Michael G Ankerich

Mae Murray (1885--1965), popularly known as "the girl with the bee-stung lips," was a fiery presence in silent-era Hollywood. Renowned for her classic beauty and charismatic presence, she rocketed to stardom as a dancer in the Ziegfeld Follies, moving across the country to star in her first film, To Have and to Hold, in 1916. An instant hit with audiences, Murray soon became one of the most famous names in Tinseltown.However, Murray's moment in the spotlight was fleeting. The introduction of talkies, a string of failed marriages, a serious career blunder, and a number of bitter legal battles left the former star in a state of poverty and mental instability that she would never overcome.In this intriguing biography, Michael G. Ankerich traces Murray's career from the footlights of Broadway to the klieg lights of Hollywood, recounting her impressive body of work on the stage and screen and charting her rapid ascent to fame and decline into obscurity. Featuring exclusive interviews with Murray's only son, Daniel, and with actor George Hamilton, whom the actress closely befriended at the end of her life, Ankerich restores this important figure in early film to the limelight.

You survived Michael G. Ankerich's Dangerous Curves 'atop Hollywood Heels. Now take a hair-raising roller coaster ride through the intimate lives of 25 beautiful, ambitious serial queens, slapstick vamps, bathing beauties, and Western heroines.The dark side of Tinseltown dope rings, whorehouses, gin joints, and other gritty hellholes trapped them on their road to bitter and tragic ends.Meticulous research, and interviews with relatives, reveal the ghosts of Hollywood past and a world overflowing with passion and imagination, illicit love, domineering mothers, desperation, greed, abuse, and discrimination.Lavishly illustrated with over 160 photographs, many from family scrapbooks.Actresses profiled include Belle Bennett, Edwina Booth, Lila Chester, Dorothy Clark, Virginia Lee Corbin, Marjorie Daw, Florence Deshon, Margaret Gibson, Jetta Goudal, Alice Lake, Barbara La Marr, Fontaine La Rue, Lolita Lee, Mona Lisa, Katherine MacDonald, Mary MacLaren, Marion McDonald, Evelyn Nelson, Lottie Pickford, Marjorie Ray, Alma Rubens, Jean Sothern, Valeska Suratt, Marie Walcamp, and Helen Lee Worthing.

"I've been away so long that nothing matters now. I went home to die, but I wasn't that fortunate." Edwina Booth "He who enters Hollywood leaves self--the real self--behind. It is the land of Let's Pretend, and the hardest acting is done off screen." Herbert Howe, writer "From the peak of fame to the brink of almost hopeless despair--that's my story of Hollywood." Alice Lake You survived Dangerous Curves 'atop Hollywood Heels, Michael G. Ankerich's 2010 book about ill-fated actresses of the silent screen, but are you ready for his companion book, Hairpins and Dead Ends: The Perilous Journeys of 25 Actresses Through Early Hollywood? Hairpins and Dead Ends takes you on a hair-raising rollercoaster ride through a time when Hollywood was surrounded by orange groves, not concrete jungles, and into the intimate lives of 25 beauties, ambitious nobodies who wanted to be somebodies. Several became twinkling stars, while others settled as serial queens, slapstick vamps, bathing beauties, western heroines, and everything in between. While many young hopefuls abandoned their quest for fame and returned home disappointed, here are the stories of women who stayed, often to a bitter and tragic end brought on by drugs, booze, and suicide. Through his meticulous research, that included interviews with relatives of the actresses, Ankerich takes you into the dark side of Tinseltown, a world of dope rings, whorehouses, gin joints, and other gritty hellholes some called home. Lavishly illustrated with over 160 photographs, many from family scrapbooks, Hairpins and Dead Ends uncovers a world that offered passion and imagination, but functioned on illicit love, domineering mothers, desperation, greed, abuse, and discrimination. The screen images of these 25 dazzling beauties were fleeting shadows. Their personal passions and struggles in real life held more drama than any role they clamored to play. These ladies make up the ghosts of Hollywood's past.

This is a collection of 23 original interviews with stars of the silent screen, with biographical information and a filmography included for each. Interviewed are Lew Ayres, William Bakewell, Lina Basquette, Madge Bellamy, Eleanor Boardman, Ethlyne Clair, Junior Coghlan, Joyce Compton, Douglas Fairbanks, Jr., Dorothy Gulliver, Maxine Elliott Hicks, Dorothy Janis, George Lewis, Marion Mack, Patsy Ruth Miller, Lois Moran, Baby Marie Osborne, Muriel Ostriche, Eddie Quillan, Esther Ralston, Dorothy Revier, David Rollins and Gladys Walton.

Marion Shilling began her career as a silent film ingenue for MGM and went on to play heroines in Westerns of the 1930s. Stage actress Esther Muir made the transition from Broadway to Hollywood just as talkies became popular. Hugh Allan was a leading man in the last years of the silents only to leave the film business in 1930 because of the uncertainty surrounding his transition to sound films and his disgust with studio politics. These three performers and thirteen others (Barbara Barondess, Thomas Beck, Mary Brian, Pauline Curley, Billie Dove, Edith Fellows, Rose Hobart, William Janney, Marcia Mae Jones, Barbara Kent, Anita Page, Lupita Tovar, and Barbara Weeks) reminisce here about Hollywood and the movie business as it made the transition.