Reading about Arkansans who lived 100 years ago, it's easy to forget how dead these people are.
All of them are more and less long gone; but as I come across evidence of their lives in newspaper archives, the dead seem less and less dead. So, there are degrees of deadness, figuratively speaking.
Also speaking figuratively, it's honest to call someone "more dead" or "less dead" than someone else.
Case in point: Ouida Bergere Rathbone, who has inspired three recent Old News columns, is less dead than her mother.
Both women are, literally, equally dead. Ouida died on Nov. 29, 1974, in a hospital in New York. We could, in theory, get in our cars and drive to Hartsdale, N.Y., to stand before her grave at Ferncliff Cemetery and Mausoleum. Also, we can get in our cars — as I did last week — and drive to Oakland and Fraternal Historic Cemetery in Little Rock to stand before the grave of Lou Ida Branch.
The sun beat down on Oak Avenue near the cemetery's western fence, and traffic came and went on Barber Street. I found a handsomely carved stone monument wide enough for two. The reverse of the monument bears the name Branch under several gray-green rosettes of lichen as wide as my hand and dotted prettily with minute fruiting bodies.
Beside Lou Ida lies Ouida's father, Stephen Walker Branch. Their names and dates are cut deeply and in an identical style. Their narrow grave depressions — the amount the soil sinks as a coffin disintegrates — are almost equally depressing. They seem quite dead to me.
But their dead daughter seems vivid. Not so vivid, though, as her husband Basil Rathbone (1892-1967). He lives on audio-visually in his many movies and voice recordings.
DEAD NAME
Ouida dropped her girlhood identity, Eula May Branch, in the 1910s. But newspaper reporters and movie theater operators at Little Rock refused to let "Eula May" die out; they remembered that the exotic Ouida Bergere used to be Eula May every time she or one of her movies came to town.
In 1931, a Little Rock theater proved that many people recalled Eula May. Sam B. Kirby, ad manager for the Arkansas Theater, held an essay contest that challenged fans to name the former Little Rock girl married by actor Basil Rathbone. Also, the essayists had to state in no more than 100 words why they admired Rathbone.
Gertrude Green of 211 E. 15th St. won $10 in gold, and 17 people won free movie tickets.
Folks remembered Eula May because Ouida Bergere continued to visit family in Little Rock; and when her mother (maiden name Lou Ida Williams) traveled to Texas to visit her brother and sister at Amarillo, Ouida sometimes joined her. The Arkansas Gazette's and Arkansas Democrat's gossipy society columns noted comings and goings.
Also, Ouida's brother, Bernice Cleveland "B.C." Branch (1890-1974), was busy keeping her memory going. B.C. began to seem a lot less dead when I looked him up in the archives. He died on Christmas Eve, for instance.
B.C. was 23 when he married 18-year-old Frances L. Giles in spring 1912, and they had a son in the fall of 1913. Their address was his parents' home: 1501 Rock St. The baby does not appear to have survived childhood.
B.C. worked as a railroad clerk while living with his father and mother, but most of his life he was a traveling salesman.
"Miss Ouida Bergere" descended from New York in May 1914 to spend 10 days at 1501 Rock. She was then employed as one of two female scenario writers with Pathe Freres and about to move to Paris, according to the Gazette, which quoted her announcement that she didn't have time "for parading about in the cause of woman's suffrage."
The Gazette volunteered:
Miss Bergere, however, all who know her will admit, is enabled to overcome many of the obstacles that beset women who have aspirations. She is young. She has dark brown eyes. Her disposition is temperamental and she is in love with her work.
Also, Ouida had "a faculty for holding the friends that she so readily makes." She didn't throw people away.
When another Maddox Seminary graduate, Rhy Alexander, moved to New York in 1916 to break into acting, Ouida got her a job at Pathes.
In 1918, something even more telling happened: B.C. and Frances Branch of North Little Rock named their second child, a girl, Ouida Bergere Branch. Judging from descriptions of the Basil Rathbone Collection at Boston University, this daughter was nicknamed "Little Ouida."
A BAD YEAR
In May 1920, B.C. — a traveling salesman for the National Biscuit Co. living at 2510 Arch St. — visited Ouida in New York. Then he toured Niagara Falls, Atlantic City, Boston and Washington. Meanwhile, back at home, he was declared bankrupt, and the bankruptcy referee met with his creditors.
And their mother, Lou Ida Branch, was an invalid taking the waters at Hot Springs.
Mrs. George Fitzmaurice (Ouida Bergere), still the former Eula May in print, came and went and came and went. In August, she visited Hot Springs before leaving for Paris.
On Nov. 1, 1920, 62-year-old Lou Ida died of "malnutrition," one year and seven days after an appendectomy and surgery to remove a gallstone, according to her death certificate. Her funeral was at the Healey & Roth Chapel in Little Rock, and the Rev. Harry Knowles read the service; but she wasn't buried right away. They kept her body in a receiving vault at Oakland until her daughter arrived from Europe.
We can imagine Ouida's ocean passage and that long train to Little Rock.
GONE TO TEXAS
In 1921, the biscuit company made B.C. head of its sales operations in Dallas. So he moved his family, and 76-year-old Dad went with them. But they continued Little Rock associations. For instance, B.C. kept up his membership in the Western Star Masonic Lodge.
When Stephen Walker Branch died in December 1936, a notice in the Fort Worth Star-Telegram identified him as "the father of Mrs. Basil Rathbone, wife of the actor." If Ouida attended her father's burial in Oakland cemetery, Little Rock newspapers didn't notice.
LITTLE OUIDA
B.C. retired from General Foods' sales department. He died at age 83 in December 1974 and was buried in Dallas. His wife, Frances, died there in February 1977.
Little Ouida (1918-1998) led a surprising life. In a small report that once again revived dim memories of Eula Branch, the Gazette's Among Ourselves column of Feb. 29, 1960, reported that Ouida Branch Wagner had an interesting job.
She was a fashion adviser with British Overseas Airways Corp. and an expert who made appearances around the nation at fashion shows and such. She had graduated from The Hockaday School in Dallas and completed her education in Europe — courtesy of her aunt, Mrs. Basil Rathbone.
There is more information to be found about Ouida Bergere Branch that would bring her to life, as it were. For example, in 1964, Ouida Branch Wagner remarried and moved to England. Her new husband, David Bruce Huxley (1915-1992), had been attorney general of Bermuda.
David had famous half-brothers, including 1963 Nobel laureate Andrew Huxley (1917-2012), a British physiologist who figured out how an electrical impulse travels through a nerve cell. His half-brother Sir Julian Huxley (1887-1975) was an evolutionary biologist and a proponent of eugenics.
Another of Little Ouida's half brothers-in-law was Aldous Huxley (1894-1963), author of nearly 50 books including the deathless "Brave New World."
Some dead people live on in stories we can tell about them. They are really, most sincerely, not completely dead until we stop.
This is the fourth Old News column about the LIttle Rock girl named Eula May Branch who grew up to be Mrs. Basil Rathbone, Hollywood hostess extraordinaire. To read the other parts:
April 11: arkansasonline.com/418eula
April 18: arkansasonline.com/425may
May 25: arkansasonline.com/52party
If the photo gallery isn't showing, click here: arkansasonline.com/418ouida
Email:
cstorey@adgnewsroom.com
Lichen clings to the monument of Stephen Walker Branch and Lou Ida Branch, parents of Ouida Bergere Rathbone. (Arkansas Democrat-Gazette/Celia Storey)Gallery: Ouida Bergère aka Eula May Branch
