She Put Glamour in the Picture

“I have always said--and I still say it right out in print,” wrote Louella Parsons, doyenne of Hollywood gossip columnists, in March 1929, “that one of the finest photographers I know is a woman. I speak of Ruth Harriet Louise, who has made Marion Davies, Norma Shearer and other M-G-M beauties even more beautiful.”

At the time, Louise was only 26 and had already been MGM’s chief portrait photographer for four years. Shooting five to six sessions a day, six days a week, her ubiquitous handiwork was seen on posters, magazine covers, music sheets and other promotional material that fueled movie fandom and the growing engine of Hollywood publicity.

Her carefully lighted, meticulously posed images of Greta Garbo and Joan Crawford, Ramon Novarro and John Gilbert were reprinted countless times, uncredited. Now a University of California Press book and a traveling exhibition are trying to go Parsons one better and make Louise as famous as her subjects.

The photographer’s champions are Robert Dance, an Old Masters dealer, and art historian Bruce Robertson, the authors of the book and curators of the show. Today they are gathered in Robertson’s office at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, where he is a curator of American art, to talk about their fascination with someone they consider one of the most influential women photographers of the century.

Classmates from Yale University, Dance and Robertson have remained friends for more than two decades, and easily take turns talking. This familiarity must have helped in their bicoastal collaboration--Dance is based in New York, Robertson in Santa Barbara and Los Angeles. “We were like Gilbert & Sullivan,” Dance says.

Twenty years ago, Dance, who collects photographs, came upon a vintage 11-by-14-inch print of Garbo at the Lee Whitkin Gallery in New York. On the back was a stamp that credited it to Ruth Harriet Louise, but neither Whitkin nor Dance knew anything about her. Dance was intrigued; he bought the photo and through the years picked up other samples of her work. Robertson, who teaches art history at UC Santa Barbara in addition to his work at LACMA, caught the bug from him and started collecting Louise prints as well.

For years, Dance’s Louise research was just a hobby. Then, in 1994, Louise was included in Naomi Rosenblum’s landmark book, “History of Women Photographers.” Dance’s print of the Garbo photograph went on exhibit in a related show. When the show arrived at the Santa Barbara Museum of Art in 1996, Dance took the occasion to suggest to Karen Sinsheimer, the museum’s curator of photography, that Louise would make a good subject for an exhibition. Sinsheimer agreed.

“Louise created a new way of making a portrait,” Sinsheimer says. “She wasn’t credited with that because her career was so short, but she really set the pace for what came afterwards. She used fabulous fabric, pattern, and design in her work, and she framed things very tightly.”

Dance and Robertson put together a proposal for the project. When they started their research, all they knew was that Louise had been an MGM photographer in the mid- to late-1920s. They wanted to fill out her biography and uncover as many examples of her work as possible.

Dance on the East Coast and Robertson on the West Coast scoured photo archives, libraries, and public and private collections for photos, and interviewed everyone they could find with a connection to Louise in those years.

At the MGM archives of the Margaret Herrick Library at the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences in Los Angeles, they unearthed a treasure trove of material. First, Robertson found two scrapbooks Louise had kept; they were filled with clippings from publications that had used her work. Then, on a visit with Dance, they asked for the files of six all-but-forgotten actors working at the studio during Louise’s tenure. They got back piles of photographs, most of them credited to Louise.

Later, after patiently going through microfiche and periodical collections, they found articles that mentioned her, and realized that not only had she worked at MGM, she had been the head of its portrait studio. Little by little, the story emerged.

Born Ruth Goldstein in New York in 1903, Louise was the child of European emigres. She grew up in New Jersey, and in 1922 her older brother, Mark Rex Goldstein, went to Hollywood, starting as a prop boy and working his way up to writer and then director. Under the name Mark Sandrich, Louise’s brother would go on to direct the Astaire and Rogers classics “Top Hat” and “Carefree.”

Back home, his sister had apprenticed herself to a New York photographer, probably Nickolas Muray, set up her own studio in New Brunswick, N.J. and adopted her professional name. By 1925 she also headed west. She made her move then, Robertson explains, “because her brother had just married, she could be properly chaperoned.”

She was hired by MGM that summer, possibly through her connection to Carmel Myers, Louise’s cousin and a bit actress in “Ben-Hur” (1925). MGM was churning out silent films at breakneck speed, completing a feature film a week, and it needed a steady stream of portraits to promote new releases, new actors, new looks--as well as to provide the photos sent out to fans--some stars received 10,000 fan letters a month, most of them requesting pictures.

Louise had a studio on the MGM lot in Culver City, and sitters--mostly actors, but also directors and writers--would report to her throughout the day. From their research, Dance and Robertson conclude that in her studio, she was in charge, determining the lighting, the props and the pose. Once in awhile she would venture “candid” shots outside the studio--Marion Davies on a diving board or John Gilbert at home.

Her portraits were captured on 8-by-10 negatives, although the type of camera is unknown. Pictures that made the cut were enlarged as 11-by-14 master prints that were made available as cover shots for publication or were copied again and reduced back to 8-by-10 for wider distribution.

The exhibition includes 80 photographs, borrowed from some 30 lenders, with several from the Santa Barbara Museum’s own collection. The great majority of these are the 11-by-14 originals printed under Louise’s supervision and possibly by her own hand. There are also two vitrines of ephemera--fan magazines, music sheets, souvenir books and so on--that made use of still photographs, either directly or as models for illustrations.

The pictures that Dance and Robertson found most striking are of women, which is not surprising. Female stars drove the box office and, as Sinsheimer says, “it does seem her real forte were [actresses]. She really wanted them to look their best.”

There is a picture of a hopeful, Patricia Avery, decked out in an Easter Bunny suit, probably as a seasonal promotion. There is Lillian Gish demure as Hester Prynne in “The Scarlet Letter.” But mostly there are glamorous shots of starlet after starlet, including Garbo and Joan Crawford, so young they barely look like the icons we know.

Louise was pretty glamorous herself--as evidenced by a couple of photographs in the show. This is corroborated by a 1928 Screenland article: “If you saw her walking across the lot you’d think that she was a star going from one set to the other. She is as pretty as a star but instead of being one of them she bosses them!”

As precipitously as Louise’s career rose, it fell. By the end of 1929, she was gone from MGM, to be replaced by the legendary George Hurrell. The book suggests that Norma Shearer, who was married to MGM production chief Irving Thalberg, preferred Hurrell for the sexy way he could photograph her--and had Louise replaced.

However, Dance and Robertson also cite burnout. “You worked like crazy because you were creating this incredible thing,” Robertson says.

“Louise was being paid we figured $50 a week,” Dance says, “a huge amount of money when the average income was around $10.”

“There are many reasons why her job ended, and I’m sure that one of them was that she was tired,” Robertson says. She was also married by then and on her way to raising a family. She had two children before her death in 1940, at age 37, from complications of childbirth.

“The surprise to me was that from the day she started, she was a fully formed, mature photographer,” Dance says. “In the earliest photographs she already had it. She did become more clever, more inventive.”

“She develops a simpler, bolder composition as time goes on,” Robertson says. “You see that with the sequence of Garbo or Crawford photographs.” Going through the book, he points to the pared-down drama of some of the later portraits--as in a 1927 portrait of Garbo. Here the silver-screen goddess emerges out of darkness, with her smoldering eyes uplifted and her firm-set jaw raised. She’s wearing naught but a black dress, with one shoulder exposed. It is a look that would not be too out of place in a fashion magazine today, more than 70 years later.

“She was really photographing the modern woman,” Sinsheimer says, “and she was the modern woman.”

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“RUTH HARRIET LOUISE AND HOLLYWOOD GLAMOUR PHOTOGRAPHY,” Santa Barbara Museum of Art, 1130 State St., Santa Barbara. Dates: Through Oct. 6. Tuesdays-Saturdays, 11 a.m.-5 p.m., except Fridays, 11 a.m.-9 p.m.; Sundays, noon to 5 p.m. Prices: $6, adults; $4, seniors; $3, students and children 6-17; free, children younger than 6. Phone: (805) 963 4364.

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Scarlet Cheng is a regular contributor to Calendar.