The Curse of Beauty by James Bone

Author:James Bone
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi, pdf
Publisher: Regan Arts.

16

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AGENTS OF THE KAISER

Audrey was always really an animal lover.

Audrey and Kittie retreated back to a boardinghouse in their old neighborhood around Lincoln Square, just across the street from the Arcade Building, where Herzog had his studio. It was a temporary step. Kittie was looking after her, and she was under a doctor’s care. She told people she had caught influenza in the epidemic that was sweeping the world at the end of the Great War. But her problems went far deeper.

The Girl o’ Dreams had never reached theaters and she had not worked in movies for two years. Her bank balance was running low. She had apparently provoked the ire of the powerful Mortimer family and been rejected by Oelrichs. Any fantasy of marrying America’s richest bachelor was at an end. She was angry and frustrated and lost. And she wanted revenge—revenge against Oelrichs and Edith Mortimer, revenge against the moviemakers, revenge against all the men who had tormented and harassed her because of her outstanding beauty.

On January 29, 1919, she sat down at her typewriter in New York and typed:

Department of State,

Washington.

Dear Sir:

I am sailing for Europe sometime in March but leave for Canada Feb. 1, 1919. As you know the Kaisers $25,000,000 in the Motion Picture Industry has thrown me out of work as I am an American of English blood dating back to the Mayflower days.

This was to be her farewell missive to America. It was the start of a desperate three-page poison-pen letter, since hidden in the FBI archives, that accused a long list of all Audrey’s enemies, including both Oelrichs and Mortimer, of being agents of the Kaiser—even though the last German emperor, Wilhelm II, had been forced to abdicate two months earlier at the end of the Great War. In her apparent delirium, she typed on.

I find it impossible to obtain employment in my own country through this German and German-Jew tie-up—I understand that the English and English Jew is the one to help me.

Audrey was furious that, while she lacked for work, other models were being sent out to theaters impersonating her in order to promote her pictures—including the rereleased Inspiration, which had been renamed The Perfect Model. Incredibly for someone who described herself as an artist and whose nudity had broken through social taboos, Audrey requested in writing that the US government censor her own films.

I am going to ask you to pull my films off the market through Censorship and place them in American or English hands or keep them from appearing at all as they are Nude—Art—Films and hundreds of girls have traveled about the U.S. as me which is not different from a White Slave Traffic.

To help the would-be government censors, Audrey identified her three films up to that point and the owners who were to be targeted: Inspiration, or The Perfect Model, owned by Edwin Thanhouser, his partner William Shallenberger, the Arrow Film Co., which handled the rerelease, and Harry Samwick of Producers Features Service; Purity, owned by John R.

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