Like her fellow Fox contract player Theda Bara, who we discussed last week, early film actress Valeska Suratt helped personify the "vamp" image in the early decades of the twentieth century. She was known during the height of her career as the best dressed woman of her generation, often appearing in Vaudeville performances wearing elaborate dresses costing tens of thousands of dollars. Before being marketed as a vamp, some sources claim that Suratt served as an inspiration for the image of the Gibson girl, "the personification of the feminine ideal of physical attractiveness" by artist Charles Dana Gibson during the early 20th century¹. She was one of the most famous and celebrated Broadway actresses of her generation, and went on to a film career that, though brief, fed into the rise of the studio system's star making machine. Though one of the most famous women of her day, Suratt fell into obscurity after retiring from film in 1917, and lived out much of her life penniless, living in a cheap hotel room. Today we'll talk about Suratt's life, work, and legacy, and how her story echoes the lives of many actresses who would follow in her footsteps, notably Barbara Payton.
Valeska Suratt was born on June 28th, 1882 in Owensville, Indiana. The daughter of second generation French and English parents, Suratt grew up in a lower-middle class family full of children. As a child she spent much of her time working in her community and fundraising, at one point sending $500 a week to the local Red Cross. Suratt was an indifferent student, dropping out at age 16 to work for a local photography studio. Her work retouching photographs inspired a lifelong fascination with fashion, and she soon began apprenticeships with seamstresses and working in department stores.
In 1900 she turned her attention from solely fashion to the theatre. She was eighteen years old, and began touring around the Vaudeville circuit, eventually landing stage roles in Chicago and even going on a tour of performances in South America with fellow actor Billy Gould, whom she would marry in 1905. During her acts, Suratt would often present herself as either mixed-race or otherwise exotic, claiming to be an Apache Native American in one famous routine. When she and Billy Gould divorced in 1908, Suratt turned to one-woman shows in which she sang, danced, and lounged around in stunningly beautiful clothes. One of the more famous outfits she donned was an $11,000 Cinderella cloak that cost more than a new house and car combined. This type of performance was a huge success- it turns out that most people in the early 1900s bought into the idea of simply looking at a beautiful woman wear clothes. At the height of her Broadway fame, she was billed (often by herself) as "The Biggest Drawing-Card in New York."
But her roles on the stage were not enough for Suratt. She longed to make a move into the cinema, where she could more adequately create a centralized gaze directed at her impeccable fashion sense. So, she did what a surprising number of young starlets did when they longed to be famous in 1910: She designed a tight-fitting, revealing black dress, put it on, and walked slowly and seductively down the grand staircase at a ritzy New York hotel, quickly gaining the attention of the many male film executives in the lobby. She signed with Fox immediately.
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| Suratt in a dress valued at $20,000 |
Clearly, this woman knew what she was doing. However, the newly developed Hollywood Studio System had its own ideas about Suratt and what kind of star they wanted her to be. During her relatively short time at Fox, Suratt made only eleven films, all of which have since been lost. She was one of several actresses touted as exotic by the studios, and her film roles often necessitated her to wear wild costumes and play seductive, mysterious vixens. The film industry was wildly different from what Suratt had imagined, or at least from the life she'd led as a stage actress. During her time on Broadway, she made $3,000 a week, had full control over her own productions, made almost every executive decision, and unlimited power to design her own brand. When she came to Hollywood, all of that control was taken away.
The most critical blow to Suratt was her second-billing to the original vamp, Theda Bara. Both Fox contract players, Suratt rolled into the film scene just slightly too late, and Bara was cast in a film Suratt had hoped to get: the star-making lead in A Fool There Was. While she was able to embody the sexy, bad-to-the-bone vamp role in the successful films She, The Slave, and Siren, all made in 1917, she was never able to rise to the same level of celebrity as Theda Bara.
Increasingly, Suratt's image fell out of favor with society. By the late 1910s, the Gibson Girl image had become less and less popular with audiences, and the ideal of feminine beauty shifted dramatically from fully-figured, rosy, motherly figures to sickly, boyish, delicate girl-women. Suratt was never thin, though she often achieved nearly impossible waist-lengths thanks to her corsets, and she was quite tall for the time, standing at 5 feet 8 inches. Her extravagant costumes and voluptuous figure spoke to a standard of beauty that was passing quickly, and her career began to decline just as soon.
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| Suratt and her unimaginably tiny waist. |
Valeska Suratt's decline began when she retired from film acting in 1917. She was 35 years old, had been married twice, and had been exhibiting erratic behavior for years. Her mental health was beginning to noticeably decline, and her obsession with the Virgin Mary and her Bahá'í faith began to take over much of her life. Although she maintained a series of moderately successful Broadway plays in the years following her retirement from film, Suratt was swiftly losing success as a performer. By the late 1920s, she was in her late 40s, and knew that nobody was looking to hire a nearly 50-year-old sexual provocateur. She fell deeply into debt.
In 1928 she and scholar Ahmad Shorab sued legendary Hollywood director Cecile B. DeMille for allegedly stealing the scenario for the film The King of Kings from them. The trial was eventually settled out of court. Many have argued that DeMille led a blacklist against Suratt, preventing her from finding work as an actress on the stage or screen following the lawsuit, and this is possible. However, as we have already discussed, Suratt was not doing very well as it was. Not having acted in a film in over thirteen years by 1930, she was suffering from unemployment due to her advancing age and the decline of both Vaudeville and the "vamp" image that made her famous on the screen. It's unlikely that DeMille would have had to do very much to prevent Suratt from finding work on a Hollywood lot.
Suratt fell out of the public eye after the settlement of her lawsuit, and it wasn't until the mid-1930s that she came into focus again. It was discovered that the former millionaire was living out of a cheap motel in New York, completely broke and mentally unstable. Upon hearing of the actress's plight, the novelist Fannie Hearst organized a fundraiser for Suratt, raising over $2,000. Suratt took the money and disappeared, eventually resurfacing broke and homeless, having gambled away the charity. At times she attempted to sell her life story to newspapers, including William Randolph Hearst's publications, but the editors found her too erratic to work with. Her rambling autobiography claimed that she was the Virgin Mary. Valeska Suratt remained penniless and out of her mind until her death, in 1962, at the age of 80.
There are several lessons we can draw from Valeska Suratt's life. Chiefly, it's important to note that her image today does not persist due to her contributions to the canon of American film. As previously mentioned, all of the films she made in her cinematic career are lost. Suratt remains famous because of her image, the celebrity she embodied as both a product of her own creation and, of course, of Fox's.
She was, like Theda Bara, constructed as an exotic act while that was the fashionable thing to do with slightly older, darker, more seductive women. Her roles on the stage and the screen were purposely provocative. Like Bara, it can be assumed that Fox's interest in creating an image of Suratt as a dangerous feminist was as a sort of horror show, demonstrating to awed viewers the occultist possibilities unlocked following women's liberation. In many ways Suratt is an enigma, a paradox of women's empowerment: on the one hand, by serving as the direct inspiration for the Gibson Girl, she helped define the turn-of-the-century beauty standard for women, which wasn't exactly liberating; on the other hand, she worked tirelessly to provoke censors and critics who complained that her performances were too scandalous, and is an excellent example of a woman who created and ran her entire career for most of her life. At one point she was even run out of town by the Mayor of Manhattan following a scandalous Broadway show in which the main attraction was Suratt not wearing a corset. She definitely had her way of attracting attention, even from the suckers who tried to shut her act down.
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| In a promotional image for her play "The Girl With The Whooping Cough," which scandalized New York theatrical patrons and led to her show's expulsion from the city by Mayor William Jay Gaynor |
Valeska Suratt's story, like the stories of many, many other actors to come after her, ends very badly. Surely she was not immune to the pressures of a Hollywood career, and her mental health issues were constantly set off in response to the stressors of the film industry. In many ways she was one of the first major celebrities to have a reasonably public breakdown. Like Hedy Lamarr, she engaged in a public legal dispute, only to be humiliated. Like Barbara Payton, she fell into obscurity and began finding illicit ways to make a living. Her fall from grace aligns with countless other tales from the Hollywood crypt- fortunately for Suratt, most of her exploits have been lost to history and remain out of the public eye. Unlike Payton and other actors who came after her, Suratt is known, not for her exploits, but for her successes, and will continue to be recognized as one of the most iconic and groundbreaking pioneers of early Broadway theatre and American cinema in history.
Join us next week for another addition of June's theme, Evil Women.
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