Billie Dove: American Beauty

Billie Dove was known as "The American Beauty", the title of one of her films. At her peak in the late 1920s, she was ranked with Colleen Moore and Clara Bow as among the most popular actresses in the cinema. For a time, she even surpassed Mary Pickford, Gloria Swanson and Greta Garbo at the box-office. She was famous for her physical perfection. Her complexion so flawless that she was a natural choice for some of the earliest films in Technicolor. Her sensitive mouth and large, expressive hazel eyes exuded emotion with an electricity that made her a world-wide symbol of glamour and romance in the silent era. Although successful in the talkies, she chose to retire at the height of her career.

Lillian Bohny was born the daughter of middle-class Swiss immigrants in New York City on May 14, 1903. Determining at an early age that she would have a career in motion pictures, she became one of the army of extra and bit players working at the film studios in Fort Lee, New Jersey, the American cinema's first "capital." Nicknamed "Billie" as a child, she added "Dove" when she began appearing in films. It was, however, her appearance on stage as one of Flo Ziegfeld's "glorified American girls" in the Follies of 1919 that first brought her fame. The Follies became the gateway for many of the silent screen's most glamorous stars, such as Louise Brooks and Olive Borden. However, none of them would prove more popular than Billie Dove, the living embodiment of Irving Berlin's perennial "A Pretty Girl is Like a Melody," a song first heard in the edition of the Follies that introduced her to the public. In 1922, she was brought out to Hollywood on a year's contract to Metro and soon landed female leads in a variety of films. In her second film produced in Hollywood, All the Brothers Were Valiant, she worked with Irvin Willat, a prominent director of action pictures whom she married in 1923.

For four years, Billie played leads for all of the major studios in Hollywood, proving herself a hard-working, capable actress with an ideal "movie star" name that was immediately recognizable to the public. Two of her films were shot in two-color Technicolor, the 1924 western, Wanderer of the Wasteland, and Douglas Fairbanks's 1926 classic adventure, The Black Pirate. As a princess rescued by Doug from captivity on a pirate ship, Billie used her soft, voluptuous femininity to complement her leading man's energetic virility.

Billie also appeared with a very young Douglas Fairbanks Jr. in several films. He recalled: "I was as smitten as any male of any age would be. She was not only lovely to look at but perfectly charming to work with. However, there was an added obstacle to my expressing myself: The director, Irvin Willat, was her husband!"

Despite her highly visible exposure in productions such as The Black Pirate, Billie still needed to work with a director who could bring out her full potential as an actress. That director turned out to be a woman, Lois Weber, whom Billie calls "the best director I ever had." In 1926, she chose Billie for The Marriage Clause which she scripted and directed for Universal.. In so many films, Billie had been primarily decorative, a beautiful image to be sought and won by such heroic leading men as John Gilbert, Tom Mix and Doug Fairbanks. But now under Weber's sensitive, intuitive direction, Billie blossomed as an actress. So effective was the combination that the two quickly reteamed for Sensation Seekers, another film produced for Universal, in which Billie portrayed a freethinking young woman of the Jazz Age.

The two films with Weber were the pivotal point in her career. She played interesting, womanly dynamic characters in both films, and the sympathetic understanding of the woman director, Lois Weber, made her feel visibly at ease in her work. Suddenly in demand by all the big studios, Billie signed a contract with First National which created star vehicles for her. Now she was central to the plot, her name above the title and box-office dynamite.

She went on to make several films including Yellow Lily and Night Watch. In Night Watch, The New York Times' critic, Mordaunt Hall wrote that she was an actress of "rare ability," performing with "considerable charm and intelligence." Yellow Lily has been preserved by the National Film Archive in London but like so many early films, has not yet been released by them to the public.

Before working with Lois Weber, Billie had found support from her husband, Irvin Willat. However, her increasing celebrity, the two grew apart and soon separated. Widely regarded as the most beautiful woman in the world, "the Dove" had thousands of male followers. One of her more persistent devotees was the maverick heir to a family fortune who had begun dabbling in movies, a young man by the name of Howard Hughes. Soon, the Billie Dove-Howard Hughes romance was the talk of Hollywood, though they never married. However, like many men who fell under her spell, Hughes would always have memories of her as the one great love of his life. Billie retained warm feelings for the man with whom she shared so much for three and a half years.

Even as the coming of sound created a cinematic revolution, Billie's career continued to thrive. She played leads in eleven talkies from 1929 to 1932 in a variety of roles that confirmed her versatility as an actress.

It was Howard Hughes that brought bring out her talents as a comedienne when he cast her in a madcap role in Cock of the Air. In this screwball World War I romance, Billie played a French actress who gets into a series of slapstick confrontations while leading on an zealous would-be seducer, an American pilot. The film's risqué humor outraged the officials of the Hays Office who wrangled with Hughes for months over changes they requested.

Unlike so many of her contemporaries, she did not fade into the obscurity of Poverty Row pictures or bit parts.

She went on to become the undisputed "first lady" of motion pictures. In her own words: "It is not how many years you have lived that makes your age. I think it's what you have up in your brain and what you have here in your heart I had more talent than I showed and I had more talent than I realized how to take hold of myself." Yet she approached her performances with intense conviction: "When you're up there on that film, you are that person completely all the time. You think the way that person thinks, you do what that person does and you're not acting. You're actually living it."

Even in the 1990s, Billie Dove still possessed the quality that made her a lasting legend and one of the screen's true goddesses.

BILLIE DOVE(1900-1997)