LEWISTON – At the end of May in 1934, actor Lew Cody — a matinee idol renowned for his way with women and beloved by the film community — partied on a California beach in Malibu with film star friends like Buster Keaton before returning home to his Beverley Hills mansion.
Two days later, the popular and famously high-living movie star, who had appeared in more than a hundred films during Hollywood’s Jazz Age, was laid to rest following a low-key ceremony in a family plot in Lewiston’s St. Peter’s Catholic Cemetery.
Film actor Lew Cody. “Who’s Who on the Screen,” 1920
Born in 1883 to a Franco-American family in Waterville, the once prominent Cody played a big role in creating the atmosphere of glitz and glamour in Hollywood that helped it become the nation’s film capital.
He knew everybody. And everyone knew him, a friend to all, always quick to offer a cocktail to a visitor and just as quick to accept one.
By all accounts, Cody, who married actress Dorothy Dalton twice and film star Mabel Normand once, lived large.
He appeared in movies with a collage of legends, among them Ginger Rogers, Clark Gable, John Wayne, Gloria Swanson, William Holden, Norma Shearer, Lon Chaney, Joan Crawford and Ronald Colman.
On the walls of his Beverly Hills mansion were paintings of some of Cody’s pals, including former Mayor Jimmy Walker of New York City, Ethel Barrymore, Gable, Swanson, Keaton and Fatty Arbuckle.
He kept a dressing room door inside his home on which many of the era’s stars carved their autographs, including Rudolph Valentino, Constance Talmadge and Lloyd Hamilton.
After his death, an auctioneer found that Cody owned scores of suits, 23 pairs of shoes, 29 hats, 53 shirts, 27 pairs of pajamas and 40 ties. He had two custom-built cars in his garage.
He didn’t have any children, just a sister back in New Hampshire who inherited everything.
It’s not clear if Cody ever lived in Lewiston. But his grandparents and father did.
A PLAYBOY, ON-SCREEN AND OFF
Tagged a “he-vamp” by overeager publicity agents, Cody relished his reputation as a ladies’ man.
“The girl is yours when you kiss her,” he once said, “until you meet the next one.”
Always happy to portray himself as a cad on film or in real life, Cody told a writer for Photoplay in 1919 talking about his role as a vampire in “For Husbands Only.”
“A male vampire exists because all women want to be a man’s last love, not his first,” he said. “Women dislike amateurs. They don’t care to be practiced on.”
Cody mentioned that “life began with a man and a woman in a garden. The game goes on, that’s all.”
Poster for the film “A Parisian Romance” starring Lew Cody.
“Incidentally,” he added, “I’ve noticed it didn’t take Eve long to get out of the garden when she found there was only one man there.”
Cody said, ”The ideal male vampire would combine the American’s punch, the Englishman’s subtlety and the Frenchman’s suavity.”
Cody’s views may be outdated, but he was portrayed as wowing woman in his time.
A trading card featuring Lew Cody put out by Wills Cigarettes in the 1920s. Private collection
The Los Angeles Times in 1918 called him “that famous professional lover of filmdom” and exclaimed that his “manly chest has during the past few months been the official resting place of such noted film stars as Mae Murray, Gladys Brockwell, Gail Kane and Mabel Normand.”
In 1919, The Wichita Eagle in Kansas and many other newspapers reported that “Lew Cody Seeks Six Pretty Girls.”
The story said Cody “wants to use them in a new picture now being cast called ‘Mr. Don Juan,’ a title that is entirely self-explanatory.”
“He doesn’t care particularly whether they are blondes or brunettes so long as their eyes are dark and they have photographic possibilities,” the Eagle said.
The half-dozen selected, the paper added, would get a weekly salary and “the thrilling experience of appearing before the camera with Lew Cody, the bizarre fascinator of the silver screen, and of being wooed by him.”
The Times in 1919 said that “when you hear the sayings that are attributed to Cody, you might imagine him to be either a super-caveman or a sleuthful and guileful cynic, going about seeking whom he may devour among the fairer sex.”
The paper said Cody himself said he thought people attributed his sex appeal to his French background because French people were “supposed to be naturally endowed with the gift.”
In movie ads, Cody was quoted as saying, “I can win any girl that I can kiss.”
A 1920s postcard showing Lew Cody’s home near the studios in Hollywood. Private collection
HIS EARLY LIFE
Cody’s birthday is often confused, a common enough issue with movie stars trying to shave a few years off their age.
But his 1918 draft registration card, which he filled in, is clear.
Cody, who listed his occupation as “moving picture actor,” was born on Feb. 22, 1883.
He told a Lewiston Evening Journal editor, with whom he liked to fish, that he was born in Waterville to French-Canadian parents who spelled their last name Cote, in the French style.
Cody grew up, though, in Berlin, New Hampshire, where his father owned a drugstore. The son spent many hours outside of school as a soda jerk at a counter inside.
He headed off to school at McGill University in Montreal with the intention of becoming a medical doctor. But it didn’t work out.
Cody began acting on stage with stock companies in out-of-the-way locales before heading West to the little but growing colony of filmmakers in Los Angeles.
Gloria Swanson and Lew Cody starred in 1919’s “Don’t Change Your Husband.” Private collection
He married Dalton in California in 1911, before he’d gotten a break in film, divorced her a couple of years later, remarried her soon after and ultimately divorced her again in 1916.
It appears he first landed in a film in 1914, with a bit part in “Harp of Tara,” a two-reel silent drama set in Ireland.
But he quickly made the leap to prominence, co-starring in 1915’s “His Mother’s Portrait” with Margaret Gibson.
Though he continued a stage career and vaudeville career for at least a dozen more years, Cody soon became a familiar silver screen figure, often portraying an urbane bad guy or taking second fiddle to the leading man.
The Los Angeles Times once branded him “a fascinating villain.”
Cody headlined quite a few movies in the silent era and in the early years of talking films.
None of the movies he made, though, are well-known anymore. Many of them have vanished, a common fate for the celluloid of that era.
Since the day his servants found him dead in his bed, wearing purple pajamas, Cody, too, has slipped out of popular memory.
But it says something of the substance behind the man that he chose a burial in Lewiston, after a quiet ceremony that barred the stars he had surrounded himself with in life.
Though Cody lived in the spotlight, he wanted to spend eternity back home in Maine, at his parents’ side near a quiet, riverside road that in horse-and-buggy days had served as Lewiston’s lover’s lane.
The tombstone for actor Lew Cody at St. Peter’s Catholic Cemetery in Lewiston, bearing the family name’s original spelling. Sun Journal file photo
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