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* T A Y L O R O L O G Y *
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* A Continuing Exploration of the Life and Death of William Desmond Taylor *
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* *
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* Issue 38 -- February 1996 Editor: Bruce Long bruce@asu.edu *
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* TAYLOROLOGY may be freely distributed *
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CONTENTS OF THIS ISSUE:
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Silent Films of Taylor's Associates on Home Video
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Wallace Reid, Part I
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What is TAYLOROLOGY?
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TAYLOROLOGY is a newsletter focusing on the life and death of William Desmond
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Taylor, a top Paramount film director in early Hollywood who was shot to
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death on February 1, 1922. His unsolved murder was one of Hollywood's major
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scandals. This newsletter will deal with: (a) The facts of Taylor's life;
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(b) The facts and rumors of Taylor's murder; (c) The impact of the Taylor
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murder on Hollywood and the nation; (d) Taylor's associates and the Hollywood
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silent film industry in which Taylor worked. Primary emphasis will be given
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toward reprinting, referencing and analyzing source material, and sifting it
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for accuracy.
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Silent Films of Taylor's Associates on Home Video
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Although a number of films directed by Taylor still exist, none are yet
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available on home video. But Grapevine Video (P.O. Box 46161, Phoenix,
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AZ 85063) has the following videos available which feature some of
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Taylor's associates. Some of these videos are only available for a
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limited time.
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The Women in Taylor's Life:
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MABEL NORMAND (visited Taylor shortly before his death)
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There is a good selection of her films available--plenty of early
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Keystone comedies (some with Fatty Arbuckle or Charlie Chaplin); the
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longest version available of her biggest hit feature "Mickey"; and some
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of her 1920's films, including "The Extra Girl," "Raggedy Rose," and
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"Nickel Hopper" (in which Boris Karloff and Oliver Hardy can be seen)."
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MARY MILES MINTER (in love with Taylor)
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A program feature from 1918, "The Eyes of Julia Deep," is
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currently the only Minter film available on home video.
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NEVA GERBER (engaged to Taylor for several years)
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"Officer 444" (a 10-chapter silent serial), "California in '49" (a
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feature version of the silent serial "Days of '49"), "Fighting
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Stallion" (starring legendary stuntman Yakima Canutt), and "Lariet's
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End" all have Neva Gerber as the leading lady.
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CLAIRE WINDSOR (dated Taylor a week before his death)
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She was the star of "The Blot," directed by Lois Weber.
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Taylor's Friends and Neighbors
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DOUGLAS MACLEAN (Taylor's neighbor)
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He was the star of "The Home Stretch," a 1921 film made under
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contract to Ince.
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EDNA PURVIANCE (Taylor's neighbor)
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Charlie Chaplin's leading lady from 1915-1921 can be seen in the
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Chaplin Essanay comedy shorts available from Grapevine Video. (Of
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course, a much more substantial appearance of Edna can be seen in "A
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Woman of Paris," directed by Chaplin, and available from CBS-FOX home
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video.)
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ANTONIO MORENO (close friend)
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Moreno can be seen as leading man to two of the top female stars
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of the 1920's, opposite Clara Bow in "It" and Pola Negri in "The
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Spanish Dancer."
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FRANK O'CONNER (close friend)
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He was Taylor's assistant director for over a year, and they
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remained good friends. O'Conner directed the Clara Bow film "Free to
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Love."
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MARSHALL NEILAN (close friend)
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Directed Mary Pickford in "Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm."
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ARTHUR HOYT (close friend)
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He played a supporting role in the classic film "The Lost World."
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WILLIAM RUSSELL (close friend)
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He starred in "A Sporting Chance" and "Six Feet Four."
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Actors and Actresses
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DUSTIN FARNUM and WINIFRED KINGSTON
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Taylor directed this team in four films. "The Trail of the Axe"
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is a 1922 Farnum/Kingston film made after Taylor's death.
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BETTY COMPSON
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The leading actress in the last film directed by Taylor in 1922,
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she can be seen in "The Pony Express," a major Paramount film of 1925.
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MARY PICKFORD
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Taylor directed America's Sweetheart in three 1918 films, which
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are not available on home video. But seven other Pickford feature
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films are available from Grapevine.
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MELBOURNE MACDOWELL
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Taylor acted on stage for several years with Fanny Davenport and
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her husband, Melbourne MacDowell. The Lon Chaney films "Nomads of the
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North" and "Outside the Law" each have Melbourne MacDowell in a
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supporting role.
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Taylor Himself?
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Taylor's first films as an actor were made during 1912-1913 for Thomas
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Ince, but credit information about the Ince films is very sparse.
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Grapevine has a video "The Films of Thomas Ince," which contains five
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short films, two of which were made during the period of time when
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Taylor was working for Ince. It is possible that Taylor may have had
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small roles in either of those films.
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Wallace Reid, Part I
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The three scandals which rocked Hollywood in the early 1920s were the Fatty
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Arbuckle case, the murder of William Desmond Taylor, and the drug-related
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death of Wallace Reid. Taylor had directed Reid in two 1917 films, and they
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both worked for Famous Players-Lasky (Paramount). Below is a biography
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published five years after Reid's death, written by one of his close friends.
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Next issue will reprint additional material on Reid, including his wife's
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version of what happened to him. For the years 1919 and 1920, Wallace Reid
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was the most popular film star in the United States, number one at the
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box office; two of Reid's films made during that time are available from
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Grapevine Video.
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* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
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June 23/July 14, 1928
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Adela Rogers St. Johns
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LIBERTY
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The Life Story of Wallace Reid:
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The Tragedy of an American Idol
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Part One
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Wallace Reid lived thirty-one years. He was born April 15, 1892. He
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died January 18, 1923.
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Into those thirty-one years he packed the experience, the work, the
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success, the joys and heartbreaks, the problems and temptations, of five
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ordinary lives.
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The high voltage killed him.
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That is the simple, psychological explanation. The actual story of his
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life is more complicated. It is utterly of our times. It is almost
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unbelievable in the extravagance and exaggeration of its color and action.
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Everyone is familiar with the picture of Wally Reid, and almost everyone
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knows the main events of his short life. The handsome, clean-cut boy who
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went up like a skyrocket and came down like a charred stick.
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But the reason for it all has been cloaked in mystery--a mystery that
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can be solved only by complete familiarity with the things that happened to
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him and with his strange, wonderful, lovable character.
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It is not enough to look upon the mere outward facts that were given to
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the world before and at the time of his tragic death. You have to go deeper
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than that. You have to go into the soul of the boy--and boy he was, right to
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the end--and into the play of events upon that too sensitive, too facile, too
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generous nature.
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Perhaps I can do that.
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It has always seemed to me that only one who knew Wally could write the
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story of his life.
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I knew Wally Reid as well as anyone ever knew him. I knew him from the
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time he made his first pictures until the day when I stood beside his wife
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and watched the smoke that consumed the last of him that was mortal fade
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against the sky. I am very proud and a little sad to remember that he
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thought of me as the sister he always wanted and never had.
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In a letter he wrote me not long before the end he said:
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"I don't know why I have failed like this. Sometimes I think you do.
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Pray for me that, somewhere in the strange land into which I am going alone,
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I may become at last the man I have always wanted to be."
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Strangely enough, the reason for his going up and his coming down, for
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the love he inspired the whole world to feel for him and his own
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heartbreaking downfall and death, for his unequaled success and his
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unparalleled defeat was the same.
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Wally Reid--the shattered idealist.
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The important thing about Wallace Reid is not that he was the greatest
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and most popular star the motion picture has produced. It is that he was,
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beyond dispute, the best loved man of his generation. He woke in the heart
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of the multitude a great affection, a lasting affection, that still gives off
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fragrance, like crushed lavender. It wasn't only women who loved him, though
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they did--and often not wisely but too well. Men loved him, boys, old
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people, children.
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There was something about Wally Reid that fitted into the dreams in
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every heart.
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His life story is important because of that love and because his death
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grieved and bewildered and shocked the whole world.
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Now, love and grief like that aren't stirred by a mere handsome face.
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It was the ideals back of that face, the ideals that corresponded so
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completely with the beauty and fineness of his outward being, that earned him
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that love. And it was those ideals, the shattered ideals he couldn't bear to
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live with, that destroyed him.
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Men without ideals can live with their disillusionments, even with their
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sins. Men with ideals very often cannot.
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The life story of Wally Reid, the shattered idealist, is a living proof
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of that...[The original article has here the background of his father, Hal
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Reid, and of Wallace Reid's early life.]
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Part Two
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...When he was at the very height, when he was better known and loved
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than any other actor has ever been, he still felt that it wasn't quite a
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man's job.
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The pictures he loved were the ones where he had to do stunts--where he
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could ride, or drive a racing car, or go on location into Yosemite Valley and
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sit around the fire with the forest rangers. I never heard him belittle his
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work, but I know there was always a sense that he might have done something
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more manly.
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"When you put grease paint on the face," he said one day, when I was
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watching him make up in his dressing room, "something goes out of the heart."
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And he laughed. But there was a wistful sound in that laugh.
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...In 1910, Wallace Reid touched motion pictures for the first time.
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His father went out to the Selig Polyscope Company to confer with them
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about some stories. Wally sent along. The father and son were very close in
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those days. Wally was once more entirely under the spell of his father's
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brains and wit and easy ways with the world.
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And there, in that little old Chicago studio, the boy saw something that
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he wanted to do. He wanted to be a cameraman. There was a combination of
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mechanics and art--the thing he had been searching for and never found. So
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he decided to stay in Chicago and turn the crank on the little black box that
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made motion pictures.
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But directors saw his great photographic possibilities, and almost
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before he knew it he was in front of the camera.
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Wally tried hard to be everything in motion pictures except an actor.
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He was a cameraman, a writer, a director--and preferred any of them to
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acting.
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The next months were swift steps in motion pictures. He went back to
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New York to be near his mother, who had been injured in an automobile
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accident. But he had decided to stick to motion pictures.
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Directing was the thing that appealed to him. In consequence, he took
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his father's play, The Confession, to Vitagraph and offered to write a script
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and direct it himself. They agreed, but in the end he played a part as well.
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And before long he was acting as Florence Turner's leading man. They just
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wouldn't let him direct--naturally enough, they didn't want to hide Wallace
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Reid from the eyes of the public.
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Later, he and his father worked for Reliance, writing and acting.
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...Then suddenly, in an hour a new life opened for him.
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He was going to Hollywood. Not as an actor. "I'm never going to act
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again," he said. He was going as assistant director, scenario writer, second
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cameraman, and general utility man to Otis Turner, the big Universal
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director. The chance of a lifetime. The creative end of this great new art
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and industry which was then actually in its infancy.
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There was a last-minute luncheon at the Knickerbocker Hotel with his
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mother. Perhaps if either of them could have looked into the future, that
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luncheon wouldn't have been so gay. But they didn't know what the Hollywood
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years were to hold, and so they were very festive; for Wally was all elation,
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and his mother unselfishly sunk her grief at losing him.
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Hollywood! There was to be no turning back now. Forever in the past
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the ranches of Wyoming where he was going to live, the editing of magazines
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he was going to make, the study of medicine through which he might benefit
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mankind. He was definitely launched in motion pictures.
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The Hollywood of those days was by no means the Hollywood of today. It
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is worth while to glance back, briefly, upon the Hollywood to which Wallace
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Reid came as an unknown assistant director in 1912.
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One main street, the Hollywood Hotel and the residence of the famous
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artist, Paul de Longpre, its outstanding architectural features. No two-
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storied buildings. I was attending Hollywood High School about that time and
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I had scarcely heard of motion pictures. Oh, yes, that funny shack on the
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corner of Sunset and Gower--that was the Universal studio and they made
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motion pictures there. The cowboys and Indians who occasionally dashed up
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and down Hollywood Boulevard were making "Westerns." The Birth of a Nation,
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the first great picture, was still in the future.
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The coming to Hollywood was the beginning of a new life for Wallace
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Reid, a complete break with the past.
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He was twenty years old. He was, I think, as fine and clean and high-
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minded a young American as could have been found in the forty-eight states.
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He was big, handsome, strong, full of the joy of life.
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It would have been difficult to imagine that he had already lived two-
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thirds of his life.
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He stayed in Hollywood for eleven years, and at the end of that time was
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glad, I think, to die there.
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What happened in those eleven years?
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Part Three
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This is not, in the main, a history of Wallace Reid the motion picture
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star. It purports to be a life story of Wally Reid the man. He lived in our
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own times and the things he did on the screen are well known to most of us.
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Therefore I feel that from the time Wally came to Hollywood in 1912
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until he died in 1923, we may abandon chronological data and deal almost
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entirely with the important things that happened to him--important as
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concerned his own inner life.
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That he achieved tremendous success in a series of pictures in which he
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represented all that was best of the ideal American is a fact we may accept.
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Just what that success brought with it and the changes it caused in his
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surroundings, its dangers as well as its rewards, are the things to consider
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if we are to get the understanding of Wally that made most of those who knew
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him love him through thick and thin.
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Truth never hurt anybody. Truth cannot hurt Wallace Reid. Rumor has
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shot far of the mark--both high and low--because of the mystery of the thing.
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Truth makes it very simple.
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It shows you at last the picture of a boy overwhelmed by odds and going
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down into the depths, to emerge with a triumph that cost him his life but not
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his soul.
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The important things which happened to Wally in the next few years were,
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first, his marriage to Dorothy Davenport; second, his elevation to stardom by
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the public; and, third, America's entrance into the World War.
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For that statement I take full responsibility. I don't know that
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everyone will agree with me. But I am going to present to you the facts as I
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know them, from observation and from Wally himself, and let you judge.
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In doing this, I am betraying no trust. In its way, this life story is
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my monument to Wallace Reid, who was my friend, and whose death was to me at
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once the most tragic and the most beautiful thing I ever saw.
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At the time that Wally came to Hollywood as general assistant to Otis
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Turner at the old Universal studio, Dorothy Davenport was already established
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as a star of the films. Because she was for twelve years the greatest single
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influence in his life, his comfort and his friend and his bulwark as well as
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his wife, it is strictly necessary that you know the sort of girl she was,
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the sort of woman she became.
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When Wally first met her she was seventeen, but she had been some years
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in the theater and had matured early. The niece of Fanny Davenport, one of
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the greatest American actresses, the daughter of Harry Davenport, for many
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years a favorite Broadway actor, she came of stock which helped to make the
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history of our theater. [1]
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At that time she was a girl of more than average loveliness and of
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striking personality. The personality entirely overshadowed even the charm
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of her red-brown hair and her dark eyes and her exquisite figure.
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The word "personality" is hard to define, but Dorothy Davenport Reid is
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a synonym. Her chief characteristics as Wally's wife were a clear common
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sense, an amazing sense of humor, and a deep, selfless loyalty.
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During the years of their marriage her self-control developed an outer
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shell which at times made people think her cold. But it enabled her to pass
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through storm, confusion, and tragedy with a serene dignity and a clear
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thought which neither the plaudits of the world nor the sufferings of her own
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heart could shake.
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If ever a girl tried to stem a rising tide, Dorothy Reid tried. If ever
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a woman upheld a man's hands, she upheld Wally's. Her habit of reserve grew
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and she changed from a sparkling girl to a strong and guarded woman in a few
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brief years; but those who knew her found beneath that calm, white-faced
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exterior a wealth of tenderness, of humor, of understanding, of fine, sane
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thinking that made her stand apart from the ordinary run of women.
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There is nothing more important to a man than the woman who stands
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beside him on his journey through life. In that, at least, Wallace Reid was
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blessed, and he knew it.
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It was a pretty romance in the beginning, the romance of Wallace Reid
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and Dorothy Davenport, played in the most charming of California settings.
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They were two young things, with the world before them, and love added a
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glamour to work that was play half the time.
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The meeting came about in this way. Dorothy Davenport needed a leading
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man. Henry Walthall had played opposite her, and James Kirkwood and Harold
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Lockwood, and she was rather fussy in the matter of leading men. But the
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need was pressing and no one was available.
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There was, it appeared, a young man on the Universal lot, by the name of
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Wallace Reid, who had played leads with Florence Turner in New York and was
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said to be very good looking.
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The Turner company wasn't ready to start work and it was willing to cut
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down its overhead by lending this young man's services to Miss Davenport. He
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wasn't very keen about it, didn't want to act any more, but he was under
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contract and, if told to act, act he must to the best of his ability.
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The first day of the film was disastrous. Miss Davenport was furious.
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This big, overgrown boy was all hands and feet. He knew nothing whatever
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about acting. Wally was annoyed because he was once more before the camera,
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and sulked openly. In fact, it is impossible to deny that they glared at
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each other across the set between love scenes.
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The second day was little better. But the third brought a development
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which won the haughty little star's respect, and she began to treat her new
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leading man with consideration.
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There was at that time, a process of initiation on the Universal lot.
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Most of the pictures being made were Westerns; and the cowboys, among them
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Hoot Gibson, Curly Eagles, and Milt Brown, always took these dude actors from
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the East, picked out the worst horses they could find, and put them aboard.
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Naturally they tried it on young Reid, and with special vehemence,
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because Dorothy Davenport was their idol, and she openly turned up her pretty
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nose at this handsome stranger. So, when she arrived on the lot the third
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morning, the first sight that met her eyes was that of her leading man very
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much occupied with the nastiest broncho in the stables.
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Her interest flamed. She was a horsewoman of distinction and she had no
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regard for a man who couldn't stay in the saddle, no matter what the horse's
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ideas on the subject might be.
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Nobody knew of Wally's year in Wyoming and they stood back, chuckling,
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to get a good view of his downfall.
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But something went wrong with the scenario. Easy, cool, graceful, the
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boy from the East took everything this bad horse had to offer--corkscrews,
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tail spins, and sunfishes--and finally brought him back to the corral
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sweating and conquered.
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He had proved his "staying qualities" and from then one was one of the
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gang. Also, he was admitted to his star's good graces.
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The friendship ripened rapidly. There was no resisting Wally once you
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knew him. He had found as a pal another young actor, Gene Pallette, and
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finally the two boys, a trifle lonesome and homesick in this new atmosphere,
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persuaded Dorothy's mother to take a house and let them share it.
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Mrs. Davenport was an energetic, competent woman, as emotional as her
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daughter was reserved. She had divorced Dorothy's father some years before,
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and had learned the lessons a woman alone with a young daughter to educate
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and launch in the world must learn. She was the kind of woman whom everybody
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on lot called "mother"--and she did mother most of them, both at Universal
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and at the Mack Sennett studio, where she herself worked from time to time as
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a character woman. She had a brusque, direct way with her, but she
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understood young people, and they came to her with their troubles and their
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joys.
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Wally won her heart instantly and much more easily than he did her
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daughter's. The little family hadn't been settled in the house a week before
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he was like a son to her.
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She was no matchmaker, and if she had been she might have made more
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ambitious plans for Dorothy Davenport than this unknown young leading man.
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But she did see in Wally all the beautiful qualities that go to make romance,
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and, being incurably romantic, hoped the two would fall in love.
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But for a time it looked as though her dreams were not to come true.
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Dorothy liked the boy, but, being herself all of seventeen, considered him
|
|
much too young. Her ideal was somebody like Henry Walthall, a man of the
|
|
world, and not a mere youth with whom she danced and rough-housed and rose
|
|
horseback.
|
|
The three of them--Dot, Wally, and Gene Pallette--built a stable in the
|
|
back yard with their own hands, kept three horses, and spent most of their
|
|
time in the saddle. They rode to the studio in the morning, rode home at
|
|
night, and on Sunday they took a day off and went riding on the many
|
|
beautiful trails around Hollywood.
|
|
But if Dorothy didn't fall in love as quickly as might have been
|
|
expected, Wally did. One day, when they were riding together in Griffith
|
|
Park, he proposed. And it was, according to Miss Davenport, who in spite of
|
|
her youth had experienced several, a bum proposal.
|
|
"I think he said," she once remarked, "something like 'I guess it would
|
|
be nice if we got married.'"
|
|
Whether it was the lack of romance in the words or whether her heart was
|
|
actually untouched, it is hard to say. At any rate she told him loftily that
|
|
they were much too young to consider anything as serious as matrimony.
|
|
"And she spurred up her horse and left me flat," said Wally.
|
|
But separation did what propinquity had failed to do. Wally went to
|
|
Santa Barbara for six months with the American Film Company, writing stories,
|
|
directing them, and acting in them. He acted in order to get the chance to
|
|
do the other two things.
|
|
Perhaps the girl missed him more than she had realized she would.
|
|
Perhaps she began to see how much those rides and the evenings spent with
|
|
books and the perfect companionship had meant to her.
|
|
Anyway, when he came back and they again began to work together--this
|
|
time Wally directing as well as starring with her--she saw it his way, and on
|
|
October 13, 1913, they were married. A quiet little ceremony and back to
|
|
work the next day.
|
|
They worked very hard, but it was great fun. They made two pictures a
|
|
week. For these Wally wrote the stories, directed them, and played the
|
|
leading role. The ideas of these stories were all Wally's, and in reading
|
|
now the brief synopses that he made, they amaze one with the clearness of
|
|
their dramatic points and the delicacy of their emotional treatment.
|
|
"My damn face kept me from getting a chance to be a writer or a
|
|
director," Wally said, later on.
|
|
He honestly felt that way about it, too. Nothing so incensed him as to
|
|
feel that he was "getting by" because of his looks.
|
|
A year after their marriage and about the time they bought their first
|
|
little home just off Hollywood Boulevard--it stands there now, a small, vine-
|
|
covered cottage that always gives me a lump in my throat when I pass it--
|
|
Wally left Universal to go with D. W. Griffith.
|
|
He took a cut in salary to do it, and a cut in salary meant a lot in
|
|
those days, for salaries weren't very big at best and the little house wasn't
|
|
paid for.
|
|
But Wally was beginning to have high ideals of what might be done in
|
|
pictures, and he wanted to work with D. W.
|
|
There he sustained the first and perhaps the only disappointment of his
|
|
career--and even that proved in the end a golden boomerang. D. W. was
|
|
getting ready to make The Clansman, which was called on the screen The Birth
|
|
of a Nation. Henry B. Walthall had been cast as the Little Colonel.
|
|
Suddenly he was taken ill. The Master--as they called Griffith then and as
|
|
he will be to the end of the motion picture chapter--cast about for an
|
|
adequate substitute, and his eye lighted on young Wallace Reid, who was again
|
|
directing.
|
|
That night there was joy in the little vine-covered cottage. Wally
|
|
forgot his prejudice against acting. It was worth going back to if he could
|
|
play such a part under such direction. Why, they actually went out and
|
|
bought chicken for dinner, and Dorothy cooked it and Wally served it and they
|
|
celebrated after the immemorial custom of young people.
|
|
Costumes were fitted to the boy. Tests were made. They started
|
|
shooting--and then Walthall recovered. Before 500 feet of the film was
|
|
actually shot, Walthall was back on the lot and ready to go to work.
|
|
It almost broke Wally's heart. They gave him instead the part of the
|
|
young blacksmith who cleaned out the gang of Negroes. They told him in the
|
|
end it would do him more good. And it did. Few who saw the film ever forgot
|
|
the picture of Wally, stripped to the waist, smiling, a white, avenging god
|
|
of strength among those mad colored men.
|
|
But it was difficult to see that then, and Wally only took it because he
|
|
was so disappointed he just didn't care.
|
|
A short time later he was offered the lead with Geraldine Farrar in
|
|
Carmen.
|
|
It was the charm of Geraldine Farrar and his desire to work with her and
|
|
know her that persuaded Wally to continue acting.
|
|
One cannot blame him. Geraldine Farrar was at that time the most
|
|
brilliant figure among American women. Famous as a beauty, as an artiste, as
|
|
a wit, she occupied a dazzling position. A thoroughly justified position.
|
|
A woman of dynamic force and of wide experience, a musician and an actress to
|
|
her finger tips, she swayed the boy as no other personality with whom he had
|
|
come in contact in his life up to that time had ever swayed him.
|
|
Above all, she did something that he had thought it impossible for
|
|
anyone to do. She awoke in him an interest in acting as an art. She saw at
|
|
once the possibilities within him. And she set to work to bring them out.
|
|
They had from the start one great common love--music.
|
|
Wally had never neglected his violin, and after work they spent many
|
|
hours at her home, or at the Reid home, where Dorothy held gracious sway,
|
|
playing, singing, talking music and all that it meant to the human race. No
|
|
further testimony to Wally's real ability as a musician is needed than that
|
|
Geraldine Farrar allowed him to accompany her and to play violin obbligatos
|
|
when she sang arias.
|
|
It was a friendship that stimulated Wallace Reid in many ways. Her
|
|
success, the fact that she was some years older than he was and had known
|
|
most of the world's interesting people, made him accept her words as the
|
|
utterings of an oracle.
|
|
The flattery of her interest gave him a new self-confidence and a new
|
|
ambition. It made him throw himself into the roles he played opposite her--
|
|
in Carmen, Maria Rosa, The Woman God Forgot, and Joan the Woman--with an
|
|
intensity he had never shown before.
|
|
From that series of pictures he emerged a star by popular acclaim.
|
|
He had also become a father. Young William Wallace Reid was born on
|
|
June 10, 1917. We have had many descriptions in fiction and history of the
|
|
anxiety of the young father awaiting the birth of his first child. A very
|
|
wise woman once said to me, "You will know the character of your man and the
|
|
quality of his love by the way he reacts to his first experience of
|
|
fatherhood."
|
|
This test Wallace Reid bore with a strength and sweetness that bound him
|
|
and his wife with indestructible ties. His tenderness and care and sympathy
|
|
were unfailing. And from the moment of his arrival in this world, young Bill
|
|
was his dad's pal.
|
|
They had moved from the first little vine-covered cottage to a charming
|
|
home on Morgan Place in Hollywood, and later built the beautiful estate in
|
|
the Hollywood foothills where Mrs. Reid and Bill still live. And during the
|
|
ensuing years that home and little family stood with and by Wally, glorying
|
|
in his triumphs, enjoying his laughter, fighting his enemies, and suffering
|
|
in his tears.
|
|
And now we come to that period of Wally's life, so many of the details
|
|
of which are and must remain confused--a confusion that is like some great
|
|
symphony gone mad--jazz mad.
|
|
I have spoken in a general way of Wally Reid's idealism. Let us see of
|
|
what, at this period, it consisted. Let us stop and look at the situation in
|
|
which he now found himself and what he himself was and wanted to be.
|
|
The motion picture business in those days was very different from the
|
|
motion picture business of today. No other stars will ever hold the unique
|
|
position occupied by Wallace Reid and Mary Pickford. The game has grown
|
|
beyond that. There are too many attractive men and women, too much
|
|
competition, too many theaters, too much interest now in the story, the
|
|
settings, the cast, the photography.
|
|
The motion picture fan has evolved, and the days of such enormous
|
|
personal popularity as came to Wally are gone forever. No one can take Wally
|
|
Reid's place because that place no longer exists. Like many another monarchy
|
|
of this century, it has become a republic.
|
|
Macaulay said of Lord Byron, "There is scarcely an instance in history
|
|
of so sudden a rise to so dizzy an eminence."
|
|
It is no exaggeration to say the same of Wallace Reid.
|
|
And in many ways the story of these two gifted and unhappy young artists
|
|
is not unalike.
|
|
At a time when most men have just completed their education, when they
|
|
are starting out to win by hard work and slow personal endeavor some of the
|
|
good things of this world, this sensitive, untried, and untrained youth found
|
|
himself, through practically no effort of his own, a sort of demigod.
|
|
Nor can I put it more effectively than Macaulay again said of Byron, at
|
|
a similar time in the poet's life: "Everything that could stimulate, and
|
|
everything that could gratify the strongest propensities of our nature, the
|
|
gaze of a hundred drawing-rooms, the acclamations of the whole nation, the
|
|
applause of applauded men, the love of lovely women, all this world and all
|
|
the glory of this world were at once offered to a youth to whom nature had
|
|
given violent passions and whom education had never taught to control them.
|
|
He lived as many men live who have no similar excuse to plead for their
|
|
faults."
|
|
Yet the desires of Wally's own heart were different. He had the
|
|
untarnished dreams of high minded youth. In a letter written while he was
|
|
away on location about that time, he said:
|
|
"There are only a few things worth while in this world--and they are so
|
|
easy to get. An open fire, books, a little music, and a friend you can talk
|
|
to or keep silence with. I think that everything you get beyond that is in
|
|
the end a burden and a temptation.
|
|
"The happy lives are the quiet lives, aren't they? And yet, it is so
|
|
hard to be quiet! I think you know how I feel about most things. But
|
|
sitting up here alone at night thoughts come more clearly. Never to hurt
|
|
anyone, to do good to others when you can, to keep your own code of honor
|
|
unbroken, your soul unstained by lust or greed or pride, your mind unsullied
|
|
by lies and pretense, your body strong and clean--these are the things you
|
|
must do.
|
|
"You believe in God. Sometimes I do, too, though I can't always give
|
|
Him a name. But always I do believe in good. I know there isn't any
|
|
happiness possible for me without self-respect, and I could never respect
|
|
myself if I fell below the standard I KNOW to be right."
|
|
It was a boy's code, not a man's. The idealism of youth. No definite
|
|
principles, no philosophy of life, had formed in this thought. His was a
|
|
mind of unconscious striving for spiritual good, but it was not a trained
|
|
mind. He felt, rather than thought. All that he had was a deep, natural,
|
|
inborn desire for right and a great admiration for the fine, upright things
|
|
of life. His love of beauty was that of the poet.
|
|
He clung, all through this time, to those few friends who had combated
|
|
the worst side of him, who had not hesitated to tell him the truth and to
|
|
battle the unworthy things that surrounded him. That is in itself no mean
|
|
test of right intention.
|
|
We see, then, a very young man to whom life had been always kind. A boy
|
|
born with a golden spoon, riding a smooth and easy path. A man of such charm
|
|
that he was forgiven anything and everything. And there is nothing more
|
|
terrible, in the end, than to be forgiven for those things which ought not to
|
|
be forgiven us.
|
|
Wally Reid was like Peter Pan. He never grew up.
|
|
The irrational and yet beautiful idolatry with which he was regarded,
|
|
his excessive popularity, startled him and bewildered him at first.
|
|
"Why?" he said. "Why? I haven't done anything. I haven't accomplished
|
|
anything."
|
|
He had fought no dragons, beaten no enemies, conquered no obstacles,
|
|
given nothing great or useful to humanity. And those, in his estimation,
|
|
were the things on which one should rest.
|
|
At first he tried to laugh it off. His modesty endured. Too much
|
|
modesty--a sort of false humility which would not allow him to do many things
|
|
he should have done, such as protecting himself from certain people and
|
|
separating himself from certain environments, for fear that somebody might
|
|
think he had grown conceited.
|
|
There was a peculiar thing in him that dreaded above everything else the
|
|
infliction of pain, or to see another humiliated. It was all but impossible
|
|
for him to say no--almost impossible for him to shut his door upon anyone,
|
|
refuse to see anyone, or to do anything that gave people even momentary
|
|
unhappiness.
|
|
Consequently the house on Morgan Place and the big new home in
|
|
Hollywood, with its swimming pool and its charming gardens and spacious
|
|
rooms, became open houses. Wally was such a good fellow. Always had a smile
|
|
and a ready handclasp, always made you feel happy and welcome and at home.
|
|
Merriment was the order of the day. Wally played like the boy he was,
|
|
and, because of that boyish quality in him, that play seemed innocent enough
|
|
and drifted far into dissipation before he or anybody else realized it.
|
|
People were always "dropping in." Dorothy Reid, with her quiet dignity
|
|
and sound sense of values, tried again and again to shut the doors. But you
|
|
couldn't do it with Wally there. The whole world was welcome to what he had.
|
|
Just a lucky break he'd happened to get it instead of the other fellow. You
|
|
had to share what you had with those less fortunate.
|
|
The thought was beautiful. But, like many beautiful thoughts, its
|
|
application was not practical. The privilege it accorded was abused. He
|
|
never had any privacy, no regularity, and not half enough sleep. His
|
|
popularity was like a sea swirling about him, and his marvelous physique
|
|
upheld him so that he could not see any bad results. Never alone, never with
|
|
time to rest and relax and read, as he loved to do. And almost no time to
|
|
think. More than that, it broke him away from the men and women who might
|
|
have given him something worth while.
|
|
He was working early and late at the studio. Big stars don't work now
|
|
as they worked then. Two or three pictures a year, with trips to Europe
|
|
between and vacations at Palm Springs and a few months in New York to see the
|
|
plays.
|
|
Wally made eight or nine pictures a year and he worked long, hard, hot
|
|
hours, and he did in those pictures an amazing amount of physical labor.
|
|
James Cruze, who directed many of them and who was one of Wally's closest
|
|
friends, says that no man in pictures has ever worked as hard as Wally
|
|
worked, or burned up so much energy, or given so much of his best qualities
|
|
to the pictures as Wally did in the first years of his stardom.
|
|
And he played as hard as he worked. He was always an extremist. He
|
|
lacked balance, and the stream that swept him along never gave him time to
|
|
establish any.
|
|
There was, first of all, a great deal of money. At least it seemed a
|
|
great deal of money to a young man who knew absolutely nothing of the value
|
|
of money and cared less. Money meant nothing to Wally Reid, except the
|
|
things he could buy and the people he could give it to. He immediately did
|
|
too much of both, as is often the way with young men who are generous to a
|
|
fault, who love life passionately and want to get the most out of it, who
|
|
cannot understand business in any way, shape, or form.
|
|
Like his father before him, Wally spent money, when he had it, for the
|
|
things that captivated his imagination or stirred his fancy. He was equally
|
|
apt to buy a new gown for Dorothy--his taste was unerring--a new electric
|
|
railroad for Bill, or a new roadster for himself.
|
|
When he didn't have money, it didn't worry him in the slightest.
|
|
Whether he went to the studio in the morning with five dollars or $100, he
|
|
came home without a dime. And as far as he was concerned, it didn't matter.
|
|
Never in his life had he had any training in the handling of money,
|
|
anything to teach him its value. If he got thirty dollars a month and
|
|
"cakes," that was fine and he was happy. If he got $2,500 a week, that was
|
|
fine, too, and he was happy, in a different way.
|
|
I once saw a little black book in which Wally kept a sort of haphazard
|
|
record of the money he had loaned to people. The names in it amazed me. But
|
|
all you ever had to do was to ask and Wally gave.
|
|
He saw the other fellow's viewpoint too well; his sympathies were too
|
|
easily stirred; he was too deeply tolerant of all kinds of faults and
|
|
suffering.
|
|
"Gosh," he used to say, "I'm nobody to judge anyone!"
|
|
Then there was fame. In a boyish sort of way, he loved it. But he
|
|
handled it in a most peculiar and dangerous fashion. When people pointed him
|
|
out, when he was circled by adoring throngs, small or great, he instantly
|
|
tried to come down to their level.
|
|
He felt abashed by their admiration. It overawed him. And to make
|
|
himself comfortable again, to be sure that he didn't give anybody the idea
|
|
that HE thought he was grand or important, he acted like a small boy who is
|
|
afraid the other boys will "give him the razz."
|
|
He was a great mixer, but he was never allowed to mix on equal terms.
|
|
Somehow, he always became the center of everything. He did everything so
|
|
well. His conversation was so amusing, his buffoonery so fascinating, his
|
|
charm so drastic, that it always ended by Wally doing the entertaining while
|
|
the rest sat and admired. This was not, I know, of his choosing. But it
|
|
inevitably happened.
|
|
There is nothing more dangerous to a man than to be separated from the
|
|
equality of at least some of his fellow men, to lose that give and take, that
|
|
easy and natural criticism and sympathy, which is possible only between
|
|
equals. All during this period of his life Wally was unfortunate enough to
|
|
have a court, a gang of admirers, none of whom were his equals.
|
|
His predicament was due partly to lack of time. He was busy, he was
|
|
terribly overworked, he was careless. He took what came nearest to hand.
|
|
And the nearest to hand was a gang of flattering sycophants such as
|
|
surrounded Louis XV.
|
|
The strong, coldwinds of honest male companionship with men of his own
|
|
class and mental caliber did not blow upon him--only the breezes of perfumed
|
|
words and self-seeking adulation.
|
|
I do not believe that anyone who did not actually see it will every
|
|
quite understand the woman angle of Wally's life at this time. It is a
|
|
difficult matter to deal with. This is a biography which must in many ways
|
|
touch the living, and, since they must not be hurt, the subject is one of
|
|
extreme delicacy. But unless it is honestly dealt with you cannot get a fair
|
|
estimate of the hurricane of temptations that were sweeping the boy.
|
|
He was not a man who cared especially for women. He had sowed no wild
|
|
oats. He had passed through one sweet and worthy young love affair to a
|
|
happy and complete marriage. As a woman who possessed and valued his
|
|
friendship, I know how deeply he revered women, how he desired to idealize
|
|
them. From them he expected and wanted the best, and he hoped that they
|
|
would want the best from him.
|
|
The three women to whom he gave a permanent feeling of love and trust
|
|
were his wife, a woman of exceptional fineness and strength; his mother, as
|
|
deeply spiritual and idealistic a soul as ever lived on earth; and myself--
|
|
and I was to him a combination of pal and sister, and he never once asked me
|
|
to soften my judgment or to temper my thoughts of him or anything he did.
|
|
He always said that we were the only persons who always told him the
|
|
truth, and to the very end he gave us all that was best and most loyal in
|
|
himself.
|
|
But many women did their best to destroy in him that idealism.
|
|
No man, not even Byron himself, has ever been so besieged by the
|
|
attention of women. Let me tell you a few instances that may startle you,
|
|
but that will make you concede my point.
|
|
There was, for instance, the beautiful society woman, a leader of the
|
|
most exclusive smart set in Los Angeles and Santa Barbara. Her beauty was a
|
|
tradition, her name a power, her position unassailable. And yet for a year
|
|
she sent Wally a continual stream of pictures of herself which nobody but her
|
|
husband should have seen. They were beautiful pictures, calculated to tempt
|
|
St. Anthony himself.
|
|
She sent him a key to her apartment, which nobody knew she kept. She
|
|
gave his valet a diamond ring worth thousands of dollars to admit her to
|
|
Wally's dressing room, and once there she exercised all her grace and
|
|
splendor and knowledge of men to win his passing fancy.
|
|
One day when Wally and Dorothy and I were leaving the studio to go to
|
|
their house for dinner, we found a girl hidden under the robe in the back
|
|
seat of the car. I stepped on her, as a matter of fact, in getting in.
|
|
I have never seen anyone more exquisite. Bronze hair and great violet
|
|
eyes and the body of a wood nymph.
|
|
Her father was an officer holding high rank in the United States Army
|
|
and her mother was one of the most noted women in Washington. No one knew
|
|
where she was. She had run away from a fashionable boarding school, sold her
|
|
jewelry to buy a ticket and come West to see Wally. And, let me tell you,
|
|
when I say she was irresistibly lovely, I mean just that.
|
|
Dorothy and I--Wally washed his hands of her from the start in much
|
|
annoyance--had a time with that child. We didn't know who she was or where
|
|
she came from. She secreted herself under Wally's bed, she haunted the
|
|
studio and the house, exquisitely dressed, her big eyes full of tears. When
|
|
we finally found out her father's name and wired, he came West to take her
|
|
home. She got off the train and San Bernardino and telephoned Wally that she
|
|
was going to kill herself. But she didn't.
|
|
Then, the beautiful ex-Follies girl, who had married a multimillionaire,
|
|
and was famous on Broadway for the damage she had done to masculine hearts.
|
|
She came to Hollywood, too, with a wardrobe from Paris and a bag of tricks
|
|
I've never seen equaled. She succeeded in winning a visiting prince, but for
|
|
all her subtlety she failed to win Wally.
|
|
This is the merest cross-section, the tiniest fraction, of the sort of
|
|
thing Wally Reid, a boy still in his early twenties, went through day after
|
|
day. I do not condemn those women. I know nothing of their problems.
|
|
Perhaps they didn't understand. But certainly they did all that a woman
|
|
can do to undermine a man's moral fiber and the pressure of their pursuit and
|
|
flattery must have told.
|
|
Through it all, Wally Reid started in merely to have a good time, to
|
|
enjoy life. Young, hot blooded, full of laughter, of excitement, of the love
|
|
of speed, he stepped into the current. And the current bore him along to
|
|
dissipation, and from dissipation to disaster.
|
|
But if the most hardened moralist, the sternest critic, will sit back
|
|
very quietly for a moment and try to estimate the strength of that current of
|
|
sudden wealth and fame upon a boy of twenty-five, perhaps he will be more
|
|
ready to weep than to condemn.
|
|
If his critics will try to put themselves for one moment in Wally's
|
|
place honestly, they will only be sad that one so young and fine should have
|
|
been subjected to the pressure of such a pace. After all, it is part of the
|
|
prayer Jesus gave us, "Lead us not into temptation."
|
|
What was it Macaulay said of Byron? "He lived as many men live who have
|
|
no similar excuse to plead for their faults."
|
|
And he condemned himself more harshly than could anyone else in the
|
|
world.
|
|
Then came the World War.
|
|
I still believe that the beginning of the end for Wallace Reid was when
|
|
he didn't put on a uniform. I will show you that he never forgave himself.
|
|
And then, long afterward, worn out by illness, by overwork, by remorse,
|
|
by the pace of pleasure which had caught him up, weakened by flattery and
|
|
indulgence, he met his arch-enemy for the first time. And the death struggle
|
|
began.
|
|
|
|
Part Four
|
|
|
|
Wallace Reid's connection with the World War was a soul problem of which
|
|
few people knew.
|
|
On the face of things, in the eyes of the man in the street, even
|
|
according to the judgment of the fervent patriot, Wally Reid's war record is
|
|
not subject to attack from any source or angle.
|
|
In the boy's own eyes that record was stamped indelibly with the black
|
|
"S" of slacker.
|
|
He himself felt that he had failed, that his manhood was smirched, that
|
|
he had fallen below his own standard and the standard of the Reid family.
|
|
All that was American in him responded to the thoughts and feelings that
|
|
swept this country into war in 1917. The thrill of the red, white, and blue
|
|
was in his blood--bred there by generations of men who had helped to make it
|
|
what it was and to keep its glory untarnished.
|
|
All that was boy in his heart heard the call of the great adventure--
|
|
war. All that was dramatic in him reacted to uniforms, bands, battle tales,
|
|
and the chance for service and heroism.
|
|
All that was idealistic in him responded to Woodrow Wilson's call to
|
|
make the "world safe for democracy."
|
|
He was twenty-five. He stood six feet one, and he weighted 190 pounds.
|
|
He was a crack shot. His physical condition was good. He had been to
|
|
military school and knew the drill and regulations. Kipling was his favorite
|
|
author and Mulvaney his favorite character.
|
|
Can you doubt that he wanted to get into the thick of it?
|
|
In 1919 he gave me a picture himself in the uniform of a British
|
|
lieutenant--taken when he played the English boy in the prologue of Joan the
|
|
Woman--and across it he scrawled, "Just a so-and-so who never got into
|
|
uniform except when he put on his grease paint."
|
|
That is the keynote. The thing had gone deep.
|
|
No one thing so fatally undermined Wally's self-respect as his failure
|
|
to join the A. E. F.
|
|
If he had gone, the thing that happened to him would never have
|
|
happened. He might not have come back from Chateau-Thierry, but had he gone
|
|
to France and returned safely he could have weathered anything.
|
|
Once again fate switched the fails of his destiny. Once again outside
|
|
facts and circumstances and people controlled his decision to his own
|
|
undoing. However, it is but just to say that probably none of them dreamed
|
|
for an instant of the effect of all this upon the boy.
|
|
Here are the facts:
|
|
The Reids had a very small baby when America decided to get into the big
|
|
show. Mrs. Reid had been out of pictures for some years, and during the year
|
|
following Bill's birth her health had not been of the best.
|
|
Wally's father and mother were dependent upon him at that time. Hal
|
|
Reid died a short time afterward. Bertha Westbrook Reid had been left, when
|
|
she and Hal were divorced, with but a small portion of what had once been a
|
|
good sized fortune.
|
|
Dorothy Reid had always kept Mrs. Davenport with her, and after the
|
|
arrival of her son felt more and more the need of her mother's help in the
|
|
confused and difficult life which she faced as the wife of a great star and
|
|
matinee idol.
|
|
All of which put Wallace Reid pretty well down the list of deferred
|
|
classifications, as far as the draft was concerned.
|
|
Furthermore, as far as he himself was concerned, he had saved no money
|
|
to meet such obligations. Wally had been getting a big salary for only a
|
|
short time and it had never occurred to him to put any of it away.
|
|
In spite of this, he wanted to enlist, and he said so. The opposition
|
|
from all quarters was intense, and reasonably so.
|
|
His drawing power at the box office had just hit its peak. To
|
|
understand his importance to the organization with which he was connected it
|
|
would be necessary to go into involved financial details and long
|
|
explanations of the selling end of motion pictures. I think we can get at it
|
|
by simply saying that Wallace Reid was for years the "whip" of the Paramount
|
|
program.
|
|
His pictures were sure-fire money makers, and exhibitors were taking
|
|
some much less desirable films only in order to get the Reid pictures.
|
|
Much of the early prosperity and success of the Paramount organization
|
|
was built upon Wallace Reid.
|
|
Naturally, they opposed his enlisting, voluntarily and without need and
|
|
over obstacles, in an army where he might be killed or disfigured. To them,
|
|
it meant the loss of millions of dollars and the removal of that corner stone
|
|
upon which they were building their future plans.
|
|
They brought to bear upon him every sort of pressure in the form of sane
|
|
and reasonable argument. In the army he would be just one more man, just
|
|
another gun, just another stopgap.
|
|
There were plenty of men willing and ready, without obligations to
|
|
either family or business associates. Let them go first. If the time came
|
|
when men in deferred classifications were needed, that would be a different
|
|
proposition.
|
|
Also, the world needed amusement as it had never needed it before. He
|
|
was filling that need. And he could be of much more use to the cause in
|
|
drives, in benefits, in keeping up the morale of the nation than he could by
|
|
carrying a single gun against the Germans.
|
|
The war fervor is over. We know a good deal more now about the war than
|
|
we did then. The viewpoint of Wally's company and his family seems to us in
|
|
the cool light of today the only sane and normal one.
|
|
There are many reasons why it is impossible to tell of some of the fine
|
|
work Wally did behind the scenes of the war. This is and must continue to be
|
|
part of the unwritten history which belongs to every war.
|
|
Many of the details I do not know myself, but I do know that Wallace
|
|
Reid served the Secret Service of his government and was of exceptional value
|
|
to it all through the days of fighting.
|
|
Also, he raised large sums of money, both for organizations helping the
|
|
boys at the front and for the Liberty Loans. He opened his home to the
|
|
disabled veterans after the Armistice, and gave liberally of his money and
|
|
his time and his talents before its signing.
|
|
Nevertheless, at any cost to himself and others, he should have gone to
|
|
France.
|
|
A man who has not the training or the judgment or the power to reconcile
|
|
his ideals to the world he must live in can be mortally wounded by other
|
|
things than bullets. In this matter, Wally fell into the gap between a high
|
|
idealism and a reasonable, practical necessity. He spent too much of himself
|
|
in remorse--about this and other things.
|
|
Wally yielded, for he stood alone. In fact, he kept to himself his own
|
|
desires and dreams, for fear he might burden those who needed him with the
|
|
sight of his bitter disappointment. But he hated himself.
|
|
He was, in his own opinion, just a low-lived slacker. Those who did not
|
|
enlist he despised. And he was one of them! Nice company! As far as he
|
|
could see, he just wasn't worth a damn.
|
|
I do not think he was ever criticized to any extent for not donning
|
|
khaki. But he believed that everybody else thought the same things he was
|
|
thinking. We winced every time he passed a man in uniform.
|
|
His confidence in himself faded to zero. What did it matter what he
|
|
did? You couldn't get any lower than being a white-livered cur who stayed
|
|
home and acted in front of a camera when every MAN was risking his life at
|
|
Chateau-Thierry or Vimy Ridge.
|
|
The shattering of the idealist took a long step forward.
|
|
There was, when you stop to consider it, a vast significance in
|
|
something seemingly trivial that happened about this time. That was Wally's
|
|
change from the violin to the saxophone as his favorite musical instrument.
|
|
His love of the violin had been a very deep and sacred thing. He had
|
|
given to it his very best, expressing his inner dreams, satisfying his love
|
|
of beauty, touching the stars through its divine voice. On quiet evenings,
|
|
which grew fewer and fewer as life went on and the merry-go-round whirled
|
|
faster and faster, he would play for hours, with Dorothy accompanying him.
|
|
Those hours had always brought them very close, renewed their devotion
|
|
to each other. To the wife they were like oases in a desert.
|
|
But the violin was no favorite with the gay, joy seeking, hilarious
|
|
young folks--and all Hollywood was unbelievably young in those days. Success
|
|
and gold belonged to youth--who pressed about Wally. The saxophone was their
|
|
instrument.
|
|
It took Wally about two weeks to master it. Like everything else he
|
|
did, he did is superlatively well. He made a collection of saxophones,
|
|
little ones and big ones, gold ones and silver ones. He could go into a cafe
|
|
and make the rounds of any good jazz orchestra and play every instrument,
|
|
including the drums, better than the performers--and he often did. But he
|
|
rarely touched his violin after that.
|
|
In the summer of 1921 Wallace Reid went to New York to make a picture
|
|
from Du Maurier's great novel, Peter Ibbetson, the picture called Forever.
|
|
He had been back but once since his first departure for Hollywood, and then
|
|
only for a brief visit to introduce his wife and son to his mother.
|
|
He did not want to go in 1921.
|
|
He had been, for the first time in his life, rather desperately ill.
|
|
His nerves, of which he himself was totally unconscious, but which
|
|
nevertheless lay very near the surface, were strung to the breaking point by
|
|
the continual rebellion within himself over the life he was leading. His
|
|
physical condition was beginning to show the result of the terrific pace at
|
|
which he was living and working. He never took any care of himself--drove
|
|
himself to the last ounce of energy always.
|
|
About that time the dentist found it necessary to pull nine of his teeth
|
|
at one time, and the shock to his system and the nervous irritation following
|
|
it told on him.
|
|
Besides, he loved his home more than any other man I have ever known--
|
|
really loved it. It was part of him. They could follow him into, but very
|
|
few persons could drag him out of it. That home influence--the companionship
|
|
of his devoted, humorous, understanding wife and the presence of the son who
|
|
was growing up a pal--had kept him normal under stress, or at least had kept
|
|
him from going "hay wire."
|
|
On a picture which now hangs over his widow's desk, and which is dated
|
|
just a little while before his departure for the East, he wrote, "To our
|
|
Mama, Wally's and Bill's, with all my devoted love, Your Wally-Boy."
|
|
That was how he felt about it. And at the last moment Dorothy could not
|
|
go with him to New York. Bill had had a hard siege of whooping cough and it
|
|
didn't seem safe to take him East into the summer heat. Nor could his mother
|
|
leave him.
|
|
So Wally went alone. He did not love New York at best. After
|
|
California and the easy, informal, outdoor life he had become accustomed to,
|
|
he dreaded the rush of the city. And he knew, perhaps, that he would be
|
|
swamped by attentions, by people, by demands of all kinds.
|
|
In New York he had nothing that he wanted and everything he didn't want:
|
|
none of the things that were good for him and all the things that were bad.
|
|
He happened to dislike both the director and the co-star of the picture
|
|
with the peculiar intensity of a man who dislikes very few people. In
|
|
consequence, they didn't like him; and Wally resembled many other sensitive
|
|
people in that he put his worst foot forward with anyone who didn't happen to
|
|
like him. He was, in the last analysis, one of those peculiar, chameleon
|
|
souls that take character from the expectations of those about them.
|
|
The weather in New York--it was the July of the Dempsey-Carpentier fight
|
|
--was insufferably hot and humid, and Wally was used to the desert heat and
|
|
cold nights of California.
|
|
Also, he had to have his hair marcelled every day! And that enraged him
|
|
out of all measure. He was overpowered once more by the nature of his
|
|
profession, the futility of his work, the unmanly quality of the things which
|
|
he was doing.
|
|
Privacy was something of which he knew no more than the now proverbial
|
|
goldfish. Old friends, new friends, members of the organization, newspaper
|
|
reporters, gushing admirers, celebrities who counted him one of the inner
|
|
circle, women of all kinds, ranks, and degrees of beauty and intelligence,
|
|
moved in upon him.
|
|
As a result of all this, he had a bad case of insomnia, when night after
|
|
night he tossed in the sticky, dripping heat without closing his eyes until
|
|
dawn, and then had to get up and start working at 9.
|
|
I saw him the day he left for that trip. He stopped by my house on his
|
|
way to the station to say good-by to my small daughter, Elaine, who was his
|
|
special pet.
|
|
I remember that he started matchmaking when she and Bill were in their
|
|
cradles--she was only a year and a half younger--and decided that he and
|
|
Dorothy and I would one day be mutual grandparents. Elaine and her "Uncle
|
|
Wally" would spend long hours on the floor operating a set of mechanical
|
|
animals he had bought for her, and I could never make up my mind which one of
|
|
them enjoyed it more.
|
|
On that day he looked ill and unhappy. A premonition of danger and
|
|
disaster hung over him.
|
|
"I wish I hadn't agreed to go," he said.
|
|
But, for all that he was thin and a little drawn, his eyes were the same
|
|
steady, clear eyes into which you could look and fine the truth about
|
|
anything. He was going "on the wagon," he said, for the whole trip.
|
|
When he came back a few months later, I went with Dorothy to meet him at
|
|
the train.
|
|
The change in him appalled me. It was like meeting a stranger or seeing
|
|
a dear friend through a thick veil. Dorothy had sensed the thing, naturally,
|
|
much more quickly and deeply than I had.
|
|
A little white mask seemed to have slipped over her radiant face.
|
|
It is not necessary to go into details. I do not know them, anyway.
|
|
I doubt if Dorothy Reid herself knows them--only this:
|
|
A doctor in New York had given Wally some "sleeping powders" to help him
|
|
conquer the "white nights." He had come to depend upon them.
|
|
There was in Wally a deep strain of the experimentalist. He would try
|
|
anything once. His curiosity about every phase of life was enormous, and he
|
|
suffered from that common delusion that he, at least, could do anything and
|
|
not be touched by it.
|
|
Many things gave evidence of this trait. In the basement of his home he
|
|
had a fully equipped chemical laboratory. When you missed him from parties,
|
|
you were pretty certain to find him down there, messing around with all kinds
|
|
of stuff. New inventions and discoveries of which he read always interested
|
|
him enormously and he liked to investigate them.
|
|
The great interest in medicine which had possessed him as a boy never
|
|
left him. He had a natural bent for it, as he had for so many things. When
|
|
the troupe was on location in the high Sierras, he once set four broken
|
|
fingers for one of the prop boys and did a perfect job, according to the
|
|
Hollywood surgeon who examined the hand when they returned.
|
|
One night a party of us were returning from San Pedro, where we had
|
|
dined on the house boat of a banker. It was almost dawn as we swept along
|
|
the boulevard, with Wally at the wheel. Now and again we passed market
|
|
trucks and wagons piled high with fruit and vegetables.
|
|
When we had almost reached the city limits, we came upon a bad
|
|
automobile smash-up. A fast driven roadster had upset one of the produce
|
|
carts. A woman had been badly injured.
|
|
It wasn't a pretty sight, but Wally was out and into it and, with
|
|
extraordinary coolness, had the whole situation in had in two minutes. He
|
|
did everything that could be done with the contents of his first-air kit, and
|
|
then Dorothy drove the car to the receiving hospital, while he held the woman
|
|
as motionless and comfortable as possible. The doctor at the receiving
|
|
hospital told us there could be no question that Wally had saved the woman's
|
|
life.
|
|
His knowledge, actually slight but augmented by his uncanny facility,
|
|
made him think of himself as a doctor. And it gave him an easy familiarity
|
|
with medicines, a confidence in his ability to handle them, which was
|
|
exceedingly bad for him.
|
|
The change in Wally after that New York trip was apparent to everyone
|
|
close to him. An indescribable, baffling something surrounded him, which no
|
|
one could understand. It was as though some malignant fairy had transformed
|
|
him with one wave of her want into a distorted image of his former self.
|
|
He had soared along at a terrific speed, packing together work, play,
|
|
achievement, hobbies to the nth degree, burning the candle at both ends,
|
|
managing somehow to do twice as much as anyone else did--all in a few years.
|
|
And suddenly he had crashed.
|
|
The gradual decline of the next few months, the crumbling of the
|
|
physical man, the dimming of the things in him that were so wonderful and so
|
|
lovable, were enough to make the angels weep.
|
|
He worked--worked, as he had always one, faithfully and consistently,
|
|
when he could hardly walk on the set. His eyes went back on him in a final,
|
|
terrible case of Klieg eye caused by working under the powerful lights; but
|
|
still he carried on.
|
|
He played his part, but the old lovable, irresistible smile, that had
|
|
won its way around the universe, was a shadow of itself. Sometimes a
|
|
terrific effort would lift him back for a moment to the boy of yesterday, the
|
|
boy the whole world loved. But the flame was gone. The shining light
|
|
within, which had reached out and touched hearts, didn't burn any more.
|
|
I do not think that he himself realized the change. He hardly knew what
|
|
was happening. An enemy from without had taken possession of him, blurred
|
|
his vision, eaten into his soul, numbed his mind. He was going through the
|
|
motions of living, but the boy Wally was held fast in the grip of something
|
|
that above all things paralyzed his consciousness of himself.
|
|
The Indianapolis road race of 1922 brought things out from under cover,
|
|
precipitated the climax.
|
|
The realization of the actual nature of the trouble mounted to a
|
|
certainty, and his family, his real friends, his business superiors--the only
|
|
ones then who actually knew--stood still for a time, poised in horror and
|
|
bewilderment. It is proof of the love and respect in which they held him
|
|
that there was no condemnation--nothing but a pity that tore every heart.
|
|
Not Wally! Not the Boy!
|
|
There again the charm of the man did him a fatal injustice. For, as a
|
|
matter of fact, we had all known, deep down in hour hearts. But we had
|
|
shuddered back from connecting it with the bright and shining things that
|
|
Wally represented to us; from the horror of facing him with it, of seeing
|
|
that proud and gay and loving spirit bowed before us.
|
|
Yet, if the thing had been faced sooner it might have had a different
|
|
end. A victim of a malady more terrible than any mere disease of the flesh,
|
|
our old instinct to make things easy for him allowed us to stand back and let
|
|
him face alone a problem which he wasn't even capable of recognizing, a
|
|
problem whose most deadly weapon is that it makes an ally of its prey.
|
|
Wally's determination to drive in the Indianapolis race forced our
|
|
hands, drove us into the open.
|
|
He had decided to drive his great English speed demon, the Sunbeam, in
|
|
the Decoration Day races. He was a licensed racing driver. The honor was
|
|
one he valued highly. He counted Roscoe Sarles and Jimmy Murphy among his
|
|
closet pals.
|
|
The thing became an obsession with him. Arguments were powerless. The
|
|
threats of the company that such an action would break his contract didn't
|
|
touch him. The pleas of his friends were unavailing.
|
|
Whether or not there was, deep down, a desire to die with his boots on,
|
|
an almost subconscious hope that this would be a final, grand gesture, no one
|
|
knows. But his decision to go was the first and only stubborn thing I ever
|
|
saw about him. He had his mechanics get his car in shape. He set the date
|
|
of his departure.
|
|
He could not go there to drive. It was worse than suicide, in his
|
|
weakened mental and physical condition. It might be murder.
|
|
Taking upon her slim shoulders the whole burden, as she had so quietly
|
|
and so courageously shouldered many other burdens, Dorothy Davenport Reid
|
|
spoke at last.
|
|
"You cannot go," she said. "You would endanger the lives of your
|
|
friends, Wally. And that I know you would never do."
|
|
Nor would he. That appeal stopped him. But at last they were face to
|
|
face with a greater thing than any road race.
|
|
I have tried to show you how Wally's feet strayed into this fatal path.
|
|
His self-respect had been destroyed by his own inner contempt for his
|
|
work, by his failure to go into the trenches, by his own falls from grace in
|
|
the face of overpowering temptations, and by his excessive remorse following
|
|
them.
|
|
His moral fiber had been weakened by the continual onslaught of
|
|
temptation and the smothering of continual flattery, and the association with
|
|
people who dragged him down in his own estimation, and by the lack of
|
|
companions who could uplift and inspire him.
|
|
His fear had been lulled to sleep by his own belief in his knowledge of
|
|
medicine.
|
|
His soul strength and character had ceased to grow because of the great
|
|
ease with which all the glories of the world came to him.
|
|
His health had been fatally undermined by overwork and nerve strain, by
|
|
insomnia and illness.
|
|
Under the paralyzing grip of a thing which had come upon him unawares,
|
|
he was no more himself than you would be under the administration of ether.
|
|
He acted blindly, and if sometimes he saw himself as he had become, he sank
|
|
himself again in the fog rather than face himself.
|
|
But at last he had to face himself.
|
|
No one can know, no one should know, what Dorothy Reid bore in those
|
|
days. Her first fight was to keep others from knowing. Her big fight was to
|
|
break the grip of this thing upon the man she loved, whose genius and
|
|
idealism she knew better than anyone else in the world.
|
|
"Our Mama, Wally's and Bill's."
|
|
With the aid of one or two trusted friends--in her beautiful self-
|
|
sacrifice she spared Wally's mother that last battle--she forced Wally back,
|
|
through agonies that were more terrible to her than to him, into clear
|
|
consciousness.
|
|
At last Wally Reid was himself again. The mind that had been clouded,
|
|
the soul that had cowered out of sight, were functioning once more. At first
|
|
he was like a man who had lost his memory, who could not fill the gap of
|
|
time. For weeks he had been in sanitariums and hospitals, helped day and
|
|
night by all that science could do to make the break from this disease
|
|
bearable to human mind and body. Dorothy had never left his bedside, giving
|
|
everything she had to give in an effort to help him, but yielding not one
|
|
inch to his mortal enemy, even when Wally joined that enemy against her.
|
|
And so he day came when the boy lay spent and broken, but himself; able
|
|
to look at her with honest eyes which held such love as few women will ever
|
|
see.
|
|
He knew. And his remorse was terrible. His tears--contemplating the
|
|
wreck of such high hopes and aspirations--kept him company day and night. Of
|
|
him might it truly be said, "His bread was sorrow and his drink was tears."
|
|
But the crucifixion was to come.
|
|
Hope had crept into the little room where he lay. After all, he was
|
|
young--just past thirty. Love--love of those who knew him and love of the
|
|
world--surrounded him still. He could come back. He could justify that
|
|
love, which now, in his dark hour, he so greatly prized.
|
|
Flashes of the old fighting spirit with which he had been born and had
|
|
never had a need to use flamed forth. He longed for music and lay listening
|
|
for hours to the great masterpieces of music on the phonograph that had been
|
|
moved into his room. Or he asked Dorothy to read such poets as Keats and
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|
Mrs. Browning or the comedies of Shakespeare.
|
|
Never, in many ways, had he risen to the heights of vision and the
|
|
desire for fine things which he showed in those days when his worn body lay
|
|
helpless upon a couch of pain.
|
|
Then the blow fell.
|
|
He wasn't getting better. He was getting steadily worse--fatally worse.
|
|
The ravages were not healing. They were increasing and slowly doing him to
|
|
death.
|
|
But one thing would save his life. A return to the old bondage, for a
|
|
time at least; a medically directed, careful, moderate return. His system
|
|
could not bear the sudden release.
|
|
He faced it bravely; death or a return to the thing that had destroyed
|
|
him, that had almost killed his spirit, that had burned his soul.
|
|
He looked, as always in moments of stress and trial, to his wife.
|
|
But this time she shook her head. That was too much to ask--that she,
|
|
who loved him so, make such a choice.
|
|
All she could do was to kneel beside him, holding his thin hands in her
|
|
strong, comforting ones, and abide by his decision.
|
|
And so his last and great decision was the first which he made alone.
|
|
It was great, as the boy was essentially and fundamentally great.
|
|
"I'll go out clean," he said. "I'd rather my body died than to go back
|
|
to the thing that almost killed me. At least, I'm myself now. I'll--go out
|
|
clean."
|
|
And then he said to her a thing which Dorothy Reid may wear all her life
|
|
as a crown and which will serve her always as a consolation.
|
|
"I believe in God now," he said. "No one but God could have made the
|
|
love you've given me. I'm not afraid."
|
|
So he signed his own death warrant. So he made his choice.
|
|
He went out--clean and unafraid.
|
|
And that clean and fearless and self-chosen death gives him a right to
|
|
occupy the place in our memories which he occupied in our hearts for so many
|
|
years.
|
|
The End
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|
*****************************************************************************
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|
NOTES:
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|
[1] It is curious how the paths cross:
|
|
a. Dorothy Davenport's aunt was Fanny Davenport, who acted on stage
|
|
with William Desmond Taylor for several years.
|
|
b. Dorothy Davenport's mother was Alice Davenport, who acted in
|
|
several Keystone films with Mabel Normand.
|
|
c. Dorothy Davenport's husband was Wallace Reid, who was directed
|
|
by William Desmond Taylor in two films.
|
|
d. Taylor, Normand and Reid were all the objects of Hollywood
|
|
scandal in the early 1920's.
|
|
*****************************************************************************
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|
*****************************************************************************
|
|
For more information about Taylor, see
|
|
WILLIAM DESMOND TAYLOR: A DOSSIER (Scarecrow Press, 1991)
|
|
Back issues of Taylorology are available via Gopher at
|
|
gopher.etext.org
|
|
in the directory Zines/Taylorology
|
|
***************************************************************************** |