A weekly feature in which my four-year-old son is let loose on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, one of the most popular tourist attractions in Los Angeles, and chooses a star from among the more than 2,500 honorees. His “random” picks sometimes reveal unexplained connections such as the summer day in 2012 when he sat down on the star of actress Celeste Holm and refused to budge. We later learned that the Oscar-winning actress had died only hours earlier.
Now that the Oscars are over, Charlie has returned to the hordes of forgotten but interesting stars that line the Hollywood Walk of Fame. Like many of the names that make tourists scratch their heads in non-recognition, Charlie’s pick this week, Alma Rubens, was once an enormous movie star who was admired around the world. Though known for her talent and her kindness, Rubens may be Charlie’s most tragic pick to date. Her career was cut short by a serious drug addiction and her dramatic downward slide was covered extensively in the press prior to her sad death at a very young age.
Born in San Francisco on February 19, 1897, Alma’s career began as a chorus girl on the stage when she was just a teenager. She met actor Franklyn Farnum who encouraged her to try her luck in the movies. Alma got a small part in D.W. Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation and caught the public’s eye in several roles that followed. By the age of 19, Ruben achieved full stardom when she starred opposite screen idol Douglas Fairbanks in the 1916 film The Half-Breed. But while Rubens’ career flourished, her personal life did not. She ended up marrying Franklyn Farnum but the marriage only lasted a few months, ending with accusations that Farnum physically abused her and even dislocated her jaw. She then married producer Daniel Carson Goodman but that marriage didn’t last very long, either. Alma’s third husband was Hollywood “Latin lover” Ricardo Cortez (who, in truth, was Jewish actor Jacob Krantz) but it was another unhappy marriage.
Alma’s real problem was with drugs. Prescribed morphine during an illness, Rubens became a serious heroin addict which caused havoc on her movie sets and led to her being committed to a series of mental institutions. What surprises me the most in looking at the news articles from the day is that her sordid descent from stardom was so publicized. I think ten years later, a star of her caliber would have been shielded by the studio system, but in the 1920s the honchos didn’t seem to have the power to protect their stars from such scrutiny. And Alma herself was very forthcoming. In one of her last interviews she told The Los Angeles Examiner, “As long as my money held out, I could get drugs. I was afraid to tell my mother, my best friends. My only desire was to get drugs and take them in secrecy. If only I could get on my knees before the police or before a judge and beg them to make stiffer laws so that men will refuse to take any dirty dollars from the murderers who sell this poison and who escape punishment when caught by buying their way out.”
One of Alma’s final roles was playing Julie in the 1929 version of Jerome Kern’s Show Boat. She attempted a comeback on the stage in 1930 and she was warmly received by audiences but was arrested soon afterwards on a narcotics charge and sent to jail. Despite her troubles, Rubens remained well liked, even by the people who were now in charge of her. “She is the most considerate prisoner I have ever observed in jail,” prison matron L.D. Wilson told a reporter. “Several times when she became hysterical and highly nervous, she would excuse herself and then apologize to those near her for her trouble.”
Rubens claimed she had finally kicked her drug habit while in jail and she was excitedly planning a comeback in the movies. But it was not to be. Shortly after being released from jail, her weakened body caused her to develop pneumonia and she fell into a coma. Alma Rubens died on January 22, 1931. She was only 33 years old. Following her death, her old friend Marion Davies jumped in and relieved Alma’s grief-stricken mother by making all of the funeral arrangements. Davies rounded up as many of Alma’s old friends as she could find — all the stars with whom Alma had worked — and had them at a touching service in a little church in Forest Lawn. I’m glad that Charlie chose to honor this sad, forgotten star.