That's a picture of Ramón Novarro (left) and Frances X. Bushman in the 1925 version of Ben Hur. Novarro was born on this day in 1899, which means he'd be a really old dude if he were still alive. Really old. But he's not - indeed he died a really brutal death in 1968. Story goes he hired a pair of brothers for sex, but instead they tried to rob him, and they beat and tortured him to death trying to find out where the loot was hidden (there was no loot). And because this is the internet, there are naked pictures of one of the brothers, Paul Ferguson, online.
If you google it you can find more explicit pictures. Anyway I don't know. The internet is a weird place. It feels kind of wrong to end on pictures of Novarro's murderer, so let's end with Ramon. What a bright and sunny note to start a new week on, eh?
I've never seen any of Novarro's films. Any of you?
.
Posts
6 comments:
I have seen the silent Ben-Hur that he was the star of, he wore very little several times and taking into consideration the acting style of the time he wasn't bad.
Also saw Mata Hari with Garbo and a 40's drama called We Were Strangers with John Garfield and Jennifer Jones that itself was rather strange. Novarro was fine in the last two but didn't really stand out.
what a horrible story
remind me not to hire anyone for sex lol
I was obsessed with this story a couple years ago to the point where I tracked down a paperback all about the murders. That biopic is destined to happen.
Tom Tryon wrote a fictionalized version of the murder in his excellent roman a clef "Crowned Heads". The book is a collection of related long Hollywood stories, and the central character in one of the stories is Novarro, w/a bit of Clifton Webb thrown in.
One of the stories, about a seemingly ageless Gorbo-esque actress, was filmed as "Fedora".
Ramon Novarro is at his best in The Student Prince In Old Heidelberg (1927) which shows up on TCM occasionally. It's a silent version of the Romberg operetta and he is incredibly charming in it. Clips from Daybreak (from which we get the striking George Hurrell publicity photo of Novarro in uniform), Devil May Care (he sings), Cat and the Fiddle (with Jeanette McDonald), Mata Hari as well as Ben Hur are all on YouTube.
Just rereading The White Album by Joan Didion, where she mentions the Navarro murder... Unlike the first time I read it, there's the internet to do research...
Post a Comment