Rave’s autobiography, Part I

Rave told me versions of this story again and again and again. She wrote many plays during the time I knew her, and apparently many more are in a storage unit her son pays for, but she never tried to have them produced. I once staged a reading of a one-woman show she wrote, and it attracted a full house at the university where we held it. Wonderful actors wanted to be in it because we were paying $100 a week, and they needed paid work to keep up their Actor’s Equity cards. Plus the university’s name added a cachet.

So she identified with the pseudonymous playwright, she changed her pseudonym once (unnecessarily, I think), and then that’s it. After her father died young, shortly following his first and only Oscar nomination, she died with him in a sense. Or at least her artist self seemed to. I’ll go into her marriages later, but she was carried off into marriage and a life raising a son, and time just seemed to bury her.

BIO: Rave ____ was born in Los Angeles, California. Her parents built one of the first houses in Beverly Hills. It still stands, at __________ (Editor’s note, it has since been torn down, but this was written circa 2005. I am not identifying it because I’m keeping her identity a secret). Rave had four plays produced professionally under a pseudonym in Los Angeles, California, under the name ________, at the Ethel Barrymore Theater, New York City, and two in Dallas, Texas. She changed pseudonyms for the last one. The reason: A famous Irish playwright of the 1890s had the same name, so Rave changed her name to the new one when the last play was produced.

Her father was a Director of Photography at _________ Pictures from the mid 19-teens until the late 1930s, when he went over to __________ Pictures. His last film, with Elizabeth Taylor, was nominated for an Academy Award for Photography, but lost to another movie.

He died too young.