Looking for Mabel Normand

 

 

 

            The Great Heart

            Hollywood Pays Tribute to Tragic, Stoic Mabel Normand

            By Charleson Gray

           

 

            Maybe she’d like to know…

 

            Maybe that gay and childlike spirit, which slipped from its tormented envelope that Sunday afternoon of February 23 at Pottenger’s Sanitarium, on the outskirts of the city she loved so well, would like to know how Hollywood was affected by her passing.  She might appreciate knowing that there wasn’t a member of the picture industry who, learning of her death, didn’t instinctively feel a shock of loss.

            For the greater part, the movie names come and go-up one day and out the next. But there are some stars in the cinematic heavens seemingly impervious to the grinding wheel of years. Chaplin. Pickford. Hart. Swanson. Mabel Normand…On the screen or off, their names are as familiar to us as are our own.

            Mabel Normand-that is a name you haven’t seen on the screen for-how long is it? Six years, seven? Since the failure of “Raggedy Rose,” and the complete going into action of those batteries of misfortune and bad health which deprived us of the shadow-self of the greatest comedienne of her day

            The Stoic

            Few people realized what a sick girl Mabel was, even during the last of those months when she played so delightfully through miles of romping celluloid.  Polly Moran tells of entering her dressing-room after a hard day of work, after hours which had seen Mabel tossed about, taking falls, going through all the comic’s routine.  Polly saw a tube in her back, draining an infected lung. Mabel had told no one. She had asked for no special favor. She simply had gone on, taking what had come, without frown or complaint, sturdily.

“I can take it on the chin,” was her cry to the last. She could endure anything. That was her credo,  the smiling challenge to the powers of darkness that she could withstand the slings and arrows of whatever outrageous fortune it might be their whim to direct toward her.

And those slings and arrows were many. “I think she was the most misunderstood person that ever lived,” her former publicity representative, Ralph Wheelright, told me.  “The world thought of her as hard, bold, a little roughneck. That was wrong, every bit of it. She was just a tomboy; and under that gay manner, she was one of the sweetest and gentlest women that ever lived.  Even when the breaks were going against her a little worse than usual, she never changed.  She never complained and she never bore any hatred except for one man-the murderer of William Desmond Taylor

            The Jests of Fate

            Even in that one small hate, out of all the many she might have entertained, Mabel was characteristic.  She did not hate that unknown slayer for what he had done to her; but for what he had done to Bill, her friend, even as she lay dying and its headlines flared up again with the dumb “confession” of a dumb politician.

            The Taylor case, that tragic affair which so definitely contributed to her retirement from the screen, was but one instance of Mabel’s wretched luck, the crowning jest of her ironic flair for being present during tragic or scandalous episodes.

            It was rumored that she was present at the fatal Arbuckle-Virginia Rappe party in the St. Francis Hotel in San Francisco; that she was present at the shooting of Cortland Dines in the apartment of Edna Purviance; and that she was the last known person to have seen Taylor alive.  Like Lloyd Hamilton, another genial comic dogged by tragedy, she was an eternal bystander in the comedy of life.  The sort of person who gets in the face the pie intended for the one who ducked, the kind whose clothing continually is being muddied by the wheels of an indifferent fate.

 

            Her Reading and Writing

            An omnivorous reader,  Mabel had stopped at the director’s house to borrow a book shortly before the slaying-and thus had her name identified with a murder that furnished gossip for half the world.  To the casual that explanation about borrowing books sounded rather thin;  but Mabel’s love of reading was as little known by the world outside as her every trifling indiscretion was distressingly familiar.  There apparently was no pen with which she was unfamiliar, from Nietzsche’s to that of Kathleen Norris.        Too, somewhere in that immense collection of books, are several manuscript volumes of poetry. Mabel’s gift for verse was authentic and clear, the true heritage of the song-loving Irish soul.  It happens that my brother-in-law for years was her legal adviser and one of her best friends.  I have known her to employ waits in his office in writing poems, impromptu bits of verse scratched off on stenographers’ pads and immediately thrown in  the nearest waste-basket.

            But it is not through any such dead medium as pen and ink that Mabel’s name will be an ever fresh memory to us all.  She will survive through the just cause of her fame-those miles of happy films, and those innumerable acts of kindness which forever have graven her name on Hollywood’s heart.

            How right was Will Rogers, saying: “She gave the world much laughter, and friends and strangers much financial aid.  Her last press notices should be beautiful!”  They appeared in newspapers and magazines all over the world.

            As to her acting ability, there can be no question.  No less an authority than Mack Sennett is quoted as holding that she was the most gifted player that ever stepped before a camera, and sweeping judgment though that may seem, there are few voices of dissent among competent critics.  It is, however, as Mabel the human being that she will be remembered along Celluloid Boulevard. There are hundreds of tales, thousands, of her open-handed generosity, her warm kindliness and help for anyone less fortunately situated than the average. It was the underdog, always the underdog, who enlisted her sympathy.

            Her chauffeur and automobiles were constantly at the call of little old Irish ladies who were more accustomed to a bent position over wash-tubs than seats upon luxurious upholstery.  She was ever busy encouraging friends to contribute to her multitudinous charities.  Always, however, in a manner in keeping with their means and their sins.

            Her Sense of Justice

            Herbert Howe, the fan writer, tells of attending a service with Mabel, and later, out of her hearing, being petitioned by the priest for a charitable contribution.  Later, Mabel asked Howe if he had been approached, and how much he had given.  He had given a hundred dollars.

            In the middle of the sidewalk she stopped, hands on hips and eyes flashing angrily, and proceeded to give the stunned writer the dressing-down of his life.   “You poor easy mark!” she concluded her diatribe.”---------- gave only fifty dollars-and he’s twice as bad as you are!”

            To compile an anthology of the countless anecdotes illustrative of Mabel’s impulsive great-heartedness would be to assemble a book a foot thick.  But there is one, among thousands of “loans”-those to the many luckless extra girls whose passages she paid back home, those to the countless young strugglers to whom she offered a helping hand on the slippery ladder to fame-which I think just a trifle more characteristic than the rest.

            A Spending Holiday

            When, after years of small salaries, she at last got into the big money, Mabel went to Paris for the purpose of spending some of it.  She did.  Among her purchases, for instance, was a ten-thousand-dollar gold gown.  Jewelry, frocks, shoes—she lavished upon every hunger for fine trappings which she ever had had the inexhaustible flow of her purse.  She went everywhere and did everything.  She had, in fine, a swell time.

            Returning to New York, she was met by a party of friends, Staten Island girls who had known her when she was the rackety little daughter of Mr. and Mrs. Claude Normand.  They told her how much they envied her the spectacular trip that she had just made—and in answer Mabel herded them all together and took them back to Paris for a holiday on the next boat!

“She was the best-hearted girl that ever came into pictures,” said Roscoe Arbuckle. “She was always doing good and she never harmed a living soul.”

            Tragically Magnetic

            Such a heedless headlong personality as was hers is certain to be the target for every manner of rumor and gossip.  “If you ever commit suicide,” she told one of her friends, presenting him with a birthday present, “for heaven’s sake don’t wear this watch! They’ll see this ‘From Mabel’ engraved on it, and say I was responsible!”

            “She was the most misunderstood person that ever lived,” this man said of her. 

            Of all the figures of picturedom who have been cruelly maligned by idly chattering tongues, there has been none to suffer more than Mabel. Most of these slanders are as unprintable as they are bitterly silly.  Suffice it to say that even her cute, eccentric way of speaking, coupled with her supercharged gaiety, opened her to charges of drug addiction!

            As the increasing years saw the fabric of lies being braided into a whip that scourged her daily, more and more was she forced to the defiant cry of “I can take it!”  Few knew how deeply she was hurt by this whispering campaign which did so much to take from her the work that she loved beyond all things. 

            Laughing Again

            One studio man, just before the Christmas of 1928, was given a glimpse.  Mabel’s husband, Lew Cody, was on a vaudeville tour.  Always the best of pals, always clowning and working out gags with which to amuse one another, she thought that it would give Lew a laugh if she sent him a movie of herself for a Christmas present.

            That movie, that little characteristic child-like present for Lew, was taken at M-G-M. Mabel hadn’t been on a set for five years.  Things had changed—lights, make-up, all the new developments were bewildering to the girl who had been buoying herself up through the long disappointed years with the thought that she was still Mabel Normand, the great star.

But soon, with the poise of the true trouper, she accustomed herself to the new lights and the panchromatic paint, and was rollicking about the set with the same verve and laugh-provoking antics which had swung her to the heights back in the old days.

           

            “Like Old Home Week”

            Some of the older men on the set—“grips” and electricians—had worked with her before.  “Gee,” one of them told me, “it was like old home week.  If only that kid had had the chance to make that one more picture that she wanted to do!”

            She captured the younger men on the set too; the newcomers to the game, just as she had recaptured the veterans.  And when they saw what it meant to her to be back in there doing her stuff, busy as they were, they let her go through the full routine of her clown’s pantomime time and time again.

            I don’t know how many times those patient, hard-boiled fellows retook those scenes for Mabel.  I do know that they were glad to do so, and are gladder now that they did. For shortly afterward her growing weakness forced her to the bed which she never left.

So that day, marked by the generosity of the studio gang, saw the last appearance before a camera of the small bundle of pleasure and pain, of ecstasy and sorrow, of indiscretions and talent and amazing valor which the world called Mabel Normand—the little regular who could take it…and did.

 

Poem, page 26

            Short, Short Story

 

            I’m bad, bad, bad!

            But I’ll really keep my engagement.

            If there was one sprig of poison-ivy

            In a field of four-leaf-clovers,

            I’d pick it up.

            If it was raining carbolic acid,

            I’d be the dumb-bell spounge.

                               Mabel Normand

 

 

Poem, page 27

            Patience

 

            The world is made of waiting—

            A lesson we all must learn.

            Don’t be condemning or hating—

            Be patient and wait your turn.

 

            Be patient when there’s sorrow—

            The sun will shine again.

            Always there is to-morrow—

            Learn to live through pain!

                             Mabel Normand

 

Poem, page 28

 

            There’s a circle of gold in the sky,

            And the sun’s far out in the West

            It’s that wonderful hour before dusk,

            That hour we both loved best.

 

            I’m waiting here beneath the window

            For your loved steps on the walk;

            I’m closing my eyes and I’m thinking,

            Thinking I hear you talk.

 

            My heart again is aflame

            You’re holding me close to your breast;

            While you whisper again that you love me

            And your lips to mine are pressed.

 

            The circle of gold is now gray

            And the sun no longer I see;

            ‘Tis only a memory that haunts me,

            But it brought you so close to me.

                                 Mabel Normand

 

 

This is a photo taken by William Grimes around December 1928, during the making of the Christmas home movie by Mabel for Lew. This is the last time our little Mabel appeared before a movie camera.  As far as I know the “home movie” has been lost so this candid shot maybe all we have.  There was another photo taken at the same time by William Grimes that appeared in the May 1930 issue of the Motion Picture Classic in an assemblage of photos running along the side of the article.  The article was written by Charleston Gray.  The magazine is part of my archive so will retype the text one of these days but what caught my eye was the photo of Mabel taken at the time she was making the movie for Lew.   

 

In the Los Angeles Times, December 17, 1928 was a story about this home movie called Wife Makes Own Picture for Lew Cody which reads “For the first time since her retirement from the screen months ago, Mabel Normand, once-popular actress, appeared last week before a camera for the making of a motion picture. The film she made was a production which she personally directed and penned herself. It is going to be a Christmas present for her husband, Lew Cody, who sailed yesterday for Europe for a vaudeville tour in England and France.  Lew and Mabel will be separated over the holidays so she took a camera man, George Nogel, at the Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer studio into her confidence and “shot” her “little play.”  The story is a secret known only to herself and the camera man. She will ship the film so that it will reach Cody before Christmas with a seal on it “Do not open until Christmas.”

 

Think for a minute Mabel began her career making little films directing and writing many of them for a man she loved (Mack Sennett) and at the end she is making her last film for her husband as a gift.  This truly was the outlet of her creative talent.    

 

 

 

 

 

 

  

Oh, happy day….a couple of weeks ago Bob Birchard had asked me about the ‘home movie’ that Mabel made as a gift for Lew for Christmas 1928.  One of his questions was, where was it shot?  I thought it was at Mabel’s house in Beverly Hills, well I was WRONG. 

 

Thanks to Mark Vieira, I now know… The set of “Our Dancing Daughters” (MGM 1928) was used by Mabel.  I have the pictures to prove it!

 

Obviously, the set has been redressed but the iron on the stairs and the unique wall treatment are the same.  The entry to Mabel’s home has a very similar layout and staircase. I just didn’t look hard enough at the photos. 

 I am so lucky to be surrounded by such good researchers.