One hundred years ago this month, Grace Kingsley heard about the travails of being an actress:
“Say,” declared Louise Fazenda to me the other day, as we sat on the edge of the set where they were making The Galloping Fish, out at the Ince studios, “every time I get a call nowadays, I expect to support a horse or double for a trained ant-eater!”
So much Hollywood glamour! They went on to have a nice gossipy chat about her co-stars, and Fazenda spilled the tea on one from Fish in particular:
But Ethel the alligator! There’s the animal I had no use for…If there is anything calculated to make a person jumpy, it is having a large, husky alligator, whose dinner time is due any minute, fix you with his cold, calculating eye—an eye that may light up at any minute with enthusiasm for your contours. Nobody wants to be referred to as ‘the alligator’s tenderloin!’
That sounds utterly reasonable. She mentioned that Ethel got loose for a few days, and the cast and crew had to avoid visiting the river. Making comedies in the early days of the movies required so much grit. A few days later, Kingsley reported that even at the studio, Fazenda got to display her fortitude: one day she dropped a bottle on her foot, puncturing her instep, but after first aid “the comedienne, who laughed it off, resumed her work within half an hour or so.” Kingsley had great sympathy for comedians; she remarked. “As for the comedies, they are extra hazardous. When one is a perfect scream, you can bet somebody broke a leg.”
During her interview, Fazenda had much nicer things to say about one of her other animal co-stars, when she talked about Freddie, called Bubbles in the film:
“He’s a dear seal,” explained Louise, “nipped me once or twice, but didn’t mean a thing by it…Bubbles didn’t think so much of the desert. He seemed to say ‘What’s the idea?’ I like a place where I can flip a mean flapper!”
She had a point: seals don’t belong in Yuma, Arizona, with an average temperature in the eighties and nineties when they were shooting in October and November. Other outlets reported on what Fazenda had to do to get along with him. Camera said that while she dotes on Freddie, “the bond of sympathy has been strengthened since Louise never omits keeping herself well smeared with fish.” They said it was inspirational to him. An L.A. Times article contradicted that, saying that she supplied him with his favorite fish, which makes more sense. Nevertheless, making comedies was hard, unenviable work!
Before the fish solution, it seems that they hadn’t been getting along so well. In November, Kingsley had reported that Fazenda a different attitude towards the bites she’d gotten: “He is too fresh for anything. He has nipped me a couple of times and I have told him distinctly that if he doesn’t look out—well, I need a new fur coat this winter, and seals aren’t such hard animals to train!”
Biting animals weren’t the only difficulty on this shoot; even though Fazenda said it cheerfully, she mentioned other troubles:
There were plenty of bathrooms, and this was a comfort as, when it wasn’t rainy, it was hot and dusty, and on returning home at night we had fairly to blast the soil off ourselves. My hands and face cracked till I looked like the alligator.
Even with all the discomfort, she concluded, “but after all, who would miss a location trip? It is certainly something to talk about in the long winter evenings.” She was a good sport.
Fazenda wrote more details about the shoot in a letter to Myrtle Gebhart from the Yuma location published in Picture Play Magazine, beginning with “Myrtle, you never saw so much dirt in your life.” She wrote about how they coped with another problem: boredom. One of her human co-stars, Truly Shattuck, had the foresight to bring along a lot of hankies that need to be hem-stitched, so they had something to do while waiting—it kept them good-humored. Oh, and she almost drowned in the flood scene. Yikes!
She told Gebhart about how Freddie’s trainer tried “to sort of compensate him for the dreadful experiences he is undergoing on this location trip” sent to Santa Barbara for another seal to keep him company. She wrote:
“We all have hopes that love will stir his bachelor heart. When I last saw him he was flapping around in front of her juggling a ball on his nose—which may be one way of winning a wife.”
The end results of all this hardship and hard work were pretty good, but alas for Miss Fazenda, like many other past and future animal stars, Freddie stole the show. The Galloping Fish opened in Manhattan in mid-April 1924 and Helen Klumph, the L.A. Times’ New York correspondent, said “the seal who plays the title role has the naivete of an ingenue star combined with sleek, debonair charm of a Lew Cody. And his emotional facility!” She enjoyed the whole movie and said, “the delicious humor of The Galloping Fish is more than anyone has a right to expect.”
Exhibitors’ Herald also admired his performance too, saying “Freddie the seal was a real surprise as a motion picture actor and the way he ambled in and out of cabs, ran up and down stairs and followed Chaplin about was a revelation.” Beatrice Barrett in Moving Picture World agreed that he was the best comedian in the picture and said “it is refreshing and diverting because you don’t have any idea what is going to happen next, and it is all good clean fun.”
When it opened in at the Rialto Los Angeles on June 4th the Times’ Kenneth Taylor felt it was a bit overhyped, saying “you may possibly be a trifle disappointed in The Galloping Fish, but if you are it will purely be a case of too much anticipation… it merely ranks high among the humorous pictures of the year, and is entertaining generally.” He agreed with the earlier reports about the scene-stealer:
“The fame of Freddie, the fish, has preceded him, you see. And while the cast included a quartet of well-known funsters the picture would be as nothing without the fish. There’s a laugh in every finny move he makes.”
It had a very good run in Los Angeles, playing for nearly five weeks, which was a record for the Rialto. The Galloping Fish doesn’t seem to be available on DVD or streaming, but it’s been preserved at archives in Warsaw and Milan.
Naturally, Freddie was a big part of the publicity for the film. At the time he was eight years old and a vaudeville veteran. He made personal appearances at every performance at the Rialto, and the Times reported: “Meeting his film fans ‘face to face’ has added greatly to the popularity of this new star, for Freddie is never temperamental and always does just the right thing to win friends.”
Freddie was in a few more movies, including a two-reeler directed by Henry Lehrman called Sweet Papa(1924) and Dizzy Daisy (1925), a short that re-teamed him with Fazenda.
Having a few movies with a scene-stealing seal didn’t harm Fazenda’s job prospects. The Galloping Fish came out at roughly the mid-point of her long and varied career. She started out in comedy shorts at Sennett then she made some feature-length dramas like The Gold Diggers (1923) and Westerns like The Old Fool (1923). Fish was a return to comedy for her, and she continued to appear in all sorts of films for nearly two more decades. Having made excellent investments and marrying producer Hal B. Wallis (Adventures of Robin Hood 1938, Casablanca,1942), she retired in 1939 to raise their son and do charitable work. If her letter to Gebhart is any indication, I’m sorry that she didn’t write an autobiography—she was a lively writer! If you’d like to know more, Lea Stans has an article about her at Silent-ology.
Beatrice Barrett, “The Galloping Fish,” Moving Picture World, March 22, 1924, p. 304.
Louise Fazenda and Myrtle Gebhart, “A Letter from Location,” Picture-Play Magazine, April 1924, pp.65, 109.
“Galloping Fish Heading Fun Bill,” Los Angeles Times, June 23, 1924.
Grace Kingsley, “Flashes,” Los Angeles Times, November 7, 1923.
Helen Klumph, “Where are Imitators?” Los Angeles Times, April 20, 1924.
“Louise Has Birthday,” Los Angeles Times, June 17, 1924.
“Louise Infatuated with Bubbles,” Camera, January 12, 1924, p.13.
“Poor Fish Fell Hard for Louise,” Los Angeles Times, June 8, 1924.
“Reviews,” Exhibitors’ Herald, March 29, 1924, p. 53.
Kenneth Taylor, “Bizarre, Hectic and Grotesque Animal Actors to Foremost Rank,” Los Angeles Times, January 20, 1924.
Kenneth Taylor, “Galloping Fish Finny and Funny,” Los Angeles Times, June 5, 1924.
Grace Kingsley's Hollywood 