Looking for Mabel Normand

 

In “The Gay Illiterate” by Louella Parsons writes of Mabel Normand as so many of Mabel’s friends wrote of her in their biographies with equal parts of the values we see in the images of the theatrical mask; “Humor and Sorrow.” Is this the reason she is so precious in memory? 

Is Mabel Normand, the symbols that holds both comedy and tragedy?  The “Imp” of Dionysus myth but is she also a symbol found in Greek tragedies, which has had such a lasting impact on our Western Culture? 

The outside walls of her personal studio, in Edendale, California hold only the smiling mask but inside herself did Mabel hold the tragedy mask? Remember they are masks, but also are they reflective of facets of her life?  The Tragic mask carries mournful or pained expressions, juxtaposed the Comic mask’s a jolly and playful image.

 Louella Parsons story, “The Gay Illiterate” was published in 1944 by Doubleday.  it was a best-seller by a powerful woman in Hollywood, who with a real sense of enjoyment and with an understanding of what made Hollywood, Hollywood; she started as a newspaperwoman, her columns were syndicated in over 400 newspapers and her radio program had a huge listening audience during the period she was writing her autobiography; she loved Mabel Normand even if I don’t agree with everything she writes, I share her emotional reaction to our Mabel.

 

So what did Louella write of Mabel?

By Marilyn Slater

“Looking for Mabel”

October 3, 2009

 

“Little Mabel Normand's tragic life was a paper-back novel.”

 

_

“The movie actress who was the most colorful to me as a personality in those days was Mabel Normand. There was no one quite, like Mabel and there hasn't been since. She was tiny, with huge eyes and a mass of dark curly hair that never seemed to be piled straight on her head but slipped from side to side. It is one of the great personal tragedies of the industry that this girl lost her way.”

_

 “My days became as a cage full of waltzing mice. I was as familiar a figure meeting trains through Chicago as any red-cap. I spent my lunch hours gossiping at the best hotels with happy and unhappy commuters to and from Hollywood-Lillian and Dorothy Gish, Mae Marsh, D. W. Griffith, Mary Pickford, Dorothy Dalton, Thomas Ince, C. B. De Mille, loveable little Mabel Normand, Mack Sennett, and hundreds of others less celebrated.”

_

“Mabel was no puppet dumbbell but she was not the ‘great mind’ the fan writers made her out to be. She was an imp continually playing a role both on and off the screen. Our first meeting took place at the old Knickerbocker Grill, and a party of people at the next table had indulged in a few too many cocktails.  ‘Some people do drink too much, don't they?’ opined Mabel, rolling her enormous eyes innocently. ‘I never touch a drop do you, Miss Parsons?’ Inwardly, I groaned. I was in no mood for an act. '1 wish, I had a good stiff drink right now,’ I snapped. ‘Waiter!’ yelled Mabel, laughing her heart out. ‘Make it two double Martinis!”

_

 

The books that lined the walls of her apartment would have been a suitable literary diet for the President of Harvard, and while the magazine writers accepted this evidence that Mabel was a deep reader, I just couldn't swallow it "How many of those books have you read?” I once asked her accusingly.  "Not a one," said Mabel, "but I've read the reviews!"

 

_

Let it be said to the everlasting credit of Sam Goldwyn that he not only adored the impish, fun-loving girl, but he spent a fortune on her trying to cure her of the habit of taking the sleeping tablets that finally led her to taking dope. Sam fought hard to save her. Finally, even his courage and the strong, protective arm he offered to help her failed. Sam had to give up and watch the girl he wanted to protect drift down the road on sensational headlines to mental and physical disintegration at length, to her death alone!

_

She loved one man devotedly as long as she lived. That man was Mack Sennett But she was always hounded by the fear that she could not hold him. Rightly or wrongly, Mabel was jealous of the beautiful women who worked for Mack. Because she loved him so deeply she thought everyone else did. As the years went by for Mabel and Mack, they eventually drifted apart but she was never free of him in her heart. Even when another producer, Samuel Goldwyn, met her and fell head over heels in love with her, Mabel could never forget Mack.