Possessed (2 page)

She loved it.

CHAPTER ONE
A Prairie Bernhardt
| 1906–1924 |

S
HE WAS OVERDRESSED
, overweight and overanxious. Standing outside La Grande railway station in downtown Los Angeles, she felt a momentary desire to hurry back into the terminal and board the next Gulf, Colorado and Santa Fe train that would take her back home.

But she had no home now, and except for a few dollar bills and some coins, she had no financial resources. Her most recent income—for working during the Christmas shopping season in Kansas City—had paid for some new clothes. The train ticket to Chicago, and from there to Southern California aboard the Los Angeles Express, had been subsidized by her new employer.

She was about five feet three inches tall, red-haired and freckled. Her dark coat camouflaged a few of her 140 pounds—too much weight, she knew, for her small frame. But soon she would be dancing again (day and night, if she had her way), and dancing was her preferred method of weight loss. She clutched her purse and put down the rattan valise that contained her few outfits and—her only extravagance—two pairs of dancing shoes that were just right for the shimmy, the Charleston and the Black Bottom.

It was January 1925, the wild era of the so-called flappers and bright young things who emerged after the Great War, and she was a charter member of the new age. She smoked, she drank—even during those Prohibition years, alcohol was not hard to obtain—and she danced until dawn; she flirted, she wore makeup, she was giddy and took risks. She replaced stiff corsets with loose undergarments and raised her hemline to the knee. She conformed to no conventional standard of behavior; so far, she had lived fast, clinging to life as if she might lose it at any moment. She refused to wear long hair piled on top of her head, as her mother’s generation did; instead, she cut and bobbed her hair short. She was a new, modern woman—and frankly sexual, without inhibitions. She never talked about her freewheeling love life; she simply got on with it.

THREE DAYS EARLIER, ON
a wintry afternoon, she had said good-bye to her mother in Kansas City. Now, bundled in a woolen coat and wrapped in a patchwork scarf, her hair tucked beneath a dark cloche, she awaited the man assigned to greet her. The perspiration trickled down her back, for the cold-weather outfit was unnecessary: the sun shone brightly at midmorning, and the temperature was climbing toward seventy.

The railway station and surrounding sidewalks of downtown Los Angeles were thronged with motley travelers. There were poor families from the Indian Territories; East Coast businessmen in striped suits, their watch fobs glittering across tightly buttoned vests; society women, draped in chiffon and pearls; and, it seemed to her, a veritable congress of begrimed and bewhiskered cowboys wearing broad-brimmed hats, leather chaps and colorful bandanas. This cross section of humanity might have been mistaken for a group of players dressed for various productions at a Hollywood movie studio.

Some moments later, a young man, sprucely attired in a summer suit, approached her. As if he had meticulously rehearsed his brief introduction, he removed his rakish straw boater, picked up her suitcase, said that his name was Larry Barbier and asked if she was Miss Lucille Le Sueur. She smiled nervously, said yes and they were spirited away in a waiting taxi.
¹

Larry, as she was told to call him, was an assistant to the assistant to the associate publicity director of the company for which she was about to begin working. He said that he was going to show her an interesting neighborhood near the hotel where a room had been booked for her, and he instructed the driver to head for an area south of the city of Santa Monica known as Venice, on the shore of the bay, twelve miles from downtown Los Angeles. Larry said that he lived in Venice, right near the beach, and that she was welcome to visit any time.

Planned by a man named Abbot Kinney, who made his fortune manufacturing Sweet Caporal cigarettes, Venice was designed to resemble its Italian namesake: it was a fanciful enclave of Los Angeles, the movie capital of the world and a kind of ultimate fantasy land. Kinney had envisioned romantic canals connecting the streets, with beaches and shops linked by bridges to residential areas on flower-banked shores. Construction of lagoons and cottages was begun in 1904, and in 1905 the canals were filled with water. Kinney persuaded merchants, hoteliers and restaurant owners to build in the style of the Venetian Renaissance, and to complete the effect, he imported two dozen gondoliers from Italy, who arrived with a repertory of their native melodies. Venice, California, soon became known as the Playland of the Pacific, and a few months after Miss Le Sueur’s arrival, it was sucked into the booming metropolis of Los Angeles.

In those days before freeways and wide boulevards, the journey from the railway station to the hotel required almost four hours as the taxi negotiated heavy traffic along dusty local streets. By midafternoon, they had finally arrived at the Hotel Washington on Van Buren Place, in the separate inland municipality known as Culver City.

Residents of the Washington routinely complained that the rate of fourdollars a week was cutthroat extortion; indeed, the word
modest
was too glamorous a description for the rude accommodations. There was only one bathroom for every thirty guests; a sink with cold water stood in the corner of each tiny room; the electrical system worked erratically; and a single telephone near the front desk had to do for all the residents. But Miss Le Sueur may not have been dejected: after all, her residences in Texas, Oklahoma, Kansas and New York had not been more luxurious.

The advantage to living on Van Buren Place was its proximity to Lucille’s new employer. A few blocks distant was the company to which she would soon report for work; within its gates and behind its walls were lakes, orchards, jungles, railway stations, parks, streets and neighborhoods of many eras—everything required by a modern motion picture studio.

WHEN LUCILLE LE SUEUR
arrived in California, a relatively new form of public entertainment was swiftly becoming a vast corporate industry—and the company that had engaged her was at its epicenter. Nine months earlier, in April 1924, New York theater owner Marcus Loew, who already owned Metro Pictures and Goldwyn Pictures, added Mayer Pictures to his holdings. This he did in order to appoint forty-year-old Louis B. Mayer—ruthless, patriotic and paternalistic—as chief of Los Angeles studio operations for the new conglomerate. At the same time, Loew appointed as head of film production Mayer’s assistant, the clever, physically frail twenty-five-year-old Irving G. Thalberg, known as the boy wonder of Hollywood. For decades afterward, the business headquarters of the new studio were in New York, the home of Wall Street financiers.

With a little pressure from Mayer, the newly formed megastudio was named Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer: MGM, or simply Metro. With remarkable rapidity, the studio could boast (as one savvy publicist put it) “more stars than there are in the heavens"—typical Hollywood hype, but not entirely inappropriate for its impressive roster of popular contract players, which eventually included Lionel Barrymore, Wallace Beery, Jean Harlow, Jeanette MacDon-ald, Norma Shearer, Clark Gable, Myrna Loy and Greta Garbo.
²
More than any other movie studio, Metro was deeply involved in the personal lives of its employees—specifically, its tight control of a tidy public image for each contract player. For Mayer and his colleagues, this was simply a matter of protecting their investments.

From the 1920s to the early 1940s, this studio was the most successful in Hollywood: it never lost money during the Great Depression and released a feature film every week, along with cartoons and short subjects. The eventual decline of the studio was primarily (but not only) caused by the rise of television and by the United States Supreme Court ruling against corporate monopolies, which forced the studios to divest themselves of theater chains; without Loew’s movie houses, Metro could not survive.

None of this was foreseen in 1925. That year, 49 million people (more than 40 percent of the American population) paid an average of ten cents to see a total of 576 silent black-and-white films. This was the heyday of stars like glamorous Gloria Swanson and demure Lillian Gish; of audacious Douglas Fairbanks and sensual Rudolf Valentino; of exotic Pola Negri and amusing Marion Davies. Metro was about to produce
The Merry Widow,
with dashing John Gilbert, and soon it would release the epic
Ben-Hur,
which showcased the glossy eroticism of Ramon Novarro.

Along with the established stars and vast numbers of technical workers at various studios, extras for the common crowd scenes in movies picked up their paychecks each week. In 1919, a total of thirty-five thousand people worked in some capacity for the movie industry; by 1925, that number had doubled, and most of the studio workers labored six days every week. Lucille was prepared for hard work when she arrived at Metro, as instructed, on Monday, January 12, 1925. Two months later, she celebrated her nineteenth birthday.

LUCILLE FAY LE SUEUR
was born in San Antonio, Texas, on March 23, 1906. By the time she registered for the new Social Security program in the 1930s, she had already been accustomed to stating her birth year as 1908; there was, after all, no official document to the contrary, for in 1906, birth certificates were neither mandatory nor routine in Texas. And so, with the encouragement and complicity of studio publicists, she established her birth year as 1908, effectively diminishing her age by two years. According to California law, however, the studio could not have hired a seventeen-year-old in 1925 without parental approval, and this was neither required nor requested in her case. Lucille had applied for a work-study program at Stephens College, Missouri, in 1922, and at that time she truthfully gave her age as sixteen. She certainly could not have hoodwinked anyone at Stephens into accepting her if she was in fact only fourteen years old.

By 1936, magazine articles occasionally reported her true birth year (without correction from the subject or her bosses) and she herself revealed it at least once. The occasion was a meeting in November 1967 with the Trustees of Brandeis University, who named her a Fellow in recognition of “her interest, time and service to a host of civic and philanthropic causes.” By that time, she had donated a large cache of personal effects to the university.
³

The extreme paucity of facts concerning Lucille’s parents has not prevented a platoon of writers from spinning fanciful tales about her family and their backgrounds, employment and characters. But very little can confidently be established. Her mother’s name was Anna Bell Johnson, and she was born in November 1884, very likely somewhere in Texas. Lucille’s father was Thomas Le Sueur, born about 1868 in Canada or (say some sources) in Tennessee. Of the couple’s earlier lives and of their marriage, nothing is known except that Tom (as some records identify him) abandoned his wife and children eitherjust before Lucille was born or just after—she never provided any information on the matter. Anna then took in laundry and found local odd jobs to support herself and her two children. The little family was grindingly poor and remained so for years to come.

Despite the imaginations of those who have supplemented missing facts with colorful fictions, Lucille’s early years remain clouded in obscurity—until 1910, when a census recorded that Anna, seven-year-old Harold (always called Hal) and four-year-old Lucille were living with Anna’s new husband, Henry J. Cassin, in the town of Lawton, Oklahoma. Curiously, the Cassin marriage was publicly recorded as Anna’s first; indeed, she may never have married Le Sueur.

Lawton, a sleepy town eighty-eight miles southwest of Oklahoma City and the headquarters of the Comanche Nation, was no busy, crowded metropolitan area. But it boasted the Ramsey Opera House, and Cassin was the booking agent and manager for its repertory of musicals, traveling shows, vaudevilles, dance recitals and just about anything that came to town capable of attracting paying customers.

“Daddy Cassin,” as Lucille referred to him even after she learned that he was not her father, was the only adult to lavish anything like attention and affection on the little girl. “He was the center of my world—a short, stocky and black-haired man with small brown eyes and a calm manner. A mature man, he was not the type to romp with children, but I could always crawl on his lap—he made room right inside his newspaper. And I knew he loved me.” Born about 1867, Cassin called her Billie, a common nickname at that time for children of both genders. For a dozen years, she identified herself as Billie Cassin. “If I could really give credit to the people who helped me the most,” she said years later, “I guess he’d top the list.”

Cassin often took her to his theater—where, for example, he once featured a classically trained ballet dancer—and, in 1912, treated six-year-old Billie to a performance of something called the “Gypsy Fantasy.” They went backstage to meet the dancer, who embraced Billie after the child said that she wanted to dance, too. The young woman gave the child a pair of used ballet slippers and told her that she would have to work very hard. This counsel was at oncetaken to heart, and Billie began to offer impromptu dance recitals in a nearby barn or on the family’s front porch. With no more inspiration than the Gypsy Fantasy, she leaped and whirled, usually to the unlikely tune of the popular song “Wait ‘Till the Sun Shines, Nellie,” for which she dragooned this or that neighborhood boy to accompany her as impromptu warbler.

“Henry Cassin encouraged me,” she recalled years later. “He seemed to think I had talent. This made my mother furious—no daughter of
hers
was going to be a dancer. But his world was real to me. The opera house must have been shabby, but to me it was glamorous. It was the life I wanted.”