A top star for half-a-dozen years in the early and mid-20s, Marie had a saucy gleam and a terrific figure; even in a getup as bizarre as this, she seems oddly contemporary.
Sadly, the coming of sound, the bottle, and bad luck brought the end of Marie's career and took her to a cheap roominghouse and, in 1937, death - attributed variously to alcoholism, some other kind of overdose, or starvation (whether self-induced as part of chronic dieting or through poverty).And there it would have been, without much else to say, had her story not been immortalized in 1978 by UK heartthrob Nick Lowe (the Jesus of Cool); he not only sensationalized the most grisly aspect of poor Marie's death, he misspelled her name as "Provost." Still, it's a pretty terrific track...
Later biographers went on to dispel that rumor and say that her dog was frantically biting her, trying to wake her up, but Kenneth Anger didn't help things much ...
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