Queer Places:
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Hollywood, Los Angeles County, California, USA
June
Mathis (born June Beulah Hughes,[1]
January 30, 1887 – July 26, 1927) was an American screenwriter. Mathis was the
first female executive for
Metro/MGM and at only 35, she was the highest paid executive in Hollywood.[2]
In 1926 she was voted the third most influential woman in Hollywood, behind
Mary Pickford and
Norma Talmadge.[3]
Mathis is best remembered for discovering
Rudolph Valentino and writing such films as
The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse (1921) and
Blood and Sand (1922). Among Alla Nazimova's intimates at her
scandalous house parties were such lesbian protegees as
Dolly Wilde,
Jeanne
Acker, June Mathis and Natacha Rambova. Nazimova's entourage of young ladies
became known as "Gillette Blades" because they cut both ways.
June Mathis was born June Beulah Hughes in
Leadville, Colorado, the only child of Virginia Ruth and Dr. Philip
Hughes. Her parents divorced when she was seven and her mother remarried to
William D. Mathis, a widower with three children whose name she would
eventually adopt as a stage name.
She had been a sickly child and believed she healed herself through her
sheer force of will. She believed everything was mental and everyone had
certain vibrations, stating, "If you are vibrating in the right place, you
will inevitably come in contact with the others who can help you. It's like
tuning in on your radio. If you get the right wave-length, you have your
station."[4]
Mathis was educated in
Salt Lake City and San Francisco.[1]
It was while in San Francisco she gained her first stage experience, dancing
and doing imitations in
vaudeville. At the age of 12 she joined a traveling company and at 17
became an
ingenue, performing with
Ezra
Kendall in The Vinegar Buyer.[5]
Later she appeared in several Broadway shows and toured for four seasons
with the
female impersonator Julian Eltinge in the widely popular show
The Fascinating Widow. Supporting her now twice-widowed mother, she
would continue to perform in theatre for the next 13 years.[6]
Mathis was determined to become a screenwriter and, accompanied with her
mother, she moved to New York City, where she studied writing and went to the
movies in the evenings.[6]
She entered a screenwriting competition; but despite not winning, her entry
was so impressive it did bring job offers.
Her first script, House of Tears, would be directed by Edwin Carewe
in 1915 and led to a contract in 1918 with
Metro studios, later to be merged into MGM. As one of the first
screenwriters to include details such as stage directions and physical
settings in her work, Mathis saw scenarios as a way to make movies into more
of an art form. Much of the standard screenwriting styles can be attributed to
her. Mathis later credited her success to a strong concentration on plot and
theme: "No story that did not possess a theme has ever really lived....
Occasionally one may make money and perhaps be popular for a time. But in the
end it dies."[6]
By 1919 Mathis and her mother had moved to Hollywood. After only a year of
screenwriting, she had advanced to the head of Metro's
scenario department.[7]
She was one of the first heads of any film department and the only female
executive at Metro.[8]
During her early years, she had a close association with silent star
Alla Nazimova. Their films together can be said to be marked by
over-sentimentality; what little praise these films received was due to
Nazimova's acting rather the conventional romantic stories.[6]
In 1921,
Richard Rowland, the head of Metro, paid $20,000 and 10% of the gross
earning for
Vicente Blasco Ibáñez's novel The Four Horseman of the Apocalypse.
The epic bestseller had been considered unadaptable by every major studio but
Rowland handed the book to Mathis for adaptation and was so impressed with her
screenplay that he asked her input on director and star. Mathis had seen
Rudolph Valentino in a bit part in
Eyes of Youth, and she exerted her influence to cast Valentino. Studio
heads resisted hiring an unknown actor for a lead role.[10]
Despite her many other accomplishments, this "discovery" would grow to be her
best-known act. For the same movie she also insisted the studio hire
Rex Ingram as director.[7]
The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse was one of the first films with an
anti-war theme. Mathis also injected some early depictions of alternative
lifestyles; it featured a scene with German officers coming down the stairs in
drag. Of the scene, Mathis later told the
Los Angeles Times: "I had the German officers coming down the stairs
with women's clothing on. To hundreds of people that meant no more than a
masquerade party. To those who have lived and read, and who understand life,
that scene stood out as one of the most terrific things in the picture."[3]
The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse was a success, grossing
$4,500,000 domestically, thus becoming one of the most commercially successful
silent films ever made and launching Valentino into stardom.[6]
Even before it was released, Valentino was receiving offers from other
studios. Taking Mathis' advice, he remained with Metro to get another solid
role or two under his belt.
Mathis and Valentino remained friends after Four Horsemen. The older
plain-looking Mathis doted on the talented, beautiful young man. Accounts
state that Valentino regarded Mathis in a motherly way, calling her "Little
Mother". Nita Naldi, who worked with them on Blood and Sand, said: "She
mothered Rudy, and my dear she worshiped him and he worshiped her."[11]
"She discovered me, anything I have accomplished I owe to her, to her
judgment, to her advice and to her unfailing patience and confidence in me",
said Valentino on Mathis in a 1923 interview with Louella Parsons.[12]
Mathis looked after Valentino's welfare during his time at Metro, making
sure he gained the best parts and was taken care of. When Valentino showed up
on the set for The Conquering Power, another Mathis script with Rex
Ingram at the helm, his new-found stardom went to his head, along with
resentment at working for the same wage of $350 a week.
The friction between him and Ingram, and his need for more
money to support mounting debts, led Valentino to sign with
Famous Players-Lasky (later known as
Paramount Pictures) for $1,000 a week.
Mathis was also one of the people who helped bail Valentino out of jail
when he was arrested for
bigamy,
having married
Natacha Rambova without finalizing his divorce to
Jean
Acker. Though the two were inseparable, their relationship became strained
during Valentino's marriage to Rambova. When Mathis submitted a script for
The Hooded Falcon, one of Valentino's pet projects, the couple deemed it
unacceptable and asked to have it rewritten. Mathis took it as a great insult
and broke off all contact with Valentino.[14]
Mathis' position with Metro was called by the Los Angeles Times,
"The Most Responsible Job ever Held by A Woman".[15]
She was arguably one of the most powerful women in Hollywood, even said to be
almost as powerful as
Mary Pickford. Mathis had influence over casting, choice of director and
many other aspects of production.[7]
Her strength lay in careful preparation of the shooting script along with the
director, cutting out waste in production while at the same time sharpening
narrative continuity.[16]
After she had spent seven years at Metro, Famous Players-Lasky was able to
lure her away with the promise that she could continue to write for her
protégé Valentino. When Valentino moved to
Goldwyn Pictures, she did as well, this time gaining sovereign control.
Mathis continued to survive in Hollywood despite being involved in two of
the greatest financial fiascoes of the 1920s. When
Erich von Stroheim presented Goldwyn Pictures with his masterpiece
Greed (1924), following
Frank Norris's novel
McTeague
very closely, it was 42 reels and 10 hours long. Stroheim himself realized the
original version was far too long, so he reduced it to 24 reels (6 hours),
hoping the film could be screened with intermissions in two successive
evenings. But Goldwyn executives demanded further cuts. Stroheim allowed his
close friend
Rex Ingram to reduce it to 18 reels (4½ hours).[16]
However, in the middle of production, Goldwyn had merged with Metro and
Louis B. Mayer Pictures to form Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. MGM took Greed
out of Stroheim's hands and gave it to Mathis, with orders to cut it even
more, which she assigned to a routine cutter,
Joseph W. Farnham. The film was then reduced to 13 reels (2½ hours) long.
In the process, many key characters were cut out, resulting in large
continuity gaps.[17]
There is speculation on whether Mathis took part in the actual cutting.
However, for contractual reasons, her name was listed in the credits as a
writer, and it was she who would be blamed for what Stroheim and his fans
would call "tampering with his genius".[7]
In fact, Mathis had worked with Stroheim before and had been fond of his
themes, and thus it is thought unlikely she would butcher his film
unnecessarily.[3]
For the original production of
Ben Hur (1925), Mathis fought the studio over the casting and
production for many months. It was her idea to film the $1 million script in
Italy; the film would eventually come in just under $4 million. When she
arrived the original director
Charles Brabin, in his words, refused to let her "interfere". The
production troubles were numerous, and due to political troubles engulfing
Italy at the time, resulted in disputes and delayed permissions. When the sea
battle was filmed near Livorno, Italy, many extras had apparently lied about
being able to swim. The first attempt to film the chariot race was on a set in
Rome, but there were problems with shadows and the racetrack surface. One of
the chariots' wheels came apart and the stuntman driving it was thrown in the
air and killed.
MGM inherited the production when it took over control of Goldwyn studios;
with the film over budget and getting out of control, the studio halted
production and relocated the shoot from Italy to California, under the
supervision of
Irving Thalberg. Before they had even returned from Italy, MGM would fire
Mathis, Brabin, and stars
George Walsh and
Gertrude Olmstead; MGM replaced them with director
Fred
Niblo, screenwriters
Bess Meredyth and
Carey Wilson, and stars
Ramon Novarro and
May
McAvoy.[7]
After her return,
First National hired her as editorial director. She also scripted several
successful
Colleen Moore pictures including Sally, The Desert Flower,
and Irene. Mathis remained at First National for two years, but left
over limitations and signed with
United Artists; with her husband she made one picture for them, The
Masked Woman. The Magic Flame (1927) would be her last picture, and
one of her best, due in part to
Ronald Colman's performance and
Henry King's direction.[6]
A short woman with untamed brown hair and a love of Parisian fashion, she
was also one of the first "writer-directors"[10]
and laid the groundwork for the later development of screenwriters becoming
producers.[18]
A
spiritualist with
mystical bents, her scripts featured many heroes with a Christ-like
demeanor. A believer in
reincarnation, she always wore an
opal ring when
she wrote, convinced it brought her ideas.
Mathis had been romantically linked to
George Walsh and
Rex Ingram; however, she returned from Italy engaged to an Italian
cinematographer named Silvano Balboni. The couple married on December 20,
1924, at the Mission of St. Cecilia, in
Riverside, California.
After Valentino's marriage to Rambova ended in 1925, the two reconciled at
the premiere of Son of the Sheik when Valentino spotted Mathis with
friends.[2]
When Valentino unexpectedly died in August 1926, Mathis offered up what she
thought would be a temporary solution; she lent him her spot in the family
crypt she had purchased in Hollywood Memorial Cemetery (now called the
Hollywood Forever Cemetery). However, when Mathis herself died the
following year, the arrangement became permanent.[20]
On July 26, 1927, during the third act of the Broadway show
The
Squall at the
48th Street Theatre while accompanied by her grandmother, Mathis suffered
a fatal heart attack. Her last words were reportedly, "Mother, I'm dying!"[21][22]
Her ashes were returned to California: instead of "evicting" Valentino,
Mathis' husband, Sylvano Balboni, moved Valentino to the crypt beside hers,
sold the remaining crypt to Valentino's family and returned to Italy. Mathis
and Valentino repose side by side to this day.
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- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/June_Mathis