Nick Lowe: “Marie Provost”
I meant to post this yesterday because of the date “July 29” in the first verse but since the song is only loosely based on fact it doesn’t really matter. What IS true is that Marie Prevost moved from Canada to California with her family and the birth name Mary Bickford Dunn. In 1916, she scored a job as one of Mack Sennett’s “Bathing Beauties” before trading up to Universal on the strength of Irving Thalberg’s promise that he’d make her a star.
She never quiet reached the stratosphere, but she did make a solid career in silent films and everything was swell until the back-to-back punches of her mother’s death and the advent of talkies. She struggled to find work and turned to booze, prefering to drink her lunches and dinners and pre-Taco Bell fourth meals. In an endless cycle of bad luck, she drank because she couldn’t get a job and being constantly wasted kept her out of work. When she did score a minor part, she had to starve herself to shed excess pounds and the cycle proved to be too much. Her official cause of death at age 38? Acute alcoholism and malnutrition.
It’s a weeper of a story but what turned it into a pop song? The fact that Prevost wasn’t discovered for a couple of days—she’d taped a “Do not knock” warning to her front door—and before a well-meaning houseboy could check on her, Marie’s beloved dachshund Maxie took a couple of nibbles out of her ankles. Or, as Nick Lowe classically put it, “She was a winner/Who became a doggie’s dinner”.
Lowe’s song is true enough, but some of the details are lacking, right to the spelling of Prevost’s name. Most of his info came from the sensationalised account in author Kenneth Anger’s slanderfest, Hollywood Babylon. Because I have nothing better to do, here are the lyrics, followed by the straight truth.
Yay for depressing stories! And for catchy-as-hell pop songs!
Marie Provost did not look her best
The day the cops bust into her lonely nest
In the cheap hotel up on Hollywood West1
July 292
She’d been lyin’ there for two or three weeks3
The neighbors said they never heard a squeak
While hungry eyes that could not speak
Said even little doggies have got to eat
She was a winner that became a doggie’s dinner
She never meant that much to me
Whoa oh poor Marie
Marie Provost was a movie queen
Mysterious angel of the silent screen
And run like the wind the nation’s young men steamed
When Marie crossed the silent screen
Whoa she came out west from New York4
But when the talkies came Marie just couldn’t cope5
The public said Marie take a walk
All the way back to New York
Those quaalude bombs didn’t help her sleep
As her nights grew long and her days grew bleak
It’s all downhill once you’ve passed your peak
Marie got ready for that last big sleep6
The cops came in and they looked around
Throwin’ up everywhere over what they found
The handiwork of Marie’s little dachshund
That hungry little dachshund
1 She actually lived at 6230 Afton Place which wasn’t a horrible place to stay. LA Times reports of her demise described it as a “modest single apartment” where “several empty whisky bottles lay in the sink”.
2 Her death certificate lists January 20 as the day she packed it in, although it was admittedly just an estimate.
3 Sorry, Nick. She’d just been there for a couple of days. The last person to see her alive was her housekeeper—the same employee who eventually found her body.
4 Nope. She moved from Ontario.
5 This was a rumor that seemingly began with Kenneth Anger’s book. He claimed that she had a “Bronx honk”. In actuality, she struggled both because alcohol had dulled her looks and because her last major film role was in a Cecil B. DeMille flop, The Godless Girl. She was over thirty and considered an “old timer”, reduced to playing sidekicks or best friends if she scored parts at all.
6 The song makes it sound like a suicide. Technically, it may have been true, that she’d slowly killed herself drink by drink over a period of years, but in actuality her heart quit on her.
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