This photo is a creative wish not an actual artifact of Leslie Howard holding Mabel Normand in his arms. Do you think that if he were a “free man” he would have hopped on the train with Mabel? He thought enough of the offer to write Adrian Brunel… I wonder…
A QUITE REMARKABLE FATHER by Leslie Ruth Howard, page 64
Leslie Howard and Ruth Martin Howard had been married in 1916, Leslie was enjoying the stage in New York, and the money he was making and Ruth was enjoying the parties and speakeasies…
During the Christmas Holidays in 1920, the Howards were in New York. Leslie wrote a letter to Adrian Brunel that his daughter printed in her 1959 book…he wrote that he had “…the signal honour of dancing with H.M. Dorothy Gish last Sunday and at various times with Norma Talmadge, Alice Joyce, Mae Murray and Mabel Normand, the latter insisting in a loud voice that I should at once go with her to California to play in Goldwyn films. I explained this was quite impossible at the moment but that as soon as I were a free man I should at once turn my steps towards the City of the Angels” … (this took 9 years to do).
