Lou Tellegen

Biography

Isidor Van Dameler—later rechristened Lou Tellegen—was born in the Low Countries to a Greek-Dutch family and grew into a face so striking it could stop traffic on two continents. Restless by nature, he hop-scotched across Europe, earning bread with his fists in Belgian boxing booths, steering a Brussels taxi through midnight rain, and somersaulting under the Berlin big top as a trapeze flyer. A stack of birth-control leaflets once landed him in a Tsarist cell for thirty frozen nights. He traded tundra for tropics, hacking through Brazilian rainforests before shoveling coal in the bowels of a French freighter. A romantic entanglement in Paris returned him to a jail bunk, but a wire to his comrade Édouard de Max sprung the door. The actor whisked Tellegen onto the stage of Sarah Bernhardt, who instantly cast the Dutch Adonis as her royal paramour. Together they sailed to America, where the 1912 film *Les amours de la reine Élisabeth* froze Tellegen’s smoldering gaze on celluloid and minted him a silent-era heart-throb. Off-screen, he wed soprano Geraldine Farrar; the marriage exited in 1919 as noisily as it had entered. In 1931 he published *Women Have Been Kind*, a memoir *Vanity Fair* quipped should have been titled *Women Have Been Kind of Dumb*. Plagued by illness and creditors, Tellegen retreated to the Cudahy mansion near Hollywood and Vine, where, on an October morning in 1934, he ended his saga with a pair of scissors.