23 Sahara Knights

Karl Dane

 

 

Sites: http://karl-dane.com

 

 

Books about: Karl Dane: A Biography & Filmography by Laura Petersen Balogh (click above to purchase)

 

There is also a chapter on him in Strangers in Hollywood: A History of Scandinavians in American Films by Hans Wollstein.  He is discussed in the essay Garbo Talks: Scandinavians in Hollywood, the Talkie Revolution as well as the Crisis of Foreign Voice by Arne Lunde in the book Screen Culture: History and Textuality by John Fullerton

 

Many MANY books inaccurately mention his perceived downfall, notably the inaccurate Hollywood Babylon.  He is briefly mentioned in the novel The Biograph Girl by William J. Mann
 

Films About: None

 

Voice: Karl appeared in many sound films and shorts, including Navy Blues (1929) with William Haines; Montana Moon with Joan Crawford; the Dane and Arthur short A Put Up Job (1932) available on the DVD Cavalcade of Comedy from Kino; and his last film, The Whispering Shadow (1932), available on two DVDs from Alpha Video.  Click here to hear him speak!

 

More Karl Dane on the web:

Karl Dane on IMDB

Karl Dane at TCM

Karl Dane at Find A Grave

Silents Talk: Karl Dane

Introducing...Karl Dane!

 

by Laura Petersen Balogh @2009, please do not use without permission

 

Biography:

 

To most people, the name Karl Dane is almost completely unknown, except for the bizarre and tragic circumstances of his death. The gawky Danish comedian was made a star virtually overnight after being discovered for the 1925 MGM classic, The Big Parade for which he played the role of the tobacco chewing “Slim.” He went on to appear in more than 40 other films with such luminaries as Rudolph Valentino and Lillian Gish until his so-called “thick and impenetrable” accent helped to sink his career with the advent of talkies. Alone and reduced to dire poverty, including a period in which he allegedly ran a “hot dog” stand close to the studio gates which had made him famous, he committed suicide in April 1934.

These few “facts” about Karl have been repeated so many times in Hollywood scandal books, that it’s almost impossible to separate the real man from the myth. As with his Son of the Sheik co-star Rudolph Valentino, Karl’s death overshadowed the important contributions he made to the world of silent cinema.
 

Karl’s name, first of all, was not his real one—he was born Rasmus Karl Therkelsen Gottlieb in Copenhagen, Denmark, on October 12, 1886. The second of three brothers, he grew up in a struggling working class family. His parents had a troubled marriage, and they were eventually divorced due to his father’s alcoholism and spendthrift ways. Karl responded by escaping into a world of make believe when he accompanied his father to his second job as a stagehand in a nearby Copenhagen theater, which helped inspire the young boy towards performing at an early age. Karl and his elder brother Reinald also had their own toy theater at home, a popular pastime in Victorian Denmark. Paper and cardboard cutouts mounted on strings and wires moved characters across the miniature stage as the boys provided the voices for these performances, which attracted throngs of friends and neighbors. Karl even entertained at picnics and family events, becoming well known as a neighborhood clown. He was already becoming the excellent athlete, gymnast, and swimmer that would serve him well in his early days in pictures.

However, the real world intervened when Karl was confirmed at age 14 in the year 1900. This meant the end of his educational career, (which he didn’t really mind, since he hated school), and entrance into the world of work. Karl became an apprentice at the firm Smith, Mygind and Hüttemeier, where Karl trained to become a machinist. He didn’t have much time for acting anymore, but found that he worked well with his hands—a source of pride he would have for the rest of his life. In fact, he boasted in a later Hollywood interview, “I can fix anything for you—from a typewriter to a locomotive!” At the end of this period, in June 1907, Karl began his mandatory military service, serving as a soldier in the First Artillery Regiment. He was considered a good soldier, and received promotions each year, finally achieving the rank of Lance Corporal.

In 1910, Karl fell in love and got married, to attractive brunette Carla Dagmar Hagen. They had two children in rapid succession, a son, Ejlert Carl, and daughter Ingeborg Helene. Karl struggled to support his growing family by repairing Singer sewing machines, but the daredevil in him still yearned for excitement. This he found by getting involved in Copenhagen racing circles with his English New Hudson motorcycle. Karl was featured in the 1915 Danish Motor Weekly magazine following his completion of the Danish Grand Prix, a several hundred mile car and cycle race from Copenhagen to Skagen and back again. According to later studio bios, Karl was also one of the first pilots in Denmark, but this is almost certainly untrue, since excellent records were kept of such early pioneers, and his name is not among them. Perhaps Karl worked with members of this glamorous circuit in some other capacity, such as a mechanic, but we’ll probably never know.

The outbreak of the First World War in August 1914 would change everyone’s world forever, and this was especially true of Karl and his family. He was called up for service again, although Denmark remained neutral throughout the conflict. He spent months at a time on maneuvers away from Carla and the children, which disrupted his family life and ability to make a decent living. When he was home, there was almost no work because of a major gasoline shortage. On one of his furloughs, Karl decided to make the leap and immigrate to the United States, before the army called him up again. The plan was that he would establish himself in New York first, and then send for Carla and the children. Karl sailed on the Oscar II on January 25, 1916, with only $25 in his wallet, and no English skills whatsoever. He was released from Ellis Island after only a few hours, and his friend Charles Lindgren, who lived in Brooklyn, helped him get a job and a place to stay. Karl did well in America financially, but his first winter in New York was a miserable one: he was frequently so sick he couldn’t eat or drink anything, and the weather was unusually harsh and snowy, even by Scandinavian standards. Karl’s biggest problem, however, was loneliness. He missed Carla and the children desperately and his lack of English skills made him feel like a real outsider.

Karl was hoping that his family would join him in the states, but fate intervened when Carla fell ill in Copenhagen one day. The diagnosis: syphilis. Carla accused Karl of infecting her before his departure, and the marriage was over, although the divorce would not be final until 1924. Karl was now alone, and left town for awhile. We don’t know everywhere he traveled, but one place was Lincoln, Nebraska, where he worked for awhile as a mechanic at a Firestone Service Station.

Karl was back on the east coast by 1917, however, and decided to revisit his old dream of performing. He tried all the studios in New York and New Jersey, but was repeatedly rejected. Perhaps his look was too unconventional for them. One official even said, “You’re a good carpenter. Why don’t you stick to your hammer and your saw?” But Karl wouldn’t give up, and one day, casting director Robert McIntyre employed him as an extra in a Vitagraph film whose title has been lost to history. Karl even was given a close-up and a little scene as a railroad worker giving the leading lady directions. The naïve Karl was completely convinced that he was on his way to stardom—but his footage ended up on the cutting room floor!

Undaunted, Karl continued haunting the studios and eventually started getting steady extra work. Most of the time, he was cast as a heavy, and later claimed to have appeared with the legendary Pearl White in some of her cliffhangers. Larger parts eluded him, until he was cast as the German Chancellor in My Four Years in Germany, made by what would eventually become Warner Brothers studio. It was a smash hit, and Karl went on to play the role again in future propaganda films before the war was over (including "To Hell with the Kaiser" which was written by June Mathis). By this time, Karl changed his name to “Carl Dane” dropping his surname of “Gottlieb”, possibly because of the anti-German sentiment present at that time.
Karl’s next major role was in the Pathe serial, The Wolves of Kultur, directed by Joseph Golden, in which he played two villainous parts. During the production, which was partly filmed at the picturesque Ausable Chasm in upstate New York, he did some very risky stunt work-- a dive off some high rocks, and an exciting underwater fight to the death with the hero, star Charles Hutchison. Unfortunately, the series’ release coincided with the Great Influenza Epidemic of 1918, so the film didn’t get the audience it deserved. Karl worked well with both Golden and Hutchison, however, and he was cast in two more of their serials, among them the lost “The Whirlwind” (1919).

By this time, Karl’s loneliness had abated, since he found romance again, with a Swedish dressmaker named Helen Benson. However, she strongly disapproved of his career, which may have been due to the risky stunts he was asked to perform. A later movie magazine stated that Karl was becoming disillusioned as well, especially since he wasn’t getting the recognition he craved. In 1920, Karl amicably agreed to quit acting and move out to California with Helen to take up poultry farming.

The pair set out by train for the San Fernando Valley that year and purchased land in Van Nuys. Here they built their small business and lived quietly for the next few years. Karl didn’t completely forget about acting as a career though-- when he went to the movies and watched his idols, Ernest Torrence and Wallace Beery, he studied their mannerisms and facial expressions. He then thought about how he would have interpreted these roles and decided that if he ever decided to go back to films, he could make a success of it.
In the meantime, Karl and Helen decided to start a family, and Helen soon became pregnant. Tragically, however, on August 8, 1923, their baby girl died shortly after birth because her lungs weren’t fully developed. The next day, Helen suffered a hemorrhage and was gone too.

 

Karl was absolutely grief-stricken. In the months that followed, he quickly became involved in a rebound relationship with an older woman, Emma Sawyer, whom he married in March 1924.This relationship was not destined to last: in September, after barely 6 months, she walked out on Karl, accusing him of “coldness and indifference.” It may be that he was still grieving over Helen’s death. This affair would prove to be embarrassing to Karl in 1926, after he became famous. By this time, Emma was a house servant, and came out of the woodwork to seek support from her more prosperous ex-husband.

It was during this period of domestic discord that Karl finally returned to pictures. According to later articles, he met his old friend Charles Hutchison on the street. Just returned from a sojourn in England, Hutchison prevailed upon Karl to co-star with him again, just like in the old days. Karl was very reluctant at first, but let himself be persuaded, and several serials followed.

 

The timing couldn’t have been more fortuitous, since over at MGM, a young director named King Vidor was casting for the three leads in a new war movie. One of those cast was the romantic idol John Gilbert and the picture was called The Big Parade. Vidor was looking for a certain “strange type” to play the part of Slim, the 6’6” Texas farm boy, and no one else seemed to fit the bill. According to film’s press book, Robert McIntyre, who had given Karl his very first extra role over at Vitagraph, saw Karl onscreen, remembered him, and recommended him to Vidor for this role. Karl was called in for a screen test, and eventually, the role was his.

The Big Parade was smash hit, and immediately catapulted Gilbert, Karl, and female lead Renee Adoree to stardom overnight. He was immediately placed under contract by MGM, and provided a salary of $150 per week, which would eventually rise to $1,500 weekly. In the months that followed, the film was shown all over the world, including Denmark, where Karl’s long-lost family had no idea about his new name and stardom. According to Danish newspapers, when Karl’s then 13 year old daughter Ingeborg saw the movie for the first time in Copenhagen, she yelled aloud in the crowded theater, “Why, that’s Dad!” A similar scene was unfolding in Aarhus, where Karl’s older brother Reinald lived. He saw newspapers with photos of someone named “Karl Dane” and noticed the great similarity in appearance. Then after he went to see the film, he knew for sure, and wrote to him in case of MGM. Karl’s family still has the reply that Reinald received, beginning, “Hello Big Brother! I’ve received your letter and confess that I’m Karl Dane!” This marked the beginning of a limited reunion with his family, from whom he’d been estranged for over nine years.

In the meantime, Karl was being hurried into one new film after another, as the studio tried to find a niche for him. Lillian Gish, who was newly signed to MGM, saw an early screening of Parade and requested Vidor, Gilbert, and Karl for her new vehicle, La Boheme, a film version of the opera. Karl played the elderly building superintendent Benoit, and followed this up with another Gish film, The Scarlet Letter. This time the role was bigger, and newspapers reported that he had “repeated”, meaning that Karl’s earlier success was not a fluke. Meanwhile, over at United Artists, production as beginning on the Valentino film, The Son of the Sheik, which would prove to be the final role for the Great Lover. Karl was lent to UA for his co-starring turn as Ramadan, the friend and manservant of Valentino’s character, Ahmed. Vilma Banky was the leading lady, the dancing girl, Yasmin. Karl provided much of the comic relief, but his role was pivotal, reuniting the young lovers after Ahmed comes to believe Yasmin has betrayed him. Shooting of the film was done in the Yuma Desert under very harsh conditions, with temperatures hovering well over 100 degrees. This would be the only film in which Karl and Valentino worked together, and nothing is known about how they felt about each other. Karl did appear to have a great time in the part, though, and the chemistry between the two legends is apparent.

This same year, Karl played the part of Rodenard in another King Vidor production, Bardeleys the Magnificent with John Gilbert in the title role. Playing a small but villainous part was a diminutive British comic named George K. Arthur. Although Karl and Arthur didn’t appear in any scenes together, MGM executive Harry Rapf conceived of the idea to pair up the two in a series of comedies. Their first film together was the hit, Rookies (1927) in which Arthur plays a clever but lazy buck private who constantly runs afoul of his bullying but slightly dim-witted sergeant, played by Karl. The success of this feature led to numerous other pairings, such as Brotherly Love, Circus Rookies, and Baby Mine, the last of which co-starred the lanky Charlotte Greenwood. Apart from his work with Arthur, MGM also provided Karl with featured roles in some high-budget productions. The gold-rush epic The Trail of ’98 (1927) is a good example, and he earned third billing below Ralph Forbes and Dolores Del Rio.
 

As time wore on, the demands of continuous filmmaking began to tell on Karl. He was making one picture after another, often with productions overlapping and the cameras cranking far into the night. He was also still asked to perform risky stunts , despite the fact that he was now a middle aged man. In 1928, during the making of Circus Rookies, Karl fell off a bicycle and broke his shoulder. Almost immediately, he came down with bronchial pneumonia, a very serious condition in the days before antibiotics. That June, barely out of the hospital, he was in a car accident one evening that left him unhurt, but badly bruised his passenger. This companion wasn’t named, but we do know that at this time, Karl was courting the former Russian dancer, model and minor actress named Thais Valdemar. She moved into Karl’s Beverly Hills home about this time and he even started introducing her to friends as his wife. Newspaper articles even claimed that the pair ran off to Tijuana, Mexico and eloped, but no record could be found, since they had used their birth names. This may have been planted in the papers to throw doubting reporters off the scent. After all, Karl had a morals clause in his contract like most other stars, and would have been ruined if he had lived openly with a woman without the benefit of marriage.

In November, however, the whole charade blew up. Karl and Thais had a big fight and she moved out. In December, she filed a $75,000 suit against him for Breach Of Promise. According to Thais, Karl promised to marry her within six months, but at the time of the breakup, he informed her that he wouldn’t wed her then or at any other time. Valdemar was hardly an innocent virgin: a couple of years before, she had accused another man, an actor named Prince Youcca Troubetzkoy, of the same thing. Eventually, by early 1929, the complaint was mysteriously withdrawn, probably through MGM’s powerful influence .

 

 
This same stressful personal period coincided with the introduction of talking pictures in Hollywood, and all the stars were feeling under the gun, although MGM studio executives were anxious to quell the fears of their players. Louis B. Mayer was known for assuring his stars that if they worked hard for him, they would always have a job, which may have created a false sense of security. Irving Thalberg even told interviewers that he didn’t think the new medium would negatively affect those with foreign accents at all, specifically mentioning Scandinavians Garbo and Nils Asther . Karl’s partner George K. Arthur claimed years later that despite these assurances, he saw what was coming very clearly, but the naïve and trusting Karl didn’t. Of course, one has to be skeptical about stories told many decades after the fact.
Karl’s turn before the microphone didn’t occur until 1929, in the William Haines vehicle, Navy Blues. (He would actually be teamed with Haines with four other pictures during his career, Speedway, The Duke Steps Out, Alias Jimmy Valentine, and Fast Life.) Reviews at the time were encouraging, with barely a mention made of Karl’s accent, and in fact, his deep voice was a good match to his imposing physical appearance.

As time wore on, though, Karl’s roles became smaller and his speaking lines were cut drastically. Strangely, in 1930’s The Big House, he literally had no dialogue at all. George K. Arthur later complained that the fault lay squarely with the studio executives, who decided in the flurry that followed the introduction of sound films, that no one with a foreign accent could possibly be funny. Therefore, he lost his studio contract. Arthur claimed to have been signed again, since his distinguished British speech was more prized. Again, sometimes memories tend to be a bit faulty, since records show that Karl was actually retained by MGM after Arthur was let go. Retained or not, however, Karl’s status in Hollywood had definitely waned, and it played havoc on his emotional well-being. That year, Karl suffered a nervous breakdown, partially due to exhaustion, and he was forced to give up his work and take a rest.

After his recovery later that year, Karl and Arthur were reunited again, in an 8-month nationwide vaudeville tour of Publix Theater houses. Though the duo’s star had dimmed in the film capital, they were still beloved in America’s heartland, as period articles and photos show they still attracted throngs of fans. The tours’ success led to them being signed for a series of shorts with Paramount Studios. Only one of them, A Put Up Job, is currently available on video. However, these films were the finish of Karl, since the writers could not think of clever enough scenarios that may have helped turn Karl’s accent into an asset. After making a few more shorts for independent producer Larry Damour, the duo was broken up for good.

There was one last part to play. Interestingly, Karl’s last role, that of Sparks, the radio dispatcher in the 1933 Mascot serial The Whispering Shadow (also starring Bela Lugosi), turned the foolish persona he had created on its head. The villain of the title is a maniacal crime boss and scientific genius, who terrorizes the Empire Transport and Storage Company, killing his enemies with a deadly electronic ray. Sparks is portrayed as a complete bumbling fool, the object of the other character’s contempt, constantly playing with a little puzzle toy, a running gag throughout the serial. In the last episode, however, Sparks is finally unmasked as the Shadow himself, the seemingly innocent toy the means to transmit the deadly currents. For the benefit of the audience, there is a flashback to several previous innocuous scenes with Sparks, demonstrating how what we had assumed was harmless foolishness was in fact the height of diabolical villainy. Somehow this seems like a statement about the mysteriousness of Karl the man himself: that there had always been so much more to him behind the jocular mask that everyone in Hollywood always remembered. It begs the question, both in the serial and in real life: who was the real fool, Karl (Sparks) or everyone else?

After Shadow, there would be no more roles, something that Karl seemed to accept. When his film roles started to lessen, he became interested in gold mining as an alternative career. He made major investments in 1931 and 1933, but lost everything when his partner turned out to be a cheat. Then he spent the last terrible months of his life in a state of near-poverty, desperately going from one job to another: car mechanic, carpenter, and finally, as a hot dog stand owner. Kenneth Anger’s Hollywood Babylon reported that the location of the stand was outside the MGM Studio gates, but there’s no evidence for this. George K. Arthur actually pinpointed the location in Westwood. Wherever it stood, this last business project ended in failure. There was one last hope: he went to his former bosses at MGM and begged for any job-- a $5 per day extra or a set carpenter, but they refused.

On the evening of Saturday, April 14, 1934, Karl returned to his modest apartment at 626 South Burnside Avenue in Los Angeles. He was supposed to meet his friend, 28-year old Frances Leake, who had been helping him out financially. She invited him out that night to see a show, since she was concerned that Karl had become deeply depressed and had taken to pacing the floor of his apartment for hours at a time. When Karl did not turn up, Frances immediately went to his place to check on him. When there was no answer to her repeated knocks, she ran to get the landlady who had his key. When they finally burst in through his door a few minutes later, they found Karl already dead in his chair, a revolver at his feet. The jazz music that was loudly blaring in an overhead apartment had masked the sound of the gunshot. A simple note lay on a table across the room: “To Frances and all my friends---Goodbye.” Next to the note was a scrapbook of Karl’s, his prized possession, filled with all of his old contracts, photos, and rave reviews. He had apparently spent the last hour of his life paging through this book, before firing a bullet through his brain. Frances reportedly fainted with shock.

The police were called, and one of them called MGM to alert them. Karl was taken to the Coroner’s Office and a tag was attached to his body: “May have relatives in Denmark. Hold for awhile.” No one, not even Frances, knew any family member’s names, and nothing was found in his personal effects to give any clues, so reportedly an ad was placed in a Copenhagen newspaper. However, by Monday morning, perhaps fearful of bad press, MGM stepped in to take care of the funeral. According to many reports, fellow Dane Jean Hersholt appealed to the studio to rescue Karl in death, but he denied this. Even if the studio had failed to step in, several other members of the Danish community in Hollywood and relief agencies were ready to bury Karl, including actor Carl Brisson, (who would later be Rosalind Russell’s father-in-law). Karl’s service was open to the public, with about 50 people in attendance. Only two actors attended, however, Hersholt, and Tom O’Brien, a co-star from The Big Parade, who both were pallbearers.

After Karl’s death, there was much discussion about what could have been done to prevent the tragedy. Danish newspapers savagely criticized MGM for paying thousands of dollars for his funeral, when they could have used the money to help him out when he was alive. Common decency would have indicated that they owed him something. After all, Karl’s beloved performance in The Big Parade had made the film a smash success, and it was this film that made the studio a major force in Hollywood. Feeling the heat, a studio spokesman tried to claim that they had offered Karl a part but in another film he had turned it down since the pay was too small.  The newspapers reacted with such scorn, however, that the studio quickly backtracked—after all, Karl had only $1.57 left in his wallet and a zero balance in his bank accounts when he died, so he was hardly in a position to refuse any sort of employment.

We now have many decades of perspective in trying to answer the question about Karl’s integration into the Hollywood scene. So many things went wrong for Karl. The beginning of the sound era was a time of great change and turmoil, and it was critical for Karl to understand the complex political minefield of Hollywood, which he failed to do. Karl was a simple and direct man, and probably took Mr. Mayer at his word, assuming that since his films made a good profit for the studio, he would always have a place with the surrogate family he had made in the film capital. Sadly, this was not the case. Time and age also played a part in the tragedy: Karl was already 39 years old at the time of his discovery, in an industry that worships youth. His great fitness level and endearing look made it possible for him to play young and athletic parts, but this would prove more difficult as the years went on.
Karl’s physical characteristics, which won him thousands of adoring fans, ironically worked against him too: Karl had a big and lumbering body, gawky looking and offbeat. These things made him a lovable figure on screen, but made it impossible for him to disappear into a crowd after his career was over. There was no going back to his former life even if money was not an issue: everyone instantly knew who he was everywhere he went, and he must have been tormented by the feeling that all eyes were on him.

Indeed, one can imagine the psychological stress that must be suffered by those who have ridden this rollercoaster of fame. After years of being fawned upon and flattered by others, earning more money than they ever dreamed of, it is easy to see why some would have imagined that their luck would hold forever. Even a person with a healthy sense of self would be crushed to see it all come crashing down.

 

But Karl was not healthy—he had secret pains that kept him separate from others and therefore, all the more vulnerable. Friendly, but remote, hidden behind his happy-go-lucky “Dumb Swede” mask, Karl brooded about the loss of his career and family, distancing himself from everyone but his beloved friend Frances in his final days. Taken all together, it was a disastrous and deadly combination. Quite literally, Karl Dane died of a broken heart.
 

To add to the tragedy, after Karl’s death, some newspaper articles played down his career, claiming that his fame was simply due to luck, not talent. Both Hollywood and the public can be cruel and have extremely short memories. However, with the passage of time there was some consolation. Some did not forget. A Star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame was placed to honor Karl decades after his death. And now, after many years, the art of silent film has undergone a resurgence of popularity, as film festivals all over the world screen classics like The Big Parade, which consistently appears on critics’ top films list. Many of his performances are also available on DVD and video format for many new fans to enjoy. Indeed, The Great Dane may somewhere be having the last laugh, as his detractors lie forgotten and their own films lost to history.

 

 

Karl Dane Filmography:

 

A complete version of Karl Dane's filmography can be found in Laura Petersen Balogh's biography on him