Luise Rainier, A Life (Long) Well-Lived

Luise Rainier died at 104 years old. It fascinated me how I'd never heard of her, so I had to go back and see what she was about:

She won two Oscars back-to-back and was the first actor to do that. I'm not sure how that happened - but it did and it's pretty cool. The Great Ziegfeld is a musical, which while not my cup of tea, made her a *Star*. But she didn't think she'd win and she stayed home from the Oscars. In the Good Earth she plays a Chinese peasant... with the eyes and all that... It was the 30s. It happened. We've mostly moved on.

She was from a Jewish intellectual family from the Old World who came to Hollywood to be a competitor to Garbo. So, summarizing her obit from an Old World paper: She was an inspiration to Bertoldt Brecht, mentioned in the diaries as a fascination  to Anais Nin, and was a good friend of Erich Maria Remarque (who wrote All Quiet on the Western Front). Federico Felini begged her to be in La Dolce Vita, Gershwin gave her a first edition pof Porgy and Bess with a dedication to her.

Ernst Toller, the playwright, was in love with her. Which would've been cool expect that he was an old man when she was just a teenager. Thankfully, her parents were protective of her. But her response, later in life, as being a lady often pursued, "He was nothing to me but a man. I was a teen and his fame meant nothing to me. But I had no room for him in my life, because there were so many other men in love with me."

Then she dropped off the Hollywood map.

The reason? When she won two Oscars she expected to be able to pick better parts and demand a raise. Things you should do when you're noted as the best in your field. Louis B. Mayer, the studio head at the time told her, "come sit on my lap and negotiate like all the other actresses do." She told him to fuck off (in other words, maybe?) and was fired. This happened an awful lot back then. Shirley Temple was fired after doing the same thing for refusing to sleep with a studio head in order to play Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz. Lauren Bacall was fired 8 times because the studio kept wanting her to play the same role she played opposite against Humphrey Bogart, the proclaimed Love of Her Life, shortly after he died. You know... just swap someone else in and keep the money pouring in.

It's illuminating about Show business. On one end, there's Angelina Jolie flying a plane around the world, directing movies, saving children, being invited to the Council on Foreign Relations, having an indecipherable (by her, maybe?) Cambodian-glyphed tattoo covering her entire back, etc. Or Keanu Reeves is so cool that he goes to a party for a movie starring him and is kept outside for 20 minutes and doesn't complain. Or George Clooney organizing a telethon that he got all of his famous friends to show up for, following a natural disaster in Haiti. These are actually things that make you go, "wow, that's super-fucking-cool."

The other end just makes you realize that it's all money and you have to carve your own destiny out. Dying 2 weeks short of her 105th birthday is impressive, but so is a life like that.