Rubye De Remer

Biography

Another in the parade of glamorous Ziegfeld Girls who briefly laid claim to fame and fortune in Hollywood, was Rubye De Remer. The great Flo himself dubbed her "the most beautiful blonde since Venus". Ravishing Rubye won a New York beauty contest in May 1916 and afterwards modeled for the renowned illustrator Harrison Fisher. The story goes, that a friend persuaded her to try her luck on the stage. After a spell with a theatrical troupe in Dayton, Ohio, she returned to the Big Apple and successfully auditioned for the Follies. Rubye was featured in "Midnight Frolic" in 1918, then had a season dancing and speaking dialogue in the Weber and Fields revue "Back Again". In between her stage commitments, she also sidelined in movies and had ambitions of becoming 'a serious actress'. Rotogravure images of her in top U.S. fashion magazines lured women to beauty products. Between 1917 and 1923, Rubye starred in twenty-two pictures for various studios, including Fox, Goldwyn, World Film and J. Stuart Blackton's independent company. One of her first features, the fruity melodrama The Auction Block (1917), in which she played a country girl to be 'auctioned off' by her evil parents, actually turned out to be a significant critical and box-office hit. This could hardly be said about many of her subsequent outings, in which her presence required decorative qualities and the modeling of extravagant gowns and priceless jewellery, but not acting ability. Rubye came to lament her situation in a 1919 article in the Washington Post entitled "Beauty Often a Handicap". Whether she could have become a 'serious actress' or not is debatable, but she was certainly destined not to be taken seriously, at least by producers. Rubye's screen career thus ended after just six years. She vanished into relative obscurity for thirteen years. Then she made an unsuccessful attempt to get back into films. She looked lovely as ever, but her comeback in The Gorgeous Hussy (1936) was in too small a role to make any headlines. With the death of her second husband, the coal magnate Benjamin Throop, Rubye retired to 'Sunkist', her mansion at the highest point of the Hollywood Hills and quietly faded from public consciousness.