SILENT MOVIE actress Anita Page maintained that Louis B. Mayer colluded with other studio bosses — the majors for which an actor or anyone else could possibly work consisted only of the Big Five and the Little Three — to blacklist young actresses who weren’t sexually cooperative from finding remunerative work anywhere in Hollywood. This is consistent with what I have read about how the Jewish studio system sexually exploited young White actresses.
According to Wikipedia, she:
. . . was born in Flushing, Queens, in 1910. She reached stardom in the last years of the silent film era. Page became a highly popular young star, reportedly receiving the most fan mail of anyone on the MGM lot. She was referred to as “a blond, blue-eyed Latin” and “the girl with the most beautiful face in Hollywood” in the 1920s.
Page (with some of her fan mail)
One source reports that Page received 35,000 letters per week at her peak. In the late 1920s, she was considered the second brightest star in Hollywood, second only to the legendary Greta Garbo — even eclipsing Joan Crawford, who once burned some of Page’s fan mail in an outburst of jealousy.
She was born Anita Evelyn Pomares to Marino Leo Pomares, Sr. and Maude Evelyn (née Mullane) Pomares. Page’s paternal grandfather Marino was from Spain; he had worked as a consul in El Salvador; her paternal grandmother Anna Muñoz was of (Castillian) Spanish descent. She was of maternal Yankee and French descent.
When her contract expired in 1933, she surprised Hollywood by announcing her retirement at the age of 23. She made one more movie, Hitch Hike to Heaven, in 1936, and then left the screen, virtually disappearing from Hollywood circles for sixty years. In a 2004 interview with author Scott Feinberg, she claimed that her refusal to meet demands for sexual favors by MGM head of production Irving Thalberg, supported by studio chief Louis B. Mayer, is what truly ended her career. She said that Mayer colluded with the other studio bosses to ban her and other uncooperative actresses from finding work.
Irving ThalbergStudio boss Louis B. Mayer sitting between Judy Garland and Irving Berlin
Page died in her sleep on September 6, 2008 at her Los Angeles home, at the age of 98. She is buried in the Holy Cross Cemetery in San Diego.
At the time of her death in September 2008, she was among the last to have acted as an adult in silent films (Barbara Kent and Miriam Seegar are among the handful of others) to live into the 21st century. She was also the last living attendee of the very first Academy Awards ceremony in 1929.
It wasn’t just that she stopped getting offers of good roles from the Jewish producers and owners of the major studios after refusing to “put out” for them: Attacks on her character suddenly surfaced in the press, around the same time she was blacklisted by the studio heads. A lesser actress would have been shut out entirely, but her former star power tempted a few B-picture producers to trade on her name for a short time — but the films, for some reason or other, enjoyed little success. Britain’s Telegraph reports:
Thalberg . . . told her that if she slept with him he would arrange for her to star in three pictures that the MGM studio head, Louis B. Mayer, had assigned to Garbo. When Anita Page rejected Thalberg’s advances, her star began to wane. Unflattering paragraphs began to surface about her private life. . . When Anita Page stormed into Mayer’s office to demand a return to star billing, she was shown the door; her career at the top was over.
