“I’m not beautiful, although I have good eyes and I know exactly how to use them. Often I sat in front of a mirror, gesturing and moving a thousand different ways. I also played with my hairstyle, putting my hair behind my ears, high on my head with a large Spanish comb, or loose… After a while people would tell me, ‘You are very pretty.’”
María Guadalupe Villalobos Vélez was born 18 July 1909 in San Luís Potosí, a rather uninspiring town in central México. She was the daughter of a colonel, Jacobo Villalobos, who would soon participate in the 10-year Revolución that would change the socio-political-cultural face of Mexico forever. Her mother, Josefina Vélez, had been a singer in a children’s theater troupe and was good friends with Esperanza Iris, the famous Mexican actress and singer who made an international name for herself in operettas. The couple had four other children, mainly girls. Once the revolution broke out, the family moved to Mexico City. Lupe later said she had vague memories of living in a barracks for awhile. She even claimed to have gone riding with her father when he went out into battle, but that seems a bit far-fetched. Even so, it would become apparent that she had indeed learned to ride horses well.
As a child Lupe preferred the rough-and-tumble games of boys more than playing dolls with girls. Yet, when left by herself, she dressed up and play-acted various characters – beautiful, haughty women (dressed in a bed sheet) and tough boys (dressed in her brother’s pants and jacket). Her father always complimented her abilities, while her mother thought she was crazy. When Lupe was 13, her father sent her and her sister Josefina to San Antonio to attend the elementary school of Our Lady of the Lake University (founded by the Sisters of Divine Providence, a French religious order). Lupe was bored with her classes in catechism, Bible studies, English, spelling, and orthography, but had a great time learning to play the ukelele, dance the Charleston and fox-trot, and sing popular American songs. All this cultural knowledge would help her much more than her academic studies in a few years. She dreamed of becoming a writer, an ice skating champion, or, even better, an actress or dancer who would create new steps. A slightly older native San Antonian, Lucille LeSueur, harbored some of those same dreams, which would be achieved when she became Joan Crawford.
Lupe and Josefina were in San Antonio from January 1923 until October except for summer vacation. Their father, who had gotten involved in a failed rebellion, summoned them home to Mexico City.
Adolfo de la Huerta, a former president of Mexico, thought he would be picked by outgoing President Alvaro Obregon to take up the presidency again. When Obregon chose Plutarco Calles instead, de la Huerta summoned his supporters and called for open rebellion against the federal government. Lupe’s father made the mistake of getting involved on the losing side of the delahuertistas and was wounded in battle, one in which one of his brothers died. De la Huerta fled to Los Angeles where he became a music teacher before being invited back to Mexico years later.
With the father’s political disgrace, the Villalobos family plunged into near-poverty. At the age of 14 Lupe secured work in a men’s clothing store in Mexico City. Caught within the throes of adolescence, Lupe, began to attract the stares of men and to understand their meaning. Deciding that she wasn’t cut out to be a store clerk, she decided to get onto the stage somehow. At her father’s demand, she adopted her mother’s last name as her own. Thus was born Lupe Vélez, replacing “Maria Guadalupe Villalobos Vélez.” Jacobo was more disturbed by having his family name appear on the stage than by being associated with a failed rebellion. Despite the aspersions that her mother used to case on her childhood play-acting, now it was Lupe’s mother who supported her decision to go on the stage.
To make this seemingly wild dream become a reality, an old friend of the family, the violinist Aurelio Campos, introduced the young girl-woman to theater impresarios Ortega, Prida, and Castro Padilla in February 1925. Lupe made her debut on 11 March 1925 at the age of 15, dancing her own version of the Charleston with a lot of “shimmy” thrown in. She danced at El Lirico, a well respected theater which showcased musical revues, similar to those found in Paris, Berlin, and New York. Lupe was described by one reviewer as moving gracefully onto the stage, then yelling, laughing, and dancing with wild abandon.
The audience went wild and another star was born. She received many cries of “Otra! Otra!” until she came back out for an encore. As her act progressed over the next few weeks, she apparently added songs and imitations to her already outlandish dances with rather revealing costumes. She was undoubtedly a natural-born entertainer who felt the pulse of the changing times.
Like many of the major metropolitan centers of the world, Mexico City was undergoing a huge change – moving from the 19th to the 20th century after the devastating World War I (in the case of Mexico, after the horrendous Civil War known as la Revolución). Modernism brought in a whole new style and attitude. Rather than the Spanish and French cultural influences in Mexico in the 19th century, by the middle of the 1920s American culture was pouring into the capital city in the form of jazz, movies, liberated women, short dresses, fast attitudes, sexual liberation, cigarettes, whisky, fast cars, and night clubs. Hip young women, regardless of social class, cut their hair and tore off those medieval corsets. Women went out on the town without men. The socio-cultural structure that had been built up by one generation was destroyed by their children, who would see a similar upheaval in the 1960s.
Mexico City had a population of one million in the 1920s. Nightlife began to abound. Especially popular were music halls or theaters which featured revues (teatro revisteril) with dance numbers, singing, comics, and specialty acts. El Ba-Ta-Clan came from Paris 12 February 1925 to the popular Teatro Esperanza Iris. Mexican cultural impresarios had to change their offerings to keep up with the American and new French invasion. Even places that had been considered strictly for the “lower class” became the new cool places to visit.
However, Lupe was in a decidedly acceptable theater but her style was totally in keeping with the modern changes. The estimable magazine Revista de Revistas carried and article by Arturo Rigel, who asked, “Do we have the Mexican artist of 1925 in the person of Lupe Vélez? Who is she? A little girl without any theatrical antecedents, who from the moment of her debut revealed an exhilarating temperament and conquered the sympathies and enthusiasms of her audience.”
Lupe was precisely the “jazz-baby” of Mexico. Her name was written in bright letters on theater marquees. Earning good wages, she still wanted more. Never nervous or shy on the stage and always eager to please and entertain her audience, she knew she could do much more. Her new dream was to get into the movies, not in Mexico, where the film industry was still relatively small, but in Hollywood. Fortunately a norteamericano Frank A. Woodward saw her perform and encouraged her to go to Hollywood. He knew that Richard Bennett (father of three Hollywood actresses) was planning a film called THE DOVE. Woodward contacted him and Bennett told him to tell Lupe to get to Los Angeles. It all seemed too easy.
At the end of 1926 Lupe Vélez, like tens of thousands before her, set out for Los Angeles after selling all her belongings. Unlike Dolores del Rio, who had a husband with her, a producer/director who already knew her and wanted her for his films, and a contract in hand, Lupe Vélez left her homeland with nothing more than the name of a man in Los Angeles. She was very brave and very naïve. But the first time she tried, she was stopped at El Paso for being a minor traveling alone with no documents which authorized her to do so. She cried all the way back to Mexico City, where she contacted all the powerful people she had met through her performances; finally, she was given the right documents. Another version of the story is that the North American colony in Mexico, especially the American ambassador, interceded on her behalf and secured a work permit for Lupe in Hollywood. The ambassador must also have seen her perform.
Finally arriving in Los Angeles – “with many illusions and no money” – she discovered that the “Mexican” role in THE DOVE had already been given to another actress. Perhaps this wasn’t unfortunate because the film’s portrayal of a revolutionary hero (based on Pancho Villa) was roundly criticized in Mexico. The actor/producer felt sorry for the young girl and gave her a screen test. She fared poorly, despite all those hours in front of a mirror as a child. She was 17 but still looked younger. Despite the less than overwhelming screen test, Bennett helped Lupe secure a small job as a dancer in between feature films – something called an “atmospheric prologue.” She threw herself into this minor job body and soul.
Fortunately Louis McClune saw one of her prologues and hired her at $35 a week to work with the stellar comic singer Fanny Brice in the esteemed Music Box Revue (lovely theater once more operating on Hollywood Blvd – I saw a world-class B-Boy hip-hop dance competition there last May). Lupe says that Miss Brice introduced her one night on stage with “Watch this little girl; she is a newcomer but has great possibilities.”
Brice didn’t stop with the accolades. She contacted showman Florenz Ziegfeld (famous for his “Follies,” a forerunner of the stage shows in Las Vegas – lots of feathers, sequins, and skin) and suggested he hire Lupe for one of his shows. Lupe would have been perfect. For her first appearance at the Music Box she was dressed in so very little that the audience reportedly gasped and almost fell out of their seats. The producers had to tell her afterwards to wear more clothes next time. (The latter part of that story sounds very unlikely unless vice cops showed up). Being in the Music Box Revue was a big deal. Not just anybody could get into a show there. Within just one week the whole town was buzzing about Lupe Vélez, a new “tropical hurricane.”
Soon Lupe’s performance came to the attention of the powerful Harry Rapf, one of the three supervisors at MGM. He invited her to come to the studio the next day for a screen test. She knew very well that Rapf was the man who discovered Joan Crawford, just beginning her career at MGM. Nonetheless, Lupe inexplicably was holding out for word from Ziegfeld. She told Rapf “No,” a word he rarely heard, especially from young star-struck women. She added that she wasn’t really pretty enough to be in the movies. He disagreed and convinced her to take a screen test before leaving for only a possibility in New York City. Lupe was no fool and finally conceded. Was she already playing hard to get? If so, she was quite shrewd.
The next day she arrived at MGM for her appointment, a little frightened and without much hope. She walked and danced in front of the camera and accomplished a rather mediocre screen test. However, Rafp was pleased enough with the results to send the test to Hal Roach, whose slapstick film company was associated with MGM. When Roach saw the test, he immediately offered Lupe a 3-year contract. Maybe getting a job at a film studio famous for custard pies in the face wasn’t a dream come true, but Lupe saw the value of this offer. She later reminisced, “Of course I could do comedies. I was in several and almost broke my neck, but I felt that they helped create a place for me here in Hollywood, where the only thing that counts is what you are doing right now and not what you did before arriving.” Her salary increased to a significant level for a 17-year-old.
Ironically she did soon receive an offer from Ziegfeld to appear in Rio Rita for 16 weeks, but she turned it down. Her eyes were set on other mountains to conquer. Even though working at the Roach Studio was strenuous and often risky because of the outlandish stunts, Lupe learned a lot and felt it helped her later (especially with Fairbanks in THE GAUCHO). In the spring of 1927 she made her first cinematic appearance in a 2-reeler “What Women Did for Me” with comic Charley Chase. [Coincidentally that very movie will be playing 16 Feb. 2008 at the Niles Essanay Silent Film Museum in Fremont, CA]. Lupe’s second appearance would be with Laurel and Hardy (still not cast as a duo) in “Sailors Beware,” another 30-minute short. The budding actress was uncredited as “Baroness Behr,” who was knocked into a swimming pool by Oliver Hardy.
Outside the studio walls there was a rather quiet Hollywood. Lupe Vélez, like all moviegoers throughout the world, thought that Hollywood was full of glamorous night spots that stayed open until the sun came up. There were restaurants and hotel nightclubs, but most of the film workers, even the stars, had to be home early because their workday often started at 6:00 a.m. This was quite a change from the vibrant nightlife of Mexico City that Lupe had enjoyed. Of the 25,000 people working in the film industry at this time for 150 film companies in 39 studios of various importance, only a few got “to the top” where they could earn the fabulous amounts of money assumed to be there for the taking. Most people got by on $100 a week, if they were working. Lupe was making $7.50 a day at Roach, with promises of a higher salary.
One man she fortuitously met at the Roach studio was F. Richard Jones, a story editor, who soon left Roach to go work with United Artists, initially with Douglas Fairbanks, who was one of the founders of UA, along with Chaplin, Mary Pickford, D.W. Griffith. This studio/distributor was designed by the top artists of the late 1910s for the express purpose of protecting their financial and artistic interests. Fairbanks was desperately looking for a “Latin type” (“tipo hispano”) to be in his new film THE GAUCHO. Jones talked Lupe up. Once more another man saw her qualities and promoted her to an even more powerful man.
Lupe was excited about the possibility of being in a film with Fairbanks. Upwards of 170 other women were brought before Douglas Fairbanks to be considered. Lupe was actually one of the few Latinas. When Lupe was in front of the middle-aged athletic actor/director, he inexplicably demanded she take off her shoes. She didn’t want to and didn’t appreciate his tone of voice. The director and novice actress actually began to argue back and forth. Her chihuahua Melitón also began barking at Doug. In a state of uncontrollable fury, Lupe walked out of the audition, but Fairbanks immediately called her back and said, “You’ve got the part.” Whether intentionally or not, he had elicited the very fiery nature he needed to see in the actress playing “the mountain girl.” In October 1927 she signed a provisional contract with United Artists. She was definitely on her way to stardom.
No less than Mary Pickford herself – America’s “sweetheart,” eternally playing women-children with bouncing curls and modest frocks, wife of Fairbanks, and an economic genius in business affairs – worked with Lupe to prepare her for the more dramatic aspects of her role. She even helped the young girl with her makeup. However, Lupe was perfectly capable of taking care of herself in the many action scenes.
The idea for THE GAUCHO came from an experience Fairbanks had when visiting Lourdes, the famous French site of healing and spiritual renewal for many believers. He decided to set such a holy spot in a South American country, loosely reminiscent of Argentina, but never called by that name. In the film Fairbanks’ character is really just a bandit leader who takes what he wants. However, something happens to him when he arrives in the village dedicated to an apparition of the Virgin Mary. Already involved with “the mountain girl” (Lupe), he is overwhelmed by the virginal innocence of the girl who received the vision. Following his usual nature he would have taken the girl like everything else he always grabbed, but something stops him – something more than the fury of Lupe. Not only does he leave well enough alone, he also takes up arms against the despotic government that is trying to make money off the sacred spot and its many people.
From these ideas Fairbanks created the loose script of THE GAUCHO, nominally directed by F. Richard Jones, but always supervised by the bouncing, leaping, flying, fighting actor, who was hoping to emulate the success of his earlier THE THIEF OF BAGDAD (doesn’t that title have a different spin in the 21st century!).
Critic/historian Alexander Walker had said that for Douglas Fairbanks “the world was not a stage but a gymnasium.” But now at 44 Fairbanks was needing to slow down and modify his style. So, for him THE GAUCHO would be something like a swansong. In Lupe he found his perfect cinema-match, a woman unlike any he had ever known – almost a female version of himself, totally unafraid of action. At times she almost stole the film from Fairbanks. If she did indeed ride with her father during the Revolution, that was excellent training for her scenes in THE GAUCHO. She was just as fierce off-screen as on: during the filming a horse bit Lupe and she bit the horse right back. However, her success as a fiery Latina in THE GAUCHO actually typecast her for almost the remainder of her career – impetuous, physical, argumentative, brave, quick to anger, those would be her characteristics which were called on for other roles. But for the moment she was ecstatic. Even before the film was released, one journalist wrote that Lupe would prove to be a sensation for the public. She already has her enthusiasts: carpenters, electricians, extras who would burst into applause with every new action scene she completed on location.
Since the film initially considered for Lupe’s debut, THE DOVE, had been banned in Mexico, Fairbanks was worried that THE GAUCHO might suffer the same fate. Many Mexican and South American critics detested what they had heard about the complete cultural mix-up of Mexican, Argentinean, and “Hollywood Latin” styles, clothes, and attitudes. Although there were “actual gauchos” advising Fairbanks (so said the publicity), his clothing and actions were questioned by others living east of the Andes. However, THE GAUCHO was well received both in and outside the US. It was placed among the top 15 films of 1927-28 (based on votes from 295 journalists from 326 newspapers and 29 film magazines).
Lupe was a star! Even before filming was completed, she bought, not a car, but a limousine. Going all the way, she even hired a chauffeur to drive her to the studio. One day when she was getting into the car, the impertinent son of an important studio financier called out jokingly in front of his friends, “Who gave you that car, Lupe?” Instead of the expected explosion, he watched her smile demurely at him and say calmly, “It was that dirty old man, your father, who gave it to me.” She was always ready with a quip, even if it might hurt her later. Not forgetting her family, Lupe got her mother and young brother to come to Los Angeles to live with her in style.
Fairbanks was so taken with his young co-star that he later planned two other films which would star Lupe – one about Hernán Cortés (she would be “La Malinche”) and another about the famous entertainer Lola Montes, but neither came to pass before Fairbanks died in 1939.
-- Chale Nafus, Director of Programming, Austin Film Society
Sources
• Gabriel Ramirez, Lupe Velez, la Mexicana que escupia fuego. Mexico: Cineteca Nacional, 1986.
