She was a mere 12 years old in Mexico at the dawning of the 20s and was excited by what she saw in the world outside her home. There was a rhythm out there that she wanted to be a part of. She knew she was too young to actually make it happen but she loved practicing. She only knew she was going to set the world on fire.
Maybe we should handle a couple of full disclosures. This first one is also a first for this blog... I have never seen any of her movies. Her time was the mainly the 1930s and my interest in that decade is spotty at best. I looked over her list of films years ago and nothing struck my fancy.
Secondly, in this day and age it might be considered racist by some or at least insensitive to use the term Mexican Spitfire but hear me out. The American press labeled Lupe Vélez the Mexican Spitfire and it stuck. There was never any doubt she was Mexican or a spitfire. In fact, she was so well-known by this moniker that she made seven movies with Mexican Spitfire in the title. Those in the Golden Age often got a nickname.
Then it occurs to me that it may be one thing to discuss Mexican Spitfire in the body of the posting but do I need to show it in the title? Perhaps not but one needs to kind of sell what one writes and a title can make the difference. I question whether simply titling this Lupe Vélez would do the trick.
Ok, back to our story. Lupe first saw the light of day in 1908 in San Luis de Potosi, Mexico. It was said she was born fiery and temperamental because both of her parents certainly were. Her father was a colonel in the army of a dictator who cultivated his reputation as being heroic, larger than life and imperious.
He did something quite odd when he occasionally took his five-year old daughter with him onto or certainly around the battlefields. She saw horrifying things, including her father killing many people, that understandably scarred her during her brief life. They may also have caused her to be determined to have a good time and in time she could become violent if that good time were thwarted. Her wild girl type could have hung from a chandelier at a posh party, sipping and dripping champagne from a bottle, squealing in fractured English. Imaginative perhaps but I suspect not far off the mark.
Mama, by the way, was either considered to be an opera singer, a vaudeville performer or a prostitute. Like her husband, she thought well of herself and they found it to be the prescription for raising their five children. The entire household was independent, outspoken and ambitious.
At 13 the youngster was sent to a convent in Texas to help her calm down. She had her quiet time which she often spent dreaming of becoming a champion roller skater. She was more an A-type personality who often ran afoul of the rules.
Then one day the father vanished, later assumed lost in battle. Apparently that's how he would have wanted to go out. Lupe was called home. Before long the family was more impoverished than they'd ever known. Perhaps no one discussed they lived well beyond their means.
Lupe, the most enterprising of the children, got a job and helped support the family. She was working in a department store and also taking dancing lessons. She had turned into a young beauty. She didn't like the young part and was working on everything she could to look older. She drooled over the women and their clothes in movie magazines. It also didn't escape her attention that she was getting a lot of compliments on her looks and clothes and manner.
Mama was said to have encouraged her untamed daughter toward theater work. Isn't that funny... that's just what Lupe had in mind. By age 16 she was on the stage, mainly in revues. She could sing and dance and perform in skits. She could also be a royal pain, far too young to be a diva. She became notorious for walking off the job for any number of reasons and she got into physical skirmishes with other performers. She seemed to court upset. One way or the other, she wound up in the press. At 17 she attempted suicide because she came in second in a beauty contest.
She rebounded and was known as a nubile young performer who wasn't planning on staying in revues. People said she was too lively, too determined and too talented to not make it big. An American patron took a shine to her, found her beautiful and very talented and asked her if she'd ever considered working in America. Oh sure, what a line. But at 18 years old, she moved to Los Angeles. She arrived with a lot of baggage... and more than just a few suitcases.
In L.A. she had several irons in the fire at once but she ended up accepting an offer from MGM for a brief appearance in a Laurel & Hardy short, Sailor Beware. Swashbuckler Douglas Fairbanks saw a screen test she made and was so taken by her beauty, talent and apparent fire that he hired her as his leading lady in The Gaucho (1927). The pair enjoyed a lusty affair.
She also had brief affairs with Charlie Chaplin, Clark Gable, cowboy star Tom Mix and others. She alerted the press about her romances and often gave breathy accounts of her partners' skills or lack thereof. Of course that part could never be printed but her tales certainly made the rounds in Tinseltown.
She appeared in films directed by Cecil B. DeMille and D.W. Griffith and played a Chinese woman in Where East Is East (1929). Sound arrived at the movies' doorstep in 1929 and it was thought the heavily-accented Vélez's career would be kaput. She worked opposite Rin Tin Tin in Tiger Rose that year, her first talkie, and it was concluded that her English was not only passable but also sometimes funny and often sexy.
The same year she starred opposite Gary Cooper in the western Wolf Song and her life was never again the same. Their torrid affair would last for three years although her love for him would last a lifetime. The sex apparently was a scorcher and the violence frequent. He called her the Mexican Hurricane. She called him the most endowed man she'd ever encountered.
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| With the love of her life, Gary Cooper |
She worked steadily in ethnic sexpot roles but her life off screen commanded far more attention. She had a grudge, seemingly, for most all women. She got into a fistfight with an equally volatile actress, Lilyan Tashman, and she threatened to cut Norma Shearer's throat. Toward the end of her life she made a Broadway appearance in Cole Porter's You Never Know and punched volatile costar (and future murder suspect) Libby Holman in the face just as Holman was coming off stage.
She made fun in public and in gossip columns of bisexual actresses Katharine Hepburn and Marlene Dietrich. When the latter and Cooper made a film together, Vélez showed up on the set day after day to prevent any shenanigans. (It didn't work.)
Cooper's overbearing mother and Vélez couldn't stand one another. Mama kept at her son to dump the Mexican Hurricane and Vélez told columnists every vile thing she could think of the mother.
She stabbed Cooper with a knife when they got into a fight while cooking dinner. She always got further annoyed when the gentle, laconic Cooper wouldn't fight back.
In 1931 Cooper was standing on a platform waiting to board a train when he heard shouting. Gary, you son of a bitch, Vélez screamed, as she pulled out a gun and shot at him. Finally, he had had enough. He couldn't stand the fighting and the violence but would later admit he had a fondness for her forever.
Two years later she married famous movie Tarzan, Johnny Weissmuller. While the marriage lasted a surprising six years, they fought through all of them, often in public, at premiere's and at Friday night boxing matches which she, at least, attended religiously. He would go wild himself when he'd discover she wasn't wearing any undergarments when they went out.
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| The ever-battling Weissmullers |
Their marriage finally came to a dramatic end when he came home and found that his beloved puppy was dead. It was determined the dog had been poisoned. Weissmuller knew Vélez did it (she neither denied nor admitted it) because she resented the attention he gave the pup. He retaliated by breaking the neck of her African Grey parrot.
She never denied what their relationship was all about. They were very passionate people and very skilled as well. Too bad the story couldn't have ended there. They knew they were jealous types so what does each do but give the other plenty of reasons to bring that angry jealousy center stage?
She made sure that he knew he could never be Gary Cooper in any way. There were times that Tarzan had to swing over to Cooper's hideaway and retrieve his errant wife.
Like most of us, when work and love were going well, Vélez was in good spirits. She had that outgoing personality, a love of laughter, a talent for humor. One never knew what she was going to look like when she showed up but it would be glamorous and sexy.
Now there really was an elegant Mexican actress at the time named Dolores Del Rio. The two were often compared but they had little in common other than they were both popular at the same time in the same industry. Del Rio was regal, beautiful and refined. Vélez knew she could never measure up to that although her physical presence was often something to behold. And Vélez could be loud... whether speaking, yelling or singing. She very much disliked being called common, especially when compared to Del Rio.
She had a brief engagement with character actor Guinn (Big Boy) Williams and dated author Erich Maria Remarque, boxers Jack Dempsey and Jack Johnson and actor Arturo de Cordova. She wanted to get married again but would have been the first to admit that her boyfriends didn't meet her matrimonial standards.
She found time to make the rounds of Ciro's or the Trocadero or other hot night spots. Nonetheless she worked constantly, at least Hollywood-style. Vélez made 25 movies in the 30s alone and also appeared on Broadway but it wasn't until the end of the decade that her professional life picked up even more.
In The Girl from Mexico (1939) Vélez plays a role that probably not coincidentally is a page from her own life. She plays Carmelita, a temperamental singer in Mexico who is discovered by a man who brings her to New York and stardom. This sassy character was so popular that seven sequels were pounded out, again, all with Mexican Spitfire in the title in some manner.
Over the years she had returned to Mexico to make a movie. In early 1944 she returned there to film Naná, an Emile Zola heroine, a French prostitute of the 19th century. The film and her performance were well-received. It would be her final work.
Despite her success as an actress, her mental state was becoming more and more fragile. If it had been another time, it would have been said that she was bipolar. She was drinking a great deal and taking drugs. Her behavior was becoming more erratic... there were lots of wild days. Her decision-making was worse than usual.
Some would say taking in a young Austrian actor (read gigolo) Harold Maresch is an example of bad decisions. He was undoubtedly using her (something she was skilled at herself) but he promised her to be the man she wanted him to be. She became pregnant with his child which allowed her to temporarily assume it was all going to work out.
On December 9, 1944, she kicked him out of the house but was despondent about it, another dead-end relationship. Four days later, after dining with her two best galpals, she laid out her blue silk pajamas, 75 Seconal pills and a glass a brandy.
Her beloved maid would find her later in the morning. She said the 5-foot tall actress was laid out in her big bed like a painted doll.
Lupe Vélez was 36 years old.
Next posting:
From the 60s
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