Quote:
Originally Posted by ethereal_reality
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The house in the photo was built in 1928 at the foot of 64th Street in Playa del Rey for $50,000 by actress Mae Murray (1885-1965), "the girl with the bee-stung lips."
themave.com --
http://www.themave.com/bijou/cvrs/cvr-maemurray.htm
Murray's best-remembered film today is MGM's
The Merry Widow (1925), directed by Erich von Stroheim. Murray had earned as much as $7,500 a week and by 1925 had accumulated $3,000,000 in the bank.
In 1926 she made the mistake of marrying Prince David Mdiviani (1907-1984), formerly of Soviet Georgia. He kept the birth of their son secret for 16 months, out of his fear it might affect Murray's career. He also talked her into breaking her contract with MGM, which prompted Louis B. Mayer to have her blackballed in Hollywood. Although she had oil wells -- which she let her husband and brother-in-law manage -- on her beachfront property, she was broke by 1933 (the year she divorced Mdiviani) and had to sell her Playa del Rey home.
Subsequently she lost custody of her son, and in later years wandered the streets of Playa del Rey and sat on the beach in front of her former home. She may have been the basis for the Norma Desmond character in
Sunset Boulevard. Murray famously commented on Desmond, "None of us floozies was that nuts."
She lived off the charity of friends. In 1964 she undertook a cross-country bus tour to revive her career. Found in St. Louis, she thought she was in New York; the Salvation Army helped get her back to Los Angeles. She died in the Motion Picture Country Home the next year.
Info from
Mae Murray: The Girl With the Bee-Stung Lips by Michael Ankerich (The University Press of Kentucky, 2013)
http://www.amazon.com/Mae-Murray-Bee...bee+stung+lips and
T. O. McCoye's Playa Del Rey by Arthur Fowler (self-published, 2011) and
http://www.ballonafriends.org/blog/2...of-mae-murray/ and
http://www.findadeath.com/Deceased/m.../maemurray.htm
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