Mexican actress Lupe Vélez made 45 films in her 36 years on this Earth, acting with nearly all the top performers of the silent era by the time she was 21.
Lupe Vélez in magazine Cine Mundial (1933).
And yet, 80 years since her death in 1944, if Vélez is remembered at all it’s for an unfounded rumor published by “Hollywood Babylon” author Kenneth Anger in 1965. His book, packed to the gills with salacious crime scene photos of murder victims and unverified “true” stories about Hollywood’s classic film stars, sought to tell the “real” story behind Vélez’s untimely death by suicide at the age of 36.
Setting the scene, he wrote:
The bed was empty. The aroma of scented candles, the fragrance of tuberoses almost, but not quite masked a stench recalling that left by Skid-Row derelicts. Juanita traced the vomit trail from the bed, followed the spotty track over to the orchid tiled bathroom. There she found her mistress, Senorita Vélez, head jammed down in the toilet bowl, drowned.
Lupe Vélez died by drowning in her own toilet. It’s a disproven rumor that has endured forever, even popping up in television shows like “Frasier.” It’s another painful example of how Hollywood racism sought to control the narrative of Vélez’s career. It’s not surprising, it had been happening throughout Vélez’s entire life. Born María Guadalupe Villalobos Vélez in July of 1908, the young girl eventually dubbed “Lupe Vélez” was raised in a large home as the daughter of a colonel in Porfirio Diaz’s army. She eventually went to San Antonio to study English and learned how to sing and dance.
She began her career in Mexican vaudeville revues starting in the 1920s when she was just a child. Her father, ashamed of what she was doing, didn’t want her to continue. So the young Lupe used her mother’s surname of Vélez to keep performing. She soon became a sensation in her native Mexico, and with success came many of the things Vélez would become famous for in the U.S. She cultivated a fiery, tempestuous personality and engaged in feuds with fellow female performers.
Douglas Fairbanks and Lupe Vélez in “The Gaucho” (1927). University of Washington Libraries, J. Willis Sayre Photograph Collection Ph Coll 200
It was around 1927 that Hollywood came calling for Vélez and, after doing a few short films, she starred in the Douglas Fairbanks-starring actioner “The Gaucho” (1927). (Interestingly, Fairbanks would become a key discoverer of ethnic actresses; he also gave Asian-American actress Anna May Wong her start with 1924’s “Thief of Baghdad”). It was from here that Vélez would play a string of similarly constructed roles, leaving Hollywood to give her names like the “Mexican Hurricane,” “Mexican Wildcat” and “The Hot Tamale.”
Adding insult to injury, despite Vélez proficient English, interviews with her would often write her quotes in an exaggerated Latino accent to illustrate she was a foreign immigrant. An example in a 1934 issue of Movie Classic Magazine discussing her marriage to “Tarzan” star Johnny Weissmuller shows this off while also emphasizing another facet of Vélez’s public persona, her ability to mix violence and sexuality:
Eet weel be the fightingest marriage Hollywood has ever seen. But divorce? Nevair! I weel keel any judge who tries to take my Johnnee away from me.
It was easy for people to become enthralled by Vélez’s fraught relationships. Before marrying Johnny Weismuller she’d engage in a public affair with actor Gary Cooper, and when those relationships turned sour the press engineered many stories to illustrate Vélez’s extreme lover scorned persona. Unconfirmed stories persist to this day about Vélez shooting a gun at Weissmuller as he got on a train, that Cooper suffered physical attacks, and that, in a fit of jealous rage, Cooper strangled Vélez’s parrot for calling him “Gary.”
Gary Cooper and Lupe Vélez in “The Wolf Song” (1929).
On the surface, these stories sound funny but it all worked against Vélez, undermining the movies she made and the strides she was making in Hollywood. In 1939 she starred in “The Girl From Mexico,” a typical opposites attract narrative about a Mexican girl who falls in love with an all-American boy. With the U.S. set to enter WWII, the story appealed to the country’s Good Neighbor Policy. The film was such a success it spawned seven additional films in what would be called the Mexican Spitfire series. The films have a standard formula: Vélez’s Carmelita and her husband, Dennis, are happy until a miscommunication tears them apart. Many of the plots would be mimicked in the likes of the 1950s sitcom “I Love Lucy.”
Gary Cooper and Lupe Velez in “The Wolf Song” (1929).
But to watch Vélez act in these movies is to witness someone with true comedic timing. She can scream and act wild, in two languages, but so many of her line readings are genuinely funny. She presents Carmelita as no wilting flower but a woman who enjoys boxing and other typical male activities; many of these things were also Vélez’s favorite activities. More importantly, the audience had so much fun watching Vélez that it was always disappointing when she’d go back to her boring American husband. “She didn’t need her American boyfriend, who later became her husband,” said author Luis Reyes about Vélez in a 2022 interview.
Even in other films like 1934’s “Hollywood Party,” wherein Vélez holds her own against Laurel and Hardy in a routine involving an egg, the actress understands how to perfectly execute a punchline. She understood comedy and while she did play up her Latina qualities, the audience is never meant to laugh at her—the joke is how the stodgy Americans react. And those same Americans were Vélez’s undoing. Unlike her fellow Mexican actress, Dolores del Rio, Vélez found herself mired in B-pictures in spite of her silent film successes in drama and her 1940s comedies. As Hollywood in Color creator Diana Martinez said in 2022, “Dolores is untouchable, she’s beautiful. She’s up on this pedestal, whereas Lupe is your homegirl.” But in spite of this relatable quality, Hollywood also saw Vélez as vulgar, brass and trashy in contrast to del Rio’s more white-passing and elegant looks.
In a way, Vélez was her own worst enemy. By trying to poke fun at herself and America’s interrelationship with Mexico, the actress was presented as only able to play derivatives of herself (still a pejorative phrase lobbed onto many minority performers). Kenneth Anger’s mean spirited fabrication about her suicide hasn’t helped matters. But Vélez’s work deserves a cultural reevaluation. She’s funny, she’s sweet and she showed how hard comedy could be. To watch her is to not see a whirling dervish but a woman who felt 100%. Whether in action, comedy or drama, her feelings are all-consuming on the screen and the audience can’t help but be enthralled by her.
The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the writer.
