FRANCIS X. BUSHMAN IS ALL OVER BALTIMORE
One of the things I love is history, and I love finding trivia about my hometown of Baltimore (Maryland, that is, and not Baltimore, Ireland or Baltimore, Ohio). You know the town I’m talking about…it’s the one where the Mayor made national headlines when he jumped into the harbor as a publicity stunt…the town that has one of the highest murder rates in the USA, and spawned two TV-series that reflect that fact from ex-Sun Paper reporter David Simon, Homicide: Life On The Street and The Wire, respectively…it’s where Jada Pinkett-Smith went to high school… where John Waters makes all of his pictures and Barry Levinson makes only some of his pictures…
Yeah. That Baltimore…
A few years ago I got curious about a statue that is across the street from the Baltimore Museum of Art, so I did a little digging and discovered that the man who posed for the figures was once a Hollywood movie star.
Turns out that man was one of the stars of the 1926 BEN-HUR, Francis X. Bushman. Not only that, he was born in Baltimore, too. Bushman, who first acted in motion pictures in 1911 and became the first major male dramatic star of cinema’s early days, was born January 10th, 1883 and he lived in northwest Baltimore on Argyle Street.
Best remembered as Messala opposite Ramon Navarro’s Juda Ben-Hur, Bushman, at the height of his fame, returned to Maryland and lived on a nearly three hundred acre estate he called Bushmanor in the Greenspring Valley area. At the time, it was reported that he was earning almost a million dollars a year. (Not bad for 1920’s money!) Considered a heart-throb for millions of female fans, his fortunes changed when it was revealed that he had a secret marriage, and his leading man status was never recovered. He would soon be eclipsed by stars like Rudolph Valentino and his BEN-HUR co-star, Ramon Navarro.
When visiting Baltimore, you can see three of the surviving public statues that Bushman posed for early in his career, before becoming a star. In 1911, the French sculptor Mercie discovered the handsome and muscular Bushman at the Maryland Institute College of Art and asked him to pose for the statue of another famous Marylander, Francis Scott Key. The statue of the composer of the national anthem, The Star Spangled Banner, was erected on Eutaw Place. Other statues modeled on Bushman’s face and physique followed: the sculpture of Lord Baltimore (at the Court House on Saint Paul Street), Glory Victus (Mount Royal Avenue), and the Confederate Soldiers and Sailors Monument (Charles Street and Wyman Drive, across from the Baltimore Museum of Art, the statue that started my casual inquiry of who, what, and where).
Bushman enjoyed a long career in show business. He played in radio soap operas, had supporting character parts as he grew older (SABRINA, with Humphrey Bogart, in1952), even some second-rate pictures (THE PHANTOM PLANET, 1961) and many television shows. Among others, he appears in two episodes of the Batman series starring Adam West in the 1960’s playing Mr. Van Jones, who wants to pay The Riddler to capture Batman and Robin so they’ll star in a silent film he wants to make.
Francis X. Bushman, once considered the “handsomest man in the world” by his adoring female fans, died in 1968 at the age of 83 in California. He is buried in Forest Lawn Cemetery.
BRIEF FILMOGRAPHY: Romeo and Juliet (1916), The Marriage Circle (1924), Dangerous Traffic (1926), Ben-Hur (1926), Dick Tracy (1937), Love Crazy (1941), Wilson (1944), The Bad and the Beautiful (1952), Sabrina (1954), The Phantom Planet (1961).
