Silent film star Corinne Griffith

meh, that's frau hysteria

I don't know what was in the water back then, but if you watch or read many interviews with people who were in silent films, you'll find a vast majority of them were crazy as bedbugs. They were constantly making up stories, I guess having gotten use to the studios and publicity people inventing stories for them when they were stars.

This reminds me of "Crowned Heads", a novel by Thomas Tryon about four fictional Hollywood stars. One segment is about "Fedora", a reclusive Garboesque movie star. She seems never to age. After "her" death the truth finally comes out. Fedora had a baby, a girl, but was somehow able to keep that a secret. As the girl grew older she looked amazingly like her mother. Fedora attempts to stay young by taking some kind of rejuvenation treatments but they don't work and she ages even faster. So to make it seem like Fedora looks still young and youthful her kept under wraps daughter takes her place. A little minor plastic surgery and voila! She's the spitting image of her mother and continues her mother's career, starring in movies and continuing her legend. Then the daughter gets angry and disgusted about this charade and becomes difficult to work with and erratic. She gets into drugs and her mother's legacy is tarnished. Finally "Fedora" dies, and it's revealed that Fedora was really an imposter, the daughter of the real one. The real one died many years ago. A preposterous story, but Tyron made it an interesting read.

Indeed, R2, it's all smoke and mirrors, which I suppose can drive the sanest mad. Though she's largely forgotten today outside film buff circles, Corinne Griffith was one of the more successful silent film stars of the time, and was nominated for an Academy Award for "The Divine Lady". Her later life though, post-Hollywood, is more interesting because of wacky shit like this.

R2 Yes I've read a few books and people concocted whole backgrounds for themselves that were total lies, invented marriages or lied about ever being married, faked illnesses......High drama. It's funny reading it now because you can't get away with shit today. You couldn't lie about what you had for breakfast because someone would have the receipts before noon.

This story also reminds of the young guy who said he had married Gina Lollobrigida a few years ago and then she filed a suit saying that it was not her and that he had hired some woman to stand in for the ceremony.

R3, Yes, I saw the movie.

R2, Raymond Burr invented a few ex wives and a dead kid he never had. And he's seen as completely sane & stable.

What was the purpose of her saying she was her sister? How would that help her in the divorce proceedings? Still, I would loved to have been in court, seeing "Betty Blythe" and "Claire Windsor" and all her old silent star friends coming out to the woodworks to testify.

R8 I'm not sure, really. There is a lot about the story that doesn't make sense. It's very bizarre.

There's a big difference between silent movie stars making crazy stuff up out of whole cloth and a gay man having to lie to stay closeted for his career back in the 1940s, R7. Feel like that goes without saying, yet here we are.

She'd told Scholl she was Corinne's younger sister. though sounds like that's what she told everyone, probably in an attempt to shave years off her age. It was brought up later when she asked for an annulment, and her husband brought these lies up as part of his argument for alimony.

Was it Mae Murray who, after seeing “Sunset Boulevard” said, “None of us broads was ever *that* nuts!”?

Thanks R11, now it makes more sense. The Wiki page should be edited to make that clear.

Here is her last movie, Paradise Alley in 1962. Oddly, she actually does look 20 years younger in this movie. She would have been 68 in 1962, and she doesn't look that old at all, even with the aging styles of that time. Maybe she was telling the truth! She comes in at the 5:20 mark.

Thanks, OP, you got me interested in this. More DL catnip from R11's link:

[quote] Tom Tryon wrote a fictionalized version of this event called Fedora, which Billy Wilder turned into a 1978 film.

That film had the star's daughter take her place, and Wilder tried to get Marlene Dietrich as the star and Faye Dunaway as the daughter. If only!

Rose at R10, no one is questioning Raymond Burr's reasons for creating a hetero background for himself, for the sake of his career. He could have said that he had 5 wives who all burned up in a fire at the family picnic and I still would understand. Where the crazy comes in, is when he fabricated a dead child as well for no reason! What sick purpose did that serve?

I'm pretty sure I have a signed photo of her in my old movie collection, I bought a lot of old posters and signed photos back in the early days of Ebay.

Her memoir was the basis of the charming movie “Papa’s Delicate “Condition” starring Jackie Gleason and DL favorite Glynis Johns and which featured the Oscar-winning song “Call Me Irtedpondible.”

This will be Madonna in another 10 years.

R19 LMFAO