Ramon Novarro: Q&A with Author Allan Ellenberger

I first contacted author Allan Ellenberger shortly before the publication of his book on Old Hollywood star Ramon Novarro, as at the time I was working on my own Novarro bio. Instead of treating me like a pesky rival, Allan generously shared the information he'd amassed throughout about a decade of research — and for that I was very thankful.

We've since become good friends (but Allan, you need to buy me pizza more often), so I'm glad to report that his Ramon Novarro (McFarland, 1999) is now available in paperback at online bookstores. In his carefully researched book (I've read it about four or five times), Allan discusses Ramon Novarro's life and career from his early beginnings in Durango, Mexico, to his brutal death in the late 1960s.

Novarro, the first Latin American performer to become a Hollywood superstar, fled the Mexican Revolution of the 1910s to come to Los Angeles. Once here, he began hounding the movie studios looking for work. After numerous frustrated attempts, he was tested and cast by Rex Ingram, then one of the top three or four filmmakers in the business. Luckily for Novarro, Ingram had been looking for a replacement to Rudolph Valentino, with whom he'd had an acrimonious dispute.

Ingram helped to shape Novarro's career, which culminated in the mid-1920s with Ben-Hur, an MGM release that became the biggest worldwide blockbuster until Gone with the Wind. Novarro remained a highly popular player for the remainder of the decade, while his pleasant singing voice helped him maintain his stardom during the early talkie period.

On the downside, as Allan points out in his book, Novarro developed a serious drinking problem. Being a movie star, the de facto head of a large family (Novarro had numerous siblings), an ardent Catholic, and gay couldn't have been easy. Novarro's career suffered a steep downturn in the mid-'30s and by the end of the decade he was reduced to playing leads in a couple of dreary films for the minor Republic studios. Later on, his name was more often associated with drunken driving arrests than with film roles.

There was a brief career resurgence in the late '40s, with supporting roles in We Were Strangers (above), The Big Steal, and a couple of other films, but that didn't go very far. When not considering entering a monastery or dreaming of the right comeback vehicle, Novarro often drank. In time, he began paying young men for sex.

His death on Halloween eve, following a drunken night with two young brothers, Paul and Tom Ferguson, at his Hollywood Hills home, became a major scandal in late 1968. The trial, with the brothers telling different stories while accusing one another, was equally sensational.

Allan, the author of books on Valentino, Margaret O'Brien, and celebrities in the 1930 census, has kindly taken time away from his myriad tasks — including biographical research on actress Miriam Hopkins (he has found amazing material on her) — to answer several questions I sent him about his work on the Novarro book. See below.

Photos: Courtesy Allan Ellenberger

Ramon Novarro in The Midshipman

Why Ramon Novarro?

One Christmas Eve in the very early '90s, I happened to watch a program on TNT called 'silent Nights." They were showing two silent films – one was The Wind and the other was Ben-Hur. I always loved old films and their history, but had never seen a good silent film. Both films were outstanding, but Ben-Hur stood out to me  – especially its star, Ramon Novarro. Perhaps it was his pretty boy looks that intrigued me, but I was interested in knowing more about him.

Of course, I knew of the Hollywood Babylon story and wondered if that was true or not. I looked for a starting place – a biography, anecdotes, etc., but that was the only source I found, especially for the dildo story. So I started doing my own research – in the days before the Internet – and it soon developed into a project that took almost ten years until its fruition.

How would you describe Ramon Novarro the man?

Novarro the man was a very complex person. He was very religious, perhaps too much so, and this in some ways was the cause of many of his problems, in my opinion. Being gay and religious created an inner turmoil that eventually drove him to alcohol at any early age. He must have somehow been able to separate these two areas of his life in order to function; but how he was able to do that I couldn't say. Aside from this, he was a good man, well liked among his peers and very generous. I found no one that could find fault with him, other than with his alcoholism.