Looking for Mabel Normand

 

Would You Take Advice From Mabel

On How To Handle The Press?

Marilyn Slater

Looking for Mabel

August 30, 2009

 

There is another Mabel Normand story like so many of them, they are best exchanged between friends setting at a table on which the dishes have been cleared and the coffee in the cups is just the right temperature and the company is so good, no one wants to get up to leave.  This is a tale by Whitney Bolton told twenty years after Mabel’s death.

 

Did you hear about the time…the unpredictable and lamented Mabel Normand, the world’s most attractive firecracker, she was early Hollywood’s most genuine queen for many years.  Her wit was as sharp as a new file, her loyalties as dependable as Navy, blue. When she liked you, she liked you enormously and when she hated you it was with equal vim.

She learned all about how to talk to the press during the quagmire of the William Desmond Taylor murder case.  Years later, when Charles Chaplin found himself badgered by the press, it was Mabel who raced to his house ahead of the reporters, walked in, cornered Chaplin and said; “Charlie, you need advice.  I will give it to you.  There is a way to do these things:  When the reporters come and ring the doorbell, walk quietly to it, open it, say – ‘good evening, gentlemen,’ and add this phrase.  Then shut the door.”

She supplied the phrase, an extraordinary blunt one, but in Chaplin’s case it didn’t work.  Maybe he wasn’t as pretty as Mabel and what was that phrase?

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Whitney Bolton was considered one of the 12 most influential critics in New York

He was a writer of graceful and amusing newspaper pieces; who is also apparently, an excellent scrivener of screen plays. The movie 42^nd Street although he is uncredited, it is generally accepted as his work. 

Among the newspapers which published Whitney Bolton as a drama critic was the Morning Telegraph "bible of horse racing". 

He was one of the founding members of the New York Drama Critics' Circle.