Looking for Mabel Normand

“With reluctance, with reluctance, with love laughter and tears, we come to the Mack Sennett star-of-stars, Mabel Normand.

Somewhere, sometime, somehow, must people have come to the moment of truth when quite literally, they meet someone they know is not of this world.  I don’t mean out of this world – that can happen here and there to very ordinary people moved by some impulse or vision.  Mabel Normand was something else again.

She was a pixie, an elf, one of the little people.  She had fey moments when I actually thought I could see – not the wings, perhaps, but the faintest glimmer of them, silver-white and transparent.  I know – but I did think so, and so did many other people.  Charlie Chaplin, for one - Marie Dressler for another.  And of course Mack Sennett.

Now – now that she is gone – now that I am looking back across the years I can feel a little sorry for Mack Sennett, too.  It can’t have been much easier for a mortal to be in love with an elf than for an elf to be in love with a mortal.

Perhaps that explains it all and the disaster that befell.”

Love, Laughter and Tears

Adela Rogers St. Johns, pg 55

Adela Rogers St. Johns has been identified as a novelist and movie historian as early as 1930, Adela described Mabel Normand as “Not of this world” perhaps true in the poetic sense if not in a factual one. 

The story of a failed suicide attempt of Mabel by jumping off a pier came from the pen of Adela late in her life.  She tells a tale of setting at a table with Wally Reid and Mabel at Nat Goodwin’s when Mabel excused herself, walked to the end of the pier, and jumped.  Adela is a bit vague as to when this happen. It was believed that she was referring to the late summer of 1915; Wally was working for Lasky on Carmen. Mabel was very busy traveling between San Francisco and San Diego but she didn’t leave for New York until December, perhaps it was in September but Adela never gave a date.  Mabel was an award-winning diver, so would she have jumped into the Pacific Ocean to end it all? But the story keeps being repeated as if Adela was reporting facts not telling one of her fan magazine stories. 

Adela was a writer of public interest and feature stories in the light, emotional and whimsical style that was her trademark.  There is little doubt that she truly liked Mabel.  She and Mabel shared many qualities; one was a total lack of interest in being reporters, as Adela never worried about the facts if there was a good story to be told.  Personally, I believe Adela’s writings hold an emotional truth but not necessarily historic facts. 

TRUTH is a quality or state of being genuine, real, or correct and is very much a philosophical statement but on the other hand, FACTS are a thing done, thing known and are scientific in nature. Fact is not a quality but an actual thing.  In general, usage, we commonly use the words interchangeable, they are not. 

Adela’s sincere affection is clear whenever she wrote of her friend, Mabel Normand.  According to an article she wrote in Photoplay in August 1921, Adela first saw Mabel at Al Levy’s restaurant. Adela writes, her dining partner put down his fork, turned to her and told her in a hushed voice  that the ‘prettiest girl I ever saw in my life’ had just walked into the restaurant’, Adela turned and saw Mabel, a “round, youthful, exquisite thing. With enormous deep velvet brown eyes between ridiculous, exaggerate golden lashes, a skin like peach-bloom and a saucy, curling, red mouth.  All in white, with her glinting red-brown curls tucked under a big white hat.”

 Later when Adela saw Mabel while Mabel was working at the Goldwyn Studio in Culver City, (1920) Mabel looked ill and unhappy as if she were harassed by something bitter. Adela wrote that, “Her face was sunken so that her eyes looked uncannily large and dark. Her cheeks were the gray-white of a sea fog. Within her rich clothes she seemed wasted away, their gorgeousness hung loose about her thin frame…She haunted me. It hurt to see her ¾  as it hurts to see a gorgeous, fragrant, budding rose suddenly cut from a bush and flung carelessly on the ground, helpless, fading, bruised by sun and wind.”

 When she wrote in 1921, of Mabel, she found Mabel was smooth and round and girlish, again, the same old Mabel that Adela first met. She asked Mabel, “How did you do it?”          “I don't know,” answered Mabel smiling. Adela said that the word courage as Mabel’s supreme characteristic.  Adela said that Mabel was courageous, so set aside the facts and believe the truth of what she wrote about her friend.

 During the newspaper coverage of the murder of William Desmond Taylor, Adela reported a long distant telephone conversation she had with Mabel the evening of February 20, 1922.  Mabel was crying, Mabel asked if Adela believed she had anything to do with the shooting.  Adela told her no one believed she had done anything that had any connection with the shooting.  And told Mabel that she loved her and for her to take care of herself.

 Adela was working for the William Randolph Hearst newspapers syndicate in 1923 as a feature writer, which is not to be confused with a reporter; she wrote human-interest features. On New Years Day 1924, she wrote that Mabel’s chauffeur, to “square things” shot Courtland Dines. In the story that Adela told, Mabel’s driver, “had a deep, spiritual love for Miss Normand.”   He was protecting Mabel’s honor when he used her gun to shot Edna Purviance’s gentleman friend, not killing him of course.

 There was a very long and endearing feature that Adele wrote for the Photoplay, June 1929.  By this time, Mabel’s health was not good. Doctor's indicated that little Mabel was dying.  The article was titled The Butterfly Man And The Little Clown, “The sad love story of two gay and gallant stars. The man who loved life.  And the girl who loved laughter.  Surely, surely, a romance between those two should have spelled happiness.”

 Adela Rogers St. Johns’ article at the death of her friend is haunting (one of Adela’s favorite words) was published in newspapers across the whole country. 

WHO WAS ADELA ROGERS ST. JOHN