Merry Murray

Last week Showman Billy Rose put on his third revue at his two-year-old Manhattan nostalgia palace, the Diamond Horseshoe cabaret. For this show Rose dug up several pre-and-early-'20s cinema stars. Master of ceremonies was grey-haired Carlyle Blackwell, who was a notable glamor boy during the Wilson Administration. The lush Nita Naldi, whose heroic scale bust was a feature of Rudolph Valentino's Blood and Sand, gave a smoldering recital of Kipling's The Vampire. Shimmy-shaking Gilda Gray didn't attempt the racking vibrations of her youth, but heaved and rolled through a less exacting danse du ventre.

But the star who really strutted her antique stuff was Mae Murray. Her platinum blondness and pouting "bee-stung" lips first got rave notices in the Ziegfeld Follies of 1908. One of the wildest waltzes in cinema history was her fling with John Gilbert in The Merry Widow in 1925. Since then she has fluctuated between a fortune of $3,000,000 and, she claims, nights on a park bench.

Last week at the Diamond Horseshoe, Mae Murray again began dancing the Merry Widow waltz, with Georges Fontana of the sleek '20s dancing team of Moss & Fontana. The featherweight toast of the 1908 Follies has long since moved into the middleweight division, but as she swooped, swirled and was flung through the air the house came down, and Billy Rose knew that he had a waltzing hit and the nostalgic smash of his career.

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