Read Online Myrna Loy by Emily W. Leider - Free Book Online Page B
Authors: Emily W. Leider
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tried to console myself by being an overwhelmingly arty character. It was the Era of Wonderful Nonsense, [but] I didn’t reap much of the fun I saw around me.” Artistic, bookish, serious-minded, and shy, Myrna steered clear of flapperdom in her early and midteens. She had a few good friends but otherwise preferred to be alone or with her family. She danced, but not the Black Bottom. The dreamy-eyed high school student preferred Chopin to jazz, and when she pranced on the grass in bare feet, she donned wisps of draped chiffon, not sequin-spangled sheaths with fringed hems that swayed to the beat. Ethereal, but at the same time purposeful and grounded, she wore her curly hair loose and flowing, like a model for a Pre-Raphaelite painting, not bobbed in the latest jazz-baby mode. 9
Myrna had fallen under the spell of Ruth St. Denis, who with her husband, the dancer Ted Shawn, had founded Denishawn, an innovative, highly influential Los Angeles–based school of interpretive dance, and a well-known concert dance company that toured around the country, drawing huge audiences at venues like the Greek Theatre in Berkeley and Lewisohn Stadium in New York. Denishawn, which attracted Martha Graham and Doris Humphrey as students and company dancers, also had links to the world of motion pictures. Several current and future Hollywood actresses, including Lillian Gish, Carmel Myers, Ruth Chatterton, Constance and Joan Bennett, and, most famously, Louise Brooks, took classes at Denishawn, Brooks at the company’s New York studio. A number of cinema dancers also studied at the Los Angeles Denishawn School, for example Margaret Loomis, who as an exotic dervish entices a crowd of Arabic men with her swirling scarves and bare midriff in the casino scene of The Sheik . When a film director sought a dancer who could deliver seductive harem dances before the camera, or peer kohl-eyed through veils of Babylonian decadence, Denishawn could show the way. 10
Ruth St. Denis, a white Protestant American, became enchanted with the traditions of the East as a young woman, and in particular with a series of exotic goddesses she portrayed. Her “Egypta” choreography came into her head when she saw a poster of the goddess Isis in an ad for Egypta cigarettes. Her “Radha,” danced to the music of Delibes, set in a Hindu temple, and based on the story of Krishna, required the use of brown body paint. Her “Green Nautch” was inspired by Indian temple dancing, and her “O-Mika,” about a courtesan who becomes a goddess, grew out of her exposure to traditional Japanese dancers and her study with former Japanese geishas. St. Denis’s adaptation of Asian ritual dancing became wildly popular in private salons and public theaters in America and Europe, complementing the Orientalism—harem pants, turbans, incense burners, patterned Turkish carpets, and embroidered cushions in dimly lit boudoirs—that had come into vogue in the late nineteenth century and that by the 1920s had become well entrenched. 11
Born Ruth Dennis on a New Jersey farm, “Miss Ruth” moved to Los Angeles in 1915 after marrying the much younger Ted Shawn, a fellow dancer who was equally drawn to all things beautiful, spiritual, and otherworldly. Once a skirt dancer in vaudeville, after touring Europe with David Belasco’s acting company and seeing performances by the famed Japanese dancer Sado Yacco, Ruth Dennis morphed into the spiritual Ruth St. Denis and became a groundbreaking soloist whose work incorporated motifs from ethnic dance. Like San Francisco–born Isadora Duncan, she saw dance as an expression of both nature’s divinity and the unshackled soul. St. Denis, like Isadora, had studied ballet, rejecting its rigid European formality, its artificiality, and its insistence on toe shoes but retaining some of its physical rigor. Miss Ruth taught her students to control and discipline their bodies, but at the same time she encouraged them to be individualistic and, above
Myrna had fallen under the spell of Ruth St. Denis, who with her husband, the dancer Ted Shawn, had founded Denishawn, an innovative, highly influential Los Angeles–based school of interpretive dance, and a well-known concert dance company that toured around the country, drawing huge audiences at venues like the Greek Theatre in Berkeley and Lewisohn Stadium in New York. Denishawn, which attracted Martha Graham and Doris Humphrey as students and company dancers, also had links to the world of motion pictures. Several current and future Hollywood actresses, including Lillian Gish, Carmel Myers, Ruth Chatterton, Constance and Joan Bennett, and, most famously, Louise Brooks, took classes at Denishawn, Brooks at the company’s New York studio. A number of cinema dancers also studied at the Los Angeles Denishawn School, for example Margaret Loomis, who as an exotic dervish entices a crowd of Arabic men with her swirling scarves and bare midriff in the casino scene of The Sheik . When a film director sought a dancer who could deliver seductive harem dances before the camera, or peer kohl-eyed through veils of Babylonian decadence, Denishawn could show the way. 10
Ruth St. Denis, a white Protestant American, became enchanted with the traditions of the East as a young woman, and in particular with a series of exotic goddesses she portrayed. Her “Egypta” choreography came into her head when she saw a poster of the goddess Isis in an ad for Egypta cigarettes. Her “Radha,” danced to the music of Delibes, set in a Hindu temple, and based on the story of Krishna, required the use of brown body paint. Her “Green Nautch” was inspired by Indian temple dancing, and her “O-Mika,” about a courtesan who becomes a goddess, grew out of her exposure to traditional Japanese dancers and her study with former Japanese geishas. St. Denis’s adaptation of Asian ritual dancing became wildly popular in private salons and public theaters in America and Europe, complementing the Orientalism—harem pants, turbans, incense burners, patterned Turkish carpets, and embroidered cushions in dimly lit boudoirs—that had come into vogue in the late nineteenth century and that by the 1920s had become well entrenched. 11
Born Ruth Dennis on a New Jersey farm, “Miss Ruth” moved to Los Angeles in 1915 after marrying the much younger Ted Shawn, a fellow dancer who was equally drawn to all things beautiful, spiritual, and otherworldly. Once a skirt dancer in vaudeville, after touring Europe with David Belasco’s acting company and seeing performances by the famed Japanese dancer Sado Yacco, Ruth Dennis morphed into the spiritual Ruth St. Denis and became a groundbreaking soloist whose work incorporated motifs from ethnic dance. Like San Francisco–born Isadora Duncan, she saw dance as an expression of both nature’s divinity and the unshackled soul. St. Denis, like Isadora, had studied ballet, rejecting its rigid European formality, its artificiality, and its insistence on toe shoes but retaining some of its physical rigor. Miss Ruth taught her students to control and discipline their bodies, but at the same time she encouraged them to be individualistic and, above
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