Unqualified Offerings

Happy, if that’s the word, Marie Provost Day, when we remember the sad fate of screen actress Marie Prevost (the real spelling) and the classic if not entirely accurate Nick Lowe song memorializing her sad demise:

Marie Provost did not look her best
The day the cops bust into her loneiy nest
In the cheap hotel up
on Hollywood West July 29
She’d been lyin’ there
for two or three weeks
The neighbors said
they never heard a squeak
For hungry eyes that could not speak
Said even little doggie’s have got to eat

I learn via the Elvis Costello mailing list and Wikipedia today that, pace Lowe, Prevost was Canadian, not a New Yorker. Nor did the talkies kill her career. Alcoholism and depression led to disordered eating, the whole combination bad news for a star whose sex appeal was as important to her career as her acting. In the end, Marie starved to death. Her “hungry little dachshound,” memorialized by Lowe, did not. Wikipedia construes the dog’s role less coldly than the Jesus of Cool, noting that

the police report stated that her pet dachshund “had chewed up her arms and legs in a futile attempt to awaken her.”

Perhaps the police were correct. Lowe’s song remains great for the moment when the false bottom drops out from underneath his cynicism, leaving the abyss beneath:

she never meant that much to me
but now I see
Poor Marie

So say we all.