Speed Kings (7 page)

Let's move in for a close-up. In the spring of 1915, Jay was spending his evenings at the San Souci club, in the basement of the Heidelberg building on 42nd Street. The star attraction there was a young dancer named Mae Murray, a short blonde with heavy eyelids and a thick, full mouth. She was soon to become famous throughout the world as the “girl with the bee-stung lips,” the brightest star at MGM. Back then she was, she insisted, an innocent little ingenue, trying to break out from the chorus lines on Broadway. Her chance came when Irving Berlin asked her to fill in for Irene Castle, the female lead in his production of
Watch Your Step
, which had opened a few weeks earlier and was still playing to full houses. “You've got to go on,” Berlin told her. “Irene is very ill. The doctors won't allow her out of bed. You've got to help me.” He didn't need to twist her arm. Murray was about to go on stage, but she cut out of the San Souci and skipped down to the New Amsterdam Theatre. She had four hours to get ready, time enough to get a costume fitted and rehearse a few steps with Irene's husband and dancing partner, Vernon Castle, while Berlin accompanied them on a piano.

She was a sensation. The
New York Times
reported that she made “a decided
hit and received round after round of applause.” Vernon Castle told her, “It's all for you, Butterfly,” and dragged her out on stage to take a bow. “Vernon and I formed an unbreakable bond during that exciting, hectic, never-to-be-forgotten night,” Mae recalled. “It was the bond of rhythm lovers.” (Irene Castle, it has to be said, never really warmed to Mae. Not that Mae minded.) She took a cold shower and a quick supper, then raced back to the San Souci so she could perform there. After her number she received her second standing ovation of the night, the applause ringing on long after her encore. She slipped backstage to change into a long white gown, then stepped out into the club. She accepted a white gardenia, refused a glass of champagne, and fell into conversation with a man named Jack de Saulles.

De Saulles was thirty-seven, a real estate broker. He had been a star quarterback at Yale back in 1901, and was named that year in the
New York Post
's All-American Team. He swept his arm around Mae's shoulders.

And then she saw him, walking toward her from across the room. “A striking man, about 36, with dark, svelte hair, dark eyes, very well-groomed. He looked as if he had just been released by his valet. His white dress shirt gleamed with pink pearl studs.” Jay O'Brien. Mae couldn't take her eyes off him.

Jay explained that he had been at the New Amsterdam Theatre that night and had watched her dance with Vernon Castle. And though she thought him fresh, she found she was “strangely grateful” for his praise. At that moment, she said, it felt “as though there were only two of us in the room.” De Saulles, understandably, seemed displeased with the interruption. Mae, who could surely have made a living writing penny romances if she hadn't been blessed with so many other talents, remembered that she looked into Jay's eyes and thought how “lustrous and dark they were,” then wondered to herself, “What is he like behind that white-white shirt, behind those pearls?”

De Saulles moved to turn her toward the dance floor, but Jay took de Saulles's arm, lifted it from her shoulders, and slipped his own around her waist. “I bet I would dance with her tonight,” he told de Saulles as he led her out into the crowd. She assumed he was joking. He wasn't. Later de Saulles, whose young Chilean wife was also there that evening, tried to persuade Mae to let him take her home. She refused, and he explained to her, “Look, Jay and I have a bet on. He's already won once from me tonight. Now you help me win over him.” He and Jay were pals; but then, as he commented to Mae a little later, “no men are friends where a woman is concerned.”

Jay was, Mae said, a glorious mover. “Our timing was so perfect that I could
not speak,” she gushed. “I closed my eyes and wondered if all this night had been a dream.” Some of it might have been. “I looked up into his immobile, finely chiseled face and saw it registered no expression. It had the perfect proportions and even features of a statue. The only difference, I thought, was that I could see a muscle throb in his right jaw.” She gasped. Her heart skipped a beat. “Although this man was many years older than me”—all of two years, to be precise—“the attraction was undeniable.” As they turned across the floor, stepping together in time to the band, Jay, one eye on his bet with de Saulles, told her, “Don't go away from me, because I tell you I am going to take you home.”

It wouldn't quite be right to say that Mae fell for Jay that night. She said she found herself both repelled by and attracted to him. She thought he was typical of “the wealthy play crowd, who lived on inheritance,” and part of her “wanted to get away from these people whose lives seemed to be made up of betting, of intrigues, of matching wits.” Best to take that with a little pinch of salt. She also insisted that she kept asking herself, “What do these men want from me?” Was it “her charm, her natural sweetness?” Was it her newfound “success and acclaim?” Or was it something else altogether? Well, quite.

Before the week was over, Jay had inveigled himself into Mae's life. He declared, after sneaking into her taxi and accompanying her home, that he was in love and intended to marry her. She balked at that. Jay, wrote Mae's biographer Jane Ardmore, “had a high-flown way of talking that shocked her with its excessive ardor. It made her feel like a schoolgirl.” She mustered the courage to turn him down, though, telling him, “I want to be free.” Until de Saulles returned, that is. He invited her to a party at his apartment. His studio, she remembered, “was so ornate and extravagant and luxurious,” and it seemed to her that “every celebrity on Broadway sat around the table.” They ate “pheasant and wild rice from silver platters, and drank champagne from crystal glasses.” A little too much champagne. De Saulles began to paw at her, pleading for a dance. “I want to hold you in my arms,” he said. And then he leaned in for a kiss.

That was when Jay arrived, which was impeccable timing on his part, or perhaps that of Mae's imagination.

“Jay!” I cried, my hand going guilty to my wet, kiss-smeared cheek.

“Hello party crasher!” said de Saulles.

“So you've won, you skunk!” Jay shot back. “You said you'd get her to your apartment, all right, and you have. But before I pay you, I've got something else for you.”

At which point, of course, he clobbered him. He knocked him onto the dining table, spilling rice and champagne and silver and crystal all across the floor. Then, as Mae remembered it, Jay seized her by the elbows, lifted her from the floor, and . . . well, again, it's best to let her take over:

“Why did you come here?” he asked me.

“Jay! You're mad!”

“Why did you come?” he asked. “I don't want you here.”

“You're hurting me. Let me down I tell you!”

“Answer me first!”

“I've told you before. I don't belong to you or anyone. I want to be free.”

“I told you that you couldn't be free.”

“Then I did something that broke the tension. I laughed.”

So did everyone else. Apart from Jay. He blanched, started to shake, and then wrapped his fingers around her throat. Mae, always the heroine of her memoirs, said she told him, “Go on. You'll justify all my doubts and answer every question I had about you.” Mae thought that it was her words that made Jay let go. It may also have had something to do with the two waiters who grabbed him by the arms.

She left with de Saulles. She admitted that she didn't have much choice about it, since he threw her over his shoulder and carried her out to his car. They drove out into the city, far from the San Souci, where Mae was meant to be appearing on stage that evening. De Saulles had an “evil smile on his face,” Mae said, “as if he were enjoying my upset night.” He cautioned her against seeing Jay again, though you'd think that after what had just happened, she would hardly have needed the warning. But then when she returned to her flat that night, she found that her bedroom was filled with red roses. Her maid brought her a note, from Jay, begging her forgiveness, pledging his love. But as Mae told de Saulles, “I don't want to be ‘a woman' in your and Jay's lives, I want to dance, to make my own living and live my own life.”

She was doing exactly that. The great impresario Florenz Ziegfeld—“Ziggie” to Mae—had just signed her up to perform in his famous Follies, “a salad of sex and art,” as one of his biographers put it; the front-row seats sold for one hundred dollars each. And Adolph Zukor, who had just founded Paramount, was trying to persuade her to move to Hollywood. Jay was beside
himself, “tortured and jealous, in a constant state of depression.” He couldn't stand having all these rivals for her affection.

Enter Rudolph Valentino. He was only twenty then and still using his real surname, Guglielmi. “He was a magnificent specimen of humanity, and had a disposition which matched his physical beauty,” Mae said. “Just to see his expressive hand lying on the back of a chair was art.” She was utterly smitten. As was everyone else. Which explains why she was so ready to admit, “We were attracted to each other from that first afternoon. Call it sex, if you will, but I call it a dancing friendship.”

As enraptured by Valentino as Mae was, she was beginning to realize that she was still obsessed with Jay. She noticed that he didn't come to her opening night at the Follies. Her big number was an “oriental love dance” in the Elysium scene, set in a Persian harem. Each night she looked out into the crowd, hoping to catch a glimpse of him. Each night she tore open the envelopes bearing notes from her admirers, hoping to find one signed by him. He never came, and never wrote. Heartbroken, Mae ended her affair with Valentino—who promptly fell in love with Jack de Saulles's long-suffering wife, Blanca.

We shall step back here, just for a moment. Mae's memoirs, which were serialized by the Hearst Corporation, were considered sensational, in more than one sense, when they were first published in 1942. Her friend Anita Loos called them “one long Valentine.” Even then people wondered how reliable they were. Years later, we can be sure that she twisted the truth for the sake of the tale and her sales. Jay's own version of their affair, you suspect, would have read very differently had he ever written it. If, however, her account sometimes seems unbelievable, we should remember that Mae's life was an incredible one, and her world was extraordinary. Nothing better illustrates that than this little side story.

Blanca de Saulles, now in love with Valentino, was, understandably, desperate to get a divorce from her husband. Valentino agreed to testify that Jack de Saulles had had an affair with his dancing partner so that Blanca could secure her divorce and keep custody of her child. Jack, in turn, arranged to have Valentino arrested on vice charges by falsely alleging that the actor had been having an affair with a brothel madam. “This,” Mae wrote of the way de Saulles had Valentino arrested, “was a terrible and vicious thing to do, and Jack was to pay, for Rudy never deserved such treatment.” Soon after the de Saulleses' divorce was finalized, Blanca drove to their country house in Westbury and demanded that Jack give her custody of their son, as the court had stipulated. When he refused, she drew a gun and pointed it at his head. When he tried to disarm her,
she shot him dead. She was acquitted of murder, essentially on the grounds that de Saulles deserved it. It was, the
New York Times
said, “a popular verdict,” but one that had “no justification” other than the “emotional” one that she was a young, comely mother and he had been “dissolute, led an evil life, and had wasted her estate.”

So the truth was sometimes even stranger than Mae made it seem. Remember that, as we move on to the most extraordinary chapter of her story.

By the time of Valentino's arrest, Mae had already quit New York for Hollywood, lured there by Zukor's promise that he would arrange a red-carpet reception for her, with a brass band, when she got off the train. When she arrived, she was disappointed to find that Zukor had sent instead a fat man with a bunch of flowers. Mae saw Jay twice before she left the city. The first time was at a party, when he had ignored her as he offered his congratulations to all her co-stars in the Follies. “He never said one word that I might take personally! NOT ONE WORD! I felt the full cruelty of his blow then.” She flounced out. Jay's somewhat transparent ploy seemed to be working. “His name rushed out and roared and tingled in my ears after every performance . . . and beat there cruelly in my heart when I was alone, disturbing me as I tried to rest.” The final time was when she bumped into him on Fifth Avenue. It was then she told him that she was moving to the West Coast.

“I am a dancer and an actress,” she said. “I want to believe that I am, and with you I can't believe anything. Not even that you love me.”

“You seem to think it is what you want that counts,” Jay said. “It's what you are. You are just a precious baby who belongs to me, not to Broadway, not to Hollywood. Dancing and acting and running away from me and doing the things I don't want you to do—they don't count! You're still my baby. Don't you understand that by now?”

And with that, he bundled her into the back of a cab, pressed his lips against hers, and then began to sob into her hair. Mae said, “I was more puzzled than ever about the strange bond between Jay and me”; he “was in torture because of me and I had been unhappy because of him. It did not seem right. His influence on my emotional life had not ended.”

“All right, all right,” she said, out of pity as much as love. “I will marry you.”

Jay and Mae agreed that she would go to Hollywood to work on her first picture—
To Have and to Hold
, co-starring “the screen's most perfect lover” Wallace Reid—and then return to New York for the wedding. They parted the next day, with Jay telling her, “I intend to hold you to your promise, baby, about
coming back after one picture and marrying me. Remember, if you don't come back, I'll come out and get you.” She did come back to New York, but only so she could break off the engagement. She was working for Cecil B. DeMille now and had fallen in love with her director on
A Mormon Maid
, Bob Leonard. Jay, just as he said he would, went out to Hollywood to persuade her to change her mind.