Follies, moving up to headliner by 1915.^[3] Murray became a star of the club circuit in both the United States and Europe, performing with Clifton Webb, Rudolph Valentino, and John Gilbert as some of her many dance partners.

Murray & Monte Blue in Broadway Rose (1922)

In 1908, she was briefly married to stockbroker William M. Schwenker, Jr. In 1916, she married Olympic bobsled champion Jay O'Brien and made her motion picture debut in To Have and to Hold that same year. She became a major star for Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, starring with Rudolph Valentino in The Delicious Little Devil and Big Little Person in 1919. At the height of her popularity, Murray formed her own production company with her director, John M. Stahl. Critics were sometimes less than thrilled with her over-the-top costumes and outsized emoting, but her films were financially successful.

After divorcing Jay O'Brien in 1917, Murray married the movie director Robert Z. Leonard the following year and, beginning in 1925, Murray, Leonard, and Stahl produced films at Tiffany Pictures, with Souls for Sables (1925), starring Claire Windsor and Eugene O'Brien, as the first film made by Tiffany.For a brief period of time, Murray wrote a weekly column for newspaper scion William Randolph Hearst.

At her career peak in the early 1920s, Murray, along with such other notable Hollywood personalities as Cecil B. DeMille, Douglas Fairbanks, William S. Hart, Jesse L. Lasky, Harold Lloyd, Hal Roach, Donald Crisp, Conrad Nagel and Irving Thalberg was a member of the board of trustees at the Motion Picture & Television Fund - A charitable organization that offers assistance and care to those in the motion picture and television industries without resources. Four decades later, Murray herself received aid from that organization.

Career decline

Murray's most famous role was perhaps the title role in the Erich von Stroheim directed film The Merry Widow (1925), opposite John Gilbert. When silent movies gave way to talkies, Murray made an insecure debut in the new medium in Peacock Alley, reworked from one of her earlier silent hits. In 1931, she was cast with newcomer Irene Dunne, leading man Lowell Sherman, and with fellow silent screen star Norman Kerry in the talkie Bachelor Apartment. The film was critically panned at the time of release and Murray made only one more film, High Stakes (1931) also with Sherman.

A crucial blow to her movie career occurred when her fourth husband, "Prince" David Mdivani (a Georgian faux-nobleman whose brothers, Serge and Alexis, married actress Pola Negri and the heiress Barbara Hutton respectively), became her manager and suggested that his new wife leave MGM. Murray took her husband's advice and unceremoniously walked out of her contract, making a powerful foe of studio boss Louis B. Mayer. Later, she would swallow her pride and plead to return, but Mayer would have none of it. In effect, Mayer's hostility meant that Murray was blacklisted from working for the Hollywood studios.^[4]

Mae Murray, 1926

Eventually, Murray and Mdivani, who married in 1926, divorced; they had one child, Koran David Mdivani (born February 1927). Koran was raised by Sara Elizabeth "Bess" Cunning of Averill Park, New York, who began taking care of him in 1936, when the child was recovering from a double mastoid operation (Cunning's brother Dr. David Cunning was the surgeon). When Murray attempted to regain custody of her son in 1939, Cunning and her other brothers, John, Ambrose, and Cortland, refused, according to the New York Times, at which time Murray and her former husband, Mdivani, entered a bitter custody dispute. It finally ended in 1940, with Murray being given legal custody of the child and the court ordering Mdivani to pay $400 a month maintenance. However, Koran Mdivani continued to be raised by Bess Cunning, who adopted him in 1940 as Daniel Michael Cunning.^[5] Reportedly, Mdivani had managed to siphon off most of Murray's money.^[4]

In the 1940s, Murray appeared regularly at Billy Rose's Diamond Horseshoe, a nightclub which specialized in a "Gay '90s" atmosphere, often presenting stars of the past for nostalgic value. Her appearances collected mixed reviews: her dancing (in particular the Merry Widow Waltz) being well received, but Murray refused to acknowledge her age, wearing heavy layers of makeup and fitting her mature figure into short skirted costumes with plunging necklines.

Final years

Murray's finances continued to collapse, and for most of her later life she lived in poverty. She was the subject of an authorized biography, The Self-Enchanted written by Jane Ardmore that has often been incorrectly called Murray's autobiography.

She later moved into the Motion Picture House in Woodland Hills, a retirement community for Hollywood professionals. Mae Murray died at age 75. She is interred in Valhalla Memorial Park Cemetery, North Hollywood, California.

For her contribution to the motion picture industry, Mae Murray has a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame at 6318 Hollywood Blvd.

Filmography

References

Bibliography

• David W. Menefee, The First Female Stars: Women of the Silent Era (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2004) ISBN 0-275-98259-9
• Jane Kesner Morris Ardmore, The Self-Enchanted: Mae Murray, Image of an Era. (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1959)
• "The Rise to Stardom of Mae Murray" by Jimmy Bangley in Classic Images August 1996 (Muscatine, Iowa: Muscatine Journal, 1996)
• F. Cugat, "Mae Murray’s Victory", Movie Weekly (August 19, 1922)
• Frances Marion, Off With Their Heads! (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1972)
• Adela Rogers St. Johns, "Mae Murray-A Study in Contradictions", Photoplay (July 1924), 43

External links

• Mae Murray at the Internet Movie Database
• Mae Murray at the Internet Broadway Database
• Mae Murray at Silents Are Golden
• Mae Murray Photo Galleries at Silent Ladies & Gents
• Mae Murray Biography at New York Times Movies
• Mae Murray Biography at Classic Images
• Mae Murray at Find a Grave
• Mae Murray Corbis page
• Mae Murray stills from some lost movies, Univ. of Washington Sayre Collection