Week of June 22nd, 1918

Enrico Caruso

One hundred years ago this week, Grace Kingsley reported on a lucrative film contract for a Metropolitan Opera star:

Enrico Caruso, the greatest of all living tenors, will lay his voice away in cotton wool for the summer, and, having listened to the lure of the purring camera and the rattle of chink in the pockets of the picture magnates, will become a picture star for Lasky-Famous Players during his vacation, receiving therefore the princely sum of $300,000 for the services.

It might seem odd that people would want to see him without sound, but his fellow Met star Geraldine Farrar was in the middle of a successful film career so there was a precedent. Also, when Kingsley spoke to Cecil B. De Mille to confirm the report, he assured her that

Enrico Caruso is a corking fine actor as well as the world’s most wonderful tenor…When I was in New York I used to frequently drop into the Metropolitan Operahouse and watch Caruso rehearse, so I know of his splendid ability as an actor, and I think that he will be a big success on the screen, not only from the fact that millions of people have heard of him and will be attracted to see him in the silent drama, but because he will score an artistic success as well.

Enrico Caruso and Carolina White in My Cousin

Enrico Caruso was one of the biggest celebrities of his time. He toured extensively and sold millions of records. However, his film career wasn’t as successful. In his first film, My Cousin, he played a dual role: a poor maker of plaster casts and his cousin, a famous tenor. The tenor helps the artist win back his love after a misunderstanding. When it came out in Los Angeles later that year, LA Times reviewer Antony Anderson admired Caruso’s acting, saying “in opera he didn’t get half a chance, but the camera offered every opportunity and he took them.” He liked the film, too, because “the story has charm, simplicity and tenderness.” He mentioned that during the screening, the orchestra at Grauman’s mostly played music from the operas that Caruso had sung.

The studio tried — they issued a press book to help sell the film

Ormi Hawley and Enrico Caruso in A Splendid Romance

The film didn’t sell as many tickets as they’d hoped, and Lasky’s never released his second film, A Splendid Romance, in the United States. That film is lost, but My Cousin survived and is available on DVD.

Kingsley’s favorite film this week was The Lesson, a Constance Talmadge comedy, “so true to life from all angles that one has a guilty feeling of spying through a window to look at it.” She particularly admired the “brilliant and facile” star:

For those who would learn sincerity and naturalness, let them study Miss Talmadge; and these qualities are all the more to her credit in that, being a person of incisive personality, she might easily impose mannerisms upon us. The Lesson is from Virginia Terhune Vandewater’s appealing story of the same name, is human and intriguing, revolving around a wife married to one of those dog-in-the-manger husbands, who while limiting the amount of sauce for the goose, believes in an overdose of that commodity for the gander.

In this lost film, Talmadge’s character dumps the skunk and returns to her small-town sweetheart.

Social Briars

There was a close tie for best line this week. About the latest Mary Miles Minter film Kingsely wrote:

The writer of One in a Million is all wrong; he evidently hadn’t seen many pictures or he would have known that 999,999 of the poor little country girls who go to New York without previous training step right out upon the musical comedy stage and register a big hit.

So that was already a tired trope in 1918. Despite that, she decided “One in a Million is a clean, engaging little comedy which any girl can safely take her mother to see.” The film got a new title, Social Briars. I wonder if the producers read this and decided to change it.

 

Kingsley’s other nifty line was regarding Rupert Julian’s new film, Midnight Madness:

It is chock full of mystery, gobs and hunks of it, so thick as to make the plot rather bewildering.

The story involved a detective tracking down jewel thieves, and Mr. Julian didn’t include the usual scenes in which the investigator stops and theorizes about whodunit. Kingsley thought that was confusing. I hope you don’t have too many gobs and hunks of mystery this week!

 

 

 

Week of September 8th, 1917

 

 

One hundred years ago this week, Grace Kingsley wrote the “very touching little story” of how Ruby Lafayette got her break in Hollywood at age 73 with the film Mother o’ Mine. Miss Lafayette had a fifty-year long career as a respected stage actress who toured the Midwest with her own company, performing plays like Pygmalion and Galatea* and Damon and Pythias. She and her husband, fellow actor John T. Curran, retired to a ranch in Lampasas, Texas. Kingsley picked up the story from there:

But she lost her husband and things went wrong on the ranch. Not long ago, without giving anybody any inkling of what she intended to do, she packed up and came West, making her appearance early one morning at Universal City. Rupert Julian had long wanted to put the Kipling poem into celluloid drama. He chanced to be passing through the office. He saw the little old lady, turned and took another look, and began to talk with her. She told him of her experience, her eagerness to work. Julian wanted to put Mother o’ Mine right on, but the powers-that-be wouldn’t let him at that time. So Miss Lafayette went back to the Texas farm. Then one day when things were looking the darkest for the brave little old soul, who was trying to make things go all alone and having a hard time of it, she got a letter from Mr. Julian. Mother o’ Mine was to be filmed after all, an nobody would do for the part except Miss Lafayette! So out she came again, and everybody who saw the tender, appealing, delightful characterization which she gave at the Garrick a couple of weeks ago, will rejoice that she is to appear on the screen in other pictures.

Kingsley didn’t know how right she was: Lafayette appeared in at least 30 films over the next 15 years (her Motion Picture Herald obituary estimated it was 200). She billed herself as “the oldest actress on the screen” and she played lots of grandmothers. She died in 1935 when she was 90, after a great third act.

Funnily enough, the same Sunday column opened with observations on how leading ladies were becoming younger and younger. Kingsley wrote “sixteen years old seems to be the popular age, just now,” then she recounted the story of a 22 year old actress “who was told, when she asked for a certain part: “Why my dear, you can’t have that part. You’re older than Methuselah!”

 

Mae Marsh, 1917

Kingsley’s favorite film this week was Polly of the Circus, which was “a huge success. Never in its palmist stage days did the play achieve the brilliant triumph which its film twin promises, with Mae Marsh in the leading role…And what a wonderful little girl Polly was! We never knew just how wonderful until we saw Mae Marsh play the role…what a creature of imaginativeness, of sensibility, of sturdy loyalty and affectionateness Miss Marsh has made her!”

The audience in Los Angeles were big fans of Miss Marsh, too; “all day and all evening huge crowds waited outside the theater.” Kingsley also appreciated the script that transferred the “quaint charm” of the play to the screen, the photography, and the orchestra and lighting effects. It told the story of a young circus horseback rider who is injured in an accident and stays with a minster while she recovers. Polly was the first film produced by Goldwyn Pictures, and it was the first appearance of the Goldwyn lion mascot that later became the MGM lion. The film was once considered lost, but it was one of the films found in the permafrost of Dawson City, Yukon in 1978.

 

Sir James Barrie

Kingsley reported that Thomas Ince tried to buy the rights to make Peter Pan from Sir James Barrie. Even though he offered “a fortune,” Barrie refused because he’d had a bad experience with a British production company and he decided to never allow one of his plays or stories to be filmed again. Luckily he changed his mind in the early 1920’s; the 1924 film starring Betty Bronson has become a favorite of silent film fans and was added to the Library of Congress’ Film Registry in 2000. It’s available on DVD.

 

Kingsley repeated claims that William Desmond Taylor and his Tom Sawyer cast and crew managed to sneak into St. Petersburg, Missouri, film several scenes and leave before anybody knew they were filming. Townspeople thought that the equipment belonged to government engineers surveying the area, and the hotel proprietor said that the company was so quiet that he couldn’t have known they were film folk. She reported that locals were irritated because they missed the chance to see Hollywood in action.

 

*Pygmalion and Galatea was written by W.S. Gilbert. It debuted in 1871, just before his first collaboration with Arthur Sullivan. It was a big hit, and it inspired other authors to do their version of the myth, including George Bernard Shaw in 1913.

Elizabeth McGaffey (1922 passport photo)

Note: My profile of Elizabeth McGaffey is up at the Women Film Pioneers site. She was the first studio librarian. I learned about her when I wrote my February 10, 1917 blog post, and of course I needed to know more. Since she was on the WFP “unhistoricized” list, I wrote up what I found and they accepted it. However, now they have new rules: you must apply and submit your CV before you write for them. Oh well, it was fun while it lasted.

 

 

Week of January 27, 1917

Jackie Saunders, 1916

Jackie Saunders, 1918

One hundred years ago this week, Grace Kingsley described a quiet work day for Balboa Studios actress, Jackie Saunders:

• Up at 6 o’clock
• Practices on piano until 7 o’clock, then has breakfast and conference with maids and cook.
• Drives to studio.
• Makes up and drives to location.
• Is shot in eight or ten scenes, then back to luncheon at 1 o’clock.
• Drives to Los Angeles, twenty-five miles.
• An hour at the hairdresser’s.
• An hour at the dressmaker’s.
• An hour at the photographer’s.
• A hasty dinner.
• Drives back to the studio (It is now 9 o’clock.)
•  Works until 11 o’clock in indoor studio, and is home by midnight.
• Up at 6 o’clock again.

And that’s why unions are so important. Jackie Saunders was married to the studio’s secretary/treasurer, so this schedule probably wasn’t worse than most. She was a theatrical actress who got her start in films in 1911 with small parts at D.W. Griffith’s Biograph Studio, then she moved West to work for Nestor. Balboa hired her in 1914, and she became one of their biggest stars. In her earlier films, she played waifs in need of rescue, but starting in 1917 she moved on to playing either spoiled rich girls or tomboys who got tamed by marriage in the last reel. After Balboa closed in 1918 she worked for Fox, Metro, and Selznick, then retired from acting in 1925.

In her reviews this week, Kingsley exclaimed “Oh, for more picture plays like We Are French…Here indeed is film footage worth viewing.” Also known as The Bugler of Algiers she found it a “swift-moving, clean-cut, thrilling drama” and knew of “no film tapestry on view for lo these many moons which is threaded with such colorful incident as this one.” The film was about Anatole and Pierre, two former soldiers searching for Gabrielle, Anatole’s sister and Pierre’s sweetheart, who vanished after her village was ransacked. The film helped make up for another of the week’s releases, The Devil’s Pay Day, a story of a rich man who marries a poor woman and quickly tires of her; Kingsley called it “futile” “improbable” and “claptrap” – “of such we are weary.” Both films are lost.

Jeanie MacPherson, 1919

Kingsley got some practical screenwriting advice from a credible source.

There are more good dramas in the pages of the average newspaper than in anything else I know of,” remarked Jeanie MacPherson, author of Joan, the Woman. “A drama is only a reproduction of human emotions and their reactions, and in no place are the emotions more clearly set forth or at least suggested to the imaginative mind than in their terse phrases of the press. Really I got my first thought for writing Joan the Woman from a story I saw in the newspaper. This story told of the French solders seeing visions of the famous Maid of Orleans over their trenches, inspiring them to deeds of bravery…Dramatists may weave productions out of their own imaginations, but stories of actual life which the newspapers contain every day I believe have a far greater appeal and are far more human.”

Jeanie MacPherson had only been writing scripts since 1913, but she went on to collaborate with Cecil B. DeMille until 1930, co-writing hits like Male and Female (1919) and The Ten Commandments (1923). He particularly valued the ideas she brought, according to a 1957 interview cited on her Women Film Pioneer page.

 

James Van Trees, Sr., 1935 (a photo he shared with his friends at American Cinematographer)

Kingsley mentioned that James Van Trees Jr., five-year-old son of the cinematographer, offered to trade his family’s new baby for a pair of roller skates. There were no takers. This expert problem-solver went on to become an assistant cameraman. His dad had a remarkable career, lasting from 1915 until 1966 when he shot an episode of My Mother the Car.

Millard K. Wilson and Gypsy Hart in Flower of Doom

Kingsley heard from the Universal lot that there’d been a rash of films being renamed by the New York office, for example, Mary, Keep Your Feet Still became Her Soul’s Inspiration (it was the story of a girl who loved to dance). So Rex Ingram complained that his next picture, The Flower of Doom would be transformed into The Poisoned Bathing Suit. The story of kidnapping and an opium den kept its title and came out on April 16, 1917.

Moving Picture World, March 2, 1918

The Buster Keaton countdown continues. On February 1^st, Kingsley reported:

To be personally conducted to New York is the honor in store for Roscoe Arbuckle, lately engaged by Joe Schenck as one of his star picture players. For this purpose, avowedly, no less a person than Lou Anger will see that Arbuckle is not kidnapped by any rival firm between here and New York; also that he does not spend all his substance in poker on the train so he has to draw ahead on Mr. Schenck for his salary when he arrives.

If Anger hadn’t gone, there would have been no one to run into Keaton on the street and take him back to Arbuckle’s studio. Most likely, Keaton would have made his way to films eventually, but who knows how long it would have taken.

 

 

 

Week of July 29th, 1916

 

Hobart Henley

Rupert Julian

Eddie Lyons

One hundred years ago this week, Grace Kingsley reported that thirty-eight film companies were at work in Universal City, and

“as a consequence art just oozes from the city walls. Every style of picture is being produced, from the psychological brow drama of Hobart Henley and Rupert Julian to…Eddie Lyons and his trick seltzer bottle.”

The Henley film, which he planned to write, direct, and star in was about infantile paralysis and “is said to pack a thrilling punch.” Perhaps it was too thrilling: there’s no record that such a film got made but Henley had a decent career as a director that lasted until 1934. Rupert Julian had been seen carrying around Robert Davis’ novel We Are French that he wanted to make in to a film. He hoped to spend twenty thousand dollars which would pay for the destruction of a French village and desert scenes with 300 Bedouins and 100 camels. This film did get made. Retitled The Bugler of Algiers it was released in November, but none of the summaries mentioned camels or Bedouins. It’s a lost film. Julian also continued to direct until sound came. There’s a web page devoted to him here. Finally, Eddie Lyons did keep making his short comedies like clockwork, one per week, until 1920.

A scene from The Payment

Her favorite film of the week was The Payment: “as a story of tense dramatic values, the picture has hardly ever been equaled.” She summarized it as the story of a love triangle becoming a quadrangle that “is unflinchingly worked out to a bitter and logical conclusion.” The film (as described in Motography) sounds downright horrifying now: a mill worker’s pretty daughter (Bessie Barriscale) wants to be an artist and a nasty old married letch (Charles Miller) offers to pay for her studies in exchange for sex. Lacking options, she accepts. Years pass, she becomes famous and she meets and falls in love with his brother-in-law Dick (William Desmond). The old letch convinces her that a soiled dove like her couldn’t possibly marry his relative, so she refuses Dick’s proposal; her abject misery is the payment for her ambitions. Yikes! The Payment is a lost film.

She thought that Douglas Fairbanks’ new film The Half-Breed was a “thoroughly satisfactory and rounded production” (and said of Mr. Fairbanks “physically he presents a striking picture,” which is a very polite way of putting it.) She also mentioned that Theda Bara had one of her best roles ever as the Foreign Legion camp follower Cigarette in Under Two Flags.

Only Chaplin could replace Chaplin at the Garrick Theater. The Vagabond was to finally end its four-week run with a special one a.m. matinee of his next film, One O’Clock. Kingsley thought it would be a treat for milkmen.

Marie Osborne

She had two stories about tough actresses. Four-year-old Marie Osborne, playing Little Mary Sunshine, was “a dead game sport.” While filming, she fell into a lily pond. The whole company fussed over her, but she said “Oh, stop chattering and go ahead and shoot!” Osborne’s grit undoubtedly helped her throughout her long career in film. After aging out of the child parts she took a break for school, then became an extra and stand-in in 1934. There’s no record that she was the basis for Joan Blondell’s character in The Stand-In (1937), but the stories were awfully similar. However, instead of ending up with an accountant and quitting she joined the wardrobe department and worked until 1977. She died in 2010, age 99.

Claire Alexander

The second story was about a dainty ingénue:

Claire Alexander is working in an unusually strenuous comedy out of the Horsely studios. And in this hot weather, too. She came into her dressing-room yesterday with a splitting headache and covered with black and blue spots. She had been nipped by a lion, carried head downward for several minutes, had fallen off a bluff and tried to milk a cow outside the cow’s office hours. ‘What is the picture?’ a visitor asked. ‘I don’t’ know,’ answered Miss Alexander, rubbing arnica on her arms. ‘They call it comedy!’

Despite it all, she wasn’t a quitter and she kept making Cub Comedies every week until late 1917. According to her Film Daily obituary, she retired from acting in 1925 and died of pneumonia in 1927.

Kinglsey’s admiring review of the Kosloff troupe reminded me how diverse vaudeville acts were. She wrote “Theodore Kosloff achieves one of the conquering successes of the Orpheum season in his ballet production of magic beauty and old world grace and majesty. The act was most artistically varied, from a Russian peasant dance to several fine little ballet conceptions.” She liked the other acts, too: Kramer and Morton provided a “crisp comedy turn” with “good jigs and clogs,” Consul and Betty, an educated chimp act provided “high-brow monkey-shines” and Jack McLallen and May Carson “are still the championship skaters.” What an evening’s entertainment! Later she reported that Kosloff’s troupe would be staying at the Orpheum for two more weeks, because they were such a sensation.

There was an update to last week’s story about Dora Mae Howe and her chocolates: at the Monday show when she opened the box, there was no candy, only an old Yale lock. She knew who did it, and her revenge was swift. During the Tuesday show, Paul Harvey found no cigarettes in his case, only rope.