Ruth Harriet Louise
American, 1903-1940

Renée Adorée, 1928
gelatin silver print

SBMA, Museum purchase with funds provided by Eric Skipsey
2002.58



Ruth Harriet Louise in self-portrait

COMMENTS

As the photographer who could transform a 'pretty, frizzy-haired' nobody into Greta Garbo, a nameless chorus girl into Joan Crawford, Ruth Harriet Louise was a force to be reckoned with in golden-age Hollywood.

It is Hollywood, 14 May 1928. A stylish 25-year-old in a white cloche hat and fur-trimmed coat drives through the arches of MGM studios. Waiting fans, clutching photographs and autograph albums, mistake the glamorous young woman for Joan Crawford, the studio's hot new star.

The woman parks outside an editing building at the front of the lot, then climbs the stairs to her photographic studio. Inside she welcomes the real Joan Crawford, and slips on a gramophone record. In their easy intimacy, she asks Crawford what she should do about the fans. The actress tells her she should sign the autographs and enjoy the confusion. She asks Crawford to pose and moves close to give her instructions, then steps back to release the camera shutter. Ruth Harriet Louise, the chief portrait photographer at MGM and confidante of Crawford, was at the time the most important portrait photographer in Hollywood.

As glamorous as the women she photographed she was the only female studio photographer in Hollywood history – and its youngest. Her roll-call of stars included Crawford, Greta Garbo, Norma Shearer and Buster Keaton.

She helped shape Garbo's image and captured Crawford's transformation from young chorus girl to Hollywood star. Her portraits could even make or break careers as producers scrutinised them for screen tests and casting.

Louise's contribution to photography and Hollywood history has been largely overlooked, but now a selection of her work can be seen at the National Portrait Gallery in its new exhibition, 'Glamour of the Gods: Hollywood Portraits'.

As Bruce Robertson, the co-author of Ruth Harriet Louise and Hollywood Glamour Photography, says, 'Ruth was there at the moment that MGM became the most important studio with the most powerful publicity machine, and Ruth was the critical player in that machine.'

Louise was born Ruth Goldstein in 1903 at the family's modest home on West 150th Street in Harlem, New York. Her father was a London-born rabbi at a progressive synagogue and her mother, Klara Jacobsen Goldstein, came from Vienna.

Her childhood was spent around New York City as her father moved synagogues, but in 1915 they settled in New Jersey. She was close to her elder brother, Mark, and her cousin Carmel Myers, who was a silent-screen actress in Hollywood and a friend of Mary Pickford.
As a teenager Louise met Nickolas Muray, the celebrity photographer, while visiting Myers in New York, and sat for a portrait in his Greenwich Village studio. Intrigued by his work, she decided to become a photographer herself and enrolled in a photographic school. But her fierce ambition and independence led her back to Muray – and she became his apprentice.

In 1922, at just 19, she set up her own one-room studio in New Brunswick, New Jersey, taking pictures of her family, her father's congregants and anyone who dropped by. 'Won't you visit my studio, and let me perpetuate your personality,' she advertised in the local business directory. It was then that she assumed what would become her professional name: Ruth Harriet Louise.

In the early spring of 1925 Louise photographed Myers, who was en route from Italy to Hollywood to finish filming Ben-Hur. Soon afterwards Louise decided to move to Los Angeles to live near Myers and her brother, now called Mark Sandrich, who worked as a screenwriter at Educational Pictures.

Louise left New Brunswick for Hollywood in July 1925 and opened a tiny studio on Vine Street and Hollywood Boulevard, close to the Famous Players-Lasky studio. Her first clients ranged from aspiring actors, who asked Louise to produce their publicity shots, to Samuel Goldwyn, the producer, who hired Louise to photograph his latest discovery, Vilma Bánky.

Within weeks of arriving in Los Angeles, Louise had been introduced to Louis B Mayer, the head of MGM. Her youth, good looks and self-possession, as well as her work, impressed Mayer, who hired her on the spot and gave her her own studio. 'It was a combination of good luck and a real sense of strategy,' says Robert Dance, the author of Glamour of the Gods (NPG).

Louise shrewdly negotiated final approval of her photographs, full credit for all her work and the opportunity to photograph people outside the studio – terms that were not given to other studio photographers.

According to Al St Hilaire, her last assistant and later an important portrait photographer in the 1930s, 'She had her own lab and could control things, so that gave her an edge. She must have been the first to have that sort of authority. She was the only photographer who had control over the development of her negs.' While this autonomy suited her independent spirit, it also isolated her, her preferential treatment creating jealousy among her male colleagues.

Louise's work was critical to MGM, helping to generate publicity and sell tickets for the studio's most important films. Her photographs of Ramon Novarro, for example, MGM's answer to Rudolph Valentino, was vital in drumming up publicity for Ben-Hur, which desperately needed to recoup its spiralling budget of $3.9 million (making it the most expensive silent film ever made).

In September 1925, two months after she joined MGM, Louise photographed the new Swedish sensation, Greta Garbo. She immediately established a strong rapport with Garbo, and her images helped to shape the young star's image into the ice-cool femme fatale she became.

As Dance says: 'Louise created Garbo's face. She took Garbo from a pretty, frizzy-haired girl who was a bit gauche to the great siren of the 20th century. Others simply refined Louise's work.'

The same year Louise started working with Garbo, she met Marion Davies, the mistress of the publisher William Randolph Hearst, and they became friends. She spent days with Davies at the star's Santa Monica beach house and took informal shots of her diving into her magnificent pool, playing tennis or welcoming guests such as Charlie Chaplin and Gloria Swanson.

'Louise was much more their peer and friend than the other photographers were,' says Karen Sinsheimer, the curator of photography at the Santa Barbara Museum of Art. 'She was more of a collaborator, an equal. Men responded to her too, as she was young and attractive and put them at their ease, so she brought energy and sizzle to the studio as well.'

In 1927 Louise married the writer and director Leigh Jason, with the director William Wyler as their best man (a year later they were named 'one of Hollywood's most useful families' by Photoplay, the first celebrity magazine).

Her status was reinforced when she was invited to photograph Herbert Hoover, the president elect, in Palo Alto, California, in 1928. She made more Hollywood history in 1929 by shooting Nina Mae McKinney, dubbed the Black Garbo, for the first all-African-American film by a major studio.

But in September of that year Louise's world collapsed. Norma Shearer, Joan Crawford's famous rival, had decided she preferred the sexier glamour shots of George Hurrell to the cool elegance of Louise's images. Hurrell had transformed Shearer into a slinky seductress with languorous poses, using heavy retouching and extreme close-ups that were a far cry from Louise's more natural style. Her contract was not renewed.

Louise left the studio in December 1929. Once the 'talkies' took hold, and the Great Depression hit, Hollywood became even more macho and hard-boiled, like its new stars Humphrey Bogart and James Cagney.

Louise, with her unique talent, connections and easy bonhomie with her subjects, had acquired a special place in studio history, but would never again find the opportunities of her early career. During the 1930s she worked intermittently as a freelancer, photographing stars from the popular Myrna Loy to 'the new Garbo', Anna Sten.

But her priority became her family. She gave birth to a son in 1932 and a daughter a few years later. Tragedy hit in 1938 when her son died of leukaemia. She became pregnant again in 1940, but there were complications with the premature birth and Louise and her son died.

Had it not been for the sheer body of her work (over 100,000 images), and the iconic stars she photographed, Louise might have been forgotten completely. But her photographs bear testimony to an early age of celebrity when image was all and a star's career could be made, or crushed, by a single photograph. Now perhaps, her talent can re-emerge from the shadows and shine as brightly as it did when she reigned supreme in her top-floor studio on the MGM lot.

- Melanie Abrams, Star maker: the photographer Ruth Harriet Louise, The Telegraph, 24 Jul 2011


SBMA CURATORIAL LABELS

While giving a lecture on Ruth Harriet Louise and the history of Hollywood glamour photography, Sinsheimer suggested that a more apt title for the genre would be “When Hollywood made glamour.” Ruth Harriet Louise, a photographer often overlooked in conversations discussing Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (MGM) and the company’s monumental influence on the movie star persona, produced over 100,000 negatives during her tenure at MGM between 1925 and 1929. At the young age of 22, Louise was hired as chief portrait photographer for MGM and immediately cultivated her own studio presence and photographic compositions for the young actors, such as Greta Garbo, whom she helped catapult to stardom.

This particular image of Renée Adorée was composed in a development Louise referred to as the “mask” photograph. In an attempt to show the dramatic expressiveness of emerging stars, such as Adorée, Louise covered the hair of the model and created dark backgrounds in order to highlight the emotive face of the actress. Framed by the heart-shaped widows peak of the black wrappings, Louise captures Adorée’s acting talents.

- Ridley-Tree Gallery, 2016