Looking for Mabel Normand

A Five Dollar Solution

Marilyn Slater

July 5, 2009

There are tons of stories of Mabel Normand and her disregard for time, but here is a story I haven’t heard before.  It was in the June 13, 1926 Oakland Tribune in Jack Wooldridge’s column Movieland. 

After I saw the photo of L.B. Mayer as a pallbearer at Mabel’s funeral, I thought perhaps it was because he was her husband’s boss but in researching the relationship between Mabel and L. B. Mayer; Robert Bichard pointed out that L. B. let her use the set of Our Dancing Daughter (MGM 1928) to make a 1928 Christmas film gift for her husband. Again there was Lew Cody connection. 

According to this story it looks like L.B. was part of Mabel’s circle before she married Lew.

Jack Wooldridge story goes something like this….Once upon a time…Mabel Normand alighted from a Santa Fe train with Joseph Schenck, Norma Talmadge and Louis B. Mayer at San Bernardino and they drove to Los Angeles,  as she walked on the station platform, she unfastened a watch from her wrist and flipped it away.  There was a scramble behind her to possess her watch.

Mabel explained that she got confused about the changing time between New York and Los Angeles and never knew whether her wrist watch was an hour ahead or an hour behind, but she did know it was one or the other.   So Mabel bought five one-dollar watches in New York, set them an hour apart and when the conductor announced a time chance, she threw a watch out the window.  It worked perfectly until they reached the Rocky Mountains and she made a mistake and threw the wrong one. 

Now wasn’t that a real Mabel Normand kind of solution to a problem!  What a great traveling companion she must have been.