Author Archives: Jim Lane

The Fog of Lost London, Part 2

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Here begins a chapter-by chapter synopsis of London After Midnight, a novel by Marie Collidge-Rask, based on the scenario of the Tod Browning production. Like the book, the synopsis will be

ILLUSTRATED WITH SCENES
FROM THE PHOTOPLAY
A METRO-GOLDWYN-MAYER PICTURE
STARRING LON CHANEY
Chapter 1 – Balfour House

Balfour House is an old ancestral home on the outskirts of London whose origins stretch back to before the time of Charles II. Successive generations of the Balfour family have added to it until it is a weird and mystifying architectural abnormality, a labyrinth of chambers, corridors, passageways and dark, massively furnished and heavily curtained rooms. One room, heavily bolted and padlocked, has not been opened in centuries. It is said that a beautiful young woman once met a horrible death in that room, and that her ghost walks restlessly moaning and sobbing whenever some tragedy is about to occur in the house. Those sobs are heard the night Roger Balfour is found dead in the house, a bullet in his head, driven to suicide by depression and money problems.

Roger’s son Harry, 15, and daughter Lucy, 13, become the wards of their father’s friend and neighbor Sir James Hamlin. Since there was no will, Sir James supervises the settling of Roger Balfour’s estate and takes the two children into his home. Balfour House and its grounds become shunned and neglected and, with no money left for their upkeep after settling Roger’s debts, fall into disrepair.

Five years pass. Harry Balfour, now 20 and more than a little resentful of his and Lucy’s dependence on Sir James’s generosity, returns from school and announces that he wants to reopen Balfour House. Sir James says this is impossible without major repairs, either by finding a wealthy tenant or a wealthy bride for Harry. Harry refuses to marry for money. Sir James offers to buy the Balfour estate outright, to give Harry a stake in life. Again, Harry indignantly refuses: “So long as I live the Balfour estate shall not revert to other hands.”

Soon after this, Harry has an unpleasant scene with Jerry Hibbs, Sir James’s secretary. An agitated Hibbs mutters to himself that Harry is “courting disaster” if he goes near Balfour House.

Chapter 2 – Another Mystery

 

Two days after his confrontations with Sir James and Hibbs, Harry fails to show up for a riding date with his sister Lucy. No one has seen him since dinner the night before, and his bed has not been slept in. At first Lucy pouts that Harry has ruined her day, but as the day wears on she begins to worry.

That night Hibbs sends one of the servants on a confidential errand. Overheard by the maid, Anna Smithson, Hibbs asks her to say nothing to anyone.

An hour later a group of Sir James’s servants, lashed by wind and rain, spooked and unnerved as they search through the overgrown grounds at Balfour House, find the body of Harry Balfour. As they lift the body to carry it to shelter, one of the servants swears he can hear, beneath the whistling of the wind, the wails of the ghost in the secret room of Balfour House.

Chapter 3 – Who Killed Harry Balfour?

 Lucy Balfour is still worrying about Harry’s disappearance when her brother’s body is brought in. She is distraught at his death and horrified, as are the others, at the sight of two red wounds on his throat. The coroner’s inquest returns a verdict of death at the hands of “person or persons unknown.” In testimony at the inquest, neither Sir James nor Hibbs mentions their respective run-ins with Harry before his disappearance. The maid Smithson testifies that on the night of the murder, she was looking out a window into the storm and saw a man heading toward Balfour House. The man was definitely not Master Harry, she says. It is assumed that the person she saw was the murderer, but there is no clue as to his identity, his motive, or why he would make those wounds on Harry’s throat.

Chapter 4 – Hypnotic Hypotheses

Chief Detective Inspector Burke of Scotland Yard, dining with the assistant commissioner of his division, discusses the unsolved murder of Harry Balfour. Burke believes that the murder of Harry confirms his suspicion that Roger Balfour was murdered as well, even though all signs seemed to point to suicide at the time. He says that he has a number of leads but no firm evidence, and plans to test his theory that under hypnosis and the proper conditions, a criminal will reenact his crimes. Burke borrows a book from the assistant commissioner’s library, saying that he expects to be busy with his investigation for some time, but when next they dine together, Burke says, he is sure he’ll have the proof he needs.

Chapter 5 – A Betrothal

Seven months have passed since Harry’s death, and Lucy is finally beginning to emerge from her grief. As May turns to June, Lucy finds herself turning more and more to Jerry Hibbs for companionship, and her feelings for him have grown more than sisterly. At last, in a sun-bathed arbor scented by the blooming roses of Hamlin House, Lucy and Hibbs profess their love for one another. They agree to say nothing to Sir James for the time being, for fear that he will disapprove and dispense with Hibbs’s services.

Chapter 6 – Uncanny Tenants

Night. Two men stand under a tree on the grounds of Balfour House, near where Harry Balfour’s body was discovered. They are representatives of the London realtor’s office that administers the Balfour property and are waiting while prospective tenants inspect the premises by lantern-light. The people came into the office near closing time and expressed an interest after seeing a picture of the house in a magazine (the realtors having long since given up advertising the property). If satisfactory, the tenants propose to move in at once. This has all happened so quickly that the agent hasn’t had time to notify Sir James, though he did get in touch with Hibbs. Hibbs told him to go ahead with the transaction if the tenants’ references are satisfactory. The agent is waiting outside for the tenants because, he said, nothing would induce him to enter the house.

Meanwhile, Anna Smithson and Thomas, another of the Hamlin House servants, are returning from the village station in a cart with the luggage of a guest Sir James is expecting. They see the light in Balfour House. They can see two shadowy figures moving about with the lantern; one of them is a woman, but they can make out no other details. Thomas believes the woman is the ghost of the house, but Anna scoffs. As they watch, the door of Balfour House opens and a man emerges, tall but stooped, shrouded in a heavy Inverness coat and wearing a high beaver hat. That’s all it takes for Thomas to crack his whip and hurry the horse on to Hamlin House.

 
The man in the beaver hat crosses slowly to where the realtor’s agents wait. The agents apologize for not accompanying him into the house, but he reassures them — in his spooky way: “Life is a mystery no man can solve. It extends beyond the grave.” They remind him that the owner will make no improvements, but he doesn’t mind; the house will suit his purposes.
 
The agent hands the man the lease papers and he peruses them, only briefly looking up when a mournful wail rises from somewhere out in the darkness. By now the agents are thoroughly unnerved and eager to be off. With a “horrible” smile, the man in the beaver hat slowly signs the lease. As he heads back into the house, the agents scurry off to apprise Sir James of the transaction.

 

Chapter 7 – Sir James Receives a Shock

At Hamlin House, preparations are under way for the coming of Colonel Yates, Sir James’s guest, when the realtor’s agents arrive. Sir James is astonished to learn that Balfour House has been let, and it is evident that the surprise is not an entirely pleasant one. Hibbs explains that he did not expect the tenants to take immediate possession; he thought they would merely inspect the property and then negotiate terms. The agents report that the tenant’s references were impeccable and he paid the entire term of the lease in cash, in advance.

Reassured, Sir James glances at the papers the agents have handed him. His calm demeanor vanishes and his face goes white when he sees the signature on the lease. It is signed “Roger Balfour.” And it is in Roger Balfour’s handwriting.

Chapter 8 – An Unexpected Guest

Why wasn’t this noticed at the office? Sir James asks. The agent replies that the matter was handled by a new employee who didn’t know the house’s history; the agent himself had simply presumed that this Roger Balfour was perhaps a distant relation wishing to see the ancestral home. Sir James says there are no other branches of the family and demands a description of the man in the beaver hat.

At this point, the butler announces Colonel Yates. Sir James’s consternation is almost complete, because in addition to this shock about Roger Balfour, he has been trying all day to remember who Colonel Yates is; he learned only today that this “old friend from India” was coming, and has been unable to place the name. As Yates is ushered in, however, Sir James remembers him at once and is reassured by Yates’s solid, dependable, no-nonsense presence. In fact, he welcomes his guest’s opinions on the matter of the new tenant at Balfour House, and briefly explains the situation to him.

It turns out Yates had known Roger Balfour years before, but had lost touch and did not know of his death; he says suicide seems unlike the Balfour he knew. When the agents describe the new tenant as “creepy” and “un-holy,” Yates scoffs. “You chaps must have been smoking something…” His laughter diffuses the tension in the room; even Sir James looks less upset.

Chapter 9 – Ghouls

As Yates and Sir James discuss the matter later, alone, Sir James shows Yates some documents signed by the late Roger Balfour, and Yates concedes that the handwriting on the lease is unmistakeably the same. Mulling this over, he cautions Sir James not to dismiss out of hand the idea of supernatural; years in India, he says, have taught him the folly of that. In fact, he has a book with him that he thinks might bear on the subject, and promises to give it to Sir James. Later, after dressing for dinner, Yates gives the book to Hibbs to place in the library, where it will be available to anyone interested. Hibbs (who for some reason has taken an instant, mild dislike to Colonel Yates) does so, and a glance at the book’s contents interests him enough to make him resolve to come back to it later.

 
 
 
 
All through dinner, and even afterward as Lucy plays for diversion, Sir James’s mind is elsewhere. He had insistd to Yates that he does not believe in ghosts, but he nevertheless has a superstitious nature and is troubled.
After Lucy finishes playing, Yates invites her to take a walk on the verandah. Hibbs, miffed and a little jealous, decides to take a closer look at Yates’s book in the library. He finds Sir James in the library, himself so absorbed in the book that he doesn’t hear Hibbs’s approach. Hibbs suggests that a study of the book might “throw light upon the mysteries of Balfour House.” Sir James says the mysteries be damned, he just wants to know who signed Roger Balfour’s name to that lease. 
 
When Yates joins them in the library, Sir James shows him a passage in the book, printed in early English text, that has particularly alarmed him: “Men who have died by murder or suicide frequently become vampyrs.” The two agree that, unpleasant as the idea is, nothing will do but that they inspect the vault on the grounds of Balfour House where all the Balfours, including Roger, have been entombed. The sooner the better. 
 
After midnight Yates and Sir James set out, armed with revolvers and carrying a lantern. Almost immediately Sir James’s courage begins to fail. He senses that someone, or something, is following them and trying to stop them on their errand, but every time he turns around, nothing is there. Only Yates, in his “military determination,” is unwavering, and Sir James forces himself to go on. At one point something suddenly flaps at them out of the darkness. A bird? A bat? No way to tell. Slowly, carefully, onward they creep. 
 
At the door to the Balfour crypt Yates raises his lantern. The door is closed and locked, seemingly undisturbed since the day months earlier when Harry Balfour was interred there. Sir James’s hand shakes as he inserts the key into the locked door. The rusty lock resists, but eventually yields, and the door slowly swings inward. 
 
The two men halt at a sudden sound — it sounded almost like a sigh. They wait, tensed, but now there is only silence. 
 
Standing in the yawning doorway, they peer into the darkness of the tomb. Yates raises the lantern and holds it forward in the gloom. By the dim yellow light, Sir James’s eyes search the shadows. His blood freezes as he sees that the lid of Roger Balfour’s coffin is open. The coffin is empty. 
 
There is a flash of lightning, a rumble of thunder, and somewhere in the night, the mournful, blood-curdling howl of a dog. 
 
 
To be continued…
 
 

The Fog of Lost London, Part 1

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London After Midnight (MGM; 1927) is the Holy Grail of Lost Films. Oh sure, there’s the complete Greed. But we do have the incomplete Greed, and it’s a masterpiece as it stands. Besides, tell the truth: Isn’t there just the tiniest little fear, deep down in your heart, that if Stroheim’s 42-reel, ten-hour cut should miraculously turn up, it just might turn out to be a letdown, maybe even (Heresy! Heresy!) a bit of a bore? But be that as it may, we do have Greed; all we have of London After Midnight is an assortment of stills like this one of Lon Chaney in makeup and costume as the Man in the Beaver Hat.

There are enough of these remnants that Philip J. Riley was able to publish a reconstruction of Tod Browning’s movie in book form, but if you didn’t have the opportunity or good sense to pay $29.95 for it in 1987, you’ll have to shell out ninety bucks or more now. A few years ago Turner Classic Movies did a similar reconstruction, this time on film, and that one’s available on The Lon Chaney Collection.

In 1970 the Museum of Modern Art staged a “Lost Films” exhibit and published an accompanying book by the same title. At least two of the pictures in MoMA’s exhibit — Street Angel (1928) with Janet Gaynor and Charles Farrell, and Rex Ingram’s The Garden of Allah (1927) — have surfaced since then, so there’s always hope. But London After Midnight remains lost, and the pages devoted to it in the MoMA book are sparse. Author Gary Carey wrote: “It is almost impossible to synopsize a mystery film which one has not seen because critics, bound by professional ethics, divulge little of the plot let alone its solution.”

Mr. Carey should have read the review that appeared in Variety on December 14, 1927. Variety’s reviewer, “Mori,” didn’t much care for the movie (“Will add nothing to Chaney’s prestige as a trouper, nor increase the star’s box office value.”), nor did he shrink from discouraging potential viewers by recounting the entire plot, solution and all. Then, amazingly, in his last paragraph, he said: “The usual suspicions, planted while the situations are worked out, succeed in leaving an impression of mystery regarding the outcome.” (Not anymore, Mori!)

As a side note, let me add that Mori wasn’t the only Variety reviewer to do this sort of thing. It’s our good luck now that the Spoiler Police weren’t so powerful back then; the detailed descriptions in Variety’s reviews from 1907 to 1930 are virtually all we have to go on for movies now lost beyond recall. I’ve found them invaluable in researching the careers of the stars in the M.J. Moriarty deck of movie playing cards.

But back to London After Midnight. There’s always hope it may someday surface, like Street Angel and The Garden of Allah, but it hasn’t happened yet; the last known print was destroyed in a studio fire in the 1960s. Director Browning did a loose remake in 1935 — Mark of the Vampire, with Bela Lugosi and Lionel Barrymore taking over the equivalent roles that were both originally played by Lon Chaney — but that time Browning made major changes; for one thing, the new picture didn’t even take place in London. If we want any sense of the original, we still have to depend on the Riley and TCM reconstructions.

 
 
 

Or…there is this. I came across this book while perusing the shelves at the estate sale of a popular Sacramento TV personality. The novelization is the work of Marie Coolidge-Rask, who evidently made a decent living out of this kind of piecework. She’s known to have also novelized Mary Pickford’s Sparrows (1926) and the King Vidor-Lillian Gish La Boheme that same year (now there’s a literary platypus for you: a novelization of a silent movie of an opera). 
 
Otherwise, Ms. Coolidge-Rask’s literary output seems not to have left much impression on the shifting sands of time. These movie tie-ins weren’t a terribly lucrative field for the writer-for-hire; usually there was just a flat fee — probably, in the 1920s, no more than a thousand dollars or so, if that — and that was that, no royalties. A shame, because London After Midnight may have sold pretty well; Mori’s opinion notwithstanding, the movie was the most successful Browning-Chaney collaboration. Whatever MGM or Grosset & Dunlap paid her for her efforts, I hope for her sake she invested it wisely.
 
In any case, she doesn’t seem to have slavishly followed Browning and Waldemar Young’s script: Her novel features at least one character, a certain Colonel Yates, who doesn’t appear in the movie’s cast list on IMDB. And she isn’t bound by the limits of silent movies — her characters are certainly a talkative bunch. For that matter, so is Ms. Coolidge-Rask herself — she crams words in like a canner stuffing sardines in a tin. Here she is describing Sir James Hamlin (Henry B. Walthall):
 
“Sir James, despite the studied calmness of his demeanor when with Lucy Balfour or in the presence of those he deemed his inferiors, was of a nervous temperament, at times easily influenced, again firm to the point of stubbornness, according to his mental reaction to whatever force against which he found himself in opposition.”
 
Got all that? Here she is again, later on the same page: 
 
“In his presence, the baronet felt himself unusually helpless. Like a fly, pinned against the wall for scientific inspection with a microscope.” 
 
I don’t know what kind of scientist would pin a fly to the wall to see it through a microscope, but I suppose Ms. Coolidge-Rask might have known some.
 
 
   
 
 
Anyhow, now, just in time for Halloween, I propose to spend the next few posts hacking through the purple undergrowth of Marie Coolidge-Rask’s prose (I do these things so you don’t have to), distilling it into a chapter-by-chapter synopsis of her novelization. In this way I hope to get some sense of what audiences at Browning’s vampire/murder mystery might have seen in 1927 — sort of like Tod Browning, Polly Moran and Lon Chaney here pretending to commune with the spirit world for the MGM publicity department. This will be, so to speak, by the book, without reference to either Philip J. Riley’s or TCM’s reconstructions; if there are differences, maybe we can talk about those later.

 

So be warned: if you’re worried about spoiling the ending of London After Midnight (which you can’t see anyhow) or Mark of the Vampire (which you can), proceed at your own risk.

Movie Playing Cards: 3 of Hearts – Geraldine Farrar

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Geraldine Farrar was not the first star to occupy the M.J. Moriarty deck’s 3 of Hearts; that distinction (if Cliff Aliperti’s guess at the deck’s provenance is correct) belongs to Cleo Madison. But Ms. Farrar is the only Metropolitan Opera star in the deck. Other great singers would make the transition from Met to movies, but not until the sound era; and while some (Lawrence Tibbett, Grace Moore, Lily Pons, Maria Callas) would be more successful than others (Kirsten Flagstad, Luciano Pavarotti), only Geraldine Farrar managed to become a movie star without ever once depending upon her voice to get her there.

No wonder. She was a natural actress without a trace of self-consciousness, and the camera loved loved loved her. The picture on the card isn’t the most flattering, with that hairstyle like a leather aviator’s helmet, but you can see what I mean, especially with those enormous, all-seeing eyes — they make you want to glance over your right shoulder to see what she finds so fascinating and amusing; not even that huge corsage can pull your attention away from her eyes for very long. 

Here’s another look at those eyes, this time smoldering and looking straight into your own. The portrait is by the German painter Friedrich August von Kaulbach (1850-1920), and is now part of the Geraldine Farrar Collection in the Music Division of the Library of Congress. It was probably painted in late 1901 or early ’02, about the time the 19-year-old Geraldine created a sensation as Marguerite in Gounod’s Faust and became the toast of Berlin.
 
That Berlin triumph was the culmination of a course of study that had taken her from her birth in 1882 in Melrose, Massachusetts — where she determined at an early age to become an opera star — through voice study in Boston, New York, Paris, and finally Berlin, where her big splash in Faust brought her under the tutelage of the great soprano Lilli Lehmann. She remained with Berlin’s Royal Court Opera for several seasons and became a favorite of the Kaiser and his family; there were scandalous rumors of an affair with Crown Prince Wilhelm which Farrar’s family and friends (protesting too much?) were at great pains to deny. Berlin was the springboard to a brilliant European career — Monte Carlo, Stockholm, Paris, Munich, Warsaw — that brought her home to America and the Metropolitan Opera in 1906. 
 
Geraldine Farrar was perhaps the world’s first multimedia star — if only because for the first time in history, a performer could have more than one medium to be a star in. Besides her dazzling success on the opera stage and recital circuit, she made over 200 recordings for the Victor Talking Machine Company; you can still hear plenty of them on YouTube.
 

And then, in 1915, yet another medium. Moving pictures came calling, in the form of Cecil B. DeMille and the Jesse L. Lasky Feature Play Company. Lasky and DeMille had been making a go of their venture out in sleepy Hollywood, shooting in a converted barn at the corner of Vine and Selma Streets. I don’t know what prompted them to approach Farrar; perhaps they read the interview where she described herself not as a singer but “an actress who happens to be appearing in opera” and figured an actress in any other vehicle… Whatever the impetus, it was a masterstroke. Farrar agreed to work eight weeks during the Met’s off season, making three pictures for a fee of $35,000. The news, and the announcement that the diva’s first picture would be a silent version of her Met success Carmen, electrified the industry. The William Fox Co. was inspired to do a quickie knockoff Carmen with their house vamp Theda Bara (Fox’s picture went into release the day after DeMille’s Carmen but doesn’t seem to have cut very deeply into its business).

The DeMille-Lasky Carmen wasn’t planned as an adaptation of the opera; the work was still under copyright, and the proprietors were asking too much for the movie rights. Instead, DeMille and his scriptwriter brother William turned to Prosper Mérimée’s original novella, now in the public domain, which had a story much changed in the opera. Still, the opera was too familiar to ignore completely, so a musical score was commissioned adapting Bizet’s themes (Lasky could afford that much).

Before shooting on their big-money title, though, DeMille made a canny decision: he would shoot Farrar’s other two pictures (Temptation and Maria Rosa) first, just in case his leading lady needed a little experience to put her at ease in front of the camera. This was probably prudent, but it proved to be unnecessary; Geraldine Farrar took to movies like a duck to water. Here she is in Carmen’s classic pose — a cliché by now, but at that time you could hardly get away with leaving it out — the rose clenched in her teeth, lasciviously eying the unfortunate Don Jose (Wallace Reid), whom she intends to seduce to help her smuggler cohorts.

And here she is again, assuring her gypsy confederate (Horace B. Carpenter) that the trap is ready to be sprung. As DeMille biographer Scott Eyman observes, Farrar wasn’t exactly beautiful, but she was alluring. Her Carmen moves like a cat, slinky, self-assured and radiating a confident, even aggressive sexuality. (Apparently in real life, too; Crown Prince Wilhelm wasn’t the only name linked romantically with hers. While at the Met she carried on a torrid six-year affair with conductor Arturo Toscanini that ended only when she gave him an ultimatum: leave your wife or else. The maestro abruptly resigned from the Met and beat a hasty retreat back to Italy, wife and family in tow.)

Carmen was a big hit for the Lasky Co., in both money and prestige. Not since the aging Sarah Bernhardt hobbled around on her wooden leg in Queen Elizabeth had a star of such international magnitude graced a movie screen. And it must be said, whatever the Great Sarah’s power on stage, she had hardly a tenth of Farrar’s instinctive understanding of movie acting. By the time the picture was released — on October 31, 1915 — Farrar had returned to the Met; the other pictures she had shot that summer were spaced out for release the rest of the season, Temptation at the end of December and Maria Rosa at the beginning of May 1916.

Farrar enjoyed her eight week stint in Hollywood, where every man and woman in the Lasky Co. was completely won over by her professionalism and her down-to-earth personal charm; people used to gather outside the window of her dressing room and listen to her sing as she prepared to go on the set. Between pictures she met the handsome actor Lou Tellegen, whom she married in February 1916. That following summer, with the Met again going dark, she was back at the Lasky Studio, again working for DeMille. 
 
This time the subject was even bigger than Carmen: Farrar would play Joan of Arc in Joan the Woman. Joan had not yet been elevated to sainthood, but it was only a matter of time; she had been beatified in 1909 (sainthood would finally come in 1920). As the title suggests, Farrar’s allure was not to be entirely subsumed into the religious fervor of the Maid of Orleans; DeMille and writer Jeanie Macpherson defied history by giving Joan a chaste romance with an English soldier, teaming Farrar again with Wallace Reid. (In the movie it plays better than it probably sounds.) 
 
Joan the Woman was the first example of the kind of movie most people think of when they think of Cecil B. DeMille today: a sweeping historical epic with semi-florid acting and none-too-subtle religious overtones. A second historical epic followed: The Woman God Forgot, with Farrar bizarrely cast as an Aztec princess, daughter of Montezuma, whose intervention on behalf of her Spanish lover (shades of Pocahontas and Capt. John Smith!) brings about the downfall of her father’s empire. (Both Variety and the New York Times commented that Miss Farrar was noticeably more pale-skinned than the rest of her Aztec family.) 
 
The Woman God Forgot wasn’t released until 1917; the big money picture for ’16 was Joan the Woman. DeMille and Macpherson drew a direct parallel between the Hundred Years War and the war then raging in Europe, telling the story of Joan’s battle for France within a framing story of an English officer in the trenches of the Great War (also played by Wallace Reid) who takes heart from Joan’s devotion (and attains a similar shall-not-have-died-in-vain martyrdom under the barbed wire). This publicity still was presumably approved for release by DeMille and Lasky, but unfortunately it isn’t terribly becoming to Ms. Farrar; granted, she was some years over-age (and some pounds overweight) for the role, but in the finished picture she never looks quite as tomboy-silly as she does here.
 

In fact, it was in working on Joan the Woman that Farrar demonstrated the quality that DeMille, throughout his career, would especially prize among his actors: absolute fearlessness. Well, not absolute; she was actually afraid of horses and had to be doubled in many of her riding scenes. But fearless nevertheless; you can see it in the battle scenes, as she strides resolutely in full armor (only without that dear little pleated skirt) among the flailing swords, maces and pikestaffs.

 

 

You can particularly see it in the scene of Joan’s execution at the stake, one of the most horrific scenes of the silent era, all the more effective for the stencil-tinting process that colored the flames of her pyre. Looking at a single frame, this closeup might look easy to fake, and it probably would be, but believe me, the flames in action look a lot closer and more dangerous than they do here. But if this shot of Joan appealing to her saints at the moment of death doesn’t convince you Geraldine Farrar was a real game ‘un…

 

 

 

 

 

 

…then how about this?…

 

 

 

 

…or this?

As Scott Eyman says, “How Farrar managed to survive without third degree burns or, at the very least, smoke inhalation remains a mystery.”

 

Alas, the honeymoon with Lasky and DeMille did not last, chiefly because of the honeymoon with Lou Tellegen. The Dutch-born Tellegen had come to America in 1910 at 29, as leading man (and offstage consort) to Sarah Bernhardt. After marrying Farrar in 1916, when she returned to Hollywood he began throwing his weight around and interfering in her films. To keep him out of their hair (and hers), DeMille and Lasky allowed him to direct a picture, What Money Can’t Buy. When they judged that one to be a dog — along with another, The Things We Love — Tellegen got his nose bent out of shape, and Farrar (out of what she later ruefully called “wifely loyalty”) sided with him. Both of them left the Lasky Co. and signed with Samuel Goldwyn.

Working her customary off-season shifts, Farrar made six pictures for Goldwyn (three co-starring Tellegen). When Goldwyn complained that her pictures were not doing well, she suggested (with no hard feelings) that they cancel the remaining two years of her contract. She left movies for good in 1920, though she appears to have remained in the M.J. Moriarty deck until it ceased production — perhaps in the hope that she might return to the screen; anyhow, it was back to the Metropolitan Opera, where she retired amid great fanfare in 1922 at the age of 40.

The marriage to Lou Tellegen (her only one, the second of four for him) suffered from his chronic infidelities and succumbed to divorce in 1923. Tellegen himself came to a sorry end in 1934, a month short of his 53rd birthday. By then he had lost his looks (to a combination of age and facial injuries in a fire) and his career. He was ailing (it was cancer, but he wasn’t told). In 1931 he had published an autobiography, Women Have Been Kind, essentially a long boast about his sexual conquests that made him widely despised as a kiss-and-tell cad. (That year, the old Vanity Fair magazine had spotlighted him in their monthly “Nominated for Oblivion” feature, referring to his memoir as Women Have Been Kind [of Dumb].) Now, three years later, he elected himself to the oblivion Vanity Fair had nominated him for: While visiting friends in Hollywood, he locked himself in the bathroom, stood naked before the mirror, stabbed himself seven times with a pair of sewing scissors, and bled to death over an array of his clippings he had strewn on the floor. Approached by a reporter for a comment, Geraldine Farrar said, “Why should that interest me?”                   

 
Now that’s a bitter divorce. 
 
What might have been if Geraldine Farrar had not joined in Lou Tellegen’s falling-out with Cecil B. DeMille is a tantalizing question mark. Even more tantalizing is the thought of how her career might have gone if she’d been born 20 years later, if she had made that hit in Berlin in 1921 instead of 1901. Then, when Hollywood went ransacking New York for musical talent during the sound revolution, she would have been about the age she is here, when she created the role of the Goose-Girl in Humperdinck’s Königskinder (The King’s Children) at the Met in 1910. Jeanette MacDonald and Irene Dunne, among others, may have had reason to be grateful that they never had to deal with any competition frrom Geraldine Farrar.
 
As it is, Geraldine Farrar is doubly unique in the Moriarty deck: the only opera star, and the star with the shortest movie career — where others made dozens, even hundreds of pictures, she made only 14 features (plus one Liberty Bonds short to aid the war effort in 1918) during five years in Hollywood. In her autobiography, she wrote of her movie experiences: “I had greatly enjoyed them, and only regret that my own era was too early for the combination of the present acting and talking features.” Yes indeed, the movie musical would have known exactly what to do with Geraldine Farrar. And vice versa.
 
 
 
The determination, hard work and self-confidence of little Alice Geraldine Farrar, who decided before age 10 that she would be a great opera star, served her well through a long and healthy life. After retiring from the Met, she continued on the concert stage until 1931, and appeared in a 1926 Franz Lehar operetta, Romany Love, that closed after one performance. From there she made occasional appearances on the radio, published an autobiography (Such Sweet Compulsion) in 1938 to go with an earlier one in 1916 (Geraldine Farrar: The Story of an American Singer by Herself), and served as a Red Cross Volunteer during World War II. She lived in comfortable retirement in Ridgefield, Connecticut as the well-loved Dowager Queen of American Opera until her death on March 11, 1967. She was 85.

 

 

Tony Curtis 1925-2010

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When the news broke that Tony Curtis had died, suddenly everybody was talking about Some Like It Hot or Sweet Smell of Success. For my part, I got out my old laserdisc of Taras Bulba. I must have seen that movie three or four times within two weeks in 1962, at Sacramento’s old Esquire Theatre, but I hadn’t set eyes on it in decades, not even when I bought the laserdisc as a sentimental sop to my adolescence. It holds up rather better than I expected: a cast-of-thousands epic that didn’t skimp at a time when you really did have to hire thousands of extras, a pretty-good movie with one great sequence (the gathering of the Zaporoshti Cossacks, galloping across the Ukrainian steppes) and, as Leslie Halliwell aptly put it, “plenty of spectacular highlights.”

I suppose my resorting to Taras Bulba betrays a certain nostalgia for the big clunky pleasures of early-’60s Panavision — plus, of course, it hasn’t been that long since I saw Some Like It Hot or Sweet Smell of Success, or some of the other pictures that people point to when they reflect that the former Bernard Schwartz Could Really Act: The Defiant Ones, Spartacus, The Boston Strangler. Nevertheless, it seems to me that Taras Bulba, in its way, serves as an apt summary of Tony Curtis’s entire 130-picture run, from City Across the River to David and Fatima: a pretty-good career with plenty of spectacular highlights.

Students who come to Tony Curtis via film-class screenings of Some Like It Hot have a different perspective from those of us who were going to movies when Curtis was really hot. For them, his career dribbles down from Some Like It Hot; for us, it built up to it — or to The Defiant Ones (his sole Oscar nomination) or Sweet Smell (for that hardy handful who saw it at the time). My intro to Tony was George Pal’s colorfully ersatz biopic Houdini, a staple of Saturday kiddie matinees in my town during the ’50s; I must have seen it five times. Son of Ali Baba was another. I can’t say I ever heard him utter the immortal “Yondah lies the castle of my faddah” (did he really say that? Where? The Prince Who Was a Thief? The Black Shield of Falworth?), but that’s pretty much the Tony Curtis I first met.

It’s the Tony Curtis of this publicity still, which was printed in a short chapter near the end of Richard Griffth and Arthur Mayer’s 1956 coffee table tome The Movies. It was part of a two-page spread headed “Teen Faves,” featuring pictures of Curtis, Tab Hunter and Guy Madison and wondering which, if any, would turn out to be more than a flash in the pan.

For Curtis’s fans from those early days, this is the Tony we remember — athletic, exuberant, rambunctious. If we want to remind ourselves of what a good actor he could be, we’re as likely to think of The Great Impostor (as real-life poser Ferdinand Demara) or The Outsider (as the tragic Ira Hayes, participant-by-chance in the famous Iwo Jima flag-raising) as we are Sweet Smell of Success. And at comedy, we may say he never got the credit he deserved for Some Like It Hot, but we’re as likely to remember him for Operation Petticoat. That was the quintessential Tony: slick, even a bit shady, Bronx-street-hustler charming, fast-talking with that Noo Yawk honk, and immensely pleased with himself and what he could get away with. Which, by all accounts (including his own), is pretty much what Bernard Schwartz was like in real life.
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Films of Henry Hathaway: The Shepherd of the Hills

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In 1941 Paramount and Henry Hathaway followed up their success with The Trail of the Lonesome Pine with another Technicolor version of a bestselling rural romance. This one was taken from a novel by Harold Bell Wright, a writer who was, if anything, even more popular in his day than Lonesome Pine author John Fox Jr. I say “in his day,” but actually it was pretty much the same day; Fox’s most productive years were 1895-1910, Wright’s 1902-16 (although he continued to write and publish almost up to his death in 1944).
 
 Certainly, even as late as 1941 the name of Harold Bell Wright was one to conjure with; in this magazine ad for the picture, Wright’s name appears above the title, not once but twice. Even so, the credit “Harold Bell Wright’s The Shepherd of the Hills” has a sharp edge of irony — in point of fact, Grover Jones and Stuart Anthony’s screenplay has little to do with Wright’s novel (even less than Lonesome Pine had with Fox’s) beyond the title and some character names. (And by the way, here’s full disclosure: One of the names, in novel and movie, is Jim Lane, father of the movie’s heroine Samantha “Sammy” Lane; he’s played by Tom Fadden.) This departure from the text is enough to make Hathaway’s movie an outcast among Wright’s latter-day fans (and yes, he still has them), but in the movie’s defense it can be said that Wright’s plot is a pretty melodramatic can of worms, though it had been filmed fairly closely in 1928, and earlier in 1919 (that version, now lost, was presumably the most faithful of all, having been produced by Wright himself). Harold Bell Wright was still around in 1941, when the Hathaway picture was released, but what he thought of it — or for that matter, whether he even saw it — is not recorded. By that time, he might simply have washed his hands of Hollywood altogether — and thereby hangs a tale.
 

 

 

Harold Bell Wright was a 35-year-old minister in the Disciples of Christ Church in Redlands, Calif. when he resigned his ministry in 1907 after the success of The Shepherd of the Hills, his second novel. Thereafter, he devoted himself full-time to writing as a way of spreading the Gospel (of decency, of hard work, of caring for the downtrodden) by other means.

 

You can get the whole story at Gerry Chudleigh’s comprehensive Harold Bell Wright Web site, including this page specifically dedicated to movies from Wright’s stories and novels. The Reader’s Digest version, as brief as I can make it, is that Wright, dissatisfied with a 1916 picture based on his Eyes of the World, decided to film his books himself. To that end he formed the Harold Bell Wright Story-Picture Corporation with his publisher, Elsbery Reynolds. The company made only one picture, The Shepherd of the Hills in 1919, adapted and directed by Wright himself. Perhaps the picture was not well-received, perhaps the company was torn asunder by the falling-out between Wright and Reynolds when the writer decided to sign with a different publisher. Whatever the cause, by 1922 the two men were on the outs and the Harold Bell Wright Story-Picture Corporation was no more.

This is where Sol Lesser enters the picture. Lesser is remembered as a low-to-middle-budget independent producer who turned out such pictures as Our Town, Stage Door Canteen, and a long spate of Tarzan movies in the 1930s, ’40s and ’50s. In 1922, however, he was an eager young go-getter, an exhibitor looking to get into production after making a killing on a quickie exploitation flick about the passing of San Francisco’s Barbary Coast. He approached Wright for the movie rights to his books, but Wright’s first nine books were co-owned by Reynolds, and the two weren’t speaking; if Lesser would deal with Reynolds, Wright said, then they could talk. Lesser bought out Reynolds’s full interest for $174,500, then made a straight trade with Wright: publication rights, including Reynolds’s original printing plates, in return for the movie rights to all nine books.
 
Wright saw in time that he’d made a bit of a fool’s bargain. His books were hugely popular, but their very popularity had saturated the market; there simply wasn’t that much to be made from republishing them. The real money was in putting them on the screen, and he had traded that chance to Lesser. After the coming of sound, Wright tried to get the rights back — or at least get more money for them — with the creative argument that he had given Lesser only the rights to make silent movies, not talkies. Nice try, Harold, but that one didn’t hold up, and Lesser’s rights to the works “regardless of technical changes or additions in the film medium” were confirmed. And those rights were extensive; they were universal and in perpetuity, and they included the right to make any changes whatsoever in the story, title, or characters of a given work “to such an extent as the purchaser [Lesser] may deem expedient.” In effect, Lesser could make pretty much any picture he wanted and call it “Harold Bell Wright’s This and Such.” That’s what he did, for example, with Wright’s cowboy morality tale When a Man’s a Man, turning it into a rather paltry little B-western in 1935.
 

So Wright may well (and I wouldn’t blame him) have sighed and rolled his eyes at what was happening to his books in Hollywood, being powerless to alter it. Then again, his curiosity may have drawn him to check out what Paramount did in 1941 with his most popular novel; if so, perhaps he took comfort that, unlike that cheapskate Lesser, at least Paramount brought Technicolor, an “A” budget, and top-shelf talent to the table — beginning with Henry Hathaway and scenarist Grover Jones.

Hathaway and Jones had collaborated successfully before, having first worked together on 1929’s The Virginian, where Hathaway served as assistant to Victor Fleming. When Hathaway himself became a director, Jones worked with him on the scripts of The Lives of a Bengal Lancer, The Trail of the Lonesome Pine and Souls at Sea. Shepherd of the Hills would be their last picture together; on September 24, 1940, while Shepherd was in post-production, Grover Jones died of complications following surgery. He was 46.

The script for Shepherd is credited to Jones and Stuart Anthony, in that order. I don’t know how much the two collaborated; maybe they didn’t. Anthony may have been the writer brought in to add some connective scenes after Hathaway left the picture (more about that later). In any case, the script jettisons all the melodramatic curlicues of Harold Bell Wright’s plot and leaves only a few basics, expanding and elaborating on those.

The setting is a remote mountain valley (Wright was living in the Ozarks of southern Missouri when he began the book) where the sparse populace ekes out a hardscrabble life based on subsistence farming, small-scale sheep ranching, and running moonshine past impotent federal authorities. Everyone cowers under a pall of superstitious misery centered on an empty homestead called Moaning Meadow, where walks (so they say) the ghost of a woman whose man left her to die of a broken heart. Feeding off this festering unhappiness like a spider is the dead woman’s sister Mollie Matthews (Beulah Bondi); she has raised her nephew, Young Matt (John Wayne), on a diet of hate, telling him every day that the curse on all their heads can be lifted only when he finds and kills the unkown man who brought it on: his father. Matt is a gentle, tormented soul who doesn’t relish the thought of killing, but he sees no way out; not even his growing feelings for pretty Sammy Lane (Betty Field), who plainly adores him, can be allowed to sway him from the task Aunt Mollie has set for him.

Into all this walks kindly old Daniel Howitt (Harry Carey), a man of some (though mysterious) means with a hankering to settle down there. He befriends Sammy Lane and her father Jim, staying with them until he persuades the Matthewses to sell him Moaning Meadow. His effect on the whole valley is nearly miraculous: he heals the sick (treating Jim Lane’s wounds when he is shot by a federal agent), raises the dead (saving a little girl who nearly chokes to death while her grieving parents look helplessly on), and makes the blind to see again (sending an old woman to the city for an operation to restore her eyesight). As Howitt tends his flocks on Moaning Meadow, folks roundabout come to regard him, both literally and figuratively, as a good shepherd.

It isn’t long before Sammy figures out what has long since dawned on us: Daniel Howitt is Young Matt’s long-lost father, the man Matt has sworn to kill. What happens from there constitutes the last act of The Shepherd of the Hills.

Whether the credit goes to Grover Jones or Stuart Anthony (my own money’s on Jones), the script for Shepherd has passages that rise to a kind of mountain poetry, like something by James Whitcomb Riley or an Ozark Robert Burns. We hear it in the everyday speech, when a mother tells the village storekeeper about her sick daughter: “I put a dried tater chip and two crawdad legs in her bed. But she’s still got that seldom feelin’, complainin’ from head to heel.” And at more important moments, such as when Sammy first tells Mr. Howitt about Moaning Meadow: “That’s where the ha’nt comes from. Frogs as quiet as graverocks, and the lake comin’ from nowhere, and the trees don’t rustle, and the flowers grow big but they don’t have pretty smells.” Then, when Howitt disregards her advice and buys the meadow: “On account o’ ye disobeyin’ me ye bought a unhappy land. Moanin’ Meadow! Won’t nobody come an’ pay ye company there, nor warm by your fire with ye … Them that goes in there has daylight dreams they allus disremembers! An’ there’s pizen plants an’ pokeberries, an’ nightshades dancin’ with the bats!” The dialogue paints us a picture of an isolated people without schooling in the rules of grammar, but who have learned to make their language measure the deepest reaches of their simple hearts.

Casting Harry Carey and John Wayne as father and son was an inspiration, and it resonated for audiences in 1941 as much as it does for us today, if for a slightly different reason. Wayne was still sweeping along on the momentum of his A-picture breakthrough in Stagecoach after nearly a decade in Poverty Row horse operas. It’s a bit of a myth that John Ford and Stagecoach made a star out of an “unknown” John Wayne. He was already a star, albeit in the kind of movies that didn’t play Radio City or the Roxy, or win Oscars or make the New York Times 10-best list. But after Stagecoach Wayne was batting in a whole different league. He reported to the set of Shepherd directly after wrapping Seven Sinners with Marlene Dietrich over at Universal. The Duke Wayne of Santa Fe Stampede or King of the Pecos couldn’t have shot his way into a Dietrich picture; that’s what Stagecoach did for John Wayne. And in 1941 the Wayne persona was still malleable; studios were still experimenting with what kind of vehicles best suited this tall, handsome, earnest young man. The persona wouldn’t really become rigidly set until 1948, with Red River, when writer Borden Chase handed Wayne the script and said, “Here’s a part you can play for the next twenty years.” (Which Wayne pretty much did.) 

In 1941, naturally, audiences couldn’t be sure where John Wayne was going, but they all knew where Harry Carey had been. Born in the Bronx in 1878, Carey was a self-made westerner and by 1917, as “Cheyenne Harry,” he was a western star on a par with William S. Hart. By the late ’30s he had made well over 200 pictures and graduated to Respected Elder Character Actor, snagging an Oscar nomination in 1939’s Mr. Smith Goes to Washington. Even without knowing what the future had in store for Wayne, audiences could see that he and Carey were two of a kind, and Shepherd of the Hills — especially in a scene at a fishing hole where Young Matt finds a tentative rapport with the man he doesn’t yet know is the father he’s sworn to kill — has an unmistakeable passing-the-torch aura to it.
 
 
But the real revelation of The Shepherd of the Hills, its fervently beating heart, is the performance of Betty Field as Sammy Lane. Some writers have asserted that Henry Hathaway was strictly a man’s director, but they don’t know what they’re talking about. A simple look at what he drew from the normally decorative Dorothy Lamour in Spawn of the North and Johnny Apollo, from the ice queen Ann Harding in Peter Ibbetson, from Debbie Reynolds in How the West Was Won, or from Marilyn Monroe in Niagara (probably her best dramatic performance) is enough to put the lie to that. 
Frame18-Wayne-FieldThe best of the lot just may be Betty Field in Shepherd. Her Sammy is feisty and independent, uneducated and superstitious — muttering half-heard incantations, drawing symbols and spitting in the dirt before venturing into Moaning Meadow — but no fool. She knows her own world inside out, and when her moonshiner father stumbles home with a revenuer’s bullet in his side, she calmly goes about her business, slicing bacon and singing as if nothing had happened, until the suspicious lawmen have gone their way. When she meets Daniel Howitt, she’s wary at first, but she soon sees the good in the man and vouches for him to others; when he seeks to cash a check for the unheard-of sum of a hundred dollars, the storekeeper blanches, but says, “Sammy’s say-so is all right with me. I’ll look around.” Sammy senses the tender heart of Young Matt, too, and struggles to reach it, battering in futile frustration at the crust of hatred so carefully planted and tended by the malicious Aunt Mollie.
Hollywood never really knew what to do with this quirky, unique actress. She wasn’t really star material, never conventionally glamourous, and she didn’t always photograph well. Even when she did, she tended to be merely “attractive” in her youth, “handsome” in middle age. But you couldn’t ignore her on screen; whatever she had, she brought it to roles as different as the slatternly Mae in Of Mice and Men (1939), poisonous bad-news Kay in Blues in the Night (’41), and the tormented Cassie Tower in Kings Row (’42).
 
In Shepherd of the Hills she gave probably the best performance of her career, and for once she photographed like gangbusters. Her delicate, heart-shaped face, blue-water eyes and fair complexion never looked better than they did for the Technicolor cameras in the crisp mountain sunshine of Shepherd‘s Big Bear locations. (What a pity that this was her only Technicolor movie in her prime; she didn’t face Tech cameras again until 1955’s Picnic, when she was well out of her thirties and playing the kind of matronly roles that would occupy the rest of her life.) For perhaps the one and only time in her career, Betty Field is truly beautiful. Still not movie-star glamourous, no competition for Ava Gardner or Maureen O’Hara, but beautiful — in a way that perfectly suits the earthy, simple and pure-hearted character of Sammy Lane. The Shepherd of the Hills is Betty Field’s picture — lock, stock and barrel — and Netflix browsers who pop it into their queues expecting a “John Wayne movie” are going to be in for a very big surprise. I hope for their sakes that they’re open to it.
 
In a 1973 oral history interview with Polly Platt, Henry Hathaway told a frustrating tale of studio politics regarding Shepherd of the Hills. His first cut ran 120 minutes and was previewed in San Bernardino. The response, he said, was excellent: no walkouts, and nobody thought the picture was too long. At a second preview, with about ten minutes cut, a few people walked out and about five percent of the audience thought it was too long. A third preview confirmed the trend: the more they cut, the more people thought the movie was too long. Paramount refused to restore any of the cut scenes and just kept cutting; eventually they decided that new scenes needed to be shot to connect what was left. Hathaway said no, just put back some of what I’ve already shot. Instead, Paramount’s Y. Frank Freeman brought in another writer (Stuart Anthony?) and director Stuart Heisler to film the new scenes. Hathaway left the studio to work for Darryl Zanuck at 20th Century Fox; he didn’t return to Paramount until The Sons of Katie Elder in 1965.
 
Stuart Heisler was a textbook example of the reliable studio hack, and I think I can spot some of the scenes he directed after Freeman took Shepherd out of Hathaway’s hands. One is this studio-bound scene between Sammy and Young Matt, talking about things which I strongly suspect Hathaway showed us in some of those missing 22 minutes. Another is the picture’s hasty and too-pat final scene, where the writing has a let’s-wrap-things-up hurry to it, with little of Grover Jones’s ear for the artless poetry of rural speech — and the staging shows little of Hathaway’s instinct for where to put the camera.
 
But it’s no use crying now over 22 minutes of milk spilt 69 years ago. As it is, at 98 minutes, The Shepherd of the Hills gives us Harry Carey toward the end of his career and John Wayne and Betty Field near the beginning of theirs, all of them — and Henry Hathaway and Grover Jones, too — at their best.

C.B. Gets His Due

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Here’s another book review, but with a difference. While the subject of my last post, Florenz Ziegfeld, was only peripheral to the Hollywood story, this one is right smack dab in the middle of it. The book is Empire of Dreams: The Epic Life of Cecil B. DeMille by Scott Eyman.

I’m still reading Empire of Dreams, but I know gold when I find it. Besides, when you’re digging in the Scott Eyman mine, your odds of hitting paydirt are always good. Scott wrote The Speed of Sound, one of two indispensible books on the transition to talkies (the other is Richard Barrios’s A Song in the Dark). He also wrote Lion of Hollywood: The Life and Legend of Louis B. Mayer; Mayer was often (and often justly) detested in his time, but Eyman gives us a warts-and-all portrait to counter the warts-only bogeyman of legend, humanizing Mayer and giving the devil his due. And speaking of legends, there’s Print the Legend: The Life and Times of John Ford; Eyman himself “prints the legend” along with the truth, and shows how the one derived from the other. Add biographies of Mary Pickford and Ernst Lubitsch among his other books, and Scott Eyman has covered some of the most revered and reviled figures in movie history.

Cecil B. DeMille, in his day and since, was both. Personally, I’ve gone from one extreme to the other on DeMille, then most of the way back again. My uncle took me to The Greatest Show on Earth when I was four; God knows it’s no work of art, but it set the image of the circus for me forever; no real circus has ever lived up to it. Then there was The Ten Commandments (1956); for me, as for anyone else who first saw it at the age of nine or ten — I say this without fear of contradiction — DeMille’s movie was the Book of Exodus brought to life once and for all. Yes, the pillar of fire that holds back the Egyptian chariots and later carves the Commandments at Mt. Sinai is only ink-and-paint animation — any child could see that even in 1957. But it didn’t matter. Charlton Heston was Moses, Yul Brynner was Rameses II, and that sure as hell was the parting of the Red Sea. (And giving DeMille credit, he wasn’t any happier with that pillar of cartoon fire than I or my friends were. But money and time grew tight during post-production and he had to cut some corners. Then, once the movie was released, that was that as far as he was concerned; the age of a Steven Spielberg or a George Lucas tacking expensive afterthoughts onto a hit movie was still years in the future.)

The zenith (or nadir) of my contempt for DeMille’s brand of moviemaking was about 1971, in my college know-it-all, tear-down-the-titans phase. I remember writing that year that Ken Russell’s movies were no better than Cecil B. DeMille’s. “No better,” indeed; in fact, Russell’s movies — all of them — were a good sight worse. I like to think (now) that I knew it even then, but I was certainly too hip to say so. Then, fifteen years ago (more or less), I had mellowed toward the old boy; when The Ten Commandments played a revival date at a local theater, I wrote, “Cecil B. DeMille may have been a sanctimonious old humbug, but he sure knew how to put on a show.”

Well, I was getting warm — in more ways than one. In fact, as Scott Eyman proves beyond arguing, Cecil B. DeMille had a career absolutely unique in movies — or any other form of show business, for that matter. He was the first superstar movie director after D.W. Griffith, and he was still riding high thirty years later, as Griffith was fading away in boozy neglect at the Hollywood Knickerbocker Hotel. Thanks to his nine-year stint as host of The Lux Radio Theatre, DeMille was a nationwide household name at a time when few Americans knew or cared who directed the movies they saw every week.

When C.B. came to Hollywood in 1913, it was a sleepy wide spot in the rural road several miles from Los Angeles, surrounded by sagebrush, rattlesnakes, wolves, deer and jackrabbits. By the time he shuffled off his mortal coil in 1959, the town was home to Ciro’s, the Brown Derby, the Hollywood Bowl and Grauman’s Chinese Theatre — not to mention the very idea of “Hollywood” itself, which DeMille and his fellow pioneers had such a hand in creating.

They say one of the components of an epic story is that it portrays great changes in the land. By that measure, Eyman’s subtitle, The Epic Life of Cecil B. DeMille, is more than just a play on the kind of picture most associated with DeMille. It is an epic story, and DeMille’s was an epic life. Larger-than-life characters — that’s another ingredient of the epic, and DeMille was that, too: grandiloquent and intimidating to many, but he attracted a stock company of actors and a core of designers and technicians who stayed with him for decades, some for the rest of their lives, others for the rest of his.

DeMille came to movies as a struggling actor-playwright firmly grounded in the theater of the 19th century; his father’s partner, and Cecil’s own role model, was David Belasco. Cecil embraced the cutting-edge technology of early movies with eager arms, just as he would in time embrace talkies, Technicolor, the wide screen and stereophonic sound. But he never lost that Belasco worldview. One of the most interesting insights in Eyman’s book comes, oddly enough, from the costume designer Adrian, who worked two years for DeMille before settling into his throne at MGM: “He believed in his world … a world of antiquity from which he rarely emerged.” As Eyman himself puts it, “DeMille would remain his father’s son, a nineteenth-century man of the theater — his greatest strength, as well as his greatest limitation.”

Scott Eyman has a historian’s thoroughness, and for Empire of Dreams he had access to Cecil B. DeMille’s archives, which run to some 2,000 boxes now housed at Brigham Young University in Provo, Utah. Equally important, he has a critic’s perception and perspective. That combination makes all his books worth reading, and this one especially, because DeMille and his career really were unique. Eyman sheds light on all the facets of DeMille’s work: the innovative artist of the early silents, the monumental presence of the talkies, and — always — the showman. I’m loving it.
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Flo Chart

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Florenz Ziegfeld Jr., who bestrode Broadway, in life and legend, for the entire 20th century, made a few forays into the movie business — especially in the last years of his life when, after a string of expensive flops on top of huge losses in the stock market crash of 1929, he tried to diversify his activities beyond Broadway and its lurking creditors. And that’s all the excuse I need to turn this post into a plug for Ethan Mordden’s Ziegfeld: The Man Who Invented Show Business.

Would you like even more of a Hollywood connection than that? Okay, how’s this: You see that beauty with the peacock feathers who adorns the front cover of Mordden’s book? There is, ahem, a more complete view on the back, reproduced at right. Mordden identifies her as The Ziegfeld Girl Who Never Was, photographed by Ziegfeld’s house photographer, Alfred Cheyney Johnston, with his customary mix of glamour, dignity and eros, even though her audition failed to get her into the rarefied ranks of the Ziegfeld Girls. Believe it or not, that’s the young Norma Shearer. No kidding. Now look again (if you haven’t already); try to match that gracefully arching back with the Norma you remember from The Women or Marie Antoinette. When her husband Irving Thalberg was overseeing The Great Ziegfeld at MGM in 1936, do you suppose Norma’s thoughts ever wandered to this photo session fifteen years or so earlier? Did she wonder what had become of the negatives and prints?

Ethan Mordden’s books are full of surprises like that, although he doesn’t usually splash them across the front cover. And the surprises usually aren’t pictorial, either; Mordden’s books are well but not lavishly illustrated.

Someone once said of the Civil War historian Bruce Catton that he wrote about the Army of the Potomac as if he had served with it — meaning his knowledge was that intimate and comprehensive, his style that relaxed and casual. That’s how it is with Ethan Mordden and his books about Broadway: he writes about these shows as if he saw them. Of course, for any show since the original The King and I in 1952, he probably did see it. But he writes with the same intimate authority about plays and musicals that came and went long before he was born in 1949, and that’s what makes his books so much fun. He’s written a seven-volume history of the Golden Age of the Broadway Musical that’s required reading for anyone even slightly interested in the subject: Make Believe (about the 1920s), Sing for Your Supper (’30s), Beautiful Mornin’ (’40s), Coming Up Roses (’50s), Open a New Window (’60s), One More Kiss (’70s), and finally (since he dates the end of the Golden Age to the death of Gower Champion in 1980) The Happiest Corpse I’ve Ever Seen (1980-2005). Toss in books like All That Glittered: The Golden Age of Drama on Broadway, 1919-1959 and the coffee-table tome Rodgers and Hammerstein, and Ethan Mordden becomes entirely indispensible. (Movies haven’t escaped his expertise, either; also indispensible is The Hollywood Musical, published back in 1981 — his seventh book.)

After all that, the very thought of a Mordden book about Florenz Ziegfeld is delicious — and the book fully delivers the feast that the thought promises. Mordden is a scholar, certainly, but he doesn’t write in a scholarly fashion; he’s offhand, chatty — even catty — and to read his account of Ziegfeld and his first wife, the belle epoque superstar Anna Held, motoring around New York in one of her beloved, newfangled automobiles is to feel like you’re there watching them pass. And he has a flair for the delightfully pithy: “Too often [in the 1900s], romantic shows dragged in jokes like a child pulling a yakking wooden duck.” “Ruby Keeler definitely had a lovable clunky something, but her performing skills per se were on the perfunctory side.” Or on the difference between the real Billie Burke, Ziegfeld’s second wife, and the Billie we know from movies like Dinner at Eight and The Wizard of Oz: “[T]hese films disguise the Billie who fell in love with Ziegfeld … Billie of the movies is a sharp comedienne playing a prattling human doily … Billie the Charles Frohman star was someone else entirely — younger, obviously, but keen, bold, and vivacious in a red-hair-and-blue-eyes coloring.” One of the ancillary pleasures of Ziegfeld is the long clear glimpse it gives us of the lady behind Glinda.

There have been many books about Florenz Ziegfeld, beginning just months after his death in 1932, and Mordden gives them full credit in a long “Sources and Further Reading” epilogue to his book (don’t skip it thinking there’s nothing more to learn). There’s much that’s unknowable, and always was, about this intensely private, even secretive, man. Mordden’s subtitle tells us his approach: The Man Who Invented Show Business. By deep research and sharp analysis he gives us what feels like a personal insight into Ziegfeld the staid conservative revolutionary, the first producer to have four smash hits running on Broadway simultaneously, earning him the cover of Time on May 14, 1928. You had to actually do something to get the cover of Time in those days. Do something and be somebody. This book gives us a real grasp of who he was, what he did, and what drove and enabled him to do it.

While I was reading Ziegfeld, I went to the post office on business. When I set the book down on the counter, the clerk glanced at it. “Ziegfeld. Is that the guy with the Follies?” Florenz Ziegfeld Jr. — and nearly everyone who knew him — had been dead a good forty years by the time this mailman was born. But he knew who Ziegfeld was — he even knew how to pronounce the name correctly. In Ziegfeld: The Man Who Invented Show Business, Ethan Mordden tells us why.

Movie Playing Cards: 5 of Spades – George Walsh

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George Walsh’s chief claim to fame is the movie he didn’t make. He’s one of three actors known to have been the 5 of Spades in the Moriarty deck, and probably not the first. Of the other two, the first was probably Harold A. Lockwood. I say “probably” because Lockwood didn’t have long to join the deck, so he must have done it early; he died in the “Spanish” Flu pandemic of 1918, age 31. Before that he had appeared in 131 pictures since 1911, with three more released posthumously. In 23 of those pictures, all between 1915 and ’17, he was half of a romantic team with May Allison (5 of Diamonds in my deck, Queen of Hearts in others). The other 5 of Spades was Charles Kent, already 64 years old by the time the cards were introduced in 1916. Kent’s first known picture was in 1908 — Macbeth for Vitagraph (and he played old King Duncan in that). Unlike Lockwood, he would outlive the production of the cards, dying in 1923 at 70. My guess is that Lockwood was the first face on the 5 of Spades, Kent the second, followed by George Walsh, who didn’t make his first picture until the others had made 94 and 81, respectively.
 
This is as good a time as any to talk about those numbers of pictures I keep throwing around. Ninety-four and 81 pictures in less than ten years? Why, Dustin Hoffman and Jack Nicholson (to take two random, veteran examples) haven’t made 80 pictures apiece in their entire careers. Of course, we’re not talking about 90-to-100-minute features here, although such things weren’t unheard of even as early as 1915. By the late ‘teens, the average feature was about five reels ( 60 to 75 minutes, depending on the speed of hand-cranked projectors in those days). Before 1914, most pictures were probably two or three reels — roughly equivalent to a half-hour TV episode. That’s how Harold Lockwood and May Allison could make 23 pictures together in two years, but it’s still a pretty breakneck pace. Mutual, Vitagraph, Biograph, Edison and Famous Players-Lasky kept their actors and crews busy, grinding out material for the burgeoning number of movie houses, where a picture would seldom play more than two or three days.  
 

But back to our subject. Born in 1889, George Frederick Walsh followed his older brother Raoul (né Albert Edward) into pictures in the mid-1910s, having originally planned to be an attorney (he attended, however briefly, Fordham and Georgetown). He also attended New York’s High School of Commerce, where he graduated in 1911, and where he was a versatile athlete: baseball, track, cross country, swimming, rowing. This experience would stand him in good stead, at least in the Hollywood short run — certainly better than whatever he learned about commerce or pre-law.

I don’t know what drew George to pictures in the first place, but it’s easy to imagine him being lured by the stories his brother told. Raoul had backed into pictures after working as a cowboy; his horsemanship had landed him a stage job, riding a galloping horse on a treadmill for a touring company of The Clansman. From that he got the acting bug, forgetting all about cowpunching. He wound up in New York making westerns (mostly) for Pathe, then followed D.W. Griffith to California. He loved the freewheeling fun of making pictures in those days, and he surely must have painted an enticing picture for George — “With your looks and athletic ability, you’re a natural for this stuff.” Hal Erickson at AllMovie.com says that George joined Raoul at Reliance-Mutual in 1914, but according to the IMDB, George’s first picture was an indeterminate bit in The Birth of a Nation for D.W. Griffith. Or more likely a series of bits; Griffith was economical in his use of extras, and George may well have been one of those who saw himself on screen fighting on both sides of a battle. Raoul played John Wilkes Booth in Birth, but was already on his way to a director’s career (it would extend to 1964; Raoul Walsh remains a favorite director among critics and historians).

George did get his first breaks in Reliance-Mutual pictures directed by Raoul and others, moving up the cast list till he was top-billed, and first drawing the eye of Variety’s reviewer in Raoul’s Blue Blood and Red (1916): “The kid is clever…a fine, manly looking chap, full of athletic stunts…” By this time, both Raoul and George were working for William Fox, and soon George worked again for D.W. Griffith. Here he is as the Bridegroom of Cana in the Judean Story section of Intolerance, receiving the bad news that the wine supply has run out. With him are 17-year-old Bessie Love (still several years from her own stardom) as the Bride of Cana and William Brown as the father of the bride.

That same year, George married Seena Owen (née Signe Auen of Spokane, Wash.). They probably met on the set of Intolerance, where Seena played Princess Beloved in the Fall of Babylon story. The union, the only marriage for either of them, would end in divorce in 1924. (UPDATE 8/14/22: It turns out this was not in fact George Walsh’s only marriage, despite what the IMDb says. See the comment below from “Anonymous”, who married George’s eldest son Tom in 1982, but who only met George once and remembers few details. A second commenter, “Art”, who evidently knew Anonymous, provides another piece of the puzzle, and a visit to Find a Grave fills in the rest. The second Mrs. Walsh was born Winnifred Craven on July 1, 1911. She married George in 1942 when he was 53 and she was 21. Winnifred died February 2, 1966 at the age of 54; she and George are buried together in San Gabriel Cemetery, California.)
 
George Walsh’s career flourished as William Fox’s slightly younger answer to Douglas Fairbanks. By this I mean he was an “answer” to the early Fairbanks, before The Mark of Zorro, Robin Hood, The Thief of Bagdad, etc. landed him permanently in costume swashbucklers. Before Zorro, the typical Fairbanks hero was a boyish, high-spirited American naif, triumphing over adversity in effortless leaps and bounds, always with a beaming, irresistible smile. 
 
And so it was with George Walsh. His pictures from 1916 to 1920 are probably all irretrievably lost, but reviews in Variety document their pleasures, and Walsh’s appeal: The Mediator (’16), “Walsh proves himself as good a rough and tumble man as ever got into focus”; Melting Millions (’17), “his athletic ability stands him in good stead for this particular line of work”; Brave and Bold (’18), “Mr. Walsh does some athletics, jumping over everybody in his path, runs an auto or motorcycle, whichever is the handiest when needed, and climbs up the front of the Ft. Pitt hotel at Pittsburgh to keep an appointment with a French prince”; On the Jump (’18), “…the whole thing is built around Mr. Walsh, apparently with the idea of giving him opportunities to perform unusual stunts”; Luck and Pluck (’19), “Walsh is in his glory scaling walls, climbing trees, foiling cops, etc. There are a couple of corking fights where he handles anywhere from a dozen to twenty opponents at a time”; From Now On (’20), “What may be held up for approval is the hard work which George Walsh invests in it.” The image conjured up from these reviews is a series of lightweight adventures distinguished by George’s prowess; as brother Raoul, who directed From Now On, said years later, “Well, anything with him wouldn’t be too heavy.”
 
George’s career did get a little heavier as the 1920s dawned. In 1922 he played explorer Henry Morton Stanley in With Stanley in Africa; neither the film nor any reviews seem to have survived (though this French postcard image does), but it appears a more serious departure from his vehicles to date. So was Vanity Fair the next year, in which he played the dashing wastrel Rawdon Crawley; the picture, unfortunately, was not well received. It’s an open question how well Thackeray’s huge novel could be adapted into an 80-minute silent movie, but writer-director Hugo Ballin seems not to have risen to the occasion; Variety carped that most of the picture was frittered away on closeups of Ballin’s wife Mabel, who played Becky Sharp. In any case, Walsh didn’t make much of an impression. He had better luck with Rosita, playing the love interest for Mary Pickford under the direction of German émigré Ernst Lubitsch making his first American picture; Walsh basked in the reflected glory showered on Lubitsch and Pickford by the movie’s artistic and commercial success.
 
Then came what looked like the break of a lifetime: George Walsh was chosen by writer June Mathis to play the title role in Metro’s screen adaptation of Ben-Hur, to be shot on location in Rome. The role was coveted by every actor in movies except Jackie Coogan. The most popular choice, Rudolph Valentino, was out of play because of a contract dispute with Famous Players-Lasky; until they settled their differences, the studio wasn’t about to let him work for anyone else. Mathis ordered tests, dozens of them, and Walsh won out. In his recounting of the Ben-Hur production in The Parade’s Gone By, Kevin Brownlow tells us that there was little enthusiasm in Hollywood for the choice; George was a fine physical specimen, they all said, but not that strong an actor.
 
To Walsh, this surely seemed like the gravy train to glory, and he grabbed on with both hands. He gladly agreed to a salary cut when offered the role, and even swallowed his umbrage when, as the company sailed for Italy in the spring of 1924, he found himself relegated to second-class accommodations. Arriving in Rome, he worked out every day with his co-star Francis X. Bushman (playing the villain Messala) and posed for a few publicity stills like this one. Otherwise he was ignored.

Things didn’t go well for Ben-Hur in Italy. Sets weren’t ready, equipment wasn’t available, crews couldn’t speak English, supervisors couldn’t speak Italian. Matters began in a state of disorganization and degenerated into hopeless chaos. June Mathis, ostensibly the production supervisor as well as scriptwriter, was barred from the set by director Charles Brabin — not that there was much set to bar her from. While construction dawdled along, the company adjourned to Anzio to shoot the sea battle; Brabin sat around guzzling wine and regaling the crew with long-winded stories while underlings haggled with local bureaucrats, and hundreds of extras idled sweltering on the beach. When cameras finally rolled, everything went wrong.

Well, I needn’t go on; you can get the whole story from Brownlow. By autumn of 1924, the newly-formed MGM had inherited this mess, and the new bosses, L.B. Mayer and Irving Thalberg, took drastic action. Brabin was fired because his footage was awful. June Mathis was fired because she had been the supposed supervisor of this fiasco, and had insisted on shooting in Rome in the first place. And George Walsh was fired because Mathis had hired him — besides, MGM wanted to build up their rising star Ramon Novarro, and since Walsh hadn’t yet appeared on film it would cost only the price of a ticket home to get rid of him. Walsh and Bushman (who was one of the few survivors of the purge) read about the changes in the newspapers. The whole company — what was left of it — was ordered back to California at once, where Mayer and Thalberg could keep a close eye on things.

It was all a bitter pill for George. “You know, Frank,” he told Bushman, “I felt this was going to happen. But to leave me over here for so long, to let me die in pictures — and then to change me!” Because MGM, in damage-control mode, kept mum about the state of the production and the reasons for such sweeping changes, the impression was left that George simply couldn’t cut it — just as everyone had suspected.

Could he have cut it? Maybe, maybe not. June Mathis shrugged off her own dismissal, saying her chief regret was for Walsh: “I had complete faith in his ability to play Ben-Hur,” she told Photoplay. “I realize many other people did not believe in him, but the same thing occurred when I selected Rudolph Valentino for the role of Julio in The Four Horsemen. Valentino justified himself, and I am confident that Mr. Walsh would have done the same thing. Actually, he was given no opportunity to succeed or fail. He was withdrawn without a chance. Indeed, Mr. Novarro was in Rome for three days before Mr. Walsh was notified that he had been succeeded in the leading role.” Nevertheless, in Hollywood — then as now — image was everything. George slunk home a “failure”, even though he had not faced the cameras for so much as a frame of film.

He didn’t exactly “die in pictures”, but in an age where a star was expected to appear in a new picture several times a year — even every few weeks — George Walsh was off the screen from December 1923 to October ’25. He might as well have moved to Tibet and become a hermit. He had lost momentum, and he never really got it back. His vehicles continued as they had before, with titles like American Pluck, The Kick-Off, Striving for Fortune and His Rise to Fame, but the scripts were more formulaic than ever, the productions cheaper and more slapdash, the companies increasingly fly-by-night. The kid was looking less clever than he once had; more important, he was no longer a kid. His last starring vehicle was the inaptly named Inspiration (1928), which Variety termed “for second run houses in not too particular neighborhoods.”

 

 

After the coming of sound Walsh made a few movies, but was never again top-billed. Supporting roles (often in brother Raoul’s pictures like Me and My Gal, The Bowery and Under Pressure) slid into bits — like this one in Cecil B. DeMille’s Cleopatra (1934), as a courier bringing Antony (Henry Wilcoxon) and Cleopatra (Claudette Colbert) the bad news that Octavian is on the march. After Raoul’s Klondike Annie and a couple of Poverty Row westerns in 1936, George decided to call it a day in pictures, and retired from the screen to work as a racehorse trainer for the Hollywood horsey set.

All in all, George Walsh didn’t have such a bad run; his pictures were breezy, undemanding fun in their day and he had a definite following. Getting canned from Ben-Hur was a blow, no doubt, but how much of his subsequent career slide was due to his two years out of circulation, and how much was simply because his day was done, is something I guess we’ll never know. Like any other star, he arrived, he blazed, and he waned, then (unlike some) lived to a ripe old age: George Walsh was 92 when he passed away in Pomona, Calif. in 1981.

Movie Playing Cards: 9 of Diamonds – Mary Miles Minter

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This one’s too dramatically juicy to ignore. Poor Mary Miles Minter — was there ever a Hollywood life more pathetic, or more completely ignored by posterity? She once seemed to be the heiress apparent to Mary Pickford, yet Pickford is still a household name nearly 80 years after her last movie, while Minter… I suppose it doesn’t help that only six of Minter’s 54 movies are said to survive. But Minter’s obscurity isn’t merely a function of poor film preservation. It was her off-screen life that doomed her to an addled oblivion and a lonely death at the age of 82 — and her off-screen life was something she never had a moment’s control over. Poor Mary Miles Minter. 
 
 As I said before, Minter is the only person to appear at the 9 of Diamonds in any extant version of the M.J. Moriarty deck of cards, so presumably the happily smiling lass we see on the card is Mary as she looked in 1916, when she was only 14 years old. She looks more mature in the undated photo at right, less inclined to adolescent baby fat, though surely no more than 18 or 19. More melancholy, too — or is it just historical hindsight that makes me want to see a sadder-but-wiser girl? 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
Poses like that are easy to find of Minter — wide-eyed, pensive, gazing soulfully to one side or the other of the camera, as if listening intently for something. Or to someone. It was a popular attitude for virginal waifs in those days, but in Mary’s case it might have had another motive: to make her look older. People look younger when they smile. For an illustration by contrast, here’s a postcard of Mary (probably from late 1922 or early ’23, near the end of her career) in which her smile looks quite open and unforced. There’s a certain dressing-up-in-Mama’s-clothes quality about this picture, isn’t there?
 
That may not be too far from the truth. Minter’s mother was a real piece of work, a frustrated actress in the mold of stage mothers from time immemorial, who live out their own thwarted ambitions through their daughters — once they realize that that’s where the real talent in the family is.
 
Mary Miles Minter was born Juliet Reilly on April Fool’s Day 1902 in Shreveport, Louisiana, the younger of two daughters of J. Homer and Lily Pearl Miles Reilly. By 1907 Homer was out of the picture, sent packing by Lily Pearl, who went gallivanting off to New York to be an actress, adopting the name Charlotte Shelby. Nobody knows why she chose that name; Sidney D. Kirkpatrick, in his book A Cast of Killers (more about that later), relays the speculation that a politician named Shelby might have helped Lily Pearl get her first big break. For whatever reason.
 

Charlotte had left Juliet and her sister Margaret with their grandmother, but she soon sent for them to join her in New York, where little six-year-old Juliet caught the eye of Charles Frohman, producer of the play Charlotte was appearing in. Kirkpatrick says Frohman cast the tot in Cameo Kirby and A Fool There Was — but neither play was produced by Frohman, and Juliet Shelby doesn’t appear in either cast on the Internet Broadway Database. Well, whatever the exact names or titles involved, Charlotte realized in short order that little Juliet was the meal ticket.

Juliet Shelby made at least one picture under that name in 1912, for Universal in New York: The Nurse (now lost, of course). Not long after that she caught the baleful eye of the Gerry Society, watchdogs over the exploitation of child labor and the bane of any show business troupe with underage players. Charlotte handled the matter creatively; she rushed back to Louisiana and borrowed the birth certificate — and name — of her sister’s daughter, who had died in 1905 at the age of eight. And hey presto! — eleven-year-old Juliet Shelby became sixteen-year-old Mary Miles Minter, old enough to satisfy the Gerry Society but looking young enough (because she was) to play the sort of roles for which she was in demand. By the time she made a hit on Broadway in Edward Peple’s The Littlest Rebel, she was Mary for good.

This, in case you’re keeping track, makes the fourth name our girl had by the time she was eleven. Born Juliet Reilly, then Juliet Miles while she lived with her grandmother, then Juliet Shelby after joining her mother in New York, and finally Mary Miles Minter, a name and identity borrowed — stolen, really — from a dead cousin she never knew, yanking her once and for all out of any chance at a normal childhood. I leave the psychiatrists to speculate on what a history like that can do to a girl’s self-image.

By the time she returned to pictures in 1915, this time on the West Coast for a succession of studios, she was an established stage name (although in true Hollywood fashion, her biggest stage hit, The Littlest Rebel, was filmed with somebody else, one Mimi Yvonne). “Of Littlest Rebel fame” followed her everywhere she went. 

And so did Charlotte. Somebody made up a nursery rhyme: 
 
Mary was a little lamb.
Her heart was white as snow.
And everywhere that Mary went,
Her mother had to go.
 
Actress Florence Vidor, as quoted by Sidney Kirkpatrick, remembered: “She and her mother were at each other’s throats from the day I met them. They fought about everything. But her mother always won. Mary was like Charlotte’s cute little puppet. I don’t think she ever cared about acting too much, really, but Charlotte wanted her to be a star, so Mary did what she was told.” Journalist Adela Rogers St. Johns said that Charlotte’s only career was “managing” Mary’s — at a 30 percent commission. She hired lawyers to find loopholes in whatever contracts she signed for Mary so she could shop for better deals at other studios. 
 
And she kept Mary hopping: Six pictures at Metro in 1915 and ’16, then ten at Mutual in ’16 and ’17, one more at Metro, then back to Mutual for nine more through July 1918, when Mary was still only 16. Then to Pathe for seven pictures in one year, topped off by Charlotte’s coup de grace in 1919: a million-dollar-plus contract with Paramount just as America’s Sweetheart Pickford was bailing on her Paramount contract for a sweeter deal with First National and, later, her own United Artists.
 
Thirty-three pictures in 49 months; that’s a long resume for someone who “didn’t ever care about acting too much, really.” Maybe Mary’s heart wasn’t in the acting at that, but what else could she do? What else had she ever been allowed to do? She had to support the family in a style to which Charlotte was enjoying becoming accustomed. Charlotte and sister Margaret were actresses after a fashion, but the only parts they ever got were supporting roles in Mary’s pictures; talent was probably not a a major factor in their casting.
 
Besides, there’s evidence that the critics, at least, were beginning to view this Mary as something of a Pickford manque. Reviewing The Intrusion of Isabel in 1919, Variety said, “Miss Minter as the years advance still has much to learn now that she [is] becoming past the age of being a child wonder … She seems to be always bounding and jumping around, throwing her arms about someone.”  Later, on Anne of Green Gables, the paper said she “revealed nothing approaching the Pickford standard.”
 
 
 
 
 
Green Gables was nevertheless a success, and credit for it accrued to the director, William Desmond Taylor (left). In all, Taylor directed Minter in four pictures, and seems to have had a good effect on her acting; of their next one, Judy of Rogues’ Harbor, Variety said, “Miss Minter shows improvement with each new production, and her work in the present feature is by far the best she has done yet.”
 

What effect further work with Taylor might have had we’ll never know, for after the release of Jenny Be Good in April 1920 they never worked together again. But there’s reason to believe — at least judging from Variety’s reviews — that he had a pivotal influence on her acting in those four pictures, all made in the year between her seventeenth and eighteenth birthdays. 

 

 

 

 

 

He may have had other effects on her as well, and that possibility came to light only after the evening of Wednesday, February 1, 1922. On that night, sometime after 7:45 p.m., in the living room of this bungalow at 404-B Alvarado Street in Los Angeles, somebody stood behind William Desmond Taylor and shot him dead with a .38-caliber Smith & Wesson revolver.

The murder came right smack in between Roscoe “Fatty” Arbuckle’s second and third trials, up in San Francisco, in the death of Virginia Rappe after a Labor Day party in Arbuckle’s suite at the St. Francis Hotel. And the press pounced on Taylor as they had on Arbuckle; here was more proof — as if any was needed — of the moral turpitude of Hollywood. Lurid stories circulated in the press as the investigation progressed. Most of them weren’t reflected in the official police files or those of a succession of Los Angeles district attorneys, but they were enough to ruin two careers.
 
Not all of those lurid stories were untrue. For one thing, it developed that William Desmond Taylor wasn’t his real name. He was born William Cunningham Deane-Tanner in 1872, not 1877 as was widely believed while he was alive. He had abandoned a wife and daughter in New York in 1908; his wife had divorced him in absentia, but she spotted him in one of his pictures as an actor, leading his daughter Daisy to seek to contact him. They had finally met in July 1921, and Tanner/Taylor promised to see her again; as things turned out, he never did. There was enough mystery in Taylor’s real life to feed plenty of rumors after his death.
 
The first career ruined by the Taylor scandal belonged to Mabel Normand. Already “tainted” in the public mind by her long on-screen association with Arbuckle, she had the incredibly bad luck to be the last person (besides the killer) to see Taylor alive. She had visited him that night, leaving a little after 7:30; Taylor walked her out to her car on Alvarado, then returned to his house for the last time. Rumors were repeated in the press: that she was a cocaine addict (true); that she was back at Taylor’s the morning his body was discovered, ransacking the place in search of compromising letters (false). She was closely questioned, investigated and exonerated. But it didn’t help; the rumors — and her drug problem — persisted, and fed each other in a spiraling decline. By the time she died in 1930, of tuberculosis no doubt aggravated by her addiction, she hadn’t worked in three years. She was only 37. As she lay dying, it’s said, she mused, “I wonder who killed poor Bill Taylor.”
 
The other ruined career, of course, was Mary Miles Minter’s, and looking at her face in this picture that she (or, more likely, Mama Charlotte) signed for the 1923 edition of Blue Book of the Screen, it’s impossible not to believe she knew the end was nigh. In the flurry of publicity after Taylor’s murder, all of her publicity was bad. Love letters surfaced, some in a kind of schoolgirl code, that she had written to Taylor — they look girlishly innocuous to modern eyes, but in 1922 they were scandalous, and not in keeping with the sugar-and-spice-and-everything-nice image Charlotte and her studios had so carefully cultivated. Stories flew, and grew in the telling. In Taylor’s bedroom dresser, it was said, they found a pair of pink panties, embroidered with “MMM”; in a later iteration, the panties became a sheer nightgown. Whatever. The garment, the story went on, was passed around police headquarters for a while, for laughs, before vanishing altogether. (That is, if it ever existed at all. Minter herself denied it in a phone conversation with historian Kevin Brownlow in the 1970s. She believed the panties/nightgown story was invented by journalist Adela Rogers St. John.)
 
Were Minter and Taylor — 15 and 45, respectively, when they met in 1917 — lovers? Only two people ever knew the answer to that one, and they both died without saying. Florence Vidor, for one, didn’t believe Minter was sexually active with Taylor or anyone else. When would she have the chance, with Charlotte never letting her out of her sight? Some friends of Taylor’s believed Minter was infatuated with the director, badgering him with pleas for his affection when he regarded her as no more than a dear little child; other acquaintances believed that, ahem, Taylor had no interest in women of any age — if you know what I mean. 
 
Whatever the case, the damage was done. Even before the murder, the Hollywood establishment had begun to suspect that Mary Miles Minter’s time had all but passed; afterward, studios and the public at large regarded her almost as a has-been who wouldn’t go away. Reviews of her last picture, The Trail of the Lonesome Pine (released on April 15, 1923) were downright cruel. The New York Times: “The chubby Mary Miles Minter, who apparently does not often take as much exercise as in this production…” Variety wasn’t as unchivalrous as all that, but reviewer “Fred” dismissed her as “colorless.” Ten days later, Paramount bought out her contract for $350,000 and released her. She had just turned 21. 
 
The murder of William Desmond Taylor was never officially solved, and it hung over Mary Miles Minter and her mother like a curse from beyond the grave. Eventually the two were driven to a public statement: the L.A. district attorney should put up or shut up; publish any evidence against them and charge them, or absolve them once and for all. The D.A.’s office replied that they had nothing, and absolved them. Over the years there’s been no shortage of theories. He was shot by a burglar. Or by Normand. Or one of her ex-lovers. Or a bootlegger to whom Taylor owed money. Or drug dealers, angered by his efforts to help Normand kick her habit and to have them driven out of town. Or a secretary who had disappeared after robbing Taylor and forging his signature to cash checks. Or, no kidding, the butler (one Henry Peavey) did it. 
 
In 1967, 73-year-old director King Vidor, who had been a contemporary and acquaintance of Taylor’s, launched a personal investigation for a screenplay he hoped to write and direct. Many Hollywood old-timers were still alive then, and nearly all of them had their own take on the mystery. His efforts took him far and wide, visiting friends and former colleagues — including Mary Miles Minter herself. She was now living quietly in Santa Monica and answering only to Mrs. Brandon O’Hildebrandt, the name of the man she married in 1957, after Charlotte Shelby finally died. Her husband had died in 1965, leaving little Juliet Reilly a final name to fold herself into.
 
Or perhaps there was one more. Vidor was appalled to find an obese, demented wreck of the beauty he had known, looking far older than her 65 years and clearly mentally unstable. She said she was writing a lot these days, poetry of her own. When Vidor glanced at the stack of poems she had, he noticed they were all signed “by Charlotte Shelby.” As they talked, Mary wafted her way through a disjointed, wandering monologue, often ignoring or only half-answering Vidor’s questions. At length, she mewled, “My mother killed everything I ever loved,” but the director couldn’t tell if she was being momentarily lucid or merely surrendering to the confusion of dim and distant imaginings.
 
Vidor never made that movie, or any other feature, though there was an unrelated documentary short in 1980. Solomon and Sheba in 1959 proved to be his final outing as a director. The fruits of his investigation were locked away in a strongbox in his garage, where they were discovered after Vidor’s death by his biographer Sidney D. Kirkpatrick. Kirkpatrick published the material in 1986, along with Vidor’s conclusions about the crime, as A Cast of Killers. Since then another book has examined the Taylor murder in depth; this was Tinseltown: Murder, Morphine and Madness at the Dawn of Hollywood by William J. Mann. Mann and Kirkpatrick — or rather, Mann and Vidor — reached quite different conclusions as to who killed William Desmond Taylor, and why, and I won’t reveal either one. Both books are good reads, and I wouldn’t care to spoil them. Besides, any would-be solution to the crime at this distance has to be based on circumstantial evidence, and circumstances can always change.
 
Juliet Reilly/Miles/Shelby/Mary Miles Minter/Mrs. Brandon O’Hildebrandt outlived King Vidor by nearly two years. Mentally fragile as she may have been, she was reasonably well-fixed thanks to real estate investments during the glory days. But her Santa Monica neighborhood grew perilous, and she was robbed more than once. During one robbery in 1981 she was bound, gagged, beaten and left for dead; she survived, and an ex-servant was charged with the crime. She died on August 4, 1984, age 82; any thoughts she had after that 1967 visit from King Vidor she most likely took with her. Mary Miles Minter has a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame at 1724 Vine St., a little over five miles from the spot where William Desmond Taylor died. 
 
POSTSCRIPT: In preparing this post, I went looking for a copy of A Cast of Killers, my first one having slipped out of my hands some twenty years ago. I found a copy at a used-book store, and snapped it up. When I got it home, I learned to my surprise that I had bought an autographed copy. On the title page, above his signature, Sidney D. Kirkpatrick had cautioned a previous owner: “Don’t let this story haunt you. It’s only Hollywood.”
 
 

“MOVIE” Souvenir Playing Cards

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Try to imagine a time when a deck of cards with movie star pictures was a novelty. It’s not easy, is it? We can hardly even imagine a time when a movie star was such a novelty that the word “movie” itself was in quotes. But here it is, courtesy of one M.J. Moriarty and the Movie Souvenir Card Co. of Cincinnati, Ohio.

When I got this deck of cards as an opening-night gift from the director of a show I was in, about 50 years ago, I thought it was something really rare — all 54 cards (including the Joker and the descriptor card shown at right) complete and unblemished, with even the gilded edges of the cards reasonably intact after who knew how many years. Yes, a singular rarity, I thought. I know better now. These Moriarty movie cards are collectible, to be sure, but they don’t seem to be particularly rare. A deck cost fifty cents in 1916 — $13.59 in 2022 dollars. Collector-dealer Cliff Aliperti said in 2010 that one could sell for anywhere from $75 to $150, depending on condition; I don’t know what his estimate would be today, but as I write this in August 2022 there’s a deck for sale on eBay with a Buy It Now price of $229.99. On the other hand, over the last twenty years or so, I’ve seen more than one in dealers’ rooms and memorabilia fairs going for $40 or less.
 

The relative commonness of these decks at collector shows suggests to me that they were probably treated as collectibles from day one; people bought them to keep and look at the pictures, not to face the wear and tear of their Tuesday night whist clubs. (When was the last time you saw a 100-year-old deck of cards in perfect condition?)

 

That may be about to change. It’s becoming common practice among dealers now to break up the decks and sell the cards one at a time. At this moment in 2022, there are 54 individual cards available on eBay at prices ranging from five to twelve dollars. At that rate, a deck that Cliff Aliperti once said was worth no more than $150 (and which I’ve seen much lower) can bring a dealer as much as $630 or more. (Some cards are worth more than others, like this Charlie Chaplin Joker; it brings a premium because it’s the one instance where the card and the personality are perfectly matched — and probably also because Chaplin is the one person in the deck whom pretty much everybody recognizes.) This deck-splitting makes good business sense, but it probably means that decks that survived the last hundred years in near-mint condition are going to have a tough time making it through the next ten.

These decks first appeared in 1916 — at least that’s the copyright date on the card backing. Stars came, went, and changed positions in the deck, and some people (here, for example, at Cliff Aliperti’s Immortal Ephemera) have made a study of comparing and contrasting the decks that can still be found. Certain evidence of the cards themselves suggests that that they stopped production in 1922 at the latest: Wallace Reid appears on the 4 of Spades, and Reid died in January 1923; that’s not conclusive, though, because two other actors (Nicholas Dunaew and Richard C. Travers) occupied that card at one time or another. More persuasive is the case of Mary Miles Minter, the only occupant (so far known) of the 9 of Diamonds. Minter’s career was wrecked in the backwash of the William Desmond Taylor murder in February 1922, when her indiscreet love letters to the late director (30 years her senior) shattered her virgin-pure screen image. But even if the cards were still in production in 1922 (probably unlikely), they stopped pretty early. Many of the stars most associated with the silent era — Rudolph Valentino, Clara Bow, Greta Garbo, John Gilbert, Colleen Moore, Harry Langdon, Ramon Novarro, Bebe Daniels, Bessie Love — hadn’t made their big splash yet and don’t appear in any version of the deck.

 

Others might be expected to show up but don’t. Conspicuous by their absence are the King and Queen of Hollywood (even before their marriage made it official), Douglas Fairbanks and Mary Pickford — although their colleague in United Artists, Chaplin, is Clown Prince of the deck. Dorothy Gish (5 of Clubs) appears, but not her sister Lillian, much the bigger star. And we have Mabel Normand (10 of Clubs) but not her teammate Roscoe Arbuckle, with whom she made dozens of popular Sennett comedies between 1912 and ’16. When these cards hit the market, Arbuckle’s legal troubles were still five years in the future, but he appears in no extant version of the deck, although “Fatty and Mabel” were as much a team as Laurel and Hardy would later be. 

Now a word about the card backing — “the famous painting, ‘The Chariot Race'”, as the descriptor card says. The cards show only a detail; here’s a more complete look at the painting. It was indeed pretty famous during the last quarter of the nineteenth century, and was the work of Alexander von Wagner (1838-1919), a sort of Hungarian Norman Rockwell of the era. Von Wagner painted at least three versions of the painting, the first one in 1873 for the Vienna Exposition. A second version went on display at Philadelphia’s Centennial Exposition in 1876, and another — or perhaps the same one — at the 1893 Columbian Exposition in Chicago. The painting sparked a national craze, with etchings and lithograph prints for sale everywhere. Contrary to what some have said, it does not reproduce a scene from Ben-Hur, which wasn’t published until 1880; indeed, the painting and its pop-culture clones may have inspired Gen. Lew Wallace to include such a scene in his novel. In point of fact, the full title of the work is “Chariot Race in the Circus Maximus, Rome, in the Presence of the Emperor Domitian”, which would have been several decades after Judah Ben-Hur and Messala had their fateful showdown in Antioch’s Circus Maximus. Only one of von Wagner’s versions of the painting is known to survive; it hangs today in the Manchester Art Gallery in England. 

But back to those 53 faces — “every one a favorite of yours”, according to the deck’s promo. So many of those favorites are forgotten today — victims of fickle audiences even in their own lifetimes, then victimized again by the passage of time and Hollywood’s too-little-much-too-late attitude toward film preservation. I thought it would be a fun project to take these cards one at a time and review what we can know now of the lives and careers behind those “beautiful halftone portraits.” Chaplin hardly needs it, of course, but what about House Peters, Mildred Harris, Wanda Hawley, George Larkin? I’ll be shuffling the deck from time to time, cutting the cards and seeing what comes up. Maybe we can uncover some sense of why these cards were bought, and enjoyed, and even cherished and preserved so carefully for a hundred years and more.

*                         *                         *

King of Hearts – H.B. Warner

 

 

Here’s an easy one for starters. Every true film buff knows Henry Byron Charles Stewart Warner-Lickford, although they might have to look twice to recognize the H.B. Warner they remember in this dapper, Arrow-collared, surprisingly youthful gent-about-town. This portrait may date from Warner’s entry into movies, when he was 38; that would have made the picture a couple of years old when the deck was published, but that sort of thing is not unheard of among actors’ head shots.

So film buffs know the name, even if the face comes as a bit of a surprise — but what about those less devout moviegoers, who don’t make a practice of memorizing the name of every Thurston Hall or J. Edward Bromberg who marches across the screen? Well, I’m going to go out on a limb here: I think it just may be that H.B. Warner’s work has been seen by more people alive today than anyone else in the M.J. Moriarty deck. Yes, maybe even more than Charlie Chaplin.

Note I said “seen by”, not “familiar to”. So take another look. Try to add, oh, maybe 30 years to that face. Look especially at the eyes. Ring any bells? Well…

 
 
How about this? That’s right, H.B. Warner was old Mr. Gower, the druggist who slaps young George Bailey around the back room of his store in It’s a Wonderful Life, and who, in the world where George was never born, is the “rummy” who “spent twenty years in prison for poisonin’ a kid.” I’ll just bet that anyone who ever saw Warner’s performance in It’s a Wonderful Life has never forgotten it, even if they never took the trouble to find out the actor’s name.
 
By 1946, the year of Wonderful Life, Warner had become a steady member of Frank Capra’s informal stock company. This was the fifth of his six pictures for Capra, and those six are a major reason why I suggest H.B. Warner’s work has been seen by so many. He played the judge hearing Gary Cooper’s case in Mr. Deeds Goes to Town (1936) — “Not only are you not insane — you’re the sanest man who ever walked into this courtroom!” It’s a hallelujah moment, provided by writer Robert Riskin and delivered by H.B. Warner.
 
 

In 1937, Capra gave Warner the opportunity to deliver probably his best screen performance. The picture was Lost Horizon, from James Hilton’s utopian romance about a group of refugees from war-torn “civilization” who find themselves in the remote Himalayan paradise of  Shangri-La. Warner (here with Isabel Jewell, Edward Everett Horton, Ronald Colman and Thomas Mitchell) played Chang, their mysterious escort from the snowbound wreck of their plane to the Edenic Valley of the Blue Moon, and their host after they arrive. Endlessly cordial, welcoming and polite, he nevertheless is inscrutably vague about when and how they will ever be able to return to their homes. Warner got an Oscar nomination as best supporting actor, but he didn’t win; he lost out to Joseph Schildkraut as Alfred Dreyfus in Warner Bros.’ The Life of Emile Zola. That’s a worthy performance, but I’m not at all sure the Academy made the right call. H.B. Warner’s other pictures for Capra were You Can’t Take It with You (1938), Mr. Smith Goes to Washington  (1939, as the Senate majority leader) and Here Comes the Groom (1951).

But you don’t get your picture on a deck of cards for supporting and character roles in your twilight years, however memorable. What about his career earlier, when he appeared on the King of Hearts sometime between 1916 and 1920? Well, unfortunately, that’s something we’re going to bump up against over and over as we discuss this antique deck of cards — and for that matter, anything else about the silent era. The survival rate of movies made between 1890 and and 1920 is only a cut or two above snowball-in-hell level; for much of Warner’s career we have to piece together what information we can from secondary sources.

We know that he made his Broadway debut on November 24, 1902 at the age of 27 (billed as “Harry Warner”), in Audrey by Harriet Ford and E.F. Boddington. In 1910 he appeared in Alias Jimmy Valentine, one of the smash hits of the early 20th century stage, adapted from the O. Henry story “A Retrieved Reformation.” He must have made quite an impression in that, because in 1914, when he filmed another one of his stage successes, The Ghost Breaker, the laudatory review in Variety mentioned him as “he of ‘Jimmy Valentine’ fame.” The Ghost Breaker was his third picture in 1914, and was co-directed by Cecil B. DeMille. They would work together again, and would in fact make their last picture together — but more of that anon.

Warner was a veteran stage star by the time his movie career really got underway in the mid ‘teens, and he established himself (if we can believe his Variety reviews) as an appealing romantic lead in titles like The Raiders, Shell 43 and The Vagabond Prince (all 1916), Danger Trail (’17) and The Pagan God (’19). He continued to appear on Broadway until Silence in the winter of 1924-25 (which he also filmed in 1926); after that he was a Hollywood actor for good.

At least one of H.B. Warner’s silent movies has survived intact, and it’s a biggie: Cecil B. DeMille’s spectacularly reverent The King of Kings (1927), in which Warner played the title role. The movie was a triumph of prestige and box office for DeMille; in reviewing it, Variety’s legendary editor Sime Silverman was quite tongue-tied with awe; in 24 column inches, Silverman (normally so terse and pithy) fairly stumbles over himself groping for superlatives. The movie is a bit too earnestly pious for modern tastes, but its appeal for 1927 audiences is still understandable, and DeMille’s showmanship is at its smoothest. Most memorably, Warner’s performance, in an age when accusations of sacrilege were a very real concern, is excellent. Here’s a strikingly dramatic shot of him at the Crucifixion, seen from the viewpoint of Jesus’s mother Mary mourning at the foot of the Cross.

 

 

And here, just to give a flavor of the lavishness of DeMille’s picture, is a frame from one of King of Kings‘s two Technicolor sequences, showing the resurrrected Christ comforting Mary Magdalene (Jacqueline Logan) at the opening to the tomb on Easter morning. (On a curious side note: in King of Kings Judas Iscariot was played by none other than the self-same Joseph Schildkraut who ten years later would ace Warner out of that Oscar.)

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
With the coming of sound, H.B. Warner was well into his fifties, so character parts became his lot as they do for nearly all actors as they age. And it proved to be a fertile field for him; after King of Kings there were well over a hundred film appearances in the 29 years that remained to him — Lost Horizon and It’s a Wonderful Life were only two of them. Here’s one that movie buffs particularly cherish: Warner playing himself in 1950’s Sunset Blvd. (though unidentified until the closing credits), as one of the has-been “waxworks” playing bridge with Gloria Swanson’s mad Norma Desmond. Staring him down is, of course, Buster Keaton. (And on a cautionary note, here’s an example of what a decade of sodden alcoholism can do to you: Warner and Keaton look about the same age; actually, Keaton was twenty years younger, almost to the day.)
 
 
 
 
H.B. Warner’s final screen appearance was a poignant one. He was approaching 80 and living at the Motion Picture Country Home in Woodland Hills in 1955 when the call came from his old friend Cecil B. DeMille. DeMille was planning a massive spectacle expanding the Biblical section of his 1923 hit The Ten Commandments, and he had a part for H.B. if he felt up to it. The role was identified in the script as “Amminadab”, an aging Israelite setting out on the Exodus from Egypt, even though he knows he’ll never see the Promised Land — indeed, probably won’t live out the day. The actor carrying him in this shot, Donald Curtis, remembered that Warner weighed no more than a child, and carrying him wasn’t merely in the script, it was a necessity: “It was clear H.B. couldn’t walk — could barely breathe.” He had come to the set in an ambulance and lay on a stretcher, breathing through an oxygen mask, until the cameras were ready to roll. In the script, he had a rather complex speech adapted from Psalm 22, but he couldn’t manage it, so DeMille told him to say whatever he wanted, and Curtis and Nina Foch would work with it. H.B. Warner’s last words in his 137th movie, after 53 years as an actor, were: “I am poured out like water, my strength dried up into the dust of death.” 
 
Donald Curtis believed the old boy could only have weeks to live, but he was wrong. In fact, H.B. Warner lasted three more years; he died on December 21, 1958, 56 days after his 83rd birthday.