The word snowbird may seem innocent enough, but for those who can associate "snow" with cocaine, the word takes on sinister and horrible aspects. A snowbird was a female cocaine addict, and silent film star Alma Rubens was that. "But it's too late now," she wrote a month before her death. "Nothing can save me."

She was right.

Alma Rubens was one of the most luminescently beautiful stars during the 1910s and 20s. She was one of Douglas Fairbanks' favorite costars. William S. Hart proposed to her. D.W. Griffith hired her without even a screen test after looking into those huge, doe-like eyes. But while her professional star glowed so brightly, her personal star was falling so quickly. She was hooked on drugs.

Somehow, someway, she managed to get down what was happening to her. The result was a series of article in the New York Daily Mirror which have been collected into a new book, Alma Rubens, Silent Snowbird, edited by Gary Rhodes and Alexander Webb, published by McFarland & Company, 2006.

Silent film fans know Alma's name and some of her roles, but all know about her tragic demise. The drugs that consumed Alma's every day for five years eclipsed her sixteen-year film career. Rhodes and Webb preface Alma's memoirs with a brief biography, then let Alma's writings tell the rest of the story. She wrote of her early life, her wonderful parents, her three disastrous marriages, the time spent in sanitariums, the harrowing ordeal of the California State Mental Hospital, the wild drug orgies in New York... While reading it, you wonder how she stayed alive as long as she did.

There is obviously some debate as to how the memoirs came into being. Did Alma write them herself? Dictate them? The point of view shifts every now and then to indicate it may have been some of both. One thing is clear -- no one could have made this up.

Wonderful book, scary book.

Rubens, Alma, "Alma Rubens, Silent Snowbird," Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Company, 2006, edited by Gary Rhodes and Alexander Webb.