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* T A Y L O R O L O G Y *
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* A Continuing Exploration of the Life and Death of William Desmond Taylor *
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* *
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* Issue 36 -- December 1995 Editor: Bruce Long bruce@asu.edu *
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* TAYLOROLOGY may be freely distributed *
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CONTENTS OF THIS ISSUE:
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Ray Frohman Interviews:
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Charlie Chaplin
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Dorothy Gish
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Louise Glaum
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William S. Hart
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Ruth Roland
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Blanche Sweet
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Clara Kimball Young
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What is TAYLOROLOGY?
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TAYLOROLOGY is a newsletter focusing on the life and death of William Desmond
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Taylor, a top Paramount film director in early Hollywood who was shot to
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death on February 1, 1922. His unsolved murder was one of Hollywood's major
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scandals. This newsletter will deal with: (a) The facts of Taylor's life;
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(b) The facts and rumors of Taylor's murder; (c) The impact of the Taylor
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murder on Hollywood and the nation; (d) Taylor's associates and the Hollywood
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silent film industry in which Taylor worked. Primary emphasis will be given
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toward reprinting, referencing and analyzing source material, and sifting it
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for accuracy.
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In late 1919, reporter Ray Frohman interviewed some of the top Hollywood
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silent film stars of that year. Seven of those interviews are reprinted
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below, to provide some background into the Los Angeles silent film industry
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in which William Desmond Taylor worked. (Frohman's interview with Mary Miles
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Minter, also part of this series, was reprinted in TAYLOROLOGY 32.)
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Charlie Chaplin
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December 2, 1919
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Ray W. Frohman
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LOS ANGELES HERALD
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(When Charlie Chaplin, creator of ludicrous film divertissements that
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assuage the cares of a trouble world, was treated to a "pre-view" of Ray W.
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Frohman's interview with him for The Evening Herald--the first authentic
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interview Chaplin has granted for over two years, and the first dialogue
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between Chaplin and Doug Fairbanks ever recorded--Chaplin, the laughmaker,
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LAUGHED and said:
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"This is the first artistic interview I've ever had.
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"It is one of the very few articles ever written about me that really
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reveal me to the public."
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Blushing over the praise of himself he had read, the comedian added that
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"perhaps the writer was a little too sympathetic!"
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And then Charlie, who, as his "big brother" Doug says, "can't
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concentrate," pleaded to keep the "copy" "to read it again more leisurely so
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that I can enjoy it more.")
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If the KIDS could vote, CHARLIE CHAPLIN would be our next PRESIDENT!
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And if it's true, as Doug Fairbanks told Charlie in my presence, that in
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Sweden and Denmark, too, they consider Charlie in a class by himself, he may
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yet be King of Scandinavia!
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In fact, when the League of Nations gets to working and the Brotherhood
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of Man is a reality, my guess is that it's the internationally popular
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Charles Spencer Chaplin who'll be the first President of the World--in spite
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of his feet.
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Even at RIVAL studios, publicity men paid to lie for Charlie's
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competitors--if he can be said to have any--say freely, "Nobody's ever had
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the vogue that Chaplin has."
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The peerless Douglas Fairbanks himself says:
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"There is only ONE king in pictures--Chaplin; and only ONE queen--Mary
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Pickford. The rest of us must be content to be pretty good and compete with
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EACH OTHER!"
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No wonder my kneecaps vibrated as I chatted over an hour with Charlie
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Chaplin--and Doug Fairbanks, too, at the same time--out in darkest Hollywood.
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There we were, all in the same small room for one admission: Charlie
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and Doug and I--the king of comedy, the nonpareil light comedian, and a
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dictographic nonentity--talking our heads off, or, rather, talking Charlie's
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head off!
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Everybody knows Charlie joined Essanay in 1915, knows about his million-
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dollar contract with First National, and that he's now "one his own" and one
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of "The Big Four." Everybody's seen every Chaplin comedy from "The Bank," "A
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Night Out," "A Woman," "His New Job" and "Police" up through "A Dog's Life,"
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"Shoulder Arms" and "Sunnyside."
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In fact, since they say "Chaplin doesn't work" and call his producing
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concern out on La Brea "the century plant," we've all been content to go to
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see him, and him alone, over and over again in the same films!
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So I didn't has over with Charlie the well known facts of his pictorial
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biography.
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Doug and Charlie, with an occasional interpolation from me, talked and
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talked of Charlie's views on art and books and plays, on beautiful women and
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sunsets, on the Grand Canyon and whether or not a desert is beautiful, and
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everything else from cabbages to kings, from "Hamlet" to Doug's new funny
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overcoat; and on Charlie's professional methods and unprofessional soul--for
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he has one--and what he says he's trying to do to pictures and is doing and
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is going to do.
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And Eureka! Now I can tell the world for the first time WHY Doug smiles
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and smiles and smiles that famous smile of his!
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It's BECAUSE HE HAS PRIVATE "PREVIEWS" OF UNRELEASED IMPROMPTU CHAPLIN
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COMEDIES, every time he and his friend get together.
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For Charlie, I think most of us agree, on the screen is "the funniest
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man in the world."
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And at times during our chat he was twice as funny as that!
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And Doug--when he's "kidding" and playfully baiting Charlie and leading
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him on conversationally, or waxing Rabelaisian, or mimicking a noted English
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author for Charlie and then registering a lobe-to-lobe grin--is funnier than
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Charlie!
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And I might have been funny myself, for I was weak and helpless from
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laughter!
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Through the flimsy cheesecloth curtain of a window I saw for the first
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time--and recognized--the little smooth-shaven face of the off-screen
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Chaplin. It was thrust forward in a sort of cataleptic grin toward Doug, who
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was uttering one of his introductory "Do you know, Charlie's" in the deadly-
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serious resonant tones that he affects toward his little friend.
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"Hah!" quoth I to myself, waxing Shakespearian, "I have thee on the hip"-
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-and I was upon them.
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It was the REAL Charlie Chaplin.
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I do not mean the Chaplin you see on the screen, the last of the royal
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jesters, with all of us as his patrons, the beloved vagabond, who has been
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paid the sincerest flattery, that of imitation, by more people than any other
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man who ever lived--by little kids all over the globe, by folks at
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masquerades, by "would-bes" on "amateur nights," by "rival" screen
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"comedians," both Caucasian and Oriental.
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That Charlie, with his most active flexible cane and his dogs, his
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oddest derby constantly being tipped to cops--until the psychological moment
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arrives--and to fair women, his trick moustache and his loose-fitting
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shapeless trousers, and the biggest feet in Filmland as well--that Charlie
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every man, woman and child under the stars knows.
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He has probably been kicked and shot in the pants--on the screen--more
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than any other living man.
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The camaraderie this humblest screen character displays toward policemen
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and burglars, until the moment arrives for him to destroy them--for he can
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pick up his feet quicker than any man in Shadowland--is world famous. A
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captivating smile, an artless blush--and then an agile hoof--is the way
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Chaplin on the silver sheet, broke in a saloon or restaurant, handles
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striking policemen before they strike.
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And you are aware how chivalrous he is toward the fair sex; how his
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matchlike--not matchless--figure, and his inimitable--not immaculate--garb
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have captivated many a beautiful heroine.
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He can get more fun out of stepping in a waste basket--but what's the
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use? You know him.
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Let it suffice to say that Chaplin's smirks, shrugs and sucking together
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of his cheeks, his characteristic Chaplinesque gestures, his personal
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accoutrements and mannerisms are the most individual, distinctive on the
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shadow screen.
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But those, as Doug opined to Charlie and me, are merely "the externals,
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the trappings" of his screen art.
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"Our most subtle comedian," he has been called by the critic of an
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eastern magazine, the veteran of a million reviews.
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"Vulgar," say some folks who have seen Charlie spout food on the screen
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amidst the medley of mock romance, mock tragedy, mock adoration, mock
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courtesy that he "spills" in the comedies he ORIGINATES.
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But no "highbrown" has ever been able to sit through a Chaplin comedy
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without bursting involuntarily into spontaneous "Hah hahs!" right out loud;
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and cultured, intellectual college professors--wasn't Professor Stockton
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Axson, brother-in-law of President Wilson, one of them!--have publicly
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proclaimed him an ARTIST.
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However, the Chaplin I talked with, as I said, was not the screen
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Chaplin.
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Neither was he the make-believe-real Chaplin who USED to talk to
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interviewers before he made all the money he wants and decided that he didn't
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need any publicity. That Chaplin, I have one of his intimates' word for it,
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used to turn on the phonograph in his room and chat engagingly, ALWAYS
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CAMOUFLAGING HIS REAL SELF.
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The Charlie Chaplin who talked to me is the real, honest-to-goodness,
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personal, unprofessional, actual Charlie Chaplin, I give you my word for it.
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He was as artless, as "off his guard" as a three years' child who doesn't
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know the camera's there when you snapshot him.
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Charlie, you know, when it comes to being interviewed--which he hasn't
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permitted for YEARS--is what Fielding's eighteenth century bailiffs would
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have called "a shy cock."
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When famous newspapermen representing papers from all over the country
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with President Wilson's party called on him. Charlie stuck his head in the
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door, took one look, said he "had to have some air," and "ditched" them all--
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went out for an auto ride!
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When his own casting director, Edward Biby pleaded with him for an HOUR
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A MONTH for nation-wide magazine interviews, saying it would be worth a
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million dollars to Chaplin, Charlie merely waved a hand airily and said: "Oh,
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no, that's all right, that's all right!"
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But I found him a delightfully interesting conversationalist, a
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sensitive little aesthete who's well-read and well versed in art, a cultured
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little chap with artistic sensibilities, a rather deep thinker--though I
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won't vouch for the soundness of his theories--and withal a somewhat shifty
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or shifting one.
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Where the "shifts" came in, the mental sidestepping from one "highbrow"
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subject to another or from high to low, the "sacheting" to use a dancing
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term, of the gray matter in instinctive--and courteous--reaction to the
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conversation of others, were with Doug Fairbanks.
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For when talking with Charlie, the jovial "Smiling Doug" Fairbanks is
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not merely magnetic--he is HYPNOTIC! He holds his friend Charlie in the
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hollow of his hand.
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"I've been dreaming of London," mused Charlie, who was born near there
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only 31 short years ago and was in vaudeville there--for he became identified
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with the theater when he was seven years old. "I tried to show it to
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someone, but there was always fog or night or something--I couldn't show its
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beauties. But I would say 'WAIT--you'll see it.'"
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Charlie said he hasn't been back in dear old Lunnon since he attracted
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favorable notice in "A Night in an English Music Hall," as the lead in which
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he came to the United States before he made his picture debut, some years
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ago.
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But, pause! I didn't tell you how the real Charlie looks!
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He's a slender sapling, this artist in the neat gray-checkered suit and
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black knitted tie and yellow-tinted pleated shirt who lolled in a Morris
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chair chatting so naturally and vivaciously. He has curly black hair with
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touches of gray--a young man's gray--at the temples, and vivid blue eyes, and
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sensitive features like the person of high-strung temperament that he is.
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When he shows his perfect teeth in a grin--a charmed, fascinated,
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hypnotized grin--at his master, Doug, he has Lewis Carroll's Cheshire cat
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"backed off the boards."
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At times when his eyes shine and his face glows as he gets talking of
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his professional or aesthetic enthusiasms, Charlie becomes almost beautiful.
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And when he gets really "worked up," his disreputable LITTLE black shoes
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with they grayish tops twist, and his supple figure writhes, as his right
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hand helps him to express himself by graceful, powerful gestures.
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"I became a star when I'd been at Keystone SIX MONTHS," said Charlie in
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response to my question. "I was there about a year. No, that's not the
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world's record--with some people it takes only one picture. Look at the way
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Betty Compson's salary jumped after her work in 'The Miracle Man.'
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"Did I have 'awful struggles,' or fights with bosses to MAKE them star
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me? My struggles were over before I went into pictures."
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"After one picture the public fell on its face and worshipped him," said
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Doug. "I'm an admirer of yours, Charlie, even if you are a friend. And when
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I see you on the screen there's something goes from you to me, I feel an
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interchange.
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"It isn't what he DOES, or even how he does it, that makes you laugh,"
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"enthused" Doug to me. "When you watch his pictures it's the human dynamo
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WITHIN that you see. And evidently what he's giving us is what the public
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wants."
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"What I put into my pictures is what I WANT to do," supplemented
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Charlie.
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"Before I went into pictures, I felt repressed, I wasn't in my proper
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sphere. Now for the first time I'm doing what I want to do.
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"I get a feeling, from a play or somewhere, and then THINK OUT WHAT I
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WANT TO DO."
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Sometimes, say folks at his studio, where his own people never dare
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disturb him when he's "on the set" or on the job mentally, Charlie sits for
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as long as eight hours in solitude thinking up something the world--for his
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audiences are numbered by the hundred million--hasn't laughed at!
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"I got a feeling from reading Thomas Burke's 'Limehouse Nights,'"
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continued Charlie, "and the result was 'A Dog's Life'--working it right out,
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going through natural experiences and having the consequent reactions. It is
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a translation, though not in Burke's language or style, of course.
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"There is beauty in the slums!--for those who can see it despite the
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dirt and sordidness. There are people reacting toward one another there--
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there is LIFE, and that's the whole thing!
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"Look at Rabelais. Vileness? That's only his SUBJECTS, BUT--!
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"Writers have no STANDARDS of beauty. What IS beauty? It is
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indefinable!
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"Beauty is all WITHIN," continued Charlie after Doug quoted "Hamlet" by
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the yard. "I DON'T THINK ANYONE HAS EVER PAINTED A BEAUTIFUL WOMAN!"
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"Artists today put on the canvas a 'Follies' type--which people call
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beautiful. That sort of beauty is merely external. Look at the old masters,
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such as Van Dyke, and you see old women with their faces screwed up with
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wrinkles. It's the beauty that's WITHIN that counts."
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When Doug called him an admirer of Basil King's novels, Charlie did not
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dissent; and when Mark Twain was mentioned Charlie said: "Ah, now you're
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getting me back on my favorite topic.
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"I've been reading Waldo Frank's book of essays, 'Our America,'"
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continued Charlie. "He is DEEP! You think when you start out it's the
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ordinary fervor, but when you get into it--! And I caught something of
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myself in what he wrote about me."
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"Me, too," said Charlie, showing his dimples in a smile of assent, when
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Doug remarked that he thinks the mouth is the most expressive feature--though
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Charlie said he's seen some women with small mouths who were uglier than
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other women with large mouths.
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When Doug said to him: "You are not responsible for what you are able
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to do," meaning that Charlie's ability to produce mirth-provoking comedy is
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God-given, Charlie modestly remained silent, making a gesture of instant,
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impersonal agreement.
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Dimpling, he admitted that he "hates it more than anything else when
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they call me sentimental." Whether he meant in real life or reel life will
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ever remain an unsolved mystery.
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We talked of sciences. "A scientist must be a lover of life," said
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Charlie.
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Do you know that Chaplin has none of his excruciatingly funny stunts
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worked out on paper in advance, nor even the plot of his comedies prepared in
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"script"? He admitted it.
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"He takes an idea, a theme, and works it out by himself as he goes
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along," said his admirer, Doug, to his face, uncontradicted. "He's a remnant
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of an aristocrat going through all those adventures. Reel after reel WITHOUT
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SUBTITLES--ACTION!"
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"You are more HEART," returned Charlie, regarding Doug's screen work.
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And then Charlie sprung NEWS of a new departure in Chaplin comedies!
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Said he:
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"In the one I'm making now there's a whole reel of drama before I
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appear. I've got pathos, human interest, tragedy, humor--we've had that
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before--EVERYTHING in it! Yet it is all pertinent, constructive of the plot.
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It's a comedy DRAMA. That's what I'm going to do from now on.
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"Edna (Edna Purviance, his leading lady) is an OPERA SINGER in this one!
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I didn't have her commit suicide."
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It was a soul-wrenching effort NOT to call him "Charlie" but--
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"Mister Chaplin," I asked, "isn't it a terrific constraint for a
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sensitive man of artistic sensibilities and tastes like you to play a
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vagabond, a TRAMP?"
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At that, Doug Fairbanks exploded:
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"Why, he's naturally a BUM!" said Doug, uncontradicted by the smiling
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Charlie. "When he has a clean collar on it's Tom Harrington (Charlie's
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secretary) who's responsible!"
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Entirely aside from his alleged bumminess, "Spencer," as Doug called him
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once, fervently declared that he LIKES the smell of idoform--"the hospital
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smell," as it is popularly known.
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He averred that the reason why people aren't particularly fond of the
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fragrance of the skunk is simply because their ancestors for generations
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haven't liked skunks, and they think of the odor that's going to get on them.
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"You," he added, turning to Doug, "are particularly sensitive of odors."
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But we were getting quite Rabelaisian, weren't we! Perhaps I'd better
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tell you at once that Charlie also talked familiarly of Bill Sikes and Nancy,
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and thinks that "Los Angeles will eventually be a great artistic center."
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And ONCE Charlie's eyes blurred.
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There were tears in them.
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The face of the man who, say some who know him, works not for money but
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as a creative artist, and plans to retire from money-making screen work in
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about five years, trembled with silent emotion--whether modest shame or
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gratefulness, I know not.
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It was when Doug quoted someone as saying that people regard Charlie as
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the one and ONLY, "than whom" there is no one like.
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Something about that tribute touched the droll comedian's heart.
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PRAISE OF CHAPLIN MADE CHARLIE WEEP!
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CHARLIE CHAPLIN became, for that moment, a TRAGEDIAN!
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* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
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Dorothy Gish
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November 8, 1919
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Ray W. Frohman
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LOS ANGELES HERALD
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WAIT A MINUTE--EVERYBODY!
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In the name of Steve Brodie, give me a chance to explain how I "took a
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chance."
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Which starry sister of the Gish constellation should we have in our
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series? That was the question.
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The vivacious comedienne? Or the ethereal tragedienne--whom even her
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sister says is "so beautiful"?
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"BOTH!" say you?
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Ah yes, but--
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Separately, 'twould make this somewhat of a family party, wouldn't it?
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And together--
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"How happy could I be with either,
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Were t'other dear charmer away."
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Torn between two such "winners" in the same story, who could do justice
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to either?
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SO--I borrowed a coin from the boss and gambled with myself:
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"Tails"--Lillian.
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"Heads"--Dorothy.
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You, dear readers, who may not approve of my consulting the fickle
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goddess, had a "sure thing"! Both the Gishes are young, both are talented,
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and both are beautiful. YOU couldn't lose!
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"Heads" won--and so you have today the story of DOROTHY Gish, that
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rollicking tomboy of the screen.
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Lillian, at least a thousand pardons! It's tough on both of us to miss
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you, but Dorothy "slipped in" a lot about you--and it's "all in the family"
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anyway.
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And now that everybody's happy, let's go.
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It may not be too much to say that Dorothy Gish is attaining the highest
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art, for she is acting HERSELF.
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As the Little Disturber in Griffith's "Hearts of the World" some two
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years ago--that queer, saucy creature with the flexible hips and the mannish
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swagger, now making a moue, now kicking up a wicked heel--the maker of stars,
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the general public, first really "discovered" Dorothy Gish.
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|
Ever since, much to her regret, she has been doomed to wear that heavy
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black wig, in hot weather, beneath powerful lights in interiors; and much
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more to her regret, she has been the girl clown, as she was in "I'll Get Him
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Yet," "Nobody Home" and her other starring vehicles.
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How does she do it?
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How is it that this dainty cameo, this normal slender, blue-eyed girl
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with the "humorous mouth" can play the harlequin so well?
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Here's the answer: She's a mistress of screen "business."
|
|
True to the best clown traditions, Dorothy doesn't hesitate to make
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herself homely to be funny.
|
|
But a "close-up of Dorothy in person, during and after rehearsal at the
|
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Griffith studio in Hollywood, and the yarn of how she got her start and how
|
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she "arrived," as told by herself in delightfully natural fashion reveals
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|
that not merely "getting the most out of" stage business put putting HER OWN
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SELF on the screen is what makes "Dot" Gish what she is today.
|
|
For she is chic; she is piquant, she is "cute"; and she is not only as
|
|
"cunning" as she can be, but as pretty as she can be--another living
|
|
refutation of the popular fallacy that it is the photographer's art to which
|
|
screen stars owe their loveliness.
|
|
You'll find this natural comedienne--the sort of practical joker which
|
|
your family and every family has in it--rehearsing before ever it comes under
|
|
the camera her own interpretation of the good old "simple country maid coming
|
|
to the city to go on the stage" motif, under the wing of her director, Elmer
|
|
Clifton, with good-looking young Ralph Graves, ver-y villainous Charley
|
|
Gerard and a vamp or two as fellow conspirators.
|
|
She is wearing a simple, one-piece blue dress, white shoes and
|
|
stockings, and her own light brown hair in a pair of curls over each
|
|
shoulder, with hair-ribbons that don't match. Even her bangs are impromptu.
|
|
Drag her out into the sunshine, perch her on a lucky soapbox, have
|
|
anuzzer yourself, and she will tell you of her blighted life as follows:
|
|
"I was chased out of Dayton, Ohio, a few months after I was born.
|
|
Mother inflicted me on New York.
|
|
"A friend of hers said that she (the friend) could play the maid in
|
|
'East Lynne' if she could get a child to carry on, and applied for me.
|
|
Mother didn't like it, but we were rather hard up then and she let me go.
|
|
"So, at the age of 4, I got my start on the stage on the road as Little
|
|
Willie in 'East Lynne,' with Rebecca Warren. We opened somewhere in
|
|
Pennsylvania.
|
|
"I was in road shows till I was 9, playing child parts. One season it
|
|
was 'Her First False Step,' with Lillian in it, too. Several years I was
|
|
with Fiske O'Hara, the Irish tenor, and my last stage appearance was with him
|
|
in 'Deacon O'Dare.'"
|
|
Then the adorable Dorothy attended grammar school for three years at
|
|
Massilon, Ohio, where she lived with her aunt, and one year at Allegheny
|
|
Collegiate Institute, Alderson, W. Va., where the climate did such things to
|
|
her that her mother and sister stopped and burst into tears at their next
|
|
meeting. Reunited, the Gish trio went to Baltimore on a promised trip to New
|
|
York for the girls, Lillian wanting to go on the stage again and Dorothy
|
|
dittoing with all her might as she "had been on the stage so long."
|
|
Whom should they discover on the screen in Baltimore, in a Biography
|
|
film, "Lena and the Geese," but Gladys Smith! The girlish Gishes had been in
|
|
plays with the "three Picks"--Gladys, Lottie and Jack. Dorothy tells the
|
|
rest of the story thusly:
|
|
"I called at the Biograph studio on Fourteenth street to see Gladys
|
|
Smith. 'I guess you must mean Mary Pickford,' they said. Mr. Griffith said
|
|
Gladys could bring her friends in--we were in the lobby, as you weren't
|
|
allowed to go in--and I was introduced to him.
|
|
"I thought he was Mr. Biograph, as he seemed to have the 'say so,' and I
|
|
didn't catch the name. I thought there was a Mr. Vitagraph, too, as there
|
|
was a Mr. Edison.
|
|
"Lillian and I were both engaged as extras."
|
|
This was in 1912, when Dorothy was 14.
|
|
"Mary (Gladys) was leaving there for Mr. Belasco's 'A Good Little
|
|
Devil.' Belasco's manager, Mr. Dean, had been the manager of Rebecca
|
|
Warren's 'East Lynne' company when I was in it, and introduced me to Mr.
|
|
Belasco.
|
|
"Among us then, 'Belasco' was a name to tremble at, a god! I was so
|
|
fluttered and fussed! He told me later it was the funniest thing he ever
|
|
saw--Lillian and I kept trying to get back of each other.
|
|
"'You don't want to go on the stage, do you?' he said to me. 'You want
|
|
to go back to school.' I wanted to choke him--I thought I was so old.
|
|
Lillian became a fairy in that show on the road. He 'didn't have any part
|
|
young enough for me.'"
|
|
When Lillian left this company to go to the Pacific Coast to go into
|
|
pictures, Dorothy, paying her own way, and their mother had preceded her.
|
|
Lillian received a regular salary playing parts with the Biograph stock
|
|
company. Dorothy led a busy life as an extra: in the morning an Indian (a
|
|
blue-eyed Indian) squaw, in the afternoon an Indian man registering a puff of
|
|
smoke from his trusty rifle, later in the day a white lady in a sunbonnet.
|
|
Then, at 15, she went back to New York, succeeded in convincing Griffith
|
|
that she was worth $40 a week and first began to play ingenues.
|
|
"My age was always against me--it was the worst thing I had to put up
|
|
with," explained the veteran of 21 summers from her throne on the soap box.
|
|
"They'd always say: 'You're too young--you can't act till you're 35.'
|
|
"I wanted to be a tragedienne. I only wanted sad parts. When mother
|
|
read the press notices when I was on the road, saying I was a 'comedienne,'
|
|
the tears rolled down my checks. I thought comedians had to have black on
|
|
their faces, or red beards, and weren't nice."
|
|
Dorothy has followed the Griffith banner ever since her Biograph days--
|
|
into the Reliance and Majestic company, then into Triangle plays, where
|
|
Lillian and Dorothy--still wanting to be a tragedienne--were "starred" in
|
|
ingenue parts--and then out when he left.
|
|
Then came New York for a while, Mr. Griffith going to Europe "to take
|
|
some scenes in a war picture."
|
|
Then Lillian, who had a contract with him, went to Europe with her
|
|
mother. Later Dorothy was sent for. The result was "Hearts of the World."
|
|
"I had starred before, and I'd had quite a few coming parts, but I
|
|
wasn't interested in them," said Dorothy-o'-the-soapbox, discussing this
|
|
turning point in her and her sister's careers.
|
|
After this, including her present Paramount starring vehicles being
|
|
supervised by Griffith, it was always comedienne and black wig for Dorothy--
|
|
the latter, perhaps, to help differentiate her on the screen from Lillian.
|
|
"I used to 'kid' around at home," continued Dorothy, "and everybody
|
|
would say: 'Why don't you play YOURSELF?'
|
|
"'If you'd be yourself, instead of putting on all that heavy acting--'
|
|
Mr. Griffith said to me.
|
|
"It's hard to do! I don't know myself. I'm so young and self-conscious
|
|
--though I've got over most of that. In all these seven Paramount pictures I
|
|
HAVE been freer. I'd like to make people who see me in comic pantomime on
|
|
the screen feel the way Mark Twain makes his readers feel.
|
|
"BUT"--and at this point the Mark Twain "fan," who goes to the other
|
|
extreme and likes Victor Hugo, too, swallowed a couple of dashes--"they make
|
|
me play myself, and I wanted to be an ACTRESS!"
|
|
|
|
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
|
|
|
|
Louise Glaum
|
|
|
|
November 13, 1919
|
|
Ray W. Frohman
|
|
LOS ANGELES HERALD
|
|
"Vamps," they say, are "going out"--perhaps have already "gone out."
|
|
But LOUISE GLAUM, credited with being the original screen vampire,
|
|
HASN'T.
|
|
Louise is "going full blast," blossoming more and more in every picture
|
|
in the full luxuriance of her opulent charms.
|
|
But not as a "vamp," as the term is popularly used.
|
|
Louise is now a "vamp" with a moral, as it were. On the screen she's a
|
|
misled woman who reforms in the fifth reel, or is hit between the eyes by the
|
|
retribution to which the "vamp" in real life is heir.
|
|
Thus, she is no longer a "vamp," but a "portrayer of emotional roles
|
|
true to life."
|
|
Why Louise has not been snuffed out, but continues to wax in reputation
|
|
while "vamps" wane' what she herself things of "vamp" roles and their
|
|
passing; and her own explanation of regenerated vamphood, as sketched above--
|
|
that you will learn in the course of human events if you read on.
|
|
Alone, with no protecting escort of local Anti-"Vamp" leaguers, without
|
|
a special leased wire to the police station, sans even a coat of armor, I
|
|
tracked the original "vamp" to her lair! 'Twas at the Thomas H. Ince studio
|
|
at Culver City, where by special arrangement J. Parker Read, her manager, is
|
|
permitted to sick Louise on handsome leading man.
|
|
I expected ponderous seductive charms of the boa-constrictor type.
|
|
There are "vamps" and "vamps," of course, but "BEEF" predominates in the
|
|
physique of most of the modern successors of the singing sirens who made
|
|
Odysseus lash himself to the mast and stuff his sailor's ears with wax to
|
|
sail the gauntlet at their isle.
|
|
Instead, I found an attractive woman with an engaging manner positively
|
|
naive, a charming unassuming woman with a personality, a robust young woman
|
|
NOT AN OUNCE OVER WEIGHT!
|
|
She was meekly sipping tea from a thermos bottle, as the last reel of a
|
|
box lunch, in the seclusion of her dressing room, far from the madding and
|
|
vampable crowd.
|
|
And she was "FUSSED" TO DEATH!
|
|
Honestly, she was twice as scared as I was! Even if I do say it, as I
|
|
shouldn't.
|
|
There was a hesitant little catch in her voice as, unaffectedly, she
|
|
tried her faltering, modest best to give her testimony as to her "life and
|
|
works."
|
|
Her hands were clasped, instead of being outstretched for prey; and she
|
|
rubbed 'em together hard and often in a smiling effort to tell "the truth,
|
|
the whole truth, and nothing but the truth."
|
|
But the poor girl--the brazen hussy who had "lured away" Charley Ray and
|
|
"Bill" Hart and goodness knows how many more, many a time and often, upon the
|
|
screen--was so "fussed" that she didn't have a date in her system! Of course
|
|
it is historic, personal dates to which I refer.
|
|
She has beautiful features, dark brown eyes to match her hair--which was
|
|
blossoming in 999,999 little round curl-lets--rainbow-shaped eyebrows and a
|
|
dimple in her chin that would have made St. Simeon Stylites climb down off
|
|
his pillar and "follow her up."
|
|
Even if Sim hadn't felt like "stepping out," I'm sure Louise would have
|
|
Glaumed him because of her costume.
|
|
It was a sheer chiffon house gown in two tones, wine color and yellow,
|
|
cut rather low.
|
|
That lure deadlier than T.N.T., a LEOPARD SKIN girdle, was caught over
|
|
one perfect shoulder with a bejeweled oriental chain.
|
|
Slippers and stockings of gold made her 100 per cent DANGEROUS.
|
|
I persuaded Miss Glaum to take me out on her "set." We glimpsed an
|
|
$8000 setting with period furniture said to have been owned by a princess,
|
|
which Louise said she'd "like to move into." Beside the regulation "vamp"
|
|
"prop," a gigantic polar bearskin, stood a sedan chair which Louise "wants to
|
|
use as a private phone booth."
|
|
And there we found our nook.
|
|
It was a cozy corner in the lavish studio "set" adjoining, which Louise
|
|
inhabits during her current picture; and gosh, it was dark! Facing the set's
|
|
real stairs and real banisters--down which eight ladies had slid during the
|
|
making of a wild night scene resulting from too much cider-"hooch"--Miss
|
|
Glaum testified as follows:
|
|
"I have only done a few real vampire parts, according to the figurative
|
|
definition: 'One who lives by preying on others.' The term has been so
|
|
misused that any woman who does anything a bit naughty is now called a
|
|
'vamp.'
|
|
"If 'Zaza,' 'Camille' and 'Sapho' were done in pictures now, they'd call
|
|
'em 'vamp' plays; yet the greatest actresses played them and they were called
|
|
immortal. They were true to life.
|
|
"The women I now portray are bad to start with, but there are always
|
|
that kind in real life--people who make a mistake, do wrong, but later atone
|
|
for it. They are NOT vampires--women entirely bad. If a woman just makes a
|
|
mistake unintentionally, I don't believe she should be condemned for it.
|
|
that's what makes life interesting--people changing, characters developing.
|
|
"The term 'vampire' may and should die, but heavy emotional roles true
|
|
to life will never die--just as little curly-haired ingenues will never die.
|
|
"I'm not conceited enough to say I originated the 'vamp' on the screen--
|
|
it's hard to prove that anything's first.
|
|
"But about 1913, at Inceville in Topanga canyon, I first 'vamped' and
|
|
first starred in my first five-reeler, when five-reelers were new. It was
|
|
'The Toast of Death,' Mr. Sullivan's first story for Ince. They started it
|
|
as a two-reeler, then made it a five-reeler.
|
|
"It was so successful that they had Mr. Sullivan write for me later 'The
|
|
Wolf Woman,' since which I have always starred.
|
|
"Young Charley Ray, who started at Inceville about the time I did, and
|
|
whom I had led astray in several pictures, looked so pitiful in 'The Wolf
|
|
Woman' when he killed himself after I turned him out!"
|
|
So! This 'vamp' had a heart!
|
|
And no wonder they starred Miss Glaum. Charley's so good looking that
|
|
anyone who could vamp him--even on the screen--by that very fact would
|
|
demonstrate herself to be the champion of sirens, the "vamp" of "vamps"!
|
|
"The first thing I knew about being a 'vamp,'" Louise declared, "was
|
|
when I woke up one morning to read a newspaper notice calling me 'the peacock
|
|
woman' and a 'vampire.' The term wasn't used in titles, sub-titles or
|
|
advertising, but was probably invented by eastern critics. I didn't mind the
|
|
'peacock woman' part of it, as I wore the first peacock gown on the screen, I
|
|
think, and I have one in this picture, and I love peacocks.
|
|
"My first big emotional role was in a picture called something about
|
|
'Ashes.' It changed my whole type of acting. Mr. Ince saw the possibilities
|
|
in me, realized that I was better at that, and thereupon put me into dramatic
|
|
work. From then on, I played emotional roles or 'heavies.'
|
|
"I played a female 'Bill' Hart, with two little pistols, in 'Golden Rule
|
|
Kate' before such roles were common. I played wicked dance hall girls,
|
|
leading 'Bill' Hart astray, when dance hall girls were new. In 'The Aryan,'
|
|
with Hart for Ince, I was the bad girl who pretended to be good. 'Bill'
|
|
found me out and dragged me by the hair of my head."
|
|
For about a year and a half after "The Toast of Death," which she said
|
|
she'd "love to do again and make a big picture out of," and after which she
|
|
always "vamped," Miss Glaum "alternated." That is, as Ince was not yet
|
|
prepared to make features permanently, she played "heavies" with Frank Keenan
|
|
as well as Hart. Twice, she said, she left Ince, but has "never been a
|
|
success except on the Ince 'lot.'"
|
|
Her first three pictures produced under her present 3-year contract with
|
|
J. Parker Read are "Sarah," by Sullivan; "The Lone Wolf's Daughter," by Louis
|
|
Joseph Vance, and "Sex," by Sullivan.
|
|
Director Fred Niblo, handsome, curly-haired, pleasant, spruce, bowed
|
|
himself into the party at this juncture. He's the hubby and director of Enid
|
|
Bennett, you know. Anyhow, he tore Miss Glaum away from me to "vamp"--pardon
|
|
me, to "baby"--William Conklin in a scene before my very eyes and those of
|
|
Conklin's screen wife, pretty Myrtle Stedman.
|
|
And she certainly did it!
|
|
The seductive-looking Glaum, puffing at a cigarette, her mocking
|
|
laughter rising above the "soft music" of a violin and portable organ, was
|
|
alluring as the deuce! That is stating it mildly.
|
|
Ah! The enthusiastic Mr. Niblo has restored the lost Louise to give the
|
|
following resume of her earlier deeds:
|
|
"I went into pictures because I couldn't get a job in stock here.
|
|
Mother didn't want me to return east, where I'd been a stock ingenue, after
|
|
my little sister died. We lived on Pico Heights. My home has been in Los
|
|
Angeles most of the time, though I was born in the country near Baltimore,
|
|
Md., leaving there when I was about 4.
|
|
"After making the rounds of the studios for a few weeks hunting a job, I
|
|
started at Universal at $35 a week, as ingenue lead in one and two-reel
|
|
comedy dramas, not 'slapstick.' That was about a year and a half before 'The
|
|
Toast of Death.' I played opposite Eddie Lyons. Lee Moran was working in
|
|
those pictures.
|
|
"I know I wasn't very good at first, but I seemed to get along all
|
|
right, staying six or seven months. I was crazy to get into dramatic work,
|
|
and had applied to Ince. When he offered me a contract as ingenue at $50 a
|
|
week, I was the happiest woman in the world. So many were anxious to work at
|
|
Inceville that I felt highly honored.
|
|
"For about a year there I 'got by' in two-reel dramas--not my real line
|
|
of work, though I didn't know it then. For about $75 a week I went to the
|
|
Kalem company for four or five months, in which I cried nights for making
|
|
such a mistake, being such a fool as to leave Ince. A raise means nothing
|
|
unless you can progress artistically.
|
|
"He took me back, very repentant. I stayed with him during the time he
|
|
released through Triangle, and when he built and went to the present Goldwyn
|
|
studio at Culver City. When he went over to Paramount, I remained with the
|
|
new owners of his studio, and later I spent a year on the Brunton 'lot' on
|
|
the Hodkinson program."
|
|
Miss Glaum, who attended Berendo street school on Pico heights, said
|
|
that she never studied for the stage. When about 16, she "left home" as
|
|
ingenue with a cheap little road show, "Why Girls Leave Home." She got the
|
|
job through an employment agency, without experience, and received $25 a
|
|
week, furnishing her own gowns, which she made.
|
|
Even now she designs her own unusual gowns, spending a large part of her
|
|
salary for odd creations, including 20 changes in her current picture.
|
|
After reaching her goal, Chicago, Miss Glaum played ingenues in the
|
|
Imperial stock company there for a year and a half, playing in "The Lion and
|
|
the Mouse" and "The Squaw Man," among other plays.
|
|
Then, in a summer stock engagement in Toledo, she created the ingenue
|
|
role in "Officer 666." Its author, Augustin McHugh, her stage director in
|
|
Toledo, tried it out there before New York ever saw that successful farce.
|
|
Miss Glaum's picture debut followed a few more months in stock in
|
|
Chicago.
|
|
"An odd personality, wonderfully easy to get along with," is what her
|
|
manager calls the Glaum.
|
|
"In full 'vamp' regalia, wonderfully hard to tear away from," I'll amend
|
|
his motion.
|
|
I DIDN'T get away till Louise had introduced me to and said a good word
|
|
for everybody on the set, including her permanent and "most wonderful" camera
|
|
man, courteous Charlie Stumar.
|
|
"Remember!" said the original EX-"vamp," "I'm NOT 'vamping' nowadays, in
|
|
the erroneous sense of the bad 'vamp.' I'm cold-blooded and selfish on the
|
|
screen, but retribution comes and teaches a moral!"
|
|
MORAL: Ain't retribution wonderful!
|
|
|
|
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
|
|
|
|
William S. Hart
|
|
|
|
November 6, 1919
|
|
Ray W. Frohman
|
|
LOS ANGELES HERALD
|
|
Buffalo Bill is dead. But Bill Hart still remains. And not even in his
|
|
palmiest days--the days of his plainsmanship or the days of his showmanship--
|
|
did the famous former have an audience go great or a following so
|
|
enthusiastic as the famous latter.
|
|
If I expected to get a bullet through both ears and be snaked off my
|
|
feet by a well thrown lasso, I was disappointed.
|
|
For William S. Hard did none of these things when he greeted me.
|
|
He just looked kind of "sad but determined," as though he were accused
|
|
of being a stage-robber and didn't dare to defend himself.
|
|
Bill Hart's expression in real life is very much the same as it is when
|
|
you see him on the screen.
|
|
He is just Bill Hart. What more is there to be said about it? Of
|
|
course there is much more to be said about Bill, but about his appearance and
|
|
his expression--not another word.
|
|
And I'll say he's pleasant. Why, he didn't even knock me out and put
|
|
his foot on my chest before inquiring my business!
|
|
We have all seen in the films a rugged, gaunt individual with a face
|
|
like a mule's, so "hard-boiled" of mien as to be almost beautiful; and we
|
|
have seen this knight of the plains do goodly deeds until that face,
|
|
reflecting his homely, heroic virtues, has registered kindliness, even
|
|
tenderness.
|
|
He isn't always a cowpuncher with a barking "gat" in each fist.
|
|
Sometimes he's a lumberjack, sometimes he's a convict, sometimes a sea
|
|
captain, or a frontier preacher; but usually he's an outdoor man, and always
|
|
he's a HE-man, just as Galahad was a HE-man, virile and admirable.
|
|
I found out lately whey those homely, heroic virtues o'erspread the face
|
|
of the man who fittingly bears such sobriquets as "Blue Blazes Rawden," "The
|
|
Tiger Man," "Two-Gun Hicks" and "Shark Monroe."
|
|
It's because his intimate personal history--and his biography are as
|
|
full of humble incidents and homely lessons as Benjamin Franklin's, and
|
|
thrice as thrilling--shows that he himself HAS those simple virtues.
|
|
When you hear "Bill" Hart relate unassumingly his experiences and
|
|
beliefs, it's easy to understand how he "got started" and never stopped.
|
|
This rough-and-ready terror of "bad men" I discovered in a regular
|
|
civilized OFFICE at his studio in Hollywood, ready to pack up for going out
|
|
"on location" in the Mojave desert for 10 days. He was wearing "store
|
|
clothes"--a clean white shirt, neat gray pants, plain black shoes. The son
|
|
of a gun, to use the language, of Windy Gap and Los Hope, Ariz., was actually
|
|
riding a swivel chair!
|
|
Unless you consider the lack of a coat and collar the mark of a
|
|
plainsman, there was nothing of the wild and woolly about this quiet, polite
|
|
gentleman with the light brown hair, determined frown, light blue eyes, high
|
|
cheek bones, firm lips with thoughtful lines about them, and strong jaw.
|
|
Except that he averaged one "damn" and one "hell" to the minute, he
|
|
might have been his own gentle pinto pony with the feed bag on.
|
|
You've got to go back into his history a bit to understand "how Bill
|
|
Hart did it"; how this raw youth of 18, who had lived in Dakota territory
|
|
until he was 15, playing, riding bareback and shooting with Sioux Indian
|
|
kids, got his first stage job as a "super" at Drury Lane theater in London
|
|
and a few weeks later lied his way to New York into his first part in a road
|
|
show; and how he was first starred on the road in 1902 as John Storm in "The
|
|
Christian."
|
|
And then you'll want to know how in 1913, with an established reputation
|
|
in Shakespearean and classic drama and later in western roles, he refused an
|
|
offer to be featured in a Broadway production in 1914 to star, at less than
|
|
one-fourth the salary, in his first picture with Triangle.
|
|
Today, instead of being a star and leading man at three or four hundred
|
|
a week facing an average audience of 800, he stars before from eight to ten
|
|
million people a day in about sixty pictures being shown all over the world,
|
|
with--he won't tell how much salary, "because I don't wish to bunk the
|
|
public, and what's the difference?
|
|
"I inherited what little stage ability I have," said Mister Hart. And
|
|
if you'd talked to him you'd call him "Mister," too.
|
|
"My grandfather on my father's side was one of the greatest criminal
|
|
lawyers in England, John Gleason Hart. My father, Nicholas Hart, an Oxford
|
|
man who came to Newburgh, N.Y., where I was born, when he was a young man,
|
|
after going around the world before the mast, was a wonderful orator.
|
|
"That's the best talent in the world to inherit for the stage. A great
|
|
orator is necessarily a great actor. In his speech, his gesticulation, his
|
|
graceful postures in delivery, you have the elements of acting.
|
|
"From the time I was six months old till I was 15 we lived in Dakota
|
|
territory. I was playing with Sioux kids at their typical sports while other
|
|
boys of my age back in New York were playing baseball and football. I knew
|
|
and loved there, as a boy, the western characters I played on the stage after
|
|
playing Cash Hawkins in 'The Squaw Man' with Faversham in New York in 1905.
|
|
"I'd ridden eight miles on a pony to a little Dakota school with five
|
|
pupils, but I'd had little formal education when my parents took me to New
|
|
York at 15. At public school they thought me stubborn--and I can hardly
|
|
blame 'em--and had my father before the board of education to explain.
|
|
"I had Indian habits. I wouldn't say 'Good morning.' If they'd talk to
|
|
me, I'd turn and walk away, as an Indian does. An Indian doesn't say
|
|
'Goodby' or "Go to hell,' or anything. I was stoical.
|
|
"My father, who was a highly educated man, decided I'd better be tutored
|
|
at home. I was a big strapping kid, anyhow, among a lot of children. For a
|
|
year and a half he 'crammed' me, and I passed the scholastic examination for
|
|
West Point. You needed 70 to pass, and I got 70.20.
|
|
"He ground it in, but I was always great on application--anything I went
|
|
after I stayed with till I got.
|
|
"I was crazy to go to West Point so I could get back West as an officer.
|
|
I'd always lived near forts, and was familiar with soldier life. But my
|
|
father couldn't get me an appointment, and I was brokenhearted.
|
|
"I'll tell you a dramatic incident that changed my whole life just
|
|
then--I've never told this to anyone, I think," continued Mr. Hart, his voice
|
|
sinking to a whisper.
|
|
"There was a wonderful bond of affection between me and my father.
|
|
I made up my mind to run away from home. I went down to the East river and
|
|
made arrangements with a captain to let me work my way to Australia. The
|
|
boat was to sail at 5; I was to go on board at 4. I made it, all right,
|
|
crawling past my parents door with my belongings in a bundle over my
|
|
shoulder, but just as I closed the house door I felt a hand on the other side
|
|
of the knob.
|
|
"It was my father, in his nightgown. He questioned me, and I told him
|
|
the boat would reach Melbourne in six months. 'All right, laddie--I'll meet
|
|
you there,' he said--and he'd a been there, too. I went back to bed!"
|
|
Then young Hart, who had been spending his spare quarters as a gallery
|
|
god in New York, told his father of his ambition to become an actor. His Dad
|
|
explained that acting was an art which called for culture and refinement and
|
|
for which a raw prairie boy wasn't fitted; but that if he was determined, he
|
|
should at least "break in" in Europe, seeing the best development of
|
|
centuries and getting the rough edges off him. He especially advised him to
|
|
learn fencing.
|
|
But the elder Hart wasn't able to send him abroad, being just about to
|
|
take his family to plunge in a far northwestern venture. So "Bill" worked
|
|
his way on a cattle boat, received $4.85 at the end of the trip, walked 208
|
|
miles from Liverpool to London, and worked there till he saved up enough to
|
|
take him to Paris.
|
|
Noting the "Ici on parle Anglais" sign in a store, Bill submitted a
|
|
little idea of his own--delivering parcels to people who spoke English--and
|
|
delivered for four or five firms. His room cost him five francs a week.
|
|
Mornings he washed windows and scrubbed floors at a fencing master's, to
|
|
receive "wonderful" lessons after hours from an assistant whom Bill, who was
|
|
always "handy with his hands," taught American boxing. Every night he went
|
|
to the theater.
|
|
In 14 weeks Bill went back to London and, being 18, tall and well made,
|
|
without trouble got his job carrying a spear. In four or five weeks he went
|
|
back to Liverpool--paying his fare this time--and was given free passage home
|
|
on a cattle boat.
|
|
"I knew I had to lie and I did," Mr. Hart explained regarding his
|
|
landing his first part in New York. "It was a white lie. I told 'em I'd
|
|
played in London. I knew only how to put paint on.
|
|
"I got a job at $12 a week with Daniel E. Bandmann, on the road in
|
|
repertoire, including Shakespeare and such plays as 'Dr. Jekyll and Mr.
|
|
Hyde,' and in eight months I played 52 parts--juveniles, heavies, bits, old
|
|
men, boys, everything.
|
|
"How did I work up from that to become a star? The same way as others.
|
|
It takes many years' service, and I suppose there must have been some ability
|
|
behind it. It's ten thousand times harder to succeed on the stage, in my
|
|
opinion. A picture star can be made almost overnight."
|
|
After that first tour, Hart served his apprenticeship with Madame
|
|
Mojeska, Julia Arthur and Madame Rhea, playing diversified roles, leads and
|
|
heavies, in Shakespearean and classic dramas. Following his being starred in
|
|
"The Christian," Hart was the original Messala in "Ben Hur." After his hit
|
|
as "The Virginian" in 1908-9 he played principally Western roles.
|
|
"You've got to keep attracting more attention," Hart continued in
|
|
explaining his rise to stardom, "gradually getting better parts and better
|
|
salary, always working hard and making good. Did I have to 'club' 'em into
|
|
making me a star? Managers are not to be clubbed. If they want you, they
|
|
want you, and you have mighty little to say about it; if they select you, you
|
|
can go down on your knees and thank God they found you--that's been my
|
|
experience."
|
|
Walking down Euclid avenue in Cleveland, where he was playing in "The
|
|
Trail of the Lonesome Pine," one cold winter night in 1913, Hart blew into a
|
|
cinema house to keep warm. It was the first picture he ever saw. He was
|
|
thrilled, and obsessed with the idea that his opportunity lay on the screen.
|
|
Rejecting the offer to be featured on Broadway, he paid his own fare to
|
|
California, and in 1914 began as the "star"--at only $75 a week--in his first
|
|
Triangle picture, "The Bargain," with scenes in the Grand Canyon. He has
|
|
been starring in pictures ever since.
|
|
In 1917 began the William S. Hart Productions, Inc., for the Famous
|
|
Players-Lasky corporation, including "John Petticoats," in which, as a
|
|
Washington lumberjack, Hart inherits a modiste's shop in New Orleans, where
|
|
scenes were taken. He is now working on nine special productions he is to
|
|
produce himself, as his own boss and without limit on time or footage.
|
|
And that's "how" the pleasant gentleman in the swivel chair--who could
|
|
have shot the whiskers off my eyeball without touching the lid--"did it."
|
|
|
|
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
|
|
|
|
Ruth Roland
|
|
|
|
November 7, 1919
|
|
Ray W. Frohman
|
|
Los Angeles Herald
|
|
No matter how many sweethearts you may have had; no matter how eternally
|
|
faithful you may have been--in spite of everything and everybody--if you met
|
|
Ruth Roland face-to-face, it's "off with the old loves, on with the new!"
|
|
Nobody could resist that wealth of light brown hair, those great deep-
|
|
blue Irish eyes--one hundred percent sparkle--those perfect teeth, that
|
|
superfect profile--and then that coloring like the tints upon the hills of
|
|
Fairyland at sunrise.
|
|
Peep at Ruth Roland as "Belle Boyd," in her current serial, "The Tiger's
|
|
Tail." It is made up of a succession of hair-lifting thrills.
|
|
But, all murder aside, your Nick Carter days are indeed over and you
|
|
haven't an "Oh, boy!" left in your system, if you can't get a kick out of the
|
|
vision of Ruth Roland in riding trousers, jumping off a cliff into a tall,
|
|
supple tree that bends over with her until she can be lassoed and hauled up
|
|
again by her friends; or diving from a forty-foot precipice into the ocean an
|
|
inch or so from where the rocky wall shelves out. (Don't be surprised if she
|
|
can heliograph with a coffee can--she can do anything.)
|
|
Better than this screen glimpse, come with me to the David Horsley
|
|
studio, back of the Washington park ballgrounds, for a "close up" of Miss
|
|
Roland in action, making the serial "The Adventures of Ruth," of which she is
|
|
not only the star, but also the central figure of the subject matter, the
|
|
director, the AUTHOR of the story, and the PRODUCER! "Yes, every nickel back
|
|
of this is mine," she tells us.
|
|
Ruth is "on the set" in a highly decorated kimono. It is a tense
|
|
moment.
|
|
Somebody is in the act of gagging somebody else, and Ruth has her trusty
|
|
rope ready to finish the trussing up.
|
|
She has just finished a fight with a 210-pounder who nearly tore her
|
|
clothes off her back. You don't know whether they're going to tie Ruth in an
|
|
airplane and anti-aircraft gun her, or seal her up in a submarine and blow
|
|
her up; but one look at her self-reliant carriage and honest, "good scout"
|
|
bearing, and you know that Ruth will win out.
|
|
Even the desperate villain, whom she hit with a blackjack, begged her,
|
|
sotto voce, to "hit me again!"
|
|
Ruth is the pet of the studio, as well as the boss; the good friend of
|
|
everyone from Business Manager Lionel Kent to Herbert (alias Handsome) Hayes,
|
|
her leading man.
|
|
"I hope they like me," she admits. "I try hard enough to make them like
|
|
me."
|
|
Her speech and her actions are rapid. She has a straightforward look.
|
|
She might do for Galeta when Aphrodite has her almost thawed out for
|
|
Pygmalion, but she's too much of a regular girl to be statuesque.
|
|
There is no illusion about Miss Roland's beauty--it's a blessed fact.
|
|
If you are one who builds a dream gallery of fair women, save the central
|
|
niche in it for Ruth, and listen to her story.
|
|
Ruth was born when she was 3 1/2 years old!
|
|
That is, she went on the stage at that age; and since acting is the
|
|
breath of her nostrils, that's saying the same thing.
|
|
It was in a singing and dancing specialty in her native San Francisco,
|
|
at the old California theater, with Ed Holden's juvenile "Cinderella"
|
|
company. Her family was well known, her father being manager of the Columbia
|
|
theater. Her mother was enthusiastic about the first appearance and gave her
|
|
an "wonderful" dress, but was very anxious about the stage fright Ruth would
|
|
have.
|
|
Instead, Ruth had the time of her life! The audience applauded. Ruth
|
|
kept on dancing. Her mother called to her repeatedly from the wings. Her
|
|
dance was finished and she knew it, but the audience kept on laughing and
|
|
clapping and Ruth kept on improvising--until they sent out a young man to
|
|
DRAG her off.
|
|
But let Ruth tell it in her own words, with an apology for talking about
|
|
herself since she couldn't help it when being interviewed:
|
|
"I was known as 'Baby Ruth,' and considered one of the best known child
|
|
actresses at the time. I was in the Belasco and Morosco stock companies, and
|
|
was featured in San Francisco as 'Little Lord Fauntleroy' and in 'Uncle Tom's
|
|
Cabin.'
|
|
"When I was 5 years old I was making $150 a week plus my own and my
|
|
mother's expenses, featured on the Orpheum circuit. There weren't--and
|
|
aren't now--many children they'd take. There was one other well known, 'Baby
|
|
Lund.' She was the favorite in the east. I was known in the west as
|
|
'California's favorite child actress.'
|
|
"I was the first child actress ever to play in Honolulu. I played there
|
|
six months, and they went wild over me. Royalty entertained me."
|
|
After playing children's parts and doing a specialty and being in
|
|
vaudeville until her mother's death, when Ruth was 9, Ruth, who had been
|
|
tutored while on the stage, went to a grammar school in Los Angeles for a
|
|
year. At 10 she played a special engagement in San Francisco, doing a
|
|
specialty in vaudeville, and then returned to school. At 12 she was the
|
|
youngest student in Hollywood High school, her big Irish heart causing her to
|
|
appear at all sorts of benefits.
|
|
At the end of the sophomore year, when she was not quite 15, she left
|
|
her aunt's home here to visit another aunt in Texas, intending to return.
|
|
Instead, she went into stock in ingenue and child parts in El Paso. She
|
|
continues the story:
|
|
"Then I went out on the road. We had a lot of bad luck and a lot of fun
|
|
--I was only a kid. We never got any salary except the first week's--and I
|
|
spent all that for my aunt's birthday present--but it didn't matter. It was
|
|
the nicest company--'The American Players'--everybody happy! I wouldn't take
|
|
any amount of money for that experience.
|
|
"I had also been on the Majestic vaudeville circuit, making two years in
|
|
Texas. I wore my beautiful hair, which came below my knees, skinned straight
|
|
back and parted, with two braids down my back. I wouldn't curl it--until I
|
|
went into pictures."
|
|
Now cometh Ruth's second "start"--this time in pictures.
|
|
"When I was in stock on the road people kept saying: 'Why don't you go
|
|
into pictures?'
|
|
"I followed them on the screen. I saved my money on the road so I could
|
|
have a good vacation at my aunt's home here--I was just a kid, and I'm an
|
|
orphan. When my money was gone I applied at the Biograph studio--the biggest
|
|
one then. This was in 1911. They took my name and address and phone number.
|
|
I met Mr. Griffith.
|
|
"Then they phoned for me, but in the meantime I had gone on the stage
|
|
again. It broke my heart--to miss that chance. I knew Mack Sennett, Charles
|
|
West and other prominent movie people. Sennett used to say: 'Come on down,
|
|
Ruth. I've got a nice part for you.' But I'd say: 'So--let me know when
|
|
you've got a lead for me. I've never played bits or "suped"--(this was very
|
|
haughty)--I'll never go into pictures till I can play leads.'
|
|
"There was a gruff old gentleman, stage manager at the Garrick, then a
|
|
vaudeville house, named Robert Chandler. He said: 'You know, I'm going to
|
|
get you a position in movies.' I thought it was the same old promise.
|
|
"I was going into musical comedy, as soubrette with the Martin Le Roy
|
|
Co., rehearsing at Long Beach. They wanted me to sign up for 10 weeks, but I
|
|
had an intuition that I'd better not, so I told them I'd see how I liked it
|
|
and they liked me for two weeks.
|
|
"Then I got a phone call. It was Mr. Chandler, to tell me that the
|
|
Kalem people were starting a new western company and wanted a leading woman.
|
|
He told me to go to Santa Monica and apply.
|
|
"I had rehearsed all day at Long Beach. I was tired and dirty and my
|
|
hair wasn't fixed. I was wearing a Buster Brown suit and collar and a long
|
|
Kelly-green tie. I like green. I'm a little bit Irish, you know.
|
|
"I went all the way from Long Beach to Santa Monica that way. I found
|
|
P. C. Hartigan at his home in his shirt sleeves, and we talked a while in the
|
|
mellow light of a lamp coming through the curtains from the next room. My
|
|
green tie--the only clean thing about me--shone like a headlight.
|
|
"He asked me how much salary I wanted. I was so afraid I'd make a break
|
|
about the salary that I cut my own salary--$85 in musical comedy--more than
|
|
in half. I asked if $40 was too much.
|
|
"'Wait till I see you,' he said, getting another lamp. 'All right.
|
|
Start Monday.'
|
|
"I was scared. It made me sick. I was to start Monday in the musical
|
|
comedy, and I'd already lost one picture position that way.
|
|
"But I explained the difficulty, and Mr. Hartigan said: 'My wife, Marin
|
|
Sais, is going to play the lead in the first picture. You can start a week
|
|
from Monday.'
|
|
"I was elated, excited despite the $40 salary. But how could I break
|
|
away, ethically, from my two weeks' engagement? However, Mr. Le Roy very
|
|
kindly 'refused to stand in my way,' and let me go. I started on Decoration
|
|
Day.
|
|
"Mr. Hartigan told me, months later, that that green tie almost lost me
|
|
my position. 'I'm Irish--H-A-R-T-I-G-A-N--and I thought you wore that green
|
|
tie just to blarney me,' he said.
|
|
"I told them I could ride. but not Western style. It was hard work.
|
|
"I hadn't been on a horse for a year, and I'd only ridden in parks and
|
|
academies. But the rest of the girls did it, and I wouldn't let 'em think me
|
|
a 'piker.' It was terrible! It nearly killed me! I'd never ridden like
|
|
that.
|
|
"People at that time used to say: 'Oh, I'd never want to work in a
|
|
5-cent movie.' But I always had confidence that pictures would come into
|
|
their own, as they have.
|
|
"For four years I stayed with Kalem, being featured from the start as
|
|
'The Kalem Girl.' There were no stars then.
|
|
"I was the first and am still the only girl to have a picture made with
|
|
no one but her in it. This was in 1912--1000 feet of 'Ruth Roland, the Kalem
|
|
Girl,' showing me riding, swimming, diving, shooting, boxing. It was really
|
|
sold to show the requirements of a picture actress.
|
|
"When Kalem changed to western comedy I became a comedienne. Marshall
|
|
Neilan was my leading man in his first picture, and I was the first one he
|
|
ever directed. But when they started throwing pies and mud, I didn't think I
|
|
liked comedy. I went into drama. The comedienne did HEAVY drama!
|
|
"The minute anyone was starred, Kalem starred me. The first time was in
|
|
1914, in a 'serial series,' 'The Girl Detective Series,' each episode
|
|
complete in itself, showing different cases I solved. It was a natural
|
|
transition to starring. I've been starring ever since.
|
|
"NO. I had no influence. Hard work did it--you see I've worked 'all my
|
|
life.'
|
|
"At the end of 1914 I went to Pathe, and am still with them, although
|
|
I'm making my own pictures now for them. I've made seven Gold Rooster
|
|
features, and this is my eighth serial.
|
|
"And serials are more popular now than ever!
|
|
"I've been hurt several times. The worst time was when I was riding a
|
|
blindfolded horse bareback on top of a mountain, and he ran away when no one
|
|
was near me. He ran to the edge of a 30-foot precipice. If I'd gone over
|
|
his head I'd have been killed. So I threw myself off at the side and he ran
|
|
over me, kicking me and scraping a stick along my leg.
|
|
"It tore the skin and flesh and muscles, just missing the bone. I was
|
|
on crutches for three weeks and laid up for five. The doctor said I just
|
|
missed being laid up for a year."
|
|
At this moment Ruth, who says she's 25 but looks like any age between
|
|
that and 18, exclaimed:
|
|
"I've talked you to death! Aren't you groggy?"
|
|
But I ask, if you'd been watching a waterfall at dawn, or taking an ice-
|
|
cold bath in nectar, would YOU feel "groggy"?
|
|
|
|
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
|
|
|
|
Blanche Sweet
|
|
|
|
October 31, 1919
|
|
Ray W. Frohman
|
|
LOS ANGELES HERALD
|
|
Blanche Sweet is a name known everywhere that films are shown--and that
|
|
means everywhere.
|
|
But turn it around and the name would be just as appropriate.
|
|
She is.
|
|
According to her own modest statement, she got her first moving picture
|
|
job at 13--because they needed blondes.
|
|
And she also says that her "previous stage experience helped her to make
|
|
good." So you can see what an early start she got.
|
|
She also avers, asservates, avows and articulates that she is a real
|
|
blonde. Not that anybody every doubted the facts in the case, but she said
|
|
it and so I'll let her place herself on record.
|
|
Of course, you've always heard of her as a star of the screen, but she
|
|
really landed in the show business "feet firsts." She danced with Gertrude
|
|
Hoffman in New York vaudeville. She "always liked to dance," she testifies.
|
|
"I don't know just how it happened," she goes on. "I guess I'm like
|
|
Topsy. Through my good experience on the stage--which doesn't necessarily
|
|
make people a success in pictures--helped me. What I've acquired I've got
|
|
through training while working in pictures."
|
|
That's how the Sweet girl--notice the wording--became a star.
|
|
She's done so many different things in such a short time that even
|
|
Blanche can hardly find her way through the interesting story. It's almost
|
|
as hard to follow her through the maze of her career as it is to find her
|
|
house.
|
|
She lives in a pretty home in a pretty section of Hollywood, out--and
|
|
up--where they have sparrows and beautiful blood-red moons in late afternoon,
|
|
and flowers on the graveled driveway, and a delightful view of the foothills.
|
|
I won't tell you exactly where, or how to get there, because I haven't a
|
|
Baedeker memory--and besides, you haven't been invited to call.
|
|
Anyhow, here at the end of the labyrinth, in a wicker armchair on her
|
|
own vinecovered porch, is the beautific and blue-eyed Blanche submitting to a
|
|
verbal questionnaire for your dear sake, dear reader.
|
|
Her profile is good to look upon. Her hair is becoming a sort of dull
|
|
spun gold with the glint of sunshine in it. Her puffs are irreproachable--
|
|
not an ear in sight. And her ultramarine eyes are wonderful!
|
|
She had just come back from the Jess B. Hampton studio, leaving her
|
|
publicity man, Arthur Statter, far, far away.
|
|
Her secretary was gone for the day; her maid, Yvonne, was fluctuating to
|
|
and fro--mostly fro--indoors.
|
|
Blanche was wearing a black silk pleated skirt, black stockings, black
|
|
patent leather pumps, a figured blue and white chiffon smock with blue
|
|
tassels and embroidered white something-or-other that I liked the looks of,
|
|
but didn't know the name for.
|
|
She looked young--very young--but she confessed to being 23. She even
|
|
maintains she has relatives to prove her age.
|
|
But she complains that the public discusses her longevity thusly:
|
|
"Blanche Sweet? Yes, I guess that girl can act all right, but she must
|
|
be OLD AS THE HILLS! Lessee--(business of scratching the head)--it must be
|
|
seven or eight years ago I saw her and she was playing leads then! MY GOSH,
|
|
SHE'S NO CHICKEN!"
|
|
"But they forget," says Blanche, "that I went on the stage very, very
|
|
young--I've forgotten just how many months old I was. My mother died when I
|
|
was a year and a half old and I've been on the stage--off and on, you know--
|
|
ever since."
|
|
Her first scene behind the footlights was in one of those good old
|
|
melodramas, "Blue Jeans," with a famous stock company in Cincinnati.
|
|
Somebody trotted out a baby for somebody else and the delighted beholder
|
|
kissed baby's foot. Blanche owned the foot.
|
|
Thus she became an actress "toot sweet," as it were.
|
|
Her next appearance was at the ripe old age of 3. Between the yowling
|
|
age of 4 and the bumptious and fractious age of 9, Blanche played child parts
|
|
in road shows which would play several weeks in New York. Three of these
|
|
years she was with Chauncey Olcott.
|
|
Her father brought her to San Francisco when she was 9 to attend a well
|
|
known private school for girls. After the great San Francisco fire, they
|
|
moved to Berkeley. Blanche attended the exclusive Miss Head's school there;
|
|
but before she finished her course, when she was not quite 13, her
|
|
grandmother took her to New York to go on the stage.
|
|
Her's a box score of her peregrinations:
|
|
When she got to New York she danced with Gerturde Hoffman, famous in
|
|
Gotham and its environs for artistic scantiness of attire, and novelty, as
|
|
well as skill in choreographic art, whatever that is. Dancing came naturally
|
|
to Blanche. Her mother, known to the professional stage by her maiden name
|
|
of "Pearl Alexander," was a beautiful dancer.
|
|
Pronto, Blanche went back to Miss Head's. Then, equally pronto, she
|
|
went back to the stage. No less than three times she went back to Miss
|
|
Hoffman.
|
|
Just at this stage in Blanche's grasshopper career, Theodore Kremer
|
|
produced "Charlotte Temple"--one of that melodramatic type of plays that have
|
|
six or seven scenes in every act, even if they are bloodless and thunderless.
|
|
But this is too good--let Blanche tell you.
|
|
"That, the title role, was a tremendous part for me. It wasn't nerve
|
|
that may me play it. They tried it on the dog somewhere and said I was too
|
|
young."
|
|
Blanche, remember, was still 13.
|
|
"Yes, I was FIRED."
|
|
See how honest and frank Blanche is with us?
|
|
"They sent me back to New York. But they couldn't get anybody else.
|
|
They tried two or three, and then sent for me again. But I wouldn't go back.
|
|
I went into pictures.
|
|
"Why? To make a living, same as anyone else. I heard of them, they
|
|
were new, and I'd 'try anything once.'
|
|
"I went to the Edison studio in the Bronx first, for a few weeks--I had
|
|
one part and was an extra.
|
|
"Then I went to the Biograph studio in East Fourteenth street to see
|
|
Frank Powell, thinking there'd be more opportunity for me there. He
|
|
introduced me to Mr. Griffith and I worked--as and extra--that same
|
|
afternoon.
|
|
"I was soon promoted from being an extra, but I could play nothing but
|
|
young parts. I'd put my hair up 's high as it'd go, and my dresses would
|
|
drag--but I'd only look like a kid!
|
|
I got along well there, though--I had 'fat' parts.
|
|
"They used to 'kid' me out there. Mr. Griffith would look at my blonde
|
|
hair and turn to Billy Bitzer, his now famous camera man, and say: 'I'm
|
|
afraid we can't photograph her today--I'm afraid she'll photograph BALD!' As
|
|
you grow older your hair gets darker, you know.
|
|
"When Mr. Griffith was going to the Pacific coast for the first time, he
|
|
wanted me to go. But although he offered me $100 a week--an enormous salary
|
|
in those days--and I knew I'd only get about $25 a week with Gertrude
|
|
Hoffman, I went back to her instead.
|
|
"Then I played the ingenue in a legitimate drama, 'The Turn of the
|
|
Road.' At the end of its season, I wired Biograph. Mary Pickford had just
|
|
left them for the Imp Co., and they wanted a blonde for leads.
|
|
"I'd played ingenue leads in the East, and I've been playing leads ever
|
|
since I came West at that time; but of course, as everybody knows, they
|
|
didn't have 'stars' in those days. For a long time they didn't reveal the
|
|
names of the Biograph players to the public. It was wrong; but there wasn't
|
|
any one big enough in pictures to MAKE them do it. We played the same kind
|
|
of plays, and played 'em the same way, but no one was ever featured.
|
|
"'The Lonedale Operator' was the first picture I played in when I came
|
|
West to play leads. I was with Mr. Griffith 'till 1913, going on four
|
|
years."
|
|
Then Mr. Griffith, taking Blanche and practically the whole studio with
|
|
him, went to the Reliance Co., releasing through Mutual--he also producing
|
|
special pictures. Miss Sweet played in the film version of the New York
|
|
success, "The Escape."
|
|
After about a year--though Miss Sweet has really done too many different
|
|
things, as we may have remarked before, to think in terms of "years"--Blanche
|
|
joined the Lasky forces. In Cecil B. De Mille's "The Warrens of Virginia,"
|
|
which scored a success, Blanche Sweet first really starred in pictures.
|
|
This was in 1914, we agreed on the porch.
|
|
You remember, don't you, F. Hopkinson Smith's 'The Tides of Barnegat'?
|
|
Blanche was the wistful and beautiful blonde hanging over the garden gate
|
|
when somebody or other left her.
|
|
For two years she stayed out of pictures. Overwork, which brought on a
|
|
nervous breakdown, started it; and studio conditions then weren't to her
|
|
liking, she explained.
|
|
With Marshall Neilan and others, Miss Sweet formed her own company in
|
|
1918, producing her own pictures. this was where she was forced to admit
|
|
that she played an "emotional" part--in "The Unpardonable Sin"--though she
|
|
"hates that word."
|
|
Now, at Hampton's she had filmed a Drury Lane melodrama, "A Woman of
|
|
Pleasure" and has just finished a comedy-drama, Bret Harte's "Cressy."
|
|
Neither has yet been released.
|
|
As Blanche and I both like "Krazy Kat," we were getting along
|
|
beautifully by this time, so that I can let you in on a few more of Blanche's
|
|
positive statements about becoming a star--and why she hates being dubbed
|
|
"emotional." Said she:
|
|
"Some people just happened to become stars, and some got in at the right
|
|
time and were lucky. I wonder how many of them have stopped to think how it
|
|
really came about?
|
|
"It's so hard--so difficult--so complicated, that it appalls me to think
|
|
of anyone breaking into the picture game without experience. It doesn't seem
|
|
complicated to those who are in it, but for anyone else--it would be just
|
|
like a child trying to get into the University of California without going
|
|
through the preliminary stages that the high school graduates had!
|
|
"I'm ambitious to play EVERYTHING on the screen--all types and parts.
|
|
Of course no one can do everything--the best we can do is to have a high
|
|
ambition and try and live up to it.
|
|
"But the trying will be lots of fun--and a great deal of hard work.
|
|
"Just trying will be worth a lot!"
|
|
|
|
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
|
|
|
|
Clara Kimball Young
|
|
|
|
October 29, 1919
|
|
Ray W. Frohman
|
|
LOS ANGELES HERALD
|
|
I didn't even ask Clara Kimball Young how old she is. I do not care.
|
|
And neither need she.
|
|
Clara Kimball IS Young.
|
|
For--no matter whether she is 16 or 60--and I'm sure that she is neither-
|
|
-she is still the most exquisite work of Nature that it has ever been my good
|
|
fortune to behold.
|
|
Beauty of face and form, graciousness of manner, engaging smile, sense
|
|
of humor, wonderful eyes, dazzling teeth, silken tresses--she has them all.
|
|
And she has a complete working knowledge of how to use them to the very
|
|
best advantage.
|
|
Not flirtily, not obtrusively, not even noticeably.
|
|
But with that completely subtle effect which is altogether bewitching.
|
|
After which spasm of raving I expect I'd better come down to earth and
|
|
begin to tell my story. As you may have surmised from the foregoing, it has
|
|
something to do with Clara Kimball Young.
|
|
I rhapsodized over Mary Pickford, and rightly. But Mary Pickford is the
|
|
youth-child, while Clara Kimball Young is the beautiful, mature woman.
|
|
But entirely aside from her physical charms--and the anomaly of her
|
|
having a publicity man who is not only not obnoxious but actually is
|
|
pleasant--Miss Young is delightfully natural, volatile and astoundingly
|
|
modest.
|
|
And the story of how she "debutted" into stage life at the rollicking
|
|
age of THREE and rose to her present rank among the goddesses of the studio--
|
|
for she "doesn't consider herself a star"--for that doesn't mean anything now
|
|
in pictures--is the story of the breaking of precedents by a girl with ideas
|
|
and a strong will, and of racontree with interesting stage and film folk.
|
|
"I want to act, too!" gurgled three-year-old Clara, toddling onto the
|
|
stage during a most pathetic scene in the third act of "Hazel Kirke," being
|
|
presented in a middle western city by the Mike Bennett company.
|
|
Bill Burress, playing a character part in the Fine Arts Photoplay
|
|
feature, "Eyes of Youth," which Miss Young has made as her first release for
|
|
the Equity Pictures corporation, was a juvenile in that company and remembers
|
|
her "going on."
|
|
But let this typical heroine of emotional dramas tell her own story.
|
|
"No, I didn't break up the show, but everybody laughed. The next night
|
|
they let me go on in the grocery store scene in 'Peck's Bad Boy' to buy some
|
|
soap. This appearance, also, was not pre-arranged.
|
|
"The orchestra struck up a tune and I danced. But they had to drag me
|
|
off--I didn't know when to quit.
|
|
"Before that, my parents Edward Marshall Kimball and Pauline Maddern had
|
|
carried me on as a 'prop.' They were married on the stage, and at 12 months
|
|
I was on the road.
|
|
"Then, till I was 9, I played kid parts on tour in a repertoire of old
|
|
time melodramas.
|
|
"They were beautiful dramas--'Jim the Penman' and 'Alabama.' I played
|
|
Little Eva when I was five. (What a Little Eva she must have made!) And I
|
|
played Willie in 'East Lynne'--and, even as a child, how I hated that play!"
|
|
After attending public school until she was 14, the beauteous Clara was
|
|
immured in a convent, St. Francis Xavier's academy, Chicago, until she was
|
|
16. Then that petulant, "I want to act too" came to the surface again.
|
|
Her parents were going to join the Aylesworth stock company in a western
|
|
city--Salt Lake City, I think--and Clara, insisted on going alone.
|
|
And if you had seen her slap her white cockatoo, "Polly," right on the
|
|
beak when "Polly" showed signs of wanting to fly away for another 24 hours of
|
|
vacation in a eucalyptus tree, you'd know that when Clara insists on anything
|
|
she gets it.
|
|
"I was very awkward--I was an ugly duckling," said Miss Young regarding
|
|
this year of playing ingenues and small part.
|
|
"You made a tremendous hit, if bouquets and having the house sold out
|
|
count for anything, dearie," amended her mother, who was listening in on our
|
|
interview.
|
|
At 18 she played ingenues and ingenue leads with the T. Daniel Frawley
|
|
stock company in Seattle, which put on such excellent plays as "The Rose of
|
|
the Rancho," "Peter Pan" (for the first time in stock, and with Miss Young as
|
|
Wendy, the girl who adopts Peter), and "The Devil," while it was still
|
|
running in New York.
|
|
And, wonder of wonders--here's an actress who admits that she once
|
|
failed to "land" in New York! She explained:
|
|
"I was never crazy about the stage. I had no definite ambition. It was
|
|
natural for me to act. There was nothing else for me to do, and my parents
|
|
saw a future for men on the stage.
|
|
"When I went to New York at 19, I couldn't get a position. They wanted
|
|
Broadway names and reputations, and thought stock experience was no good. So
|
|
after a while I got a vaudeville engagement. Finally I got the part of a
|
|
young French girl in a musical comedy Henry B. Harris was putting on, 'The
|
|
Skylark.' The show lasted two weeks!"
|
|
Her last appearance in spoken drama was at the age of 20, during a 10
|
|
weeks' season playing ingenue leads and replacing the leading woman when she
|
|
was resting, with the Orpheum Stock company in Philadelphia. Percy Winter,
|
|
brother of the famous dramatic critic, William Winter, was the director.
|
|
Miss Young played the school teacher, Molly, in "The Virginian," appeared in
|
|
"Barbara Fretchie," and was in the ingenue in "The Gentleman from
|
|
Mississippi," with her father joining the company to play the lead, Tom
|
|
Wise's part.
|
|
J. Stuart Blackton, one of the owners of the Vitagraph company, saw a
|
|
photograph of the Clara Kimball Young head, wanted her as she had good stage
|
|
training and lured her into pictures at $25 a week "with raises right along."
|
|
And "P. D. Q." two precedents of the then youthful film industry went by the
|
|
board. Says Miss Young:
|
|
"It was hard then, eight years ago, to get stage folk into the despised
|
|
pictures. I was getting $100 a week in stock, but I figured that I'd be
|
|
employed 52 weeks a year, could live in the same place and wouldn't have to
|
|
study.
|
|
"In those days the various characters in various plays all wore company
|
|
clothes. When they were filming "My Official Wife," the first picture of
|
|
Russian life, I told Mr. Blackton that, as I was portraying a woman with all
|
|
kinds of money, I wanted to furnish my own beautiful French ball gowns.
|
|
"I was the first one to start that (precedent No. 1) and then the others
|
|
in the company started to get their own things, and they had different
|
|
clothes in each production.
|
|
"Was I 'rotten' when I first went into movies? No, I knew how to act.
|
|
The only thing to learn was how to register before the camera. Mr. Blackton
|
|
told me just to THINK things inside, and use a consistent improvised
|
|
conversation, and I'd register things all right.
|
|
"So, I think theatrical stars make the best picture actors. They need
|
|
stage experience. It gives them poise, independence, assuredness.
|
|
"There are exceptions, of course: many stage stars haven't made good in
|
|
films, and many have made good without stage experience. But Mary Pickford,
|
|
Fairbanks, Chaplin, Hart, Nazimova, Farrar all had stage experience. I think
|
|
it's absolutely necessary for picture work. It's being proved right now.
|
|
We're going right to the stage for our casts; there's not a person in our
|
|
latest cast who hasn't had stage experience.
|
|
"Innumerable times I've picked some extra girl with unusual expression
|
|
from the back row of a group of extras and given her a small part. Ability
|
|
shows. It's a divine give.
|
|
"But they don't want to begin small. It seems so easy to act in
|
|
pictures. But it's not. It's harder work than on the stage--you do more.
|
|
"On the stage you go from one climax to another, you play the whole show
|
|
in one evening, you work right through the story and then you're through.
|
|
"In films I may go into a hallway, for instance, crying. The following
|
|
situation, the one that I go through the door to arrive at, we may have to
|
|
put on a week later. I have to go into it cold and yet register the same
|
|
disposition and the same state of nerves. Then, too, the directors break
|
|
into dramatic situations and have you finish them another way.
|
|
"I think you should keep showing action, only interrupting it for the
|
|
audience with a 'close-up' to show an expression that can't be seen at a
|
|
distance."
|
|
For three years, beginning in 1912, "without a contract but looked after
|
|
like a member of the family," Miss Young played with the Vitagraph stock
|
|
company, always playing leads. Ralph Ince played opposite her before he ever
|
|
directed.
|
|
Incidentally, some of today's big picture stars were extras in the
|
|
Vitagraph pictures that she played leads in, for, when not working as leads,
|
|
Vitagraph players used to have to fill in as extras.
|
|
That's where Miss Young smashed precedent No. 2. Hired for leads, she
|
|
wouldn't be an extra; the others dittoed, and then they got other people for
|
|
extras.
|
|
Vitagraph, Miss Young explained, was the first company to believe in
|
|
making its players popular, and printed their names in small letters on the
|
|
lithographs, featuring the whole cast as it were, with the names of John
|
|
Bunny, Maurice Costello and Florence Turner in larger type.
|
|
Miss Young played Anne Boleyn in the Henry VIII play, "Cardinal Wolsey";
|
|
accompanied the Vitagraph company all around the world for six months in 1913
|
|
making short pictures; and was Lady Babbie in its first three-reeler,
|
|
Barrie's "The Little Minister"--which they were afraid exhibitors would think
|
|
too long.
|
|
Finally, in 1914, instead of "Vitagraph presents 'A Million Bid'," it
|
|
was "Clara Kimball Young" in the electric lights at the Vitagraph theater,
|
|
New York, in that company's first five-reeler, "My Official Wife."
|
|
She was the first Vitagraph star to land there, and it was the first
|
|
time she really starred. And she got $150 a week and quit because they
|
|
wouldn't give her $200!
|
|
Can you IMAGINE Clara Kimball Young in slapstick comedies? She had
|
|
previously done several of them, three reelers, including "Goodness
|
|
Gracious," with Sidney Drew, a burlesque on "The Perils of Pauline."
|
|
Then came a contract for starring with the World Film corporation at
|
|
$200 a week, with provision for advancement to $750. This was for two years.
|
|
In 1916 she formed her own company to produce famous emotional dramas
|
|
successful on the stage. In 1917-18 she continued to make her own pictures,
|
|
releasing through the Select Pictures corporation.
|
|
One last word from the beautiful star in the patio, with the scarlet
|
|
geraniums as her background and at a bowl of white and yellow roses at her
|
|
elbow. An inventory of her personal ornaments revealed: One huge diamond
|
|
brooch, one large emerald ring set in diamonds, and one diamond-studded
|
|
watch, but she cried: "Tell them, although my pictures sell well, I'm not
|
|
making millions!"
|
|
|
|
*****************************************************************************
|
|
*****************************************************************************
|
|
For more information about Taylor, see
|
|
WILLIAM DESMOND TAYLOR: A DOSSIER (Scarecrow Press, 1991)
|
|
Back issues of Taylorology are available via Gopher or FTP at
|
|
gopher.etext.org
|
|
in the directory Zines/Taylorology
|
|
*****************************************************************************
|
|
|