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Taylorology Issue 38
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* T A Y L O R O L O G Y *
* A Continuing Exploration of the Life and Death of William Desmond Taylor *
* *
* Issue 38 -- February 1996 Editor: Bruce Long bruce@asu.edu *
* TAYLOROLOGY may be freely distributed *
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CONTENTS OF THIS ISSUE:
Silent Films of Taylor's Associates on Home Video
Wallace Reid, Part I
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What is TAYLOROLOGY?
TAYLOROLOGY is a newsletter focusing on the life and death of William Desmond
Taylor, a top Paramount film director in early Hollywood who was shot to
death on February 1, 1922. His unsolved murder was one of Hollywood's major
scandals. This newsletter will deal with: (a) The facts of Taylor's life;
(b) The facts and rumors of Taylor's murder; (c) The impact of the Taylor
murder on Hollywood and the nation; (d) Taylor's associates and the Hollywood
silent film industry in which Taylor worked. Primary emphasis will be given
toward reprinting, referencing and analyzing source material, and sifting it
for accuracy.
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Silent Films of Taylor's Associates on Home Video
Although a number of films directed by Taylor still exist, none are yet
available on home video. But Grapevine Video (P.O. Box 46161, Phoenix,
AZ 85063) has the following videos available which feature some of
Taylor's associates. Some of these videos are only available for a
limited time.
The Women in Taylor's Life:
MABEL NORMAND (visited Taylor shortly before his death)
There is a good selection of her films available--plenty of early
Keystone comedies (some with Fatty Arbuckle or Charlie Chaplin); the
longest version available of her biggest hit feature "Mickey"; and some
of her 1920's films, including "The Extra Girl," "Raggedy Rose," and
"Nickel Hopper" (in which Boris Karloff and Oliver Hardy can be seen)."
MARY MILES MINTER (in love with Taylor)
A program feature from 1918, "The Eyes of Julia Deep," is
currently the only Minter film available on home video.
NEVA GERBER (engaged to Taylor for several years)
"Officer 444" (a 10-chapter silent serial), "California in '49" (a
feature version of the silent serial "Days of '49"), "Fighting
Stallion" (starring legendary stuntman Yakima Canutt), and "Lariet's
End" all have Neva Gerber as the leading lady.
CLAIRE WINDSOR (dated Taylor a week before his death)
She was the star of "The Blot," directed by Lois Weber.
Taylor's Friends and Neighbors
DOUGLAS MACLEAN (Taylor's neighbor)
He was the star of "The Home Stretch," a 1921 film made under
contract to Ince.
EDNA PURVIANCE (Taylor's neighbor)
Charlie Chaplin's leading lady from 1915-1921 can be seen in the
Chaplin Essanay comedy shorts available from Grapevine Video. (Of
course, a much more substantial appearance of Edna can be seen in "A
Woman of Paris," directed by Chaplin, and available from CBS-FOX home
video.)
ANTONIO MORENO (close friend)
Moreno can be seen as leading man to two of the top female stars
of the 1920's, opposite Clara Bow in "It" and Pola Negri in "The
Spanish Dancer."
FRANK O'CONNER (close friend)
He was Taylor's assistant director for over a year, and they
remained good friends. O'Conner directed the Clara Bow film "Free to
Love."
MARSHALL NEILAN (close friend)
Directed Mary Pickford in "Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm."
ARTHUR HOYT (close friend)
He played a supporting role in the classic film "The Lost World."
WILLIAM RUSSELL (close friend)
He starred in "A Sporting Chance" and "Six Feet Four."
Actors and Actresses
DUSTIN FARNUM and WINIFRED KINGSTON
Taylor directed this team in four films. "The Trail of the Axe"
is a 1922 Farnum/Kingston film made after Taylor's death.
BETTY COMPSON
The leading actress in the last film directed by Taylor in 1922,
she can be seen in "The Pony Express," a major Paramount film of 1925.
MARY PICKFORD
Taylor directed America's Sweetheart in three 1918 films, which
are not available on home video. But seven other Pickford feature
films are available from Grapevine.
MELBOURNE MACDOWELL
Taylor acted on stage for several years with Fanny Davenport and
her husband, Melbourne MacDowell. The Lon Chaney films "Nomads of the
North" and "Outside the Law" each have Melbourne MacDowell in a
supporting role.
Taylor Himself?
Taylor's first films as an actor were made during 1912-1913 for Thomas
Ince, but credit information about the Ince films is very sparse.
Grapevine has a video "The Films of Thomas Ince," which contains five
short films, two of which were made during the period of time when
Taylor was working for Ince. It is possible that Taylor may have had
small roles in either of those films.
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Wallace Reid, Part I
The three scandals which rocked Hollywood in the early 1920s were the Fatty
Arbuckle case, the murder of William Desmond Taylor, and the drug-related
death of Wallace Reid. Taylor had directed Reid in two 1917 films, and they
both worked for Famous Players-Lasky (Paramount). Below is a biography
published five years after Reid's death, written by one of his close friends.
Next issue will reprint additional material on Reid, including his wife's
version of what happened to him. For the years 1919 and 1920, Wallace Reid
was the most popular film star in the United States, number one at the
box office; two of Reid's films made during that time are available from
Grapevine Video.
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
June 23/July 14, 1928
Adela Rogers St. Johns
LIBERTY
The Life Story of Wallace Reid:
The Tragedy of an American Idol
Part One
Wallace Reid lived thirty-one years. He was born April 15, 1892. He
died January 18, 1923.
Into those thirty-one years he packed the experience, the work, the
success, the joys and heartbreaks, the problems and temptations, of five
ordinary lives.
The high voltage killed him.
That is the simple, psychological explanation. The actual story of his
life is more complicated. It is utterly of our times. It is almost
unbelievable in the extravagance and exaggeration of its color and action.
Everyone is familiar with the picture of Wally Reid, and almost everyone
knows the main events of his short life. The handsome, clean-cut boy who
went up like a skyrocket and came down like a charred stick.
But the reason for it all has been cloaked in mystery--a mystery that
can be solved only by complete familiarity with the things that happened to
him and with his strange, wonderful, lovable character.
It is not enough to look upon the mere outward facts that were given to
the world before and at the time of his tragic death. You have to go deeper
than that. You have to go into the soul of the boy--and boy he was, right to
the end--and into the play of events upon that too sensitive, too facile, too
generous nature.
Perhaps I can do that.
It has always seemed to me that only one who knew Wally could write the
story of his life.
I knew Wally Reid as well as anyone ever knew him. I knew him from the
time he made his first pictures until the day when I stood beside his wife
and watched the smoke that consumed the last of him that was mortal fade
against the sky. I am very proud and a little sad to remember that he
thought of me as the sister he always wanted and never had.
In a letter he wrote me not long before the end he said:
"I don't know why I have failed like this. Sometimes I think you do.
Pray for me that, somewhere in the strange land into which I am going alone,
I may become at last the man I have always wanted to be."
Strangely enough, the reason for his going up and his coming down, for
the love he inspired the whole world to feel for him and his own
heartbreaking downfall and death, for his unequaled success and his
unparalleled defeat was the same.
Wally Reid--the shattered idealist.
The important thing about Wallace Reid is not that he was the greatest
and most popular star the motion picture has produced. It is that he was,
beyond dispute, the best loved man of his generation. He woke in the heart
of the multitude a great affection, a lasting affection, that still gives off
fragrance, like crushed lavender. It wasn't only women who loved him, though
they did--and often not wisely but too well. Men loved him, boys, old
people, children.
There was something about Wally Reid that fitted into the dreams in
every heart.
His life story is important because of that love and because his death
grieved and bewildered and shocked the whole world.
Now, love and grief like that aren't stirred by a mere handsome face.
It was the ideals back of that face, the ideals that corresponded so
completely with the beauty and fineness of his outward being, that earned him
that love. And it was those ideals, the shattered ideals he couldn't bear to
live with, that destroyed him.
Men without ideals can live with their disillusionments, even with their
sins. Men with ideals very often cannot.
The life story of Wally Reid, the shattered idealist, is a living proof
of that...[The original article has here the background of his father, Hal
Reid, and of Wallace Reid's early life.]
Part Two
...When he was at the very height, when he was better known and loved
than any other actor has ever been, he still felt that it wasn't quite a
man's job.
The pictures he loved were the ones where he had to do stunts--where he
could ride, or drive a racing car, or go on location into Yosemite Valley and
sit around the fire with the forest rangers. I never heard him belittle his
work, but I know there was always a sense that he might have done something
more manly.
"When you put grease paint on the face," he said one day, when I was
watching him make up in his dressing room, "something goes out of the heart."
And he laughed. But there was a wistful sound in that laugh.
...In 1910, Wallace Reid touched motion pictures for the first time.
His father went out to the Selig Polyscope Company to confer with them
about some stories. Wally sent along. The father and son were very close in
those days. Wally was once more entirely under the spell of his father's
brains and wit and easy ways with the world.
And there, in that little old Chicago studio, the boy saw something that
he wanted to do. He wanted to be a cameraman. There was a combination of
mechanics and art--the thing he had been searching for and never found. So
he decided to stay in Chicago and turn the crank on the little black box that
made motion pictures.
But directors saw his great photographic possibilities, and almost
before he knew it he was in front of the camera.
Wally tried hard to be everything in motion pictures except an actor.
He was a cameraman, a writer, a director--and preferred any of them to
acting.
The next months were swift steps in motion pictures. He went back to
New York to be near his mother, who had been injured in an automobile
accident. But he had decided to stick to motion pictures.
Directing was the thing that appealed to him. In consequence, he took
his father's play, The Confession, to Vitagraph and offered to write a script
and direct it himself. They agreed, but in the end he played a part as well.
And before long he was acting as Florence Turner's leading man. They just
wouldn't let him direct--naturally enough, they didn't want to hide Wallace
Reid from the eyes of the public.
Later, he and his father worked for Reliance, writing and acting.
...Then suddenly, in an hour a new life opened for him.
He was going to Hollywood. Not as an actor. "I'm never going to act
again," he said. He was going as assistant director, scenario writer, second
cameraman, and general utility man to Otis Turner, the big Universal
director. The chance of a lifetime. The creative end of this great new art
and industry which was then actually in its infancy.
There was a last-minute luncheon at the Knickerbocker Hotel with his
mother. Perhaps if either of them could have looked into the future, that
luncheon wouldn't have been so gay. But they didn't know what the Hollywood
years were to hold, and so they were very festive; for Wally was all elation,
and his mother unselfishly sunk her grief at losing him.
Hollywood! There was to be no turning back now. Forever in the past
the ranches of Wyoming where he was going to live, the editing of magazines
he was going to make, the study of medicine through which he might benefit
mankind. He was definitely launched in motion pictures.
The Hollywood of those days was by no means the Hollywood of today. It
is worth while to glance back, briefly, upon the Hollywood to which Wallace
Reid came as an unknown assistant director in 1912.
One main street, the Hollywood Hotel and the residence of the famous
artist, Paul de Longpre, its outstanding architectural features. No two-
storied buildings. I was attending Hollywood High School about that time and
I had scarcely heard of motion pictures. Oh, yes, that funny shack on the
corner of Sunset and Gower--that was the Universal studio and they made
motion pictures there. The cowboys and Indians who occasionally dashed up
and down Hollywood Boulevard were making "Westerns." The Birth of a Nation,
the first great picture, was still in the future.
The coming to Hollywood was the beginning of a new life for Wallace
Reid, a complete break with the past.
He was twenty years old. He was, I think, as fine and clean and high-
minded a young American as could have been found in the forty-eight states.
He was big, handsome, strong, full of the joy of life.
It would have been difficult to imagine that he had already lived two-
thirds of his life.
He stayed in Hollywood for eleven years, and at the end of that time was
glad, I think, to die there.
What happened in those eleven years?
Part Three
This is not, in the main, a history of Wallace Reid the motion picture
star. It purports to be a life story of Wally Reid the man. He lived in our
own times and the things he did on the screen are well known to most of us.
Therefore I feel that from the time Wally came to Hollywood in 1912
until he died in 1923, we may abandon chronological data and deal almost
entirely with the important things that happened to him--important as
concerned his own inner life.
That he achieved tremendous success in a series of pictures in which he
represented all that was best of the ideal American is a fact we may accept.
Just what that success brought with it and the changes it caused in his
surroundings, its dangers as well as its rewards, are the things to consider
if we are to get the understanding of Wally that made most of those who knew
him love him through thick and thin.
Truth never hurt anybody. Truth cannot hurt Wallace Reid. Rumor has
shot far of the mark--both high and low--because of the mystery of the thing.
Truth makes it very simple.
It shows you at last the picture of a boy overwhelmed by odds and going
down into the depths, to emerge with a triumph that cost him his life but not
his soul.
The important things which happened to Wally in the next few years were,
first, his marriage to Dorothy Davenport; second, his elevation to stardom by
the public; and, third, America's entrance into the World War.
For that statement I take full responsibility. I don't know that
everyone will agree with me. But I am going to present to you the facts as I
know them, from observation and from Wally himself, and let you judge.
In doing this, I am betraying no trust. In its way, this life story is
my monument to Wallace Reid, who was my friend, and whose death was to me at
once the most tragic and the most beautiful thing I ever saw.
At the time that Wally came to Hollywood as general assistant to Otis
Turner at the old Universal studio, Dorothy Davenport was already established
as a star of the films. Because she was for twelve years the greatest single
influence in his life, his comfort and his friend and his bulwark as well as
his wife, it is strictly necessary that you know the sort of girl she was,
the sort of woman she became.
When Wally first met her she was seventeen, but she had been some years
in the theater and had matured early. The niece of Fanny Davenport, one of
the greatest American actresses, the daughter of Harry Davenport, for many
years a favorite Broadway actor, she came of stock which helped to make the
history of our theater. [1]
At that time she was a girl of more than average loveliness and of
striking personality. The personality entirely overshadowed even the charm
of her red-brown hair and her dark eyes and her exquisite figure.
The word "personality" is hard to define, but Dorothy Davenport Reid is
a synonym. Her chief characteristics as Wally's wife were a clear common
sense, an amazing sense of humor, and a deep, selfless loyalty.
During the years of their marriage her self-control developed an outer
shell which at times made people think her cold. But it enabled her to pass
through storm, confusion, and tragedy with a serene dignity and a clear
thought which neither the plaudits of the world nor the sufferings of her own
heart could shake.
If ever a girl tried to stem a rising tide, Dorothy Reid tried. If ever
a woman upheld a man's hands, she upheld Wally's. Her habit of reserve grew
and she changed from a sparkling girl to a strong and guarded woman in a few
brief years; but those who knew her found beneath that calm, white-faced
exterior a wealth of tenderness, of humor, of understanding, of fine, sane
thinking that made her stand apart from the ordinary run of women.
There is nothing more important to a man than the woman who stands
beside him on his journey through life. In that, at least, Wallace Reid was
blessed, and he knew it.
It was a pretty romance in the beginning, the romance of Wallace Reid
and Dorothy Davenport, played in the most charming of California settings.
They were two young things, with the world before them, and love added a
glamour to work that was play half the time.
The meeting came about in this way. Dorothy Davenport needed a leading
man. Henry Walthall had played opposite her, and James Kirkwood and Harold
Lockwood, and she was rather fussy in the matter of leading men. But the
need was pressing and no one was available.
There was, it appeared, a young man on the Universal lot, by the name of
Wallace Reid, who had played leads with Florence Turner in New York and was
said to be very good looking.
The Turner company wasn't ready to start work and it was willing to cut
down its overhead by lending this young man's services to Miss Davenport. He
wasn't very keen about it, didn't want to act any more, but he was under
contract and, if told to act, act he must to the best of his ability.
The first day of the film was disastrous. Miss Davenport was furious.
This big, overgrown boy was all hands and feet. He knew nothing whatever
about acting. Wally was annoyed because he was once more before the camera,
and sulked openly. In fact, it is impossible to deny that they glared at
each other across the set between love scenes.
The second day was little better. But the third brought a development
which won the haughty little star's respect, and she began to treat her new
leading man with consideration.
There was at that time, a process of initiation on the Universal lot.
Most of the pictures being made were Westerns; and the cowboys, among them
Hoot Gibson, Curly Eagles, and Milt Brown, always took these dude actors from
the East, picked out the worst horses they could find, and put them aboard.
Naturally they tried it on young Reid, and with special vehemence,
because Dorothy Davenport was their idol, and she openly turned up her pretty
nose at this handsome stranger. So, when she arrived on the lot the third
morning, the first sight that met her eyes was that of her leading man very
much occupied with the nastiest broncho in the stables.
Her interest flamed. She was a horsewoman of distinction and she had no
regard for a man who couldn't stay in the saddle, no matter what the horse's
ideas on the subject might be.
Nobody knew of Wally's year in Wyoming and they stood back, chuckling,
to get a good view of his downfall.
But something went wrong with the scenario. Easy, cool, graceful, the
boy from the East took everything this bad horse had to offer--corkscrews,
tail spins, and sunfishes--and finally brought him back to the corral
sweating and conquered.
He had proved his "staying qualities" and from then one was one of the
gang. Also, he was admitted to his star's good graces.
The friendship ripened rapidly. There was no resisting Wally once you
knew him. He had found as a pal another young actor, Gene Pallette, and
finally the two boys, a trifle lonesome and homesick in this new atmosphere,
persuaded Dorothy's mother to take a house and let them share it.
Mrs. Davenport was an energetic, competent woman, as emotional as her
daughter was reserved. She had divorced Dorothy's father some years before,
and had learned the lessons a woman alone with a young daughter to educate
and launch in the world must learn. She was the kind of woman whom everybody
on lot called "mother"--and she did mother most of them, both at Universal
and at the Mack Sennett studio, where she herself worked from time to time as
a character woman. She had a brusque, direct way with her, but she
understood young people, and they came to her with their troubles and their
joys.
Wally won her heart instantly and much more easily than he did her
daughter's. The little family hadn't been settled in the house a week before
he was like a son to her.
She was no matchmaker, and if she had been she might have made more
ambitious plans for Dorothy Davenport than this unknown young leading man.
But she did see in Wally all the beautiful qualities that go to make romance,
and, being incurably romantic, hoped the two would fall in love.
But for a time it looked as though her dreams were not to come true.
Dorothy liked the boy, but, being herself all of seventeen, considered him
much too young. Her ideal was somebody like Henry Walthall, a man of the
world, and not a mere youth with whom she danced and rough-housed and rose
horseback.
The three of them--Dot, Wally, and Gene Pallette--built a stable in the
back yard with their own hands, kept three horses, and spent most of their
time in the saddle. They rode to the studio in the morning, rode home at
night, and on Sunday they took a day off and went riding on the many
beautiful trails around Hollywood.
But if Dorothy didn't fall in love as quickly as might have been
expected, Wally did. One day, when they were riding together in Griffith
Park, he proposed. And it was, according to Miss Davenport, who in spite of
her youth had experienced several, a bum proposal.
"I think he said," she once remarked, "something like 'I guess it would
be nice if we got married.'"
Whether it was the lack of romance in the words or whether her heart was
actually untouched, it is hard to say. At any rate she told him loftily that
they were much too young to consider anything as serious as matrimony.
"And she spurred up her horse and left me flat," said Wally.
But separation did what propinquity had failed to do. Wally went to
Santa Barbara for six months with the American Film Company, writing stories,
directing them, and acting in them. He acted in order to get the chance to
do the other two things.
Perhaps the girl missed him more than she had realized she would.
Perhaps she began to see how much those rides and the evenings spent with
books and the perfect companionship had meant to her.
Anyway, when he came back and they again began to work together--this
time Wally directing as well as starring with her--she saw it his way, and on
October 13, 1913, they were married. A quiet little ceremony and back to
work the next day.
They worked very hard, but it was great fun. They made two pictures a
week. For these Wally wrote the stories, directed them, and played the
leading role. The ideas of these stories were all Wally's, and in reading
now the brief synopses that he made, they amaze one with the clearness of
their dramatic points and the delicacy of their emotional treatment.
"My damn face kept me from getting a chance to be a writer or a
director," Wally said, later on.
He honestly felt that way about it, too. Nothing so incensed him as to
feel that he was "getting by" because of his looks.
A year after their marriage and about the time they bought their first
little home just off Hollywood Boulevard--it stands there now, a small, vine-
covered cottage that always gives me a lump in my throat when I pass it--
Wally left Universal to go with D. W. Griffith.
He took a cut in salary to do it, and a cut in salary meant a lot in
those days, for salaries weren't very big at best and the little house wasn't
paid for.
But Wally was beginning to have high ideals of what might be done in
pictures, and he wanted to work with D. W.
There he sustained the first and perhaps the only disappointment of his
career--and even that proved in the end a golden boomerang. D. W. was
getting ready to make The Clansman, which was called on the screen The Birth
of a Nation. Henry B. Walthall had been cast as the Little Colonel.
Suddenly he was taken ill. The Master--as they called Griffith then and as
he will be to the end of the motion picture chapter--cast about for an
adequate substitute, and his eye lighted on young Wallace Reid, who was again
directing.
That night there was joy in the little vine-covered cottage. Wally
forgot his prejudice against acting. It was worth going back to if he could
play such a part under such direction. Why, they actually went out and
bought chicken for dinner, and Dorothy cooked it and Wally served it and they
celebrated after the immemorial custom of young people.
Costumes were fitted to the boy. Tests were made. They started
shooting--and then Walthall recovered. Before 500 feet of the film was
actually shot, Walthall was back on the lot and ready to go to work.
It almost broke Wally's heart. They gave him instead the part of the
young blacksmith who cleaned out the gang of Negroes. They told him in the
end it would do him more good. And it did. Few who saw the film ever forgot
the picture of Wally, stripped to the waist, smiling, a white, avenging god
of strength among those mad colored men.
But it was difficult to see that then, and Wally only took it because he
was so disappointed he just didn't care.
A short time later he was offered the lead with Geraldine Farrar in
Carmen.
It was the charm of Geraldine Farrar and his desire to work with her and
know her that persuaded Wally to continue acting.
One cannot blame him. Geraldine Farrar was at that time the most
brilliant figure among American women. Famous as a beauty, as an artiste, as
a wit, she occupied a dazzling position. A thoroughly justified position.
A woman of dynamic force and of wide experience, a musician and an actress to
her finger tips, she swayed the boy as no other personality with whom he had
come in contact in his life up to that time had ever swayed him.
Above all, she did something that he had thought it impossible for
anyone to do. She awoke in him an interest in acting as an art. She saw at
once the possibilities within him. And she set to work to bring them out.
They had from the start one great common love--music.
Wally had never neglected his violin, and after work they spent many
hours at her home, or at the Reid home, where Dorothy held gracious sway,
playing, singing, talking music and all that it meant to the human race. No
further testimony to Wally's real ability as a musician is needed than that
Geraldine Farrar allowed him to accompany her and to play violin obbligatos
when she sang arias.
It was a friendship that stimulated Wallace Reid in many ways. Her
success, the fact that she was some years older than he was and had known
most of the world's interesting people, made him accept her words as the
utterings of an oracle.
The flattery of her interest gave him a new self-confidence and a new
ambition. It made him throw himself into the roles he played opposite her--
in Carmen, Maria Rosa, The Woman God Forgot, and Joan the Woman--with an
intensity he had never shown before.
From that series of pictures he emerged a star by popular acclaim.
He had also become a father. Young William Wallace Reid was born on
June 10, 1917. We have had many descriptions in fiction and history of the
anxiety of the young father awaiting the birth of his first child. A very
wise woman once said to me, "You will know the character of your man and the
quality of his love by the way he reacts to his first experience of
fatherhood."
This test Wallace Reid bore with a strength and sweetness that bound him
and his wife with indestructible ties. His tenderness and care and sympathy
were unfailing. And from the moment of his arrival in this world, young Bill
was his dad's pal.
They had moved from the first little vine-covered cottage to a charming
home on Morgan Place in Hollywood, and later built the beautiful estate in
the Hollywood foothills where Mrs. Reid and Bill still live. And during the
ensuing years that home and little family stood with and by Wally, glorying
in his triumphs, enjoying his laughter, fighting his enemies, and suffering
in his tears.
And now we come to that period of Wally's life, so many of the details
of which are and must remain confused--a confusion that is like some great
symphony gone mad--jazz mad.
I have spoken in a general way of Wally Reid's idealism. Let us see of
what, at this period, it consisted. Let us stop and look at the situation in
which he now found himself and what he himself was and wanted to be.
The motion picture business in those days was very different from the
motion picture business of today. No other stars will ever hold the unique
position occupied by Wallace Reid and Mary Pickford. The game has grown
beyond that. There are too many attractive men and women, too much
competition, too many theaters, too much interest now in the story, the
settings, the cast, the photography.
The motion picture fan has evolved, and the days of such enormous
personal popularity as came to Wally are gone forever. No one can take Wally
Reid's place because that place no longer exists. Like many another monarchy
of this century, it has become a republic.
Macaulay said of Lord Byron, "There is scarcely an instance in history
of so sudden a rise to so dizzy an eminence."
It is no exaggeration to say the same of Wallace Reid.
And in many ways the story of these two gifted and unhappy young artists
is not unalike.
At a time when most men have just completed their education, when they
are starting out to win by hard work and slow personal endeavor some of the
good things of this world, this sensitive, untried, and untrained youth found
himself, through practically no effort of his own, a sort of demigod.
Nor can I put it more effectively than Macaulay again said of Byron, at
a similar time in the poet's life: "Everything that could stimulate, and
everything that could gratify the strongest propensities of our nature, the
gaze of a hundred drawing-rooms, the acclamations of the whole nation, the
applause of applauded men, the love of lovely women, all this world and all
the glory of this world were at once offered to a youth to whom nature had
given violent passions and whom education had never taught to control them.
He lived as many men live who have no similar excuse to plead for their
faults."
Yet the desires of Wally's own heart were different. He had the
untarnished dreams of high minded youth. In a letter written while he was
away on location about that time, he said:
"There are only a few things worth while in this world--and they are so
easy to get. An open fire, books, a little music, and a friend you can talk
to or keep silence with. I think that everything you get beyond that is in
the end a burden and a temptation.
"The happy lives are the quiet lives, aren't they? And yet, it is so
hard to be quiet! I think you know how I feel about most things. But
sitting up here alone at night thoughts come more clearly. Never to hurt
anyone, to do good to others when you can, to keep your own code of honor
unbroken, your soul unstained by lust or greed or pride, your mind unsullied
by lies and pretense, your body strong and clean--these are the things you
must do.
"You believe in God. Sometimes I do, too, though I can't always give
Him a name. But always I do believe in good. I know there isn't any
happiness possible for me without self-respect, and I could never respect
myself if I fell below the standard I KNOW to be right."
It was a boy's code, not a man's. The idealism of youth. No definite
principles, no philosophy of life, had formed in this thought. His was a
mind of unconscious striving for spiritual good, but it was not a trained
mind. He felt, rather than thought. All that he had was a deep, natural,
inborn desire for right and a great admiration for the fine, upright things
of life. His love of beauty was that of the poet.
He clung, all through this time, to those few friends who had combated
the worst side of him, who had not hesitated to tell him the truth and to
battle the unworthy things that surrounded him. That is in itself no mean
test of right intention.
We see, then, a very young man to whom life had been always kind. A boy
born with a golden spoon, riding a smooth and easy path. A man of such charm
that he was forgiven anything and everything. And there is nothing more
terrible, in the end, than to be forgiven for those things which ought not to
be forgiven us.
Wally Reid was like Peter Pan. He never grew up.
The irrational and yet beautiful idolatry with which he was regarded,
his excessive popularity, startled him and bewildered him at first.
"Why?" he said. "Why? I haven't done anything. I haven't accomplished
anything."
He had fought no dragons, beaten no enemies, conquered no obstacles,
given nothing great or useful to humanity. And those, in his estimation,
were the things on which one should rest.
At first he tried to laugh it off. His modesty endured. Too much
modesty--a sort of false humility which would not allow him to do many things
he should have done, such as protecting himself from certain people and
separating himself from certain environments, for fear that somebody might
think he had grown conceited.
There was a peculiar thing in him that dreaded above everything else the
infliction of pain, or to see another humiliated. It was all but impossible
for him to say no--almost impossible for him to shut his door upon anyone,
refuse to see anyone, or to do anything that gave people even momentary
unhappiness.
Consequently the house on Morgan Place and the big new home in
Hollywood, with its swimming pool and its charming gardens and spacious
rooms, became open houses. Wally was such a good fellow. Always had a smile
and a ready handclasp, always made you feel happy and welcome and at home.
Merriment was the order of the day. Wally played like the boy he was,
and, because of that boyish quality in him, that play seemed innocent enough
and drifted far into dissipation before he or anybody else realized it.
People were always "dropping in." Dorothy Reid, with her quiet dignity
and sound sense of values, tried again and again to shut the doors. But you
couldn't do it with Wally there. The whole world was welcome to what he had.
Just a lucky break he'd happened to get it instead of the other fellow. You
had to share what you had with those less fortunate.
The thought was beautiful. But, like many beautiful thoughts, its
application was not practical. The privilege it accorded was abused. He
never had any privacy, no regularity, and not half enough sleep. His
popularity was like a sea swirling about him, and his marvelous physique
upheld him so that he could not see any bad results. Never alone, never with
time to rest and relax and read, as he loved to do. And almost no time to
think. More than that, it broke him away from the men and women who might
have given him something worth while.
He was working early and late at the studio. Big stars don't work now
as they worked then. Two or three pictures a year, with trips to Europe
between and vacations at Palm Springs and a few months in New York to see the
plays.
Wally made eight or nine pictures a year and he worked long, hard, hot
hours, and he did in those pictures an amazing amount of physical labor.
James Cruze, who directed many of them and who was one of Wally's closest
friends, says that no man in pictures has ever worked as hard as Wally
worked, or burned up so much energy, or given so much of his best qualities
to the pictures as Wally did in the first years of his stardom.
And he played as hard as he worked. He was always an extremist. He
lacked balance, and the stream that swept him along never gave him time to
establish any.
There was, first of all, a great deal of money. At least it seemed a
great deal of money to a young man who knew absolutely nothing of the value
of money and cared less. Money meant nothing to Wally Reid, except the
things he could buy and the people he could give it to. He immediately did
too much of both, as is often the way with young men who are generous to a
fault, who love life passionately and want to get the most out of it, who
cannot understand business in any way, shape, or form.
Like his father before him, Wally spent money, when he had it, for the
things that captivated his imagination or stirred his fancy. He was equally
apt to buy a new gown for Dorothy--his taste was unerring--a new electric
railroad for Bill, or a new roadster for himself.
When he didn't have money, it didn't worry him in the slightest.
Whether he went to the studio in the morning with five dollars or $100, he
came home without a dime. And as far as he was concerned, it didn't matter.
Never in his life had he had any training in the handling of money,
anything to teach him its value. If he got thirty dollars a month and
"cakes," that was fine and he was happy. If he got $2,500 a week, that was
fine, too, and he was happy, in a different way.
I once saw a little black book in which Wally kept a sort of haphazard
record of the money he had loaned to people. The names in it amazed me. But
all you ever had to do was to ask and Wally gave.
He saw the other fellow's viewpoint too well; his sympathies were too
easily stirred; he was too deeply tolerant of all kinds of faults and
suffering.
"Gosh," he used to say, "I'm nobody to judge anyone!"
Then there was fame. In a boyish sort of way, he loved it. But he
handled it in a most peculiar and dangerous fashion. When people pointed him
out, when he was circled by adoring throngs, small or great, he instantly
tried to come down to their level.
He felt abashed by their admiration. It overawed him. And to make
himself comfortable again, to be sure that he didn't give anybody the idea
that HE thought he was grand or important, he acted like a small boy who is
afraid the other boys will "give him the razz."
He was a great mixer, but he was never allowed to mix on equal terms.
Somehow, he always became the center of everything. He did everything so
well. His conversation was so amusing, his buffoonery so fascinating, his
charm so drastic, that it always ended by Wally doing the entertaining while
the rest sat and admired. This was not, I know, of his choosing. But it
inevitably happened.
There is nothing more dangerous to a man than to be separated from the
equality of at least some of his fellow men, to lose that give and take, that
easy and natural criticism and sympathy, which is possible only between
equals. All during this period of his life Wally was unfortunate enough to
have a court, a gang of admirers, none of whom were his equals.
His predicament was due partly to lack of time. He was busy, he was
terribly overworked, he was careless. He took what came nearest to hand.
And the nearest to hand was a gang of flattering sycophants such as
surrounded Louis XV.
The strong, coldwinds of honest male companionship with men of his own
class and mental caliber did not blow upon him--only the breezes of perfumed
words and self-seeking adulation.
I do not believe that anyone who did not actually see it will every
quite understand the woman angle of Wally's life at this time. It is a
difficult matter to deal with. This is a biography which must in many ways
touch the living, and, since they must not be hurt, the subject is one of
extreme delicacy. But unless it is honestly dealt with you cannot get a fair
estimate of the hurricane of temptations that were sweeping the boy.
He was not a man who cared especially for women. He had sowed no wild
oats. He had passed through one sweet and worthy young love affair to a
happy and complete marriage. As a woman who possessed and valued his
friendship, I know how deeply he revered women, how he desired to idealize
them. From them he expected and wanted the best, and he hoped that they
would want the best from him.
The three women to whom he gave a permanent feeling of love and trust
were his wife, a woman of exceptional fineness and strength; his mother, as
deeply spiritual and idealistic a soul as ever lived on earth; and myself--
and I was to him a combination of pal and sister, and he never once asked me
to soften my judgment or to temper my thoughts of him or anything he did.
He always said that we were the only persons who always told him the
truth, and to the very end he gave us all that was best and most loyal in
himself.
But many women did their best to destroy in him that idealism.
No man, not even Byron himself, has ever been so besieged by the
attention of women. Let me tell you a few instances that may startle you,
but that will make you concede my point.
There was, for instance, the beautiful society woman, a leader of the
most exclusive smart set in Los Angeles and Santa Barbara. Her beauty was a
tradition, her name a power, her position unassailable. And yet for a year
she sent Wally a continual stream of pictures of herself which nobody but her
husband should have seen. They were beautiful pictures, calculated to tempt
St. Anthony himself.
She sent him a key to her apartment, which nobody knew she kept. She
gave his valet a diamond ring worth thousands of dollars to admit her to
Wally's dressing room, and once there she exercised all her grace and
splendor and knowledge of men to win his passing fancy.
One day when Wally and Dorothy and I were leaving the studio to go to
their house for dinner, we found a girl hidden under the robe in the back
seat of the car. I stepped on her, as a matter of fact, in getting in.
I have never seen anyone more exquisite. Bronze hair and great violet
eyes and the body of a wood nymph.
Her father was an officer holding high rank in the United States Army
and her mother was one of the most noted women in Washington. No one knew
where she was. She had run away from a fashionable boarding school, sold her
jewelry to buy a ticket and come West to see Wally. And, let me tell you,
when I say she was irresistibly lovely, I mean just that.
Dorothy and I--Wally washed his hands of her from the start in much
annoyance--had a time with that child. We didn't know who she was or where
she came from. She secreted herself under Wally's bed, she haunted the
studio and the house, exquisitely dressed, her big eyes full of tears. When
we finally found out her father's name and wired, he came West to take her
home. She got off the train and San Bernardino and telephoned Wally that she
was going to kill herself. But she didn't.
Then, the beautiful ex-Follies girl, who had married a multimillionaire,
and was famous on Broadway for the damage she had done to masculine hearts.
She came to Hollywood, too, with a wardrobe from Paris and a bag of tricks
I've never seen equaled. She succeeded in winning a visiting prince, but for
all her subtlety she failed to win Wally.
This is the merest cross-section, the tiniest fraction, of the sort of
thing Wally Reid, a boy still in his early twenties, went through day after
day. I do not condemn those women. I know nothing of their problems.
Perhaps they didn't understand. But certainly they did all that a woman
can do to undermine a man's moral fiber and the pressure of their pursuit and
flattery must have told.
Through it all, Wally Reid started in merely to have a good time, to
enjoy life. Young, hot blooded, full of laughter, of excitement, of the love
of speed, he stepped into the current. And the current bore him along to
dissipation, and from dissipation to disaster.
But if the most hardened moralist, the sternest critic, will sit back
very quietly for a moment and try to estimate the strength of that current of
sudden wealth and fame upon a boy of twenty-five, perhaps he will be more
ready to weep than to condemn.
If his critics will try to put themselves for one moment in Wally's
place honestly, they will only be sad that one so young and fine should have
been subjected to the pressure of such a pace. After all, it is part of the
prayer Jesus gave us, "Lead us not into temptation."
What was it Macaulay said of Byron? "He lived as many men live who have
no similar excuse to plead for their faults."
And he condemned himself more harshly than could anyone else in the
world.
Then came the World War.
I still believe that the beginning of the end for Wallace Reid was when
he didn't put on a uniform. I will show you that he never forgave himself.
And then, long afterward, worn out by illness, by overwork, by remorse,
by the pace of pleasure which had caught him up, weakened by flattery and
indulgence, he met his arch-enemy for the first time. And the death struggle
began.
Part Four
Wallace Reid's connection with the World War was a soul problem of which
few people knew.
On the face of things, in the eyes of the man in the street, even
according to the judgment of the fervent patriot, Wally Reid's war record is
not subject to attack from any source or angle.
In the boy's own eyes that record was stamped indelibly with the black
"S" of slacker.
He himself felt that he had failed, that his manhood was smirched, that
he had fallen below his own standard and the standard of the Reid family.
All that was American in him responded to the thoughts and feelings that
swept this country into war in 1917. The thrill of the red, white, and blue
was in his blood--bred there by generations of men who had helped to make it
what it was and to keep its glory untarnished.
All that was boy in his heart heard the call of the great adventure--
war. All that was dramatic in him reacted to uniforms, bands, battle tales,
and the chance for service and heroism.
All that was idealistic in him responded to Woodrow Wilson's call to
make the "world safe for democracy."
He was twenty-five. He stood six feet one, and he weighted 190 pounds.
He was a crack shot. His physical condition was good. He had been to
military school and knew the drill and regulations. Kipling was his favorite
author and Mulvaney his favorite character.
Can you doubt that he wanted to get into the thick of it?
In 1919 he gave me a picture himself in the uniform of a British
lieutenant--taken when he played the English boy in the prologue of Joan the
Woman--and across it he scrawled, "Just a so-and-so who never got into
uniform except when he put on his grease paint."
That is the keynote. The thing had gone deep.
No one thing so fatally undermined Wally's self-respect as his failure
to join the A. E. F.
If he had gone, the thing that happened to him would never have
happened. He might not have come back from Chateau-Thierry, but had he gone
to France and returned safely he could have weathered anything.
Once again fate switched the fails of his destiny. Once again outside
facts and circumstances and people controlled his decision to his own
undoing. However, it is but just to say that probably none of them dreamed
for an instant of the effect of all this upon the boy.
Here are the facts:
The Reids had a very small baby when America decided to get into the big
show. Mrs. Reid had been out of pictures for some years, and during the year
following Bill's birth her health had not been of the best.
Wally's father and mother were dependent upon him at that time. Hal
Reid died a short time afterward. Bertha Westbrook Reid had been left, when
she and Hal were divorced, with but a small portion of what had once been a
good sized fortune.
Dorothy Reid had always kept Mrs. Davenport with her, and after the
arrival of her son felt more and more the need of her mother's help in the
confused and difficult life which she faced as the wife of a great star and
matinee idol.
All of which put Wallace Reid pretty well down the list of deferred
classifications, as far as the draft was concerned.
Furthermore, as far as he himself was concerned, he had saved no money
to meet such obligations. Wally had been getting a big salary for only a
short time and it had never occurred to him to put any of it away.
In spite of this, he wanted to enlist, and he said so. The opposition
from all quarters was intense, and reasonably so.
His drawing power at the box office had just hit its peak. To
understand his importance to the organization with which he was connected it
would be necessary to go into involved financial details and long
explanations of the selling end of motion pictures. I think we can get at it
by simply saying that Wallace Reid was for years the "whip" of the Paramount
program.
His pictures were sure-fire money makers, and exhibitors were taking
some much less desirable films only in order to get the Reid pictures.
Much of the early prosperity and success of the Paramount organization
was built upon Wallace Reid.
Naturally, they opposed his enlisting, voluntarily and without need and
over obstacles, in an army where he might be killed or disfigured. To them,
it meant the loss of millions of dollars and the removal of that corner stone
upon which they were building their future plans.
They brought to bear upon him every sort of pressure in the form of sane
and reasonable argument. In the army he would be just one more man, just
another gun, just another stopgap.
There were plenty of men willing and ready, without obligations to
either family or business associates. Let them go first. If the time came
when men in deferred classifications were needed, that would be a different
proposition.
Also, the world needed amusement as it had never needed it before. He
was filling that need. And he could be of much more use to the cause in
drives, in benefits, in keeping up the morale of the nation than he could by
carrying a single gun against the Germans.
The war fervor is over. We know a good deal more now about the war than
we did then. The viewpoint of Wally's company and his family seems to us in
the cool light of today the only sane and normal one.
There are many reasons why it is impossible to tell of some of the fine
work Wally did behind the scenes of the war. This is and must continue to be
part of the unwritten history which belongs to every war.
Many of the details I do not know myself, but I do know that Wallace
Reid served the Secret Service of his government and was of exceptional value
to it all through the days of fighting.
Also, he raised large sums of money, both for organizations helping the
boys at the front and for the Liberty Loans. He opened his home to the
disabled veterans after the Armistice, and gave liberally of his money and
his time and his talents before its signing.
Nevertheless, at any cost to himself and others, he should have gone to
France.
A man who has not the training or the judgment or the power to reconcile
his ideals to the world he must live in can be mortally wounded by other
things than bullets. In this matter, Wally fell into the gap between a high
idealism and a reasonable, practical necessity. He spent too much of himself
in remorse--about this and other things.
Wally yielded, for he stood alone. In fact, he kept to himself his own
desires and dreams, for fear he might burden those who needed him with the
sight of his bitter disappointment. But he hated himself.
He was, in his own opinion, just a low-lived slacker. Those who did not
enlist he despised. And he was one of them! Nice company! As far as he
could see, he just wasn't worth a damn.
I do not think he was ever criticized to any extent for not donning
khaki. But he believed that everybody else thought the same things he was
thinking. We winced every time he passed a man in uniform.
His confidence in himself faded to zero. What did it matter what he
did? You couldn't get any lower than being a white-livered cur who stayed
home and acted in front of a camera when every MAN was risking his life at
Chateau-Thierry or Vimy Ridge.
The shattering of the idealist took a long step forward.
There was, when you stop to consider it, a vast significance in
something seemingly trivial that happened about this time. That was Wally's
change from the violin to the saxophone as his favorite musical instrument.
His love of the violin had been a very deep and sacred thing. He had
given to it his very best, expressing his inner dreams, satisfying his love
of beauty, touching the stars through its divine voice. On quiet evenings,
which grew fewer and fewer as life went on and the merry-go-round whirled
faster and faster, he would play for hours, with Dorothy accompanying him.
Those hours had always brought them very close, renewed their devotion
to each other. To the wife they were like oases in a desert.
But the violin was no favorite with the gay, joy seeking, hilarious
young folks--and all Hollywood was unbelievably young in those days. Success
and gold belonged to youth--who pressed about Wally. The saxophone was their
instrument.
It took Wally about two weeks to master it. Like everything else he
did, he did is superlatively well. He made a collection of saxophones,
little ones and big ones, gold ones and silver ones. He could go into a cafe
and make the rounds of any good jazz orchestra and play every instrument,
including the drums, better than the performers--and he often did. But he
rarely touched his violin after that.
In the summer of 1921 Wallace Reid went to New York to make a picture
from Du Maurier's great novel, Peter Ibbetson, the picture called Forever.
He had been back but once since his first departure for Hollywood, and then
only for a brief visit to introduce his wife and son to his mother.
He did not want to go in 1921.
He had been, for the first time in his life, rather desperately ill.
His nerves, of which he himself was totally unconscious, but which
nevertheless lay very near the surface, were strung to the breaking point by
the continual rebellion within himself over the life he was leading. His
physical condition was beginning to show the result of the terrific pace at
which he was living and working. He never took any care of himself--drove
himself to the last ounce of energy always.
About that time the dentist found it necessary to pull nine of his teeth
at one time, and the shock to his system and the nervous irritation following
it told on him.
Besides, he loved his home more than any other man I have ever known--
really loved it. It was part of him. They could follow him into, but very
few persons could drag him out of it. That home influence--the companionship
of his devoted, humorous, understanding wife and the presence of the son who
was growing up a pal--had kept him normal under stress, or at least had kept
him from going "hay wire."
On a picture which now hangs over his widow's desk, and which is dated
just a little while before his departure for the East, he wrote, "To our
Mama, Wally's and Bill's, with all my devoted love, Your Wally-Boy."
That was how he felt about it. And at the last moment Dorothy could not
go with him to New York. Bill had had a hard siege of whooping cough and it
didn't seem safe to take him East into the summer heat. Nor could his mother
leave him.
So Wally went alone. He did not love New York at best. After
California and the easy, informal, outdoor life he had become accustomed to,
he dreaded the rush of the city. And he knew, perhaps, that he would be
swamped by attentions, by people, by demands of all kinds.
In New York he had nothing that he wanted and everything he didn't want:
none of the things that were good for him and all the things that were bad.
He happened to dislike both the director and the co-star of the picture
with the peculiar intensity of a man who dislikes very few people. In
consequence, they didn't like him; and Wally resembled many other sensitive
people in that he put his worst foot forward with anyone who didn't happen to
like him. He was, in the last analysis, one of those peculiar, chameleon
souls that take character from the expectations of those about them.
The weather in New York--it was the July of the Dempsey-Carpentier fight
--was insufferably hot and humid, and Wally was used to the desert heat and
cold nights of California.
Also, he had to have his hair marcelled every day! And that enraged him
out of all measure. He was overpowered once more by the nature of his
profession, the futility of his work, the unmanly quality of the things which
he was doing.
Privacy was something of which he knew no more than the now proverbial
goldfish. Old friends, new friends, members of the organization, newspaper
reporters, gushing admirers, celebrities who counted him one of the inner
circle, women of all kinds, ranks, and degrees of beauty and intelligence,
moved in upon him.
As a result of all this, he had a bad case of insomnia, when night after
night he tossed in the sticky, dripping heat without closing his eyes until
dawn, and then had to get up and start working at 9.
I saw him the day he left for that trip. He stopped by my house on his
way to the station to say good-by to my small daughter, Elaine, who was his
special pet.
I remember that he started matchmaking when she and Bill were in their
cradles--she was only a year and a half younger--and decided that he and
Dorothy and I would one day be mutual grandparents. Elaine and her "Uncle
Wally" would spend long hours on the floor operating a set of mechanical
animals he had bought for her, and I could never make up my mind which one of
them enjoyed it more.
On that day he looked ill and unhappy. A premonition of danger and
disaster hung over him.
"I wish I hadn't agreed to go," he said.
But, for all that he was thin and a little drawn, his eyes were the same
steady, clear eyes into which you could look and fine the truth about
anything. He was going "on the wagon," he said, for the whole trip.
When he came back a few months later, I went with Dorothy to meet him at
the train.
The change in him appalled me. It was like meeting a stranger or seeing
a dear friend through a thick veil. Dorothy had sensed the thing, naturally,
much more quickly and deeply than I had.
A little white mask seemed to have slipped over her radiant face.
It is not necessary to go into details. I do not know them, anyway.
I doubt if Dorothy Reid herself knows them--only this:
A doctor in New York had given Wally some "sleeping powders" to help him
conquer the "white nights." He had come to depend upon them.
There was in Wally a deep strain of the experimentalist. He would try
anything once. His curiosity about every phase of life was enormous, and he
suffered from that common delusion that he, at least, could do anything and
not be touched by it.
Many things gave evidence of this trait. In the basement of his home he
had a fully equipped chemical laboratory. When you missed him from parties,
you were pretty certain to find him down there, messing around with all kinds
of stuff. New inventions and discoveries of which he read always interested
him enormously and he liked to investigate them.
The great interest in medicine which had possessed him as a boy never
left him. He had a natural bent for it, as he had for so many things. When
the troupe was on location in the high Sierras, he once set four broken
fingers for one of the prop boys and did a perfect job, according to the
Hollywood surgeon who examined the hand when they returned.
One night a party of us were returning from San Pedro, where we had
dined on the house boat of a banker. It was almost dawn as we swept along
the boulevard, with Wally at the wheel. Now and again we passed market
trucks and wagons piled high with fruit and vegetables.
When we had almost reached the city limits, we came upon a bad
automobile smash-up. A fast driven roadster had upset one of the produce
carts. A woman had been badly injured.
It wasn't a pretty sight, but Wally was out and into it and, with
extraordinary coolness, had the whole situation in had in two minutes. He
did everything that could be done with the cont
ents of his first-air kit, and
then Dorothy drove the car to the receiving hospital, while he held the woman
as motionless and comfortable as possible. The doctor at the receiving
hospital told us there could be no question that Wally had saved the woman's
life.
His knowledge, actually slight but augmented by his uncanny facility,
made him think of himself as a doctor. And it gave him an easy familiarity
with medicines, a confidence in his ability to handle them, which was
exceedingly bad for him.
The change in Wally after that New York trip was apparent to everyone
close to him. An indescribable, baffling something surrounded him, which no
one could understand. It was as though some malignant fairy had transformed
him with one wave of her want into a distorted image of his former self.
He had soared along at a terrific speed, packing together work, play,
achievement, hobbies to the nth degree, burning the candle at both ends,
managing somehow to do twice as much as anyone else did--all in a few years.
And suddenly he had crashed.
The gradual decline of the next few months, the crumbling of the
physical man, the dimming of the things in him that were so wonderful and so
lovable, were enough to make the angels weep.
He worked--worked, as he had always one, faithfully and consistently,
when he could hardly walk on the set. His eyes went back on him in a final,
terrible case of Klieg eye caused by working under the powerful lights; but
still he carried on.
He played his part, but the old lovable, irresistible smile, that had
won its way around the universe, was a shadow of itself. Sometimes a
terrific effort would lift him back for a moment to the boy of yesterday, the
boy the whole world loved. But the flame was gone. The shining light
within, which had reached out and touched hearts, didn't burn any more.
I do not think that he himself realized the change. He hardly knew what
was happening. An enemy from without had taken possession of him, blurred
his vision, eaten into his soul, numbed his mind. He was going through the
motions of living, but the boy Wally was held fast in the grip of something
that above all things paralyzed his consciousness of himself.
The Indianapolis road race of 1922 brought things out from under cover,
precipitated the climax.
The realization of the actual nature of the trouble mounted to a
certainty, and his family, his real friends, his business superiors--the only
ones then who actually knew--stood still for a time, poised in horror and
bewilderment. It is proof of the love and respect in which they held him
that there was no condemnation--nothing but a pity that tore every heart.
Not Wally! Not the Boy!
There again the charm of the man did him a fatal injustice. For, as a
matter of fact, we had all known, deep down in hour hearts. But we had
shuddered back from connecting it with the bright and shining things that
Wally represented to us; from the horror of facing him with it, of seeing
that proud and gay and loving spirit bowed before us.
Yet, if the thing had been faced sooner it might have had a different
end. A victim of a malady more terrible than any mere disease of the flesh,
our old instinct to make things easy for him allowed us to stand back and let
him face alone a problem which he wasn't even capable of recognizing, a
problem whose most deadly weapon is that it makes an ally of its prey.
Wally's determination to drive in the Indianapolis race forced our
hands, drove us into the open.
He had decided to drive his great English speed demon, the Sunbeam, in
the Decoration Day races. He was a licensed racing driver. The honor was
one he valued highly. He counted Roscoe Sarles and Jimmy Murphy among his
closet pals.
The thing became an obsession with him. Arguments were powerless. The
threats of the company that such an action would break his contract didn't
touch him. The pleas of his friends were unavailing.
Whether or not there was, deep down, a desire to die with his boots on,
an almost subconscious hope that this would be a final, grand gesture, no one
knows. But his decision to go was the first and only stubborn thing I ever
saw about him. He had his mechanics get his car in shape. He set the date
of his departure.
He could not go there to drive. It was worse than suicide, in his
weakened mental and physical condition. It might be murder.
Taking upon her slim shoulders the whole burden, as she had so quietly
and so courageously shouldered many other burdens, Dorothy Davenport Reid
spoke at last.
"You cannot go," she said. "You would endanger the lives of your
friends, Wally. And that I know you would never do."
Nor would he. That appeal stopped him. But at last they were face to
face with a greater thing than any road race.
I have tried to show you how Wally's feet strayed into this fatal path.
His self-respect had been destroyed by his own inner contempt for his
work, by his failure to go into the trenches, by his own falls from grace in
the face of overpowering temptations, and by his excessive remorse following
them.
His moral fiber had been weakened by the continual onslaught of
temptation and the smothering of continual flattery, and the association with
people who dragged him down in his own estimation, and by the lack of
companions who could uplift and inspire him.
His fear had been lulled to sleep by his own belief in his knowledge of
medicine.
His soul strength and character had ceased to grow because of the great
ease with which all the glories of the world came to him.
His health had been fatally undermined by overwork and nerve strain, by
insomnia and illness.
Under the paralyzing grip of a thing which had come upon him unawares,
he was no more himself than you would be under the administration of ether.
He acted blindly, and if sometimes he saw himself as he had become, he sank
himself again in the fog rather than face himself.
But at last he had to face himself.
No one can know, no one should know, what Dorothy Reid bore in those
days. Her first fight was to keep others from knowing. Her big fight was to
break the grip of this thing upon the man she loved, whose genius and
idealism she knew better than anyone else in the world.
"Our Mama, Wally's and Bill's."
With the aid of one or two trusted friends--in her beautiful self-
sacrifice she spared Wally's mother that last battle--she forced Wally back,
through agonies that were more terrible to her than to him, into clear
consciousness.
At last Wally Reid was himself again. The mind that had been clouded,
the soul that had cowered out of sight, were functioning once more. At first
he was like a man who had lost his memory, who could not fill the gap of
time. For weeks he had been in sanitariums and hospitals, helped day and
night by all that science could do to make the break from this disease
bearable to human mind and body. Dorothy had never left his bedside, giving
everything she had to give in an effort to help him, but yielding not one
inch to his mortal enemy, even when Wally joined that enemy against her.
And so he day came when the boy lay spent and broken, but himself; able
to look at her with honest eyes which held such love as few women will ever
see.
He knew. And his remorse was terrible. His tears--contemplating the
wreck of such high hopes and aspirations--kept him company day and night. Of
him might it truly be said, "His bread was sorrow and his drink was tears."
But the crucifixion was to come.
Hope had crept into the little room where he lay. After all, he was
young--just past thirty. Love--love of those who knew him and love of the
world--surrounded him still. He could come back. He could justify that
love, which now, in his dark hour, he so greatly prized.
Flashes of the old fighting spirit with which he had been born and had
never had a need to use flamed forth. He longed for music and lay listening
for hours to the great masterpieces of music on the phonograph that had been
moved into his room. Or he asked Dorothy to read such poets as Keats and
Mrs. Browning or the comedies of Shakespeare.
Never, in many ways, had he risen to the heights of vision and the
desire for fine things which he showed in those days when his worn body lay
helpless upon a couch of pain.
Then the blow fell.
He wasn't getting better. He was getting steadily worse--fatally worse.
The ravages were not healing. They were increasing and slowly doing him to
death.
But one thing would save his life. A return to the old bondage, for a
time at least; a medically directed, careful, moderate return. His system
could not bear the sudden release.
He faced it bravely; death or a return to the thing that had destroyed
him, that had almost killed his spirit, that had burned his soul.
He looked, as always in moments of stress and trial, to his wife.
But this time she shook her head. That was too much to ask--that she,
who loved him so, make such a choice.
All she could do was to kneel beside him, holding his thin hands in her
strong, comforting ones, and abide by his decision.
And so his last and great decision was the first which he made alone.
It was great, as the boy was essentially and fundamentally great.
"I'll go out clean," he said. "I'd rather my body died than to go back
to the thing that almost killed me. At least, I'm myself now. I'll--go out
clean."
And then he said to her a thing which Dorothy Reid may wear all her life
as a crown and which will serve her always as a consolation.
"I believe in God now," he said. "No one but God could have made the
love you've given me. I'm not afraid."
So he signed his own death warrant. So he made his choice.
He went out--clean and unafraid.
And that clean and fearless and self-chosen death gives him a right to
occupy the place in our memories which he occupied in our hearts for so many
years.
The End
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NOTES:
[1] It is curious how the paths cross:
a. Dorothy Davenport's aunt was Fanny Davenport, who acted on stage
with William Desmond Taylor for several years.
b. Dorothy Davenport's mother was Alice Davenport, who acted in
several Keystone films with Mabel Normand.
c. Dorothy Davenport's husband was Wallace Reid, who was directed
by William Desmond Taylor in two films.
d. Taylor, Normand and Reid were all the objects of Hollywood
scandal in the early 1920's.
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For more information about Taylor, see
WILLIAM DESMOND TAYLOR: A DOSSIER (Scarecrow Press, 1991)
Back issues of Taylorology are available via Gopher at
gopher.etext.org
in the directory Zines/Taylorology
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