ALMA RUBENS BORN 1897 FEBRUARY 19 -1931 JANUARY 22 ON DRUG ADDICTION

 

ALMA RUBENS BORN 1897 FEBRUARY 19 -1931 JANUARY 22 ON DRUG ADDICTION

Today is the birthday of Alma Rubens (Alma Genevieve Reubens, 1897-1931).

Originally from San Francisco, Rubens started out when still a teenager as a chorus girl in musical comedies. There she met long-time trouper Franklyn Farnum, 20 years her senior, with whom she went into movies, and who was to become her first husband. She was an extra in D.W. Griffith films like The Birth of a Nation (1915) and Intolerance (1916), but then began to be cast opposite Douglas Fairbanks in such films as Reggie Mixes In (1916), The Mystery of the Leaping Fish (1916), The Half Breed (1916) and The Americano (1916). She co-starred in several westerns with William S. Hart. Then in 1920, she signed with William Randolph Hearst’s Metropolitan Pictures, starring in his hit Humoresque and others. Later she signed with Fox, where the film version of the melodrama favorite East Lynne (1925) was one of her hits. In 1927 she married her third husband the movie star Ricardo Cortez (her second had been film scenarist Daniel Carson Goodwin).

By the late 20s she was in the grip of a worsening drug addiction, which had apparently developed when a physician had prescribed morphine for an ailment. Sanitarium stays, arrests and bad publicity began to prevented her from working in films. Her last role was Julie in the 1929 version of Show Boat.

Now it was that she went into vaudeville, as many films stars were doing in the early 30s. She toured in a team with Cortez, commencing with much fanfare at the Palace in New York. But during the tour, the couple broke up. Rubens was arrested for drug smuggling and possession in San Diego in early 1931. It was shortly after this that she sadly died of pneumonia at the age of 33.

Actress. She is remembered for a prolific albeit drug shortened career in silent features. Born Alma Rueben, not Genevieve Driscoll as stated by some sources, to a mixed Irish-German family, she hooked-up with a local theatrical troupe while still a young girl and made her initial stage appearance when the group needed a fill-in for an indisposed chorus girl. Alma followed the ensemble and the much older character actor Franklyn Farnum to Los Angeles and made her silver screen bow in the 1913 short "Banzai". Her next appearance was to be in another short with the sadly prophetic title of "Narcotic Spectre" (1914); Alma's good looks landed her steady work, her assignments including a small part in D.W. Griffith's 1915 classic "The Birth of a Nation". Her major break came opposite Douglas Fairbanks in the 1916 comedy "Reggie Mixes In" and later that same year she again joined Fairbanks for "The Half Breed" and the cocaine-themed comedy "The Mystery of the Leaping Fish". Alma married Farnum in 1918, the union lasting only a month, and kept working steadily up thru 1924; from 1923 until 1925 she was married to Hollywood wannabe Dr. Daniel Carson Goodman and though she performed well in 1924's "The Price She Paid" and "Cytherea", the latter an early attempt at filming in color, her life had already started a spiral of self destruction. As cocaine took charge she experienced a series of trips to insane asylums, drug rehabs, and even jails; married from 1926 until her death to actor Ricardo Cortez she was financially supported by William Randolph Hearst and though she continued to appear on the screen her roles became insignificant. Alma's life was out of control from 1928 on with her final screen credits the 1929 "Show Boat" and "She Goes to War"; she was last seen on stage in January of 1930 and after a late 1930 attempt at a comeback in New York fizzled she returned to Los Angeles and died of pneumonia a short time later. A few of her performances are preserved on DVD.

Alma Rubens: A Marked Woman

Feature by Thomas Gladysz

This feature was published in conjunction with the screening of The Half-Breed at SFSFF 2013

Today, Alma Rubens is remembered not for her films or versatility as an actress, but for the demons that plagued her and ultimately ended her life. Born in San Francisco in 1897, Rubens appeared in nearly 60 films for the Triangle, Famous Players, Cosmopolitan, and Fox studios. Early roles include The Narcotic Spectre (1914), as well as bit parts in Peer Gynt (1915), The Birth of a Nation (1915), Intolerance (1916), and the Douglas Fairbanks cocaine comedy The Mystery of the Leaping Fish (1916). Bigger roles alongside Fairbanks in Reggie Mixes In (1916), The Half-Breed (1916), and The Americano (1917) got her noticed. While still a teen, Rubens went from supporting player to acclaim as a leading lady.

In 1917, she starred in the box-office smash The Firefly of Tough Luck and The Regenerates, a drama about drug addiction, both directed by E. Mason Hopper. In 1918, Rubens had top billing in every film in which she appeared. By 1920, she was a major star. The hits that followed include the original Humoresque (1920), The World and His Wife (1920), Enemies of Women (1923), The Price She Paid (1924), and East Lynne (1925).

After a busy 1925–1926, this dark-eyed beauty found it difficult to get roles, but not because her star had dimmed. Rubens’s cocaine and morphine use had begun to take its toll. She became increasingly unreliable, and colleagues noted her “drifting speech and glassy eyes” on set. In 1926, newly signed MGM actress Greta Garbo replaced her as the female lead in The Torrent.

Rubens’s earnings, as much as $3,000 a week at the height of her career, were squandered in search of her next high. William Randolph Hearst, who had produced several of her films, helped support her at Marion Davies’s request. It wasn’t enough. By the late 1920s, Rubens had been in trouble with the law, attempted to get clean, was hospitalized, escaped from a sanatorium, and was in and out of the headlines. She was also briefly and unhappily married to three well-known Hollywood figures, including actor Ricardo Cortez.

Over the course of her career, Rubens worked with some of the best directors of her time: Raoul Walsh, D.W. Griffith, Henry King, Victor Sjöström, and Frank Borzage (four times). She appeared in melodramas, crime stories, and westerns alongside the likes of William S. Hart, Lon Chaney, Lionel Barrymore, John Gilbert, Bela Lugosi, and George O’Brien. One of her last films was the part-talkie Show Boat (1929), in which she received fifth billing as the tragic Julie. Soon, however, all her accomplishments were eclipsed.

In 1931, Rubens’s sensational confession detailing her troubled life was serialized in newspapers across the country. The New York Daily News shouted its headline: “Why I Remain a Dope Fiend: The Most Amazing Confession Ever Told! Alma Rubens’ Own Story, Written Personally by the Once Great Movie Star Who Was Ruined by Drugs.” In poor health, Rubens died shortly after its publication. She was only 33.

Thomas Gladysz is a Bay Area arts journalist and editor of the “Louise Brooks edition” of The Diary of a Lost Girl. He is also the director of the Louise Brooks Society, which he founded in 1995.

ALMA RUBENS: IN HER OWN WORDS Excerpts from an article by Malcolm H. Oettinger in Picture-Play magazine, April 1922

“[Bill Hart] was watching Chet Withey direct Doug Fairbanks and me in one of those light Manhattan-cocktail comedies that Doug made famous. He asked me to do the vamping señorita in his next picture. I didn’t want to, but I was loaned to the Ince branch, and lured Bill Hart in a Mexican border affair. Louise Glaum, still camping in the old vamp ground, was my rival in the same picture.”

“I had a shawl-and-comb part, romantic, dashing, picturesque—the kind you know that always figures extensively on the posters in front of the theater… and from then on I was a marked woman.”

“When Doug Fairbanks put on Bret Harte’s story … he insisted upon my playing the exotic passion flower, another fandango lady… I was definitely established as a ‘furriner.’”

“To escape the rôle fate had thrust upon me I went East … and made so-called society dramas, yes, but paper-covered dramas, all of it.”

“Frank Borzage was looking all over New York and outlying territory for his ‘Humoresque’ girl. He had to find a Semitic type of considerable beauty, he told me, and he was kind enough to choose me.”

“After ‘Humoresque,’ I signed a lovely ‘know-all-men-by-these-presents’ contract with Cosmopolitan, and I’ve been in New Y

Tragic Stars: Alma Rubens

There is no shortage of tragic star stories from Hollywood, but few stars ever get to write of their own dramatic demise. 

Alma Rubens is remembered not for her successful (but short) time as a movie star, but for the drug addiction that cut her career and her life short.

In a serialized autobiography, published in several newspapers and magazines in 1930 - 1931 and called “Bright World Again,” silent star Alma Rubens told her harrowing tale to the public. Beautiful, talented and married to sexy heart-throb Ricardo Cortez, Alma seemed to have it all. How could this stunning and successful girl go from glamorous star to pathetic addict in just a few short years?

Alma Rubens: Her face was her fortune

Alma's story starts with a poor but loving childhood in San Francisco. From the beginning, her mother was the one constant and stabilizing force in her life. But Alma was a wayward girl. She had a strong sense of adventure and was easily tempted to stray off the path she knew was safest.  In order to help her family, Alma needed to work, but clerical or retail jobs were not for her. Her pretty face and form got her noticed and, by 1916, she was in the movies. An early marriage to the much older star, Franklyn Farnum, lasted only a month or so, with Alma claiming he dislocated her jaw. Poor little Alma, she seemed so gentle, but was always getting into scrapes.

Alma worked her way down from San Francisco to Hollywood, managed a contract with W.R. Hearst’s Cosmopolitan Pictures and married her second husband, Dr. Daniel Carson Goodman, doctor and prominent film producer.  In Hollywood, Alma began to live a lavish life style, with beautiful clothes, furs and jewels.  However, Alma was restless. And sneaky.  Like other stars (notably Wallace Reid), Alma’s drug troubles started when she was treated for an injury. Her addiction was swift and Alma spares no one, not even herself, in her harrowing tale of her swift and painful decline.

The sweet and sophisticated look of Alma Rubens

At the beginning of her addiction, Alma managed to maintain her career, divorce the doctor and marry Ricardo Cortez (in 1926). Meanwhile, she was very adept at finding doctors to provide her with more and more morphine, her initial drug of choice. As she became increasingly dependent on the drugs, she became unreliable, unprofessional and unable to work. Her contract with Hearst was dissolved. She worked for a while at Fox and Columbia, but mainly kept very busy selling her personal possessions to feed her habit (notably some silken undergarments to a drug-dealing maid). Mother and husband tried to help her.  She was admitted several times to private sanitariums, but Alma proved to be an unwilling patient. Several times she escaped, even wounding a doctor with a knife. Finally, her family had enough and committed her to Patton Institute, surely the model for any psychiatric horror story every filmed.  Truly, the Snake Pit would have been an improvement. At Patton she suffered, and suffered greatly. Her awful story has to be read to be believed. Her dignity and sanity were compromised. But, after 7 months, she was released and she swore she was done with dope.

Alma and hubby, Ricardo Cortez

But, Alma never could stay away from it very long. Truly, this woman’s appetite for drugs was astounding.  In an effort to jump start her career, Alma and her husband went to New York and appeared together in a Vaudeville act in 1930. It seemed that the public liked Alma and she always got good reviews for her work. So much more the shame that she just could not kick her habit. In New York she and Cortez split (although they did not divorce) and Alma sunk into the depths of depravity, going to drug parties,  giving into random sexual encounters and running from the cops. She sold everything she owned, including furs and the last of the expensive lingerie, and ended up rooming with other ladies who shared her struggle.

Alma loved being a movie star

Time and time again Alma tried to kick the habit, but her addiction was too strong. In 193- she penned her story as a cautionary tale (and a bid to make some much needed money) and set off across the country to go home to California and her mother. She and a friend were travelling by car and she knew in her heart that if she didn’t leave New York and return home to her mother she would die. Her story ends with the hope that she will be able to achieve her dream.

Alma's lovely profile

Sadly, by the time Alma’s story was printed, she was dead. Arrested in San Diego on the suspicion of smuggling dope from Mexico she was jailed. Her mother came to her rescue, but by then, Alma had developed a cold that worsened into pneumonia. Her system, so weakened by abuse, could not combat the infection and on January 21, 1931, she was dead. It was confirmed that, at the time o her arrest, she was drug free.

Sadly, Alma’s screen achievements are largely forgotten. Her one foray into sound films, 1929’s “Showboat” (as Julie), is in tatters, with the sound missing.  Her fame rests on her tragic tale.

With John Gilbert in 1928's "Masks of the Devil"

Alma’s story in her own words and a brief biography can be found in Gary D. Rhodes' and Alexander Web's “Silent Snowbird.”

In 2015, Patton opened a museum, a record of the horrors of the treatment of addicted and mentally ill patients in the early 20th century.  By 1930, over 2,000 patients who died at Patton were buried on an on-site cemetery. The cemetery was full in 1930. The unclaimed bodies of those who died after that date were donated to science.