The Secrets of Mabel Eastlake by Donald S Olson

Author:Donald S Olson [Olson, Donald S]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Lume Books
Published: 2020-05-27T22:00:00+00:00

9.

The talk in Hollywood was of nothing but Mabel Eastlake. Whispered rumors about her behavior on the set of Desperate Female were beginning to leak past the protective barricades erected by the publicity department at Paradise Studios. Too many people on the set had seen things, heard things, and Hollywood, when it came to gossip, was smaller than any small town and twice as vicious.

Notorious for the way he guarded sound stages where she was working, Otto Kranzler was said to be furious with the star he had created. Countless ruined takes had shot production costs up to nearly a million over budget, an unheard of sum in 1939, and Harry P. Franklin, personally producing Desperate Female, started to panic. Losing his faith in Kranzler had more to do with the escalating budget of the picture than with any deterioration in Kranzler autocratic genius.

Desperate Female was Kranzler’s most ambitious picture to date. Unlike many of his American counterparts, he considered himself an artist. He could think this way only so long as Paradise Studios, wanting what Harry Franklin called “some class” in their pictures, bankrolled Kranzler’s ideas. Surprisingly enough, Kranzler’s pictures, all of them starring Mabel Eastlake—and probably because of her—were money-makers. Not always great money-makers, but money-makers.

Just as a painter might migrate to Paris for its light and artistic vitality, so Kranzler had found his way to Hollywood. Here at his disposal was exactly what he wanted: technical equipment and technicians of the very highest caliber. Nothing was impossible in Hollywood. He was proving that with his Mabel Eastlake movies.

To finish Desperate Female, which he considered his most subtle, powerful and subversive film, the last thing the mighty Prussian director needed was Harry P. Franklin—his source of capital—undermining his confidence and questioning his undisputed authority. This had never happened to Kranzler. Until Desperate Female began shooting, Kranzler had been living a charmed existence.

For any number of reasons, then, the shooting of Desperate Female was overloaded with tension: creation, at war with the reality of a ledger book, became a battle of personalities and personal power.

But how desperate a female was Mabel Eastlake really? Was she caught in all this, or was she merely its catalyst? Hollywood said that she was preparing for a new role—as a patient in Glenwillows, that quiet and discreet “rest home” where stars went when, like overworked horses, they broke down after too many years in the harness. Those who made it their business to know the secret dramas of a star’s private life topped one another with Mabel Eastlake anecdotes. There seemed to be no end to them.

On the night of Desperate Female’s premiere, a famous Hollywood astrologer later claimed, a particularly malignant conjunction of stars and planets foreboded dire events. The night of the premiere was the same night that Jimmy Flame, born Giacomo Fiamma, scheduled a private premiere of his own, to take place in the projection room at Glass House.

Within the Industry, Desperate Female was rumored to be a bomb, which only added to the intense interest surrounding its release.

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