Ricardo Cortez — The Star with the Broken Heart (1932) 🇺🇸

Adela Rogers St. Johns who knows Hollywood from behind the scenes, tells of the memories of Ricardo Cortez — beautiful and tragic, glorious and terrible.

Upon a spring day, a young man walked upon Fifth Avenue. He was going nowhere in particular, seeking nothing save some answer to the call of spring that echoed through the great city.

Yet that walk was to change his destiny, to involve him in a great and tragic love affair.

For he stopped to peer into a window, where some jewels lay glowing upon rich velvet. And raising his eyes, he looked into a woman’s face. A white face, beneath wings of dark hair, in which glowed the most amazing dark eyes he had ever seen.

The lady passed on, and since she was by no means a lady such as a young man might accost upon Fifth Avenue, he watched her go. He did not know her name nor where she came from, but he did know that he had seen the One Woman. That there was nothing he would not do for her, no place he would not go if she were there.

That was the first time Ricardo Cortez saw Alma Rubens, and he proceeded to find out who she was.

Much has been written about the screen’s great lovers. Yet, I think, of them all, Ricardo Cortez has loved and suffered most. Vilified, misunderstood, stung with gossip of those who knew so little about the strange tragedy which almost wrecked him, fighting a silent and losing battle with his loved one, which of all battles is the hardest to fight.

A man who knew both Alma and Ric very well, told me not long ago that his admiration for Cortez was greater than his admiration for any other man he knew.

“He did everything a human being could do to save another,” he told me. “He sacrificed himself over and over again. And because of the very nature of the thing he found his worst enemy in the woman he loved and was trying to save. Because he stood between her and the horrible thing which had her in its grasp, she fought against him. And he took it without a word and went on trying to help her, loving her, being faithful to her no matter what happened. He was big enough to understand that it wasn’t

Alma herself who was fighting him, but the impersonal evil that was trying to destroy her.

“He failed. But it made him a man.”

Ricardo Cortez has become a star. He has become a fine actor. There is a poignancy to his work that I have seen seldom in talking pictures. Since he was a mere flashy, sexy leading man a few years ago, he has gained an understanding of life that may make him really great.

And that has come from a broken heart.

Yet to know Ric is to know a simple, emotional, honest young man, who feels before he thinks, whose strongest quality is gratitude, who appreciates kindness and loyalty. The melancholy of his race lies deep within him. The true love of beauty brings him a simple joy. Tears and laughter are always closely mingled, and he gives the one as freely as he gives the other.

Sometimes, nowadays, he seems almost pathetically to seek life’s laughter.

“Has it come too late?” I asked him.

“What?”

“All this success — stardom, popularity, security. Has it come too late to mean to you what it once could have meant?”

I was thinking of Alma, of the days he fought so hard to succeed for Alma, since he wanted to lay every gift upon the altar of his love for her. I was thinking of something Wilson Mizner once said to me, that success means nothing unless there is just the one person to cheer for you.

Ric knew of what I was thinking, but we didn’t speak of her. Even now, he cannot mention the name of his dead wife without showing in his dark eyes the pain of his loss.

He was born, this boy who wanted to be an actor, in New York City. His name is John Kranze.

I asked him about that, because though I’ve known him for ten years, I never somehow connected Ricardo Cortez with any particular past. Because he looks so foreign, because he seems a romantic figure, somehow you just took it for granted that he lived a romantic life, full of excitement, that he had been born in some romantic spot.

He smiled a little when I asked him. He has a nice smile, quick and anxious to please. There is that about him — he asks to be liked; he asks to be understood.

“Do you know,” he said, “you’re the first person who ever asked me anything about myself? I don’t know why, but nobody ever asked me about anything. They just seemed to take it for granted that I was born in Budapest, or Shanghai, or the Ghetto in Pittsburgh.

“The same with the dancing. Because once they talked about me as a successor to Valentino — as though anybody could ever be another Valentino — everybody just assumed that I had been a dancer. I never danced professionally in my life — never earned a quarter as a dancer. And nobody ever asked me if I’d been a dancer. They just went on saying so. Funny, isn’t it?”

His mother and father came from Austria and Hungary. Came to America, seeking the new land of freedom. Simple people of the middle class, devoted to the idea-1 of home and family. To them, in the city of New York, were born five children, three boys and two girls. John was the oldest, and they looked up to him and expected much.

When he was quite small he went to work, for the family wasn’t rich. He helped in his father’s business, he acted as office boy, he did odd jobs.

And finally he became a runner for a brokerage house in Wall Street. The little family rejoiced, and Papa Kranze had great visions of his son as another giant of industry.

So, unknown to his father, the boy began to follow the dictates of his own ambition. He fought his way into studios, he played extras, bits. He hung around the theaters and did any piece of work he could find to do. Little by little, he began to make headway. He had talent, he had looks.

And then came a great and tragic blow. His father died. Two days later his favorite sister followed him. The little family was left destitute and very sorrowful. John became then the head of the family, and upon his young shoulders fell the burden of support for his mother and for those younger than himself.

It was a heavy load for a youngster, but he worked hard, carrying two or three jobs at once, sending the others to school, trying to take his father’s place with his mother.

And at last he came to Hollywood.

Strangely enough, he didn’t come as an actor. He came as a business representative for the New York offices of Universal. But Irving Thalberg, then manager of Universal, saw him and soon had him before the camera.

There is one illuminating little story about his early days in the film capital, where he had some quick and rather easy success.

Paramount wanted him. Jesse Lasky was kind, enthusiastic about his work, ready to lend him a helping hand. It was Lasky, by the way, who changed his name from Jack Crane, under which he had worked in New York, to the picturesque Ricardo Cortez.

Another company wanted him, too, for a big part and a bigger salary. But they took the method of telling him that he didn’t amount to much, that he’d have to work very hard and that maybe he’d never succeed — that they were taking a big gamble with him.

It is typical of Cortez that he signed with Lasky.

Just when he identified the lady he had seen on Fifth Avenue with Alma Rubens, then a great star, isn’t important. It was soon after he came to Hollywood. But he was shy. She seemed so far above him. He was afraid to meet her. Three different times he asked friends to present him to her, to arrange parties where she would be present, and three times he lost his courage and didn’t show up.

Then one morning it came over him that he was wasting his life. That nothing would be complete to him until he knew her and at least chanced his suit. So he found out where she lived and sent her a great basket of flowers.

And then they fell in love. Instantly, simply, completely. There was never any argument about it. Somewhere in eternity, perhaps, that spark had already been lighted, and once they met it seemed as though they had always known each other, always belonged together.

So they were married.

All happiness lay before them. I can remember so well seeing them then in the Cocoanut Grove, both tall and dark and handsome. In those first years we used to point them out with pride, because they looked so grand together and seemed so devoted. For Alma, for all her dark and romantic beauty, had a vivid, brilliant sense of humor that lightened the slightly serious Cortez.

He does not talk about Alma now. Simply because he cannot.

But he used to talk to me about her then, because she and I were friends and his love boiled over in talk, as all true love does. When he wasn’t with Alma he wanted to talk about her.

Always he spoke of that brightness of hers, that lovely laughter. Of her understanding of life and people. Of the things she had taught him and the inspiration she was in every word and act of his life. She had, in all truth, taught him to laugh, taught him to love, taught him to live.

To go to their home — they lived then in the fashionable Wilshire district in Los Angeles — was to be sure of hours of real delight.

I think it was then that Cortez, who was born with a deep fear of life, who had that undertone of sadness in his character, who had known sorrow and toil from childhood, first began to believe that the world was a pretty swell place and that happiness could be real.

And into the very height of that brightness crept the dark shadow that was to destroy love and happiness, wreck his life and close forever those dark eyes so full of laughter.

No one can blame Alma Rubens. No one but must see her as a victim, just one more victim added to the thousands who go down each year before the monster of drugs. It began when she was very ill, and by the time she was well a.a:ain she had lost her identity as do all victims of the poppy.

At first her husband didn’t know. Then he wouldn’t — couldn’t — believe. It seemed impossible that such a thing could happen to Alma, who was always so strong a personality, so courageous a woman. But at last he had to believe. There was no escape from a fearful reality.

I think his heart almost broke with the agony of it. For Alma had been to him more than a woman. He hadn’t only loved her, he had idolized and idealized her. The disillusionment almost killed him.

Then he faced it. To him, in long hours, came understanding. And with that understanding came a great pity for his wife. All censure went from him for all time.

Have you ever fought for someone you loved against themselves? Have you ever tried to reach them through a great wall, behind which you could see them and where they seemed to be held prisoner? Have you ever known what it means to see the one dearest to your heart slowly turning before your eyes into someone else, as though black magic were transforming them? Have you ever bruised the wings of your spirit against the enmity of a loved one because you were trying to help that loved one?

I hope not.

There is no need here to go into the long details of that fight which Ricardo Cortez put up to rescue the woman he loved. There is no need to bring back the sordid story of their quarrels, their separations, her accusations, which were never her own but always those of her master.

But I know something of what that man went through.

The New Year’s Eve before she died I spent with Alma. She drifted by chance into a party where I was. Because she knew I understood, we had a long, long talk that night. And among other things she told me that though they had quarreled, though they were separated, in her heart she still loved Ric and that he had always been her best friend.

In the beginning Cortez was a handsome boy with a certain flair which women liked, a certain dark, magnetic charm. But he was a very bad actor. Perhaps his very modesty, his self-consciousness did that to him. Now suddenly he has found himself! It isn’t possible to divorce that awakening from his love story — at least it doesn’t seem possible to me.

As long as he lives and no matter what happens to him, Ricardo Cortez will carry those memories — beautiful and tragic, glorious and terrible. And since a man is what his memory makes him, he must by the very nature of things have a well of emotion, a depth of understanding that is possible to few people. If there is anything in the old, old theory that a man must have suffered and loved and know life in the raw before he can be a great artist, Cortez should do great things.

Hollywood doesn’t see much of him. He plays golf, he rides a lot. On the RKO lot where he is soon to be starred in “Is My Face Red?” he is very popular, because of his quiet courtesy, his ability to fit in anywhere, his lack of conceit.

Not only as an actor has he developed. From the boy I first knew, soon after his arrival in Hollywood, the change in him today is enormous. He talks well, he has a rather quiet, distinguished manner. He can tell a story and not take too long about it. He doesn’t go to parties, and he is always upset for days when anybody couples his name with that of some girl in Hollywood with whom he has been friendly.

Week-ends he usually spends down at Malibu with George O’Brien, who is his best friend. Directors who work with him say that he never gets enough work, that he is always first on the set, last to leave, ready and willing to do any amount of labor to get the part right.

Perhaps you don’t know how he got the coveted leading role in “Symphony of Six Million.” Every actor on the lot wanted to play the part — in fact, almost every actor in Hollywood had his eye upon it. And the last actor anyone would consider was Ricardo Cortez. Cortez — the matinee idol, the heavy man, the character actor, famed as a home-wrecker and a menace, for this sympathetic, gentle, emotional doctor? Never!

He begged and pleaded, but they just laughed and told him to run along and forget about it.

But he didn’t. With his own money he hired lights, cameras, electricians’ and cameramen. All by himself he went out in a deserted corner of the stage and all by himself he made scenes from the picture. He worked for weeks. And when he had done it as well as he thought he could he asked the director, Gregory La Cava, to look at his work.

He got the part.

There aren’t many people in Hollywood who will admit to being very much interested in acting. But Ric does and is.

Perhaps some day some woman will come along and give Ric the companionship, the sweetness that he so much needs. Perhaps just the right girl will know how to heal the wounds that life has given him. But that time is not yet.

Right now Cortez sinks himself in work and carries a torch for the woman who taught him how sweet and how bitter life can be.

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Cortez, as the young doctor, in a scene with Irene Dunne in “The Symphony of Six Million.”

He cannot mention the name of his dead wife, Alma Rubens, without showing in his dark eyes the pain of his loss.

Collection: The New Movie Magazine, July 1932