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Taylorology Issue 36
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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 36 -- December 1995 Editor: Bruce Long bruce@asu.edu *
* TAYLOROLOGY may be freely distributed *
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CONTENTS OF THIS ISSUE:
Ray Frohman Interviews:
Charlie Chaplin
Dorothy Gish
Louise Glaum
William S. Hart
Ruth Roland
Blanche Sweet
Clara Kimball Young
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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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In late 1919, reporter Ray Frohman interviewed some of the top Hollywood
silent film stars of that year. Seven of those interviews are reprinted
below, to provide some background into the Los Angeles silent film industry
in which William Desmond Taylor worked. (Frohman's interview with Mary Miles
Minter, also part of this series, was reprinted in TAYLOROLOGY 32.)
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Charlie Chaplin
December 2, 1919
Ray W. Frohman
LOS ANGELES HERALD
(When Charlie Chaplin, creator of ludicrous film divertissements that
assuage the cares of a trouble world, was treated to a "pre-view" of Ray W.
Frohman's interview with him for The Evening Herald--the first authentic
interview Chaplin has granted for over two years, and the first dialogue
between Chaplin and Doug Fairbanks ever recorded--Chaplin, the laughmaker,
LAUGHED and said:
"This is the first artistic interview I've ever had.
"It is one of the very few articles ever written about me that really
reveal me to the public."
Blushing over the praise of himself he had read, the comedian added that
"perhaps the writer was a little too sympathetic!"
And then Charlie, who, as his "big brother" Doug says, "can't
concentrate," pleaded to keep the "copy" "to read it again more leisurely so
that I can enjoy it more.")
If the KIDS could vote, CHARLIE CHAPLIN would be our next PRESIDENT!
And if it's true, as Doug Fairbanks told Charlie in my presence, that in
Sweden and Denmark, too, they consider Charlie in a class by himself, he may
yet be King of Scandinavia!
In fact, when the League of Nations gets to working and the Brotherhood
of Man is a reality, my guess is that it's the internationally popular
Charles Spencer Chaplin who'll be the first President of the World--in spite
of his feet.
Even at RIVAL studios, publicity men paid to lie for Charlie's
competitors--if he can be said to have any--say freely, "Nobody's ever had
the vogue that Chaplin has."
The peerless Douglas Fairbanks himself says:
"There is only ONE king in pictures--Chaplin; and only ONE queen--Mary
Pickford. The rest of us must be content to be pretty good and compete with
EACH OTHER!"
No wonder my kneecaps vibrated as I chatted over an hour with Charlie
Chaplin--and Doug Fairbanks, too, at the same time--out in darkest Hollywood.
There we were, all in the same small room for one admission: Charlie
and Doug and I--the king of comedy, the nonpareil light comedian, and a
dictographic nonentity--talking our heads off, or, rather, talking Charlie's
head off!
Everybody knows Charlie joined Essanay in 1915, knows about his million-
dollar contract with First National, and that he's now "one his own" and one
of "The Big Four." Everybody's seen every Chaplin comedy from "The Bank," "A
Night Out," "A Woman," "His New Job" and "Police" up through "A Dog's Life,"
"Shoulder Arms" and "Sunnyside."
In fact, since they say "Chaplin doesn't work" and call his producing
concern out on La Brea "the century plant," we've all been content to go to
see him, and him alone, over and over again in the same films!
So I didn't has over with Charlie the well known facts of his pictorial
biography.
Doug and Charlie, with an occasional interpolation from me, talked and
talked of Charlie's views on art and books and plays, on beautiful women and
sunsets, on the Grand Canyon and whether or not a desert is beautiful, and
everything else from cabbages to kings, from "Hamlet" to Doug's new funny
overcoat; and on Charlie's professional methods and unprofessional soul--for
he has one--and what he says he's trying to do to pictures and is doing and
is going to do.
And Eureka! Now I can tell the world for the first time WHY Doug smiles
and smiles and smiles that famous smile of his!
It's BECAUSE HE HAS PRIVATE "PREVIEWS" OF UNRELEASED IMPROMPTU CHAPLIN
COMEDIES, every time he and his friend get together.
For Charlie, I think most of us agree, on the screen is "the funniest
man in the world."
And at times during our chat he was twice as funny as that!
And Doug--when he's "kidding" and playfully baiting Charlie and leading
him on conversationally, or waxing Rabelaisian, or mimicking a noted English
author for Charlie and then registering a lobe-to-lobe grin--is funnier than
Charlie!
And I might have been funny myself, for I was weak and helpless from
laughter!
Through the flimsy cheesecloth curtain of a window I saw for the first
time--and recognized--the little smooth-shaven face of the off-screen
Chaplin. It was thrust forward in a sort of cataleptic grin toward Doug, who
was uttering one of his introductory "Do you know, Charlie's" in the deadly-
serious resonant tones that he affects toward his little friend.
"Hah!" quoth I to myself, waxing Shakespearian, "I have thee on the hip"-
-and I was upon them.
It was the REAL Charlie Chaplin.
I do not mean the Chaplin you see on the screen, the last of the royal
jesters, with all of us as his patrons, the beloved vagabond, who has been
paid the sincerest flattery, that of imitation, by more people than any other
man who ever lived--by little kids all over the globe, by folks at
masquerades, by "would-bes" on "amateur nights," by "rival" screen
"comedians," both Caucasian and Oriental.
That Charlie, with his most active flexible cane and his dogs, his
oddest derby constantly being tipped to cops--until the psychological moment
arrives--and to fair women, his trick moustache and his loose-fitting
shapeless trousers, and the biggest feet in Filmland as well--that Charlie
every man, woman and child under the stars knows.
He has probably been kicked and shot in the pants--on the screen--more
than any other living man.
The camaraderie this humblest screen character displays toward policemen
and burglars, until the moment arrives for him to destroy them--for he can
pick up his feet quicker than any man in Shadowland--is world famous. A
captivating smile, an artless blush--and then an agile hoof--is the way
Chaplin on the silver sheet, broke in a saloon or restaurant, handles
striking policemen before they strike.
And you are aware how chivalrous he is toward the fair sex; how his
matchlike--not matchless--figure, and his inimitable--not immaculate--garb
have captivated many a beautiful heroine.
He can get more fun out of stepping in a waste basket--but what's the
use? You know him.
Let it suffice to say that Chaplin's smirks, shrugs and sucking together
of his cheeks, his characteristic Chaplinesque gestures, his personal
accoutrements and mannerisms are the most individual, distinctive on the
shadow screen.
But those, as Doug opined to Charlie and me, are merely "the externals,
the trappings" of his screen art.
"Our most subtle comedian," he has been called by the critic of an
eastern magazine, the veteran of a million reviews.
"Vulgar," say some folks who have seen Charlie spout food on the screen
amidst the medley of mock romance, mock tragedy, mock adoration, mock
courtesy that he "spills" in the comedies he ORIGINATES.
But no "highbrown" has ever been able to sit through a Chaplin comedy
without bursting involuntarily into spontaneous "Hah hahs!" right out loud;
and cultured, intellectual college professors--wasn't Professor Stockton
Axson, brother-in-law of President Wilson, one of them!--have publicly
proclaimed him an ARTIST.
However, the Chaplin I talked with, as I said, was not the screen
Chaplin.
Neither was he the make-believe-real Chaplin who USED to talk to
interviewers before he made all the money he wants and decided that he didn't
need any publicity. That Chaplin, I have one of his intimates' word for it,
used to turn on the phonograph in his room and chat engagingly, ALWAYS
CAMOUFLAGING HIS REAL SELF.
The Charlie Chaplin who talked to me is the real, honest-to-goodness,
personal, unprofessional, actual Charlie Chaplin, I give you my word for it.
He was as artless, as "off his guard" as a three years' child who doesn't
know the camera's there when you snapshot him.
Charlie, you know, when it comes to being interviewed--which he hasn't
permitted for YEARS--is what Fielding's eighteenth century bailiffs would
have called "a shy cock."
When famous newspapermen representing papers from all over the country
with President Wilson's party called on him. Charlie stuck his head in the
door, took one look, said he "had to have some air," and "ditched" them all--
went out for an auto ride!
When his own casting director, Edward Biby pleaded with him for an HOUR
A MONTH for nation-wide magazine interviews, saying it would be worth a
million dollars to Chaplin, Charlie merely waved a hand airily and said: "Oh,
no, that's all right, that's all right!"
But I found him a delightfully interesting conversationalist, a
sensitive little aesthete who's well-read and well versed in art, a cultured
little chap with artistic sensibilities, a rather deep thinker--though I
won't vouch for the soundness of his theories--and withal a somewhat shifty
or shifting one.
Where the "shifts" came in, the mental sidestepping from one "highbrow"
subject to another or from high to low, the "sacheting" to use a dancing
term, of the gray matter in instinctive--and courteous--reaction to the
conversation of others, were with Doug Fairbanks.
For when talking with Charlie, the jovial "Smiling Doug" Fairbanks is
not merely magnetic--he is HYPNOTIC! He holds his friend Charlie in the
hollow of his hand.
"I've been dreaming of London," mused Charlie, who was born near there
only 31 short years ago and was in vaudeville there--for he became identified
with the theater when he was seven years old. "I tried to show it to
someone, but there was always fog or night or something--I couldn't show its
beauties. But I would say 'WAIT--you'll see it.'"
Charlie said he hasn't been back in dear old Lunnon since he attracted
favorable notice in "A Night in an English Music Hall," as the lead in which
he came to the United States before he made his picture debut, some years
ago.
But, pause! I didn't tell you how the real Charlie looks!
He's a slender sapling, this artist in the neat gray-checkered suit and
black knitted tie and yellow-tinted pleated shirt who lolled in a Morris
chair chatting so naturally and vivaciously. He has curly black hair with
touches of gray--a young man's gray--at the temples, and vivid blue eyes, and
sensitive features like the person of high-strung temperament that he is.
When he shows his perfect teeth in a grin--a charmed, fascinated,
hypnotized grin--at his master, Doug, he has Lewis Carroll's Cheshire cat
"backed off the boards."
At times when his eyes shine and his face glows as he gets talking of
his professional or aesthetic enthusiasms, Charlie becomes almost beautiful.
And when he gets really "worked up," his disreputable LITTLE black shoes
with they grayish tops twist, and his supple figure writhes, as his right
hand helps him to express himself by graceful, powerful gestures.
"I became a star when I'd been at Keystone SIX MONTHS," said Charlie in
response to my question. "I was there about a year. No, that's not the
world's record--with some people it takes only one picture. Look at the way
Betty Compson's salary jumped after her work in 'The Miracle Man.'
"Did I have 'awful struggles,' or fights with bosses to MAKE them star
me? My struggles were over before I went into pictures."
"After one picture the public fell on its face and worshipped him," said
Doug. "I'm an admirer of yours, Charlie, even if you are a friend. And when
I see you on the screen there's something goes from you to me, I feel an
interchange.
"It isn't what he DOES, or even how he does it, that makes you laugh,"
"enthused" Doug to me. "When you watch his pictures it's the human dynamo
WITHIN that you see. And evidently what he's giving us is what the public
wants."
"What I put into my pictures is what I WANT to do," supplemented
Charlie.
"Before I went into pictures, I felt repressed, I wasn't in my proper
sphere. Now for the first time I'm doing what I want to do.
"I get a feeling, from a play or somewhere, and then THINK OUT WHAT I
WANT TO DO."
Sometimes, say folks at his studio, where his own people never dare
disturb him when he's "on the set" or on the job mentally, Charlie sits for
as long as eight hours in solitude thinking up something the world--for his
audiences are numbered by the hundred million--hasn't laughed at!
"I got a feeling from reading Thomas Burke's 'Limehouse Nights,'"
continued Charlie, "and the result was 'A Dog's Life'--working it right out,
going through natural experiences and having the consequent reactions. It is
a translation, though not in Burke's language or style, of course.
"There is beauty in the slums!--for those who can see it despite the
dirt and sordidness. There are people reacting toward one another there--
there is LIFE, and that's the whole thing!
"Look at Rabelais. Vileness? That's only his SUBJECTS, BUT--!
"Writers have no STANDARDS of beauty. What IS beauty? It is
indefinable!
"Beauty is all WITHIN," continued Charlie after Doug quoted "Hamlet" by
the yard. "I DON'T THINK ANYONE HAS EVER PAINTED A BEAUTIFUL WOMAN!"
"Artists today put on the canvas a 'Follies' type--which people call
beautiful. That sort of beauty is merely external. Look at the old masters,
such as Van Dyke, and you see old women with their faces screwed up with
wrinkles. It's the beauty that's WITHIN that counts."
When Doug called him an admirer of Basil King's novels, Charlie did not
dissent; and when Mark Twain was mentioned Charlie said: "Ah, now you're
getting me back on my favorite topic.
"I've been reading Waldo Frank's book of essays, 'Our America,'"
continued Charlie. "He is DEEP! You think when you start out it's the
ordinary fervor, but when you get into it--! And I caught something of
myself in what he wrote about me."
"Me, too," said Charlie, showing his dimples in a smile of assent, when
Doug remarked that he thinks the mouth is the most expressive feature--though
Charlie said he's seen some women with small mouths who were uglier than
other women with large mouths.
When Doug said to him: "You are not responsible for what you are able
to do," meaning that Charlie's ability to produce mirth-provoking comedy is
God-given, Charlie modestly remained silent, making a gesture of instant,
impersonal agreement.
Dimpling, he admitted that he "hates it more than anything else when
they call me sentimental." Whether he meant in real life or reel life will
ever remain an unsolved mystery.
We talked of sciences. "A scientist must be a lover of life," said
Charlie.
Do you know that Chaplin has none of his excruciatingly funny stunts
worked out on paper in advance, nor even the plot of his comedies prepared in
"script"? He admitted it.
"He takes an idea, a theme, and works it out by himself as he goes
along," said his admirer, Doug, to his face, uncontradicted. "He's a remnant
of an aristocrat going through all those adventures. Reel after reel WITHOUT
SUBTITLES--ACTION!"
"You are more HEART," returned Charlie, regarding Doug's screen work.
And then Charlie sprung NEWS of a new departure in Chaplin comedies!
Said he:
"In the one I'm making now there's a whole reel of drama before I
appear. I've got pathos, human interest, tragedy, humor--we've had that
before--EVERYTHING in it! Yet it is all pertinent, constructive of the plot.
It's a comedy DRAMA. That's what I'm going to do from now on.
"Edna (Edna Purviance, his leading lady) is an OPERA SINGER in this one!
I didn't have her commit suicide."
It was a soul-wrenching effort NOT to call him "Charlie" but--
"Mister Chaplin," I asked, "isn't it a terrific constraint for a
sensitive man of artistic sensibilities and tastes like you to play a
vagabond, a TRAMP?"
At that, Doug Fairbanks exploded:
"Why, he's naturally a BUM!" said Doug, uncontradicted by the smiling
Charlie. "When he has a clean collar on it's Tom Harrington (Charlie's
secretary) who's responsible!"
Entirely aside from his alleged bumminess, "Spencer," as Doug called him
once, fervently declared that he LIKES the smell of idoform--"the hospital
smell," as it is popularly known.
He averred that the reason why people aren't particularly fond of the
fragrance of the skunk is simply because their ancestors for generations
haven't liked skunks, and they think of the odor that's going to get on them.
"You," he added, turning to Doug, "are particularly sensitive of odors."
But we were getting quite Rabelaisian, weren't we! Perhaps I'd better
tell you at once that Charlie also talked familiarly of Bill Sikes and Nancy,
and thinks that "Los Angeles will eventually be a great artistic center."
And ONCE Charlie's eyes blurred.
There were tears in them.
The face of the man who, say some who know him, works not for money but
as a creative artist, and plans to retire from money-making screen work in
about five years, trembled with silent emotion--whether modest shame or
gratefulness, I know not.
It was when Doug quoted someone as saying that people regard Charlie as
the one and ONLY, "than whom" there is no one like.
Something about that tribute touched the droll comedian's heart.
PRAISE OF CHAPLIN MADE CHARLIE WEEP!
CHARLIE CHAPLIN became, for that moment, a TRAGEDIAN!
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
Dorothy Gish
November 8, 1919
Ray W. Frohman
LOS ANGELES HERALD
WAIT A MINUTE--EVERYBODY!
In the name of Steve Brodie, give me a chance to explain how I "took a
chance."
Which starry sister of the Gish constellation should we have in our
series? That was the question.
The vivacious comedienne? Or the ethereal tragedienne--whom even her
sister says is "so beautiful"?
"BOTH!" say you?
Ah yes, but--
Separately, 'twould make this somewhat of a family party, wouldn't it?
And together--
"How happy could I be with either,
Were t'other dear charmer away."
Torn between two such "winners" in the same story, who could do justice
to either?
SO--I borrowed a coin from the boss and gambled with myself:
"Tails"--Lillian.
"Heads"--Dorothy.
You, dear readers, who may not approve of my consulting the fickle
goddess, had a "sure thing"! Both the Gishes are young, both are talented,
and both are beautiful. YOU couldn't lose!
"Heads" won--and so you have today the story of DOROTHY Gish, that
rollicking tomboy of the screen.
Lillian, at least a thousand pardons! It's tough on both of us to miss
you, but Dorothy "slipped in" a lot about you--and it's "all in the family"
anyway.
And now that everybody's happy, let's go.
It may not be too much to say that Dorothy Gish is attaining the highest
art, for she is acting HERSELF.
As the Little Disturber in Griffith's "Hearts of the World" some two
years ago--that queer, saucy creature with the flexible hips and the mannish
swagger, now making a moue, now kicking up a wicked heel--the maker of stars,
the general public, first really "discovered" Dorothy Gish.
Ever since, much to her regret, she has been doomed to wear that heavy
black wig, in hot weather, beneath powerful lights in interiors; and much
more to her regret, she has been the girl clown, as she was in "I'll Get Him
Yet," "Nobody Home" and her other starring vehicles.
How does she do it?
How is it that this dainty cameo, this normal slender, blue-eyed girl
with the "humorous mouth" can play the harlequin so well?
Here's the answer: She's a mistress of screen "business."
True to the best clown traditions, Dorothy doesn't hesitate to make
herself homely to be funny.
But a "close-up of Dorothy in person, during and after rehearsal at the
Griffith studio in Hollywood, and the yarn of how she got her start and how
she "arrived," as told by herself in delightfully natural fashion reveals
that not merely "getting the most out of" stage business put putting HER OWN
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!"
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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 or FTP at
gopher.etext.org
in the directory Zines/Taylorology
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