Looking for Mabel Normand

The Pensacola Blimp

by Marilyn Slater

June 29, 2009 

Molly O’ was a large and important production for the Mack Sennett Studio; it was advertised as his first feature drama.  The amount of promotion was extensive from the very beginning.  Sennett had brought Mabel Normand back to Edendale with the promise of a million dollar contract although she still had time to run on her Samuel Goldwyn Studio contract. The negotiation between Goldwyn and Sennett was a rather convolved affair but at the end Mabel was back with Mack with Goldwyn’s assent according to the February 11, 1921 Variety.  

 

In February with the approval of the Goldwyn executive Mabel stayed in California to work for Sennett and Sam had left for New York.  A million dollars is a lot of money even in 2009 dollars but in 1921, the value would be more like 11 million dollars.  Sennett must have felt that she was worth the money and a feature film with her as his star would create a profit, if promoted right.

 

One of intriguing uses of the newspaper to entice interest in Molly O’ was the tie-in with an accident of Pensacola blimp, which had wrecked in March of 1921 just as the filming of Molly O’ had begun and the ZR-2 in August. The promotional material included the blimp story. 

 

The public reading the story of the filming of the blimp sequence at the end of Molly O’ would have been very aware of the accident in Pensacola, which happened almost 90 years ago.  So perhaps to put the “Mack Sennett Molly O’ Newspaper Clip” article in context, here are just a little on the coverage from March 1921. The search for this missing blimp was a front page story for weeks.

 

 

March 25, 1921 NAVAL BALLOON AND CREW ARE STILL MISSING.

The vessel not equipped with radio.  The balloon left Pensacola station Tuesday night, in a brisk southwesterly breeze, the flight being scheduled to continue overnight.  Two balloons were loosed, but the other was recovered after descending in Alabama.

 

REPORTED OFF PANAMA CITY– Washington. March 25 (1921) – “The naval free balloon, missing since it left Pensacola on March 22, was last reported 20 miles west of Panama City according to a dispatch to the navy air station…”

 

 

Let’s go back to 1919, the US Navy began its rigid airship program with the end of WWI with the building of 2 blimps and in Lakehurst, New Jersey a huge hanger was constructed to hold the new dirigibles, ZR-2 was built in England and ZR-1 in Lakehurst. The 1^st trial flight was in June 1921. In August 1921 there were questions about the blimps structural strength and performance. Then it happened the ZR-2 broke up in the air, some of her hydrogen lifting gas exploded, 49 men were on board only 5 survived.  U.S. Naval Historical Center collection holds a photograph of the crash of the airship (US Navy ZR-2) dated August 24, 1921, which was again published on the front page of the 1921 newspapers.

 

The Hindenburg fire and crash didn’t happen until May 1937 but according to the coverage of the accidents in 1921 there was some foreshowing and even the “Mack Sennett Molly O’ Newspaper Clip” article holds some forewarning premonition. 

 

Dick Jones and Mabel Normand in blimp at Pensacola while making Molly O'

In Joseph Gordon Vaeth’s “They Sailed the Skies”: 

“In American as the 1920 unfolded, the command “Let Go” – The order given to a ground crew to release a balloon – was increasingly heard in the land

 

For US Navy balloonists however the decade began tragically.

 

An all-night training flight took off at the naval air station at Pensacola on March 23, 1921.  Five men were on board with Chief Quartermaster E. W. Wilkinson in charge.  His enlisted trainees were R. V. Wyland, E.L. Kershaw and J. P Elder, plus W.H Tressey of the Marine Corps.  Wilkinson was an experienced airman who knew well the hazards of flying balloons in the Pensacola area where water abounded.

 

Two messages were received at the station by pigeon from the balloon.  The first reported it drifting slowly northwest over the Gulf of Mexico, twenty miles from St. Andrews Bay.  The second advised that all sand ballast had been dropped.  They were at one hundred feet and descending.

 

After that: nothing.  The balloon and the men were never found.

 

When the audiences saw Molly O’ they had the advantage of knowing the newspaper coverage of the Pensacola blimp. The “Mack Sennett Molly O’ Newspaper Clip” articles were used in newspapers and the readers would have understood the fear of the wind and the blimp. 

 

 

February 23, 1922, BALLOON RUNS AWAY WITH A PICTURE CAST

Sennett Players Producing “Molly O’ Taken by Blimp to Cuba to Avoid a ZR-2 Accident.

Accidents such as wrecked the huge ZR-2 called attention to the weakness which exists in all heavier than air craft.  The broad expanse of surface which offers resistance to air currents seems to present an obstacle which the best engineers have not yet conquered, because a frame strong enough to withstand all pressure is too heavy to be included in an airship.

 

Nearly everyone who has ever ridden in a “blimp” has encountered this danger and in one case this very weakness of such crafts carried an entire motion picture company from Florida to Cuba.  The company was the one which appears in “Molly O’,” the Mack Sennett production starring Mabel Normand, which has crowded the Paramount Theater every night this week.

 

The climax of the picture is a scene in which the kidnapped heroine is being taken away in a “blimp” and the hero gives chase in an aeroplane.  The scenes were taken in Pensacola, Florida, and while the “blimp” was in the air for the long shots a heavy offshore breeze sprung up, blowing so stiff that the commander of the dirigible did not want to take the chance of turning and permitting the breeze to strike broadside on the big bag.

 

The engines were kept going, holding the ship almost stationary against the breeze, and then the fuel ran low.  Before it was completely exhausted the commander stopped the engines and the big bag was carried by the breeze almost in a direct line for Cuba.  When the wind died down to a point where the commander thought it safe to fight it, Cuba was much closer than the Florida coast, and because of the fuel shortage the landing was made there.

 

The tanks were replenished and the commander was ready to start back, but Mabel Normand, Jacqueline Logan, Ben Deely and others of the Sennett company had had enough and they came back by steamer.

 

“Molly O’” will be shown at the Paramount three more days….

---The Logansport Morning Press

 

The promotion of Molly O’ went on to included more planted newspaper stories and product try-ins but the use of a genuine news story was a real Sennett touch.