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Comic venus: women and comedy in American silent film

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Comic venus: women and comedy in American silent film

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Content “COMIC VENUS:”
WOMEN AND COMEDY IN AMERICAN SILENT FILM
by
Kristen Michelle Anderson
A Dissertation Presented to the
FACULTY OF THE GRADUATE SCHOOL
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
In Partial Fulfillment of the
Requirements for the Degree
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
(CRITICAL STUDIES)
May 2009
Copyright 2009 Kristen Michelle Anderson
ii
Acknowledgements
Writing a dissertation can be solitary work, but I feel fortunate to have a
support system of friends and family who have stood by me through this long
process. I owe a tremendous debt of gratitude to everyone who has offered me
support, encouragement, advice, comfort and the occasional kick in the pants –
without these people, this project likely would have remained nothing more than a
collection of scattered notes and half-formed ideas.
I would like to thank my parents for their unending encouragement and faith
that I could actually do this, even when I was convinced that I couldn’t. They have
always set a great example for me, and this degree was motivated in large part by a
desire to make them proud. I’d especially like to thank my father for keeping me
grounded by reminding me what it was like to write his own dissertation in the days
before computers, and my mother for always listening, always encouraging, and for
knowing better than to ask how the writing was going. I’d also like to thank my
stepfather for all of the support and laughter he’s shared with me over the years.
My good friend Dr. Michele Torre dragged me, sometimes kicking and
screaming, to the finish line, and talked me down off the dissertation-ledge on more
occasions than I can count, and for that I am eternally grateful.
I’d like to thank Paige and Stephane Conte for giving me a sofa to sleep on
while on research trips in New York, Jennifer LeBoeuf for making it possible for me
to both write my dissertation and pay the rent, and the staffs of the Academy of
Motion Picture Arts and Sciences and the Academy’s Margaret Herrick Library
iii
(especially Barbara Hall), the UCLA Film and Television Archive, the New York
Public Library, and the Museum of Modern Art in New York for generously sharing
their time and expertise.
I’d like to thank my committee, Tara McPherson, Rick Jewell, and Alice
Gambrell for their invaluable insights and contributions, and I’d especially like to
thank Linda Overholt for all of her behind-the-scenes work that helped make the
process as painless as possible.
And finally, I’d like to thank my husband, Jeff Wagner, for always believing
in me, and for giving me more patience, support, encouragement, space, and
motivation than I would have thought humanly possible. Jeff’s faith and enthusiasm
over the years helped me to believe that this was actually possible, his love of silent
film helped me to stay passionate about my topic, and his sense of humor reminded
me not to take any of this too seriously.
iv
Table of Contents
Acknowledgements................................................................................................... ii
List of Figures ............................................................................................................v
Abstract .................................................................................................................. viii
Introduction................................................................................................................1
Endnotes...................................................................................................................27
Chapter 1
“Have Women a Sense of Humor?”.........................................................................30
Endnotes...................................................................................................................92
Chapter 2
“An Inferiority Complex in a One-Piece Bathing Suit:” Beauty, Femininity
and Comedy ...........................................................................................................100
Endnotes.................................................................................................................168
Chapter 3
“Cupid Lips and an Ungodly Appetite:” Sensuality, Sexuality, and Desire..........173
Endnotes.................................................................................................................245
Chapter 4
“Ever on the Move:” Modernity and the New Woman..........................................251
Endnotes.................................................................................................................313
Conclusion .............................................................................................................319
Endnotes.................................................................................................................331
References..............................................................................................................332
Bibliography...........................................................................................................336
Appendix A: Selected Filmographies ...................................................................343
v
List of Figures
Figure 1-1 “Fun From the Films: Colleen Moore in Her Wild Oat..................50
Figure 1-2 “Kitchen Komedy”...........................................................................57
Figure 1-3 The Extra Girl (1923) ......................................................................64
Figure 2-1 “Honest, These Girl Comediennes of the Screen are Pretty when
They’re Not on the Movie Screen..................................................109
Figure 2-2 Greta Garbo, Jetta Goudal, Pola Negri...........................................113
Figure 2-3 Colleen Moore, Constance Talmadge, Dorothy Devore................113
Figure 2-4 Eva Tanguay...................................................................................124
Figure 2-5 Gale Henry and Louise Fazenda ....................................................126
Figure 2-6 Charlotte Greenwood .....................................................................129
Figure 2-7 Gale Henry .....................................................................................131
Figure 2-8 Greenwood and Grant ....................................................................133
Figure 2-9 The Red Mill (1927) .......................................................................136
Figure 2-10 The Clinging Vine (1926)...............................................................139
Figure 2-11 The Clinging Vine (1926)...............................................................139
Figure 2-12 The Clinging Vine (1926)...............................................................140
Figure 2-13 Irene (1926)....................................................................................143
Figure 2-14 Irene (1926)....................................................................................143
Figure 2-15 Constance Talmadge ......................................................................146
Figure 2-16 Colleen Moore in The Wall Flower (1922)....................................146
Figure 2-17 Mary Pickford in Suds (1920)........................................................147
vi
Figure 2-18 Alice Howell ..................................................................................164
Figure 2-19 Gale Henry .....................................................................................165
Figure 3-1 Mabel Normand .............................................................................186
Figure 3-2 Ambrose’s Fury (1915) ..................................................................192
Figure 3-3 Tillie Wakes Up (1917) ..................................................................194
Figure 3-4 Tillie Wakes Up (1917) ..................................................................196
Figure 3-5 The Red Mill (1927) .......................................................................206
Figure 3-6 The Red Mill (1927) .......................................................................206
Figure 3-7 Mantrap (1926) ..............................................................................210
Figure 3-8 It (1927)..........................................................................................210
Figure 3-9 It (1927)..........................................................................................211
Figure 3-10 Orchids and Ermine (1927) ...........................................................215
Figure 3-11 It (1927)..........................................................................................221
Figure 3-12 Tillie Wakes Up (1917) ..................................................................222
Figure 3-13 Mickey (1918).................................................................................224
Figure 3-14 Mickey (1918).................................................................................225
Figure 3-15 Hula (1927) ....................................................................................228
Figure 3-16 Hula (1927) ....................................................................................228
Figure 3-17 Hearts and Flowers (1919) ............................................................238
Figure 3-18 Know Thy Wife (1918) ...................................................................238
Figure 3-19 Behind the Screen (1916)...............................................................242
Figure 4-1 Gibson Girl and Suffragettes..........................................................253
Figure 4-2 Mabel Normand and Marie Dressler..............................................254
vii
Figure 4-3 Colleen Moore................................................................................262
Figure 4-4 Marion Davies................................................................................278
Figure 4-5 Her Wild Oat (1927) ......................................................................283
Figure 4-6 Her Wild Oat (1927) ......................................................................284
Figure 4-7 What Happened to Rosa? (1920) ...................................................297
Figure 4-8 Manhandled (1924)........................................................................300
Figure 4-9 My Best Girl (1927) .......................................................................301
Figure 4-10 My Best Girl (1927) .......................................................................302
Figure 4-11 Mary Pickford ................................................................................304
Figure 4-12 Constance and Natalie Talmadge...................................................307
Figure 5-1 Amy Sedaris, Margaret Cho, Tina Fey ..........................................329
viii
Abstract
This dissertation explores a largely forgotten area of American film history,
the contributions made by female comedians in American silent film. This project is
primarily a recuperative history of the impact and importance of these comediennes,
who were extremely popular during the silent era but have almost entirely faded
from the popular imagination. In this dissertation, I argue that silent comediennes
played an important role in a societal reconceptualization of femininity and gender
roles in the first decades of the 20
th
century, using comedy to provide audiences with
an alternative to other, more restrictive and repressive models of femininity
circulating in American society. At a time when popular conceptions of femininity
were rapidly changing, silent comediennes were both reflections of and central
figures in the creation of new, modern femininities, as they used comedy’s inherent
liminality and transgressiveness in an attempt to reinterpret and redefine femininity
on their own terms. In this work I focus on four distinct areas in which silent
comediennes specifically contradicted and challenged conceptions of ideal
femininity – the idea that a proper woman should be refined, beautiful, chaste, and
domestic.
In my dissertation I interrogate some of the complex and often contradictory
popular discourses surrounding silent-era comediennes, from the idea that femininity
and a sense of humor were mutually exclusive qualities to the belief that comedy was
a decidedly lowbrow genre, unfit for women, and I examine the ways that various
social and cultural tensions inform comediennes’ performances. The impact of these
ix
comediennes continues to be felt today, and a primary goal of this project is not only
to gain a better understanding of women’s experience in the early 20
th
century, but
also to better understand and appreciate the unruly and boundary breaking women
who have followed, as Mabel Normand, Louise Fazenda and Clara Bow helped to
pave the way for later comediennes, from Carole Lombard and Lucille Ball to Carol
Burnett, Whoopi Goldberg and Tina Fey.
1
Introduction
“When you know how to play comedy, you know how to play
anything.”
--Bebe Daniels
1
When I tell people that I’m writing about female comedians in silent film, the
first question I’m asked is invariably “Were there any?” After a few moments of
thought, most people can remember Mabel Normand, and a few can recall Clara
Bow or Marie Dressler, but the popular knowledge of silent comediennes ends there.
At the same time, even those who have never seen a silent film immediately
recognize Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton. Of course, silent performers in
general have fallen victim to this cultural amnesia, but in no other genre is the gender
disparity between who is remembered and who has been forgotten so pronounced,
with the result that silent comediennes have been virtually erased from the public
memory.
This same pattern is evident in academia, but with an important difference.
While silent comediennes have been forgotten by the general public, they have
generally been neglected by the film community, including film scholars and
historians. Beginning with James Agee’s influential 1949 essay “Comedy’s Greatest
Era,” the pantheon of Chaplin, Keaton, Harry Langdon and Harold Lloyd was
established as the “Big Four” of silent comedy. Later scholars have added other
comedians to the mix, such as Roscoe “Fatty” Arbuckle and John Bunny, but few
have mentioned the contributions of female comics, a fact that says more about the
2
biases of those who have written film history than it does about the relative abilities
of female comics. This approach has continued in more recent critical works that
continue to glorify the canonical comedians to the exclusion of all others. In Walter
Kerr’s highly-regarded The Silent Clowns, for example, only two paragraphs in the
more than 350-page book are dedicated to female comedians, and these paragraphs
occur in a chapter entitled “The Demiclowns,” which describes comedians of lesser
ability than the big four of Chaplin, Keaton, Langdon and Lloyd. In countless other
critical and academic works the traditional canon similarly goes unchallenged. Even
in the increasingly popular field of women in silent film, scant attention is paid to
female comics. The recent collection A Feminist Reader in Early Cinema, for
example, does include a chapter-length discussion of flapper comediennes, but
throughout the book only passing mention is made of slapstick and character
comediennes.
2
None of this is surprising, given the fact that women’s humor in all forms has
historically been overlooked and neglected. Whether in literature, theater, art,
motion pictures, or in everyday communication, comic women have traditionally
been, for all intents and purposes, invisible; as Gail Finney argues, “thinkers as
earnest as Schopenhauer, Bergson, and Freud have disqualified women from the
comic arena; when they and other men have written about humor, laughter, and
jokes, they have meant male humor, laughter and jokes.”
3
Just as history is written
by the winners, comic history has been overwhelmingly written by and about those
in power, to the exclusion of women and minority groups. Of course, this all begs
3
the question, so what? Does it really matter if people remember Louise Fazenda’s
spit curls and blank deadpan, or if academics ponder the cultural and historical
significance of Colleen Moore’s Cinderella-as-flapper characters? After all, we’re
talking about jokes and pratfalls, rubber chickens, seltzer bottles and custard pies.
Why is this important?
The answer has to do with issues of cultural power and the ability to enact
social change. A custard pie may not seem like much of a weapon, but humor has, in
fact, historically been understood as an effective means of social control, as well as a
way of commenting on and changing perceived flaws in society. Many theorists,
especially those who write about women’s humor, have noted this link between
humor and cultural power.
4
For Henri Bergson laughter is a social corrective, and
the “function of laughter” is to ensure that all members of a society adhere to
mainstream values and behaviors, lest they be subjected to the derisive and
controlling laughter of those around them.
5
While this conception of laughter as
social control is somewhat limiting, it does highlight the important notion of humor
as a means of exerting control, especially over those who are in subordinate
positions.
A comparable dynamic is at work in sexuality, which, as Michel Foucault
and many others have argued, is similarly tied up in issues of power and social
control.
6
“Like sexuality,” Frances Gray writes,
laughter has been sometimes highly valued, sometimes denigrated;
but like sexuality – indeed with sexuality – laughter has been closely
bound up with power.... Just as cultures in which sex was perceived as
evil recognized women as having sexual desires, and cultures which
4
saw sex as a normal healthy sport for chaps developed the concept of
female frigidity, just so cultures which did not exalt humor to its
current overblown status could attribute it to women.... Only when
laughter is the sign of the civilized man...do women appear to suffer
from a mysterious frigidity of the funny bone.
7
The pervasive denial and suppression of women’s humor by both popular culture and
academia is essentially a denial and suppression of women’s social and cultural
power. And, if women are powerless objects rather than empowered subjects, it
follows that they would be the butt of men’s jokes rather than the joke makers.
These issues of power were especially resonant in the late 19
th
and early 20
th
centuries, as women were making increasingly vocal demands for social and political
equality with men. When women’s humor is dismissed or ignored they are
effectively being kept in a subordinate position; as Gray points out “to define a joke,
to be the class that decides what is funny, is to make a massive assumption of
power.”
8
At the same time, to be excluded from humor is to be denied access to that
same power.
Women’s comedy
Along with being an expression of cultural power, humor can be an effective
means of criticizing social structures and attempting to bring about change, a useful
weapon for women and other repressed or oppressed groups. Despite its links to
power and social control, humor is often seen as non-threatening, as comedy is
literally not taken seriously. As a result, controversial or unsettling topics are more
readily accepted by audiences when presented in the form of a joke rather than as
5
more serious rhetoric – as Bonnie J. Dow argues, “comedy offers space for
representing social controversy and social change that might be too threatening when
encoded as realist drama.”
9
Comedy’s usefulness in critiquing social systems is
important for female comics who have used humor to question gender boundaries,
what Kathleen Rowe describes as “the power of female grotesques and female
laughter to challenge the social and symbolic systems that would keep women in
their place.”
10
This power was just as important to comediennes in the silent era as it
is now, as a means of challenging assumptions about femininity and redefining
gender roles. As late-19
th
and early-20
th
century women entered the workforce and
political arena in greater numbers, the concepts of “femininity” and “womanhood”
were increasingly open to question and debate.
Comediennes addressed these issues in their comic routines with both overt
and subtle comments on women’s experiences. Stage comediennes during this time,
especially those who appeared in vaudeville, often openly criticized sexism,
supported suffrage, and critiqued the institution of marriage for women, in acts that
celebrated female independence and activity while often depicting the traditional
feminine roles of wife and mother as dreary and oppressive. Many stage
comediennes challenged the Victorian ideal of women as pure and passive through
their aggressive and sexually suggestive songs and routines. Motion picture
performers faced certain constraints not found in vaudeville, including stricter
censorship and, of course, the lack of synchronous sound and the actors’ resultant
inability to use their voices as an element of their performance. Also, whereas
6
vaudeville performers used the liveness of their acts – the direct interaction with the
audience and the ability to slip in subversive moments unnoticed by theater
managers – film actors were necessarily removed from their audiences, and therefore
from the transgressive potential of live performance. Still, motion picture comics
were able to use their medium to critique and challenge social structures, and on a
much larger scale than their stage counterparts, due to the fact that films reached a
much greater audience than theater, and comediennes – especially those working in
shorts – made vast numbers of films, and so would be seen much more frequently
than stage performers. Clara Bow’s lustful glances at her leading men, Gale Henry’s
fearless stunts, and Marie Dressler’s exuberant excessiveness all relayed the message
that women didn’t need to conform to restrictive notions of proper femininity. These
performances suggested that breaking boundaries was not only possible, it was also
fun.
In their comic performances, comediennes were helping to redefine what it
meant to be a woman. Much of women’s humor concerned their inability or
unwillingness to play the role of the ideal woman, and showed the joys of living
outside of the narrow and restrictive boundaries of traditional femininity. In
watching these performers, women in the audience were able to glimpse alternate
femininities available to them. Of course, these performances can be read as
somewhat regressive, as many comediennes engaged in self-deprecating humor that
in many ways reinforced negative stereotypes about women; as Regina Barreca
claims, “when you make self-deprecating jokes, you are solidifying your own lowly
7
position in the power structure by seeming to agree that you deserve to be the victim
or target of such humor.”
11
And yet, even comic performances that apparently
confirm sexist images of women are more complex than they seem. When Marie
Dressler’s Tillie character runs amok at Coney Island in Tillie Wakes Up (1917), she
is certainly using her age, weight and admitted homeliness as the source of much of
her humor in a way that could be interpreted as self-deprecating. However, when
Tillie escapes her depressing married life and runs off for the day with her
neighbor’s husband, and then has, as a title tells us, “the time of her Young Life” she
is making a case for the excitement of single life and illicit romance over the
drudgery of a loveless marriage. And when Dressler uses her ample body to get
laughs in the film, she is demanding visibility as a middle-aged, overweight, not
conventionally attractive woman. Rather than remaining demurely out of sight,
Dressler places herself and her excessive body unapologetically front and center.
Finally, any derisive laughter at Tillie’s plight would be mitigated by appreciative
laughter at Dressler’s exceptional comic talents. So while comedy can be used to
demean or belittle women, it can also be a site of resistance for women who were
unwilling or unable to perform dominant notions of femininity, a space where
excessive, unruly, and otherwise “unfeminine” women could command attention and
respect, and in so doing question the ideology of idealized gender roles.
The importance of reclaiming women’s comedy, then, has to do with humor’s
position as a site of cultural power and social criticism. When women engage in
comic performances they are assuming this power, and challenging the social
8
structures that would keep them subordinate. For film comediennes during the silent
era this meant questioning clearly defined gender boundaries and restrictive
definitions of acceptable feminine behavior. This was not an empty exercise, as
women (and men) in the audience could vicariously experience the freedoms and
expanded roles played out by actresses on-screen. As Susan Glenn points out,
“Female performers explored, exaggerated, and exploited modern fears and fantasies
about women’s roles and identities. In doing so they inspired other women to dream
and experiment.”
12
The custard pies thrown by silent comediennes were more than
just comic props; instead, they represented a weapon that could be used to break
boundaries.
Furthermore, the impact of silent-era comediennes continues to be felt today.
Certainly, later comediennes from Lucille Ball and Carol Burnett to Margaret Cho
and Sarah Silverman owe a tremendous debt to Eva Tanguay, Louise Fazenda, Gale
Henry and Clara Bow. The early 20th century debates about whether women have a
sense of humor, and what types of comedy are appropriate for women to perform,
still continue to this day. Female comedians still push gender boundaries, and are
still punished for it. The comediennes discussed here were not only important
because of their impact on future generations of female performers, but because in
many ways they challenged social and cultural definitions of gender roles, and forced
those around them to rethink the traditional narrow definitions of gender and race.
This is the legacy of these performers, one which continues, to this day, to have an
impact on how we understand gender.
9
Breaking boundaries
A major impetus for this project was my desire to begin to recuperate an area
of women’s history that has been largely forgotten. As I mentioned earlier,
surprisingly little work has been done on the careers and significance of female
comedians in silent film, an area that is quite rich and that reveals a great deal about
women’s experience in the early 20
th
century. In this dissertation, I argue that silent
comediennes played an important role in a societal reconceptualization of femininity
and gender roles in the first decades of the 20
th
century, providing audiences with an
alternative to other, more restrictive and repressive models of femininity circulating
in American society. At a time when popular conceptions of femininity were rapidly
changing, silent comediennes were both reflections of and central figures in the
creation of new, modern femininities, as they used comedy’s inherent liminality and
transgressiveness to reinterpret and redefine femininity on their own terms.
Certainly, this project of redefinition and reconceptualization was both complex and
problematic. As I mentioned above, much of women’s humor at this time was self-
deprecating, and could reinforce existing misogynistic stereotypes. Also, many
screen comediennes resisted comedy, and comedy itself was frequently posited as a
sort of generic ghetto that women must leave as soon as they could in favor of
drama. Still, at a time when women’s very ability to understand and appreciate
humor was widely questioned, and women’s presence in the public sphere was
10
frequently criticized, the existence of funny women in the highly public forum of
motion pictures is significant and worthy of study.
In this work I focus on four distinct areas in which silent comediennes
specifically contradicted and challenged conceptions of ideal femininity – the idea
that a proper woman should be refined, beautiful, chaste, and domestic. These are
closely aligned to the four “cardinal virtues” of “piety, purity, submissiveness and
domesticity” that Barbara Welter describes as essential to the Victoria-era True
Woman, although drawing from the work of Lois Banner and Kathy Peiss detailing
the increasing importance of female beauty at this time, and the supposed link
between physical beauty and moral rectitude, I have replaced piety with beauty as an
imperative for the ideal woman of the early 20
th
century.
13
Comediennes frequently
provided examples of women who actively rejected this model of ideal femininity
and, significantly, were not penalized for their transgressions. Unlike lustful screen
vamps who were usually punished with death, or adventurous heroines whose
attempts at independence were met by white slavery or prostitution rings, comic
characters could indulge in unladylike behavior and still make it to the end of their
films unscathed.
Chapter One, “Have Women a Sense of Humor?”, addresses the ways in
which silent-era comediennes contradicted the notion that refinement, passivity and
respectability are essential feminine traits. In the early 20
th
century, many people
assumed that women were incapable of understanding or appreciating humor, due to
their delicate sensibilities, their close alignment to nature, and their emotional, rather
11
than intellectual disposition. Comediennes showed that not only could women be
funny, but they could succeed, both artistically and financially, using the same type
of knockabout slapstick as male comics. While pratfalls, chases and pie-throwing
were clearly not ladylike behaviors, comediennes engaged in these activities on-
screen, often unapologetically. However, many comediennes expressed ambivalence
toward this type of lowbrow comedy, an indication that cultural proscriptions against
unruliness were deeply felt and difficult to overcome.
In Chapter Two, “An Inferiority Complex in a One-Piece Bathing Suit,” I
examine the complex ways in which the ideas of beauty and femininity were used in
popular discourses surrounding silent comediennes, and the ways in which
comediennes challenged the assumption that beauty was a fundamental component
of ideal femininity. For many actresses, appearing in comedies was presented in
almost tragic terms. Fan magazines and studio publicity frequently described the
sacrifices comediennes made to be funny, from covering their natural beauty with
dowdy costumes to abandoning their dreams of success in dramatic films. Publicity
surrounding many slapstick comediennes described the actresses’ first painful
discoveries that they were plain or clumsy or lacking in feminine wiles, and therefore
were unsuited to dramatic roles. These accounts make these comediennes appear
sympathetic, even pitiable. While these discourses would seem to reinforce
Hollywood’s obsession with female beauty and support the stereotype that beauty
and a sense of humor were mutually exclusive qualities, they also create space for an
alternate view of femininity in which “ideal” traits are shown to be artificial, rather
12
than natural qualities that all women possess. This is further emphasized by the
numerous magazine articles that feature photographs of comediennes in their full
character makeup alongside glamorous studio portraits. These juxtapositions serve
to reassure audiences that their favorite comediennes are not as grotesque (and
therefore threatening) as they appear on screen, while at the same time proving that
“beauty,” “grace,” and even “femininity” are not fixed or natural categories.
The concept of women as chaste is discussed in Chapter Three, “Cupid Lips
and an Ungodly Appetite.” For many silent comediennes, desire and sexuality
formed an important part of their on- and off-screen personae. Flappers and light
comediennes created comedy around sexually-charged situations. Flappers,
especially, flaunted the mores of traditional Victorian culture and enacted aggressive
sexuality. Even slapstick comediennes incorporated sexuality and desire into their
performances, and in their performance of gags they made a case for female
sensuality as they reveled in the pleasures of physical activity. By representing
sexuality as fun and playful, suggesting that personal relationships could be fluid
rather than stable, and crossing gender boundaries through inversion and cross
dressing, comediennes helped to symbolically broaden the boundaries of acceptable
female sexual desire.
The final chapter, “Ever on the Move,” explores comediennes’ connection to
the modern world. In this chapter I argue that silent comediennes were exemplars of
New Womanhood and symbols of modernity in the 1910s and ‘20s. Not only did
comediennes epitomize the spirit of modernity with their energy and activity, they
13
also stood as visible symbols of the changing gender roles of the early 20
th
century.
By engaging in knockabout physical comedy, considered by many to be the rightful
province of male comedians, and by moving freely in the public sphere,
comediennes were both transgressing traditional gender roles and providing
examples for their female fans of ways to successfully negotiate the changing social
landscape. As working women who were shown to embrace modern technology,
activities and styles, comediennes were, in many ways, the embodiment of New
Womanhood and the modern world.
In my conclusion, I discuss some of the ways that the coming of sound
affected women’s film comedy. Only a few comediennes successfully transitioned
to talking pictures, and while it’s true that silent performers in general had a difficult
time adapting to the new medium, comediennes had a unique set of expectations and
challenges to meet. In the conclusion I also consider the impact of silent
comediennes on later generations of funny women.
This dissertation engages with and builds on the work of a number of
scholars who have written about comedy, early film history, women’s history, or a
combination of the three. The work of Jennifer Bean and Ben Singer on silent action
heroines and serial-queen melodrama has provided a starting point from which to
imagine active, assertive actresses and their relationship to broader societal issues,
although generic differences, including comedy’s increased potential for subversion
and transgressiveness, are significant. Singer claims that “At its most assertive,
14
[serial-queen melodrama’s] fantasy of female prowess gravitates toward a reversal of
gender positions.”
14
I would argue that at its most assertive, slapstick comedy
moves toward an erasure of gender positions, an obliteration of traditional gender
roles, as the chaos and anarchy evident in the slapstick universe, including pervasive
and persistent gender confusion, goes cheerfully unresolved at the end of the film.
Action series and serials ultimately work toward maintaining order, including gender
binaries (regardless of which gender is “on top”). Slapstick comedies, however, in
their most anarchic form, reject the notion that there is a universal order that can be
maintained. In a world where the laws of society, physiology, and even gravity are
abandoned, the project of maintaining traditional gender positions comes across as
an exercise in futility. Of course, not all comedy leans toward the erasure of gender
positions in the same way that slapstick does; in fact, most feature-length comedies
end with a traditional romantic union where gender roles are, to some degree,
restored. And yet, even in these films lies the possibility of gender disruption, as
women played against the boundaries of appropriate femininity.
The extensive work on gender inversion and unruliness in relation to women
and comedy is tremendously useful when thinking through these possibilities for
gender fluidity in silent comedy.
15
Certainly, many silent-era comediennes were
unruly women, reveling in excessiveness, disruptiveness and unapologetic spectacle,
challenging and upsetting gender positions and positing an alternative, transgressive
model of femininity. The research of scholars such as Kathleen Rowe, Mary Russo,
Natalie Zemon Davis and M. Alison Kibler provides a social and historical context
15
for the comediennes I discuss, proving that they were not an aberration but, rather,
were part of a larger constellation of women that ranges from the carnivalesque
“woman on top” of the 16
th
century to the stand-up comediennes playing comedy
clubs today. Much of the writing on unruly women points to their potential to break
boundaries, to use their disruptiveness and liminality to challenge traditional gender
binaries, and this potential certainly exists in the work of silent-era comediennes.
The work on unruly women also provides a useful framework for theorizing
embodiment as it relates to silent comediennes. Unruly women revel in their bodily
excesses and pleasures, and ultimately present a vivid alternative to the passive
object of the male gaze described by feminist film theorists.
16
Rowe argues that
feminist film theory’s focus on psychoanalysis, which “takes as its given women’s
identification with loss,” has meant that the potentially radical subjectivity inherent
to comic performances has been overlooked:
texts which might suggest an alternative view of female subjectivity
have not received the scrutiny they might. I am referring in particular
to those which position women as subjects of a laughter that expresses
anger, resistance, solidarity, and joy – or those which show women
using in disruptive, challenging ways the spectacle already invested in
them as objects of a masculine gaze.
17
I am particularly intrigued by the ways in which comediennes might use “the
spectacle already invested in them” to challenge traditional notions of femininity, to
actively create meaning through their bodies and their image rather than passively
having meaning assigned to them by (male) spectators. I find that comediennes
embraced their physicality and used it in powerful ways, to demonstrate sensual
16
enjoyment in physical activity, and to experience the sensual present, posited by
Heidegger as a way around modern alienation, rather than being passive objects.
A limitation of film theory based in psychoanalysis is the fact that this type of
theory generally assumes an ahistorical spectator. Just as comediennes actively
contributed to their own meaning, so did their audiences; however, this can only be
fully understood when consideration is given to the social, cultural and historical
moment in which these audience members lived. Audiences, when considered in
context, become an important element in the meaning-making process of the
Hollywood star system. Richard deCordova talks about how the star’s identity
does not exist within the individual star (the way we might, however
naively, believe our identities exist within us), but rather in the
connections between and associations among a wide variety of texts –
films, interviews, publicity photos, etc. The star’s identity is
intertextual, and the star system is made up in part of those ongoing
practices that produce the intertextual field within which that identity
may be seized by curious fans.
18
I would argue that along with these other texts “fans” are one of the discursive fields
that create the star’s identity and the star system. Fans didn’t just consume films and
film-related texts (such as fan magazines, clothing, etc.) – they actively engaged with
them, writing letters to actors, studios and fan magazines, entering “Fame and
Fortune” contests, driving the types of films and merchandise produced through their
consumption habits, and, most importantly, adopting styles, manners and personality
traits that they saw performed by actors in films and in “private” moments
showcased in newspaper and magazine articles. The description of fans as complicit
in the development and maintenance of the star’s identity is important because it
17
positions them as active rather than passive, producers rather than just consumers.
Furthermore, if fans participated in creating the stars’ identities, and even adopted
parts of those identities for themselves, then this suggests the possibility that the
boundary pushing performed by comediennes in their films and as a part of their
movie personae would be repeated by everyday women in their own lives.
Methodology
Any research on silent film faces a unique set of challenges and obstacles.
An alarmingly high percentage of films from the silent era have been lost – the
Library of Congress estimates that only 20 percent of American feature films from
the 1920s and 10 percent from the 1910s still exist, and the survival rate is much
lower for shorts, newsreels, documentaries, independents, and avant-garde films.
19
The cellulose nitrate film stock used in most films until 1951 was highly unstable,
and vast numbers of films made in that period have been lost to fire or decay. Many
films were intentionally destroyed by the studios, as a preventative measure against
fire because of the volatility of the film stock, or to recover silver from the nitrate, or
to simply make room in crowded storage vaults. Many of the films that survive are
in varying states of decay and unavailable for viewing, and an unknown number of
existing films are tucked away in the attics or closets of collectors, or remain
unidentified in archives. The occasional success story – for example, the recent
discovery of a nitrate print of the presumed-lost Colleen Moore vehicle, Her Wild
Oat (1927), in the Czech National Film Archive – is overshadowed by the
18
knowledge that every day an unknown number of films decay beyond repair and are
lost.
The first, and most fundamental, reason for silent comediennes’ current
obscurity, then, is the fact that so few silent films exist. Because so many silent
films have been lost, it follows that the stars of those films would also be “lost.” A
number of figures from the silent era, including Mack Sennett, made an effort to
preserve their films, but many were unable to prevent their loss or were content to let
their old films disappear. In fact, some were complicit in the destruction of their
films – Mary Pickford argued in 1931 that the rapid technological innovations of the
motion picture medium meant that older films would be rendered obsolete, and
“ridiculous” to future audiences, and as a result for several years she had been
locating and destroying her old films, and even had put a clause in her will that
stipulated that her films would be destroyed upon her death, although she ultimately
rethought her stance on her old films and worked to preserve them.
20
It’s unlikely
that other comediennes actively sought to destroy their old films, but at the same
time there is no evidence of widespread efforts to safeguard them. The survival rates
for the films of silent comediennes vary, but are universally low. While over half of
Louise Fazenda’s sound features still exist, for example, only about 20% of her silent
films survive, mostly shorts made for Keystone. The survival rate of Fazenda’s films
is actually fairly high – while there are some silent comediennes whose films still
exist in higher numbers, including Mabel Normand, Clara Bow and, despite her
stated intentions, Mary Pickford, for other once-popular comediennes, including
19
Gale Henry, Alice Howell, Polly Moran and Constance Talmadge, an alarmingly
small number of their films survive.
The deep-rooted notion that women aren’t as funny as men has undoubtedly
also played a role in film archiving and preservation. The films that were spared by
the studios, and those that have been saved over the years by archives, are generally
the ones considered “important” for various reasons – usually because of their
director, star, writer, or studio. For this reason, the films of canonized male
comedians such as Chaplin, Keaton, Lloyd, Arbuckle, and Laurel & Hardy survive in
vastly greater numbers than films by other, lesser known filmmakers and performers,
including women. Because the established canon influences what films are seen on
television, in video and DVD releases, and in film revivals and festivals, the public
has been fed a steady diet of Chaplin and Keaton, and is entirely unfamiliar with
Howell and Fazenda.
Along with preservation matters, issues of authenticity and originality also
need to be addressed when researching silent film. Because exhibitors regularly re-
edited distribution prints based on local censorship restrictions, audience tastes, or
the whim of theater managers and projectionists, there is no way to know with any
certainty whether an archival print of a silent film matches the print released by the
filmmakers (production records, while helpful, generally only provide an incomplete
picture). Silent film exhibition also included a number of live performance elements
that can’t be recaptured, including live (and often improvised) musical
accompaniment, narrators or benshi, and projection speed, which could vary from 16
20
to 24 frames per second. Paolo Cherchi Usai describes the impossibility of exactly
reproducing the original circumstances of silent film exhibition:
we should never forget that a different film was actually seen at the
time of its commercial release. We can get close to this condition
only if we have the rare fortune of seeing the nitrate copy; but the
equipment and the auditorium, the screen, the audience’s
psychological expectations, the cultural and economic conditions of
the time cannot be reproduced or recalled, even approximately. The
“original” print is not the same document, even though worn and
incomplete, that it was in the past. On the contrary, it is simply one of
the many faces the work has assumed in the course of time.
21
Viewing a silent film on a flatbed at an archive, or on a video or DVD simply
doesn’t come close to recreating the conditions that contemporaneous viewers
experienced.
In researching my topic I have viewed as many films as possible, taking into
account issues of accessibility and survival status. I have been fortunate enough to
view screenings of rare films at festivals such as Le Giornate del Cinema Muto in
Pordenone, Italy, and the San Francisco Silent Film Festival, and have made
extensive use of the film archives at the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and
Sciences, UCLA, and the Museum of Modern Art in New York. It’s possible to find
the work of some silent comediennes on video or DVD, but viewing silent films in
this manner is problematic for a number of reasons: among other issues, the print
quality is often poor, the projection speed and aspect ratio can be inaccurate, the
musical accompaniment, if it exists, is often canned music that has no relation to the
action on screen, and the availability of films by lesser-known performers is
minimal. Despite taking advantage of these various options, I have been able to
21
view only a small percentage of films made by the comediennes discussed in my
dissertation.
The problems of accessibility and availability of film prints, however, don’t
present an insurmountable obstacle in conducting research. In fact, the films
themselves are only one of many texts that can be analyzed to understand film
culture. As Eric Smoodin points out in Looking Past the Screen, film scholarship
has historically privileged the film text over other non-filmic materials such as
newspapers, magazines, trade journals, production documents, and personal papers,
despite the fact that all of these texts work together to create meaning.
22
Smoodin
calls for “a conceptual model of history and of understanding films that lessens the
priority of the film text itself,” one that understands and acknowledges that “film
audiences occupy competing and contradictory positions; positions that are
themselves influenced by different forms of exposure to film culture.”
23
My
difficulties in finding extant and viewable films, then, are mitigated by the wide
availability of other resources from the silent era. While a complete print of Colleen
Moore’s 1923 breakthrough film Flaming Youth no longer exists, contemporaneous
articles and reviews, production photos, and Moore’s discussion of the film in her
1968 autobiography all serve to form a more complete understanding of the film and
its impact.
With this in mind I have made extensive use of press resources, particularly
fan magazines, trade journals, and newspapers, to inform my work on the cultural
impact of silent-era comediennes. Richard deCordova has shown that newspaper
22
and magazine articles about actors, both on-screen and off-, were an essential
element in the creation of that star’s identity. These sources provide an important
point of entry for understanding how audiences understood and interpreted movies
and stars; through them we can trace a variety of discourses and begin to answer a
number of questions, including:
1. What information about stars did studios feel was important to impart to
fans?
2. What information actually got through to fans?
3. Which discourses/themes/myths resonated with fans, based on volume of
articles, repetition of themes, reader polls, etc., and which did not
resonate?
4. What did fans’ interaction with the press – through letters, poems,
contests, etc. – say about how they saw the stars?
5. What non-filmic information did studios and publishers think would
interest fans, including beauty tips, social/etiquette advice, etc.?
Newspaper and magazine discourses were able to shape the audience’s
understanding of comediennes and their performances in a unique way because, in
many ways, they were more lasting than the one-reel comedy shorts that would pass
through town in a week or less. Press articles could be collected, saved, read and
reread, and as such had the potential to create an equal or greater impact on fans than
the films, as evidenced by the many fans who used press clippings to create
scrapbooks and other tributes to their favorite stars.
Press discourses are not without their own set of problems, of course. Gaylyn
Studlar has shown that stars’ press agents were known to write newspaper and fan
magazine articles, and celebrity interviews and articles purportedly written by stars
were often written without the actors’ involvement.
24
Newspaper columns about
movies and stars were often syndicated and widely distributed, making it difficult to
23
discern regional interests and tastes. And fan magazines’ close relationship to the
film industry, and the fact that their economic fortunes were aligned with those of the
studios, meant that it was in their self-interest to project a positive image of stars,
their films, and the movie industry. Still, even though press discourses must be read
as biased and as doing their own cultural work, they remain a part of the overall
public understanding of actors and films. Whether the stars actually wrote the
articles or uttered the quotes attributed to them, or whether they were as domestic,
delightful, spontaneous, or charming as the articles would have readers believe, is
almost irrelevant. If the press accounts of stars are pure fabrication then we have
less insight into that actor as a person, but it doesn’t interfere with our understanding
of that actor’s public persona.
Of course, it’s impossible to know all of the different ways fans interpreted
films, or what exactly stars meant to their audiences. There is some indication of
audience reaction in fan mail (some of which exists in archives), box office figures,
theater manager reports, and sources such as Herbert Blumer’s 1933 study Movies
and Conduct. Press discourses, although problematic in the ways described above,
provide another useful source for theorizing fans’ relationship to actors and their
films.
I would like to make a final comment about the comediennes I discuss in my
project. Contrary to those who don’t believe silent comediennes ever existed, there
were actually vast numbers of women performing comedy in silent film. It would, of
course, be impossible to include every one of these performers, and so I’ve limited
24
my discussion to those who I feel made a significant impact on their fans, or had the
greatest potential for breaking boundaries. I’ve used the term “comedienne”
*
somewhat broadly, including performers such as Louise Fazenda, Mabel Normand
and Alice Howell, who made knockabout slapstick films and performed almost
exclusively in comedies, as well as performers such as Mary Pickford, Dorothy Gish
and Marion Davies, who made “comedy-dramas” and were considered accomplished
dramatic actresses. While it may seem that “comic actress” or “comic performer”
would be a more appropriate term to use for such a wide range of actresses and
performance styles, all of the women I discuss were described at the time as
comediennes, by the press and in studio publicity, and audiences at the time would
have understood them as comediennes, with all that that term implies.
I’ve also limited my project to include only American films, for similarly
practical purposes. Because of its dependence on shared cultural experiences,
referents, and values, comedy is arguably the most culturally specific genre. Almost
all of the performers discussed here are American (with the exception of Canadians
Marie Dressler, Mary Pickford, and Beatrice Lillie), and while their films played
overseas, it’s unlikely that they would have had the same cultural impact as they did
in the United States. Certainly, other national cinemas featured female comics, but
to include them in this project would simply be too great an undertaking. Finally, I
would like to comment on the fact that all of the comediennes discussed here are
white. While there were women of color performing comedy on stage, including
*
I use “comedienne” rather than the gender-neutral “comedian” because this was the term used at the
time, and also to more easily differentiate between male and female comic performers.
25
Bessie White and the Whitman Sisters, they were absent from mainstream motion
pictures. It’s entirely possible that some of these women appeared in independently
produced comedies, but unfortunately I have not been able to find evidence of such
performances. It is certain that women of color made contributions to the field of
comedy during this period, and I hope that their history will one day be recovered.
The goddess of beauty and pratfalls
The title of my dissertation, Comic Venus, is taken from the title of a 1918
Photoplay profile of Louise Fazenda. I like the inherent tension in the phrase, which
would seem to be a contradiction in terms. Venus, the Roman goddess of love, is a
symbol of beauty and fertility. Her representation in painting and sculpture generally
has her lounging or standing, but never moving. She is invariably beautiful, nude,
passive, distant, and unsmiling – if she does smile, as in Titian’s Venus of Urbino,
her smile is faint and gentle. The thought of the goddess of love and beauty taking a
pratfall, cracking a joke, laughing broadly, or hurling dishes at her partner while
wiping custard pie from her face is irresistible. Marie Dressler as Tillie, tripping
drunkenly around Coney Island, Louise Fazenda as a scorned wife ready to crown
her husband with a baseball bat, or Clara Bow as a sexually-charged shopgirl
devouring hot dogs and wrapping her handsome boss’ arms around her would seem
to be everything that Venus is not. Comediennes counter the passive and enigmatic
beauty of Venus with their activity, energy, assertiveness and sensuality. And yet,
just as Venus is a personification of a specific type of femininity, so do comediennes
26
embody their own version of femininity. Their femininity may be just as fictional as
the idealized version found in representations of Venus, but its existence and
pervasiveness on stage and in the new popular art form of motion pictures provided a
powerful reminder to audiences of the early 20
th
century that there was more than
one way to be a woman. Those women who didn’t see themselves reflected in the
beautiful and retiring nude on the half-shell might find it easier to relate to the
laughing and vibrant demi-anarchists on-screen. Comediennes represented the
possibility of multiple, equally acceptable conceptions of womanhood, and argued
for the complexity of femininity, in society at large, and in individual women who
were not easily placed in extreme or idealized categories. Ultimately, comediennes
proved that comedy and femininity could co-exist – that Venus could throw a pie
with the best of them.
27
Introduction Endnotes
1
Christopher Bram, “Bebe Daniels: The Early Screen Siren at her Beachfront
House,” Architectural Digest, April 2000, Bebe Daniels clipping file, AMPAS.
2
James Agee, “Comedy’s Greatest Era,” in Gregg Rickman, ed., The Film Comedy
Reader, (New York: Limelight Editions, 2001), 14-28; Walter Kerr, The Silent
Clowns, (New York: Da Capo Press, 1975); Jennifer M. Bean and Diane Negra,
eds., A Feminist Reader in Early Cinema, (Durham and London: Duke University
Press, 2002).
3
Gail Finney, “Unity in Difference?: An Introduction,” in Finney, ed., Look Who’s
Laughing: Gender and Comedy, (Langhorne, PA: Gordon and Breach Science
Publishers, 1994), 1.
4
See Nancy Walker, A Very Serious Thing: Women’s Humor and American
Culture, (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988); Regina Barreca, ed.,
Last Laughs, Perspectives on Women and Comedy, (New York: Gordon and Breach,
1988); Frances Gray, Women and Laughter, (Charlottesville: University Press of
Virginia, 1994); and Henry Jenkins, What Made Pistachio Nuts? Early Sound
Comedy and the Vaudeville Aesthetic, (New York: Columbia University Press,
1992).
5
Henri Bergson, “Laughter,” in Comedy, Wylie Sypher, ed., (Baltimore: The Johns
Hopkins University Press, 1956), 148.
6
Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, (New York: Vintage Books, 1990).
7
Gray, 6-7.
8
Gray, 8 (emphasis in original).
9
Bonnie J. Dow, Prime-Time Feminism: Television, Media Culture, and the
Women's Movement Since 1970, (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press,
1996), 103. For more on comedy and social change, see Geoff King, Film Comedy,
(London: Wallflower Press, 2002), 2; and Hugh Duncan, Communication and Social
Order, (New York: Oxford University Press, 1962), 398.
10
Kathleen Rowe, The Unruly Woman: Gender and the Genres of Laughter,
(Austin: University of Texas Press, 1995), 3.
11
Regina Barreca, They Used to Call Me Snow White...But I Drifted: Women’s
Strategic Use of Humor, (New York: Penguin Books, 1991), 26.
28
12
Susan A. Glenn, Female Spectacle: The Theatrical Roots of Modern Feminism,
(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2000), 216.
13
Barbara Welter, “The Cult of True Womanhood: 1820-1860,” American
Quarterly, Vol. 18, Issue 2, Part 1, Summer, 1966, 152; Kathy Peiss, Hope in a Jar:
The Making of America’s Beauty Culture, (New York: Henry Holt and Company,
1998), 24-25; Lois W. Banner, American Beauty, (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1983), 9.
14
Ben Singer, Melodrama and Modernity: Early Sensational Cinema and Its
Contexts, (New York: Columbia University Press, 2001), 174.
15
See Kathleen Rowe, The Unruly Woman: Gender and the Genres of Laughter,
(Austin: University of Texas Press, 1995); Mary Russo, The Female Grotesque:
Risk, Excess and Modernity, (New York: Routledge, 1994); Natalie Zemon Davis,
“Women on Top,” in Society and Culture in Early Modern France, (Stanford, CA:
Stanford University Press, 1975); Jenkins, What Made Pistachio Nuts?; Robert C.
Allen, Horrible Prettiness: Burlesque and American Culture, (Chapel Hill: The
University of North Carolina Press, 1991); M. Alison Kibler, Rank Ladies: Gender
and Cultural Hierarchy in American Vaudeville, (Chapel Hill, N.C.: The University
of North Carolina Press, 1999); Glenn, Female Spectacle; Lori Landay, Madcaps,
Screwballs, and Con Women: The Female Trickster in American Culture,
(Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1998).
16
See Laura Mulvey, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” in Gerald Mast,
Marshall Cohen, and Leo Braudy, eds., Film Theory and Criticism, Fourth Edition,
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1992)
17
Rowe, 5.
18
Richard deCordova, Picture Personalities: The Emergence of the Star System in
America, (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1990), 12.
19
“Redefining Film Preservation: A National Plan: Recommendations of the
Librarian of Congress in consultation with the National Film Preservation Board,”
Library of Congress, Washington, D.C., August 1994.
20
Eileen Whitfield, Pickford: The Woman Who Made Hollywood, (New York:
Faber and Faber, Inc., 1997), 370-72.
21
Paolo Cherchi Usai, Burning Passions: An Introduction to the Study of Silent
Cinema, trans. Emma Sansone Rittle, (London: British Film Institute, 1994), 84.
29
22
Eric Smoodin, “The History of Film History,” in Jon Lewis and Eric Smoodin,
eds. Looking Past the Screen: Case Studies in American Film History and Method,
(Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007).
23
Smoodin, 20-21.
24
Gaylyn Studlar, “The Perils of Pleasure? Fan Magazine Discourse as Women’s
Commodified Culture in the 1920s,” in Richard Abel, ed., Silent Film, (New
Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1996), 272.
30
Chapter One
“Have Women a Sense of Humor?”
In 1901 Harper’s Bazar asked the question “Have Women a Sense of
Humor?” More than 100 years later Vanity Fair published an article explaining
“Why Women Aren’t Funny.”
1
These articles are part of a larger debate that has
existed for many years, and clearly continues to this day – whether women have the
capacity to engage in and appreciate humor. Countless writers and critics have
argued that femininity and a sense of humor are mutually exclusive, and that
women’s “natural” inclination toward emotion and sensitivity has left them
incapable of possessing a quality – humor – that many feel is dependent on
“masculine” traits such as intellect and aggressiveness. Women, the argument goes,
are far too refined and delicate to be funny. The True Woman, the feminine ideal for
much of the late nineteenth century, was known for her morality, passivity and
spirituality, not for her ability to tell a joke. But just as women in the early 20
th
century challenged assumptions about femininity established with the True Woman,
female comedians challenged the notion that women were inherently unfunny.
Comediennes in early 20th century entertainments were performing at a time
when these debates about women and comedy were at their most heated, and when
the very concepts of "woman" and "femininity" were undergoing massive
transformation. Because of the pervasive belief that comedy was inappropriate for
women, female comics were much more liable than other performers to be seen as
31
crossing social boundaries into unacceptable behavior, and were open to criticism for
performing certain types of comedy thought to be unladylike. As a result of these
concerns and criticisms, comediennes – along with fans and the popular press – were
often highly ambivalent regarding the relationship between comedy and femininity.
Rather than avoiding the genre altogether, comediennes negotiated a comic space for
themselves in myriad ways. Some advocated a more refined, “feminine” comedy as
an alternative to the rough-and-tumble slapstick that many felt was unsuitable for
women, and some – acquiescing to prejudices against funny women – spoke of their
desire to leave comedy for more respectable dramas. Other comediennes
unapologetically embraced comedy, even lowbrow slapstick, to the delight of their
fans and the consternation of their critics. Although these critics generally felt that
physical comedy was antithetical to delicate femininity, some comediennes built
highly successful careers on movies “of the ‘custard pie’ variety.”
2
However they chose to conduct their careers in the face of these challenges,
comediennes at this time were a highly visible example of women defying
expectations regarding ladylike behavior and proper femininity. Whether they were,
as the press frequently argued, “born comediennes” who were simply expressing
their natural talents, or skilled artists who cultivated their abilities through years of
hard work, comediennes contradicted notions of how women should behave and
proved that they were capable of succeeding in a “masculine” genre.
32
“Is there any humor in nature?”
In February 2000, the U.S. Comedy Arts Festival in Aspen, Colorado
honored Jerry Lewis with a retrospective of his work and a discussion with comedian
Martin Short, followed by a question and answer session with the audience. During
the Q&A session, an audience member noted that Lewis had only mentioned male
comics as influences, and asked who his favorite female comics were. Lewis
responded, “I don’t like any female comedians.” Short reminded Lewis of Lucille
Ball, saying, “you must have loved her.” But Lewis would not be swayed, replying
simply, “No.” He then explained that, “A woman doing comedy doesn’t offend me,
but sets me back a bit. I, as a viewer, have trouble with it. I think of her as a
producing machine that brings babies in the world.”
3
Lewis’ remarks drew a fair amount of negative attention, and several days
later he apologized, while simultaneously chastising the press for quoting him out of
context. In a statement issued to the press, Lewis named several female comedians
that he does find funny, including Whoopi Goldberg, Elayne Boosler, Diane Ford
and Phyllis Diller. However, Lewis continued,
When women, doing comedy, do routines written for them by drill
sergeants, I take objection. Their filth makes me and many ashamed
to be in our business, and to me women doing anything, especially
comedy, are looked upon by me as one of God’s great miracles – they
can make a baby.
4
Several months later, on CNN’s Larry King Live, Lewis presented further
clarification of his remarks: “a man comedian can do anything he wants and I’m not
offended by it. But we’re talking about a God-given miracle who produces a child. I
33
have a difficult time seeing her do this on stage. “
5
King offered that Lewis was
“only criticizing women when they do unwomanly things,” and Lewis agreed,
explaining that his discomfort stems from the fact that he’s “mid-Victorian, old-
fashioned.”
6
Lewis seemed genuinely annoyed by the uproar surrounding his
comments in Aspen, and he urged the press to “please accept my humble apology
and let’s go back to where we were.”
7
Jerry Lewis’ plea to “go back to where we were” is both ironic and yet
somehow fitting under the circumstances, as his comments are a perfect example of
“where we were.” While his attitudes toward female comedians are certainly a
reflection of his “mid-Victorian” values, they also represent traces of a larger,
longstanding prejudice in American culture against women performing comedy, a
prejudice that has affected women’s comic expression in every form and forum.
Public debates about whether women have a sense of humor and the nature of
women’s humor date to at least the nineteenth century, and, as Lewis’ comments
illustrate, can still be found in the present day. As recently as 2007 Vanity Fair ran
an article titled “Why Women Aren’t Funny,” in which contributing editor
Christopher Hitchens asked, “Why are women, who have the whole male world at
their mercy, not funny? Please do not pretend not to know what I am talking about.”
Like Lewis, Hitchens argued that childbearing in some way contributed to women’s
lack of humor, because “reproduction is, if not the only thing, certainly the main
thing,” and therefore “for women the question of funniness is essentially a secondary
one. They are innately aware of a higher calling that is no laughing matter.”
8
34
It’s telling that both Lewis and Hitchens point to women’s ability to create
life as a reason for their inability to create comedy. This line of reasoning is
presented by these men as a glorification of women – they’re a “God-given miracle”
with a “higher calling” – but ultimately denies women humanity, reducing them to
their biological functions. This type of reductionist thinking can be found in a 1959
text entitled Humour in English Literature, which is surprisingly virulent in its
description of women’s lack of humor:
The truth is...that women have not only no humor in themselves but
are the cause of the extinction of it in others. This is almost too cruel
to be true, but in every way women correspond to and are
representative of nature. Is there any humor in nature? A glance at
the zoo will answer this question...Women are the undifferentiated
mass of nature from which the contradictions of real and ideal arose
and they are the unlaughing at which men laugh.
9
Lewis, Hitchens, and countless others espouse the essentialist viewpoint that women
are so closely aligned with nature that they lack the (specifically human) traits
widely accepted as necessary to appreciate humor, such as intellect, logic and the
ability for analytic thought.
Not only does women’s biology link them to nature and exclude them from
comedy, so does their supposed reliance on emotion rather than logic or reason.
Throughout the nineteenth century, the “cult of domesticity,” as defined by Barbara
Welter, reinforced the image of women as emotional, rather than intellectual beings,
and as a result “womanly wit had difficulty maneuvering around the image of ideal
womanhood – an image that denigrated woman’s intellect in favor of her emotional
and intuitive nature.”
10
Writers who have debated the issue of female humor have
35
often used her perceived capacity for emotion, rather than intellect, as justification to
deny her the aptitude for humor. Writing in 1842, a contributor to Graham’s
Magazine claimed that “there is a body and substance to true wit, with a
reflectiveness rarely found apart from a masculine intellect.... The female character
does not admit of it.”
11
A 1909 newspaper article claimed that “a woman was made
to be loved and fondled...she certainly was not made to be laughed at,” and that “you
do not find much in [women] to arouse your sense of humor.... Measured by the
ordinary standards of humor she is about as comical as a crutch....”
12
French
philosopher Henri Bergson, in his 1900 essay on comedy, declared that “laughter has
no greater foe than emotion.... [H]ighly emotional souls, in tune and unison with life,
in whom every event would be sentimentally prolonged and re-echoed, would
neither know nor understand laughter.”
13
Given the popular conception at the time
of women as “highly emotional souls,” it would follow that in Bergson’s view
women are excluded from laughter. Hitchens picked up this line of reasoning
without missing a beat in his 2007 article, claiming that “Male humor prefers the
laugh to be at someone's expense, and understands that life is quite possibly a joke to
begin with…. Whereas women, bless their tender hearts, would prefer that life be
fair, and even sweet, rather than the sordid mess it actually is.”
14
Whether humor is, in fact, dependent on intellect to the exclusion of emotion
is open to debate (one can certainly question the intelligence necessary to enjoy The
Three Stooges), and yet this belief has become conventional wisdom in writings and
discussions on comedy, from well before Bergson’s time to the present. Ultimately,
36
whether comedy requires intellect, emotion, or some combination of the two to be
successful is beside the point; what matters is that those who write on comedy have
generally accepted it as truth, and this belief informs the understanding of those who
declare that women’s nature is incompatible with comedy. Men, as intelligent,
rational, logical beings can appreciate humor, while women, whose biological
imperative and close link to nature limit their intellectual capacity, are destined to be
humorless killjoys. Writers and commentators who argue this line of reasoning are
making the argument that women are somehow more primitive than men, that their
close connection with nature, and their primary function – reproduction – links them
more closely to the animals in the zoo than to men. If humor is based on
intelligence, observation and understanding then women, who are mired in their own
biological functions, must certainly be excluded from the comic realm.
Women’s supposed close link to nature and their resultant lack of intellect
and logic are not the only evidence given as proof that they are incapable of humor.
The inherently aggressive nature of comedy is also diametrically opposed to the
cultural ideal of femininity as defined at the turn of the twentieth century, with its
emphasis on submissiveness, deference and passivity. For many critics and writers,
humor was at odds with perceived notions of how proper middle- and upper-class
women should behave. Comedians deliver punch lines and kill their audiences.
They call attention to society’s idiosyncrasies and failings rather than quietly
accepting the world as it is, and in so doing they often expose truths that would
otherwise go unspoken. In vaudeville, the aggressive nature of comedy was apparent
37
in the fact that comedians frequently addressed the audience directly, actively
engaging and confronting spectators, while singers, dancers and other performers
were more submissive, positioning themselves as recipients rather than bearers of the
gaze. This dynamic can also be seen in Keystone comedies of the 1910s, as the
comic actors (both male and female) engaged in violent knockabout routines and
gags, while the bathing beauties (always female) stood quietly on the sidelines and
observed, but seldom participated in, the chaos. As Mack Sennett said, a pie in the
face is funny, but “Shetland ponies and pretty girls are immune.”
15
The bias against
well-behaved women performing comedy was linked to a similar cultural
proscription against female competitiveness. Women should passively support men,
not actively compete with them; as Nancy Walker put it, “The lady laughs at men’s
jokes; she does not invent her own.”
16
Passivity, submissiveness and deference were not the only feminine traits that
were thought to be incompatible with humor. In the nineteenth century, women were
seen as guardians of morality, a trait that was similarly considered to be antithetical
to humorous expression. Men were not saddled with the responsibility of
maintaining civility and gentility in society, and so were allowed the freedom to
revel in the comic, whereas women, as society’s de facto moral compass, were left
with the responsibility of curtailing men’s fun, a dynamic that led to the pervasive
stereotype of the female nag.
17
Empathy and compassion, stereotypically feminine
traits that guided women’s morality, were also to blame for women’s failure to find
humor in many situations. Bergson wrote about humor as “corrective” with “an
38
avowed intention to humiliate;” as a means by which “society avenges itself for the
liberties taken with it. It would fail in its object if it bore the stamp of sympathy or
kindness.”
18
Sigmund Freud similarly described humor’s potential for aggression,
arguing that the tendentious (as opposed to innocent) joke could be “either a hostile
joke (serving the purpose of aggressiveness, satire, or defense) or an obscene joke
(serving the purpose of exposure)”; these jokes require someone to be “the object of
the hostile or sexual aggressiveness.”
19
And, in a 1902 article in Harper’s Bazar
titled “Have Women a Sense of Humor?”
*
the author claimed that “The tears from
the woman’s sympathetic heart fill her eyes before the laughter can ripple across her
lips.”
20
The idea of women as champions of morality, like many other stereotypes
that exclude women from comedy, continues to this day: a 2000 book on film
comedy makes the point that “women are commonly associated with civilization
because, with their physical and sexual vulnerability to men, they stand to lose much
more than men by civilization’s breakdown. Socially they have to represent the
superego to counteract the male id.”
21
If women’s responsibility is to make sure that
men don’t have too much fun, it’s not surprising that women are seen as incapable of
having fun themselves.
Given the persistent and widely-held conception of humor as antithetical to
femininity, it’s not surprising that when women in the 19
th
and early 20
th
centuries
engaged in comic performances they sometimes downplayed stereotypically
feminine traits and attributes. Writing in 1902, a theater critic commented on how
*
The fact that two articles with this same titled appeared a year apart in the same magazine indicates
the level of public interest in the question of women’s humor.
39
female comedians “do not hesitate to sacrifice all of the vanities of their sex – looks
and grace – to evoke laughter from their audience.”
22
This description brings into
focus the perceived incompatibility of femininity and humor, the fact that women
were viewed as either feminine or funny, but seldom both. In order to engage in
comic performances, women had to “sacrifice” their feminine qualities, defined here
as “looks and grace.” A traditionally feminine woman performing comedy had the
potential to create dissonance in the minds of audience members, as they might
struggle to reconcile the femininity of the performer with the masculinity of the
performance; however, a “mannish” woman performing the same routine could seem
less transgressive because she is already removed from the trappings of femininity.
In “sacrificing” their femininity, then, the potential threat posed by women who
engaged in the unruly and aggressive arena of comedy could be defused for
audiences worried about changing gender roles.
When comediennes downplayed traditionally feminine attributes such as
passivity and submissiveness in their acts, the femininity that they performed on
stage and sometimes even off stage could be understood by spectators as somehow
deviant, qualitatively different from and ultimately inferior to the femininity found in
widely circulated images of ideal womanhood. When overweight comediennes such
as May Irwin or Trixie Friganza made jokes about their size, unruly comediennes
such as Eva Tanguay or Marie Dressler ran amok on stage and screen, or slapstick
comediennes such as Louise Fazenda and Mabel Normand threw punches and pies
they were deliberately choosing excessiveness, visibility, and aggression over
40
modesty, deference and submissiveness. This choice helped smooth the incongruity
inherent in women performing comedy, but ultimately excluded comediennes from
the popular conception of what constituted normative femininity as defined by
artists, writers and popular (non-comedic) actresses of the late 19
th
and early 20
th
centuries. While other performing women, including ingénues, chorines and bathing
beauties, projected the image of normative femininity, comediennes chose to
relinquish stereotypically feminine traits in order to get a laugh.
And yet, even a woman “sacrificing” femininity by deliberately presenting
herself as more masculine in order to perform comedy could be unsettling to some.
As gender roles continued to be in flux in the early decades of 20
th
century, the idea
that women were capable of appropriating and discarding feminine attributes such as
grace, delicacy, and refinement would call into question the authenticity of those
attributes. As Susan Glenn argues, “To sacrifice femininity, even in the name of
artistic devotion, was really to emphasize it by calling attention to the difference
between sanctioned and unsanctioned female behavior and looks.”
23
When
comediennes created characters who were loud, brash, ungraceful, and unrefined,
they were exposing the artificial and constructed nature of femininity. In his review
of comedienne Beatrice Lillie’s 1952 stage act, George Jean Nathan expressed his
discomfort with female comics and suggested a way to alleviate it: “I wouldn’t get
in the least mad if her acts were interrupted and supplemented by, say, a line of
pretty dancing girls, maybe 30 or 40….”
24
Nathan’s solution – incorporating “pretty
dancing girls” into Lillie’s act – would certainly strike a balance between two types
41
of femininity that many (including Nathan, apparently) saw as opposing: the
intelligent and biting wit of Lillie, and the passive beauty of the chorus line.
Feminine Humor
Despite the depth of popular sentiment that femininity and comedy were
incompatible, the increasing numbers of women making a living as comediennes
prompted some to allow that they could, perhaps, have a sense of humor. However,
even those writers and critics who conceded women’s humor argued that women’s
sensitive and emotional, rather than intellectual, nature meant that they were capable
of understanding and appreciating only the most subtle, delicate humor. In the 1901
Harper’s Bazar article titled “Have Women a Sense of Humor?” the writer, Constant
Coquelin, is effusive in his praise of women’s sense of humor – “Wit, humor,
sparkle, they are gifts that the gods have liberally bestowed upon the feminine mind”
– and yet makes it clear that “women’s sense of humor is more sensitive than that of
men, but not so broad. It encourages more often than it creates. It is more a hidden
power than an active force.” For women, the article claims, humor is a matter of
instinct rather than reason, and a woman “knows the real [humor] because she feels
it, and a woman’s feelings are a true touchstone.” Furthermore, the traditionally
female quality of modesty is given as the reason why many men don’t perceive of
women as humorous:
It is her appreciation of humor that makes her so companionable. Her
delicacy and exquisite tact that keep her from thrusting it before your
face. But just because she conceals it, men make the mistake of
thinking it is not there.
25
42
In the opinion of Coquelin and many others, women are capable of understanding,
enjoying and even creating humor but their humor is qualitatively different that that
enjoyed by men, and these differences are rooted in fundamental differences between
the genders. Women’s humor in this viewpoint is inextricably tied to their inherently
emotional nature, whereas men’s humor runs the gamut of comedic expression, from
slapstick to satire to sophisticated comedy. This reflects the longstanding correlation
between women and nature, but represents a step forward from earlier thinking that
completely denied women the capacity for humor. In this revised view, women’s
emotional and sensitive nature doesn’t exclude them from humor, instead it informs
the types of humor they appreciate and enjoy. Rather than seeing comedy as
incompatible with femininity, this viewpoint claims that there is a type of comedy
that is intrinsically feminine.
What, then, is “feminine” comedy? Like traditional femininity, feminine
comedy was thought to be sensitive and emotional, gentle rather than aggressive, and
passive rather than active.
26
Coquelin describes women’s “delicacy and exquisite
tact that keep her from thrusting [her humor] before your face”: her feminine
propriety prevents her from the decidedly masculine and somewhat hostile act of
“thrusting” anything in anyone’s face. A 1926 description of Colleen Moore
similarly celebrates this type of feminine humor: “Colleen’s most charming quality
is her sympathetic sense of humor – sympathetic, because it never carries a barb.”
27
Along with being gentle and non-threatening, feminine humor was often seen as
effortless, the result of unconscious facility rather than active labor. Women’s
43
humor, then, “is no attempt at being funny, but just a natural flow of gentle wit, and
the art of seeing the ludicrous.”
28
Ultimately, this view allows women a space to
enjoy and inspire, but little space to create humor. Coquelin sees this as an
admirable aspect of women’s humor:
It is only another example of woman’s unselfishness that she has been
willing to let us think that we men have a monopoly, as you say in
this country, on humor. She did not dispute it. She did not claim any
of our laurels. For woman does not try to be funny. She leaves that
to man. When we ask, “What have you written that was true humor?”
“Very little,” she acknowledges. She can smile and be magnanimous
in this, for she knows that she has inspired and enjoyed the humor of
the world. She can well afford to rest content.
29
Women can appreciate comedy and they can inspire male humorists, but actually
creating comedy is too assertive, too competitive to be ladylike behavior. Men
produce humor; women inspire and appreciate their efforts.
“I am not a highbrow”
If women were more inclined toward gentle, subtle, and emotional comedy, it
follows that “low” types of physical comedy, such as slapstick, were too coarse for
women’s sensibilities. Coquelin claimed that when women are confronted with wit
and humor “in the form of what is boisterous and broad and rough, she does not
recognize them,” and writing in 1902, Robert Burdette explained that women’s
humor “is delicate, sympathetic, refined to the highest culture. True humor delights
her, while buffoonery, if it be brutal, shocks her.”
30
Twenty-five years later, Moving
Picture World echoed this sentiment, saying that “Slapstick comedy with man-made
laughs, and broad masculine humor seldom please the woman patron… The reason
44
that Our Gang comedies are such a great success is because here is humor that is
gentle and that the feminine heart can interpret and enjoy.”
31
These writers allow for
women’s appreciation of humor, as long as the humor is suitably ladylike. Even
Mack Sennett, who regularly cast women in knockabout comedies, felt that there
were certain gags that shouldn’t be performed by women: “movie fans do not like to
see pretty girls smeared up with pastry… You can put a pretty girl in a comedy
shower bath. You can have her fall into mud puddles. They will laugh at that. But
the spectacle of a girl dripping with pie is displeasing.”
32
Even though Sennett
seems to forget that comediennes took plenty of pies to the face while working in his
films, his theory is revealing on a number of levels. First, it’s telling that his
admonition against throwing pies in women’s faces only applies to pretty women; as
I will discuss in Chapter 2, for film comediennes there was a definite division of
labor based on their appearance, with conventionally attractive women playing in
“high-class” light or romantic comedies, and less attractive comediennes appearing
in slapstick. It’s also interesting that in Sennett’s view audiences would approve of a
pretty woman being doused with water or covered in mud, but they wouldn’t stand
for her face being sullied by a pie. Physical comedy that accentuates the “pretty
girl’s” form or heightens her sexuality is apparently acceptable, but a gag that
obscures her pretty face, or represents an overt act of violence towards her – as a pie
thrown in her face would be – is not allowed.
The idea that slapstick and “low” comedy were inherently unfeminine was
especially problematic for female comedians in the late 19
th
and early 20
th
centuries
45
as this type of comedy was becoming prominent on the stage, and later on the screen.
As I will discuss in Chapter 4, a new type of comedy that reflected the energetic and
chaotic modern world began gaining in popularity in the 1890s. This “New Humor”
was violent, anarchic and fast-paced, and served as the basis for slapstick and unruly
performances. Based in inversion and disorder, New Humor was a popular and
decidedly lowbrow break from earlier forms of comedy that tended to be slower-
paced and more thoughtful. Traditionally defined femininity did not allow for
enjoyment of New Humor and low comedy. Women were supposed to be too
sensitive, too refined, too “ladylike” to enjoy comedy based on visceral humor and
laughter based on shocks. Furthermore, it was assumed that women would not fully
understand or appreciate the irony and satire of New Humor.
33
Still, many female
comedians made use of New Humor and low comedy in their performances. Marie
Dressler’s pratfalls and Sophie Tucker’s aggressive sexuality served to contradict the
popular notion that women were either uninterested in low comedy or incapable of
performing it. When they incorporated low comedy into their acts, female
comedians risked being labeled disreputable and unfeminine, and yet these
performances played a vital role in helping redefine what constituted acceptable
behavior for women.
The burgeoning popularity of low comedy was alarming to some theater
owners and managers, who saw it as a threat to the theater’s hard-fought and new-
found respectability, and some tried to replace slapstick on their stages and in their
movie theaters with more refined, genteel forms of comedy.
34
In the early 20
th
46
century vaudeville and movie theatre owners courted middle-class women to
supplant unruly and boisterous audiences, in the hopes that their presence would add
an air of respectability and refinement to entertainment forms that were increasingly
associated with the lower classes.
35
This desire for respectability, however, could be
problematic for comedians, as comedy – and especially New Comedy – was
considered to be distinctly lowbrow. Mabel Normand confirmed this in a 1920
magazine article, in which she told her readers, “I am not a highbrow. If I were, I
wouldn’t be earning my living by being funny—or trying to be.”
36
In this
assessment, being funny and being highbrow are mutually exclusive qualities – the
fact that Normand is a comedienne automatically means that she can’t be a
highbrow. A review of Charlotte Greenwood’s Broadway production of So Long
Letty sets up a similar dialectic: “Nobody is pretending So Long Letty is high class.
It does not want to be high class – it wants to be human and trolley-car-colony
class.”
37
While some comediennes could reconcile their image of comedy as
lowbrow with the broader desire of the theater and cinema for respectability, other
comediennes made it clear that they were able to find some refinement in an
otherwise unrefined genre. Fay Tincher, for example, was adamant that neither she
nor her films were lowbrow:
The truth is, that up to the last year or so comedy has never been
handled seriously by either the producer or the public, and that is just
the reason there has been so much cheap, vulgar, dime-novel comedy
– slapstick, the managers call it.
I could have done that sort of thing when I first began, and got big
pay for it, too, but I won’t do it. I hate it. There’s no art in that sort
47
of thing, and there’s nothing funny in it, either, for people with any
brains.
38
While Normand cheerfully accepted comedy’s lowbrow status, Tincher’s rejection of
“cheap, vulgar, dime-novel comedy” and her allusions to art and intellect echo the
language of those who hoped to reform the theater and cinema. The opposition
between these two points of view reflects the different challenges faced by
comediennes in light of these reforms. Normand, who specialized in physical
comedy, shrewdly embraced her style of comedy, despite its lowbrow connotations,
while Tincher, who aspired to more refined light comedy and “comedy-drama” felt
the need to distance herself from “vulgar” slapstick.
The parallel drives to respectability on stage and on the screen, with their
mutual goal of attracting more female audiences, ultimately led to a privileging of
“feminine” humor. This type of gentle and emotional humor was seen as
comparatively highbrow when compared to the anarchic roughhousing found in
slapstick. A clear tension between advocates of slapstick humor and supporters of
more refined comedy can be found in press discourses in the 1910s. A 1915 Variety
review of the Marie Dressler film Tillie’s Tomato Surprise complained that there was
nothing for the cast to do “excepting ‘funny’ falls,” and that there was “absolutely no
‘class’ to the picture.”
39
That same year Charlotte Greenwood’s Jane garnered
praise for being “a good grouch chaser without slap stick” and “a model film comedy
at which advocates of the non-slapstick photoplay may point with pride.”
40
Two
years later, however, Motion Picture News praised the physical comedy in Dressler’s
Tillie Wakes Up, saying that “The last three reels are in fact so slapstickedly good
48
that one forgets the dragging of the first two,” while Wid’s Film Daily dismissed the
film as “rough-and-tumble hokum comedy constructed around the skeleton of a
story.”
41
Reviewers, and presumably audiences, were clearly ambivalent about the
use of physical comedy in motion pictures. Although physical comedy was still
popular, the violence and chaos of this type of comedy was at odds with the desire
for the motion picture industry’s attempt to establish itself as a refined and
respectable entertainment. Mabel Normand noted this conflict as early as 1915:
The comedy of four or five years ago was a very different affair
from those made today, but I think there is still plenty of room for
improvement, and the next few years will witness as great a
development.
Of course there will always be the slap-stick work. That brand of
humor is still popular on the stage, with some people, and there will
always be more or less of a demand for this kind of fun.
42
Although popular, the humor in slapstick comedy – full of bodies and machines
running amok – didn’t fit the image of respectability that the industry was aiming
for. “Feminine” comedy, however, with its gentle, sensitive and sympathetic humor,
was the ideal generic counterpart to a more refined cinema.
By 1919 Wid’s declared that “Exhibitors everywhere are looking for good
comedies of a type superior to the slapstick variety,”
43
and that same year
screenwriter Anita Loos explained that she was “working [gradually] toward the
production of high comedy.”
We began with farce; that was strong on plot, of course, but the
satirical element in it saved the picture from being too much like the
old ‘chase’ pictures. Then we produced comedy-dramas that
gradually resolved themselves into comedies with a strong dramatic
49
interest. From them we want to develop a true high comedy, a
comedy of ideas.
44
Loos’ “comedy of ideas” was based in situation rather than slapstick, as exemplified
by the light comedies she wrote for Constance Talmadge. The reliance on situations
and dialogue rather than gags and physical shtick meant that, by the late 1910s and
throughout the 1920s, title cards became increasingly important. The Christian
Science Monitor claimed that “It is perhaps for her reform of caption writing that
Miss Loos has been most valuable to motion pictures. She brought to her work an
alert sense of humor, which demanded that the captions for comedies should be as
light as the comedy itself.”
45
As the captions became more important in the
production of comedy, gags became less important, especially for female comedians.
Her Wild Oat (1927), for example, features a fine light comedic performance by
Colleen Moore as well as very funny titles, including a mention of “Girls in their
short skirts getting tanned as far up as the Canadian border.” [Figure 1-1]
Reviewers noted the importance of the intertitles in the creation of the comedy,
saying that the film “is free from the old type ‘gag’ comedy idea and is a radical
departure in many respects because of the telling of the story pictorially, while the
titles were the heavy artillery.”
46
Moore’s Ella Cinders (1926) similarly used titles
to create a great deal of the film’s comedy – as one reviewer noted, “except for one
scene, almost all the humor in “Ella Cinders” is contributed by the subtitles.”
47
This
growing reliance on titles as the “heavy artillery” in silent comedies was evident in
the films of both male and female comedians. However, whereas male comedians
such as Buster Keaton and Charlie Chaplin continued to use elaborate gags and
50
stunts, female comedians increasingly based their comedy on situations, with titles
becoming increasingly important for generating laughs. Physical comedy was still
used by women in this era, but far less frequently than in the 1910s.
Figure 1-1 – Her Wild Oat (1927): Intertitles were increasingly used to create
comedy.
51
“Women are Sometimes Funny”
When female comedians eschewed physical gags in favor of situation- and
personality-based comedy, it added fuel to the old idea that women simply weren’t
funny. Instead of arguing that women were incapable of humor, however, some
writers of the 1920s lamented that a funny women was a possibility, but there were
few, if any such women in Hollywood. A typical rant is found in Film Daily in
1924:
A Need
A comedienne. And needed muchly. True there are a few
cavorting about. But they aren’t getting so far – or so fast – that there
isn’t a lot of room for a new one. Where is the successor to [Louise]
Fazenda? Who is she? And what producer is developing her?
Connie Talmadge had the field of her own to herself until she
failed to find material. Mabel Normand once had a tremendous
vogue. Where is it today?
Colleen Moore looks a comer. But she has her own type of work
– and is doing it very well indeed. Little Pauline Garon – if she was
handled the right way – should find a place somewhere in that line.
Mae Busch could do it – but then she can do almost anything. Why
don’t [sic] Metro give Viola Dana a chance in this direction?
The world wants to laugh. If you disagree look at Chaplin and
Lloyd – and their records – and quit arguing. The world will laugh as
much with a woman star if she is given the right material. Will
someone please start something?
48
This writer certainly allows that women can be funny, and gives credit to a few
women who have the potential to be strong comediennes, but at the same time
diminishes the impact of the many popular comediennes who were making films at
52
the time. Furthermore, the writer seems to be looking for a physical comedienne, a
successor to Louise Fazenda and Mabel Normand, both of whom made their names
in slapstick, rather than one who engages in “feminine” comedy. A similar plea for
funny women appeared two years later in a New York World article written by
Palmer Smith:
In all but a few scenes Ella Cinders was stupid and boresome, and to
me served only to emphasize that the screen has failed to develop any
comedienne to compare with Chaplin, Lloyd, Maclean, Griffith,
Langdon or Hines. Mabel Normand, Bebe Daniels and Gloria
Swanson approach nearest, but Paramount seems to favor dilution of
the Daniels and Swanson comedy by wardrobe contrasts. Louise
Fazenda has at times shown real promise of clowning ability if given
opportunity. For the others the ‘leading ladies’ of slapstick graduate
and go to straight parts, while the male comedians are promoted from
two reels to six. One of the real needs of the screen to-day will be
met only by development of two or three first rate comediennes.
49
As in the earlier example, in Smith’s view a “first rate comedienne” would engage in
slapstick comedy, not the sort of light comedy that Colleen Moore performed in Ella
Cinders. Although he does mention, accurately, that for many comediennes
slapstick was thought to be a starting point, something to “graduate” from (which I’ll
discuss in more detail below), he dismisses the fact that many slapstick comediennes
went into other types of comedy, including romantic comedy and farce. Smith also
shares with the Film Daily writer an inclination to blame the studios for mishandling
promising comediennes by not developing them or giving them the proper material
to work with. This is likely a valid point, as the project of shaping the careers and
public images of actors working under the studio system was often left to producers,
publicists and other studio personnel rather than to the actors themselves. Actors
53
under contract often did not have a great deal of control over the trajectory of their
careers, and would not necessarily have been able to choose film projects for
themselves that they felt best suited their talents or personae. However, blaming the
studios does take some agency away from comediennes, several of whom were heads
of their own production companies and had at least some control over their projects.
While Film Daily wants to know “what producer is developing” the next great
comedienne, and speculates on Pauline Garon’s prospects “if she was handled the
right way,” these articles never question whether these women would fare better if
they had the creative control that Charlie Chaplin, Harold Lloyd and many other
male comedians enjoyed. Furthermore, blaming studios for this perceived lack of
female comedians shifts the focus from the pervasive prejudice against women
performing comedy that ultimately led women away from slapstick and into the
“straight parts” that Smith decries. If the studios’ strategy to feature women in
“feminine” comedies that were heavy on character and situation and light on stunts
and gags was fueled by the industry’s overall drive toward respectability, it was the
public’s perception that women performing slapstick was vulgar and unladylike that
made “feminine” comedy a respectable alternative in the first place.
In 1927 a similar viewpoint was expressed by yet another writer. Under the
heading “Women Are Sometimes Funny,” “Celluloid” discusses why women aren’t
as funny as men:
Women are sometimes comedians, too. Some of them are funny.
Others just make-believe. There are half a dozen funny women on the
screen. Go over them all and name those who could actually exude
fun without doing stunts.
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I suppose Colleen Moore is one of the best, but she has to be made
into characters. Bebe Daniels is the fastest comedian of all the
women, but she is seldom funny except in action – the faster the
better. Clara Bow is comic mainly by character and invention. She is
a type. Sally O’Neil is similar. The fact is we don’t expect antics
from the average actress, let alone the average woman. The girl in a
company who sets out to be funny has to be careful not to overdo it.
We don’t enjoy laughing at women very often. When some of them
are funny they are screams, especially fat women who become
caricatures and imitate [sic] geniuses like Elsie Janis.
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Like Smith, Celluloid dismisses the type of character-based comedy performed by
Moore or Clara Bow, but also seems to dismiss those comediennes who derive their
humor through stunts. Celluloid doesn’t leave much room for women to be funny,
other than performing self-deprecating caricatures of themselves or appropriating
others’ manners and personalities.
†
Laments such as these indicate a convergence of
earlier opinions about women’s humor, or lack thereof. The longstanding belief that
women aren’t funny is coupled with the concept of a subtle and refined “feminine”
humor, with the resultant conclusion that women can be funny, but the feminized
comedy favored by the industry beginning in the late 1910s and, by extension, its
practitioners, were simply not as funny as male comedy and comedians. Despite the
best efforts of the motion picture industry to move away from slapstick and promote
“respectable” comedy, there were still those who longed for “clowning” and “antics”
– “the faster the better” – over “character and invention.”
†
Imitative humor and the idea of the comedienne as mimic will be discussed more fully in Chapter 4.
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“Mud in the hair, pie in the eyes”
In the midst of ongoing debates and changing definitions of respectability and
femininity, female comediennes were trying to make a living being funny.
Although, as I have shown, women’s comic abilities were widely questioned
throughout the 1910s and ‘20s, women found a great deal of success during this time
performing comedy on the stage and screen. Fan magazines and trade journals
generally acknowledged, and even promoted, women’s humor, although traces of
pervasive stereotypes about the incompatibility of comedy and femininity are evident
in these discourses. Most often, however, these stereotypes appear in these
publications only to be disproved and dismissed, a shrewd strategy for trade journals
trying to market their stars, and fan magazines whose largely female readership
would likely be interested in stories of women breaking boundaries and defying
expectations. And so Moving Picture World declared in 1917 that “Women have
demonstrated on the stage that they can be just as funny as the comedians of musical
comedy, burlesque, vaudeville or farce,”
51
and the popular press was continually
comparing film comediennes favorably to acknowledged male comic geniuses such
as Charlie Chaplin, Harold Lloyd and Harry Langdon. Ultimately, comediennes
showed that femininity and humor were not mutually exclusive attributes.
Despite the longstanding and widely-held biases against women and physical
comedy, throughout the 1910s and ‘20s slapstick comediennes performed the very
types of “low” physical comedy that women weren’t supposed to appreciate. The
comedy that these women were performing was not the light “feminine” comedy
56
advocated by the motion picture industry and some critics, instead, they were
engaging in a style of performance similar to many male comedians in theater and
films. This style is marked by an emphasis on physicality, with knockabout
slapstick, tussles and pratfalls, and frequent use of sight gags and props. By
performing this type of physical comedy, slapstick comediennes were contradicting
popular notions about appropriate behavior for women. And by succeeding in these
performances, both artistically and professionally, comediennes were making a
strong argument that the definition of “feminine” comedy should be expanded to
include physical humor.
In 1918 Photoplay summed up Louise Fazenda’s on-screen antics in this
way:
Custard pies, a chase, a fall, mud, a fire hose, soup, a lead in the
plumbing, innumerable lost garments, broken dishes, a slide on a cake
of soap, mud in the hair, pie in the eyes, soup down the back, a fall
into a lake, policemen, a cleaning up, a bucket of suds and a mop, a
slavey with a round-eyed, utterly blank expression, a Mack Sennett
comedy, Louise Fazenda.
52
The laundry list of gags mentioned here is a far cry from the sensitive and emotional
comedy thought to be the province of women. As described here, Fazenda engages
in physical activity such as chases, falls and slides, and finds herself covered in mud,
pies and soup. A newspaper illustration that appeared the same year cements her
persona as a knockabout comedienne, with Fazenda throwing pots and pans at her
hapless partner and generally wreaking havoc in the kitchen. [Figure 1-2]
53
As the
illustration suggests, the gags and behaviors performed by slapstick comediennes
such as Fazenda often played with the iconography of traditional femininity, turning
57
it on its ear in the service of comedy. And so Fazenda was the “comic of the
kitchen,” turning the center of women’s domestic life into a chaotic whirl of
“masculine” slapstick comedy, as “Mishaps with broken plumbing, cook stoves,
mops and pails, pots and pans, are the subjects of most of her comic scenes.”
54
Figure 1-2 – Louise Fazenda and “Kitchen Komedy”
58
These comedies transform the iconography of the kitchen from a peaceful space
where women carry out their domestic duties, to an anarchic setting featuring a
woman run amok. In these films women’s domestic sphere has been infiltrated by
the unruly and decidedly “unfeminine” world of slapstick comedy. The very symbol
of slapstick – the custard pie – sums up this conflict between female space and
masculine comedy, as a traditional baked good is used as a comic projectile.
There is certainly nothing dignified or refined in any of the gags attributed to
Fazenda – in fact, they are precisely the type of comedy that women were said to
find shocking and offensive. And yet numerous comediennes were building careers
based on pie throwing and anarchic chases. Polly Moran was described as “stopping
stove lids, runaway flivvers, rabid motorcycles and fire engines with various parts of
her anatomy,”
55
and Mabel Normand “was forever being chased by some one:”
With a wee bit of plot the pictures consisted mainly of a series of
chases. Mabel ran miles, pursued by Ford Sterling, who played
opposite her then. Sometimes Mabel ran after Sterling and sometimes
she was chased by the whole company.
56
Certainly, these performances ran counter to the passive and dignified humor and
appropriate behavior ascribed to women. Rather than keeping herself demurely out
of harm’s way, Moran is figured as using her body for gags that sound particularly
painful, and Normand is equally at home whether she’s chasing, or being chased by,
men. Despite their unladylike pursuits, however, the press often made the seemingly
contradictory claim that slapstick comediennes were, in fact, ladies. Photoplay, for
example, describes an Alice Howell film as “containing the conventional slapstick
femininely applied,”
57
which would seem to be a contradiction in terms, and
59
describing Mabel Normand the same journal in 1919 declared, “Whether she is
falling down a well, leaping through an upper window in a ball gown or visiting New
York…she is startling, vivacious, girlish, and always funny.”
58
The idea of
knockabout comedy “femininely applied,” or a woman “leaping through an upper
window” and remaining “girlish” indicate the desire of fan magazines and trade
journals to assimilate seemingly disparate notions of femininity, as well as the
willingness of fans to accept that women could be both feminine and funny.
Descriptions such as these were undoubtedly meant to confirm for readers that
participating in slapstick didn’t rob comediennes of their femininity. By ascribing to
physical comediennes an uneasy integration of traditionally feminine and masculine
traits, accounts such as these were, in fact, placing comediennes in a liminal space
between genders. A 1938 article about Louise Fazenda shows the extent to which
this strategy defined slapstick comediennes as neither male nor female, but rather an
amalgamation of both genders:
Ever since she started out in Mack Sennett comedies away back when
a custard pie in the face was a mere love tap, she has been building up
a reputation as a quality bruiser – with just enough mild character
roles in between to hold her franchise as a lady. The movie public has
come to regard her as an unpredictable cross between Mother
Hubbard and Strangler Lewis – the sort of full-rigged female who, if
she happened to stand up all of a sudden in a crowd, you couldn’t be
altogether sure whether she was going to start a community sing or
offer to wrastle any guy in the place for $5.
59
Fazenda is a walking contradiction in this description – a “bruiser” who is also a
lady, an unlikely cross between a lovable nursery rhyme matron and a champion
wrestler. In this article, and others like it, slapstick comediennes are depicted as
60
occupying a liminal space between genders – a position that could be potentially
threatening to people worried about changing gender roles. And yet as “comics of
the kitchen,” these comediennes demonstrated that blending traditionally feminine
and masculine attributes and spaces could result in entertaining and enjoyable
comedy.
“She was born funny”
In many cases comediennes were described, by the press or by their own
accounts, as “naturally” funny, a concept that directly contradicts the essentialist
notion that women’s supposed lack of humor was linked to their biology. And so
readers were told that Polly Moran was “a born comedienne,” Constance Talmadge
“was born for comedy,” Alice Howell has “a most delightful natural humor,” Louise
Fazenda was “a born comedienne” and “a true comedienne,” and Charlotte
Greenwood was “a possessor of abundant natural wit,” and that “nature never
intended this fair Charlotte for anything but comedy.”
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If Moran, Greenwood, and
the rest of these comediennes were born funny, then they dispute the notion that
women are biologically incapable of creating or appreciating comedy, an idea that’s
reinforced by the fact that all of the comediennes mentioned above were highly
successful and, with the exception of Talmadge, performed rough-and-tumble
slapstick as well as light comedy.
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Describing Polly Moran, Motion Picture Classic claimed that she was not
only born funny, but that she indulged her humorous impulses even if that got her in
trouble:
Polly doesn’t mean to be funny. God knows she doesn’t try to be
funny. She doesn’t have to. She is funny. She was born funny. She
says so herself. …
She was frequently fired from the chorus because she could never
resist the temptation of making faces at the principals. Especially
when they were very serious, singing teary ballad about moonlight
and roses and yoooou.
61
Along with being a born comedienne, this article implies that Moran’s comedic
nature excluded her from more traditionally feminine pursuits, such as “singing teary
ballads” about sentimental and romantic topics. Not only did Moran opt out of such
performances herself, but according to this account she actively injected her
disruptive and unruly sense of humor into more “respectable” entertainment forms.
A similar story was told about Louise Fazenda:
At the age of fifteen she left school and joined a dramatic stock
company to play ingénue parts, but her sense of humor and her love
of grimacing behind the backs of other players soon proved that she
was not intended for serious drama.
62
Although these accounts are likely apocryphal, the fact that press agents would
create backgrounds such as these for Moran and Fazenda is telling. In both cases,
the women are presented as unwilling or unable to suppress their inherently comic
natures when confronted with the type of refined performances that women were
supposed to prefer. If Moran and Fazenda chose to make faces rather than sing
sentimental ballads or play the ingénue, then they were tacitly rejecting the idea that
62
women were naturally drawn to certain genres or modes of performance, and instead
confirming that women could enjoy and appreciate humor. This was reinforced by
the fact that these women were said to be “born comediennes.” Mocking
traditionally feminine performance styles, then, was an expression of a natural
inclination, rather than evidence of deviation from women’s biologically determined
sensitivity and refinement.
The concept of comediennes as “naturally funny” shows up, to varying
degrees, in several films. Mabel Normand in The Extra Girl (1923), Colleen Moore
in Ella Cinders (1926) and Marion Davies in Show People (1928) each plays an
aspiring actress hoping to make a name for herself in dramatic roles. In each case,
the character is clearly better suited to comedy, and this fact gets in the way of her
dramatic ambitions. The inherent irony of these films lies in the fact that while the
characters long to play dramatic roles and stumble upon comedy inadvertently, the
actresses themselves were celebrated comediennes who worked hard to develop their
comic technique. And so the trait – humor – that stands in the way of the characters
realizing their goals is the same trait on which the actresses built their careers. The
characters’ failure is the actresses’ triumph: while the characters’ comic inclination
thwarts their attempts at drama, the actresses’ flair for comedy makes them a
resounding success in their chosen genre.
The Extra Girl and Show People both tell the stories of naïve young women who
travel to Hollywood with the goal of gaining fame as dramatic actresses. In The
Extra Girl, Sue Graham (Normand) sees Hollywood as an exciting escape from a
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small-town existence and a pre-arranged marriage to a man she doesn’t love. She
enters her picture in a magazine beauty contest and wins, but only because her rival
for the man she truly loves has replaced her picture with that of a flawlessly beautiful
Gibson Girl-type model. Sue’s predilection for drama is evidenced early in the film,
when she acts out melodramatic scenes involving sheiks and exaggerated swoons,
but Normand’s, and by extension Sue’s, talent for comedy overshadows her attempts
at drama. Once she arrives in Hollywood the studio head refuses to sign Sue to a
contract, but instead offers her a job in the costume department, and eventually she is
able to make a screen test. Although she is testing for a drama, Sue is consistently,
albeit unintentionally, funny. After stepping in gum she gets a brick stuck to her
shoe, and then she sits on a workman’s dirty glove, leaving a black handprint on her
white bloomers. Entering the scene for another take she bends over, causing her
hoop skirt to fly up and flashing her bloomers – complete with the handprint on her
rear – to the assembled cast and crew, who howl with laughter. [Figure 1-3]
Unaware of the source of the comedy, Sue is nevertheless encouraged by the reaction
to her screen test, gushing to her beau that “the director said I was just naturally
funny.” Sue’s unintentionally comic performance is reminiscent of the press
accounts of Polly Moran and Louise Fazenda as uneasy chorines; like Sue, their
attempts to join the ranks of serious actors are thwarted by their irrepressibly comic
personalities. And while it may seem that Sue is the unwitting object of the crew’s
laughter – in other words that the crew is laughing at her rather than with her – it is
not apparent from the film that this is the case. The director’s comment that Sue is
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“naturally funny” is complimentary and indicates that he sees her as a comedienne,
and therefore his (and, presumably, the rest of the crew’s) laughter was appreciative
rather than derisive. Also, the audience’s extradiegetic knowledge of Mabel
Normand as a successful and highly praised comedienne could potentially mitigate
their response to this scene, as their laughter at Normand’s performance would be
echoed by the fictional crew’s laughter at Sue’s screen test. If the audience was
laughing at Normand’s skillful comic performance, then it’s certainly possible that
they would interpret the on-screen crew as appreciating Sue’s antics on a similar
level.
Figure 1-3 – The Extra Girl (1923): Sue Graham (Mabel Normand) displays her comic
side.
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Like The Extra Girl, Show People centers on an aspiring dramatic actress –
Peggy Pepper (Davies) – who is better suited for comedy. Arriving at a studio
casting office with her father, Peggy puts on an impromptu audition, showcasing
“the various moods” – meditation, passion, anger, sorrow, joy – by holding a
handkerchief in front of her face and then lowering it to show her changed
expressions. Although Peggy is quite earnest in her attempt at drama, the casting
director laughs and tells her she’s “very funny,” the first indication within the
narrative that she is a natural comedienne. Peggy’s first experience before the
camera resembles Sue’s, in that the comedy she creates is inadvertent. Although
Peggy’s first film is a slapstick comedy, she believes she’s appearing in a drama, and
even recites some lines from a stage melodrama for the director before he begins
shooting. When she enters the scene, however, she’s sprayed in the face with seltzer
water; outraged, she responds by throwing anything within reach at the other actors.
As everyone laughs at her bravura performance she begins to cry and runs off the set,
and when her friend Billy follows her she sobs, “I came here to do drama. Why
didn’t you tell me it was this?” Billy gently helps Peggy reapply her makeup as he
comforts her, reminding her that “all the stars have had to take it on the chin –
Swanson, Daniels, Lloyd – all of them.” Peggy’s sense of shame is palpable, and
Billy’s attempts to console her and prepare her for the next take are both tender and
mildly unsettling, as he paints her face while reassuring her that “it’ll be easy from
now on,” and urging her to engage in a bodily activity that she finds both distasteful
and humiliating. Despite her reservations, Peggy decides to “take it on the chin” and
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continue in comedy, eventually making a name for herself as a comedienne.
However, when the chance comes to leave comedy and move to drama she jumps at
the opportunity. Her dramatic screen test is the polar opposite of her work in
comedy – instead of the physical abandon of slapstick, she is asked to sit in a chair
and react as the director feeds her situations. The restricted mobility on-screen finds
its parallel in Peggy’s off-screen life, as she constrains her true (comedic)
personality, and instead becomes the pretentiously elegant Patricia Pepoire.
Although Peggy Pepper is uncertain about comedy, Show People is not.
From the film’s beginning it’s clear to viewers that Peggy was meant for comedy,
and, as with Sue Graham, even when she’s engaged in “serious” drama she’s funny.
Furthermore, the film can be seen as a comment on Davies’ own career, as she
alternated comedies with historical dramas despite the fact that many critics thought
she was a natural and very talented comedienne – the year Show People was released
Photoplay called Davies “a superb comedienne,” and Variety said that she “does
some really great comedy work.”
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The film’s happy ending doesn’t just involve the
romantic union between Peggy and Billy; it also involves Peggy abandoning her
highbrow dramas and embracing her comic nature – “the real Peggy Pepper” that the
studio head lamented was lost in her high-class pictures. The film finds a generic
middle ground for Peggy in a World War I film directed by King Vidor (who also
directed Show People). An unmistakable reference to Vidor’s blockbuster The Big
Parade (1925), this fictional war film would be a far cry from the knockabout
slapstick that started Peggy’s career. However, The Big Parade (as well as Vidor’s
67
The Crowd [1928], released a few months before Show People) made liberal use of
comedy scenes and moments, setting it apart from the humorless melodramas
favored by Peggy. And so by turning to Vidor-style drama-with-comedy Peggy can
live out her dramatic aspirations while still indulging her natural flair for comedy.
Ella Cinders features another take on the trope of a woman whose natural
humor stands in the way of her dramatic ambitions. In a retelling of the Cinderella
tale, Ella (Moore) is abused by her stepmother and stepsisters and lives a life of
drudgery. Ella enters her photo in a beauty contest hoping to escape her life by
winning a trip to Hollywood and a movie contract, but unbeknownst to her the
picture submitted by the photographer was taken at the moment a fly landed on her
nose. Instead of the glamorous portrait Ella had hoped to submit, her contest photo
instead features her scrunching up her face and looking cross-eyed at the fly.
Despite this, she wins the contest – as the fire chief/judge tells her, “Beauty means
nothin’. We firemen see the best-lookin’ wimmin at their worst. The movies needs
newer and funnier faces.” She is initially hurt by the thought that people are
laughing at her, but is reassured when her beau reminds her, “Not everyone can
make people laugh, Ella. It’s a great thing – making people happy.” Although Ella
worries that her outdated clothing and plain appearance would handicap her in the
beauty contest, her natural humor – demonstrated earlier in the film when she’s seen
clowning around to entertain children that she’s babysitting – is what sets her apart
from the more conventionally attractive but humorless contestants and sends her to
Hollywood. And while Ella eventually finds success in dramatic pictures, not
68
comedies, Colleen Moore turns in an exceptional comedic performance in this and
many other films, a fact that complicates the message of the film. Ella’s natural flair
for comedy – whether intentional or not – leads to her success as a dramatic actress,
a plot point that would seem to privilege drama over comedy within the diegesis.
However, Colleen Moore’s extradiegetic commercial and artistic success as a comic
actress provided a clear example for fans of a funny woman who preferred to make a
career in comedies.
Fan magazine discourses surrounding Moore highlighted her preference for
comedy, as evidenced in a 1924 interview:
But I didn’t really care for tragic parts. I have always believed that
laughter is so much greater than tears. It is easy enough to make your
audience cry by mere experience and ability, but the gift of humour
comes spontaneously and to few. I have always coveted it for
myself.
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Magazine and newspaper articles frequently emphasized the willingness of
comediennes to embrace their comedic talents, and in fact oftentimes claimed that
their senses of humor left them better prepared to deal with the world around them.
Being a funny woman wasn’t always seen as entirely positive by either the
comediennes themselves or the press – as I’ll discuss below and in Chapter 2
comediennes were, for a variety of reasons, often ambivalent about performing
comedy. But for many of these women performing comedy was a logical and
welcome career given their natural inclination toward humor. In an article titled
“Don’t Fight Against Nature,” Charlotte Greenwood’s advice to aspiring comic
actresses is to embrace and develop their funny side: “it’s a great mistake for a
69
comedienne to pay any attention to Shaw or Shakespeare. She must just make up her
mind to be funny and let it go at that, no matter what her family or Sunday school
teacher may think.”
65
For Greenwood, women shouldn’t fight against their true
selves and waste their time with drama if their proclivity is for comedy.
Greenwood’s advice can be applied to the career of Beatrice Lillie, who, according
to Motion Picture Magazine, was a born comedienne but tried to suppress her natural
good humor in order to find work as a serious actress. After a string of rejections,
Lillie decided to change her tactic before visiting a manager named Andre Charlot:
All right, she would see Charlot – but not as she had seen the others.
She would be herself for once. She threw away her solemnity as one
discards a mask – what an ill-fitting mask it was that Beatrice had
worn so long. Faith in herself swung gaily back into her heart. Thus
Charlot was the first theatrical manager to see, and hear, the real
Beatrice Lillie. She mocked, and ridiculed. She sang “with gestures.”
She walked out onto that stage as herself, and left the theater with a
contract.
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According to this account, Lillie wasn’t “herself” until she dropped the mock
solemnity and embraced comedy. Like Greenwood, Fazenda, Moore and numerous
other comediennes, Lillie’s success comes only after she decides to drop any
pretense of becoming a “serious” actress, and accepts her natural comic talent.
These discourses, then, contradict the essentialist argument that women were
biologically excluded from humor, and instead argue that women could, in fact, be
naturally predisposed toward comedy.
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“How to Be a Comedienne”
Although comediennes’ performances came across as spontaneous and
effortless on-screen, fan and trade magazines were quick to point out that their
comedy was actually the result of a great deal of work and deliberation on the part of
the actresses. Comedy was presented as skilled work, and comedians, both male and
female, were depicted as honing their techniques through years of practice and study.
When discussing female comedians, these discourses demonstrate an appreciation
for women’s labor and also argue that women were actively involved in crafting their
comic personae and developing their talents to achieve maximum financial and
artistic success. Comediennes, according to these stories, excelled at comedy as a
result of their own hard work.
‡
Combined with stories about women being
“naturally funny,” these discourses provide an overall picture of comediennes as
craftswomen who honed their natural talents to rise to the top of their chosen
profession, and provided an air of legitimacy and professionalism to women who
were engaged in this supposedly unfeminine pursuit.
Numerous articles and interviews discussed, in detail, the nuts and bolts
process of creating comedy. Articles described how comediennes thought up gags
and comic situations, designed their costumes and makeup, and invented characters.
These articles emphasize the craft and labor involved in film comedy, and
simultaneously express respect for comediennes while also giving advice and
information to readers who might aspire to be comic performers themselves. Many
‡
A more detailed discussion of comediennes as working women can be found in Chapter 4.
71
comediennes gave long and detailed talks about their views of comedy, and what it
took to incite laughter from the audience. Quoted in Moving Picture Weekly, Alice
Howell expresses a thorough understanding of the mechanics of film comedy:
Your whole body must work with you. The idea is to exaggerate just
in the right place. You know how just one comic touch in the middle
of a serious situation will upset everybody’s gravity, like a very feeble
joke in church, which makes everybody helpless with laughter. Well,
that is the principle in a comic make up, indeed of all good comedy.
Otherwise it is just senseless slapstick stuff, with all the absurdity
dragged in by the hair. That sort of thing never makes people laugh
really hard. An inch is a very small thing, except on the end of your
nose. That is the principle in a nutshell.
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Howell’s detailed description of how screen comedy works positions her as a
knowledgeable artist, someone who thought through her character and routines.
While Howell was described in the press as being a “natural” comedienne, her hard
work was also recognized as contributing to her talent, as in this 1916 review:
“Alice is not only a true artist, but a funny one as well, about as funny as a highly
perfected technic [sic] and a most delightful natural humor can make her.”
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The
idea of comediennes actively intellectualizing and crafting their innate talents and
honing their comic technique is a far cry from the passive and instinctual humor that
many attributed to women. The press emphasized the work of comediennes in
perfecting their comedy, and praised them for their successes. One writer insisted of
Charlotte Greenwood, “She makes you laugh because she is a finished comedienne
and she knows what she is about every moment…. She is funny because she has
studied and perfected herself in the art of being funny.”
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Mabel Normand revealed
that when she visited New York, she would go to the lower East Side to get ideas for
72
her characters: “Perhaps I see a character that strikes me as funny, either in
deportment or way of dressing. Perhaps I can copy her costume or some of her odd
gestures at a later date, when I'm working in a picture.”
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And Constance Talmadge
declared, “The comedienne’s head is not so empty as it seems. It is packed with
gags, funny scenes, situations and bits of nonsense that life, the greatest moving
picture of all, unreels for us.”
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Talmadge, Normand, Greenwood, and Howell are
depicted as actively striving to enhance their natural talents and improve their comic
techniques through study, practice and observation, and as having a thorough
understanding of what they need to do to get a laugh. Overwhelmingly the press
presented comediennes’ labor as commendable, and the comediennes themselves as
hard-working artists and career women rather than gender transgressors trying to
participate in a genre and performance type that they were socially or biologically
unsuited for. This is exemplified in a quote from Motion Picture Magazine
describing how Louise Fazenda was rewarded for her talent and hard work: “So
active is her brain in conceiving grotesque and whimsical comedy effects, Mack
Sennett has offered to let her direct her own company, the highest tribute that can be
paid a film actress.”
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Moreover, in articles such as “How to Be a Comedienne,”
“How to Be Funny,” and “Have YOU Got the Makings of a COMEDIAN?”
73
fan
magazines encouraged readers, the majority of whom were female, to dream of
trying comedy for themselves and potentially achieve the kind of success enjoyed by
Fazenda, Talmadge, Normand and other screen comediennes.
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When writers praised comediennes for their hard work, talent and skill, they
often insisted that comedy is more difficult to perform than drama. Numerous
articles maintained that comic work was more strenuous than dramatic, and less
certain to succeed with audiences. In a typical quote, Motion Picture Magazine told
its readers, “To be a good screen comedienne is harder, they say, than to be a
tragedienne. If so, Miss Dorothy [Gish] has bridged the difficulty with ease,” while
another article insisted that Charlotte Greenwood “could, if she wished, be the Queen
in Hamlet or Lady Macbeth, but that is not nearly as difficult as being the sort of
comedienne Miss Greenwood is.” Colleen Moore recalled director Mervyn LeRoy
expressing a similar sentiment, declaring that “An onion can make any actress cry,
but the vegetable has yet to be grown that can make her funny.”
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Part of the reason
for the supposed difficulty was said to be the physical toll of performing comedy.
Louise Fazenda described the difference when she returned to slapstick after
appearing in light comedies and dramas for a year:
Physically and mentally it is so much harder than drama that there is
no comparison…. Before I had appeared playing it “straight” I had
heard actors talking about a difficult dramatic scene they had done.
Especially some of the girls, as they told of spending an hour or so
shedding tears for the camera. But that is only for one scene.
Comedy is one steady grind from first to last. We fun-makers have to
hold up the business for laughs. There is no story, only the slightest
scaffolding to which the “gags” are attached and we must be
responsible for those “gags” for the most part, and furnish hilarity as
we go along.
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Along with concerns about the problems involved in performing comedy, comic
actors could never be sure of the audience’s reaction to a gag. As Constance
Talmadge wrote, “Certain dramatic situations – big love scenes, exciting rescues,
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moments of poignant suffering – are almost sure-fire, but there is nothing absolutely
sure about comedy,” and Louise Fazenda similarly stated that “you have to go a lot
farther for a laugh than you do a weep. They weep from their eyes but they laugh
from their hearts, and the farther you go the harder it is.”
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Articles such as these
that highlighted the difficulties in playing comedy and the uncertainties in audience
response implicitly praised comediennes for being able to rise above the issues
intrinsic to the genre.
Articles that discussed the comparative difficulties of comedy versus drama
sometimes referenced the stereotype that women are inherently emotional to
illustrate the challenge that comediennes faced. If women were, in fact, more
emotional then men, it would follow that actresses would be better suited to drama
than comedy. Comediennes, then, were depicted as facing hardships beyond the
standard difficulties of gags, tone and audience reaction. An article from the mid-
1910s sums up this line of thinking:
Comedy, as a rule, is the hardest sort of work of the theatrical
profession. There is an old saying that any woman can be a great
emotional actress because she is naturally emotional to start with, but
that it requires a great many brains and a world of hard work to
become a good comedienne.
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While women’s “natural” tendency toward emotion apparently makes them ideal
dramatic actresses, the implication here is that women don’t naturally possess the
brains or the fortitude to excel at comedy. This would certainly make an already
difficult genre even harder although, as noted above, the press was quick to praise
comediennes for their skillful comic technique. What could have been a reiteration
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of the sexist stereotype about women’s inability to appreciate humor, then, becomes
in these discourses an acknowledgement of comediennes’ ability to use their
intellect, determination, and natural comedic talents to succeed in a “masculine”
genre.
The popular press, then, recognized comediennes as skilled artists who were
able to succeed in a difficult genre despite a supposed natural inclination to comedy.
Very often, writers expressed their praise by comparing comediennes to popular
male comics. Alice Howell, Polly Moran, Mabel Normand, Marion Davies, Colleen
Moore, Beatrice Lillie and Marie Dressler were among the many comediennes who
were described as feminine versions of Charlie Chaplin. Harold Lloyd, Harry
Langdon and Douglas Fairbanks were also frequently mentioned in these same
terms. And so Davies “combines Charlie Chaplin’s pathos with Harry Langdon’s
drollery and adds the breeziness of Harold Lloyd for good measure,” Howell was
apparently “aspiring to be the feminine edition of Charlie Chaplin,” Normand
“proves herself the feminine and artistically concentrated essence of a Chaplin-
Fairbanks combination of humor and agility,” Lillie’s “technique at times closely
resembles her compatriot, Charlie Chaplin,” and Moore “is positively Chaplinesque
in her quite brilliant portrayal of…’Ella Cinders.’”
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While these comparisons were
meant to be complimentary, they also reinforced the notion that male comedians
were the standard by which female comics should be measured and implied that
women’s achievements could only be recognized in terms of how they compared to
men. Furthermore, the fact that male comedians are used as the standard of comic
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virtuosity supports the stereotype that there are no good female comedians.
Although the point of these comparisons was, no doubt, to praise comediennes in the
highest terms possible, those terms ultimately position them as lesser comics,
aspiring to join the ranks of Chaplin, Lloyd or Langdon. Not all comediennes were
pleased with these comparisons; as Alice Howell said, “I don’t want any bestowed
glory…. I am just as much a star in my own way as the well-known male
funmakers.”
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“Clowns with aching hearts”
In 1934 Louise Fazenda, one of the most popular and acclaimed comediennes
of the silent era, was asked by Movie Classic to explain what it takes to become a
comedian. Her response revealed a profound uneasiness toward comedy:
The making of a comedian – a woman comedian, at least – comes
from hurt feelings. No woman on earth wants to be funny. No
woman on earth wants to be laughed at. In fact, the last thing on earth
any woman wants is to be considered funny. I believe that every
comedienne is the child of an inner tragedy. I don’t know if all of the
funny men are “clowns with aching hearts,” but I do know that all
funny women are, if they’ll be honest about it –
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Fazenda’s feelings of pain and disappointment about performing comedy were well
documented throughout her career, and her image as a reluctant comedienne became
an important part of her off-screen persona.
§
But Fazenda was not the only
comedienne who was said to be ambivalent about her profession. Articles in fan
§
As I’ll discuss in Chapter 2, many of the stories about Fazenda’s uneasy relationship to comedy had
to do with her physical appearance, and the fact that her supposed homeliness was emphasized in her
comedies.
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magazines with titles such as “Is it Tragic to Be Comic?” and “The Tragedy of Being
Funny”
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situated comediennes as victims – to their circumstances, their talents, and
their looks – and films such as Show People and Ella Cinders to some degree
supported the idea that being a funny woman was cause for pity as well as praise.
This dynamic is perfectly illustrated in a Motion Picture Classic profile of Polly
Moran:
Is it tragic to be comic? Would you like to be laughed at
everywhere, all the time? No matter what you might say or do? No
matter how you might feel?
Mustn’t there be moments when a comic would like to be taken
seriously?
And especially if the comic in question is a woman. Like – well,
like Polly Moran.
What do you suppose it does feel like to have the whole world
know you as a ridiculous individual who can make it split its sides,
but never break its heart?
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These discourses indicate the uneasy marriage of two disparate lines of thought –
that femininity and comedy were incompatible, and that comediennes were skilled
artists with a natural talent for comedy. This tension shows up in interviews and
articles in which comediennes describe their uneasiness with comedy, relate their
initial dismay at discovering their comic tendencies, and discuss their desire to
“graduate” to drama or move away from “vulgar” slapstick. However, despite the
“tragic” nature of comedy, however, comediennes were often ultimately depicted as
happy with the opportunity to perform comedy, indicating a tacit approval of funny
women by the press and the comediennes themselves.
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If comediennes were born funny, they weren’t always said to be pleased with
their “natural” gifts. Reflecting the popular debates over femininity and comedy,
comediennes were sometimes described as feeling shock and anguish when they first
discovered that they were funny, as if admitting the presence of a sense of humor
was tantamount to admitting the absence of femininity. As one writer phrased it, “It
took Charlotte Greenwood six years to learn that she was funny. It took another year
to reconcile herself to the idea.”
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The fact that Greenwood would have to “reconcile
herself” to a trait that was the key to her fame and fortune indicates the extent to
which women could have internalized negative stereotypes about being funny.
Rather than seeing a sense of humor as a positive trait, it’s presented as something
that a woman must reluctantly come to terms with, like a disability. As such, certain
press discourses argue that women only turn to comedy as a last resort, like
Greenwood, who “didn’t start out in life to become a comedienne. Few comediennes
do.”
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Similarly, Louise Fazenda describes her early attempts at drama, and their
disastrously comedic results:
When I started into pictures I had the idea I could act; you know
what I mean, highbrow stuff and dramatic things, and romantic
pictures. The director gave me several bits in straight dramas but I
always managed to ball things up. I was so awkward I was always
falling over my feet or somebody else’s feet, and once I ruined a
whole scene by falling down a flight of stairs.
Things like that happened right along, until it got to be a joke that
I’d mess up any “bit” that was given me and turn it into comedy –
unconsciously. At last I was kindly but firmly told that I had missed
my vocation, which might be comedy, but which assuredly was not
drama.
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79
These stories about Greenwood and Fazenda share a common narrative of the
comedienne’s dismay over the discovery of her humor, and eventual reluctant
acceptance. As such, they encapsulate both sides of the debates of women’s humor –
the idea that women could not (and should not) be funny, and the notion that some
women are born comediennes. That Greenwood and Fazenda were both slapstick
comediennes is important to note, as their aptitude for physical comedy would have
positioned them, in the press and in the public’s imagination, further from popular
conceptions of ideal femininity than light comediennes. Their reported consternation
when faced with their comic tendencies could be explained by this gap between ideal
femininity and the apparently degraded femininity that these comediennes saw
themselves as possessing.
**
“A stepping stone to the heavier dramatic roles”
Not surprisingly, given the prejudices against women performing comedy,
many actresses who began their careers as comediennes were only too glad to
“graduate” to drama. Like the main characters in Ella Cinders, Show People and
The Extra Girl, comedy for some comediennes was depicted as a sort of generic
ghetto, a starting point that must be abandoned as soon as possible if one had any
hopes of becoming a legitimate actress. The fact that this general predisposition
against comedy existed alongside descriptions of comedy as more difficult and
requiring more skill than drama, and stories of comic actresses who cheerfully
**
As I will discuss in Chapter 2, discourses about comediennes’ shock at discovering they were funny
were often accompanied by stories about their unhappy realization that they were not beautiful.
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rejected drama in favor of comedy, indicates the depth of the ambivalence felt by the
press, the film industry, audiences, and the actresses themselves toward the genre. A
quote by Fay Tincher sums up these feelings:
I hoped to again play “heavies” or even ingénue leads, but my
reputation as a comedienne always caught up with me and finally
forced me to play in two-reel funnicisms.
Now at last I am to appear in roles I really care for. Screen farce
has never appealed to me. Comedy is, at best, a transitory
entertainment that seldom lingers in a person’s mind after it is over.
Drama is a different matter. Drama affects – for drama is life. That is
why I want to play in dramas again – I want to portray life.
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Tincher’s expressed feelings toward comedy approach contempt, as she describes
being “forced” to appear in comedy shorts and dismisses comedy as “transitory
entertainment.” This disdain certainly wasn’t limited to female comics, as comedy
in general was often thought to be a less desirable genre, whether it featured the
work of men or women. But when understood alongside the existing notion that
most women were naturally suited to drama, and that drama was a more fitting genre
for properly feminine women, one can see that the stakes for women performing
comedy were higher than for men. The supposed incompatibility of femininity and
humor, coupled with the general perception of comedy as lowbrow, led to the
uncomfortable possibility of comediennes being regarded as lacking in both
femininity and class. It’s not surprising, then, that many comediennes echoed
Tincher in expressing their eagerness to abandon the slums of comedy for the lofty
perches of refined drama. Dorothy Devore told Motion Picture Magazine, “Of
course, I do not want to remain in comedies always…. So many comedy girls have
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stepped right into dramatic work and that is where you’ll see me some day,” and The
Morning Telegraph let readers know that Bebe Daniels “accepted less money than
she was getting with [Pathé] in order to get away from comedies and get into the
serious side of picture making.”
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A 1924 article on Devore spelled out the strategy
of many actresses who started in comedy, by describing her as “another of the young
women film stars who is going to use her training in the comedy school as a stepping
stone to the heavier dramatic roles in the silent drama.”
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Along with reporting on
comediennes’ desires to leave comedy, the press often implicitly passed judgment on
the genre though the language it used, referring to Constance Talmadge’s pictures as
“mere refined comedy” and Gale Henry as “just a comedienne,” and describing
dramatic films as “important pictures” and “more ambitious things,” and a dramatic
performer as “a real actress.”
89
Some comediennes expressed an awareness of the unique difficulties that
female comics faced as they tried to reconcile their gender with their genre, and
blamed this for the fact that male comedians were both more numerous and more
successful in Hollywood. Bebe Daniels told a reporter, “I don’t believe a girl can
ever attain the success that a man can as a comedian. That is one of the reasons why
I wanted to play the serious roles., ” and Constance Talmadge apparently agreed with
Daniels’ somewhat pessimistic assessment:
People often wonder why so few actresses in Hollywood take up
comedy as their métier. While there are fully a dozen well-known
comedians, the screen comediennes who have reached stardom are
few indeed. It is probably this very necessity for being a little
ridiculous to get good comic scenes that results in there being so
many more comedians than comediennes. Women are afraid of being
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laughed at – no matter how good-natured the merriment – and look
forward to graduating as soon as possible from the comedy class.
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The reason Talmadge gives for women’s lack of interest in performing comedy goes
back to the idea that the genre is inherently unfeminine. “Being laughed at” – as the
instigator, rather than the butt, of the joke – requires a willingness to put oneself on
display and demand attention, to be “a little ridiculous.” But unlike the passive and
sexually objectified, “to-be-looked-at” mode of display that Laura Mulvey describes
as the inescapable position for women in classical Hollywood cinema, comic display
is aggressive and assertive.
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The necessity of – and anxieties about – stepping
outside the bounds of traditional femininity to participate in what many considered to
be a lowbrow genre could certainly have been a factor in so many comediennes
leaving comedy for drama, and is a demonstration of the pervasiveness of concerns
about the comedy’s supposed incompatibility with femininity.
“The comedy of ideas”
The ambivalence that many comediennes felt towards performing comedy
was not only evidenced by their high rate of defection to dramatic films. Many
comediennes built their entire careers around comedy films, making few, if any,
dramas. However, just as some saw comedy as a whole as a sort of generic ghetto,
others perceived a hierarchy among different types of comedy, with light comedy
viewed as far more respectable than slapstick. As I discussed above, women had a
complicated relationship to slapstick – although physical comedy was considered
lowbrow and at odds with proper feminine behavior, slapstick comediennes such as
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Louise Fazenda and Polly Moran were popular with audiences. Until the mid-1910s
slapstick was by far the predominate mode of comedy found on-screen, but by the
late ‘teens longer film lengths and the growing reliance on intertitles for jokes
allowed for more complicated plots, and comedy based more on situation than on
gags and stunts. Just as the attractions-based cinema of the early 20
th
century was
eclipsed by longer narrative films, and the shocks and thrills of the serial-queen
melodramas eventually fell out of style, slapstick routines were ultimately absorbed
into situation-based comedies.
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Both male and female comics continued to use
physical comedy in their films throughout the 1920s, but by the late 1910s
comediennes were increasingly vocal about their desire to leave slapstick for
“comedy-drama,”
††
or “comedies with a little drama, a laugh, followed by a tear
perhaps, and capped with a laugh.”
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While comediennes of the 1910s had shown
that audiences would accept women performing slapstick, by the end of the decade
female comics were clearly interested in finding a way to reconcile their comedy
work with popular conceptions of femininity.
Comediennes frequently referred to “refinement” and “dignity” when
discussing their preference for comedy-drama over slapstick. Mabel Normand
explained in 1916 that,
She wants to be a trifle more serious and dignified than they have
allowed her to be in the Keystone comedies. She says comedy does
not altogether consist of falling downstairs and throwing custard pies,
and she believes that she can be just as funny in more dignified
situations.
94
††
The phrase “comedy-drama” was frequently used in the press to describe light comedies, films that
relied more heavily on plot and situation than slapsticks, and that blended pathos with comedy.
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Dorothy Devore echoed this sentiment when she explained that “A starring
comedienne cannot afford to be anything but a perfect lady,” and “the kicking,
punching and slapping which an audience ‘eats up’ when a man is the purveyor or
recipient just doesn’t go with a leading woman on the screen.”
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Both Normand and
Devore position slapstick comedy as undignified and unladylike, recalling debates
about whether physical comedy was appropriate for women and whether lowbrow
humor had a place in refined cinema. The much-maligned pie became a symbol for
coarse and unseemly humor: the extent of comediennes’ opposition to broad
physical comedy can be seen in Fay Tincher’s forceful reply to a reporter who asks if
she will make movies “of the ‘custard pie’ variety.”
“Never!” Fay Tincher declared. “A laugh isn’t precious enough to
resort to that (and besides I don’t think Mr. Hoover would approve of
such a waste of pies.) I shall strive to get them – the laughs, I mean,
legitimately or not at all. Of course comedy-drama is my aim…”
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Tincher’s response implies that the laughs generated by slapstick comedy are
illegitimate, and therefore unthinkable for a woman of dignity to pursue. This line of
thinking represents a compromise of sorts for female comics. By denigrating
slapstick as lowbrow and coarse and simultaneously praising comedy-drama as
dignified and refined, comediennes could continue to perform comedy while
retaining an acceptably feminine appearance. For comediennes wary about
slapstick’s link to suspect femininity, light comedy and comedy-drama offered a
more refined alternative.
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In many cases, the difference between slapstick and comedy-drama was
context, as Tincher explained in 1916:
True comedy …[is] just in the situation itself – in the meaning of the
situation. For example, there’s nothing funny about getting hit in the
face with a pie, if there’s no reason for it. No, it’s the innocent person
getting in wrong somewhere thru [sic] some blunder he isn’t
conscious of, but which the audience knows all about, that makes a
thing really funny.
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Just as narrative was gradually being privileged over thrills in the cinema as a whole,
in comedy situation was taking precedence over gags. Anita Loos described this as a
“comedy of ideas,” in which “The action grows naturally out of the thoughts and
emotions of the main characters, as in any literature.” Or, as Constance Talmadge
put it, “in the old days the best actors were the ones who could climb, and jump, and
run best, but now Miss Loos’ scenarios let us jump only to conclusions.”
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This
reference to literature certainly recalls the ongoing efforts within the motion picture
industry, described above, to redefine itself as refined entertainment. It’s not
surprising, then, that comediennes would make a similar move from attraction-based
slapstick to narrative-based comedy-drama. While those comediennes who were
closely linked to slapstick had a more difficult time leaving their old antics behind –
Gale Henry sighed that she was “trying to get away from the pie-throwing type of
picture…but it seems as if the comedy fan never tires of an artistic fall off a cliff, or
a good free-for-all chase”
99
– others were able to easily transition to the “comedy of
ideas,” and ultimately situation-based comedy-drama would become the dominant
mode of comedy.
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“Comedies, always comedies”
In 1916 Fay Tincher described to Motion Picture Magazine the qualities
necessary to succeed in the movie business:
A girl has got to have a sense of humor in order to get into Motion
Pictures. No one ever succeeded at the first shot. You have got to
keep trying and trying until the ordeal becomes funny, and after a
while you’ll land. If you take it too seriously, you will find it a cruel
experience.
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While a sense of humor could be seen as troublesome for women, as Tincher points
out it could also be beneficial. As writers, critics, social conservatives, and even
some comediennes were debating the range and value of women’s humor, many
female comics made it clear that they welcomed their comic talents. Newspapers
and fan magazines often described comediennes’ pleasure in performing comedy and
in making people laugh, and paradoxically, even comediennes who reportedly
wanted to abandon comedy in favor of drama were, at times, said to be delighted
with comic work. While the most obvious reason for this contradiction has to do
with the needs of press agents and studio publicity departments when promoting a
new film – an actress’s relative love of comedy or drama would certainly rise or fall
depending on the genre of her latest picture – it also reflects the broader societal
ambivalence surrounding women and comedy. Very few, if any, comediennes were
said to be entirely comfortable with comedy throughout their careers. Instead they
were generally depicted as conflicted in some way, whether uneasy about performing
physical comedy, uncomfortable with their character makeup and costumes, or afraid
of looking ridiculous in public, none of which is surprising, given how controversial
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the discourses surrounding women’s humor were. If simply having a sense of humor
raised doubts about a woman’s femininity, then actively engaging in comic
performances could be seen as an affront to and unraveling of traditional gender
roles. For the press, fans and comediennes to show a certain degree of ambivalence
or unease about female comics, then, is understandable. At the same time, the fact
that many comediennes embraced comedy can be read as an act of rebellion,
however minor. Even if their stated love of comedy was followed up, on the release
of their next dramatic film, by lengthy discussions of their preference for drama, and
even if they were depicted as “clowns with aching hearts” longing to have their
dramatic talents discovered, when comediennes were said to enjoy performing
comedy they were publicly declaring that women could be unapologetically funny,
actively creating humor rather than being the passive butt of the joke. As Tincher’s
quote above illustrates, humor could be an important asset for women.
The image of the “tragic comedienne” – the performer who longs to trade the
indignities of comedy for the refinement of drama – was repeated in the press so
often that it became a sort of stereotype. As such, the press was quick to draw
attention to comediennes who contradicted that stereotype in claiming that they were
happy with comedy. Colleen Moore’s reported preference for comedy over drama
was said to be “reversing the familiar situation which has robbed the comedy
concerns of so many of their leading luminaries.”
101
In explaining her affinity for
comedy, Moore referenced the notion that women were inherently more emotional
than men:
88
I would rather play comedy than anything else, even if it is more
difficult. Practically all women are emotional. They can cry and
pound the door and create a rumpus, but few can make people laugh.
That is what I want to do. A genuine comedy scene must be studied
and worked and felt.
102
Rather than acquiescing to her “feminine” emotions, Moore embraces the challenge
that comedy supposedly presents, and in so doing she implicitly questions the need
for women to abide by societal restrictions regarding what women can and can’t do.
If, as many people thought, women were biologically programmed to be emotional
and therefore suited to drama, then Moore’s rejection of drama and clear preference
for comedy is, ultimately, a rejection of biologically determined gender roles. Moore
was clearly aware of the fact that women were supposed to be emotional, and
therefore drawn to drama, but by choosing comedy she was refuting that idea.
Certainly, Moore’s stated preference for comedy was not a grand statement in
support of women’s rights or their changing place in society. It was, however a
subtle but clear message that women didn’t have to passively accept the gender roles
that were assigned to them; but that they could create roles for themselves based on
their own talents and inclinations.
This is reinforced by other comediennes who similarly expressed a
preference for comedy over drama. At the conclusion of a 1920 interview with Gale
Henry, a Photoplay writer “realized with amazement that the interview seemed to be
nearing an end and Miss Henry hadn’t said a word about how she longed to make
really big, serious pictures…. Gale Henry was content to stick to comedy.”
103
Another writer noted that Constance Talmadge “refused to live up to the tradition
89
that all motion picture actresses long to make massive productions of the classics,”
and that she was, as she herself put it, “pretty satisfied with the parts I have.”
104
Recalling her beginnings in drama with D.W. Griffith, Colleen Moore said that she
“didn’t really care for tragic parts”:
I have always believed that laughter is so much greater than tears. It
is easy enough to make your audience cry by mere experience and
ability, but the gift of humour [sic] comes spontaneously and to few.
I have always coveted it for myself. That is why I was glad of the
opportunity to put my ambitions to the test under Al Christie, and I
enjoyed every moment of my time with him, as a pure comedienne.
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Certainly these stories about comediennes who were satisfied with their line of work
were complicated by the many stories of comediennes who couldn’t wait to leave the
genre behind. Much of the discourse surrounding women who “graduated” to drama
and/or comedy-drama involved consideration of external factors – whether
comediennes would be regarded by others as unrefined or unfeminine if they stayed
in comedy or slapstick. When the press described women who were content to play
comedy, however, they often wrote of their personal satisfaction with the genre, an
approach that makes sense given the claims of many fan magazines that comedians,
both male and female, were born funny. Comedy, in this viewpoint, was a logical
and fulfilling mode of expression for people with an innate sense of humor, a view
that perhaps seems obvious, but which was somewhat revolutionary for women
given the very vocal critics who felt that proper ladies couldn’t and shouldn’t be
funny. A declaration by Charlotte Greenwood, then, that “I love my work because I
love to hear my audiences laugh and I love to laugh myself” or by Constance
Talmadge that the films she wants to make are “Comedies, always comedies”
106
90
confirms that women could unapologetically enjoy and engage in comedy, despite
concerns about dignity or femininity. In fact, as Fay Tincher’s quote about needing a
sense of humor to succeed in motion pictures indicates, humor could be an effective
way for women to face challenges and adversity. Fan magazines encouraged female
fans to take their cues from comediennes and similarly see humor as a valuable asset.
In a profile of Marie Dressler Photoplay told its readers, “If you get depressed
because there are wrinkles just beginning to show around your eyes take a look at
Marie. Sure, she has wrinkles. They got there from laughing,” and Motion Picture
Classic assured fans that Polly Moran “is a woman who may find it, now and then,
tragic to be comic, but who is wise enough to know that it is a good deal more comic
to be tragic.”
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By highlighting the fact that many comediennes enjoyed performing
comedy and appreciated humor, fan magazines and comediennes themselves were
contradicting pervasive sexist discourses about women and comedy, and showing
fans that a sense of humor was a welcome, and even admirable, quality.
Conclusion
The very presence of women performing comedy on stage and in motion
pictures was a strong argument against those who said that women were incapable of
understanding and appreciating humor. While some critics used essentialist
arguments to prove that women’s close link to nature meant that humor was out of
their reach, others used those same types of arguments to claim that women’s
inherent sensitivity and highly-charged emotions meant that they could only enjoy
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refined and gentle humor. Comediennes contradicted both of these notions, as they
not only performed comedy, they performed rough-and-tumble, lowbrow slapstick,
they very type of comedy that was assumed to offend women’s delicate sensibilities.
By contradicting essentialist notions of what kind of comedy (if any) women
were supposed to enjoy, comediennes were broadening the public’s understanding of
what women were capable of, and how they should behave. While the idealized
femininity posited by critics of women’s humor is dignified and refined, supportive
rather than creative, and passive rather than active, the type of femininity that
comediennes performed, both on-screen and off-, was assertive, intelligent and
unruly. Although many comediennes were said to be ambivalent about comedy,
their ambivalence reflected broader concerns in American society about appropriate
behavior for women. The fact that so many actresses chose to stay in comedy,
despite any concerns they many have had about the genre, would have sent a strong
message to fans that women didn’t have to restrict themselves to appropriate
behavior as defined by others, or try to conform to an idealized and outmoded
conception of femininity. By performing, enjoying, and succeeding in comedy,
comediennes showed that women could safely step outside the confines of traditional
femininity and find a new definition of femininity that suited their own individual
proclivity and talents.
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Chapter 1 Endnotes
1
Constant Coquelin, “Have Women a Sense of Humor?” Harper’s Bazar, January
12, 1901, 67-69; Christopher Hitchens, “Why Women Aren’t Funny,” Vanity Fair,
January 2007, 54.
2
Grace Lee Mack, “The Girl Who Put Stripes in Comedy,” Photoplay Journal, June
1919, 37.
3
David Bianculli, “Comedy Turns To Horror As Lewis Pans Female Comics,” New
York Daily News, 15 February 2000, 82; W. Speers, “Jerry Lewis’ Odd Remarks
About Female Comics,” The Philadelphia Inquirer, 15 February 2000, D02; Michael
Posner, “The Day the Clown Bombed,” The Globe and Mail, 19 February 2000, R1.
4
Glenn Collins, “Public Lives,” The New York Times, 18 February 2000, B-2;
“Names and Faces,” The Washington Post, 19 February 2000, C03; “For The Kids,
This Ladies' Man Is Sorry,” USA Today, 21 February 2000, 2D.
5
CNN Transcript – Larry King Live: Jerry Lewis Discusses Hosting His 50
th
Telethon, original airdate September 1, 2000,
http://www.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/0009/01/lkl.00.html (accessed April 2008).
6
CNN Transcript – Larry King Live.
7
Collins, “Public Lives.”
8
Hitchens, 54.
9
Reginald Blyth, Humour in English Literature, quoted in Regina Barreca, ed., Last
Laughs, Perspectives on Women and Comedy, (New York: Gordon and Breach,
1988), 4.
10
Barbara Welter, “The Cult of True Womanhood: 1820-1860,” American
Quarterly, Vol. 18, Issue 2, Part 1, Summer, 1966, 151-174; Nancy A. Walker, A
Very Serious Thing: Women’s Humor and American Culture, (Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 1988), 27.
11
Quoted in Henry Jenkins, What Made Pistachio Nuts? Early Sound Comedy and
the Vaudeville Aesthetic, (New York: Columbia University Press, 1992), 256.
12
Quoted in Linda Martin and Kerry Segrave, Women in Comedy, (Seacaucus, NJ:
Citadel Press, 1986), 13.
93
13
Henri Bergson, “Laughter,” in Comedy, Wylie Sypher, ed., (Baltimore: The Johns
Hopkins University Press, 1956), 63.
14
Hitchens, 54.
15
Mack Sennett, “The Psychology of Film Comedy,” Motion Picture Classic,
November 1918, 70.
16
Nancy Walker, “Toward Solidarity: Women’s Humor and Group Identity,” in
Women’s Comic Visions, June Sochen, ed. (Detroit: Wayne State University Press,
1991), 59.
17
Walker, A Very Serious Thing, 43.
18
Bergson, 148, 187.
19
Sigmund Freud, Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious, trans. and ed. James
Strachey, (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1960), 115, 118.
20
Robert J. Burdette, “Have Women a Sense of Humor?” Harper’s Bazar, July
1902, 597-598, quoted in Jenkins, 257.
21
Alan Dale, Comedy Is a Man in Trouble: Slapstick in American Movies,
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000), 122.
22
“’Comedian’ Girls Jump to the Front,” n.p., June 8, 1902, quoted in Susan A.
Glenn, Female Spectacle: The Theatrical Roots of Modern Feminism, (Cambridge:
Harvard University Press, 2000), 46.
23
Glenn, Female Spectacle, 58-59.
24
George Jean Nathan, “Bea Lillie an Exception to Sad Rule,” Los Angeles
Examiner, 19 October 1952, Beatrice Lillie clipping file, AMPAS.
25
Coquelin, 68.
26
M. Alison Kibler, Rank Ladies: Gender and Cultural Hierarchy in American
Vaudeville, (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1999), 59; also M.
Alison Kibler, “Nothing Succeeds Like Excess: Lillian Shaw’s Comedy and
Sexuality on the Keith Vaudeville Circuit,” in Performing Gender and Comedy:
Theories, Texts and Contexts, Shannon Hengen, ed., (Amsterdam: Gordon and
Breach, 1998), 71.
94
27
J. Francis Perrett, “The Colleen of the Movies,” Extension Magazine, November
1926, Colleen Moore scrapbook #15, AMPAS.
28
Coquelin, 67.
29
Coquelin, 68.
30
Coquelin, 68; Burdette, quoted in Kibler, Rank Ladies, 59.
31
Beth Brown, “Making Movies for Women,” Moving Picture World, 26 March
1927, 342.
32
Mack Sennett, “The Psychology of Film Comedy,” 70.
33
Glenn, Female Spectacle, 43.
34
Glenn, Female Spectacle, 41; Kibler, Rank Ladies, 56.
35
For vaudeville’s efforts at refinement, see Kibler, Rank Ladies and Robert W.
Snyder, The Voice of the City: Vaudeville and Popular Culture in New York,
(Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 1989). For cinema’s drive to respectability, see William
Uricchio and Roberta E. Pearson, Reframing Culture: The Case of the Vitagraph
Quality Films, (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993), Shelley Stamp, Movie-
Struck Girls: Women and Motion Picture Culture After the Nickelodeon, (Princeton,
NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000), and Lee Grieveson, Policing Cinema:
Movies and Censorship in Early Twentieth-Century America, (Berkeley, University
of California Press, 2004).
36
Mabel Normand, “How to Be a Comedienne,” New York Dramatic Mirror, 19
June 1920, MNSB 141-142.
37
Unidentified clipping, 28 October 1916, Charlotte Greenwood clipping file, NYPL
38
Margaret Denny, “How Fay Tincher Regards Her Profession,” Motion Picture
Magazine, August 1916, 77.
39
Jolo, “Tillie’s Tomato Surprise,” Variety, 1 October 1915, 19.
40
“Jane” ad, Charlotte Greenwood clipping file, AMPAS (emphasis in original);
“Jane” Next Oliver Morosco Release, Moving Picture World, 20 November 1915,
1515.
41
Peter Milne, “Tillie Wakes Up,” Motion Picture News, 3 February 1917, 759;
“Tillie Wakes Up,” Wid’s Film Daily, 25 January 1917, 60.
95
42
James R. Quirk, “The Girl on the Cover,” Photoplay, August 1915, 41.
43
“Experimental Marriage,” Wid’s Daily, 30 March 1919, 16.
44
“The Coming Film Comedy of Ideas,” The Christian Science Monitor, 4
November 1919, 16.
45
“The Coming Film Comedy of Ideas,” 16.
46
Jack Gaines, “Her Wild Oat,” Filmograph, 3 December 1927, Colleen Moore
scrapbook #18, AMPAS.
47
Untitled review, Judge, Colleen Moore scrapbook #13, AMPAS.
48
“A Need,” Film Daily, 3 February 1924, Colleen Moore scrapbook #2, AMPAS.
49
Palmer Smith, “Three Farcical Offerings With Two Good – Hendricks and
Gunboat Smith Emerge – Paul Leni on Production Abroad – The ‘Unhappy Ending’
Test – First National Shuns the Stage,” New York World, 14 June 1926, Colleen
Moore scrapbook #13, AMPAS.
50
“Celluloid,” “Most Screen Comedians are Sheer Individualists,” Toronto Star, 16
April 1927, Colleen Moore scrapbook #15, AMPAS.
51
“Alice Howell in New Comedies,” Moving Picture World, 19 May 1917, Alice
Howell clipping file, NYPL.
52
Allen Corliss, “Fazenda – Comic Venus,” Photoplay, April 1918, 67.
53
“Kitchen Komedy,” unsourced, 20 March, 1918, Louise Fazenda file, Robinson
Locke scrapbook, NYPL.
54
“Kitchen Komedy.”
55
Untitled, Photoplay, January 1919, Polly Moran clipping file, NYPL
56
Julia Harpman, “The Inside Dope on Movie Stars – Mabel Normand Victim of An
Unkind Fate,” 29 June 1924, Mack Sennett Collection, Mabel Normand folder,
AMPAS.
57
“Automaniacs,” Photoplay, June 1918, Alice Howell clipping file, NYPL.
58
Julian Johnson, “The Shadow Stage,” Photoplay, April 1919, 68.
96
59
“Ladeez and Ge’men, in This Corner”, ca. 1938, Louise Fazenda clipping file,
AMPAS.
60
“Three’s a Crowd,” Photoplay, June 1930, Polly Moran clipping file, AMPAS;
“Norma’s Sister Constance,” Chicago News, 7 September 1916, Constance
Talmadge clipping file, NYPL; “Alice Howell in ‘Alice in Society,’” Moving Picture
Weekly, 28 October 1916, 26; untitled, Photoplay, March 1914, Louise Fazenda file,
Robinson Locke scrapbook, NYPL; untitled, Motion Picture Magazine, April 1917,
Louise Fazenda file, Robinson Locke scrapbook, NYPL; untitled, The Morning
Telegraph, 10 December 1910, Charlotte Greenwood clipping file, NYPL;
unsourced, ca. 1916, Charlotte Greenwood clipping file, NYPL.
61
Gladys Hall, “Is it Tragic to Be Comic?” Motion Picture Classic, May 1931, 91.
62
Unsourced, Louise Fazenda clipping file, NYPL.
63
Cal York, “You Can Never Be an Actor,” Photoplay, July 1928, 78; Variety, 25
April 1928, The Patsy production file, AMPAS.
64
“A Captivating Colleen,” Pictures and Picturegoer, October 1924, 41, Colleen
Moore scrapbook #2, AMPAS.
65
“Don’t Fight Against Nature,” ca. 1917, Charlotte Greenwood clipping file,
NYPL.
66
Helen Carlisle, “Enter and Exit, Smiling,” Motion Picture Magazine, December
1926, 115.
67
Mlle Chic, “Alice Howell – Funniest Woman in Pictures,” Moving Picture Weekly,
13 May 1916, 31.
68
“Alice Howell in ‘Alice in Society,’” Moving Picture Weekly, 28 October 1916,
26.
69
Unidentified clipping, ca. 1922, Charlotte Greenwood clipping file, NYPL.
70
Mabel Normand, “How to Get Into the Movies,” Movie Weekly, 25 March 1922,
MNSB, 289.
71
Constance Talmadge, “The Tragedy of Being Funny,” Motion Picture Magazine,
August 1927, 54.
72
Harry Carr, “Putting the Fizz in Fazenda,” Motion Picture Magazine, January
1919, 109.
97
73
Mabel Normand, “How to Be a Comedienne,” New York Dramatic Mirror, 19
June 1920, MNSB 141; “How to Be Funny,” unsourced, 26 August 1915, Polly
Moran clipping file, NYPL; Gladys Hall, “Have YOU Got the Makings of a
COMEDIAN?” Movie Classic, December 1934, 30.
74
Photo caption, Motion Picture Magazine, October 1919, 28; Unidentified clipping,
ca. 1922, Charlotte Greenwood clipping file, NYPL; Colleen Moore, Silent Star,
(Garden City, NY: Doubleday & Company, Inc., 1968), 174.
75
“Louise Back in Comedy,” The Morning Telegraph, 6 April 1924, Louise Fazenda
clipping file, AMPAS.
76
Constance Talmadge, “The Tragedy of Being Funny,” Motion Picture Magazine,
August 1927, 54; Harry Carr, “Putting the Fizz in Fazenda,” Motion Picture
Magazine, January 1919, 109.
77
Unidentified clipping, ca. 1915, Charlotte Greenwood clipping file, NYPL.
78
Regina Cannon, “Quality Street,” New York American, 25 October 1927, Marion
Davies clipping file, NYPL; “Automaniacs” review, Photoplay, June 1918, Alice
Howell clipping file, NYPL; “Mikey” review, The Moving Picture World, 10 August
1918, 880; “Exit Smiling” review, Moving Picture World, 20 November 1926, 166;
Alma Whitaker, “Ella Cinders Blends Tragedy With Humor,” Los Angeles Times, 30
May 1926, C17.
79
“Two-Reel Trip to Joy Planet,” ca. 1917, Alice Howell clipping file, NYPL.
80
Hall, “Have YOU Got the Makings of a COMEDIAN?” 30.
81
“Is it Tragic to Be Comic?” 48; “The Tragedy of Being Funny,” 54.
82
“Is it Tragic to Be Comic?” 48.
83
Unidentified clipping, ca. 1916, Charlotte Greenwood clipping file, NYPL.
84
Unidentified clipping, Charlotte Greenwood clipping file, NYPL.
85
Emma Lindsay Squier, “’Pies is Pizen,’” Photoplay Art, September 1918, 4.
86
“Fay Tincher – An Ingenuish Vampire,” unsourced, Fay Tincher clipping file,
NYPL.
98
87
Maude Cheatham, “A Toiling Lily,” Motion Picture Magazine, March 1921, 54;
untitled, The Morning Telegraph, 3 February 1924, Bebe Daniels clipping file,
AMPAS.
88
“Comedienne Sighs For Other Worlds,” Los Angeles Times, 4 May 1924, 24.
89
“Two Weeks,” Dramatic Mirror, 5 February 1920, 181; “A Look at Mehitabel
Lactea,” Cleveland Leader, 24 June 1917, Gale Henry clipping file, NYPL;
“Coiffure Note: Louise Fazenda Still Wears Those Old Pigtails,” Herald-Tribune,
23 January 1938, Louise Fazenda clipping file, NYPL; unidentified photo caption,
Dorothy Devore clipping file, NYPL; Maude Cheatham, “A Toiling Lily,” Motion
Picture Magazine, March 1921, 54.
90
The Morning Telegraph, 3 February 1924, Bebe Daniels clipping file, AMPAS;
“The Tragedy of Being Funny,” 54.
91
Laura Mulvey, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” in Gerald Mast, Marshall
Cohen, and Leo Braudy, eds., Film Theory and Criticism, Fourth Edition, (New
York: Oxford University Press, 1992), 746-757; on comedy’s inherent
aggressiveness, see Kathleen Rowe, The Unruly Woman: Gender and the Genres of
Laughter, (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1995), Frances Gray, Women and
Laughter, (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1994), Barreca, Last
Laughs, Walker, A Very Serious Thing.
92
See Jenkins, What Made Pistachio Nuts?
93
Grace Lee Mack, “The Girl Who Put Stripes in Comedy,” Photoplay Journal, June
1919, Fay Tincher clipping file, NYPL.
94
“They Will Not Remain in Comedy,” Film Fun, May 1916, MNSB, 94.
95
“The Big Four of Educational,” Moving Picture World, 23 April 1927, 709.
96
Grace Lee Mack, “The Girl Who Put Stripes in Comedy,” Photoplay Journal, June
1919, Fay Tincher clipping file, NYPL.
97
Margaret Denny, “How Fay Tincher Regards Her Profession,” Motion Picture
Magazine, August 1916, 78.
98
“The Coming Film Comedy of Ideas,” The Christian Science Monitor, 14
November 1919, Constance Talmadge clipping file, NYPL.
99
Dorothy Faith Webster, “The Bear Facts About Gale Henry,” Photoplay, January
1920, Gale Henry clipping file, NYPL.
99
100
Untitled, Motion Picture, October 1916, Fay Tincher clipping file, NYPL.
101
Untitled, Photoplay Journal, ca. 1920, Colleen Moore clipping file, NYPL.
102
“Colleen Moore Likes Comedy Best,” Pittsburgh Post, 21 June 1925, Colleen
Moore scrapbook #2, AMPAS.
103
Dorothy Faith Webster, “The Bear Facts About Gale Henry,” Photoplay, January
1920, Gale Henry clipping file, NYPL.
104
“The Coming Film Comedy of Ideas,” The Christian Science Monitor, 14
November 1919, Constance Talmadge clipping file, NYPL.
105
“A Captivating Colleen,” Pictures and Picturegoer, October 1924, 41, Colleen
Moore scrapbook #2, AMPAS.
106
Unidentified clipping, Charlotte Greenwood clipping file, NYPL; Walter Vogdes,
“Twenty Minutes with Constance,” Select Pictures Magazine, ca. 1918, 5, Constance
Talmadge clipping file, AMPAS.
107
Katherine Albert, “Two True Troupers – Louise & Marie,” Photoplay, March
1930, 35; Gladys Hall, “Is It Tragic to Be Comic?” Moving Picture Classic, May
1931, 93.
100
Chapter Two
“An Inferiority Complex in a One-Piece Bathing Suit”
Beauty, Femininity and Comedy
“Beauty is not essential in a comedienne, it is merely an asset.”
--Louise Fazenda, 1916
1
In a tongue-in-cheek 1928 Photoplay interview with Marie Dressler, the
comedienne is asked the question “What is beauty?” After several nonsensical
answers – “beauty is a second-hand lawn mower – beauty is a pale green ice-cream
cone – beauty is a theater ticket without a stub” – she settles on a definition that
seems to satisfy her: “’Whoa!’ Marie called. ‘I’ve got it! Beauty is an inferiority
complex in a one-piece bathing suit!’”
2
What exactly this means is certainly open to
interpretation. What is worthy of examination here is the fact that Dressler would be
asked this question at all. Like a great many comediennes in silent film, particularly
those performing physical comedy, Dressler was not known for her beauty.
However, beauty – whether lack of beauty, desire for beauty or hiding of natural
beauty – was a frequent topic in discussions about silent comediennes.
The concepts of beauty and femininity appear in varied and complex ways in
popular discourses surrounding silent comediennes. More than in other genres,
comedy created a place for women of all physical types to perform in both featured
and leading roles. In this way, comediennes offered a model of femininity that ran
counter to the narrow images of beauty perpetuated by Hollywood, but the potential
was complicated by a number of factors. The type of comedy performed by a silent
101
comedienne was in many ways determined by her appearance, with conventionally
attractive comediennes appearing in light comedies, while women who were
considered less attractive primarily made slapstick comedies or appeared in character
roles, often in support of other, prettier comediennes, a strategy that reinforced the
prevalent stereotype that women could either be pretty or funny, but not both.
Furthermore, comediennes who were considered less attractive were very frequently
positioned as worthy of pity because of their appearance, as fan magazines and
studio publicity presented these women as tragic figures who suffered greatly
because of their inability to fit into popular conceptions of beauty and femininity. In
many ways these discourses perpetuate Hollywood’s obsession with female beauty,
and support the idea that “success” as a woman means living up to high standards of
feminine attractiveness.
At the same time, comediennes helped to put forward the idea that beauty
was not an essential component of femininity, and furthermore that beauty – along
with other “typically” feminine traits such as modesty, grace and sensitivity – was
not automatically available to all women. When slapstick comediennes donned
outrageous and unflattering costumes and arranged their hair and makeup to
emphasize their less attractive features they were embracing their non-normative
appearance and complicating the notion that women should aspire to be beautiful.
Furthermore, the theme of transformation used in a number of comedies exposes the
work required to acquire and maintain beauty, and shows that beauty could be a
performed, rather than a natural, trait.
102
Beauty or Comedy
As I discussed in Chapter 1, comedy has long been considered antithetical to
femininity. Stereotypically feminine traits, such as refinement, morality, and a
tendency to be emotional rather than intellectual were thought to preclude women
from enjoying or participating in humor. Another essential marker of femininity was
beauty, which was similarly considered incompatible with a sense of humor
(although it was not necessarily seen as a cause of women’s lack of humor). If
beauty was a fundamental element of ideal femininity, and if comedy was
incompatible with femininity, then it followed that comedy was incompatible with
beauty as well. This pretty/funny dichotomy can be seen in silent comedy in two
significant ways – the fact that different types of comedy were available to women
depending on their appearance, and that comediennes who engaged in slapstick often
used exaggerated costumes and makeup to make themselves appear less attractive.
Throughout the silent era there was a distinction between funny women and
pretty women, a distinction that began on the stage. Susan Glenn points out that
female comics in the theater “arrived on the scene at precisely the moment when
beauty was becoming something of a cult in the world of popular entertainment.”
3
Around the turn of the century beautiful women gained fame on the stage and in
photographs and magazine illustrations just for being beautiful, while stage
comediennes served as a counterpoint to the stage beauties, helping to cement the
demarcation between beauty and comedy in the public consciousness. This division
103
of labor continued in motion pictures, as the type of comedy women performed in
silent film had a great deal to do with their physical appearance: whether a
comedienne engaged in slapstick or light comedy was based, to a great extent, on
whether she was conventionally attractive. While some comediennes who were
considered pretty, such as Mabel Normand, appeared in slapstick, those who were
considered unattractive seldom, if ever, appeared in leading roles in light or romantic
comedies. As I discussed in Chapter 1, light comedies were the privileged form of
comedy – they were generally multi-reel films that foregrounded plot and character,
with very little suggestion of physical comedy. Often based on stage plays or novels,
light comedies were described as “refined” or “high-class,” as opposed to slapstick,
which was generally considered to be more lowbrow. The fact that refined comedy
was reserved for more attractive comediennes makes sense given that this type of
comedy was more in line with “feminine” humor than rough-and-tumble, lowbrow
slapstick. The comparatively respectable and refined humor of light comedy was a
perfect compliment to the conventional beauty of comediennes such as Constance
Talmadge; in both cases, elements of traditional femininity are being reinforced.
Those comediennes who were not considered attractive generally played in
slapstick or character comedy, often acceding to the stereotype that beautiful women
couldn’t be funny by donning outlandish costumes and grotesque makeup in their
films to accentuate their perceived unattractiveness. As I described in Chapter 1,
women often downplayed stereotypically feminine traits such as refinement and
grace in order to work in comedy. Beauty was another of these traits, and through
104
their use of unflattering costumes, stylized makeup, pratfalls and gawky gestures
comediennes were effectively “sacrific[ing] all of the vanities of their sex,”
4
thereby
lessening the potential gender confusion of a “feminine” woman performing
“masculine” routines. Further reinforcing the popular conception that pretty women
weren’t funny and funny women weren’t pretty, many films placed comediennes
who were not considered conventionally attractive alongside acknowledged beauties,
as was the case with Mack Sennett’s “Bathing Beauties.” Describing Louise
Fazenda’s appearance with the Bathing Beauties, one writer explained that “most of
them were really pulchritudinous. And one of them was comical,”
5
as if the two
qualities were mutually exclusive. Another writer similarly set the Beauties up in
opposition to the comics: “Others in the company might have curves or what-not;
Miss Fazenda had pigtails.”
6
Positioning the beautiful (and passive) Bathing
Beauties alongside the unattractive (but active) slapstick comediennes could,
paradoxically, serve to both temper and highlight the disruptive potential of the
comediennes. Certainly, the Beauties were meant to be models of ideal femininity
whose presence emphasized the comediennes’ lack of traditional femininity. At the
same time, the comediennes were the stars of the films and the protagonists within
the films, and their joyfully anarchic antics could seem a more attractive model of
femininity to women in the audience than the decorative and boring Beauties.
105
There isn’t anything funny in her looks at all
Although the division of labor between “pretty” comediennes and “funny”
comediennes was fairly clear-cut, there was not always agreement in the press
regarding which women fell into which category. Although there was unanimous
agreement that Constance Talmadge, for instance, was beautiful, and that Marie
Dressler was not, a number of comediennes were considered not-quite-beautiful but
not-quite-homely, variously described as pretty or plain depending on the opinion of
the writer, the demands of the studio, or the roles they were currently playing. The
shifting standards of beauty for comediennes never shifted too far – despite some
disagreement over how to classify certain actresses, there was broad agreement over
what physical characteristics were necessary to be considered beautiful. However,
these disagreements also tacitly challenged beauty standards by publicly questioning
the validity of how particular women were classified and, by extension, the very
system of classifying women based on physical appearance. By featuring a broader
range of physical types and more attainable models of beauty than other genres,
comedy created a space for women who fell outside the bounds of conventionally
defined beauty.
The beauty standards of the film industry were widely discussed in the press,
as numerous articles catalogued, in great detail, the physical attributes necessary to
succeed in motion pictures. Many of these articles encourage aspiring actresses to
assess their own appearance and gauge their chances for success in Hollywood based
on how their appearance measured up to established beauty standards. A 1926
106
article titled “Is Your Face the Type for Film Success?” paints a bleak picture for
girls with blue eyes and high cheekbones:
If you are analyzing the possibilities of some friend or of yourself
for the movies consider first this feature of the eyes. You may have
large soulful eyes of the right color, deep grey or brown – but they
may be hidden under heavy projecting brows. Deep set eyes are
shaded by the overhanging brows and lose their beauty and
effectiveness. The light blue eye is unphotographic…. There are a
few top notchers who possess light blue eyes, but their ascendancy
has depended upon some other extraordinary qualities, and in many
instances they may have a trace of grey or green in with the blue.
After you have studied the effect of the eyes weigh the other
screen requisites of the movie player. High cheek bones, for example,
are bad for photographic purposes, particularly when aligned with
deep set eyes. A pointed chin is bad. Too large a mouth
automatically eliminates the movie aspirant. All these are bad largely
because the motion picture camera is slightly magnifying; it
accentuates any prominent feature.
[Lois Wilson’s] features are ‘regular, and if you can apply that
adjective to your own face you have the facial requirements of the
movie player.
7
This article – which has the sub-title “If You Have Regular Features, Eyes Which
Are Expressive But Not Too Deep Set, a Small Mouth and Shapely Limbs Your
Chances in Hollywood are O.K.” – presents a fairly narrow and specific conception
of beauty. Blue eyes, “heavy projecting brows,” and a pointed chin – which are
apparently not “regular” features – are all presented here as deal breakers for young
women wanting to break into the movies. This type of very detailed cataloguing of
acceptable physical traits could also be found in a 1922 article attributed to Mabel
Normand (but likely ghostwritten) as part of a Movie Weekly series on “How to Get
107
Into the Movies.” In the article titled “Types of Girls That Producers Seek,”
Normand tells her readers that:
The only attributes of which a producer may be positive are the
physical. He knows a pretty girl when he sees one, hence she has
more in her favor than the girl who is not pretty, even though the
latter may have more innate dramatic talent.
8
She then goes on to mention requisite traits, such as “She must be small, because a
small woman is supposed to be more appealing and because she may play youthful
roles that a large woman could not,” “She must be young…. A woman of thirty
should never consider the screen as a career unless she wants to play character roles
and even then she hasn't great opportunities,” and “Slenderness is another requisite.
Fat is anathema to the screen actress.”
9
The article gives an example of the rigid
beauty standards placed on actresses:
I know a beautiful girl who has been playing “extras” for two years.
Only recently she secured a small part. Most of the time she was
without any sort of work, dependent entirely on the money she
received from home. She has an unusually lovely face and a nice
personality. Her trouble? She is plump and has thick ankles. If she is
able to reduce, the ankles may be forgiven her. But you see how
exacting the producer and the camera -- can be.
10
Ultimately, Normand declares, “While a woman need not be beautiful, she cannot be
absolutely homely.”
11
Articles such as these make it clear that success in Hollywood
was largely dependent on appearance, and that beauty standards were well known
and very specific, from brown eyes and a small mouth to a slim figure and slender
ankles. When studios classified comediennes as “pretty” or “homely,” then, and
accordingly cast them in either light comedies or slapsticks, they were evidently
following these standards. However, what appeared to be a clearly defined set of
108
standards in reality had room for interpretation. Although the press seemed to know
exactly what constituted a screen beauty, they often expanded their definition of the
term when describing a number of comediennes.
While some comediennes were consistently described as either beautiful or homely,
a number of others apparently defied classification. Much of the press discourse
surrounding slapstick comediennes was built around stories of their “tragic
homeliness,” in which, as I’ll discuss below, newspaper and magazine accounts
detailed the suffering that these women had experienced because they were not
beautiful. At the same time, the press frequently insisted that underneath their wild
hair and comic makeup they were actually conventionally attractive. [Figure 2-1]
Descriptions of Polly Moran similarly make it clear that the press was unsure of how
to classify her. In a 1915 article announcing that Moran had signed her first contract
with Keystone, she is described as “the beautiful and talented singing comedienne”
who “represents the typical American beauty, referred to so often by well known
artists and illustrators, being tall and willowy, with exceptionally black hair, brown
eyes and a stunning complexion.”
12
A contradictory description of Moran appeared
a few years earlier, however, when a reviewer argued that
She hasn’t a shred of beauty beyond a set of teeth which give her the
appearance of being lined with ivory; she has no more voice than the
edge of a saw evokes from a log, and, according to her own gleeful
admission, she is ‘fat.’ But she is alive and sparkling…she wins
hands down over all the others by being just what she is – a
personality, crude, rough, half-refined maybe, but definite, vivid.
13
109
Figure 2-1 – “Honest, These Girl Comediennes of the Screen are Pretty when They’re Not
on the Movie Screen” (Los Angeles Times, 4 November 1917)
110
The press was clearly divided on whether or not certain comediennes could be
considered pretty. By simultaneously describing these women as attractive and
homely, these discourses point to ruptures in the monolithic beauty ideal personified
by the Ziegfeld chorine, Miss America, and Sennett’s Bathing Beauties. If “ugly
duckling” Louise Fazenda or “long and lanky” Charlotte Greenwood were beauties,
then that opened the possibility that other unconventional types were as well.
The press wasn’t alone in its uncertainty over how to classify various
comediennes; the studios also sometimes positioned comediennes as alternately
pretty and homely before settling on a type. Fazenda “was a pretty comedienne for
quite a while,”
14
appearing in her Keystone films in the same type of slapstick-
ingénue roles played by Mabel Normand. In Ambrose’s Fury (1915), for example,
she plays a flirtatious neighbor to Mack Swain’s Ambrose, and spends much of the
film cavorting on the beach in a bathing costume
*
and flirting with both Ambrose
and a police officer. Especially in her early films, she alternated these types of roles
with character roles featuring character costumes and makeup: in Willful Ambrose
(1915), made at the same time as Ambrose’s Fury, Fazenda plays a hick character
named “Ma,” with thick, bushy eyebrows and her hair tied in a wild knot on top of
her head, who keeps “Pa” Ambrose in line with the aid of an oversized wooden bat.
Moran generally embraced her “crude, rough, half-refined” image in her
films, especially in her series of one-reel comedies playing the rough-and-tumble
*
Fazenda, however, wears a decidedly more demure bathing costume than the one-piece “Annette
Kellerman” type, discussed in Chapter 3, that Mabel Normand wore on-screen in such films as The
Water Nymph (1912).
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Sheriff Nell. In the film Sheriff Nell’s Tussle (1918) she is described ironically as
“Triggerville’s dainty sheriff” and is paired romantically with the smaller and
physically unimposing Ben Turpin, who serves as a counterpoint to her swaggering,
cocky Nell. Early in her film career, however, it’s clear that the studio had not yet
settled on her image, as she, like Fazenda, played slapstick-ingénue roles. In Love
Will Conquer (1916), for example, she plays a vamp who seduces Ambrose and
drives men to duel over her, although in Her Painted Hero (1915), she is a rough-
and-tumble stage-struck girl who aggressively pursues a matinee idol with whom she
is infatuated.
This disagreement in both the press and in the films themselves over the
relative beauty of various comediennes was due, in part, to the fact that comedy
didn’t have the same demands for beauty as other genres. As a result, a wider range
of physical types appeared in comedy, many of whom fell outside the standards of
screen beauty described above. This was certainly true in the case of slapstick
comediennes such as Marie Dressler, Gale Henry and Charlotte Greenwood, who
were, among other things, older, heavier and taller than the requirements of the
screen dictated. But it was also true for some of the light comediennes, who were
closer to the ideal but still not considered beauties. One reviewer said that Dorothy
Devore’s “nose suggests the up-tilt, which probably explains one reason she has been
cast in comedy roles,” and another claimed that Mabel Normand was “too durned
[sic] plump and easy to gaze upon to be considered one of those ethereal, spiritual
gooks who imagine things.”
15
Although most writers described Dorothy Gish as
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pretty, one article stated bluntly that she “isn’t at all beautiful. She has a little girl’s
figure, but her wistful heart-shaped little face doesn’t follow any of the popular ideas
of beauty….” The writer concluded that Gish “would never win a prize were she to
compete with a group of Follies girls.”
16
The crowning of Margaret Gorman, a
woman who strongly resembled screen beauty Mary Pickford, as the first Miss
America in 1921 was a move toward a unified vision of beauty for American
women. For the popular press to disagree over who was or wasn’t beautiful, despite
its own awareness of the very specific ways that the motion picture industry defined
beauty, indicated a crack in that unified vision. Rather than relying on the film
industry or press to declare who was or wasn’t beautiful, then, these contradictory
accounts gave fans license to draw their own conclusions about feminine beauty.
Discussions of Colleen Moore often dwelled on the fact that she was
attractive, but not beautiful, “a charming actress without being a stunning beauty, as
it were.”
17
In fact, a large part of the appeal of Colleen Moore, and many screen
comediennes, was precisely the fact that they were not impossibly beautiful.
Compared to widely heralded (and often foreign) beauties such as Greta Garbo, Pola
Negri or Jetta Goudal, all of whom appeared primarily in dramatic films, the all-
American, girl-next-door “cuteness” of Colleen Moore or Dorothy Devore seemed
more accessible and less threatening. [Figures 2-2 and 2-3] Moore was pretty, but
not too pretty, wild but not too wild:
A typical American girl of the “cutie type,” the bobbed-hair ingénue.
But not one to win beauty contests, although there is undenied
attraction. A popular type just now. Wild, vivacious, sprightly and
easily roused to incontrolable [sic] anger – in her pictures, of course.
18
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Moore’s beauty – and her personality – is playfully fun, non-threatening and all-
American, a distinct counterpart to the foreign (or sometimes “foreign”) vamps
prowling the screen in dramas and melodramas.
Figure 2-2 – Greta Garbo, Jetta Goudal, Pola Negri
Figure 2-3 – Colleen Moore, Constance Talmadge, Dorothy Devore
The accessible nature of Moore’s beauty was, in fact, explicitly mentioned by
the press as a part of her attraction:
114
Colleen’s success is ample proof that doll-like beauty and high-hat
airs are not necessary to stardom. Her triumphs are a result of “being
herself.” Miss Moore is pretyy [sic] to be sure – but her beauty is
such as might be found in thousands of other girls.
“I always try to portray characters that are within the scope of
every girl,” declares Colleen. “Also I insist that my stories tell a tale
of every-day life. They must be full of reality – not absurd,
improbable yarns.
In that paragraph Miss Moore sums up the “why” of her
popularity. It is a simple matter for her followers to vision themselves
in her shoes. And they flock to see her pictures that they may enjoy
an hour and 15 minutes of this blissful imagination.
19
Not everyone found Moore’s safe brand of femininity reassuring – it could also be
seen as bland, as was the case with this reviewer who determined that audiences
liked Colleen Moore because her own Cinderella-type rise from obscurity made her
sympathetic to audiences, despite the fact that she possessed “the very smallest
equipment in physical attractiveness and in talent for make-believe:”
Perhaps it is simply that Colleen Moore is one of those perfectly safe
players who may be counted upon not to do anything which seems far
away from our own experience, who will flaunt no charms and graces
to which the most obscure may not aspire. That must be the
explanation of her vogue. There is no other.
20
Even this unenthusiastic assessment reinforces the idea that type of beauty and
femininity portrayed by Moore in her films were within reach of movie fans. Unlike
the exotic and impossible-to-achieve beauty of Garbo or Goudal, Moore’s
appearance was familiar and attainable.
Interestingly, a number of articles use the not-exactly-cutting edge sciences
of physiognomy and phrenology to describe, in great deal, how Moore’s all-
American, girl-next-door features indicate an all-American, girl-next-door
115
personality. A 1923 article pointed to “the bony formation of the face and head, the
shape of the nose, and mouth,” as well as her “wide lips” and “bright eyes” as proof
that Moore was just as vivacious, spontaneous, quick-witted, and lovable as the
characters she played in her films.
21
A similar article appearing the following year
(possibly derived from the same studio release as the previous article), found “good
imagination and constructive ability” in Moore’s nose and an affinity for music and
dancing above her eyes. This writer concluded that Moore
has enthusiasm, an active nature, good mentality, is industrious,
persistent, determined, has good judgment, and an all-absorbing
interest in her work. She is self-confident and, above all, has the
courage of her convictions. There are initiative, thoroness [sic],
patience, carefulness, ability to master details, and dramatic sense.
She has vivid mental pictures of the things she desires to do, and
usually accomplishes that which she attempts.
22
The personality traits evident in Moore’s face – enthusiasm, industriousness,
confidence – are, like the characters that she played, typically American. This
positions Moore in contrast to the exotic foreign vamps, and also reinforces the fact
that her type of beauty was familiar and attainable to women in the audience. A
movie fan from Dubuque or Eureka might experiment with imitating the mysterious
otherness of Garbo’s mannerisms or Negri’s appearance,
†
but the exotic beauty and
personae of these actresses and the characters they played would have been far
removed from the everyday lives of most American spectators. Moore, however,
comes across as a feminine embodiment of the well-worn Horatio Alger myth, a
Cinderella figure both on- and off-screen, whose rags-to-riches background would
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likely be comfortably familiar to American audiences raised on countless
incarnations of those stories in books, plays and movies. If Moore’s appearance
bespoke a solidly American personality, then it’s possible that American girls could
see themselves in her place. The fact that Moore, like a great many comediennes,
may not have been a “stunning beauty,” added to her appeal, making her familiar and
accessible compared to the mysterious and glamorous beauty of many dramatic stars.
The disagreements in the press and the studios over the relative attractiveness
of Louise Fazenda or Colleen Moore point to wider tensions regarding the validity of
Hollywood’s beauty standards. These standards are further questioned in the press in
articles about screen comediennes that celebrate, albeit prematurely, the industry’s
rejection of its beauty standards in favor of brains, personality and talent. By
downplaying the importance of beauty for actresses, these discourses in some ways
contradict the many articles that described in detail the physical traits necessary to
succeed in motion pictures, and yet the two stances on beauty work in tandem,
especially in fan magazines. While articles that reinforced beauty standards might
induce readers to buy the beauty products advertised in the magazine, articles that
de-emphasized beauty in favor of brains or personality, along with the articles that
presented Fazenda’s and Moore’s type of beauty as accessible and attainable, could
encourage movie fans to imagine motion picture stardom for themselves.
†
As I will discuss in Chapter 4, fans did in fact play with trying on and discarding personalities they
had seen on the screen.
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In a 1921 newspaper article titled “Beauty and Personality,” readers were
informed that beauty in the movies was becoming passé:
Beauty, sacred these years in the films, is being humbled by the latest
vanity-wrecking efficiency movement. In the new arrangement of
qualifications of screen luminaries beauty is shoved far down the list,
with personality exalted to the highest requisite. Beauty, if
accompanied by intelligence and a charm that survives the
photographic processes, is still very desirable. But beauty, just for
beauty’s sake alone, is no longer being done in pictures.
23
The article argues that “personality” – described here as largely made up of
intelligence – has become more important to producers than beauty both on stage and
in the movies, and points to Colleen Moore as the perfect combination of personality
and beauty. Another article from the same period quotes Moore, who declares that
“beauty is not enough” in Hollywood, that “it must be augmented by personality and
brains.”
24
The series of articles attributed to Mabel Normand detailing “How to Get
Into the Movies” also addressed this topic, telling readers that “The pretty face has
been tried and found wanting.” As in the other articles, intelligence was mentioned
as an essential accompaniment to beauty:
Of a young girl who flashed for a moment into prominence and
then disappeared, I heard a director remark:
“Yes, she is a beauty -- but what a dumbbell!”
I don't pretend to claim that an actress must know scientific and
algebraic formulas or other subjects of higher education. I only say
that she must have an alert, comprehending mind that can grasp the
information which she requires and adapt it to her work.
25
The emphasis on intelligence in these articles is especially interesting given the fact,
discussed in Chapter 1, that excessive intellect was not considered appropriately
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feminine. Normand excuses women from being too intellectual – the type of
knowledge that her article advocates is based more in instinct and natural ability than
education – but still argues that intelligence, like beauty, is essential to actresses. A
similar argument was made by Fay Tincher in 1916:
Beauty counts; but it is only a parlor ornament if your luxuriant
auburn hair and dreamy eyes don’t take their root in gray matter.
Beauty without brains is unmarketable; brains without beauty is a
gambling chance; but brains and beauty combined are a dandy
working partnership. With Old Experience taken into the firm, you
are on the high-road to a successful studio career.
26
Like Normand and Moore, Tincher emphasizes the importance of brains as well as
beauty for actresses. While none of the articles dismisses beauty entirely, the fact
that they wed it to what many considered to be a masculine trait echoes the way that
comediennes themselves combined the apparently opposing traits of beauty and a
sense of humor. Arguments that intelligence was as important to actresses as beauty,
then, much like the image of a woman performing comedy, served to blur the
boundaries created by rigid gender roles by combining traditionally masculine and
traditionally feminine traits.
Along with insisting that beauty was out and intelligence was in, the press
also tried to reassure fans that compared to screen beauties, actresses who were
unattractive led happier, more fulfilling lives in spite of, or even because of their lack
of beauty. A Motion Picture Magazine article from 1928, titled “It Pays to Be
Homely,” argued that “we buck-toothed people have just as much chance for
happiness in life as our fancier brethren and sistren; that it isn’t necessary to look like
a magazine cover” to find true love. While Clara Bow had not yet been married, and
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Constance Talmadge had been married and divorced several times, the article points
out, Louise Fazenda, “the homely girl, has won out where the beauties have failed.
For a year she has been married to the good-looking and popular Hal Wallis.”
27
A
profile of Charlotte Greenwood follows the same logic, claiming that “Charlotte may
not have a face like a magazine cover, but she has a fan following which would
compare very well with Clara Bow’s. And she points to her own good-looking
husband as proof positive that it isn’t only the girls with bud-like mouths and big
blue eyes who have romances.”
28
Marie Dressler was similarly positioned as a
valued companion: “Marie may not be the World’s Sweetheart. But she is the
World’s Best Friend. And the world knows it. Sweethearts may come and go, while
true friendship goes on forever.”
29
Like Fazenda and Greenwood, Dressler’s worth,
according to this article, is based on deeper qualities than beauty.
The premise behind this thinking, as spelled out by Motion Picture Magazine,
was that:
When a man marries a girl for her looks she has to worry the rest of
her life for fear someone more beautiful will win him away from her –
as one usually does. But when a man falls in love with a charming
personality, and a sense of humor, his wife is safe. She can trust him
every evening at gatherings of Hollywood’s most practiced sirens.
30
However patronizing this logic may be, it’s not inconceivable to think that it may
have been reassuring to some readers. Certainly, fans who felt inferior to glamorous
movie stars and their idealized beauty could seize on this idea that the stars’ lives
were not necessarily happy, and perhaps feel better about their own lives. When
magazines described less attractive comediennes as having happier home lives
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because of their appearance, they were contradicting the popular perception,
supported (and to some extent created) by advertisements that ran in the same
magazines, that beauty was the surest path to happiness.
Articles that downplay the importance of beauty for actresses provide an
interesting counterpoint to the ubiquitous insistence that movie stars not only had to
be beautiful, but also had to fit a very specific and well-defined standard of beauty.
It’s significant that these articles are specifically tied to comediennes because, as I
argued above, comedy allowed for a broader range of physical types, and so fans
could more easily see themselves reflected in the faces and bodies of comedy stars
than in the perfect beauty of glamorous tragediennes. For the press to point to
comediennes as proof that the impossible-to-achieve beauty of most dramatic
actresses was “no longer being done” in Hollywood, that brains, personality, and
talent were gaining prominence, and that homely women were happier than pretty
ones, indicates that magazine writers and studio press departments may have
understood that fans needed to feel that stardom could, conceivably, be within their
reach. While most strategies used by the popular press to convince fans that they,
too, could be movie stars were centered on consumption and transformation – from
advertisements for makeup and articles about stars’ clothing to fan magazine-
sponsored beauty contests – articles that de-emphasize the importance of beauty in
Hollywood avoid these tropes, and instead seem to optimistically advance the idea
that women should be rewarded for their accomplishments and abilities rather than
solely for their appearance. Furthermore, by using such vague terms as
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“personality,” “brains,” “accomplishments,” and “qualifications,” as opposed to very
specific lists of required beauty traits, more women could see themselves in these
magazine descriptions. After all, while not everyone was 5’ 3” with brown eyes and
slender ankles, most anyone could be said to have at least some manner of brains or
accomplishments. In fact, many of the discourses about how comediennes measured
up to Hollywood’s beauty standards – including disagreements about who was or
wasn’t pretty, comparisons to glamorous dramatic actresses, and insistence that
beauty was not the most important trait for actresses – were implicitly sympathetic
toward female spectators who also didn’t measure up to those standards. This was,
of course, complicated by the fact that these same magazines and newspapers
advertised products that tried to convince women that the key to self-worth was
achieving beauty by buying the right kind of stockings or face powder. However,
comediennes at least presented an alternative model of beauty to female spectators
who could not, or would not, emulate Hollywood’s narrow beauty standards.
“Graceful Awkwardness”
The tensions regarding Hollywood’s beauty standards that circulated in press
discourses were also evident in comediennes’ performances. Comediennes who
were said to fall outside the film industry’s conception of normative beauty – even
those who were sometimes described as pretty – frequently ignored beauty standards
on-screen and made their characters as unattractive as possible. This was
accomplished in large part through costuming, as comediennes designed outfits,
makeup and hairstyles for their characters that were funny by virtue of being ill-
122
fitting, outmoded and unflattering. Comediennes further emphasized their
appearance through physical performances in which they used the physical traits that
set them apart from normative femininity as sources of comedy, from Marie Dressler
performing an inability to control her excessive body to Charlotte Greenwood
kicking her remarkably long, limber legs over her head. Finally, comediennes whose
bodies were tall, heavy, or otherwise excessive were often paired with smaller, and
often submissive, leading men, in order to highlight and draw laughs from the
reversal of gender positions hinted at by the discrepancy in male and female sizes.
In many ways, then, comediennes embraced and emphasized the traits that set them
apart from acknowledged screen beauties such as Greta Garbo and Jetta Goudal, and
reveled in their supposed homeliness. Although their strategy of using self-
deprecating humor and inviting audiences to laugh at their physical shortcomings
was problematic in many ways, they were also complicating Hollywood’s beauty
standards by willingly defying cultural expectations that women should be – or at
least strive to be – beautiful, and instead made themselves unattractive in the name of
comedy.
Female comics working in the theater in the early 20
th
century frequently
made the “flaws” in their appearance a central element of their acts, establishing a
tradition that would be continued by film comediennes. Especially on the vaudeville
and burlesque stages, comediennes saw their lack of physical beauty not as an
impediment, but as a source of comedy. Overweight comediennes such as Stella
Mayhew, May Irwin, Sophie Tucker and Trixie Friganza drew attention to their size
123
through their songs and costumes – Tucker sang a song titled “Nobody Loves a Fat
Girl,” for example, and Friganza wore layers of costumes which added to her girth
and saw her weight as a positive, asking at one point, “is it surprising that the actress,
whose breadth is her meal-ticket, wants to make the most of that asset?”
31
Tall,
skinny and angular comedienne Fanny Brice would emphasize these physical
characteristics through awkward dancing and costumes, and was known for
performing roles that made a joke of this awkwardness, as in her parodies of the
ballet and of famous sex symbols. “Cyclonic Comedienne” Eva Tanguay similarly
used her excessive body as a centerpiece in her vaudeville act. She would frequently
appear onstage wearing costumes which were deliberate parodies of those worn by
burlesque and Follies chorines, dripping with feathers, beads, furs and sequins.
[Figure 2-4] Her body, however, was not like anything found in Ziegfeld’s chorus,
with “bosoms bursting out of bras and thighs rippling with fat.”
32
Tanguay put her
body on display, mocking the unwritten rule that women who did not adhere to
idealized beauty standards could not be objects of sexual spectacle. Photographs of
Tanguay frequently show her in revealing costumes, unapologetically displaying her
body, and, most importantly, laughing.
What these stage comediennes have in common is an embrace of their
excessive, plain, and/or unruly bodies, and an active incorporation of their non-
normative appearances into their acts as a source of comedy. Screen comediennes,
especially those who appeared in slapstick, continued this tradition of making their
perceived unattractiveness and unwillingness or inability to conform to popular
124
Figure 2-4 – Eva Tanguay
beauty standards an integral part of their comedy. Rather than attempting to “pass”
as beautiful through attractive costumes, makeup and appropriately “feminine”
physicality, many comediennes instead used these same elements to make
themselves look as awkward and homely as possible, often drawing attention to
physical characteristics – such as their height, weight or specific features – that most
differentiated them from stage and screen beauties. In this way, comediennes on
both the stage and screen performed an active, embodied mode of comedy, in which
their physical appearance was used to tacitly critique accepted beauty ideals.
125
One strategy that screen comediennes used to make themselves look
comically unattractive was through the use of costumes, makeup and hairstyling.
Slapstick comedians, both male and female, typically wore outlandish costumes,
makeup, and hairstyles to enhance and accentuate their characters. Like Charlie
Chaplin’s too-tight suit and oversized shoes which immediately undermined his
Tramp character’s attempts at dignity, and Harold Lloyd’s horn-rimmed glasses and
straw hat that positioned him as an everyman in impossible situations, slapstick
comediennes also designed costumes and makeup that visually represented the comic
personae they had created. These costumes were almost always unflattering, too
large or too small, mismatched and out of date, with makeup that served to draw
laughs rather than enhance their appearance. Gale Henry’s costumes were often
poorly fitting, with too-short sleeves and skirts to emphasize her long and lanky
body, and she generally wore her hair in a tight, unflattering bun, with limp bangs
hanging over her angular face, and an absurd straw hat perched on top of her head –
one interviewer describes Henry fixing up her hair by “massaging her outstanding
bangs with a cake of wet, yellow soap,” and points out that “she buys her clothes at
the Salvation Army rummage sales, and has to alter them very little .“
33
Louise
Fazenda’s standard costume with Keystone, developed around 1918, consisted of an
unflattering gingham dress and pantalettes, with her hair pulled back into severe
pigtails – that Mack Sennett famously had insured for $10,000
34
– and one big curl in
the center of her forehead. [Figure 2-5] Fazenda explained that she designed her
126
character’s hair and makeup to deliberately draw attention to a physical trait that she
concealed off-screen:
I have a very high forehead – so high that off-stage I wear my
hair so as to cover it. I pulled the hair straight back on my head like a
little girl’s and looking into the glass, found that it gave me a very
bizarre appearance. Then I put a thin circle of black around each eye
and assumed a vacant expression. The effect was startling! I hardly
knew myself.
Mr. Sennett was delighted with my appearance and gave me a
leading part right away. My make-up proved so popular that it was
utilized for every comedy thereafter in which I appeared.
35
Figure 2-5 – Gale Henry and Louise Fazenda
There is an implicit rejection of popular beauty standards in the way that Henry and
Fazenda – as well as Alice Howell, Polly Moran, and numerous other slapstick
comediennes – made a point of using their costumes, makeup and hair to emphasize
their physical “flaws,” rather than attempting to conceal these traits to more closely
127
resemble Hollywood beauties. When Henry draped ill-fitting second-hand clothes
over her thin frame, or Fazenda pulled her hair off her high forehead and placed a
spit-curl in the center like a target, they were refusing to be ashamed or embarrassed
of their “flaws,” but instead were using them as a source of comedy.
Along with using costumes, comediennes also used physical humor to
accentuate their physical appearance. Marie Dressler, who the press described as
“homely,” “elephantine,” and “as plain as an old size-eight shoe,”
36
used physical
comedy to highlight her size and admitted homeliness. In many of Dressler’s films
her appearance is the source of numerous gags, as her characters try to maintain their
dignity while being thrown around and roughly mistreated. Dressler’s gags are
frequently centered on her inability to contain her tremendous size, as she
inadvertently collides with, gets stuck in, or knocks over anything in her path. In
Tillie’s Punctured Romance (1914), Dressler’s Tillie is constantly knocking people
over or falling down and taking anyone in close proximity with her. A running gag
involves Tillie knocking people over with her behind – at one point she playfully
bumps Charlie Chaplin’s character, knocking him off his feet, and later she bends
over and inadvertently takes out several members of the police force. The payoff of
this gag comes at the end of the film, when Tillie herself is knocked in the behind by
a police car, causing her to fall off of a pier into the ocean. The joke here is that
Tillie’s body is so large that the front half doesn’t know what the back half is doing,
and that it takes something as large as a car to knock her off her feet. Dressler
enthusiastically plays Tillie as unruly and out of control, making use of her large
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body and accentuating her homeliness with her costumes, makeup, and frequent
doleful expressions.
Charlotte Greenwood, whose long, limber arms and legs earned her fame in
vaudeville and in musical theater used these assets to her advantage in her silent
films. Greenwood’s stage act was built around her “gracefully awkward”
37
dancing
and her ability to “[kick] up each foot on each side - not in front - of her body until
the toes were on a level with her shoulders, alternately.”
38
As one reviewer
described her performance in the Broadway production of So Long Letty (1916-17),
“In her own simple way, Miss Greenwood swings an arm or a leg upon an innocent
bystander when she has nothing else to do.”
39
She continued to emphasize her
gangliness and “graceful awkwardness” in her films, as reviews of her 1915 debut
film, Jane, pointed out that “Greenwood is her usual angular self,”
40
and that “Miss
Greenwood is probably the most grotesque of the numerous Janes…whom we have
seen in the character.” The reviewer goes on to add that,
…the elongated Charlotte is always good for a laugh when it is handy.
In this picture she confines her gymnastic eccentricities and facial
grimaces to the character of the maid…and she makes Jane an
amiable if amusing female “boob.”
41
Twelve years later, when Greenwood was back in Hollywood filming Baby Mine
(1928), her limber legs were still an important part of her act: a publicity photo of
the comedienne nonchalantly reading a book while resting her foot against a camera,
well over her head, appeared in newspapers with a caption stating that “She kicks
exactly six feet high between scenes in Baby Mine.”
42
[Figure 2-6] This photo is
especially interesting in its attempt to make Greenwood’s signature move appear
129
non-performative – she’s not in front of an audience, but instead appears to be
relaxing between takes – a strategy that makes her pose seem even more bizarre.
Figure 2-6 – Charlotte Greenwood
According to this photograph Greenwood’s high kick was not just a part of her act, it
was something she did off-stage and out of character, seemingly without thought or
purpose. As such, it implies that this trait that marked her deviation from normative
beauty – her unusually long and limber arms and legs – was not something that she
performed, but was rather a part of who she was. This image of Greenwood
130
complicated articles, discussed above, that assured fans that she was not gangly or
unusually built in any way, and instead insisted that her long legs and flexibility were
simultaneously remarkable and unremarkable – while they were unusual traits, they
were apparently regarded with indifference by Greenwood.
Like Greenwood, Gale Henry also played up her gawkiness on-screen, using
her elastic face to comic effect, with exaggerated grimaces and mugging aiding her
wild gestures and pratfalls. In a poem that appeared in Moving Picture Weekly, she
described her appeal: “Leading woman of the Jokers, I’m as thin as twenty pokers.
When it comes to face-distortion, I’m the one and only Caution.”
43
Henry frequently
based her comedy on the gap between her characters’ attempts at stereotypical
femininity and the reality of their decidedly unfeminine appearance. In the film
Mighty Like a Moose (1926), she plays a homely wallflower in pursuit of Charley
Chase’s character, who calls her Floradora and then refers to her as “one of the
Mayflower girls,” ironic references to both the renowned sextet of beautiful chorines
who gained fame in the turn-of-the-century musical Floradora, and “a quartet of four
fascinating young women” who appeared in the 1925 musical Mayflowers.
44
An ad
for the film Art Arches (1917) continued this strategy of setting Henry up in comic
opposition to classic beauties. Henry stands on a pedestal wearing classical garb in
front of a background that resembles paint strokes while beneath her is the caption,
“December Afternoon, Posed by Gale Henry, The Funniest Woman on the Screen.”
[Figure 2-7] This ad, like the references to the Floradora and Mayflowers chorus
girls, focuses attention on the fact that Henry doesn’t fit the beauty standards
131
presented in classical art and personified by Broadway chorines. But like
Greenwood, Henry uses her appearance as a source of comedy, rather than
attempting to make herself appear beautiful or remaining out of sight altogether.
Henry, like Greenwood, Dressler, Louise Fazenda, Polly Moran, Alice Howell, and
numerous others, made her appearance an integral part of her comedy, foregrounding
traits that directly contradicted popular conceptions of beauty. In this way, these
comediennes subtly challenged Hollywood’s beauty standard by parodying, rather
than praising, beauty.
Figure 2-7 – Gale Henry
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Comediennes who were tall or overweight, such as Dressler, Greenwood and
Moran, were frequently positioned opposite smaller leading men in their films,
making them appear even larger and more ungainly than they actually were. In
Tillie’s Punctured Romance, for example, Dressler is paired with Charlie Chaplin,
and while she was likely only an inch or two taller than he was she clearly
outweighed him. The disparity in their sizes was emphasized by her broad,
unrestrained performance: while Chaplin keeps his movements relatively small,
Dressler charges through each scene with physical abandon, knocking over anyone
and anything in her path. Dressler is larger than life in this film, turning every
appearance on screen into a whirlwind of chaos and anarchy, often because of
Tillie’s inability to control her excessive body. The fact that Mabel Normand’s
character in the film is generally referred to as “little” – “the little girl crook,”
Charlie’s “little playmate” – further accentuates Tillie’s size and sets her apart from
acceptably feminine traits.
Charlotte Greenwood’s partner from vaudeville and Broadway, Sydney Grant
– who was described by Moving Picture World as “Greenwood’s comical little
partner”
45
– also appeared in Jane, continuing his stage role as a comic foil to
Greenwood. The disparity in their sizes, highlighted by photographs and illustrations
that show Greenwood towering above Grant, further accentuated the lankiness and
gangliness that were the central focus of Greenwood’s comedy both on stage and on
film. [Figure 2-8] Just as Dressler’s pairing with smaller leading men drew
attention to her excessive weight, Greenwood’s pairing with Grant made her height a
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source of comedy in their act. Other slapstick comediennes, including Polly Moran
and Louise Fazenda, similarly appeared with smaller and/or less imposing leading
men, who served as comic counterpoints to their large and unruly characters.
Figure 2-8 – Greenwood and Grant (Chicago
Tribune, 6 June 1915)
These pairings emphasize and draw humor from the very physical traits that exclude
these comediennes from Hollywood’s beauty standards, and at least to some extent
mock those standards and question their validity. Although the fan magazines told
readers that a proper motion picture star must be short and slender, Greenwood and
Dressler made their height and girth a central part of their stardom, creating
enjoyment for viewers from these supposedly “unattractive” traits. The coupling of
larger women with smaller men in comedies also point to tensions over changing
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gender roles in the early 20
th
century, as the image of women towering over men and
dominating them physically certainly reflects anxieties over women’s increased
social and political power. At the same time, the fact that the interactions between
these characters were played for laughs could ease some of these tensions by
presenting inverted gender roles as comical rather than threatening.
Comediennes’ use of costumes, physicality and casting to create self-
deprecating comedy had complex and contradictory meanings. Certainly, the fact
that comediennes made jokes about the ways in which they supposedly fell short of
the feminine ideal tempered their impact somewhat. By framing their appearance in
terms of difference, they were allowing their audiences to think of them as second-
class women, displaying a femininity which was inherently different from and
perhaps inferior to the type of femininity possessed by Ziegfeld’s and Sennett’s
beauties. However, when comediennes called attention to their appearance, they
were demanding visibility in a society that placed a premium on feminine
attractiveness. These women were refusing to remain out of sight; instead they were
insisting on being seen, and on controlling the terms on which they were seen.
Dressler, Moran and other overweight comediennes demonstrated that there was a
place for larger women within the concept of femininity, while Henry, Greenwood,
and Fazenda showed that grace was not an inherently female quality. The fact that
these women embraced their non-normative bodies, putting them on display rather
than attempting to make them conform to popular beauty standards, then, can be read
as a subtle challenge to those standards.
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“A pretty girl can afford to play homely parts.”
In the 1927 film The Red Mill, Marion Davies plays Tina, a “drudge” in a
Dutch inn and tavern. With her crooked braids and her face scrubbed free of
makeup, Tina is mousy and unassuming, a far cry from the vivacious and beautiful
movie-star image of Davies. Tina befriends Gretchen (Louise Fazenda), a rich
woman staying at the inn, and the two switch places so that Gretchen can elude her
father and tryst with her beau. While waiting in Gretchen’s room for her to return,
Tina regards herself idly in the mirror, and then notices a jar of “Mud Massage Face
Beautifier” – “one application guarantees perpetual beauty” – on the counter. After
applying some to her face, she peels off the mask and is transformed, complete with
flawless makeup and flattering soft focus; she then lets down her braids and runs a
brush through her hair, ending up with perfect curls. [Figure 2-9] The scene is not
only a wonderful comic moment, it also offers a commentary on Hollywood’s
laughably unrealistic beauty standards, and a glimpse of one way that comediennes
drew attention to and challenged those standards. The tropes of transformation and
of adopting alternate identities are frequently used by comediennes to advance the
idea that beauty wasn’t automatically available to all women, but rather required a
certain amount of work to achieve. Whether in the form of makeover stories or the
idea of disguising oneself as either pretty or plain, the notion of transformation
informed much of the work of and discourses about comediennes, and served as a
means of questioning the concepts of idealized beauty and femininity.
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Figure 2-9 – The Red Mill (1927): Tina (Marion Davies) finds “perpetual beauty” in a jar.
The makeover as a plot device, in which homely or unruly women learn how
to be appropriately feminine, has been popular in motion pictures since the silent era.
A number of silent comedies feature makeover scenes or story arcs, although they’re
not always as straightforward or as uncomplicated as the type of transformation
parodied in The Red Mill. These scenes offer multiple and sometimes contradictory
messages. In these films, beauty and femininity are often shown as desirable goals,
and the key to achieving these goals is often shown to be consumer goods, whether a
new wardrobe or beauty product. At the same time, the makeovers are often shown
to remain on the surface, as temporary performances of femininity that don’t
completely transform the characters, but instead allow them to try on feminine
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attributes while still holding on to their “unfeminine” qualities. These scenes also
“lay bare the device” of femininity by exposing the tremendous amounts of effort,
preparation and deliberation involved in achieving and maintaining idealized beauty.
Makeover films, then, present femininity and beauty as performative rather than
natural and automatically available to all women, and in this way they challenge the
idea that either trait is essential for women.
A remarkably comprehensive makeover, at least in terms of surface qualities,
occurs in The Clinging Vine (1926). A.B. Allen (Leatrice Joy), assistant to the
president of a paint company, is the epitome of a mannish, overly intellectual
professional women – she even describes herself as “a sexless, loveless machine.”
[Figure 2-10] The opening scenes of the film show that A.B. essentially runs the
company for her absent-minded boss, T.M. Bancroft, and the ineffectual (and all-
male) board of directors. A.B. is shown to be an astute and capable businesswoman,
but a miserable failure as a woman – her short, slicked-back hair, thick eyebrows,
lack of makeup, and masculine suit and tie (with a skirt instead of trousers, in her
only nod to her gender) are evidence of the fact that she has actively rejected all
trappings of femininity, as does an intertitle saying that she “hired, wired and fired
men – but had never kissed one.” Even her name – A.B. – is a rejection of
femininity, as she chooses gender-neutral initials over her presumably female given
name. While on a business retreat at Bancroft’s country estate A.B. overhears his
spoiled grandson, Jimmie, refer to her as a “flat-chested, flat-heeled, flat-headed
Amazon,” and consequently allows Bancroft’s wife (referred to only as “Grandma”)
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to give her a makeover. Grandma buys a new wardrobe for A.B., and teaches her to
pluck her eyebrows, curl her hair, and bat her eyelashes. [Figure 2-11] Grandma’s
take on love is fairly cynical – as she tells A.B., “A man wants beauty, not brains.
His task is to find a woman pretty enough to please him and dumb enough to love
him.” In short, Grandma tells A.B., men want “a clinging vine.” After learning how
to “twitter,” and being assured that the only phrases she needs are “Do go on!” and
“Aren’t you wonderful!”, A.B. is introduced to Grandma’s guests, wearing an
absurdly over-the-top outfit adorned with yards of ruffles, flounces and bows.
[Figure 2-12] The transformed A.B. looks like a parody of Little Bo Peep, and,
accordingly, the men follow her like a flock of sheep. Even Jimmie – who has never
before met A.B. in person – is smitten, and despite Jimmie’s many shortcomings
A.B. decides that she wants to marry him.
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Figure 2-10 – The Clinging Vine (1926): Leatrice Joy as A.B. Allen.
Figure 2-11 – The Clinging Vine (1926): “Woman – wouldst thou have Beauty? – Cry
and get it!”
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Figure 2-12 – The Clinging Vine (1926): “Who dressed A.B. up like a girl?”
Although A.B. gamely plays along with what Grandma has taught her about
femininity, it’s clear that the “new” A.B. is a performance. This is evidenced when
A.B. uses her business sense to simultaneously save Bancroft’s guests from a con
artist, her company from financial ruin, and Jimmie from his own inexperience and
naiveté. While she is playing the part of the flirtatious and empty-headed “ideal”
woman, A.B. loses none of her business acumen, and is ultimately able to find a
happy medium between the extremes of mannishness and hyper-femininity. A.B.
begins the film as a humorless, sexless businesswoman, a caricature of everything
social conservatives feared women would become if they were granted increased
social and political power, and is then molded into a vapid, vacuous creature who
epitomizes an old-fashioned model of femininity that feminists were eager to leave
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behind. Neither role suits her – she is unhappy in her initial guise, but uncomfortable
with abandoning it entirely – but she is able to find a way to combine elements of
both positions, to be smart and capable as well as conventionally beautiful and
“feminine.” In this way, The Clinging Vine offers an interesting commentary on
women’s changing roles in society, one that is echoed in a newspaper commentary
by Dorothy Dix that was published shortly after the film was released:
And where would you go to look for a clinging vine in this day
and age? You remember the gentle little feminine thing who rolled
her eyes and asked every man she met what he thought she thought,
and who was so frail and delicate she looked as if she was about to
pass away at any time?
… She thought politics perfectly horrid and believed that
woman’s place was the home. She didn’t know which was the
business end of a check. She didn’t know how to buy a railroad ticket
or check a trunk, and as a wife she meekly did as John told her and
began every statement with “John says.”
Perhaps a few specimens of the clinging vine still survive in
remote rural communities, but you never see one in cities. Every
flapper can drive a car and play as hard a game of golf and tennis as
her brother. …
The great majority of young women earn their own living, and the
only thing they cling to is their jobs. And when they marry they are
far more likely to tell their husbands where they get off than to listen
to such advice themselves.
46
The Clinging Vine is vague on exactly how much of a clinging vine A.B. will remain
after she marries Jimmie, but like the modern young women Dix refers to A.B. is
smart, capable and tough, and the film implies that she will retain these qualities,
along with her flowing dresses and plucked brows, after her marriage.
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Irene (1926), like The Clinging Vine, features a character who submits herself
to a makeover in order to appear appropriately feminine. Irene (Colleen Moore), a
working-class girl, attracts the attention of a rich young man named Donald
Marshall. Donald gets Irene a job as a model in a modiste shop run by his business
partner, an effeminate man called Madame Lucy (as he explains, “I inherited my
aunt’s business and her name.”). Madame Lucy is doubtful about Irene’s modeling
potential – he tells her that he’s “seen sausages with more style than you” – but he
nevertheless attempts to transform her. He begins by fitting a dress on her, but she
can’t stand still; she fidgets, sneezes, clowns around, and complains that the dress is
too tight and the pins are poking her. Irene is not a static, classical beauty; instead,
she is a fully embodied woman who acknowledges and addresses her bodily needs
and functions. This is further illustrated when Madame Lucy removes Irene’s bra
straps, and Irene clutches the top of the dress to keep it up, drawing attention to the
fact that the demands of beauty sometimes conflict with the demands of the body –
in this case, the fact that gravity trumps fashion. [Figure 2-13] Madame Lucy’s other
attempts to transform the lively and playful Irene into a stuffy, decorative fashion
model are similarly unsuccessful: when he shows her how to strike a pose she makes
a joke of it, and when he passes out books to Irene and her friends while teaching
them how to walk, the other women place the books on their heads, while Irene
opens hers and begins to read. [Figure 2-14]
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Figure 2-13 – Irene (1926)
Figure 2-14 – Irene (1926)
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Like The Clinging Vine, Irene shows the work behind beauty and femininity.
Irene doesn’t automatically know how to wear fashionable clothes or “ooze along”
while walking, she needs to be taught these things. The fact that she learns
femininity from an effeminate man recalls the strategy of pairing larger comediennes
such as Marie Dressler and Charlotte Greenwood with smaller leading men. In fact,
a number of makeover films feature effeminate men as supporting characters,
including Snitz Edwards as both a timid board member in The Clinging Vine and a
valet in The Red Mill. By pitting the comediennes’ characters against these men the
films highlight the women’s inadequate femininity, as they end up looking more
masculine by comparison. Ultimately, although Irene leans a few tricks from
Madame Lucy (and is a hit at the Technicolor fashion show that is the film’s climax),
she largely retains the playful and spontaneous aspects of her personality. Irene,
then, like The Clinging Vine, argues for finding a balance between feminine and
“unfeminine” traits, as Irene is able to successfully combine unruliness and beauty.
Although Marion Davies was widely regarded as beautiful, in The Red Mill
she plays a plain kitchen drudge, wearing a frumpy dress, crooked braids, and no
makeup. Similarly, a number of comediennes who were considered attractive played
characters who were homely, performing a version of the makeover stories in reverse
and furthering the idea of beauty and femininity as artifice. By moving easily
between pretty and plain, comediennes such as Davies, Colleen Moore and
Constance Talmadge blurred the lines between those classifications somewhat, and
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by playing sympathetic, albeit homely, heroines they demonstrated that other
qualities – such as kindness, intelligence and a sense of humor – were more
important and useful to women than beauty. At the same time, audiences knew that
underneath the dowdy costumes and messy hair were attractive women, and as a
result their performance of homeliness could in some ways be read as a type of
slumming, of playing at being unattractive but returning to the safety of their own
beauty when the cameras stopped rolling.
In an interview with Talmadge, the comedienne describes her willingness to
appear in unflattering roles, because she knew that there wasn’t much at risk:
I don’t want to be a pretty-pretty actress. I am very willing to be as
ugly or as funny looking as the part demands, for the public knows
how I look anyhow, and after an ugly part they may think me prettier
than I really am, through pure contrast!
47
In Her Night of Romance (1924), she got the chance to play an “ugly part” of sorts,
as a character disguised as a country schoolteacher, alternating in the film between
“the flippant flapper and the bleak schoolma’am.”
48
[Figure 2-15] Similarly, when
Davies played homely or plain characters she was providing an in-joke to audiences
who were well aware of her off-screen beauty. Although Colleen Moore inspired
some debate about whether she was beautiful, the press generally agreed that she was
attractive, and therefore paid attention when she played homely characters, such as in
Ella Cinders (1926) or The Wall Flower (1922). The press noted that Moore was
“willing to sacrifice appearances for ‘art,’” in her performance of “a horrid little
unkempt, unwashed slavey” in Ella Cinders, and after her turn in The Wall Flower as
Idalene Nobbin, “A weed in a garden of roses…a wistful figure, awkward and
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pigeon-toed,” remarked that “A pretty girl can afford to play homely parts.”
49
[Figure 2-16]
Figure 2-15 – Constance Talmadge: publicity
still from Her Night of Romance (1924)
Figure 2-16 – Colleen Moore in The Wall Flower (1922)
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In fact, the films often made a point of reminding audiences that the homely
parts were being played by pretty girls. This was certainly the case in films
involving transformations or makeover plots, as the unattractive characters
eventually become as beautiful as the actresses playing them. Even in films in which
there is no transformation for the heroine, there is sometimes a scene that showcases
her beauty. In Suds (1920), for example, Mary Pickford plays a shabby, working-
class laundress who fantasizes about a fictional rich and titled family. Although
Pickford’s character is never made over in the film, a fantasy sequence allows the
audience to get a glimpse of her as a beautiful princess, complete with her trademark
curls. [Figure 2-17]
Figure 2-17 – Mary Pickford in Suds (1920): Laundry worker Amanda dreams of a better
life.
When attractive comediennes played unattractive characters in their films,
they were offering contradictory and complex messages. By cheerfully appearing
on-screen in outmoded and unflattering costumes and makeup, they were doing some
of the same work as slapstick comediennes who also donned grotesque character
costumes in their films, such as Louise Fazenda and Alice Howell. In both cases, the
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comediennes were de-emphasizing beauty and instead putting the focus on their
characters’ other qualities and personality traits, such as their humor, intelligence,
compassion and resourcefulness. However, the effectiveness of this act is tempered
by the fact that the homely characters generally underwent transformations to make
them beautiful, and by the audience’s knowledge that Talmadge, Davies, and other
comediennes were not really as unattractive as the characters they were playing.
The idea of transformation at work here – the idea of homely characters
becoming beautiful or beautiful actresses becoming homely – both draws from and
challenges Hollywood’s beauty standards. Press discourses, studio publicity and
films that feature physical transformations – from homely to pretty, from unruly to
feminine – necessarily set up an idealized concept of beauty or femininity as the
ultimate goal of the transformation. When Marion Davies’ Tina becomes beautiful
in The Red Mill her success is measured against idealized standards, and in turn
reinforces those standards. At the same time, these standards are challenged when
they’re shown to be impossible or undesirable to achieve. In makeover films,
idealized beauty and femininity are frequently presented as unsatisfying, as the
heroines only find happiness when they embrace their unruly and unfeminine traits
along with their newfound beauty and femininity.
“Is it Tragic to Be Comic?”
As I discussed in Chapter 1, a common theme found in discourses
surrounding comediennes was the tragedy behind their comedy, the fact that they
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were “clowns with aching hearts.” Numerous articles, interviews, movie reviews
and press releases described the difficulties that comediennes faced in coming to
terms with their natural comedic abilities, and the sacrifices that they had to make to
be funny. According to many of these discourses, one of the greatest sacrifices a
comedienne could make was to hide her natural beauty beneath grotesque makeup
and unflattering costumes, just as slapstick comediennes did in their films. Despite
the fact that most slapstick comediennes designed their own costumes and makeup in
a calculated effort to draw humor from their appearance, numerous press discourses
imply that these comediennes were victims, both to the demands of the genre and to
their own comic bent, as they had to hide what the press insisted were their naturally
pretty faces and forms and subject themselves to unladylike situations. At the same
time, newspapers and fan magazines offered contradictory readings of comediennes,
arguing that they were not beautiful, but in fact had suffered greatly throughout their
lives because of their unattractiveness. These articles often point to homeliness as a
reason for their turning to comedy rather than drama, echoing the assumption,
discussed in Chapter 1, that women became comediennes because they were
unsuited for drama, rather than due to a specific desire to do comedy. In both cases
women were said to resort to comedy rather than drama because they were not
appropriately feminine, recalling the division between pretty and funny women that
was reinforced by the press and by the studios through casting. Still, the
simultaneous positioning of these women as pitiable both because they’re attractive
and because they’re not attractive coincides with disagreements over the relative
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beauty of various slapstick or light comediennes, indicating cracks in the film
industry’s seemingly monolithic beauty standards.
A 1931 profile of Polly Moran titled, fittingly, “Is It Tragic to Be Comic?”
asked, “Wouldn’t any woman rather be known for her beauty than for her wit?
When woman’s whole aim in life is to be attractive, how must it feel to play the
buffoon?”
50
This combination of bewilderment that a woman would choose to make
herself a buffoon, and sympathy for those who must sacrifice their “whole aim in
life” is common in writings about female comics. The idea that women don’t like to
make themselves appear unattractive, and that this accounted for the supposed
scarcity of female comedians in both motion pictures and theater, was repeated often.
Charlotte Greenwood is quoted as saying that “’The reason so few women on the
stage are genuinely funny…is that they refuse to be or to look ridiculous,’”
51
Similarly, in a 1918 article Louise Fazenda “remarks truly” that “’There aren’t many
girl comics…. I think it must be because girls like pleasing surroundings with pretty
clothes and hate to be laughed at.”
52
Another article noted that “About the hardest
thing a pretty woman can do is to make herself look ridiculous…. When a woman
can sacrifice her vanity on the altar of art she must be a true artist.”
53
The press treated comediennes who supposedly “sacrificed their vanity”
reluctantly with sympathy. Louise Fazenda was typically described as one who
dreaded making herself appear grotesque for laughs. Many articles pointed out that
Fazenda had to hide her natural beauty, that “Her career has been built upon a
systematic suppression of personal charm, on bumps and bruises. Following out the
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paradoxical intent of her existence, she has risen in spite of her femininity rather than
because of it..”
54
Saying that she was “heartbroken” the first time she had to play an
unattractive character role, one interview quotes her as saying that “it always hurt me
to look homely and grotesque, and to have some comedian like Mack Swain or
Chester Conklin kick me…. No one has ever known this, but I’ve said prayers
before a scene to give me the strength to be humble enough to go through with it.”
55
Fazenda’s uneasiness with her “slob” costumes and “slavey” characters, and her
desire to appear beautiful on-screen, was endlessly discussed in articles, interviews
and publicity releases. More than any other slapstick comedienne, Fazenda’s issues
with her appearance formed an integral part of how the public understood her.
Articles about Louise Fazenda very frequently foregrounded her beauty
issues, with titles such as “You Don’t Have to Be Beautiful,” “Plain or Pretty as You
Will,” and “It Pays to Be Homely.”
56
In these articles, Fazenda frequently discusses
her dissatisfaction with wearing grotesque costumes and makeup. In a typical quote,
she describes her ambivalence towards her slapstick roles:
It is pleasant to a comedienne to hear herself laughed at, and I used to
see every comedy of mine at the Los Angeles theatres just to hear the
audiences laugh at me. But after a time that laughter grew rather
tiresome. I wearied of being considered a poor boob and longed for a
chance to show my face on the screen without that wild makeup.
57
In another article, she laments her comedic fate:
I’m feminine – and I’m human. I love to be dressed in laces and
velvets and flowers. Do you suppose that I wouldn’t give anything in
the world to be a romantic type – and dress like one? Do you suppose
that I enjoy wearing my hair skinned back into a towering
pompadour, or enjoy wearing funny clothes and taking funny falls and
making funny faces? I remember – too well – when I first began to
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do comedies. I looked upon them as something temporary; I had
other ambitions.
58
These articles positioned comediennes – primarily those whose attractiveness was
tentative to begin with – as tragic victims, cruelly forced to sacrifice their vanity and
dignity to get laughs. Significantly, attractive comediennes such as Constance
Talmadge and Marion Davies were not shown to have the same distaste for assuming
character costumes and makeup in some of their films. Certainly, the fact that
slapstick comediennes wore character garb in the majority of their films, at least in
the 1910s, while light comediennes only played homely characters occasionally, was
a factor in their disparate treatment. It’s also likely that by performing physical
comedy slapstick comediennes were already dangerously unfeminine, a position that
would only be reinforced when they made themselves appear unattractive. It’s
understandable, then, that the press and the studios would want to reassure fans that
Louise Fazenda’s or Polly Moran’s performance of unruliness and transgressiveness
femininity was a reluctant sacrifice rather than a joyful embrace of deviant
femininity.
Comediennes who willingly, even cheerfully made themselves unattractive
on-screen, however, were viewed by many in the press with consternation. Alice
Howell was particularly perplexing to the media, because of her seeming disregard
for the trappings of conventional femininity. A 1917 profile of Howell drew
attention to her unflappable attitude toward both her dowdy costumes and violent
routines:
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When beauty persists in disguising itself in rags and indulging in
comedy of the brand known as slapstick, the public’s impatience for
an explanation of such proclivities reaches a hectic pitch. It cannot
conceive of any one enjoying being dumped from a motor car into the
sea from the top of a cliff or being dragged all over a lot by the hair or
being thrown from the roof of a house. Especially is this true when
the subject is possessed of beauty and is young and talented enough to
aspire to heroine roles where even the leading man must keep his
distance until beckoned to. Alice Howell is the unusual young person
who would rather be slung around by the hair than be made love to.
She says that she not only has no prejudice against such things, but
she actually prefers such work to all other in pictures. And yet it does
seem a pity to put stove polish and biscuit dough on such a skin and to
use such wonderful golden hair simply to haul one on and off the
screen. “It makes it easier to toss me about,” said Miss Howell as she
shook down her hair which comes nearly to the bottom of her gown.
“I don’t care what they do with that but confidentially I don’t care
much about stopping pies in mid-career with my face.”
59
Describing the “public’s impatience for an explanation” as to why a woman would
prefer to work in knockabout slapstick films that require her to cover herself in
“stove polish and biscuit dough,” the author seems genuinely at a loss. Howell
herself clearly was comfortable with her slapstick persona, and in fact sent out
publicity photos of herself in her character costume and makeup rather than studio
portraits.
60
Frankly confounded by Howell’s indifference to presenting herself as the
beautiful young woman that the press insisted she was, Moving Picture World
printed a picture of her without her costume or makeup, accompanied by the
following explanation:
Alice Howell does herself such perpetual injustice while she is
making her fortune and winning fame as a screen comedienne, that
the publicity agent of Century Comedies submits a picture of this
clever girl unsullied by greasepaint and divested of the unsightly
makeup she affects for business reasons only. Reckless and daring in
her conduct before the camera, Alice Howell is docile and domestic
when off duty.
61
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By insisting that she donned the costume “for business reasons only,” and that off-
screen she was “docile and domestic,” the writer was reclaiming for Howell the
normative femininity that she herself seemed indifferent to. In another article from
1917, the author described Howell’s preference for unflattering slapstick roles (this
preference had become a standard part of her persona), and ends by expressing her
“hope, some day, to see Miss Howell in a picture where this pillorying of her fresh
young charm will be unnecessary.”
62
Similarly, an article on Beatrice Lillie described how she laughingly drew
attention to her long nose, thus deflecting criticism about her appearance:
And, I beg of you, what other actress on the screen, over whose
somewhat imperfect features the producers are worrying, would say,
when profile shots are being taken, “Get all of my nose in this scene,
boys. Don’t forget!”
63
While the press was prepared for women like Fazenda or Greenwood – women who
longed to be pretty and feminine, but reluctantly sacrificed their femininity for their
comedy – they didn’t know what to make of Alice Howell or Beatrice Lillie, who
were seemingly content to embrace their unconventional appearances. The press and
studios were clearly more comfortable with comediennes who longed to fit in to
Hollywood’s beauty standards (of course, whether this longing was real or
manufactured as a part of their public persona is unknowable), because, among other
reasons, cosmetics, clothing and personal hygiene industries were dependent upon a
similar desire among female fans. But when women such as Howell and Lillie
showed a casual indifference to those standards, they challenged the necessity for
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beauty standards, and presented fans with a model of femininity that wasn’t tied to
physical appearance.
“I wasn’t like those girls out there.”
At the same time that the press was insisting that slapstick comediennes
really were beautiful underneath their grotesque costumes and makeup, and that they
had to sacrifice their natural beauty in order to be funny, seemingly contradictory
stories were circulating describing how these same comediennes had suffered greatly
in their lives because of their lack of physical beauty. In these articles comediennes
tell of their painful first discoveries that they were not beautiful, recalling stories,
discussed in Chapter 1, about their unhappy discovery that they were funny.
Charlotte Greenwood tells of the “bitter” tears she cried before coming to terms with
her appearance. She describes “the saddest blow of all” as a time when a friend
suggested they form a vaudeville act together, with Greenwood acting as a comic foil
to her friend’s beauty. “Now think of that… and I had never dreamed that I was not
beautiful – I who had dreamed of the day when I would Sarah-Bernhardt and Olga-
Nethersole all over the stage!”
64
At the same time that some writers were praising
Louise Fazenda’s off-screen beauty, others were describing her disappointment in
being homely, and her desire to be pretty. In a Motion Picture Classic article
attributed to Fazenda, she claims that “the worst bump of my life was when I found I
was not pretty.” She describes her assessment of her appearance after making that
discovery at a school dance:
156
I wasn’t like those girls out there. My eyes were neither veiled nor
mischievous – they were round and frankly stared at a then unfriendly
world; my hair fell in limp, drab folds – it was hair and that’s all; my
mouth was neither pouty nor cupid-bowed – it was something to put
food into; of my nose, the less said the better; and my forehead and
ears, exposed nakedly to the public, gave me a horrid, undressed
feeling. I was not pretty. Only a girl can realize what a terrible
realization that must be.
65
Fazenda’s heartbreaking discovery of her own plainness, and her plaintive longing
for beauty, were the topic of countless articles in newspapers and magazines, such as
this 1928 profile in Motion Picture Magazine:
…Louise Fazenda has gone through life getting her feelings hurt
about her looks. According to the standards set by Venus and
Ziegfeld, Louise’s features don’t quite jibe. She’s had that brought
home to her almost all her life. … Louise is the first to admit that her
teens were not a lovely age. She was an ungainly kid with large
wrists and a mouth that spread too far when she laughed; and funny,
rather crinkly eyes in place of large, dreamy ones. When she grew a
little older and went into pictures, the bathing beauties over at
Sennett’s used to refer to her as the homely girl. It hurt at first. It
hurt something awful, as it always does with girls with hearts as
lovely as Louise’s and exteriors that don’t match. Even after she
became famous on the screen with her comedy antics, there were dark
days and nights when Louise wondered if life with its lovely gifts of
love and happiness was going to pass her by because she didn’t look
the part.
66
One writer found in her homeliness the root of her comedy: “What girl ever lived
who sincerely wanted to be called a good sport? Clowning was her ‘cover-up.’…
The ugly duckling was to become a bird in calico comedy, winging its message to
hungry souls.”
67
In a profile of Fazenda titled “You Don’t Have to Be Beautiful,”
the writer states flatly,
It has never occurred to me to think that Louise is not a pretty girl.
She offers so much that mere beauty seems a trivial matter. I doubt if
the fans pause to notice this lack. Yet, any analysis shows that she
157
does not measure up to the accepted standards of beauty. …[S]he has
proved that beauty is not necessary for success on the screen. …But,
she says, she would like to be beautiful.
68
The contradictions in this quote – that, on the one hand, beauty is unnecessary and
unimportant to the fans, while on the other hand not being pretty means not
“measur[ing] up” – mirror the contradictions evident in the discourses about the
relative beauty of screen comediennes. Ultimately, these stories served to make their
subjects sympathetic to audience members who may have had similarly
contradictory and ambiguous feelings toward their own appearance. The heart-
wrenching descriptions of Fazenda, Greenwood and others trying to come to terms
with what amounts to a failure to live up to normative standards of beauty would
certainly have been familiar, on some level, to a great many women. As physical
beauty was becoming ever more important in American society, and as idealized
standards of beauty were narrowing, it’s understandable that women would take
comfort in the knowledge that their film idols struggled with the same body and
appearance issues as they did.
Surprisingly, similar stories about growing up homely were circulated
regarding attractive comediennes. Constance Talmadge described her younger self
as “an overgrown, gawky kid” who was too “little and skinny” to follow her famous
sister Norma into dramatic films.
69
Although she was only 17 years old and already
quite pretty when she made her debut in films, Talmadge describes her entrée into
motion pictures, which came about while visiting Norma at her studio:
158
one day I heard them say they were looking for a homely, skinny little
girl to play a bit. My vanity was all gone by that time…. They told
me I was a bit too homely and too skinny, but I might try.
70
Similarly, Adela Rogers St. Johns speculated that Marion Davies’ “desire to be an
actress came partly from the fact that she was a very plain little girl who only
blossomed into a beauty when she had gone through all the hurts and slights of a
plain little girl.”
71
Like the stories about “homely” comediennes’ childhoods, stories
that positioned attractive comediennes as gawky, plain, insecure little girls certainly
allowed fans to relate to them. At the same time, these kinds of discourses fed into
the theme of transformation found in many of the light comediennes’ films (and also
the strategies of the burgeoning cosmetics industry) by assuring fans that beauty was
available to every woman, that even the ugliest of ducklings could become a swan.
“Why Not Homely Movie Stars?”
Stories about comediennes’ tragic plainness often included mention of the
fact that many of these women turned to comedy because they were not considered
attractive enough for dramatic roles. Charlotte Greenwood’s description of her
dramatic ambitions is typical: “I wanted to be a great dramatic star or prima donna,
but all that time I was fighting against nature. It took me all that time to realize that I
wasn’t built to shine as Ophelia or the Merry Widow.”
72
Gale Henry took a more
cavalier approach to her comedic fate. When asked by an interviewer if she liked
comedies, she laughingly replied “Do I like ‘em?…I have to like ‘em! Can you
imagine me as the heroine of a melodrama?”
73
159
Louise Fazenda similarly claimed that she had had her heart set on becoming
a dramatic actress, and the “accidental” start to her comedy career became an
important part of her studio publicity. In one article, Fazenda describes the “terrible
irony of fate if you began with the aspirations of a Bernhardt and ended as a clown,”
and remarks that “when it came to ingénues, I couldn’t ‘inge’ worth a cent.” She
concludes the article by saying that she “did have a few faint yearnings toward
drama, but have reconciled myself with the thought that every one has a hard luck
story and to create smiles was worth any sort of sacrifice.”
74
As Fazenda’s
realization that she was not beautiful was presented in tragic terms, so was her
inability to fulfill her dramatic aspirations. In language that echoes the heartbreaking
stories of her childhood as an ugly duckling, a 1925 Motion Picture Magazine article
argues that Fazenda was “one of the most unhappy” people in Hollywood:
She is the greatest girl comedian in the world: but she doesn’t want to
be a girl comedian. The ambition of her life has been to play tragedy.
And they will not let her. Louise once told me that she never saw
Lillian Gish in a big tragic picture that she didn’t go home and cry her
eyes out to think it could not be she doing it.
75
Just who “they” are, who refuse to let Fazenda play tragedy, is unclear. While this
article doesn’t question the system that insists on separating the beautiful
tragediennes from the homely comediennes, another asked, “Why must a capable
actress like Charlotte Greenwood work only in comedies where she sits in mud
puddles instead of playing the heroine who gets wooed and won by a hero who
hasn’t a Greek-god profile?”
76
As Greenwood insightfully pointed out to her
interviewer,
160
the only women who get courted, kidnapped, insulted, endangered,
hired as secretaries, kissed, plotted against, left a fortune,
compromised, fought for or married are the young and beautiful ones.
All the others presumably live in boarding houses, teach school, and
botanize for excitement.
77
When comediennes are presented as unable to perform dramatic roles – whether due
to their appearance or their natural proclivity for comedy – the implication is that
they are unable to perform “ideal” femininity. For Fazenda, her awkwardness and
lack of “feminine wiles” conspire to make her a spectacle even when she is trying to
behave like a lady. Her fans are clearly meant to find her inability to perform drama
as sympathetic, and fan magazines and studio publicity reported on roles that she
played that fell closer to her dramatic ideal. Upon the release of her 1924 film The
Lighthouse By the Sea, one article commented on the fact that Fazenda “plays, for
the first time in her long screen career, the heroine who marries the hero,”
78
and in an
article titled “Slow Music for Louise at Last,” her opportunity to play a death scene
in an upcoming film is described with a proud enthusiasm most often reserved for
winners of beauty pageants: “In all her eight years of acting she never realized this
great moment would ever come.”
79
For “homely” actresses such as Fazenda, Greenwood and Henry, comedy is
presented as their only choice. These discourses, then, simultaneously reinforce and
draw attention to the stereotypical division between beauty and comedy. By pointing
out that many actresses are prevented from working in drama only because of their
appearance, these articles question the usefulness and validity of that system. At the
same time, by presenting these comediennes as longing, but unable, to play dramatic
161
roles these articles continue the longstanding tradition of situating comedy as
inherently inferior to drama.
“As they really are”
Either as the beauty who courageously hides her attractiveness for the
camera, or as the tragic ugly duckling longing to be beautiful, comediennes were
frequently presented in a way that called attention to their appearance and made it an
integral part of their personae, and stories that positioned comediennes as tragic
figures in many ways advanced the idea of Hollywood’s beauty standards as an
unrealistic ideal that many women couldn’t live up to. When Louise Fazenda
catalogues her physical deficiencies, she sets herself up in opposition to a feminine
ideal created by the media, with “veiled” and “mischievous” eyes, “pouty” and
“cupid-bowed” lips. Instead of these attributes, she describes eyes that “frankly
stared” at the world and a mouth made “to put food into.” She is not a passive,
mysterious beauty; instead, she investigates the world with her “round” eyes, and
consumes with her mouth. She is a part of the world, a human being rather than an
impossible ideal. Similarly, when Marie Dressler laments that she was born homely,
or when Charlotte Greenwood insists that she was not fated to play glamorous
ingénue roles, they draw attention to the fact that ideal beauty is out of reach for
many women.
Stories about comediennes’ lack of success in dramatic roles can be seen in
this same light. As I discussed in Chapter 1, these discourses complicate the idea
162
that women are naturally sensitive, that they are instinctually drawn to the higher art
forms. The notion that many comediennes turned to comedy because they were
unable to perform drama functions in the same way as stories about their lack of
natural beauty: in both cases, they are unable to perform conventional femininity.
The element of pathos in these stories – the idea of a woman who desperately wanted
to be a beautiful tragedienne and ended up a homely comedienne – would certainly
have resonated with women who similarly had difficulty conforming to societal
gender expectations. The fact that both of these themes resurface time and again in a
wide variety of newspaper and magazine articles as well as studio publicity indicates
that this element of pathos was an important part of comediennes’ appeal to fans.
Whether these comediennes celebrated or lamented their unconventional femininity,
they functioned as a reminder that conventional femininity was an ideal that was
difficult for many women to achieve.
Not only do these comediennes draw attention to the film industry’s
impossibly high standards of beauty, they also reveal the artifice behind idealized
beauty and femininity. This is something that the popular press also understood: in a
1925 profile of Louise Fazenda, Adela Rogers St. Johns simultaneously exposes and
perpetuates the constructed nature of Hollywood beauty:
Louise is no beauty, but I sometimes think that she might have been
made into a beauty as well as some others I have seen on the screen.
She has as much to start with – glorious, curly, thick hair, in shades of
golden brown. Intelligent eyes. And a figure so excellent that she has
posed a number of times for famous sculptors. But if there was ever a
woman indifferent to her personal appearance, it is Fazenda. Just the
same I cling to my hunch that if as much time and money and
163
attention had been spent on Louise as has been spent upon certain
other stars, she might have been called a beauty.
80
St. Johns frankly affirms that Hollywood actresses are only as beautiful as the
studios made them, and that even someone like Fazenda, who is “no beauty,” and
whose heartbreaking homeliness was an integral part of her persona, could have been
just as beautiful as other stars. What comediennes offered was an alternate
conception of beauty and femininity as performance, something that is not inherently
possessed by all women, but rather something that can be played with and even
rejected.
A perfect illustration of this can be found in the many newspaper and
magazine articles that printed pictures of comediennes in character next to glamorous
studio portraits. Numerous articles claim to show actresses “as they really are,” as if
the highly controlled and posed portraits are any closer to the reality of these
women’s lives than the character shots. These photographs insistently assert that off-
screen slapstick comediennes are not as grotesque, and therefore threatening, as they
appear on-screen. On-screen, they may break every law of society and physics as
they roughhouse with men and throw themselves about with reckless abandon. But
off-screen, these pictures tell us, they are refined and dignified, and are even a little
bewildered by their own on screen antics. [Figures 2-18 and 2-19]
164
Figure 2-18 – Alice Howell: “look at her as she really is.”
165
Figure 2-19 – Gale Henry: “Off the screen she is a most attractive
young woman.”
At a time when highly visible and unruly women were challenging social and
political structures and demanding enfranchisement, these photographs could serve
to reassure fans that their idols were really proper ladies. At the same time, just as in
comedies that feature transformation themes, these photographs show that beauty is
largely performative, and that women could “pass” as either pretty or plain (within
limits, of course). Furthermore, the fact that these women were celebrated for
166
qualities other than their beauty makes these other qualities – their talent, humor,
intelligence, etc. – seem more valued, a fact that is visually represented by the
pictures in these articles. Not only are the character images much larger than the
studio portraits, the fact that they feature the full body of each actress, as well as the
actresses’ activity and interaction with other (male) characters, points to the fact that
the comic characters are embodied and fully participating in the world, as opposed to
the beautiful but static and isolated portraits. These photographs seem to be saying
that the portraits may be pretty, but the comic figures are having fun.
Conclusion
Silent comediennes’ relationship to beauty, as framed by press and studio
discourses, was complicated and frequently paradoxical. Although the press
frequently discounted the importance of beauty, it simultaneously praised women
who were beautiful and reinforced the idea of homeliness as pitiable, and while
many comediennes willingly “sacrificed” their beauty and femininity in their films,
the disruptive potential of these performances was often tempered by press
discourses that insisted on comedy as tragedy. Stories that focused attention on
comediennes’ beauty, or lack thereof, reinforced Hollywood’s obsession with female
beauty, while simultaneously furthering the longstanding stereotype that women
could be either pretty or funny, but never both.
At the same time, comediennes offered an alternative model of femininity
that countered the ideal image of beauty found in other film and stage genres. When
167
comediennes emphasized their non-normative physical traits in their acts, they were
rejecting the notion that excessive, homely or unruly women should attempt to
conform to popular standards and were instead embracing their “deviant”
appearance. And when comediennes engaged in on-screen transformations, either as
homely characters who turned beautiful or beautiful actresses who turned homely,
they were showing that an acceptably feminine woman could have an unruly edge.
Finally, by showing the work required to achieve and maintain beauty, comediennes
demonstrated that beauty is not something innate to all women, but rather something
that can be created, manipulated, and even rejected altogether. Overall, comediennes
modeled a type of femininity that wasn’t dependent on beauty or an idealized image
of femininity, and argued that brains, personality and a sense of humor were as
important to a woman as how she looked.
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Chapter 2 Endnotes
1
Louise Fazenda, “How to Get In!,” Motion Picture Magazine, December 1916.
2
Robert Fender, “What Is Beauty?” Photoplay, July 1928, 35.
3
Susan A. Glenn, Female Spectacle: The Theatrical Roots of Modern Feminism,
(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2000) 47.
4
“’Comedian’ Girls Jump to the Front,” n.p., June 8, 1902, quoted in Susan A.
Glenn, Female Spectacle: The Theatrical Roots of Modern Feminism, (Cambridge:
Harvard University Press, 2000), 46.
5
Irene Thirer, “Film Beauts Come and Go – Funny Fazenda Lingers,” New York
Evening Post, April 29, 1936, NYPL.
6
“Coiffure Note: Louise Fazenda Still Wears Those Old Pigtails,” Herald-Tribune,
23 January 1938, n.p., NYPL.
7
William Cohill, “Is Your Face the Type for Film Success?” The Des Moines
Sunday Register Magazine, 7 November 1926, Colleen Moore scrapbook #15,
AMPAS.
8
Mabel Normand, “How to Get Into the Movies: Part II, Types of Girls That
Producers Seek,” Movie Weekly, 25 February 1922, MNSB, 285.
9
Normand, “Types of Girls That Producers Seek,” MNSB, 285-6.
10
Normand, “Types of Girls That Producers Seek,” MNSB, 286.
11
Normand, “Types of Girls That Producers Seek,” MNSB, 286.
12
Unidentified clipping, 5 July 1915, Polly Moran file, NYPL.
13
Polly Moran, Denver Times, 8 October 1911, n.p.
14
Ted Le Berthon, “Star Once Sold Newspapers at Arcade Depot,” unsourced, 25
June 1930, AMPAS.
15
“Toiling Lily,” Motion Picture Magazine, March 1921; Mabel Normand 1918
16
“Dorothy Gish Gratifies Early Stage Ambition,” Philadelphia Inquirer, 13 April
1930, n.p., NYPL.
17
Unidentified photo caption, Colleen Moore scrapbook #2, AMPAS.
169
18
“Two Entrancing Types,” unsourced, Colleen Moore scrapbook #2, AMPAS.
19
Dan Thomas, “Daily Movie,” West Palm Beach Post, 13 October 1925, Colleen
Moore scrapbook #15, AMPAS.
20
“J.G.” “Her Wild Oat,” St. Paul Pioneer Press, 25 December 1927, Colleen Moore
scrapbook #18, AMPAS.
21
“Character Sketch of Vivacious Colleen Moore,” Newark Ledger, 9 December
1923, Colleen Moore scrapbook #1, AMPAS.
22
Brooklyn Motion Picture Magazine, September 1924, Colleen Moore scrapbook
#2, AMPAS.
23
“Beauty and Personality,” Washington Star, 20 November 1921, Colleen Moore
scrapbook #1, AMPAS.
24
“More Than Beauty Needed, Is Claim,” unsourced, ca. 1921, Colleen Moore
scrapbook #1, AMPAS.
25
Mabel Normand, “How to Get Into the Movies: Part VI, Keep a Diary!” Movie
Weekly, 25 March 1922, MNSB, 289.
26
“Fay Tincher,” Motion Picture Magazine, October 1916, 68.
27
Dorothy Manners, “It Pays to Be Homely,” Motion Picture Magazine, November
1928, 31.
28
Lynn Fairfield, “Why Not Homely Movie Stars?” Motion Picture Magazine,
December 1927, 54.
29
Kutten, “The World’s Best Friend.”
30
“Why Not Homely Movie Stars?” 93.
31
Archie Bell, “Her Breadth Is Her Meal Ticket, Quoth the Mirthful Trixie,” n.p.,
NYPL.
32
Slide, Encyclopedia, 488.
33
Dorothy Faith Webster, “The Bear Facts About Gale Henry,” Photoplay, January
1920, Gale Henry clipping file, NYPL.
34
“Coiffure Note: Louise Fazenda Still Wears Those Old Pigtails.”
170
35
Louise Fazenda, “Plain or Pretty as You Will,” Pantomime, 5 October 1921, 8.
36
W. Stephen Bush, “Tillie’s Tomato Surprise,” The Moving Picture World, 16
October 1915, 463; Jane Kutten, “The World’s Best Friend,” Motion Picture
Magazine, January 1931, 31.
37
Unidentified clipping, Charlotte Greenwood file, NYPL.
38
Unidentified clipping (ca. 1914), Charlotte Greenwood file, NYPL.
39
Charles Darnton, ”’So Long Letty’ Almost as Broad As It Is Long,” New York
World, 1916, NYPL
40
Thomas C. Kennedy, “’Jane,’” Motography, 18 December 1915, 1289.
41
“’Jane,’” New York Dramatic Mirror, 11 December 1915, 26.
42
New York Evening Journal, 1 November 1927, Charlotte Greenwood file, NYPL.
43
“Gale’s Infinite Variety,” Moving Picture Weekly, 10 Mar, 1917, n.p., NYPL.
44
“Mayflowers Bloom With Sweet Tunes,” New York Times, 25 November 1925, 14.
45
“’Jane’ Next Oliver Morosco Release,” The Moving Picture World, 20 November
1915, 1515.
46
Dorothy Dix, “Vanished Ladies,” The Hartford Courant, 27 September 1926, 8.
47
Constance Talmadge, “Here’s How Kid Connie Landed in the Movies,” Toledo
Blade, December 1919, n.p., NYPL.
48
“How These English Lords Do Suffer,” The Hartford Courant, 7 December 1924,
C3.
49
Cleveland News, 26 February 1926, Colleen Moore scrapbook #13, AMPAS; The
Wall Flower advertisement, unsourced, Colleen Moore scrapbook #1, AMPAS.
50
Gladys Hall, “Is It Tragic to Be Comic?” Motion Picture Classic, May 1931, 48.
51
“Don’t Fight Against Nature,” unidentified clipping, ca. 1917, NYPL.
52
“Kitchen Komedy,” unidentified clipping, May 20, 1918, NYPL.
53
“Alice Howell in ‘Alice in Society,’” Moving Picture Weekly, October 28, 1916,
26.
171
54
Willis Goldbeck, “Stuff of Gold,” Motion Picture Magazine, November 1921, 52.
55
Ted Le Berthon, “Star Once Sold Newspapers at Arcade Depot,” unidentified
clipping, 25 June 1930, AMPAS.
56
Marquis Busby, “You Don’t Have to Be Beautiful,” Photoplay, January 1930, 47;
Louise Fazenda, “Plain or Pretty as You Will,” Pantomime, 5 October 1921, 8;
Manners, “It Pays to Be Homely.”
57
“Plain or Pretty as You Will,” 8.
58
Gladys Hall, “Have YOU Got the Makings of a COMEDIAN?” Motion Picture
Classic, December 1934, 30.
59
“Alice Howell,” New York Tribune, September 2, 1917, n.p., NYPL.
60
“Alice Howell,” Moving Picture World, 29 September 1917, n.p., NYPL.
61
“Alice Howell Without Make-up,” Moving Picture World, 15 December 1917,
1625.
62
Carol Lee, “Oddities of Screen Makeup,” Motion Picture Magazine, May 1917,
33-34.
63
“Enter and Exit, Smiling,” 115.
64
Unidentified clipping, Charlotte Greenwood file, NYPL.
65
Fazenda, “Me by Myself,” 35.
66
“It Pays to Be Homely,” 31.
67
Myrtle Gebhart, “La Fazenda Tops the Waves,” Picture Play, ca. 1930, 55, 57.
68
Busby, “You Don’t Have to Be Beautiful.”
69
Walter Vogdes, “Twenty Minutes with Constance,” Select Pictures Magazine, ca.
1918, 5, AMPAS.
70
Grace Kingsley, “The Wild Woman of Babylon – Oh, Yes! She Has Tame
Moments,” Photoplay, May 1917, 154.
71
St. Johns, “An Impression of Marion Davies,” 104.
72
“Don’t Fight Against Nature,” unidentified clipping, ca. 1917, NYPL.
172
73
Webster, “The Bear Facts About Gale Henry.”
74
Louise Fazenda, “Me By Myself: The Confessions of a Comedienne,” Motion
Picture Classic, May 1919, 69.
75
Harry Carr, “No! They’re Not Happy Even With Wealth and Fame,” Motion
Picture Magazine, September 1925, 111.
76
“Why Not Homely Movie Stars,” 93.
77
“Why Not Homely Movie Stars,” 93.
78
Unidentified clipping, ca. 1924, Louise Fazenda file, NYPL.
79
“Slow Music for Louise at Last,” Toledo Blade, February 1, 1923, NYPL.
80
Adela Rogers St. Johns, “The Most Versatile Girl in Hollywood,” Photoplay, June
1925, 129.
173
Chapter Three
“Cupid Lips and an Ungodly Appetite”
Sensuality, Sexuality, and Desire
In a scene from the 1927 film It, shopgirl Betty Lou Spence (Clara Bow)
spots her new boss across a crowded room and determines on the spot to win him
over. Like a cat stalking her prey, Betty Lou fixes her gaze on her intended, as her
initially tender expression changes from barely contained lust to plaintive longing.
After filming the close-up the film’s director, Clarence Badger, asked Bow to
explain her look:
“Well,” she came back, “if you knew your onions like you’re
supposed to, you’d know that first expression was for the love-sick
dames in the audience, and that the second expression, that passionate
stuff, was for the boys and their paps, and that third expression – well,
Mr. Badger, just about the time all the old women in the audience had
become shocked and scandalized by that passionate part, they’d
suddenly see that third expression, become absorbed in it, and change
their minds about me having naughty ideas and go home thinking how
pure and innocent I was; and having got me mixed up with the
character I’m playing, they’d come again when my next picture
showed up.”
1
Bow’s description of her various expressions and their likely appeal to different
segments of the audience indicates a savvy understanding of how a comedienne
could effectively portray sexuality on-screen. In silent-era drama and melodrama
female sexuality was generally depicted as dangerous, as vamps and other sexually
knowing women, played by stars such as Theda Bara, Pola Negri and Greta Garbo,
left a path of ruined lives in their wakes. In a great many of these films female
sexuality is punished, often with the death and/or insanity of the “fallen woman,” her
174
lovers, or both.
2
In The Devil’s Daughter (1915), for example, Theda Bara plays a
vengeful beauty who drives her lover mad after crippling his wife, and finally
succumbs to madness herself. Greta Garbo’s The Temptress (1926) similarly ends
with the title character on the brink of madness, and in Flesh and the Devil (1926)
Garbo’s character causes the death of her first husband and drives her second
husband and her lover to the brink of duel before she herself dies. Several film
adaptations of Andre Dumas’ novel La Dame aux camélias were filmed in the silent
era, each ending with the death of the “courtesan” Camille, either in her lover’s arms
or alone.
*
This trend toward punishing female sexuality was not generally found in
comedies; sexuality was contained at the end of the film, usually through marriage,
but women were free to express their sexuality in myriad ways before the final fade
to black, with no ill consequences. Certainly, silent comediennes never wrought the
kind of destruction that the melodramatic vamps did, but they were nonetheless
frequently depicted as desiring and often sexually knowledgeable figures. This is
most clearly evident in flapper films, where characters played by Clara Bow, Louise
Brooks, Colleen Moore and Joan Crawford danced, smoked, petted, schemed, and
always emerged triumphant. The light comedies of “virtuous vamps” Constance
Talmadge, Dorothy Gish and Marion Davies similarly feature women who flirt with
illicit sexuality and are still rewarded with happy endings. Collectively, these films
*
The 1915 and 1917 versions of Camille, starring Clara Kimball Young and Theda Bara, respectively,
end with the heroine dying in Armand’s arms. In the 1921 and 1927 versions, starring Alla Nazimova
and Norma Talmadge, Camille dies rejected and alone. Other silent-era versions of Camille were
filmed in the U.S. (1912), Denmark (1907), France (1912), Italy (1909, 1915), and Germany (1917,
1920).
175
make an argument for female sexuality as fun and natural; in fact, an essential tool
for getting and keeping a mate.
Flappers and “virtuous vamps” were not the only comediennes to play with
issues of female sexuality in their films. Slapstick comediennes played with
sexuality and sensuality in a variety of ways in their films. Although they were not
presented as overtly sexual as flappers or light comediennes, slapstick comedy
presented women with an opportunity to test the boundaries of socially acceptable
relations between the sexes and revel in bodily pleasures in ways unseen in other
genres.
Comediennes, then, found many ways to express female sexuality on-screen.
Flirtation in comedies highlighted the inherent fun in sexual relations, while
simultaneously suggesting that romantic relationships could be fluid, rather than
stable. In films where comediennes were called upon to enact aggressive sexuality
they were calling attention to and questioning behavioral standards that required
women to be demure and reserved. Comediennes also presented a powerful
endorsement of female sensuality in their films, as they reveled in the bodily
pleasure of physical comedy. Another way in which silent comediennes were able to
play with tropes of sexuality and desire in their films can be found in cross-dressing
comedies. Drawing from the long tradition of male impersonation in vaudeville and
burlesque, these films tested the boundaries of acceptable sexuality and presented the
possibility of homosexual desire. Male impersonation allowed comediennes the
176
opportunity to transgress traditional gender roles, while simultaneously allowing
audience members to enjoy the illicit sexuality that these films presented.
Respectability and Audiences
The tremendous popularity of fallen women and vamp films is indicative of
public nervousness surrounding women’s increased presence in the public sphere
after the turn of the century. Whereas in the previous century middle-class women
were not supposed to return a man’s gaze, by the late 1800s they had acquired a
“directness of gaze,” making eye contact not only with husbands and family
members, but also with strangers on the street.
3
This newfound directness, coupled
with an increased presence in public and changes in make-up and clothing, made it
increasingly difficult to determine at a glance whether or not a woman was
“respectable.”
4
Far removed from the pious, pure, submissive and domestic ideal of
femininity popular earlier in the nineteenth century, women in the late 1800s were
testing boundaries and discovering new limits of acceptable feminine behavior. As
the twentieth century drew near, “an ethic of leisure gradually emerged as an
acceptable strand of modern life. This ethic encouraged the pleasures of leisurely
shopping and consumption, as well as the pastimes of dancing, movies, and
amusement parks.”
5
By the 1890s, an active, independent and assertive model of
femininity would emerge to question and challenge societal expectations of the
proper role for women.
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The rise of the New Woman ideal coincided with a more generalized
relaxation of gender roles around the turn of the century. Alison Kibler describes a
“sexual revolution” that took place between 1890 and 1920, in which both women
and men “experimented more with sexuality outside of marriage and adopted more
assertive sexual styles of dress and behavior in public.”
6
Dating, which in the
Victorian era had been seen as a precursor to marriage, became a recreational
activity that was an end in itself. This increased sexual freedom, combined with
women’s intensifying demands for suffrage and equal rights, made women
threatening to those who wished to maintain the status quo, and in fact the New
Woman was held responsible for the predicted demise of the American family.
Should women’s demands be met concerning contentious topics such as the vote,
equality in education and the workplace, and birth control, many feared that the
nuclear family would not survive.
7
At the same time, female theater- and cinemagoers in the late 19
th
and early
20
th
centuries were negotiating a difficult set of new roles. On the one hand,
changing standards of respectability in legitimate and motion picture theaters meant
that audiences were required to sit quietly and passively enjoy the entertainments.
On the other hand, loosening restrictions concerning gender roles meant that women
could attend the theater on their own or with other women, and could participate in a
level of heterosocial mixing that was unheard of in the 19
th
century. Theater owners
and managers made a specific appeal to female spectators, hoping that the presence
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of women in the audience would dignify their entertainments.
8
However, the types
of entertainments that women actually enjoyed were often far from dignified.
A major element in theater’s drive to respectability in the nineteenth century
was making the theatrical experience less interactive. Boisterous audiences were
trained to sit quietly and passively watch the show, without trying to participate in
the entertainment. Similarly, actors were expected to observe the fourth wall, and to
avoid directly interacting with the audience. A great many female comedians
disregarded this new theatrical convention, however. Many comediennes’ acts
involved directly addressing the audience, specifically recalling the days before the
“feminization” of theater when actors and spectators worked together to create the
entertainment. Like the rest of the material in their acts, their interactions with the
audience were frequently loaded with sexual overtones. Female performers would
flirt with men in the audience, often to the embarrassment of the men and the
consternation of the theater managers. The Faber Sisters, a singing and dancing team
whose repertoire included the playfully suggestive song “How’d You Like to Be My
Daddy?” were ordered by one manager to cut their “reference to becoming better
acquainted with one of the men in the audience,” and another manager chastised
comedienne Lillian Shaw’s habit of talking to patrons seated in the boxes, saying,
“You would think that a girl who had been on the circuit as long as she has would
know better.”
9
Engaging the audience was a way for female performers to gain more
power onstage, as interacting with the audience effectively removed the performers
from the position of passive receiver of the spectators’ gaze, a position which
179
characterized the chorines of the Ziegfeld Follies. The effect of the suggestive lyrics
of their songs combined with an assertive delivery was that the performers appeared
in control of their own sexuality, as well as in control of the men in the audience.
As spectators in legitimate and motion picture theaters women were able to
envision alternate roles for themselves and vicariously experience transgressive
behaviors. In the safety of the darkened theater, women could watch female
performers engaging in wild, anarchic behavior and questioning the validity of
women’s assumed place in society. Female spectators seemed to be particularly
delighted by acts which questioned or complicated traditional gender roles and
hierarchies. Many popular female performers in vaudeville, for example, challenged
the Victorian ideal of women as pure and passive through their aggressive and
sexually suggestive songs and routines. Many of the song titles of the period
exemplify this performance style, for example Nora Bayes’ “I Work Eight Hours a
Day, I Sleep Eight Hours a Night, That Leaves Eight Hours for Lovin’” (1915),
Sophie Tucker’s “When They Get Too Wild for Everyone Else, They’re Perfect for
Me” (1922), Eva Tanguay’s “It’s All Been Done Before but Not the Way I Do It”
(1913), and Irene Franklin’s prohibition-era song about men who carry hip flasks,
“What Have You Got on Your Hip? You Don’t Seem to Bulge Where a Gentleman
Ought to.” Just as these unruly performances made vaudeville theaters “places
where women in the audience could fantasize about other possible lives, imagine
alternatives to Victorian refinement, and unleash any anger at the limitations in their
own lives,”
10
screen comediennes, by appropriating the transgressive performance
180
styles of their theatrical predecessors, were encouraging female film audiences to
imagine the same kinds of possibilities.
While it is impossible to know precisely how audiences reacted to specific
performers or acts, there is ample evidence that female spectators enjoyed acts which
challenged gender roles and allowed them to flirt with forbidden sexuality. The
theater afforded women a place to safely experiment with rebellion, and to try on
new gender roles. Furthermore, in the performances of actresses in general and
comediennes in particular, women could see alternate models of femininity, and
differing ways of negotiating rapidly changing expectations for women. Female
spectators could see that there was the possibility for sexual pleasure outside of
marriage, and that independence and personal fulfillment were accessible to women.
“All Actresses Are Naughty”
Public attitudes towards actresses were complex and still somewhat negative
in the early 1900s. In the mid-1800s, the link between actress and prostitute was still
very clear, as Robert Allen points out that
the phenomenon of independent, working-class women engaging in
commerce in a working-class theatrical space was perceived by those
in a position to make laws as tantamount to criminal sexuality. … [I]n
the 1850s, “prostitution” meant not so much literal sexual commerce
as a whole symbolic constellation of qualities attendant upon the
working-class woman’s economic and social independence from her
family and resistance to or distance from patriarchal control.
11
The rise of female audiences and the resultant feminization of the theater meant that
by the early twentieth-century actresses were regarded in a somewhat better light.
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However, many held that the theatrical profession was inherently immoral, and that
women who made their living onstage were somehow wicked. In 1899, English
drama critic Clement Scott commented that “it was nearly impossible for a woman
who adopts the stage as a profession to remain pure.”
12
This statement sparked a
great deal of controversy in both England and the United States – comedienne May
Irwin denounced him as a “hypocrite, a journalistic vampire – a man so low, so vile,
that he can see nothing but vice wherever he may look”
13
– but nonetheless it is
likely that Scott was not alone in his opinion. Even those who allowed that actresses
could manage to remain pure were frequently of the opinion that “women onstage
were vain and frivolous, not truly artistic and professional.”
14
The widely reported
extravagances and luxuries of many actresses, which may have been attractive to
some aspiring actresses, were seen by many as evidence of women’s naturally
frivolous nature. Whereas actresses were thought to be interested only in wealth and
status, actors were assumed to be interested in the artistic merits of the theater.
If actresses were thought to be vain and frivolous, chorus girls were seen as a
much more serious threat. In the early 1900s, “the chorus girl came to be viewed as
a social problem, one that seemed to threaten, along with woman suffrage, the very
foundation of traditional gender relations.”
15
On the one hand, the chorus girl was
stereotyped as a Cinderella character who rises from poverty to achieve economic
and professional success, and occasionally marry a rich admirer. Conversely, the
chorus girl was frequently portrayed as a heartless gold digger, who ruthlessly took
advantage of love-struck men, draining their bank accounts and their self-respect.
182
As actresses on the legitimate and vaudeville stages were breaking away from their
longstanding association with prostitution, chorus girls were increasingly identified
as "working girls.” The gold digger myth was a way of punishing actresses for their
economic independence and their perceived sexual transgressiveness. Chorus girls
were commonly thought to be loose and immoral, in part because “Broadway
producers and performers stimulated fantasies about the sexual desirability and
perhaps even the accessibility of theater women. Actresses of all kinds were
implicated in the fantasy, but none more so than chorus girls.”
16
Adding to the
chorus girl myth were popular books such as Anita Loos’ Gentlemen Prefer Blondes
(1925) and plays such as Avery Hopwood’s Gold Diggers (1919), which portrayed
Broadway chorines as alluring and manipulative women who used their sexuality to
have their way with unsuspecting men. For women who wanted to find a career in
the theater, the chorus offered tremendous possibilities. However, “no profession
except for prostitution so stigmatized women. To interrogate this paradox is to
reveal much about the history of women’s curious entrapment between the
empowering potential of performance and its equally powerful potential to
immure.”
17
The independence and equality that women found in the Broadway
chorus often translated into negative stereotyping resulting from conservative
backlash.
While film actresses generally were not perceived to be as immoral as the
stage actresses of the 19
th
century or the gold digging chorus girls of the early 20
th
century, they were still a part of this tradition. Many actresses used this stereotype to
183
their advantage – not just those who made a career out of playing vamps and
dangerous women, but also comediennes, especially flappers and light comediennes.
Constance Talmadge explicitly referenced the association between acting and
prostitution in a Photoplay article titled “Why Men Fall in Love with Actresses:”
…men in droves “fall” for actresses more readily than for other
women because the actress has the advantage – if you want to call it
an advantage – of the tradition, accumulating in weight for hundreds
of years, that all actresses are naughty. They aren’t, but that doesn’t
make any difference. The tradition is there. And Thomas and
Richard and Henry like naughty women. Or they think they do.
I have watched men falling over each other in a wild rush to
become acquainted with an actress, simply because her press agent
had carefully painted a picture of her as a wicked woman – and have
then seen these same men dropping her like a hot cake when they
discovered that she actually was no more wicked than a bowl of
crackers and milk.
18
Talmadge draws attention to the stereotype that “actresses are naughty,” and then
deftly deflects any negative connotations by insisting that, in fact, the tradition is
inaccurate, and by pointing out that men only think that they want a woman who is
“naughty.” This image of the “good little bad girl” or the “virtuous vamp”
†
is found
in a great many of the films of Talmadge and other light comediennes: in these
films, the heroine gets involved in complicated and compromising situations, but her
innocence is always confirmed at the end of the film.
Like light comediennes, flapper comediennes’ personae were frequently
crafted with the actress-as-whore tradition in mind. Clara Bow, especially, was
†
Numerous light comediennes were described in the press as “good little bad girls;” A Virtuous Vamp
(1919) was the name of a Constance Talmadge vehicle, written by Anita Loos, and the term was
subsequently used to describe her in the press.
184
portrayed in the press as somewhat loose: “Amoral, and not immoral,” as Motion
Picture Magazine described her.
19
Countless newspaper and fan magazine accounts
breathlessly described her affairs with Gary Cooper, Victor Fleming, Harry
Richman, Rex Bell, and numerous other men.
20
One article argued that “Her thirty-
six thousand fan letters last month proved that she is the kind of girl that men like to
remember,”
21
and another article revealed that “every year, she entertains the whole
University of Southern California team en masse at her home. Now and then, a few
of them individually. Football coaches don’t approve.”
22
Motion Picture concluded
that its own publicity could mean that Bow would have a hard time finding a
husband: “She knows that no ‘nice man’ would be very likely to marry her – now.
‘Nice men’ are squeamish about newspaper stories and reputations all messed up and
untidy.”
23
Rather than hurting Bow, however, this type of publicity helped to more
closely align her with the sexually adventurous flappers she played in her films. As
the quote that began this chapter illustrates, Bow was aware of and played with her
promiscuous image, directing “passionate” looks to the “boys and their paps” in the
audience, and then changing her expression to appease the “old women” who might
be “shocked and scandalized by that passionate part.” Bow’s reference to these old
women confusing her with her character and going to see more of her pictures is
telling, as she clearly understood that she needed to maintain a balance between the
desirable and desiring flapper and the innocent girl in order to appeal to different
segments of the audience. While the actress-as-whore reputation certainly sold
185
magazines and more than a few tickets to their films, this image, for Bow and other
comediennes, needed to be tempered by an image of the actress as innocent girl next
door. This duality made it possible to present potentially dangerous and illicit
sexuality to a broad audience, all in the safe confines of film comedy.
“I never flirted in my life – unless it was absolutely necessary.”
Silent comediennes frequently played with flirtation in their films. Whether
as a means of snaring an on-screen mate or as an end in itself, flirting could be a
powerful tool for comediennes, who flirt with friends, neighbors and even complete
strangers with joyous abandon. Men in silent comedies routinely ditch their wives to
follow attractive young girls who smile at them, and women are shown to enjoy
creating havoc with a passing glance. On the one hand, the flirtations in these films
foreground anxieties about women’s increased presence in the public sphere and the
increasing popularity of heterosocial interactions, including unchaperoned dating and
companionate marriage. At the same time, however, they showcase a world in
which women are in control of social and sexual situations, where romance and sex
are fun and exciting rather than obligatory, and, perhaps most revolutionary, where
relationships are fluid, and swapping partners is a playful alternative to monotonous
monogamy.
Slapstick comedies very frequently feature situations in which playful
flirtations lead to chaos and mayhem. In these flirtation comedies, the comediennes
by and large control not only the narrative, but also the men around them. In The
186
Water Nymph (1913), Mabel Normand is told by her boyfriend that “Papa feels
younger today, vamp him at the beach.” Mabel happily obliges, smiling seductively
at Papa as she passes him, and Papa – who is described in an intertitle as “a faithful
husband when locked in at home” – immediately responds by sneaking away from
his wife to join Mabel for a swim. The bathing costume that Mabel wears – a highly
controversial one-piece style popularized by Australian swimmer Annette Kellerman
– positions her as daring and confident, especially when contrasted to the other
women in more traditional bathing costumes [Figure 3-1].
Figure 3-1 – Mabel Normand
187
For many women wearing a Kellerman, as the one-piece suits were popularly
known, was tantamount to making a political statement; although the suits were less
restrictive than traditional costumes and allowed for freer movement while
swimming, women could be arrested for indecent exposure when wearing them in
public.
24
When Mabel appears in a Kellerman while “vamping” her boyfriend’s
father she is making a complicated and contradictory statement: on the one hand,
she is presenting herself as an object of desire, to be looked at not only by Papa but
by everyone else at the beach. At the same time, Mabel isn’t passive; after stripping
down to her Kellerman, she immediately goes to a diving board and performs a
series of athletic dives, reminding the viewers that the original purpose of the one-
piece costume was not sexual display but rather the feminist desire for more
practical, less restrictive clothing for women.
25
Just as her wearing of a Kellerman suit can be read in contradictory ways, so
can her enthusiastic agreement to vamp her boyfriend’s father for fun. She is
simultaneously making a sexual spectacle of herself, and making a feminist
statement about proper feminine behavior. While she flirts with Papa and allows
him to gaze lasciviously at her in her bathing costume, she is entirely in control of
the situation, leading Papa along even though she knows she is not interested in him
romantically. Sex is presented as sport, no different from Mabel’s athletic dives.
Like slapstick comedies, light comedies and flapper films also used the trope
of flirtation to show that sexuality could be fun and playful. At the same time, these
films contain traces of a tension between Victorian-era respectability and New
188
Woman liberation not found in slapstick. Morality is generally not at issue for
slapstick comediennes engaging in flirtations; the films are more concerned with
setting up the gag than with commenting on women’s proper sexual role. In light
comedies and flapper films, however, comediennes were presented as good girls at
heart regardless of how much illicit behavior they engaged in before the final fade to
black.
In light comedies and flapper films, as in slapstick comedies, when women
flirt with men they are in control of the sexual situation. Clara Bow was especially
known for her playfully flirtatious roles, and in fact this characterization became a
part of her persona. A 1928 Motion Picture Classic description of Bow reinforced
this image:
Clara Bow. Plump, red-head, cat eyes. Has Cupid lips and an
ungodly appetite. Begins to flirt with you after the second cocktail.
After the fourth begins to flirt with the saxophone player or the fellow
who beats the drum. Knows some good stories, but doesn’t always
get them straight.
26
In Mantrap (1926), Clara Bow plays with her flirtatious image as Alverna, a
manicurist who uses her feminine wiles to get everything and everyone she desires.
She is introduced in the film climbing out of an elderly man’s car in front of her
workplace, saying “So long, Sweet Man – thanks for the buggy ride.” When Joe
Easter, a small-town man visiting the big city spots her in the salon in which she
works, she convinces him to get a manicure by stroking his hand and telling him that
“I just love working on a real he-man’s hand – for a little change!” For Alverna,
flirting is the currency she uses to get what she needs, whether that means a ride to
189
work or a customer. Even after Alverna marries Joe and moves with him to the
backwoods Canadian village of Mantrap, her flirting doesn’t stop. Setting her sights
on a visiting lawyer from New York named Ralph Prescott, she convinces him to
take her back to the city and ultimately gets him to propose. On their way back to
the city Alverna and Ralph get lost in the wilderness and are discovered by a forest
ranger; hoping to procure some food Alverna smiles and winks at the ranger, and is
then chastised by Ralph for flirting. Alverna points out that “to get the eats one of us
had to flirt with him – and it couldn’t be you, could it?” Later she insists that “I
never flirted in my life – unless it was absolutely necessary.” The idea of flirting as
necessary, as the best (and in some cases only) way for a woman to get what she
wants is notable, as it introduces the idea of sex as currency, something that women
can exchange to fulfill other needs.
It’s useful to compare Clara Bow and her use of flirting to Constance
Talmadge in A Virtuous Vamp.
27
For Talmadge’s Gwen Armitage, described as a
“congenital vamp,” flirting is almost reflexive, something she does automatically.
Throughout the film she is able to drive men to distraction simply by smiling at
them. The scenario by Anita Loos indicates that Gwen is aware of her power over
men, but seldom in the film does she use this power for material gain. In fact, her
smiles cause her more trouble than anything else, as she tries to hold a job as a
stenographer but continually runs across bosses with more than dictation on their
minds. However, it’s likely that Talmadge infused her performance with more active
190
and playful flirtatiousness than is called for in the script. Describing Talmadge’s
performance in this film, one reviewer noted that,
Her methods are of a kind known to most every woman under the sun,
through seldom practiced by a girl of breeding such as she is
supposed to be. Just naturally she looked upon every man in sight as
rightful prey, soulfully gazing into his eyes as she jotted down
dictation. She being pretty and ultra feminine in appeal, the most
sluggish imagination will be able to picture the consternation that
soon reigned.
28
If Gwen is “soulfully gazing” at her “prey” that certainly indicates that she is
actively plying her feminine wiles. Like Bow’s Alverna or Mabel Normand’s Water
Nymph, Gwen uses flirtation to maintain control over sexual situations and the men
around her. Unlike Alverna, however, Gwen is, as the title makes abundantly clear,
virtuous. Whereas Alverna’s flirting carries with it the promise and potential of sex,
Gwen is indignant when her smiles are met with a pass. When a boss, overcome
with desire, proposes to her, Gwen is outraged, exclaiming that she is “surprised that
you should so presume on our business relationship.” The script describes the
exchange that follows:
He says, “Business relationship? What are you talking about?” and
rises to his feet. “Haven’t you led me on to think that you cared for
me?” She says she certainly has not done anything of the kind. He
says, “Well, what have you meant every day when you smiled at me,
when you let me hold your hand, when you did everything you could
possibly do to let me think you cared for me?” Then she says, “Mr.
Bell, you are insulting me. I have done nothing of the kind. If I have
smiled at you it has been entirely in a business way.”
29
This is very different from Alverna, who is not only happy to drive men to propose,
but also gladly takes them up on their propositions.
191
Despite the persistent on-screen flirtation enacted by comediennes, light
comedies and flapper films invariably assured spectators that the women were, after
all, good girls. Constance Talmadge’s 1926 film The Duchess of Buffalo was one of
many films that positioned her as an essentially good girl who got herself into and
out of compromising situations. In this film she plays Marian Duncan, an American
dancer in love with a Russian soldier named Vladimir Orloff; to protect her lover,
Marian finds herself forced to seduce his commanding officer, the Grand Duke. The
seduction scene is played for laughs – at one point Marian jumps into the Grand
Duke’s lap to prevent him from leaving the room, and he responds by
enthusiastically bouncing her on his knee; later, she clasps his head to her breast to
prevent him from spotting Orloff, much to the Grand Duke’s delight. As with
Alverna, flirting for Marian is a necessity, a means to an end. Both Alverna and
Marian understand that the most expedient way to get what they want is by
manipulating men and bending them to their will. In Marian’s case, however, it’s
clear that she’s not really a vamp at heart. She is, like Gwen, a “virtuous vamp,” a
woman who can use but not compromise her sexuality. The Duchess of Buffalo ends
in much the same way as many other light comedies and flapper films, with the
marriage of the young lovers, leaving the spectators with the reassuring image of
contained female sexuality.
Silent comedies, then, often feature women who are in control of sexual
situations and who derive pleasure from testing the boundaries of heterosocial
interactions. These films present flirtation and romance as fun and exciting, an
192
enjoyable sport rather than a means to an end (marriage). Furthermore, and perhaps
more telling, many of these films also present pre- or extra-marital flirtation as
preferable to the monotony and even misery of marriage. In the 1915 Keystone short
Ambrose’s Fury, dreary, loveless marriages are contrasted with the excitement and
pleasure of illicit romance. Ambrose is married to a stern, domineering wife; his
emasculation is made evident as soon as he is introduced, cleaning the house in a
frilly apron as his wife barks orders. When Ambrose tries to chat up the maid his
wife physically separates them, pushing Ambrose across the room. Glancing out the
window, Ambrose spots his neighbor (Louise Fazenda) hanging laundry, and he goes
outside to join her. [Figure 3-2]
Figure 3-2 – Ambrose’s Fury (1915): Louise and Ambrose plan a trip to the beach.
193
As the two laugh and flirt in front of the clothesline and make plans to meet later at
the beach, the disparity between married and single life is clear. This illicit flirtation
represents an escape from their dreary lives, represented by the laundry drying
behind them. Marriage for Ambrose and Louise means drudgery and overbearing
spouses; flirtation means excitement, escape and release. Interestingly, although
Louise’s husband is jealous and even violent, she is shown to have the upper hand in
their marriage. After her husband catches her flirting with Ambrose he attempts to
drive Ambrose away, only to be cuffed into submission by his much larger neighbor.
When in an attempt to chastise Louise for her indiscretion he meekly slaps her across
the face, she responds by soundly belting him and then indignantly walking away.
Although she is positioned as a more acceptable feminine model than Ambrose’s
bossy, mannish wife, Louise is not a shrinking violet: she is independent and refuses
to be bullied by her husband.
Another film that argues for extra-marital flirtation as an alternative to joyless
marriage is Tillie Wakes Up (1917). In this film Marie Dressler plays Tillie,
‡
a
neglected wife whose husband married her for her money and now shuns physical
contact with her. Tillie reads a newspaper article by “Beetrees Flarefacts” titled
“How to Hold Your Husband’s Love,” which encourages wives to find a “Romeo of
your own even if you have to pay him a salary. Show your husband that you are
human and he will begin to suspect that you are.” Tillie is not sold on the idea of
‡‡
Although Tillie Wakes Up is not directly related to Dressler’s previous films Tillie’s Punctured
Romance (1914) or Tillie’s Tomato Surprise (1915), or her Broadway play Tillie’s Nightmare (1910-
11), the title character is clearly meant to recall the slavey character played by Dressler in the earlier
vehicles.
194
sparking an affair: a title tells us that, “Tillie could not see that Romeo idea. In the
first place she was overweight for Juliet and in the second place she was afraid
something might happen.” However, she decides to take a chance with her neighbor,
a henpecked husband named J. Mortimer Pipkins. Tillie and J. Mortimer encounter
each other on the landing between their apartments, and flirt clumsily but eagerly
with one another (according to an intertitle, “In thirty seconds J. Mortimer had made
good with the old one about ‘You have beautiful eyes’ and Tillie felt she was fast
becoming a Regular Devil.”) As they stand in the darkened hallway talking and
laughing, they are framed in close-up with nothing but darkness visible behind them.
[Figure 3-3] The landing becomes a secret, unreal space where they are alone and
can throw away rules concerning propriety and societal expectations.
Figure 3-3 – Tillie Wakes Up (1917): Tillie (Marie Dressler) and J. Mortimer (Johnny
Hines) conspire to make their spouses jealous.
195
Even in a crowded apartment building in New York they are in their own private
world, free to engage in secret flirtations. Tillie’s plan works – after a day spent
cutting loose at Coney Island with J. Mortimer, their neglectful spouses track them
down and, realizing the error of their ways, reaffirm their love for Tillie and J.
Mortimer. The experience has clearly had an effect on Tillie, however, as she and J.
Mortimer steal a wink and a smile at each other while in their spouses’ arms before
the final fade to black.
The end of Tillie Wakes Up finds Tillie back in the arms of her husband, with order
between sexes and spouses seemingly restored. However, her last smile and wink at
J. Mortimer, as well as her glances at the well-built lifeguards who have rescued her
from the ocean [Figure 3-4], indicate that Tillie is not completely reformed. Similar
endings are found at the ends of countless comedies. Although most romantic
comedies and many slapsticks end with marriage or reconciliation, the final pairings
are not always convincing when the heroine has spent the previous reels engaging in
– and enjoying – flirtation. In fact, these films demonstrate the difficulty inherent
in trying to reconcile the impression created by the comediennes’ flirtation with the
generically necessary ending of heterosexual union. In Mantrap, the impossibility of
this reconciliation is made clear in the last scene. After leaving her husband for a
handsome lawyer, and then abandoning both men for the big city, Alverna finally
decides to return to her husband. As they embrace, a young Mountie walks through
their door. Alverna’s eyes widen as she looks him up and down. After a moment
she looks back to her husband, and says “Hang on to me, Joe – I’m slipping just a
196
little.” Clearly, marriage will never change Alverna – the desire to “slip” back into
her old habits will always be strong – as Joe puts it, “She’ll flirt as long as she
breathes.”
Figure 3-4 - Tillie Wakes Up (1917): Tillie steals a glance at her rescuer.
The real-life marriages of many flapper comediennes were discussed in the
press in terms of containment, in much the same way that their characters were
ostensibly contained in their films. An article about Joan Crawford which begins by
stating that “She receives all her telephone calls while in the bathtub,” goes on to
describe how domestic and settled down she’s become since her well-publicized
marriage to Douglas Fairbanks Jr.: “Joan, in the early days, had been somewhat of a
play girl, winning many cups and trophies at dance contests. When she became Mrs.
Douglas Fairbanks Jr., she settled down into a sedate matron.”
30
Here, Crawford’s
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life follows the same trajectory as many of the characters she played. Just like in her
films, Crawford had been tamed and rewarded with marriage.
Clara Bow received similar treatment in the press after marrying Rex Bell in
1931. Interestingly, although she is described as settling down and becoming
domesticated, as in her movies her containment is neither complete nor entirely
convincing. One press account of the newly-married Bow pointed out that “Once
upon a time Clara would have been delighted to oblige the greeting horde of
photographers by dancing atop a table if they asked her. Today she insisted on being
pictured gazing wistfully out her hotel window at the Sunday traffic on the
boulevard”
31
– the implication being that Bow’s insistence on a demure, thoughtful
pose has as much to do with her carefully constructed image as her earlier, table-
dancing days. Even Bow herself implicitly acknowledged that marriage couldn’t
contain her. In an article entitled “Hot-Cha Life Doesn’t Pay, Says ‘It’ Girl,” Bow is
quoted as saying: “I have found out that hot-cha doesn’t pay. I’m young, but I’m
getting older. I’m going to lead a quiet life. Just like a nice married girl.” However,
she then goes on to add: “Of course, I’ve still got a lot of pep. But I’ll take it out in
dancing.”
32
So, in her life as well as in her movies, marriage won’t entirely contain
the ‘It’ girl.
Comediennes, then, made use of flirtation in their films for a number of
reasons, and with varying results. When used by film comediennes, flirting
showcased situations where women were in control of and enjoyed their sexuality,
and in some cases represented an alternative to joyless monogamy. And although
198
many films made clear that the comediennes were essentially good girls at heart, and
attempted to contain their characters’ sexuality before the final fade to black, these
comedies still presented audiences with an example of female sexuality that was a far
cry from the passive and reserved sexuality that had long been the feminine ideal.
“When I’m on the make for a man, I GET HIM!”
At the same time that comediennes were flirting on-screen, they were also
enacting sexual desire, often aggressively. Whereas flirting was generally used to
make the comedienne the object of desire, in many cases the comediennes’
characters were also the desiring subjects. The comically aggressive sexuality of
slapstick comediennes, the innocent desire of the light comediennes, and the carnal
lust of the flappers all showcased female sexual desire as not only acceptable but
also enjoyable.
The ideal woman of the early-1900s was supposed to be sexually attractive,
but not sexually aggressive. Women at this time inspired anxieties for conservative
society about female sexuality, as they eschewed traditional female traits and took on
attributes which had previously been associated with men. By the 1910s,
acknowledgement of women’s sexual drives was a standard element of feminist
discourse, and despite creating new fears about the “Pandora’s Box” of female
sexuality, the topic found its way onto the stage and screen.
33
Unlike the passive
availability of the Ziegfeld Girl, female performers in vaudeville, burlesque and
nightclubs exhibited aggressive sexuality, and tacitly argued that women could take
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just as much pleasure in sex as men could. Screen comediennes took the lead of
their stage counterparts and frequently enacted aggressive sexual desire in their
films.
Sex was a popular topic on the vaudeville stage despite Tony Pastor and B. F.
Keith’s efforts to make vaudeville a refined entertainment, suitable for the delicate
sensibilities of women and children. Performers such as Mae West, Sophie Tucker,
Lillian Shaw and Eva Tanguay pushed limits with racy songs and patter and a
suggestive delivery. Theater managers were often torn between censoring the “blue”
material and leaving it in because it was popular with audiences. Audiences and
critics seemed similarly divided, both praising and condemning risqué acts. In
1915, for example, Variety reported an incident in which Eva Tanguay’s publicity
posters in Syracuse, New York were deemed immodest by local authorities:
Miss Tanguay’s popularity in town was given a wide local sphere
when Commissioner of Public Safety Hitchcock developed a sudden
sense of modesty last week requesting Manager Kallet of the Grand to
remove all of the Tanguay “one-sheets” from the billboards and
stores. The posters had been up for three days before action was
taken by the Commissioner, who said he had received a complaint.
The newspapers printed the story with the result the Grand has
been besieged by crowds wanting the lithos.
34
Tanguay was known for her revealing costumes – described by one reviewer as “the
usual tight Tanguay thing-ums”
35
– and one can assume that the censored posters
featured one of these costumes. Tanguay was also known for her masterful use of
public relations and publicity, and it is entirely likely that the poster incident was
orchestrated by Tanguay herself. Whether or not this was a publicity stunt is almost
200
beside the point, however. What is most telling in this instance is the fact that the
removal of the posters resulted in the theater being “besieged” by fans seeking copies
for themselves. In her act as well as in her publicity, Tanguay appealed to the
prurient interests of the audience, and was rewarded for it throughout her career.
The incorporation of aggressive and highly sexual material into her acts helped make
her the highest paid and most popular star in vaudeville throughout the 1910s and
‘20s. Theater managers knew that raciness was central to her act’s appeal, and were
reluctant to censor her: as one manager wrote in 1909, “She was a veritable riot to-
day…. Certainly a phenomenal drawing card, and while we might like to make
some changes in her material, still I think the fact that it is Tanguay makes the people
forget what in another might offend.”
36
Other performers similarly used risqué material in their acts, employing an
aggressive sexuality which was at odds with the image of ideal womanhood
exemplified by the Ziegfeld Girl. Sophie Tucker was famous for her suggestive
songs and colorful language; as one writer put it, “Her exuberance and racy songs
made people feel wicked without the wear and tear of being so.”
37
Maintaining that
her songs “[had] to do with sex, but not with vice,”
38
Tucker’s lyrics were filled with
racy double entendres aided by a smoldering delivery, causing songs such as “Who
Paid the Rent for Mrs. Rip Van Winkle (When Rip Van Winkle Went Away)” to be
censored in some cities. In later years, the transgressiveness of Tucker’s sexually
charged delivery was tempered by her weight, as it was easier to dismiss her as
grotesque rather than threatening. However, early in her career she was considered
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conventionally attractive: in her first review in Variety, in 1909, for example, it was
reported that, “The young woman has a way of ingratiating herself at once, and
possesses not only good looks but magnetism to back it.”
39
When Tanguay, Tucker, and countless other female performers made use of
sexually aggressive material in their acts they were challenging the dominant
conception of women as passive and refined. They were demanding that women be
seen as sexual beings, and not just as homemakers and moral compasses, and their
performances were in line with the feminists’ demands for a recognition of female
sexuality. Furthermore, incorporating risqué material into their acts made them
immensely popular. Certainly, many people were offended by their acts, and they
faced constant battles with censors. But the fact remained that they frequently
played to standing room only houses, earned top salaries, and enjoyed long careers.
Clearly, their acts, although they employed “immodest material,” struck a nerve with
audiences who wanted to see an alternative type of femininity represented onstage.
***
While flirtation comedies frequently show women who are self-assured and
even a little brazen in their playful flirtations with men, many slapstick comedies
follow the lead of unruly stage comediennes and position women as sexually
aggressive, hunters who will stop at nothing to get their prey. Polly Moran,
especially, was presented as a man-hungry aggressor in many of her comedies. In
her earlier films she sometimes played slapstick-ingénues and vamps, but she soon
became known for playing rough-and-tumble women such as Sheriff Nell in a series
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of shorts in the late 1910s and early 1920s. A 1918 Motion Picture Magazine piece
titled “She Insisted on Idealizing Her Man” confirms her aggressive persona.
Alongside a photo of Moran in her Sheriff Nell costume, complete with guns drawn,
is a description of her ideal mate:
These are the specifications for my ideal man:
HE MUST NOT--
Talk about himself when I want to talk about myself,
He must not blacken his tan shoes,
He must never call me ‘Lovey.’ I could stand for ‘Dearie’ or ‘Honey’
or even ‘Angel,’ but I firmly draw the line at ‘Lovey.’
He must not eat dill pickles or wear spats.
Have gold front teeth.
HE MUST BE ABLE TO DO THE FOLLOWING
THINGS:
Change an automobile tire without swearing,
Be bored to death by all females except me,
Drink nothing but water.
Here’s hoping from
POLLY MORAN
40
The idea of Moran insisting on idealizing her man, combined with her assertive pose
in the accompanying photo and the laundry list of attributes that she will and will not
put up with positions her as a determined woman who knows what she wants, and
will do what’s needed to get it. The demure “Here’s hoping” that ironically ends the
piece stands in contrast to the must’s and must not’s that precede it. By the end of
the silent era Moran’s image as a sexual aggressor was solidified, as in this article
from 1931: “When I’m on the make for a man, I GET HIM! I make wisecracks, but
not too many, and subtle ones, you know…. I act coy… like this… I… oh, you
know….”
41
203
This image can be found in her films as well as in her publicity. In Her
Painted Hero (1915) Moran plays a “Matinee Idoler” who is in pursuit of a
handsome leading man. After inheriting a fortune she agrees to marry a stagehand
from the local theater, but invites the Matinee Idol in the hopes of winning him over.
When she spots him chatting with a group of girls, Polly darts across the room and
jumps on his back in greeting, then drags him outside to be alone with her. When the
groom tries to keep her away from the idol, she clocks him and runs off. This film
references the tradition of stage-struck (and later movie-struck) girls, young women
who were demonstrative in their adoration of handsome leading men, and entertained
dreams of stardom for themselves. Stage- and movie-struck girls disrupted the
classical mode of viewing: rather than passively absorbing the spectacle on stage or
screen, these young women wanted to be a part of the spectacle, narcissistically
imagining a place for themselves on stage or screen.
42
Stage- and movie-struck girls
exhibited the same kind of aggressive sexuality that Moran enacts in Her Painted
Hero. In referencing and exaggerating the perceived threat of these young women,
Moran allows audiences to laugh at what many felt was “the worst aspect of the
female audience.”
43
When comediennes in these films enact comically aggressive sexuality they
become unruly women, unable to contain their passions. Kathleen Rowe describes
how the unruly woman contrasts with the “well adjusted woman,” who is “static,
silent, invisible – ‘composed’ and ‘divinely’ apart from the hurly-burly of life,
process, and social power.”
44
In the scene described above, Polly Moran’s stage-
204
struck girl is the epitome of the unruly woman: the well-adjusted women at her
wedding are content to passively admire the matinee idol, whereas Polly, unwilling
to sit by and let the man take the lead, physically accosts him. She eventually strikes
a deal with her idol – “Make me your leading lady and I’ll back your show” – in
essence purchasing the opportunity to satisfy not only her sexual desires but also her
dramatic aspirations.
Light comediennes’ performance of desire was often contradictory and
complex, frequently combining the comically aggressive sexuality of the slapstick
comediennes with the blatant lust of the flappers. As with their use of flirtation, light
comediennes were careful to maintain a balance between sex and virtue, frequently
mitigating their desire by making their characters childlike. In The Red Mill (1927),
Marion Davies plays Tina, a Dutch girl who does drudge work at an inn. While
looking out her window she spots Dennis and is immediately smitten; she rushes
outside and stands awkwardly in front of him, grinning. After entering – and
winning – an ice-skating contest for which the winner has been promised a kiss from
Dennis, Tina is full of joyful expectation, and is crestfallen when he leaves town
without delivering her prize. Tina’s childishness is emphasized in the beginning of
the film by the fact that Davies wears very little make-up, with her hair in pigtails.
She is awkward when she meets Dennis, standing close to him and smiling
expectantly rather than flirting or making any move to win him. [Figure 3-5] This
scene stands in contrast to both the aggressive sexuality of Polly Moran’s characters,
205
and the skillful flirtation found in The Water Nymph, A Virtuous Vamp, Mantrap,
and other films. Tina doesn’t know how to use her “feminine wiles” to get a man –
she is much too naïve and innocent to understand the laws of sexual attraction. She
does, however, understand her own desire, and although she doesn’t know what to
do with that desire, she knows that she wants to act on it. When she finally gets her
kiss, she has already begun her transformation from innocent girl to desiring woman
(evidenced by the fact that she is now wearing make-up and has her hair down) and
the realization of her desire completes her transformation. As Dennis kisses Tina,
we see a close-up of her hand on his arm as she feebly tries to push him away; after a
few moments he starts to pull away, but she forcefully pulls him closer to extend
their clinch. The film ends with Dennis promising to make Tina “an Irish Princess,”
and the two imagine an elaborate setting, with servants standing in a line holding
jewels, perfume, gowns, and food while an elegantly dressed Tina and Dennis lounge
on a bed of pillows. [Figure 3-6] Tina’s sexual desires are realized by the end of the
film, but the fantasy suggests a catalogue of material desires as well.
206
Figure 3-5 – The Red Mill (1927): Tina (Marion Davies) spots the object of her desire
(Owen Moore)…
Figure 3-6 – … and the objects of her desires.
207
Other light comedies similarly counteract the potency of female desire by
emphasizing the childishness of the heroine. Although Mary Pickford plays an adult
in the film Suds (1920), her character, a laundry slavey named Amanda, is like a
child in her innocent simplicity – at one point in the film Amanda rescues a
neighborhood horse from the glue factory and brings him home to her second-floor
apartment, where she spends the night curling the horse’s mane and tail. Amanda
has built up an elaborate fantasy surrounding a man named Horace who has left a
shirt at her laundry, insisting to the other laundresses that he will return to rescue her
from her life of drudgery. As with Tina, Amanda’s sexual and romantic desire is
tempered by her childishness – her adoption of the horse, her detailed fantasy based
on one brief encounter with Horace – as well as her appearance – she wears slavey
make-up and her trademark curls are tucked into a messy bun. Because of this she is
not positioned as a sexual subject; instead, Pickford’s mature femininity is defused
by Amanda’s youthful androgyny.
Mabel Normand takes this to an extreme in What Happened to Rosa? (1920).
In an effort to get close to Maynard Drew, a doctor with whom she has fallen in love,
Mayme (Normand) hijacks a neighbor boy’s clothes, muddies her face, and fakes a
collision with a pushcart. When Dr. Drew asks where it hurts, she points first to her
rear; then, thinking better of it, points to her face. At this moment in the film when
she is boldly acting on her desires, her very convincing urchin-boy costume mitigates
the power of her actions and ultimately diffuses the transgressiveness of a sexually
mature, desiring woman. Like Tina and Amanda, Mayme has the potential to be a
208
powerful, even threatening sexual symbol. As single women living alone and
working and playing in heterosocial urban settings, they represent the increasing
numbers of independent women similarly testing new social and sexual boundaries.
This new independence added to active female desire was a potent combination, and
the source of a great deal of concern among social conservatives who may have been
worried about a perceived increase in immorality among young women. As one
writer at the time lamented:
The age of innocence is gone. Blame it on the war, blame it on
bobbed hair, blame it on our prodigiously increasing national wealth,
blame it on radio, on automobiles or any other means of making life
wise and uniform by communication – young America is speedily
taking on the sophistication of old Europe.
45
This anxiety was most clearly found on screen in the character of the vamp, a man-
hungry parasite who would drive a man to ruin and then glibly move on to her next
victim. Certainly Tina, Amanda, Mayme, and other childlike characters played by
light comediennes were not meant to be as threatening as vamps; however, they
nonetheless represent cultural anxieties over women’s sexuality. Whereas vamps
indicate the destructive side of female desire, these childlike characters show a way
in which women’s desire and sexuality can be rendered non-threatening.
Additionally, the placement of these characters in the “safe” genre of comedy can be
seen as further eroding their potential threat, although ultimately these comedies may
have made female desire more palatable to audiences.
209
Screen flappers, like light comediennes, performed a mixture of active desire
and essential virtue. Like the stage comediennes before them, screen flappers’
performances were often boldly, aggressively sexual – they knew what and who they
wanted, and they knew how to get it. Flapper films presented their heroines as
mature, desiring women, rather than the desexualized childish figures of the light
comedies. At the same time, flapper films took a cue from light comedies by
insisting that their heroines were really good girls and that their sexual needs would
be fulfilled by marriage to the right man.
Flapper comediennes are frequently presented as the romantic aggressors in
their films, acting on desire and lust. Clara Bow, especially, was famous for
portraying barely contained lust in her pictures. Her typical characters in the 1920s
were wild young things who burned with desire for the man (or in some cases men)
they wanted to posses. Bow’s performance of desire was not deflected or mitigated
as in the light comedies; on the contrary, in many of her films it is emphasized by
lingering close-ups on her face as she gazes lustfully at the objects of her passion.
[Figures 3-7 and 3-8]
210
Figure 3-7 – Mantrap (1926)
Figure 3-8 – It (1927)
211
The scene from It described at the beginning of this chapter provides an excellent
example of Bow’s performance of desire. In this scene, department store lingerie
salesgirl Betty Lou has just spotted Mr. Waltham, the new boss. Betty Lou is
immediately struck, and a close-up reveals her chest heaving as she pleads, “Sweet
Santa Claus, give me him!” Betty Lou is so focused on Waltham that she doesn’t
seem to notice the other salesgirls who have gathered around her to join in gawking
at the new boss. This shot is framed so that Betty Lou is the apex of a triangle:
behind her, the other shopgirls represent the life of department-store drudgery that
faces her if she can’t win her man; in front of her, the bits of silky lingerie strewn
about the counter provide a suggestion for how she might achieve her goal. [Figure
3-9]
Figure 3-9 – It (1927): “Sweet Santa Claus, give me him!”
212
As Lori Landay has argued, “Bow’s active gaze accentuated the erotic possibilities
of modern femininity.”
46
Bow’s glance was an outward manifestation of her inner
sexual desires, a way of telegraphing to the object of her gaze as well as to audiences
that her characters were comfortable with and confident in their sexuality. These
close-ups serve to draw audience members into Bow’s act and make them the
unwitting objects of her performed sexual desire, much like the interactive
performances of stage comediennes. Furthermore, these glances represent a break
from an earlier time when women were expected to hide baser passions such as
longing and lust.
47
Of course, Bow and other flappers are removed from the film
audience, providing that audience safety from their transgressiveness through
distance. Still, the very presence on screen of desiring women who are not punished
for their blatant desire is notable.
Not surprisingly, the on-screen antics of Bow and other flappers as sexual
aggressors were attributed to their off-screen lives as well. After marrying Rex Bell,
one newspaper claimed that “Miss Bow said she was really the huntress in pursuing
Bell, who was an obscure figure in the screen world compared to her.”
48
Similarly,
an article about Joan Crawford claimed that: “Across a luncheon table she is as
anatomically seductive as she has ever been when doing her carnal darndest in a
screen sex orgy typical of our modern maidens and dancing daughters.”
49
These
instances are notable because they implied that there was some truth to the characters
played by Bow and Crawford, that the desiring, possibly threatening woman found
on screen had a basis in reality.
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“Be Good and You’ll Preen in Duvetyn”
In a 1925 magazine article a writer pointed to the new moral terms of the
1920s, describing how the innocent, virtuous image associated with Mary Pickford
had been eclipsed by the shrewd worldliness of Gloria Swanson:
The moral offered by Gloria is infinitely more attractive than the
one advanced by Mary. Mary’s amounted to: “Be good and you’ll
wear rags,” but Gloria’s is: “Be good and you’ll preen in duvetyn.”
The problem for the flapper is how to be good yet fashionable.
She doesn’t care to be listed as an abandoned soul simply because she
bobs and lipsticks and lingeries. Gloria does not list her so. Gloria
bobs and rouges and lingeries, yet always defeats the villain’s ends –
even though he supplied her with the rouge and the lingerie.
Thus, the young female of the hour looks upon Gloria as
possessing greater finesse than the little girl who sacrifices home and
honor before getting so much as a beaded bag. Gloria is a positive
good woman; the old heroine was a passive good one. I leave it to
you which the girl of today is.
50
As this article makes clear, sexual desire for the flapper figure was often conflated
with material desire. Tina’s final fantasy in The Red Mill showed that she was
content to wait until after marriage before realizing her material fantasies, but
flappers, on the contrary, preferred to fulfill their material and sexual desires at the
same time. In a great many flapper films (as well as light comedies) class is an
integral issue, as working women – shopgirls, telephone operators, secretaries – fall
in love with and eventually marry rich men. This dynamic will be explored more
fully in Chapter 4, but for now I would like to point out the way that these films
combine sexual desire and material gain. Although women in these films are shown
214
to desire the man, and not his bank account, the leading man’s money and status are
often what draws the attention of the working girl in the first place. In It, Betty Lou
doesn’t notice Mr. Waltham until a co-worker exclaims “Hot socks – the new boss!”
Although the look she gives Mr. Waltham is one of pure lust, it’s never entirely clear
in the film whether she’s attracted to his looks, his position, or his bankroll.
Orchids and Ermine (1927) spells out the flapper’s materialist leanings with the first
title card of the film: “Every girl of today loves fine feathers, but only one in a
thousand can find the right bird.” The film then introduces Pink Watson (Colleen
Moore), who “was willing to fall in love if she could fall on fine feathers.” Pink so
desperately longs for the trappings of wealth, symbolized by orchid corsages and
ermine coats, that she rescues a discarded orchid from the middle of the street, and
then, throwing her cat around her shoulders, poses with her own low-budget version
of luxury. When she does meet a millionaire, Richard Tabor, he has switched
identities with his valet to avoid the attentions of gold diggers, and so she believes
him to be poor. While Pink pursues rich men, she is pursued by Richard. Pink
ultimately learns the lesson “that a poor girl can be happy – but a happy girl isn’t
poor,” and agrees to marry Richard, who immediately confesses his real identity and,
instead of kissing his new fiancée, announces that he’s taking her to “the finest
modiste shop in town.” Pink’s expression in anticipation of their shopping spree is
far more passionate than her expression when being proposed to. This moment
marks the culmination of Pink’s desires – she has found a man to love who will buy
her everything she desires. Their orgy of consumption at the dress shop takes the
215
place of sex for Pink and Richard; instead of kissing or embracing to consummate
their engagement he wraps her in decadent clothes and runs his hands over her fur-
draped shoulders, as the ermine coat becomes the object of their displaced sexual
desire. [Figure 3-10] A similar conflation of sexual and material desires can be
found in many light comedies, although the comediennes in these films don’t portray
desire as frankly as the flapper comediennes. While the heroines of light comedies
were happy to wait until after marriage to have their material desires fulfilled, for
flapper characters making bank was almost as important as making love.
Figure 3-10 – Orchids and Ermine (1924)
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Physical comedy and bodily pleasure
Perhaps the most interesting way in which comediennes addressed sexuality
and sensuality on screen was in their depiction of the bodily pleasure inherent in
physical comedy. Comediennes reveled in the sheer joy of their physical interaction
with the world around them. Whereas the feminine ideal of the 19
th
century was
passive and polite, keeping herself removed from the possibility of contact with
public sphere, comediennes fully interacted with the people and places around them.
In so doing, they revealed the sensual pleasure inherent in physical activity.
Movie theaters in the 1910s, following the lead of legitimate theaters at the
end of the 19
th
century, attempted to create an atmosphere of “refinement” by taming
the rowdy, vocal and active crowds of the nickelodeon years and encouraging
passive spectatorship.
51
As film historians have shown, this transition was not
brought about smoothly, as audiences continued to respond to films in ways that ran
counter to the theater owners’ preferred “feminized” mode of viewing. Shelley
Stamp notes that “Many commentators also recognized the intense physiological
sensations and unaccustomed mental states audiences experienced watching
astonishing serial exploits enacted on screen.”
52
She further points out that:
Adventuresome, suspenseful antics on film also seem to have
produced boisterously enthusiastic crowds, whose reported behavior
was at odds with the visual inscription of female fans in ads that
pictured decorous, stylishly dressed, middle-class women, patrons
from whom such immodest behavior would not have been expected.
53
217
Jennifer Bean has similarly commented on the physical reaction of spectators to
adventure serials, such as The Perils of Pauline (1914) and The Hazards of Helen
(1914-1917).
54
While most studies of early viewers’ physical reaction to films focuses on
adventure genres, I would argue that spectators likely experienced similar physical
reactions to comedies. Numerous silent films feature scenes of theater and cinema
audiences enjoying comedy performances. Without fail, these audiences – men and
women alike – are shown doubled over with laughter, stomping their feet, throwing
their hands in the air, slapping their knees, and in all ways behaving the exact
opposite of the passive audiences promoted by theater owners. In That Ragtime
Band (1913), one of many Keystone shorts that takes place in a theater, the audience
at an amateur vaudeville show starts out laughing hysterically, and eventually
becomes so boisterous that they start throwing food and other objects at the
performers. Similarly, King Vidor’s drama The Crowd (1928) ends in a vaudeville
house: the final shot of the film is a tracking shot of row after row of spectators
convulsed with laughter, rocking back and forth in their seats.
Just as in adventure genres, this kind of physiological reaction to comedy
films could have been seen as threatening. Reactions like those described above
showed that these genres had a sensual as well as an intellectual appeal, a dangerous
proposition at a time when the motion picture industry was trying to reposition itself
as a refined entertainment.
55
A parallel can be drawn between the unruly audiences
watching comedies, and the unruly women appearing in the comedies. Mary Russo
218
argues that the “grotesque body is opposed to the classical body, which is
monumental, static, closed, and sleek, corresponding to the aspirations of bourgeois
individualism; the grotesque body is connected to the rest of the world.”
56
The
classical body is controlled by intellect; the grotesque body succumbs to the sensual
pleasure of laughter. Film comediennes, like women in the audience, were expected
to fit the mold of the classical body and not the grotesque.
Physical comedy, when performed by women, could be read as an
endorsement of female sensuality and bodily pleasure. While for most comediennes
this tended to represent implicit rather than overt sexuality, it is a representation and
celebration of sexuality nonetheless. As Kathleen Rowe has argued, “the grotesque
body breaks down the boundaries between itself and the world outside it.”
57
In many
comedies, the comediennes interact endlessly with their surroundings with physical
abandon. They are not refined or reserved. They venture into the modern world,
with its inherent shocks and dangers, and they connect with and ultimately triumph
over their surroundings. Ben Singer has pointed out that the rise of modernity
brought with it anxieties about urban living, including fears of bodily peril, sudden
and violent deaths caused by increased traffic, falls from great heights, and other
elements of the modern city.
58
Many of these anxieties are addressed in comedies,
especially slapstick comedies, as both male and female comedians are subjected to
and conquer the many dangers of the modern city. A discussion of comediennes and
modernity will be developed more fully in Chapter 4; for now, I’d like to focus on
219
some ways in which comediennes depicted the thrills and excitement of modernity as
physically pleasurable.
Comediennes interacted with the world around them, and their enjoyment of
this physical interaction is often palpable. Perhaps the clearest example of this
dynamic can be found in amusement park comedies. Amusement parks such as New
York’s Coney Island featured rides that allowed visitors to safely flirt with danger,
while the relaxed atmosphere at the parks presented an opportunity for visceral
pleasures and heterosocial mixing: “Coney Island plunged visitors into a powerful
kinesthetic experience that, like the surf itself, overturned conventional restraints,
washed away everyday concerns, buoyed and buffeted participants as they submitted
to its sway.”
59
Numerous silent comedies take place in amusement parks, and in
these films we can see comediennes enjoying the bumps, jolts and thrills of
modernity. Their delight in the physical sensations found on the rides and attractions
represents a more general enjoyment of bodily pleasure, as the rides stand in for the
modern city. In Tillie Wakes Up, Tillie’s outing with her neighbor ends up at Coney
Island, where she tries out various rides such as the Witching Waves, the Barrel of
Fun, and the Human Pool Table. Although Tillie is at first unsure of these rides after
being roughly tossed around, she comes to enjoy these new physical sensations, as an
intertitle tells us that “Tillie was willing to try anything once, for she was having the
time of her Young Life.” Tillie’s growing enjoyment of the physical thrills at Coney
Island coincides with her burgeoning understanding of her own sexual powers: as
she loosens up and enjoys her illicit outing with J. Mortimer, she more fully enjoys
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the bodily pleasures of the amusement park. Tillie’s experience can be contrasted
with Ambrose’s wife in Ambrose’s Fury. In an attempt to ditch his wife so that he
can meet his neighbor at the beach, Ambrose tricks her into getting on a roller
coaster, and then runs off once she is secured in the car. The wife is shown sitting in
the front of the roller coaster, screaming unhappily and berating the ride operator. In
contrast to Tillie, Ambrose’s overbearing, killjoy wife is incapable of enjoying the
sensual thrill of the roller coaster, offering an explanation of why Ambrose would be
tempted by his fun-loving neighbor.
The sensual pleasures of the amusement park are even more clear when Clara
Bow is involved. In It, Betty Lou and Mr. Waltham go to Coney Island on a date,
and Betty Lou goes on many of the same rides as Tillie did years earlier. With Bow,
however, there is a level of flirtatiousness and frank sexuality absent from Dressler’s
performance. Like Tillie, Betty Lou enjoys the physical thrills of the amusement
park rides, and we frequently see her laughing heartily as she’s tossed about. Unlike
Tillie, Betty Lou sees the amusement park as a way to get closer to her date; while
Tillie and J. Mortimer’s physical contact is friendly and platonic, Betty Lou looks for
excuses for romantic contact with her date, at one point telling him to “Hold me
tight” and wrapping his arms around her before heading down a slide.
Both Tillie and Betty Lou ride the Barrel of Fun, which turns them head over
heels and allows the audience generous views of their undergarments. At least one
reviewer commented on this scene in Tillie Wakes Up by asking “What would any
show of Miss Dressler’s be, minus her preposterous display of nether-nether-nether
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lands?”
60
The description of Dressler’s display of “nether-nether-nether lands” as
preposterous indicates the likelihood that the audience would have read this scene as
comedic rather than sexual, and certainly the views of Tillie’s voluminous petticoats
and sizeable cotton bloomers, along with her vain efforts to maintain her dignity, are
very comical. In It, on the other hand, shots of Betty Lou’s abbreviated silk
undergarments and lacy garters, shown in great detail, are certainly meant to
highlight the considerable sexual appeal of Betty Lou and, by extension, Bow.
[Figures 3-11 and 3-12]
Figure 3-11 – It (1927)
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Figure 3-12 – Tillie Wakes Up (1917)
In both of these films, the amusement park is a place to explore exciting,
illicit sexuality, and an essential component to this is the sensual thrill offered by the
rides. Lauren Rabinovitz has pointed out that “The amusement park invited women
to find sensual pleasure in their own bodies as it simultaneously transformed them
into spectacles.”
61
Certainly, Betty Lou and Tillie are both offered up as sexual
spectacles, to the other amusement park patrons as well as the films’ spectators.
While Tillie is unsure of her new role as sexual spectacle – she struggles to keep her
“nether-nether-nether lands” covered – Betty Lou is clearly not bothered by the
prospect of putting herself on display. What the two women share is a thorough
enjoyment of relinquishing bodily control to the rides. Rabinovitz describes the
“young female bodies” in an early amusement park comedy as “acted upon, out of
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control, and given over to shaking and jerking movements that produce a kind of
unrestrained, sensual motion of the body rather than of individual will or subject
control. As park pleasure-seekers, the boarding school girls have shed their ladylike
demeanor and self-control for an unrestrained, unfettered display of physical
expression.”
62
In the case of Betty Lou and Tillie, it’s important to note their
enjoyment of the sensual experience. Certainly, on one level they are sexual
spectacles, but the fact that they are deriving physical, sensual pleasure from the
rides complicates the idea of sexual display.
Physical enjoyment wasn’t just found at the amusement park; it could also be
found in ostensibly private moments. Mabel Normand combines bodily pleasure
with bodily display in her 1918 film Mickey. In this film Normand plays a young
tomboy raised in a remote mining community. Mickey is introduced as a childlike
character, a tomboy with an affinity towards animals and a penchant for stirring up
trouble. Normand’s positioning in this film as half-woman, half-child is reminiscent
of films featuring Constance Talmadge, Mary Pickford, Dorothy Gish, and other
light comediennes. However, Mickey’s childish asexuality is contrasted suddenly
and starkly with a scene in which she swims in the nude. As surveyor Joe Meadows
looks on, an undressed Mickey makes a perfect dive off of a cliff into a lake, and
then runs back to the top of the cliff, joyously waving her arms and legs, and jumps
again. The scene is highly voyeuristic, as we see Mickey in a long shot through
Joe’s telescope [Figure 3-13]; only after Joe has turned his telescope away do we see
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a close-up of Mickey’s face, as she exuberantly emerges from the lake after her
second dive. [Figure 3-14]
Figure 3-13 – Mickey (1918)
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Figure 3-14 – Mickey (1918)
This scene certainly recalls Normand’s earlier film, The Water Nymph, as both
showcase her athletic ability as well as her figure. However, the context has changed
– in Mickey, she is watched without her knowledge, the classic recipient of the
Mulveyan gaze. Like the glorified American girls in the Ziegfeld Follies, Mickey is
beautiful, passive, and non-threatening. Mickey is unaware that she is being
watched, and so has no control over how her image is interpreted; in The Water
Nymph, on the other hand, she is putting on a show, fully aware of and in control
over how others are viewing her. However, despite her more passive position in the
scene from Mickey, she still demonstrates a sensual enjoyment of her body that is
very powerful. As she dances on top of the cliff, spinning around and throwing her
arms and legs wildly about, she is clearly completely absorbed in the physicality of
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the moment – the feeling of the sun on her skin, the cold water, the freedom of
leaping from the cliff. The fact that she is being watched makes this moment sexual,
but it’s her own enjoyment of her bodily sensations that makes this moment sensual.
Perhaps not surprisingly, Normand’s nude scene in Mickey was mentioned in
several reviews as a selling point for the film. Motion Picture Classic pointed out
that “Mabel does high dives from distant rocks apparently minus all Kellermanns.
Which, as they say in the classics, is important, if true,”
63
and Wid’s Film Daily
mentioned that, “There was one sequence in which we saw Mabel doing some
Annette Kellerman stuff, dressed as Eve without even a fig leaf, and this was not
only pretty and nicely handled, but will, of course, be an added attraction if carefully
handled in the advertising.”
64
By drawing attention to the nude scene – including
Wid’s recommendation that exhibitors refer to it in advertising for the film – the
press was helping to foreground Normand’s sexuality, despite the efforts of the film
to mitigate this sexuality by making the character childlike.
A somewhat similar presentation of bodily pleasure is found in Clara Bow’s
Hula (1927). Bow’s Hula Calhoun shares some similarities with Mickey: she is a
tomboy living in a remote and “uncivilized” location (in Hula’s case, Hawaii), and
she is linked to nature and animals, both of which serve to highlight her youth and
immaturity. Like Mickey, an early shot of Hula finds her bathing in the nude.
However, unlike Mickey, Hula appears in close-up, and she remains unobserved
within the diegesis. Hula is introduced in the film lying on her back in a shallow
pool of water, surrounded by vines and tropical flowers, an Eve all alone in her
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Eden. As she lounges in the pool, a close-up of her face shows her delighted smile
as she throws back her head to more fully experience the feel of the water. Spotting
a flower near her foot, she grabs it with her toes and brings it to her hands, in the
process exposing most of her leg. [Figure 3-15] Her pleasure is ruined by a bee
stinging her thigh, shown in extreme close-up.
Rather than resembling a Ziegfeld chorine, like Mickey, Bow in this scene
resembles a burlesque stripper, showing us exactly what she wants us to see, while
teasing us with the prospect of more. Bow owns her sexuality in this scene - even
the stolen glimpse of her thigh as the bee stings her is happily repeated by her later in
the film when she shows the sting to her nursemaid, and later to handsome engineer
Anthony Haldane. [Figure 3-16] Where Normand takes Freud’s classic female
position in smut, as the innocent and embarrassed object of the joke, Bow is the
instigator of her own joke, and is entirely in on the fun.
65
Despite the differences in
the way these scenes impart their characters’ presentation of their sexuality, they
have in common an endorsement of female sensual pleasure. In Mickey, the
potential objectification of Normand’s character is mitigated by her bodily pleasure;
similarly, Hula’s sensual enjoyment of her swim indicates an ownership of her body
and her sexuality, one that’s further reinforced when she shows Anthony her “hurt,”
in a move that’s both childishly naïve and playfully sexual.
228
Figure 3-15 – Hula (1927)
Figure 3-16 – Hula (1927)
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Another way of showing the sensual pleasure of physical activity was
through dance. Especially for flapper comediennes, dancing could be a frank
expression of sexuality, a way of releasing sexual energy while showcasing athletic
ability and bodily pleasure. Dance was a common element in many vaudeville and
burlesque comediennes’ acts, often as an extension of the brazen and aggressive
sexuality found elsewhere in their performances. Dancing was certainly linked to
sex, and many saw dance as a sexual outlet for women:
66
in 1894, Havelock Ellis
claimed that dancing enabled women “to give harmonious and legitimate emotional
expression to this neuromuscular irritability which might otherwise escape in more
explosive forms.”
67
Female comedians in vaudeville and burlesque used dance as a
means of sexual expression, which, along with their suggestive songs and sensual
delivery, helped to position them as sexually assertive, transgressive and unruly.
The screen flappers, like the unruly stage comediennes before them, used
their bodies to exude sexuality, and nowhere is this more evident than through dance.
Whether Clara Bow is dancing the hula, or Joan Crawford is dancing the Charleston,
dance is very clearly used as an outlet for their characters’ pent-up sexuality. In
Hula, Bow’s character uses dance to draw in the object of her affection: after her
married lover tells her that they can’t see each other anymore, she performs an
energetic hula dance at a luau. Her plan works, as Anthony is unable to control
himself and carries her away. Bow makes similar use of dance in other films: in
Mantrap, for example, Alverna stages an impromptu dance at her home in order to
entice a visiting big-city lawyer, and in The Plastic Age (1925) Cynthia Day
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performs a suggestive shimmy while dancing with a new conquest. In these and
other scenes dance is not a performance, per se; rather, it’s an expression of the
characters’ sexuality. For Hula, Alverna and Cynthia the most effective way to
convey their complex feelings is physically, though dance. As modern women, it’s
not surprising that these characters would find expression in movement, in what Lori
Landay calls “the kinaesthetic pleasures of modernity.”
68
Dancing in these films is
another way in which comediennes showcased the sensual pleasure in physical
activity, and another way in which comediennes perform sexuality in their films.
“This Young Fellow is My Wife:” Male Impersonation and Gender Confusion
Male impersonation was a form of entertainment well known to audiences of
the silent era. Nineteenth-century actresses found tremendous success on American
stages appearing as men in vaudeville, burlesque, minstrel shows, and melodrama.
By the early 20
th
century, however, the popularity of male impersonators had begun
to wane, due to increased anxiety over gender and sexual roles, and new research on
homosexuality. Despite this decrease in popularity, male impersonation is found in
numerous silent comedies. Rather than avoiding the contentious and increasingly
controversial practice of male impersonation, silent comedies frequently embraced
the transgressive and subversive potential of these performances.
While these performances drew from a long tradition of cross dressing and
male impersonation in vaudeville, British music hall and Victorian melodrama, in
silent comedies they were often more sexually charged, and frequently had overtly
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homosexual overtones. Furthermore, when impersonating men silent comediennes
could transgress restrictive gender roles and flirt with illicit sexuality, all within the
“safe” confines of the comedic genre. These films also allowed audiences to
vicariously experience and enjoy queer moments, as both male and female spectators
could entertain same-sex attractions. While heterosexual audiences could be secure
in the knowledge that the gender confusion would right itself by the end of the film,
homosexual spectators were able to revel in the cracks and fissures of normative
heterosexuality that these performances highlighted.
Gender was a site of tremendous struggle in early 20
th
century America. As
women increasingly moved into the public sphere the once-sharp boundaries
separating “masculine” and “feminine” began to blur. Complicating matters was the
work of late 19
th
century sexologists such as Richard von Krafft-Ebing and Havelock
Ellis, who claimed a symptomatic link between lesbians, or “inverts,” and feminists.
Homosexuality was defined by social practices rather than sexual practices,
69
and it
was thought that any woman who rejected the trappings of True Womanhood and
instead desired a place on the public stage was likely to be a lesbian. Krafft-Ebing
believed that the female invert was, in fact, a man trapped in a woman’s body, and
that this would cause these women to “act like men” in a variety of ways, from
taking a job or becoming involved in politics, to carrying on romantic relationships
with other women, to wearing men’s clothing. Ellis agreed that cross-dressing was
frequently indicative of inversion, and went on to claim that professional women and
actresses were likely to be lesbians.
70
232
These discourses about the pathology and supposed deviance of the “third
sex” created difficulties for performers for whom cross-dressing was an important
part of their acts. Both male and female impersonators found themselves in a
precarious position from the late 19
th
century on, as they had to assure audiences of
their essential heteronormativity while at the same time they were transgressing
gender boundaries every time they stepped on stage. Vaudeville historian Anthony
Slide argues that
An entire generation of sexually repressed men could live out their
homosexual fantasies through attending vaudeville programs
featuring male impersonators…. The natty clothes and the tight
trousers, the bobbed hair and the masculine swagger were what males
in the audience desired, and what they could watch and enjoy in a
darkened theater without fear of retribution and often in the company
of their wives.
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While audience members, both male and female, could explore their repressed
desires while watching male impersonators on stage, some could also vicariously
revel in the prospect of women enjoying the same freedoms and independence as
men.
The effects of these gender and sexual tensions on male impersonators were
marked. In the mid-1800s male impersonators were praised for their realism. The
most successful of these women “embodied masculinity” onstage, never appearing
onstage in women’s clothing and meticulously imitating the fashions and
mannerisms of their male characters.
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This first generation of male impersonators
sang songs that included scenes of debauchery and sexual liaisons with women.
These songs, sung in the first person, would no doubt have been considered
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inappropriate and shocking if they had been sung by a woman in women’s clothing,
but the fact that these performers were imitating men made their songs of sexual
conquest acceptable to Victorian audiences. One example of such a song is “Hi
Waiter! A Dozen More Bottles,” performed by Ella Wesner in the late 19
th
century:
Lovely woman was made to be loved,
To be fondled and courted and kissed;
And the fellows who’ve never made love to a girl,
Well they don’t know what fun they have missed.
I’m a fellow, who’s up to the times,
Just the boy for a lark or a spree
There’s a chap that’s dead struck on the women and Wine,
You can bet your old boots that it’s me.
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Lyrics such as these are certainly suggestive, and when sung by a woman have
undeniable homosexual overtones. At the same time, the transgressiveness of these
numbers was tempered by the fact that the performers were alone on stage, singing
about their sexual conquests and lives of debauchery, but not actually demonstrating
any of this behavior.
By the late 19
th
century, anxiety over gender and sexual roles led to a
feminizing of male impersonators’ performances. This generation of performers was
younger than their predecessors, and generally played adolescents and boys rather
than adult men. Their costumes were designed to show their figures, and many of
them made their costume changes on stage, in view of the audience, to add an
element of female sexuality to their acts. They still sang songs that were sexually
charged, but now they were performed in the second person, or with an introductory
verse explaining that the song referred to someone else. Later male impersonators
were also careful to present themselves as properly feminine in the press, by
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emphasizing their domesticity, and distancing themselves from “mannish” women
such as suffragists and lesbians.
74
However, in some ways these later, more feminized male impersonators were
more transgressive than their predecessors. Rather than faithfully imitating men, late
19
th
and early 20
th
century male impersonators appeared onstage as a blend of
masculine and feminine – both male and female, but at the same time neither male
nor female. Following the work of Judith Butler, we can read these performances as
examples of performative gender, in which the nature of gender as artifice is
revealed. In drag, Butler argues, “we see sex and gender denaturalized by means of
a performance which avows their distinctness and dramatizes the cultural mechanism
of their fabricated unity.”
75
Although 19
th
and early 20
th
century male impersonators
were not, strictly speaking, drag performers, their cross-dressed appearances would
work to destabilize gender and sex in a similar way.
Given the volatile sexual climate of the time, it is not surprising that male
impersonation in vaudeville began to wane in popularity around the turn of the
century, essentially disappearing by 1930. Cross-dressed performances subverted
gender ideals at a time of intense anxiety over men’s and women’s proper roles, and
were linked to sexual and social practices that were considered by many to be
unnatural and perverse. Despite all this, cross-dressing is a familiar trope in silent
film, especially in silent comedies. Far from shying away from the contested terrain
that these performances represent, silent comedies often playfully embrace their
transgressiveness, offering homosexually charged moments and allowing for
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alternative, queer readings. And while everything is safely returned to
heteronormativity by the last reel, one can question how “normal” the universe
represented by silent comedy really is.
Numerous silent comedies bear a resemblance to what Chris Straayer calls
“temporary transvestite” films, films in which a (presumably heterosexual) character
cross-dresses as a disguise.
76
Although Straayer’s work doesn’t specifically address
silent-era films, her theories can be applied to early 20
th
century works, as many of
the same dynamics are in place. Both men and women cross-dress in these
temporary transvestite films; however, while the female impersonations are largely
played for broad laughs, the male impersonations, like those found on stage in the
early 20
th
century, showcase both skillful imitation and sexual display. A fairly
typical example of female impersonation in silent comedy can be found in the 1915
Keystone comedy Miss Fatty’s Seaside Lovers. In this film Roscoe Arbuckle
appears as a woman vacationing at a seaside resort, who must ward off men who
mistakenly believe that he/she is an heiress. Interestingly, in this film Arbuckle does
not play a man who cross-dresses as a woman; rather, he simply plays a female
character. With his large frame dressed in long skirts and a hat decorated with
flowers and bows, Arbuckle makes an unconvincing woman. Much of the comedy
in the film comes as Miss Fatty overpowers her would-be suitors in the typical
Keystone knockabout style.
While female impersonation on screen, as well as on stage, was primarily
played for broad comedy, male impersonation, on the other hand, was more subtly
236
subversive, in that homosexually charged moments were implicit, and sometimes
even exploited by the filmmakers. A scene from another Keystone film, Hearts and
Flowers (1919), illustrates the way that male impersonation was often handled on
screen. Phyllis Haver, a Sennett Bathing Beauty, cross-dresses in order to woo a
flower girl, played by Louise Fazenda, away from Haver’s love interest. With her
form-fitting suit and her playful attitude, Haver’s performance resembles that of
male impersonators on the early 20
th
-century vaudeville stage. While Arbuckle’s
Miss Fatty makes no attempt at verisimilitude, Haver adopts stereotypical
mannerisms of a dandy, swaggering and flirting with women.
Temporary transvestite films frequently feature moments that are
simultaneously hetero- and homosexually charged. Straayer argues that these films
“often support heterosexual desire at the narrative level and challenge it at a more
ambiguous visual level where other desires are suggested.”
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This commonly occurs
through what she terms the “paradoxical bivalent kiss.” These kisses take place
under one of two circumstances: in one, different-gendered characters appear to be
in a homosexual situation because one of the characters is cross-dressed; and in the
other, characters of the same sex are involved, but heterosexuality is implied because
of costuming.
78
In both of these instances, the “properly” gendered characters know,
or believe, that they are engaging in a heterosexual romance. An example of the
latter situation occurs in Hearts and Flowers. Disguised as a man, Haver flirts with
Fazenda’s flower girl, and then kisses her. After the kiss, the flower girl pauses a
moment, and then goes in for another one. When her boyfriend appears and breaks
237
up the clinch, the flower girl kisses him on the forehead and sends him on his way
before turning back to her new “boyfriend.” As the two women embrace, an
intertitle appears, reading “Woman against woman.” [Figure 3-17] In this instance
the characters (with the exception of Haver’s temporary transvestite) believe that a
heterosexual romance is taking place, while the audience knows that they are
witnessing a homosexual moment. The opposite situation takes place in the Christie
comedy Know Thy Wife (1918). In this film Bob returns home from school with his
new wife Betty (Dorothy Devore) disguised as a man so as not to upset his parents,
who are unaware of his marriage and have picked out another woman for him.
Wearing a suit and hiding her long hair under a short wig, Betty is welcomed as her
husband’s college roommate. When Betty and Ben find a moment alone they share a
kiss, only to be interrupted by Ben’s mother, who looks away in embarrassment and
confusion, finally remarking that “You boys are certainly fond of each other.”
[Figure 3-18] Later, the masquerade is ended when Betty removes her wig to reveal
her long hair, and Ben explains to his parents that “This young fellow is my wife.”
Ben’s statement mirrors the subversion of sex and gender roles evident throughout
the film.
238
Figure 3-17 – Hearts and Flowers (1919): “Woman against woman”
Figure 3-18 – Know Thy Wife (1918): “You boys are certainly fond of each other.”
239
A more subtle example of the dynamics of simultaneous hetero- and
homosexual moments involved in paradoxical bivalent kisses occurs when the film’s
hero finds himself sexually attracted to the heroine while believing that she is a man.
In comedies such as The Ragged Earl (1914) and The Dream Lady (1918) male
characters are drawn to female characters disguised as men, and although the female
characters are revealed to be women before the pairs can be united, the films offer
moments of intriguing queer possibility. The audience knows that the beautiful
young man is actually a woman, but the male character who is attracted to her
doesn’t know this. Although the possibility of the leading man’s homosexuality is
left unspoken in these films, its presence is felt.
Temporary transvestite comedies of the silent era invariably end with
“proper” gender roles restored. But before everything is returned to heterosexual
normalcy at the end, audiences are given the opportunity to vicariously transgress
sexual boundaries. The spectatorial pleasures of these films are manifold. All
viewers, regardless of their gender or sexual identity, could derive pleasure from
watching gender boundaries stretched to their limits. Women might savor the
potential freedom represented by male impersonators, who could move about in
masculine spaces with impunity. Gay and lesbian audiences could take pleasure in
seeing queer moments, including implied homosexual behavior on-screen, while
straight audiences, both male and female, could experience the thrill of illicit,
potentially deviant sexuality, comfortable in the knowledge that all would be righted
in the end. This restoration of traditional gender roles would have been especially
240
reassuring to those viewers who were anxious about continually shifting social and
sexual roles.
As reassuring as the endings of these comedies may have been to some
viewers, however, it is difficult to claim that they feature a complete return to
normalcy given the fact that the universe of silent comedy is anything but normal. Is
it even possible to talk about what’s traditional or conventional in a filmic world of
chaos and anarchy, where anything is possible? Hearts and Flowers ends with a
heterosexual marriage, but the ceremony is preceded by a would-be suitor being
thrown and batted around the corridor like a baseball. Why should we believe that
these newlyweds will assume conventional gender and sexual roles when other
characters in the story can’t even be bothered to abide by the laws of gravity? In A
Florida Enchantment (1914), a woman swallows seeds from a mysterious African
“Tree of Sexual Change” and is transformed into a man; her maid and fiancé are
similarly transgendered after swallowing the seeds, and all three engage in cross-
dressing and manic flirtations with members of what had been the same, but are now
the opposite sexes. Although the “natural” order is restored at the end of the film by
the revelation that it was all a dream, it doesn’t entirely erase the impact of the
alternate universe created in the preceding reels. Even after these comedies have
ended, audiences are left with the impression that gender is fluid and unstable, a
proposition that likely would have been thrilling to some spectators and horrifying to
others. In the anarchic worlds created by silent comedies, where comedians defy the
laws of physics and logic in every reel and “normal” is relative, the restoration of
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traditional gender and sexual roles at the end of the film can only be assumed to be
temporary and incomplete.
While the transgressiveness of male impersonation was gradually being toned down
onstage, silent film comedies highlighted the most subversive aspects of these
performances. Silent comedies that featured male impersonators exploited
homosexual subtext with a knowing wink at the audience. The scene from Know
Thy Wife offers an example of this, as the mother’s obvious distress over her son’s
apparent proclivities is played for laughs. An even more blatant example of this can
be found in Behind the Screen (1916). Desperate to break into motion pictures, a
woman (Edna Purviance) disguises herself as a man and joins the stage hands in the
studio. One of the stage hands (Charlie Chaplin) meets her, and after discovering
that she is a woman, kisses her. Another stage hand witnesses the kiss and teases the
couple, dancing and skipping about the sound stage and wagging his finger at
Chaplin. [Figure 3-19] These actions are a clear indication that the filmmakers
knew that this kiss would be read as a homosexual moment by audiences, and that
these moments were meant to be read as homosexually charged. Alison McMahan
has argued that director Alice Guy Blaché was aware of and deliberately exploited
the homosexual subtext in her cross-dressing comedies.
79
Whether other filmmakers
similarly made a conscious decision to exploit homosexual themes is unknown,
although in silent comedies homosexuality is among the many social transgressions
and taboos that are playfully satirized. This is perhaps surprising, given the fact that
homosexuality was considered by many to be perverse and immoral. Comedy,
242
however, has always been a “safe” place to play out cultural anxieties. The fact that
silent comedies included these queer moments without passing judgment on them or
endorsing contemporaneous homophobic discourses speaks to comedy’s ability to
address contentious topics and make them acceptable, and even enjoyable, for a mass
audience.
Figure 3-19 – Behind the Screen (1916)
For comediennes, cross-dressing meant an opportunity to perform
masculinity with the freedom and license that entails. Even if just within the
confines of the film shoot, actresses who impersonated men could explore masculine
spaces, and women in the audience could experience these spaces vicariously
through them. Just as male impersonators on stage were able to say and do things
that would be inappropriate for a woman in women’s clothing, male impersonators
243
on film were able to engage in transgressive, homosexually charged behavior
because they were playing male characters. Male impersonators who appeared on
stage had to worry that they would be labeled “mannish” at best, and immoral or
homosexual at worst, and these worries, and the subsequent feminizing of their
performances, contributed to the downfall of these acts. On screen, however, the
threat inherent in male impersonation was mitigated by the fact that the cross
dressing was only temporary, and the knowledge that the actresses who appeared in
these roles would likely be performing “proper” femininity on screen in their next
film. Whereas male impersonators onstage built their entire careers around dressing
and acting like men, the cross dressing that screen actresses engaged in was brief and
temporary, and therefore more acceptable to audiences.
Conclusion
Comediennes’ performances of sexuality and sensuality on-screen were as
diverse as the comediennes themselves. Through their enactment of flirtation,
desire, bodily pleasure and gender confusion, comediennes helped broaden and
complicate notions of female sexuality, and allowed a space for women to own their
own desires and bodies. Certainly, comediennes’ enactment of sexuality was not
without problems. Slapstick films often present female sexuality as comic rather
than something to be taken seriously, and comediennes were often presented as
sexual spectacles, so that even though they appeared in control of their own
sexuality, they were still ultimately defined in terms of sex. Perhaps most
244
problematic was the fact that the desires that they were enacting and encouraging,
which were, ultimately, desires for political and social equality, for freedom from
oppressive familial and social systems, from systematic sexism and oppression, were
presented as easily fulfilled through consumerism and, especially, through marriage.
So while comediennes often helped women give voice to the dissatisfaction they felt
in their lives, they simultaneously implied that buying a new dress or marrying the
boss would bring them the happiness they sought.
Despite these complications, comedy gave women the opportunity to
experiment with sexuality in ways unseen in other genres. Unlike the heroines of
drama and melodrama, comediennes could revel in their own desires and pleasures
without being punished at the end of the film. Ultimately, comediennes provided
women with important and highly visible examples of healthy and enjoyable
sexuality.
245
Chapter 3 Endnotes
1
Clarence C. Badger, “Reminiscences of my experiences as director of the
Paramount motion picture, It,” Unpublished article intended for the George Eastman
House magazine Image, dated January 26, 1956.
2
See Lea Jacobs, The Wages of Sin: Censorship and the Fallen Woman Film,
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), and Janet Staiger, Bad Women:
Regulating Sexuality in Early American Cinema, (Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, 1995).
3
Robert C. Allen, Horrible Prettiness: Burlesque and American Culture, (Chapel
Hill, N.C.: The University of North Carolina Press, 1991), 140.
4
Allen, 140.
5
Lisa Mizejewski, Ziegfeld Girl: Image and Icon in Culture and Cinema, (Durham,
N.C.: Duke University Press, 1999), 67.
6
M. Alison Kibler, “Nothing Succeeds Like Excess: Lillian Shaw’s Comedy and
Sexuality on the Keith Vaudeville Circuit,” in Shannon Hengen, ed., Performing
Gender and Comedy: Theories, Texts and Contexts, (Amsterdam: Gordon and
Breach Publishers, 1998), 61.
7
Shirley Staples, Male-Female Comedy Teams in American Vaudeville, 1865-1932,
(Ann Arbor, MI: UMI Research Press, 1984), 106-110.
8
M. Alison Kibler, Rank Ladies: Gender and Cultural Hierarchy in American
Vaudeville, (Chapel Hill, NC: The University of North Carolina Press, 1999), 29-32.
9
Quoted in Kibler, “Nothing Succeeds Like Excess,”, 64.
10
Kibler, “Nothing Succeeds Like Excess,” 61.
11
Allen, 76.
12
“Clement Scott Resigns,” New York Times, December 11, 1898, 1, quoted in
Albert Auster, Actresses and Suffragists: Women in the American Theater, 1890-
1920, (New York: Praeger Publishers, 1984), 43.
13
Morning Telegraph, December 26, 1898, quoted in Auster, 43.
14
M. Alison Kibler, Rank Ladies: Gender and Cultural Hierarchy in American
Vaudeville, (Chapel Hill, N.C.: The University of North Carolina Press, 1999), 86.
246
15
Susan A. Glenn, Female Spectacle: The Theatrical Roots of Modern Feminism,
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000), 188.
16
Glenn, 200.
17
Angela J. Latham, Posing a Threat: Flappers, Chorus Girls, and Other Brazen
Performers of the American 1920s, (Hanover: Wesleyan University Press, 2000),
118.
18
Constance Talmadge, “Why Men Fall in Love with Actresses,” Photoplay,
February 1925.
19
Gladys Hall, “In Defense of Clara Bow,” Motion Picture, January 1931.
20
See, for example, Ruth Biery, “The Love Life of Clara Bow,” Motion Picture
Magazine, November 1928, and Marian Rhea, “Wedded Bliss Is Told By Clara
Bow,” Los Angeles Evening Herald and Express, 19 December 1931, AMPAS.
21
Ruth Biery, “The Love Life of Clara Bow,” Motion Picture Magazine, November
1928.
22
Michael Woodward, “That Awful ‘It’!” Photoplay, July 1930.
23
Gladys Hall, “In Defense of Clara Bow,” Motion Picture, January 1931.
24
Angela J. Latham, Posing a Threat: Flappers, Chorus Girls, and Other Brazen
Performers of the American 1920s, (Hanover: Wesleyan University Press, 2000),
69.
25
See Latham, 65-69.
26
Untitled, Motion Picture Classic, January 1928, AMPAS.
27
Descriptions and quotes from this film, which is not known to survive, are taken
from a reproduced scenario in Anita Loos, The Talmadge Girls, (New York: The
Viking Press, 1978), 137-204.
28
Untitled, Wisconsin News, 16 November 1919, NYPL.
29
Loos, 165-166.
30
Louella O. Parsons, “Doug Fairbanks Jr. and Joan Crawford Reveal Separation,”
L.A. Examiner, 18 March 1933, Joan Crawford clipping file, AMPAS.
247
31
“Clara Bow Demurely Poses in Pensive Vein,” unidentified clipping, 23
November 1932, AMPAS.
32
“Hot-Cha Life Doesn’t Pay, Says ‘It’ Girl,” source unknown, 30 November 1932,
Clara Bow clipping file, AMPAS.
33
Nancy F. Cott, The Grounding of Modern Feminism, (New Haven: Yale
University Press, 1987), 41-48.
34
“Tanguay’s Posters Banned,” Variety, March 10, 1915, n.p., Eva Tanguay file,
Billy Rose Theater Collection, New York Public Library.
35
Dramatic Mirror, January 29, 1916, n.p., Eva Tanguay file, Billy Rose Theater
Collection, New York Public Library.
36
Quoted in Kibler, “Nothing Succeeds Like Excess,” 63.
37
Quoted in Anthony Slide, The Encyclopedia of Vaudeville, (Westport, CT:
Greenwood Press, 1994), 508.
38
Quoted in Mary Unterbrink, Funny Women: American Comediennes, 1860-1985,
(Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland & Company, Inc., 1987), 30.
39
Quoted in Slide, Encyclopedia, 510.
40
“She Insisted on Idealizing Her Man,” Motion Picture Magazine, June 1918, n.p.,
NYPL.
41
“Is it Tragic to Be Comic?” Motion Picture Classic, May 1931
42
For stage-struck or matinee girls, see Richard Butsch, “Bowery B’hoys and
Matinee Ladies: The Re-Gendering of Nineteenth-Century American Theater
Audiences,” American Quarterly, Vol. 46, No. 3, September 1994, 397; for movie-
struck girls, see Shelley Stamp, Movie-Struck Girls: Women and Motion Picture
Culture After the Nickelodeon, (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000),
37.
43
Butsch, 397.
44
Kathleen Rowe, The Unruly Woman: Gender and the Genres of Laughter,
(Austin: University of Texas Press, 1995), 31.
45
Herbert Howe, “Is Mary Pickford Finished?” The Pre-View, 25 March 1925, 7.
248
46
Lori Landay, “The Flapper Film: Comedy, Dance, and Jazz Age Kinaesthetics,”
in Jennifer M. Bean and Diane Negra, eds., A Feminist Reader in Early Cinema,
(Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002), 237.
47
See Barbara Welter, “The Cult of True Womanhood: 1820-1860,” American
Quarterly, Vol. 18, Issue 2, Part 1, Summer, 1966, 151-174.
48
Marian Rhea, “Wedded Bliss Is Told By Clara Bow,” Los Angeles Evening Herald
and Express, 19 December 1931, AMPAS.
49
J. H. Keen, “Joan Crawford,” Philadelphia Daily News, 8 August 1930, AMPAS.
50
Herbert Howe, “Is Mary Pickford Finished?” The Pre-View, 25 March 1925, 7.
51
See Miriam Hansen, Babel & Babylon: Spectatorship in American Silent Film,
(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1991), 95; Lawrence W. Levine,
Highbrow/Lowbrow: The Emergence of Cultural Hierarchy in America,
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988), 184-198.
52
Stamp, 114.
53
Shelley Stamp, Movie-Struck Girls: Women and Motion Picture Culture After the
Nickelodeon, (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000), 125.
54
Jennifer M. Bean, “Technologies of Early Stardom and the Extraordinary Body,”
in Jennifer M. Bean and Diane Negra, eds., A Feminist Reader in Early Cinema,
(Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002), 432-437.
55
See William Uricchio and Roberta E. Pearson, Reframing Culture: The Case of
the Vitagraph Quality Films, (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993).
56
Mary Russo, “The Female Grotesque,” 62-63.
57
Rowe, The Unruly Woman, 33.
58
Ben Singer, Melodrama and Modernity: Early Sensational Cinema and Its
Contexts, (New York: Columbia University Press, 2001), 62-90.
59
John F. Kasson, Amusing the Million: Coney Island at the Turn of the Century,
(New York: Hill & Wang, 1978), 49.
60
Peter Milne, “Tillie Wakes Up,” Motion Picture News, 3 February 1917, 759.
249
61
Lauren Rabinovitz, For the Love of Pleasure: Women, Movies, and Culture in
Turn-of-the-Century Chicago, (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press,
1998), 138.
62
Rabinovitz, 163.
63
Frederick James Smith, “The Celluloid Critic,” Motion Picture Classic, October
1918, 47.
64
“Mikey,” Wid’s Daily, 11 August 1918, 4.
65
Sigmund Freud, Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious,
66
Allen, 229.
67
Quoted in Allen, 229.
68
Landay, “The Flapper Film,” 237.
69
Elizabeth Reitz Mullenix, Wearing the Breeches: Gender on the Antebellum
Stage, (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2000), 291.
70
Mullenix, 296-298.
71
Anthony Slide, The Encyclopedia of Vaudeville, Westport, CT: Greenwood Press,
1994, 332.
72
Gillian Rodger, “He Isn’t a Marrying Man,” in Queer Episodes in Music and
Modern Identity, ed. Sophie Fuller and Lloyd Whitesell, (Urbana: University of
Illinois Press), 109.
73
Quoted in Rodger, 114.
74
Rodger, 121-122.
75
Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity, (New
York: Routledge, 1990), 138.
76
Chris Straayer, Deviant Eyes, Deviant Bodies: Sexual Re-Orientations in Film
and Video, (New York, Columbia University Press, 1996), 42
77
Straayer, 54.
78
Straayer, 54.
250
79
Alison McMahan, Alice Guy Blaché: Lost Visionary of the Cinema, (New York:
Continuum, 2002), 224
251
Chapter Four
“Ever on the Move”
Modernity and the New Woman
When a 1917 magazine article wanted to know “who is the most strenuous
[woman in] the photoplay?” the obvious answers of serial queens such as Pearl
White and Helen Holmes were quickly dismissed. “No, no, no! You’re all wrong,”
the writer insisted,
Diving out of a balloon and flicking a speeding freight train isn’t
at all strenuous as Polly Moran knows the word. And Polly, we
venture, is the most strenuous thing in or out of skirts. If you want to
see the wild, wild woman of the screen, you want to see Polly.
She rides a horse with the reckless abandon that would make Bill
Hart look like a nursery jockey. Upstairs, downstairs, over cliffs,
from one towering ledge to another – that’s the sort of horse tricks she
executes. And she can wield her fists as fast and as effectively as any
man you ever saw. She has no aversion to leaping head foremost into
a crowd of some twenty gangsters and then cleaning out the entire set.
And she can handle a lariat with dexterous skill. Does she rope one
object at a time? She does not! She ropes twenty and thirty with one
movement, and just to demonstrate her strength, she pulls them all
through the city streets and lodges them in jail.
1
Looking past the tongue-in-cheek hyperbole of this article (almost certainly written
by a studio publicist) one finds a description of a very modern woman. Polly Moran
is figured here as strong, assertive, independent, intelligent, and athletic, and able to
hold her own alongside men. Her character, Sheriff Nell, was a working woman
holding a traditionally masculine job, and Moran herself was known as a gifted and
hard-working comedienne. Moran, and comediennes more generally, in many ways
were the personification modernity, with its speed, thrills, energy and vitality.
252
Whether performing wild and dangerous stunts or embracing athletics and
automobiles, comediennes’ activities both on-screen and off- linked them to the
thrilling and lively modern city and also to the iconic figure of the New Woman.
They also made a strong case for the malleability of personal identity, the ability to
choose one’s personality and type and to change it at will, an appealing prospect in a
time when everything from fashions to technology to social values was changing at
lightning speed. Comediennes further cemented their link to modernity and to New
Womanhood by virtue of their position as working women, both in the film industry,
where they served as actors, writers, directors and producers, and in their films,
where they played shopgirls, secretaries, waitresses, and other working-class
heroines. Finally, by bobbing their hair and appearing in comedies that blurred the
line between traditionally masculine and feminine roles, comediennes questioned
strict gender boundaries and instead promoted women’s social and political power.
In these ways comediennes provided a highly visible example of women who
successfully negotiated the modern world, with its constantly changing landscape.
These women were often progressive and forward-looking, breaking with the past as
they gave female spectators a model for modern femininity. Just as Louise Fazenda
was said to have “clubbed her path-way to success, leaving behind her a pallid mass
of shocked and bleeding traditions,”
2
comediennes showed women that they didn’t
need to be demure and conventionally feminine to succeed – in fact, comediennes
seemed to suggest that just the opposite qualities were needed for the modern New
Woman to engage fully with the modern world
253
Comediennes and the Modern World
The New Woman, of course, was as much cultural construct as lived reality.
Originally figured as an antidote to the True Woman, the New Woman came to
embody the complex changes taking place in women’s lives in the early 20
th
century.
She was fashionable, young, healthy, attractive and vivacious when figured by
Charles Dana Gibson, Howard Chandler Christy and Ziegfeld’s chorines; she was
mannish, overbearing, sexually ambiguous, dangerously over-educated and
inexcusably neglectful of her husband and children when represented by anti-
suffragists and social conservatives. [Figure 4-1] She was, in short, a catch-all
symbol for the anxieties and fears that many were feeling as women increasingly
made their mark on the public sphere – holding jobs, mixing in heterosocial
company, and making ever more vocal demands for equality and enfranchisement.
Figure 4-1 – Gibson Girl and Suffragettes
254
The character types that comediennes played on-screen often mirrored these
divergent images of New Woman, from light comediennes and slapstick-ingénues
such as Colleen Moore and Mabel Normand, to unruly knockabout types such as
Marie Dressler and Alice Howell. [Figure 4-2] However, rather than simply
confirming popular stereotypes about New Women, comediennes defused their
perceived threat through their comic portrayals. Furthermore, unlike action heroines
who typically portrayed one type of New Womanhood – active, young, and attractive
– comediennes portrayed a wide range of femininities, from comically overbearing
or gawky, to young, pretty and effervescent. As such, they helped broaden the
popular conception of New Woman, and showed audiences that “New Woman” was
a much more inclusive category than many believed.
Figure 4-2 – Mabel Normand and Marie Dressler
255
As a site of struggle over changing gender roles the New Woman was, as Ben
Singer describes her, “a particularly striking example of modernity’s characteristic
cultural discontinuity.”
3
Comediennes, like the image of the New Woman, stood as
visible symbols of the changing gender roles of the early 20
th
century. By simply
engaging in comic performances female comedians were crossing gender
boundaries, claiming for themselves a trait – humor – that was typically considered
exclusively masculine. Many believed – and still believe – that comedy and
femininity are mutually exclusive, because of comedy’s inherent aggressiveness and
the reliance of much humor on intellect over emotion. And yet in many ways
comedy, modernity and New Womanhood are strikingly similar. Comedy is
aggressive. It’s also bold, active and assertive. The comedy found in motion
pictures and on the vaudeville stage of the 1910s is tantamount to performed
modernity, full of speed and thrills.
Just as the icon of the New Woman was gaining prominence in the early 20
th
century, a new type of comedy was similarly displacing older forms. This so-called
“New Humor” was, as theater historian Susan Glenn describes it,
a visceral, fast-paced, direct, physically demonstrative and sometimes
violent style of comedy. In contrast to more cerebral, thoughtful and
didactic forms of narrative humor, the new humor created joking and
laughter for its own sake.
4
This new style of comedy found its way into vaudeville and motion picture theaters
in the form of slapstick and eccentric comedy, which was violent and anarchic and
concerned with disorder and inversion. Rules of acceptable behavior were
256
acknowledged and then broken, as comedians, both male and female, pushed the
limits as far as they could. This new type of comedy is perfectly illustrated in a
routine performed in the Ziegfeld Follies by Eva Tanguay, described by a reviewer
as “a mimic ball game in which she and the audience pelt each other with soft balls,
and for a few minutes the fun is fast and furious.”
5
Comedy of the 1910s, just like
comediennes, New Women, and the modern world itself, demanded attention; it was
not content to sit quietly and demurely on the sidelines.
In many ways, comediennes were uniquely equipped to confront the modern
world. Armed with a new style of humor (and perhaps a few soft balls),
comediennes engaged in and ultimately triumphed over the shocks and thrills of the
modern landscape. As Ben Singer, Jennifer Bean, and others have argued, the turn
of the twentieth century was a time of tremendous anxiety, as rapidly changing
technologies, expanding cities, and increasing immigration brought about a
displacement of 19
th
-century lifestyles and culture.
6
The big city, it seemed, was
fraught with peril. In the city, Singer points out, there was a “sense of a radically
altered public space, one defined by chance, peril, and shocking impressions rather
than by any traditional conception of continuity and self-controlled destiny.”
7
Crossing the street could mean risking one’s life, as out-of-control trolleys collided
with horse-drawn carriages, and the brand-new menace of automobiles mowed down
everyone and everything in their way. Horrible accidents were breathlessly reported
in the popular press, adding to the sense of danger from all sides. Headlines such as
“A Falling Man Kills a Boy,” “Horse Smashed Cable Car Window,” and “Child
257
Choked by a Transom” reinforced the ubiquitousness and unpredictability of violent
death in the city.
8
Anxieties about modern urban living, including fears of bodily peril and
sudden and brutal deaths, are frequently acted out in comedies, especially slapstick
comedies, with their violent and chaotic situations. In fact, early cinema in general
had what Bean describes as a “unique capacity for giving aesthetic expression to the
very crisis of which it is a part; that is, to embrace disruption and discontinuity as a
premise for titillation.”
9
While a number of early genres – especially action and
chase films – embraced disruption and discontinuity, comedy foregrounded these
tropes and played them for laughs. A comparison can be drawn between the
expression of modernity in action serials and in slapstick comedies. In action series
and serials, the commonly used devices of runaway trains, careening cars, and
malfunctioning telephones and telegraphs point to the instability and unreliability of
modern technology, “its potential to backfire, to generate a world of blind chance.”
10
The restoration of order, however temporary, at the end of each film/episode
provides reassurance to the audience that the problems of the modern world are
fixable. These films allow audiences to revel in the shocks and thrills of modernity
at its most chaotic, and then safely return to normalcy.
By contrast, in slapstick comedy unreliable technology is just one of many
unstable factors to be reckoned with. The volatility and disorder at play in slapstick
is presented as a fundamental element of the larger world. In the comedy universe
everything is unstable, including technology, industry, institutions such as marriage
258
and family, the government (particularly the police), and even the laws of physics
and physiology. Nothing is restored at the end of a slapstick comedy, because there
is no “normal” world to return to. The comedy universe is, indeed, one where the
breakdown of machines, order, and society itself are regularly occurring events. As
such, comedy is the perfect generic parallel to modernity. As much as audiences
might like to believe that the restoration of order and stability found at the end of
action films was possible in real life, the change and upheaval begun in the late 19
th
century instead continued unabated throughout the 1910s and 20s.
Of course, the expression of modernity that appeared in comedy was an
extreme version. In Manhandled (1924), shopgirl Tessie McGuire (Gloria Swanson)
struggles with the challenges of the modern city. After emerging from the hectic
department store basement where she works, Tessie stands momentarily on the busy
sidewalk and is promptly splattered with mud from a passing car. Her difficulties
continue on the subway, as she has to fight her way through the mass of commuters
to get on her train, and after narrowly escaping being crushed by the subway doors
she is crushed between two large men as she rides. After emerging from the train
she heads to the exit, but trips over a barricade and lands on her rear. Another run-in
with public transit can be found in the Hal Roach comedy, Anything Once! (1927), in
which Mabel Normand plays a laundry employee charged with delivering a
voluminous gown to a client. As she attempts to board a crowded trolley with her
massive package she is bumped and jolted, and forced off the trolley and into the
street. When she finally manages to board, an annoyed passenger throws the
259
oversized box out the window, at which point the dress is promptly run over by a
passing horse-drawn carriage; jumping out of the trolley to save the dress, Mabel
herself is almost run down by a passing car. Chase films also show out-of-control
traffic, such as in Keystone’s Love, Loot and Crash (1915), in which a wild chase
involving two cars and a motorcycle winds through the city streets, demolishing a
pushcart and a fence before ending with the cast and their vehicles plunging into the
Pacific Ocean.
Traffic and transit aren’t the only elements of unruly modernity featured in
these films. A Strong Revenge (1913) follows a pair of immigrants – Schnitz (Mack
Sennett) and Meyer (Ford Sterling) – as they attempt to assimilate into American
society and woo Mabel Normand’s character. Crime is featured in numerous silent
comedies, and the success of the criminals coupled with the incompetence of the
police (such as the Keystone Kops) adds to the notion of the modern city as a place
of anarchy and lawlessness. Even the widespread fear of danger from above –
evidenced by repeated news stories of objects and people falling from overhead –
shows up in silent comedy. Hold Your Breath (1924) includes a scene of an airplane
spiraling out of control and falling in the middle of a crowded city street, and Harold
Lloyd in Safety Last (1923) and Dorothy Devore in Hold Your Breath risked falling
from great heights as they scaled the sides of buildings. Rooftop chases also figure
prominently in silent comedies: in films such as Keystone’s Fatty’s Faithful Fido
(1915) and Buster Keaton’s The Three Ages (1923), the heroes either chase or are
chased across the tops of buildings. In a gag that echoes newspapers headlines that
260
warned of big-city dangers, a chase in Court House Crooks (1915) includes a pair of
policemen on foot running into a ladder on which a house painter is perched. The
painter falls on top of the policemen, who knock him around before they continue
their chase.
The language used in the popular press to describe comediennes – volatile,
topsy-turvy, impulsive, impudent – was similar to the language used to describe the
modern experience. Comediennes were, in many ways, the embodiment of
modernity, with their frantic pace, limitless energy and unbounded optimism. In a
1915 review of Eva Tanguay’s act, for example, a writer claims that she “admirably
personifies the American ideals of hurry, assurance and impudent disregard for
conventions,” and then goes on to say that,
The songs are, after all, inconsequential. They are merely lines
upon which the electricity travels.…
Miss Tanguay, we have said, is the spirit of the subway rush. But
she’s more than that. She is Personality tearing through the line of
Art for a touchdown. She is Excitement knocking a homerun in the
ninth, with Hysteria on third. She is a Krupp howitzer of Restlessness
hurling a 42-centimeter shell into Poise. She is – Eva Tanguay.
11
Both stage and screen comediennes, as New Women, were icons of the new modern
world. The traits that made a successful comedienne – pep, vitality, energy, an
effervescent personality – were ascribed both to the New Woman and to the modern
city. And so Dorothy Gish is described as “a little dynamo of energy” and “a rag-
time comedienne, with all the pep of a jazz band,”
12
Mabel Normand is “a dancing
mouse, whirling madly all the time, but without purpose,”
13
and Dorothy Devore is
“a ‘Go-Getter’ of the real kind.”
14
Likewise, Constance Talmadge is “the female
261
exponent of pep, so delightfully and naughtily sophisticated, so pretty, so charming,
so approximate to mere man’s idea of a mate to lay his slippers out for him at night;
but then Constance Talmadge would never lay out his slippers – no, she’d be
dragging him off to the theater, then to supper, cabaret, and all.”
15
Along with
language indicating energy and effervescence, writers frequently used electricity as a
metaphor to describe comediennes. Regarding Colleen Moore, one writer claimed
that “Her conversation kind of sizzles. She gives a remarkably good imitation of an
electric spark.” Another wrote that “Colleen has always been about as calm and
reflective as electric current. She goes rushing around all the time you are talking to
her and her conversation sizzles. There are no cobwebs in her mind.”
16
A
newspaper illustration from around 1927 pictures Moore as a live wire, her body
coursing with so much “pep” and energy that three large and gruff-looking women
have to hold her down until the director is ready for her [Figure 4-3].
17
Comediennes are closely aligned with modernity in these examples, as they are said
to be infused with the same energy, electricity, and excitement as the modern world.
A typical article describes Constance Talmadge, who was perhaps closest of all the
screen comediennes to the ideal of the pretty and vivacious New Woman in the late
1910s and early 1920s, in this way:
A saucy, inconsequent little baggage, ever on the move, is Constance,
and possessed of an illusive fascination that’s quite irresistible. She
races her car like mad – only last week she killed a Ford – and she
takes long walks through the Hollywood hills, swims like a fish, sails
a boat like an old salt, dances like a nymph – anything as an excuse to
be forever on the move.
18
262
Just like the thrilling modern city and the lively and adaptable New Woman who
inhabited it, Talmadge is “forever on the move,” her restless energy a perfect
companion and complement to the comedies she appeared in.
Figure 4-3 – Colleen Moore
Far from being threatened or made vulnerable by the dangers of the modern
world, comediennes epitomize the spirit of modernity with their energy and activity,
and revel in the sheer joy of their physical interaction with the world around them,
engaging their surroundings with physical abandon. They are not refined or
reserved. They venture into the city with its inherent shocks and dangers, and they
connect with and conquer their surroundings. Their ability to successfully negotiate
these spaces is indicative of their ability to negotiate the modern world in general. In
Hold Your Breath, Dorothy Devore plays Mabel, an aspiring reporter who ventures
263
out into the city in search of a story. Her first few attempts fail – she chases a fire
engine only to watch it return to the station, and when she races back to her editor
with news of a plane crash on Broadway she discovers that another reporter has beat
her to the story. Finally, Mabel is assigned to interview a wealthy collector about his
acquisition of a $50 million bracelet. While inspecting the item in the collector’s
hotel room, an organ grinder’s monkey darts into the window and swipes the
bracelet. The collector accuses her of theft, prompting her to duck out the window
and scale the side of the building in pursuit of the monkey. As Mabel climbs from
ledge to ledge she encounters a variety of obstacles, and several times she slips, only
to have her falls broken by awnings, flagpoles and other protrusions. Mabel
ultimately catches the monkey, returns the bracelet to its owner, and clears her name,
and then immediately renounces her career as a reporter in favor of marriage to her
long-suffering beau.
While the ending of this film is somewhat unsatisfying, as the scrappy and
resourceful Mabel declares of her fiancé, “I guess I’ll let him do the reporting – and
I’ll do the wife-ing,” the audience is still treated to the spectacle of Mabel fearlessly
taking on the city. After her first failed attempt to find a story, a dejected Mabel tells
her boyfriend, “I guess I’ll never be a reporter, dear. Perhaps it’s better that we get
marri—“. Before she can finish her thought she sees an airplane fall from the sky,
and she immediately dashes to the scene of the accident, leaving her beau behind.
As she tries to fight her way through the crowd she is pushed over into a baby
carriage, which gets hooked onto the back of a car. Mabel is pulled down the street
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and then thrown roughly from the carriage as the car turns. Undaunted, she leaps to
her feet, runs back to the plane crash, interviews the pilot, and runs to her editor to
tell him the story. Interestingly, she is scooped by another reporter who phoned in
the details of the accident while Mabel was heading to the office on foot. Mabel’s
link to modernity doesn’t come through technology – especially passive devices such
as the telephone. Instead, she embodies the rush and excitement of the city. She
runs from story to story, even wearing out the man her boyfriend had hired to follow
her and keep her out of trouble. When she decides to chase the bracelet-stealing
monkey, she doesn’t rely on elevators, stairs, or ladders; instead, she chooses the
most physically demanding route, pulling herself up by her fingertips and swinging
her legs up and over ledge after ledge. The policemen following her are unable to
keep up with her acrobatic and fearless pursuit, and instead continue their chase from
the interior of the hotel. Mabel embodies modernity, and therefore she is able to
connect with the city in a way that other characters cannot.
Other films similarly highlight comediennes’ affinity to the modern city. In
Mabel’s Dramatic Career (1913), Mabel Normand plays a small-town cook who is
engaged to her employer’s son (Mack Sennett). After catching Mack flirting with a
girl “Fresh from the city,” Mabel throws a violent fit and chases after the two of
them while brandishing a stick. Mabel is summarily thrown out – “Driven out into
the cruel world” – and she lands in the city, and eventually at the Keystone Studio.
Seeing a pair of actors mock-strangling each other on set, Mabel cheerfully
determines that this is the job for her. The explosive violence and energy exhibited
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by Mabel – chasing her beau and her rival, beating them with a stick, wringing their
necks – are unacceptable in the small town, but are the keys to Mabel’s success in
the big city: the actions and traits that cause her to be thrown out of her small town
are the very traits that allow her to flourish in the “cruel world” of the city. Not only
does Mabel get a job at Keystone, she becomes a star. When Mack sees one of her
films years later, he is unfamiliar with moving pictures and believes that the villain
on screen is actually threatening his Mabel. Mack pulls a gun and shoots at the
screen, and then goes to the actor’s house, only to find that the “villain” and Mabel
are married, with two small children. Mack is clearly at odds with the modern
world; whereas Mabel is able to use her unruly and energetic personality to thrive in
the city, Mack fails to understand simple (and by 1913, ubiquitous) motion picture
technology, and after losing both the city girl and Mabel ends up all wet, both
figuratively and literally – as he peers into Mabel’s window, a bucket of water is
dumped on him from an upstairs window.
“Fearlessness is one of her characteristics”
The athleticism, personality and daring ascribed to female comedians showed
up in their films in the form of daring stunts and perilous gags. Slapstick and some
light comediennes engaged in on-screen stunts and acrobatics that rivaled the
exploits of action heroines, including scaling buildings, diving off piers, racing cars,
flinging pies, and chasing, and being chased by, all manner of animals. Press
accounts of their off-screen physical accomplishments such as swimming, running,
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driving and dancing (which will be discussed more fully below) were received along
with films that included their daring on-screen stunts, with the result that fans
understood many comediennes to be exceptionally gifted and courageous athletes.
Jennifer Bean has described how discourses surrounding action heroines
worked to “enhance the believability of real peril to the players’ body”
19
by, among
other things, emphasizing the very real risks the stars took when executing their
stunts. Similarly, press reports and studio publicity pointed out that comediennes,
too, did their own stunt work, and that they were very often put in peril and even
injured. The press let readers know that “Miss [Alice] Howell’s art is not of the
make-believe kind,” and that Gale Henry was working closely with a live bear in a
1920 film.
20
As with action heroines, stories about broken bones and other on-set
mishaps were widely reported. In 1919, Photoplay reported that, “After stopping
stove lids, runaway flivvers, rabid motorcycles and fire engines with various parts of
her anatomy for two years without even sustaining a bruise, Polly Moran, Keystone
comedienne, has finally reached the hospital,” after falling off a horse and breaking
her arm while performing a stunt.
21
Another press item told fans about an on-set
accident involving Mabel Normand: “You will be glad to know that this clever little
comedienne has recovered from a severe accident. A blow from the heel of a shoe,
thrown in a comedy rehearsal, fractured her skull, and for a time threatened to prove
fatal.”
22
In discussing action stars, Bean argues that articles that draw attention to
on-set accidents and the very real dangers inherent in stunt work posit the star as an
“exceptional subject of modernity.” The action star and, I would argue, the
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comedienne, “not only experiences accident but, more importantly, survives and,
better yet, thrives on it – her persistence in the face of ceaseless catastrophe raises
the threshold of commonly held psychical, physical, and conceptual limits of human
motility.”
23
In making a career out of performing stunts that the public knew to be
dangerous, and succeeding, both physically and financially, these stars were
providing a powerful and highly visible counter-argument to those who claimed that
modernity brought about a rise in neurasthenia, shock, eyestrain, nervous stimulation
and other physical and mental disorders.
24
The idea that modern life was draining
the populace – and especially the female populace – of energy, virility, strength, and
mental abilities was forcefully disputed by films that showed women scaling
buildings and riding horses over cliffs. That comediennes were risking life and limb
in the service of comedy added an element of playful flippancy – not only were these
women willingly putting themselves in harm’s way, they were doing so for a laugh.
In fact, despite the various broken bones and run-ins with wild animals,
comediennes were said to cheerfully take on the wildest stunts, a logical extension of
the good humor required to succeed in comedy. Dorothy Devore, then, “neither
balks at dancing on the ledge of the 27
th
floor of the Paramount Building, nor
hesitates in jumping off a fast-moving train,”
25
Fay Tincher “never balks nor protests
no matter how difficult her Komic comedy assignment may be,”
26
and readers are
told of Mabel Normand that “Fearlessness is one of her characteristics. When a thrill
is required in a picture nothing daunts her.”
27
One reviewer even admitted that “one
is forced to admire the nerve of Marie Dressler. For a woman as large as she is and
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one who has lost the resiliency of youth she takes some risks that are thrilling and
nerve wrecking to say the least.”
28
This is certainly evidenced in Tillie Wakes Up
(1917), in which Dressler’s Tillie is thrown unceremoniously around the rides and
attractions of Coney Island like a rag doll, but gamely submits to the inevitable
bruises to her body and dignity.
As I discussed in Chapter 3, comediennes’ engagement in physical comedy
can be read in terms of sensual pleasure, as an endorsement of finding enjoyment in
purely physical sensation. The public’s interest in accounts of comediennes
performing thrilling and dangerous stunts and gags can also be seen as a response to
what Heidegger described as the “lostness” of the present in the modern world, the
idea that awareness of a moment only comes after the moment has passed, and
therefore it is impossible for cognition and sensation to occur in the same moment.
Physical sensation, however, is experienced in the moment, and therefore, as Leo
Charney explains it,
the present’s lostness could be partly redeemed by valorizing the
sensual, bodily, prerational responses that retain the prerogative to
occupy a present moment. To say we cannot recognize the present
inside the moment of presence is not to say that the present cannot
exist. It is merely to say that it exists as felt, as experienced, not in
the realm of the rational catalog but in the realm of the bodily
sensation.
29
Heidegger posits the “possibility of a sensual present as antidote to the alienation of
modernity,”
30
and while he refers to the sensation of vision it seems clear that other
bodily sensations would similarly work to dispel modern alienation. Therefore,
when comediennes use their bodies to take a pratfall, dive off a cliff, tangle with
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amusement park rides or take a pie to the face, they are fully experiencing the
moment. The fact that they are said to perform these dangerous stunts willingly,
even cheerfully, despite possible harm aligns them more closely with “sensation”
rather than “cognition” – after all, a reasonable person would not “[stop] stove lids,
runaway flivvers, rabid motorcycles and fire engines with various parts of her
anatomy,” but Polly Moran gladly performs these acts every day.
Spectators, then, could vicariously experience the sensual moment through
the performances of Moran and other comediennes. Watching them perform wild
stunts and gags, audiences could see an alternative – however extreme – to the
“lostness” of the present moment, and the alienation brought about by modernity.
But even more than this, audiences could experience a sensual present while
watching the films, as they laugh and thrill along with the comediennes. A Moving
Picture Word review of a Polly Moran film describes possible audience reactions:
“In “Roping Her Romeo” Miss Moran does more stunts on horseback than the
average comedienne can accomplish upon her own feet. While the spectators are
being convulsed with laughter they will also be thrilled at her daring feats.”
31
While
spectators are both spatially and temporally removed from the on-screen moment,
given that the films were shot weeks or months in advance, their own sensual
reaction to the film – whether being “convulsed with laughter” or feeling “thrilled”
by the action on-screen – can enable them to fully experience the moment while
watching the film.
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Humor and the New Woman
A 1916 description of Constance Talmadge reveals the characteristics that
were essential to the New Woman as personified by the screen comedienne:
She is decidedly athletic, splendidly built and has the grace and
freedom of movement that comes from muscles in perfect condition.
She can run like a deer, dive and swim, and handle her own car, and
she is as quick of wit as she is of movement.
32
The inclusion of “quick wit” among the standard list of New Woman qualities of
athleticism, daring and grace highlights the fact that a sense of humor was an
important trait for the comedienne-as-New Woman. In other articles Connie is
described as having “the comedy spirit and the rare facility of spoofing herself,”
33
and possessing “never-failing wit and delightful good humor.”
34
In fact, humor is
seen as a specifically modern trait: “The Perfect Flapper of 1924 is exactly what her
grandmother would like to have been, could she have dared to laugh as heartily at
her sweetheart’s whiskers as they deserved.”
35
The freedom to laugh, then, is seen as
the difference between the modern girl of 1924 and her grandmother. Dorothy
Gish’s sense of humor also linked her to the modern world, as her pep and vitality
are attributed to her good humor: “Perhaps Lillian Gish appropriated a trifle more
than her share of girlish beauty, but Dorothy sure did get even by grabbing a big
piece out of the family funny-bone and keeping it for her very own. It runs all
through her anatomy and just won’t let her arms or legs behave.”
36
When describing
the personality traits important to a comedienne, Louise Fazenda understandably
included humor, but the rest of her description of an ideal comedienne is strikingly
similar to the popular conception of the “ideal” New Woman:
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Personality, adaptability, quickness to grasp the situation, keen insight
and a sense of humor to me appear to be the principal requirements,
and, of course, a girl has got to take lots of chances, especially in
“slap” comedy, and must be a pretty good athlete.
37
It’s certainly understandable that a sense of humor would be among the traits
required of a comedienne. That humor would be an essential trait of the modern
woman is perhaps not surprising, either. Given the frantic pace of the modern world
and its ubiquitous shocks, anxieties and nervous ailments, the ability to laugh at
oneself and the world at large would be a singularly effective coping strategy.
Some writers even saw humor as a trait unique to the specifically American
New Woman. A Boston writer, defending comedienne Charlotte Greenwood from
charges of vulgarity in her vaudeville act, argued at length that Greenwood’s humor,
far from being vulgar, is in fact distinctly and proudly American:
The quality in American girls which makes Europeans eye them
askance is their chummy “open-faced” manner. … [The American
girl] is not a snob; she is as willing to be chummy with a count as
with a cabby. To her, anyone who enjoys a joke needs no
introduction; she takes the whole world into her confidence, thanks to
her sense of humor, yet never loses her individuality and her
underlying dignity. Her mother would have been gracious to the men
she met and excoriated them behind their backs; she tells them what
she thinks to their faces. She is not at all the typical “summer girl,”
who is athletic and “free” as a ruse to attract men. Still less is she the
“mannish” girl, who slaps young men on the back and calls them “Old
Sport.” She is, rather, the girl who, when she discovers that the
family expects her to be the same fudge-making little miss that she
was in short dresses, goes out and finds a “job,” and keeps it, makes
all men respect her, and those few who she cares about love her. Her
frankness is amazing; it is one of her chief assets.
38
Frankness, athleticism, affability, good humor – these are the traits of the American
New Woman and the American comedienne, as interpreted by the popular press.
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“An athlete from every point of view”
Comediennes were further linked to modernity and typed as New Women
through their hobbies, as reported in the press and through studio publicity. Many of
the comediennes’ reported hobbies involved sports, travel, dancing and driving, all
of which emphasized women’s increased presence in the public sphere, and also took
advantage of the technological and social advances brought about by modernity.
Stories about comediennes dancing the night away, swimming for exercise (most
likely in one-piece suits), and enjoying the mobility provided by their cars,
reinforced the notion that the modern woman could, and did, mix freely in
heterosocial society without fear of reproach or reprisal.
A tremendous amount of press was given to comediennes’ love of fast cars
and reckless driving, a parallel to the earlier icon of the New Woman and her
bicycle. A 1914 article titled “Movies’ Speed Queens Hurl Auto Defis” declared
that Mabel Normand and Marie Dressler would settle a rivalry by means of a car
race, with Normand in her Stutz and Dressler in her Fiat, and “each claim[ing] her
car is faster than that of the other.”
39
The article reports that when Normand
proposed the race, Dressler “laughed joyously and accepted the challenge,” a
response which highlights the comedienne’s humor as well as her love of thrills.
Other comediennes also were said to enjoy the speed and excitement that came with
driving, and the press discourses invariably described them as reckless thrill seekers.
Constance Talmadge reportedly “races her car like mad – only last week she killed a
273
Ford,”
40
and Louise Fazenda sped about town in a car called “the coop,” one that
“travels at an incredible rate of speed for so ancient and battered a car, and Louise
manoeuvers [sic] it through mazes of intricate traffic in a fashion which must be
cited as masterly.”
41
Of course, these driving habits would eventually catch up with
some of them: Bebe Daniels was reported to have spent ten days in jail after being
arrested for speeding, although vast numbers of visitors and many comforts from
home no doubt helped to ease her time behind bars.
*42
Comediennes were also said to be avid swimmers, hikers, dancers – anything
involving speed, energy and athleticism. Marie Prevost was “a daring and skilled
athlete, particularly in water sports like swimming and surf board riding,”
43
and
Louisa Fazenda claimed, “I’m fond of swimming, dancing and driving a car, and
when I’m fifty I’ll still be enjoying dance-music, sea-bathing and automobiles – or
maybe air-planes!”
44
Constance Talmadge “is the best ballroom dancer, according to
masculine report, among the screen stars. She plays a rattling good game of golf and
swims like a fish,”
45
and “is one of those slim, clean-limbed girls who can ride a
horse, drive a car, sail a boat, and do everything else a good, healthy, out-of-door girl
can do,”
46
while Charlotte Greenwood “is an athlete from every point of view….
She drives her own touring car, wins her own tennis matches and swims, dances,
golfs and bowls.”
47
Colleen Moore was said to swim year round and “claims that the
only objection she has to motion pictures is that they interfere with her outdoor
life.”
48
*
Daniels’ run-in with the law was capitalized on in a film called The Speed Girl (1921), in which her
character is arrested for speeding and spends ten days in jail.
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The emphasis on female stars’ athleticism and love of speed and thrills was
certainly not unique to comediennes, nor were all comediennes described in these
terms (some were said to prefer more traditional activities such as sewing, cooking,
and keeping house). However, these discourses firmly aligned comediennes with
both the New Woman and modernity. As in their films, comediennes engaged in
energetic, exciting activities (with the exception of Alice Howell, who obstinately
replied to a fan magazine’s questionnaire by saying that her hobby was “not filling in
questionnaires.”
49
). The activities that comediennes were said to enjoy – swimming,
dancing, driving, even surfing – were the same as those enjoyed by the stereotypical
New Woman and Flapper. In fact, Colleen Moore’s description of “The American
Girl of Today” is indistinguishable from a typical fan magazine description of a day
in the life of a movie star:
Getting up late, they begin the day with the lip stick. Afterward they
play a round of tennis or golf or ride horseback. After lunch they read
the latest books and get a thrill out of them. In the afternoon they
may sit in on a game of Mah Jongg or bridge. Then have tea and
converse freely on psycho-analysis and love. Possibly a drink now
and then but that’s just a pose. Being able to order a dinner for two or
a brunch. Dance the latest dances all night without getting tired.
Drive a car and be up-to-date on all the latest styles. Believe me – it’s
not easy!
50
Mary Pickford also understood the link between an active lifestyle and the modern
woman. In a published plea to her fans to let her trade her famous curls for a more
practical bob, Pickford argued that
In these outdoor days of swimming, golf, and motoring, a woman is
relieved of that constant nagging anxiety of how her hair is standing
the strain. Her hair, so to speak, is no longer on her mind to the
exclusion of possibly more important matters… We are more mobile,
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more active and alert. Short hair fits our new character as gracefully
as long hair crowned the more dignified behavior of our ancestors.
51
In this view, the revolutionary trend of bobbing hair (which, as I will discuss below,
was as much a feminist as a fashion statement) goes hand-in-hand with an active
lifestyle; in other words, letting go of past fashions and, presumably, conventions, is
an important precursor to engaging in many of the comediennes’ favorite activities.
But these activities were not only associated with the New Woman; they were also
activities that, like the comediennes themselves, epitomized modernity.
Comediennes didn’t just drive cars, they drove fast and recklessly. Their physical
activities put them in close contact with men (dancing) or on public display
(swimming), and emphasized the speed, energy and mobility that were essential
elements of the modern world.
The Comedienne as Mimic and the Fluidity of Modern Identity
The modern city was the perfect place for a young woman to reinvent herself.
Rising populations afforded city dwellers a level of anonymity not found in small
towns, and mass-produced, ready-to-wear versions of the latest fashions were
increasingly available to women in rural areas as well as cities through the
Montgomery Ward and Sears-Roebuck catalogues.
52
These and other changes meant
that class and societal boundaries were not as clearly demarcated as they had been in
the 19
th
century. In this new world identity was fluid; “personality” could be
appropriated and discarded at will. Comediennes reinforced this notion in their
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publicity and in their films, which often figured them as expert mimics, able to
change identities frequently and with ease.
Susan Glenn has shown that imitative comedy was used by almost all female
comedians on stage in the early 20
th
century.
53
Impersonators such as Elsie Janis and
Cecilia Loftus were tremendously popular in vaudeville and revues, and Janis was
able to parlay her stage success into a moderately successful screen career. The type
of impersonations performed by Janis and Loftus on stage relied as much on voice as
on appearance – in a typical Elsie Janis act, for example, the impersonations were
based around musical numbers with Janis performing as “Leonore Ulric singing a
jazz song; Beatrice Lillie doing a sentimental sob-ballad; Jeanne Eagels singing a hot
popular tune; John Barrymore doing ‘Yes, We Have No Bananas,’ and Fanny Brice
doing ‘Peter Pan,’ dialect and all.”
54
Although voice wasn’t a factor in silent film,
screen comediennes could make use of appearance and mannerisms in their
impersonations, and they used these tools to work imitations of well-known
celebrities as well as more generalized character types, such as vamps or aristocrats,
into their films. Whether imitating Lillian Gish or a fictitious duchess, when
comediennes used impersonation they were demonstrating the malleability and
fluidity of identity, and making an argument that women could change their
personality as needed to cross boundaries.
An example of a comedienne imitating both actual celebrities and more
generalized character types occurs in The Patsy (1928). Pat (Marion Davies) decides
that she needs to “get a personality” in order to get the man of her dreams to notice
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her. After reading a few self-help books she decides to try on a new personality,
peppering her conversation with “interesting” sayings, such as “Many a live wire
would be a dead one if it wasn’t for his connections” and “Always remember –
Nature gives us many of our features but she lets us pick our own teeth.” When this
first attempt at “personality” falls short – her odd behavior causes her mother to
think she’s crazy – her father invents a ruse based on a movie he saw the night
before, about a girl who “sure knew her onions.” Pat heads to the house of a well-
known playboy named Billy Caldwell and plays the role of a wild flapper in an
attempt to get him to seduce her, but she’s unable to rouse any interest from the very
drunk and nearly unconscious man. Seeing framed pictures of several movie stars in
Billy’s living room, Pat puts on an impromptu show, impersonating Mae Murray,
Lillian Gish and Pola Negri. Pat’s attempts to try on different personalities – the
“fascinating conversationalist,” the carefree flapper, and the movie star personae of
Murray (the party girl), Gish (the demure virgin) and Negri (the dangerous vamp) –
make an argument for the ease with which women can appropriate different
identities to suit their needs. While Pat’s impersonations fail within the context of
the diegesis, as comedic performances they are utterly successful. Davies’ skillful
impersonations of other stars are a highlight of the film, and even formed a part of
the film’s publicity – a fan magazine photo layout that appeared shortly before the
film’s release featured pictures of Davies as Gloria Swanson, Mary Pickford, Greta
Garbo, Gish, Negri, and Murray, and told readers that Davies is “always the life of
the party – and her impersonations are partly the reason why.”
55
[Figure 4-4]
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Figure 4-4 – Marion Davies: “always the life of the party – and her impersonations are partly the
reason why.”
A similar photo spread appeared in a fan magazine featuring Colleen Moore, “a born
mimic,” imitating Douglas Fairbanks, Charlie Chaplin, Lillian Gish, Mary Alden and
Werner Krauss as Dr. Caligari.
56
These photo layouts suggest that identity is a guise,
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and that adopting different personalities could be fun and playful. Just as Mary Ann
Doane discusses “womanliness” as “a mask which can be worn or removed,”
57
these
imitative performances suggest that identity itself is a similar type of masquerade.
Comedies that featured impersonation gave audiences the vicarious thrill of
temporarily abandoning societal restrictions to cross gender, sexual and class
boundaries. As I discussed in Chapter 3, audiences watching cross-dressing
comedies could enjoy queer moments and a questioning of strict gender boundaries.
Along with male impersonation, two other types of imitation were frequently found
in the silent comedies: women posing as vamps (breaking sexual boundaries), and
women posing as aristocracy (breaking class boundaries). In the first type of film,
the comedienne generally poses as a vamp – a sexually knowing and aggressive
woman – either to distract a man (thereby aiding the real object of her affection), or
to cut loose and have fun. In The Cardboard Lover (1928), Sally’s (Marion Davies)
friend Andre is hung up on a duplicitous vamp named Simone. In order to get Andre
to forget Simone, Sally puts on a vamp act, telling Andre “you’re not really
cured…until you want to kiss someone else.” In Exit Smiling (1926), Violet
(Beatrice Lillie) is similarly called on to rescue her would-be boyfriend, Jimmy,
from trouble. As the “drudge” of a traveling theater troupe, Violet does the cooking
and plays an occasional maid, but longs for the chance to play the vamp onstage.
When Jimmy is threatened by a blackmailer, Violet dons a vamp costume and
attempts to distract the blackmailer by acting out the seduction scene from the
company’s play in his living room. Although she is not terribly effective as a vamp
280
– at one point her necklace breaks and spills beads all over the floor, attracting the
attention of a playful cat – she succeeds in keeping the blackmailer at bay and saving
Jimmy’s reputation. Even innocent Mary Pickford has a shot at a vamp scene in My
Best Girl (1927). When shopgirl Maggie (Pickford) becomes romantically involved
with department store heir Joe, Joe’s father grows concerned about the match and
offers Maggie $10,000 not to marry his son. Maggie loves Joe, but understanding
the potential damage to Joe’s reputation if he marries beneath him, she tries to
convince him that she was only in it for the money, telling him he was an “easy
mark…for a golddigger like me.” Putting on a jazz album, Maggie paints her lips,
lights a cigarette, and performs a frantic Charleston, telling Joe, “That’s me all over –
a red hot mama!” In all of these instances the women play with their identity,
assuming the character of a sexual aggressor in order to achieve their desired
outcome. Although their results are mixed – Sally and Maggie win their men, Violet
does not – they still get to experiment, however briefly, with dangerous and illicit
sexuality.
Mabel Normand has a different reason for putting on a vamp act in What
Happened to Rosa? (1920). Normand plays Mayme, a hosiery salesgirl in a
department store and “a dreamer whose dull, drudging life has never been brightened
by a single gleam of romance.” When a psychic tells her that she is inhabited by the
spirit of a beautiful Spanish woman – and that “You need only to smile, and men will
obey your slightest wish!” – Mayme takes her words to heart and starts acting the
part. Her first test comes when she boards a streetcar without the money to pay the
281
fare. As the conductor reprimands her, Mayme decides “to try her powers of
fascination,” and batting her eyes at the conductor tells him, “I no got ze money.
You let me ride, plees?” Her ploy works, and pleased with her success she dives into
character, digging up a Spanish dress her mother had worn as a vaudeville dancer
and insisting that she is Rosa Alvaro. Mayme’s impersonation of Rosa is a response
to and escape from her dreary modern life. Her job is stressful – the first title card of
the film tells us that “Bargain Monday at Friedman’s [is] heralded as the most
ruthless carnage of regular prices in the history of retail drygoods,” followed by a
shot of throngs of shoppers clamoring to save a nickel on silk hose – and her life
outside of work is bleak. Impersonating Rosa gives Mayme an opportunity to live
out a fantasy of romance, exoticism and intrigue. She has a chance to make her
romantic fantasy a reality when she meets Dr. Maynard Drew, whom she believes to
be the “handsome, dark complexioned young man” the psychic predicted she would
meet, but worried that he would be unimpressed by an ordinary shopgirl, Mayme sets
out to seduce him as Rosa. Mayme’s plan works a little too well – when she finally
confesses her impersonation to the doctor, he exclaims “To me you will always be
Rosa Alvaro!” Her attempt to blur the lines between fantasy and reality through
playful impersonation lands her the man, but at the cost of potentially having that
fantasy take over her life. Mayme’s stunned expression at Dr. Drew’s declaration,
followed by a backwards swoon, indicates that she is not thrilled at the prospect of
playing Rosa indefinitely. Her impersonation was a temporary thrill, a way to step
out of herself and her “drudging” life (the word “drudging” is used multiple times to
282
describe Mayme). The notion of her temporary fantasy becoming a permanent
reality is more than she can handle.
Comediennes didn’t only play with sexual boundaries in their films; they also
played with class boundaries. A great many comedies feature working-class
characters – shopgirls, waitresses, maids, etc. – who long for a better life. The
broader implications of this will be discussed below, but for now I will focus on
films in which working-class characters impersonate upper-class women, particularly
royalty. Her Wild Oat (1927) features an elaborate scheme by Mary Lou (Colleen
Moore), a lunch cart owner, to break into high society. After working hard and
saving her money for five years, she decides to indulge in a stay at an exclusive
seaside resort. Mary Lou is well aware of the fact that she won’t fit in among the
elite, and so she asks her friend, a cabaret dancer named Daisy, to teach her how to
be elegant. Daisy is a thinly-disguised prostitute – she is described as “One of those
Iowa girls – ‘Iowa month’s rent, Daddy.’” – and while her idea of elegance may
seem chic to humble Mary Lou, the ruffles and feathers she dresses Mary Lou in are
loud and garish compared to the upper-class fashions. After a run-in with the house
detective who thinks that she, too, is a prostitute, Mary Lou turns to her friend
Tommy, a lifestyle reporter who straddles the upper- and lower-class spaces.
Tommy finds some new clothes for Mary Lou and encourages her to pass herself off
as the fictitious “Duchesse de Granville.” The ruse works, and soon the same people
who had previously snubbed Mary Lou are desperate to meet her. For Mary Lou, as
for Mayme, her impersonation allows her an escape from her life of drudgery. The
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opening scenes of Mary Lou hard at work on her lunch cart from early morning until
late at night provide a striking contrast to the life of luxury she experiences as the
Duchesse de Granville. [Figures 4-5 and 4-6]
Figure 4-5 – Her Wild Oat (1927): Colleen Moore as Mary Lou Smith…
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Figure 4-6 – Her Wild Oat (1927): … and the Duchesse de Granville.
A similar rags-to-riches impersonation occurs in Cinderella Cinders (1920),
which features Alice Howell as Cinderella, a hardworking fry cook and server in a
greasy-spoon diner. When her union goes on strike, Cinderella takes a job as a cook
for a wealthy family, and is asked to pose as a Countess at a party given by the
family when the real Countess is unable to attend. Cinderella and the butler (posing
as the Count) are continually betrayed by their working-class manners, despite their
best efforts to act dignified. Their efforts are further hampered when they
unknowingly drink spiked punch, although even drunk they maintain the haughty
demeanor and stiffly formal expressions that they associate with the upper class.
When Mabel Normand’s “Girl Bandit” passes for high class in Should Men Walk
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Home? (1927), she does so for decidedly sinister means – to rob the home of a
society couple throwing a party. She and her partner are able to fool the guests at the
party, but they can’t escape the suspicions of the detective, a working-class man who
recognizes his own class. In all of these instances the characters are able to slip
(mostly) undetected into high society, and for a short time escape the harsh realities
of their own lives. Continued drudgery presumably awaits Mary Lou and Cinderella
after their stints as royalty are over, and while it’s assumed that the Girl Bandit will
continue her life of crime, her introduction in the film – hitchhiking on the side of the
road – indicates that she has not had a great deal of success in her chosen career.
While their daily lives involve a struggle to make ends meet, for a brief time they are
waited on by others and treated with deference not usually shown to working-class
women.
Whether impersonating vamps or duchesses, the heroines of these films
always discover that they’re best served by remaining true to who they are. At the
same time, the films offer the underlying message that crossing boundaries is
uncomplicated and rewarding. This idea could be unsettling to some, however, as
Susan Glenn has argued:
…in the era of the New Woman, the idea that individuals were always
in flux, and always susceptible “to influence of others,” threatened to
undermine any claims for a stable, autonomous self, and suggested
the possibility of endless gender permutations. Even a concept as
previously unassailable as sexual difference might be threatened by
theories of the imitative self.
58
If personality, as these films suggest, is something that a woman can easily put on
and discard to suit her needs, what does that say about the stability of gender roles
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and, more generally, personal identity? If a servant can pass herself off as a duchess,
or an otherwise “virtuous” woman can come across as a sexual aggressor, then that
calls into question the rigid gender, class and social boundaries that purportedly
divided people into neat groups in the 19
th
century. While this concept would
certainly have been threatening to some, for many the prospect of crossing
boundaries would have been exciting. Film fans were encouraged to experiment
with identity not just by the films, but also by fan magazines and advertisers. The
notion of identity as malleable, of personality as masquerade and artifice, is apparent
in fan magazines in promotions such as Motion Picture Classic’s Fame and Fortune
contest, which promised to transform a lucky young woman into a glamorous
international movie star. In the advertisements, also, readers were presented with the
image of personality as changeable, as they were encouraged to adopt the attitudes
and appearances of the screen stars. The idea of a woman being able to experiment
with a whole new personality simply by changing her make up, hair, or clothes was
certainly something that advertisers would want to encourage, as was the concept of
“developing a personality” through imitation. Fan magazines ran countless
advertisements that featured the trope of personal transformation, of using lipstick,
silk stockings, toothpaste, and other products to become someone else. Ads that
featured celebrity endorsements invited readers to imitate their favorite stars, in the
hopes of emulating the glamorous lives that the stars were supposed to have led.
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Faced with the encouragement from films, fan magazines and advertisements
to reinvent themselves movie fans were glad to try out different personalities. One
fan described her attempts at developing a “coquettish” personality:
When I discovered I should like to have this coquettish and coy look
which all girls may have, I tried to do it in my room. And surprises! I
could imitate Pola Negri’s cool or fierce look, Vilma Banky’s sweet
but coquettish attitude. I learned the very way of taking my
gentlemen friends to and from the door with that wistful smile, until it
has become a part of me.
59
Other viewers similarly cultivated personalities they had seen in the movies. One
young woman admitted, “Clara Bow has been my ideal girl, and I have tried to
imitate some of her mannerisms. … I have learned from the movies how to be a flirt,
and I have found out that at parties and elsewhere the coquette is the one who enjoys
herself the most.”
60
Another girl pointed out, “It seems on the screen that the wild
girl or the one that pets gets the one she loves. I am now trying that method and am
going to see how it will work. … The movies give one many ideas and I’m going to
try this one. Time will tell.”
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For these girls, a personality is something that can be
tried on as easily as a new coat, and discarded just as easily if it doesn’t fit.
“The work is as strenuous as a laundry girl’s”
One of the most visible ways in which comediennes symbolized the modern
world, both on-screen and off, was simply by doing their job. As working women
comediennes could be role models for the vast numbers of women entering the work
force in the early 20
th
century. Stage and screen actresses from all genres were very
public examples of women who had achieved the social autonomy and mobility that
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feminists were fighting for. Acting was one of the few professions in which women
could achieve career parity with men, with the opportunity for equal pay and equal
opportunities. Furthermore, many comediennes were involved in other aspects of
film production, including writing, directing and producing, and a number of them
ran their own production companies. Much of the discourse surrounding motion
picture acting points out the difficulties of the profession, including long hours,
tedious work, and, as I discussed earlier, the dangers involved in performing stunts
and physical comedy. At the same time, comediennes are very frequently presented
as capable businesswomen for whom film work is not a hobby, but rather a fulfilling
career.
Although actresses faced many risks and hardships, a career as an actress
offered women opportunities not found in other professions. Writing in 1909, a
British playwright claimed that “The actress has long appeared to the crowd as the
ideal image of freedom and spontaneity, and indeed as a pioneer of public work and
wages for women…free from many old-fashioned crampings and conventions.”
62
The potential for high salaries, economic and social independence, and equality with
men existed in movies and theater, and made acting an attractive career for many
women. Performers were paid according to talent and popularity, regardless of
gender, and female headliners appearing in first-class vaudeville theaters could earn
between $1,000 and $4,000 a week, compared to the $5 to $15 a week earned by the
average female worker in the 1910s. Even non-headliners’ salaries were high in
vaudeville, ranging from $200 to $500 a week.
63
At first motion pictures salaries
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were, on average, lower than theater salaries, but as Variety pointed out, “the figure
they command is good the whole year round and that is more comfort than working
the legitimate stage at a bigger salary for a short season.”
64
In 1913 Mabel Normand
was one of the highest paid women in the movies; by 1914 her salary was reported to
be $1,500 a week, and ten years later it had risen to $5,000 a week.
65
Even this
impressive amount seemed small when compared with Mary Pickford, who in 1916
earned $10,000 a week and 50 percent net profits on her films, giving her an annual
salary almost seven times higher than that of the current U.S. president Woodrow
Wilson. Studio publicity described Pickford’s salary as “the largest salary ever paid
to any woman in the world.”
66
Comediennes were very frequently involved in aspects of film production
besides performing, and their involvement in writing, directing and producing was
widely reported in the popular press. Constance Talmadge, Mabel Normand, Fay
Tincher, Alice Howell, Mary Pickford, Gale Henry, Dorothy Devore and Dot Farley
are among the many comediennes who ran their own, often self-named, production
companies. While their duties varied and some were production heads in name only,
many took an active role in producing their films, making decisions on everything
from budgets to scripts to casting. Mary Pickford’s behind-the-scenes acumen was
well known to film fans, as fan magazines and newspapers frequently reported on
her business dealings. One magazine speculated that Pickford could “become one of
the greatest producers the screen has known. And what’s more to be desired?” The
writer further predicted that if Pickford left acting, “she may progress to a higher
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plane as a creator.”
67
Like Pickford, Fay Tincher was also described in the press as a
skillful businesswoman, capable of running her own production company:
Fay Tincher is very businesslike, tho [sic] she looks like the most
feminine of her sex. She is highly intelligent, thinks quickly,
expresses herself very clearly, has a fine flow of language and has
learnt from every one of her varied experiences. She is self-reliant,
knows the Motion Picture business thoroly [sic], and is confident that
she will succeed as head of the Fay Tincher productions.
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When the press detailed the business acumen of Pickford, Tincher and other
comediennes, it was celebrating highly visible women who were in positions of
power and authority. Fan magazines were uniformly positive in their discussions of
women’s power in Hollywood, telling their largely female readership that these well-
paid and highly respected positions were both exciting and rewarding for the women
who held them. Although comediennes’ production companies were almost always
subsidiaries of larger studios, and as such comediennes only had control over their
own films – and not always complete control – the fact that these women were, for
all intents and purposes, their own bosses was seen as tremendously positive by the
popular press. As Moving Picture World said about Dorothy Devore, “What gives
her the great kick is that this June she will practically be her own boss.”
69
In these
discourses, the prospect of being one’s own woman, not controlled by men, is highly
appealing.
Along with acting in and in some cases producing their films, many
comediennes were also writers and directors. Film fans knew that Mabel Normand
directed many films at Keystone, including some of Charlie Chaplin’s earliest work.
In 1915 she was “reputed to be the only actress director in the country today,” and
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two years later Moving Picture World proclaimed her “the first woman director of
comedies.” Gale Henry was a writer as well as an actor and director, and her 1929
Paramount biography highlighted her career trajectory, pointing out that she “entered
Century Comedies as a starring comedienne. For four years she was starred by this
company; and then she turned producer herself. In one year, she wrote, directed,
produced, and starred in twenty-six two-reel comedies.”
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Fan magazines let readers
know that Louise Fazenda “has worked upon scenarios and has a sense of plot
development that many students of photoplay writing would give much to acquire,”
and that Dot Farley “has written more than 200 photoplays all of which have been
produced on the screen.”
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Slapstick comediennes were also known to invent their
own gags, an important form of authorship in films that, in the 1910s, had little or
nothing in the way of written scripts. As early as 1915 Photoplay was crediting
Mabel Normand with being an integral part of Keystone’s creative team – “Always
brim-full of new ideas and ever creating new scenarios she helped Sennett make
moving picture history out there in Edendale, Calif.” – and Normand discussed how
audience reaction would shape the creative process: “I make it a part of my daily
work…to attend theaters where they show Keystone pictures. I listen eagerly for
criticisms among the audience and many times get good ideas in this way. But I do
not confine myself to my own pictures either. I see everybody’s. That is the only
way I can keep in touch.”
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Louise Fazenda acknowledged the hard work involved
in inventing gags, a process that could be quite stressful for performers. “We start a
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picture with only the thinnest frame-work of a plot,” Fazenda revealed, and the
actors were often under pressure to supply the comic situations.
Sometimes the director sits with his arms folded on his chest and an
I’m-from-Missouri-expression on his face and says, “Well, be funny.
Make me laugh, why don’t you?” And you try all the gags you’ve
thought of, and they don’t look as funny as they might – I tell you, it’s
no joke! Even if I did go to a convent for a little while, this work has
given me some very original ideas on religion. For instance, my idea
of heaven is anywhere that there isn’t such a thing as a gag you have
to think of yourself; and my idea of hell is a studio where you have to
spend all eternity thinking up gags that nobody laughs at.
73
Whether producing, directing, writing scenarios or authoring gags, comediennes
were actively involved in the creation of their films from both sides of the screen.
Through their involvement in the creative elements of their films, comediennes could
control, at least to some extent, the structure and content of their films, and thereby
control their representation, image and identity. Furthermore, the publicity given to
comediennes’ behind-the-scenes work meant that the general public could see these
women as serious professionals, and capable businesswomen.
This image was reinforced by stories that emphasized the long hours and
difficult work involved in making films. Fay Tincher summed up the disconnect
between the public’s perception and the reality of motion picture work.
The trouble with most girls is – and I have talked to hundreds of them
in the studios – that they seem to think Motion Pictures are a
combination picnic-ground, dream-world and short-cut to fame. They
are anything but that. The work, to talk plain English, is as strenuous
as a laundry girl’s; the hours are long, there is very little time for
outside pleasures, and your E-string must be kept twanging at concert
pitch all the time.
74
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Colleen Moore agreed that making movies was more work than glamour, saying, “I
don’t know whether there’s a short cut to stardom or not…whatever I’ve done has
been through hard work, study, and not playing about, but sticking on the job all the
time.”
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Mary Pickford compared motion picture work to retail sales when she spent
a day working in a five-and-dime to prepare for her role in My Best Girl. Pickford
claimed that “It wasn’t nearly as hard work as some of my own work in
pictures…Of course, it might get monotonous if you had to do it every day, but I’m
not a bit tired. I wouldn’t have missed it for anything.”
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While some shopgirls
might take exception to the idea that their work wasn’t that hard, stories about
comediennes’ difficult rise to the top of their profession, and the hard work involved
in a motion picture career, helped to confirm their image as serious professionals.
Furthermore, these stories provide evidence of another way that comediennes are
linked to, and ultimately triumph over, modern life. While a great many women
entered the workforce in the early 20
th
century, either because of financial need or
desire for a career, there was a great disparity in the types of jobs held by women as
compared to men, and the salaries they received. When comediennes succeeded in
business, functioned as their own bosses and achieved at least some parity with men
they were providing an example of women who successfully negotiated the changing
social and financial landscape and came out on top.
Of course, the financial and business success enjoyed by motion picture
actresses was not accessible to all women. Large numbers of women in the
workforce in the early 20
th
century worked long hours in service jobs for low pay.
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This reality was reflected in comedies, as comediennes frequently portrayed
working-class girls such as shopgirls, servants, secretaries, telephone operators and
waitresses. Although the real-life problems of these women were complicated and
not easily resolved, the films almost always presented a happy ending, which usually
included marriage, often to the boss or to a handsome young millionaire. Although
these films are sympathetic to the plight of the working girl, she is by-and-large
figured as a modern day Cinderella waiting for her prince to rescue her from the
world of paid labor, rather than as an ambitious businesswoman hoping to work her
way to the top. The Cinderella trope is evident in many of Colleen Moore’s films, to
such an extent that the press was often critical of the similarity between her roles.
One writer cynically proclaimed that “Some day Colleen Moore is going to play the
part of a rich spoiled little girl, instead of a downtrodden, hard-working girl, and then
the millennium will have arrived,” and another writer postulated that Moore’s
popularity with fans was due to the fact that “the Cinderella legend is dearest to our
hearts of all the stories in the world. Miss Moore’s career dramatizes that story. She
has come up from the ranks of the extras and she has come with the very smallest
equipment in physical attractiveness and in talent for make-believe.”
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Moore’s
Cinderella persona is reflected in her films, most notably in Ella Cinders (1926), in
which she plays an abused stepchild yearning for a movie career, but also in her
other films such as Her Wild Oat and Orchids and Ermine (1927). Mary Lou, the
lunch cart owner in Her Wild Oat and Pink, the telephone operator in Orchids and
Ermine long for lifestyles beyond their means, but are unable to achieve their dreams
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despite the long, hard hours they work. Mary Lou points out that she’s slaved day
and night for five years, working toward her goal of leaving her job in the lunch cart,
while Pink hopes to snare a rich man to take her away from her drab job. Mary Lou
and Pink are both shown to be hard workers, and the former is presented as an
especially good businesswoman, as she runs her lunch cart on her own, deftly
handling finances, customers, and competition from other lunch cart owners.
Despite Mary Lou’s shrewd business sense, or Pink’s natural aptitude for answering
busy phone lines and interacting with the public, neither is shown to be especially
ambitious in terms of career. For these women, work is something to be done until
one can find a husband. As one reviewer described the trajectory of Moore’s
characters, “Colleen, as usual, starts as a “poor working girl” and ends in a palace –
or the American conception of whatever that is.”
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According to these films, the
perfect outcome for a working-class Cinderella was a rich suitor and an escape from
the labor force. Although these films seem to deny the possibility of female
ambition in the workforce, for working women who held demanding and stressful
jobs, and who found it difficult or impossible to compete with male co-workers and
find success in the working world, these Cinderella stories could be attractive
escapist fantasy.
Shopgirls are especially sympathetic characters in silent comedies, as their
chaotic jobs and impoverished home lives are the subject of both comedy and pathos.
Gloria Swanson (Manhandled), Mabel Normand (What Happened to Rosa?), Clara
Bow (It, 1927) and Mary Pickford (My Best Girl) are among the comediennes who
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played women working in retail settings. In Manhandled Gloria Swanson plays the
socially ambitious salesgirl Tessie, introduced as “one of the mob” of retail workers.
Tessie’s social position is illustrated by her physical position at work, in the
basement of Thorndyke’s department store. As she emerges from the chaos of
Thorndyke’s basement after work she stops on the sidewalk to enjoy the sunlight and
air, and is promptly splattered by mud when a car drives through a puddle in front of
her. Descending once more underground, Tessie is jostled and abused as she rides
the subway to her home, a depressing one-room apartment that is a perfect
architectural manifestation of her dead-end life. Tessie desperately longs for escape
from her dreary life, and she pleads with her boyfriend, Jimmy, to take her dancing,
telling him, “I’m so sick of Thorndyke’s – and bargain hunters, and pawed-over
goods. I just got to have some fun!” Mabel Normand similarly seeks escape from
her life of drudgery in What Happened to Rosa?, as her Mayme masquerades as the
romantic and exotic Rosa Alvaro. While at work, Mayme, like Tessie, has to deal
with disapproving bosses and demanding customers, whose frenzied hunt for
bargains resembles a brawl. [Figure 4-7] Both Tessie and Mayme retreat from their
hectic and unrewarding jobs and dreary apartments through fantasy. While Mayme
impersonates Rosa to create some excitement and attract the attention of Dr. Drew,
Tessie has a more ambitious exit strategy. Tagging along to a party with a co-
worker, Tessie meets a sculptor who invites her to be his model for $60 a week – a
marked improvement over her $18 weekly salary at Thorndyke’s. Tessie takes the
job, but quits when the sculptor tries to force himself on her. She then meets
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Figure 4-7 – What Happened to Rosa? (1920): Shoppers hunt for bargains
the owner of a tea room, who offers her a full $75 a week to pose as a Russian
countess while serving tea in his restaurant. He, too, makes a pass at her, and Tessie
ultimately realizes that her happiness lies with Jimmy, who has conveniently struck it
rich as an inventor. When Tessie and Mayme engage in class- and nationality-
crossing impersonations – Tessie as a Russian countess, and Mayme as a Spanish
noblewoman – they are appropriating identities that are as distant from their
working-class lives as possible and using these identities as a way out of their lives.
This type of fantasy would certainly have resonated with motion picture fans who, as
Herbert Blumer showed in his landmark study Movies and Conduct, engaged in
similar fantasies inspired by the movies. One young movie fan described how she
“particularly liked pictures in which the setting was a millionaire’s estate or some
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such elaborate place. After seeing a picture of this type, I would imagine myself
living such a life of ease as the society girl I had seen. My day-dreams would be
concerned with lavish wardrobes, beautiful homes, servants, imported automobiles,
yachts, and countless handsome suitors.”
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Even movie fans who were not,
themselves, working girls, could understand the concept of fantasy and role play as
an alternative to reality.
While some shopgirl characters are portrayed as desperately longing to
escape their lives, others are shown to be cheerful, scrappy and resourceful, making
the best of their lowered economic and social situations, using their limited means to
care for others, and enjoying the excitement of the modern city. In It, Betty Lou
(Clara Bow) works at the lingerie counter at Waltham’s department store where, a
title tells us, “In a shopgirl’s day, the first thousand customers are the crabbiest.”
Despite the pressures of her job, Betty Lou is consistently energetic and optimistic.
She shares her apartment – located “in that fashionable downtown suburb –
Gashouse Gables” – with a sick shopgirl friend and the friend’s baby, and when her
friend expresses remorse for not being able to contribute financially, Betty Lou just
smiles and tells her that she “won’t go back on a pal.” My Best Girl’s Maggie is also
the chief caretaker for her household, a ramshackle Victorian situated on a busy
street corner – “the swellest house on Goat Hill” – that she shares with her ailing
parents and party-girl sister. After working a long day as a stock clerk and salesgirl
in Merrill’s five-and-dime store, Maggie goes home to cook dinner, wash the dishes,
and settle family disputes. Maggie doesn’t complain about her tough life, and is in
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fact a passionate defender of her family, telling Joe that they “live a sort of quiet
life,” and later, when her sister is dragged into night court, tearfully pleading with the
judge to let her go, telling him “we’re such a happy family.” Whether Maggie
genuinely believes this to be true is unclear, but what is clear is that she loves her
family and is, for the most part, happy to care for them. Betty Lou and Maggie, then,
both face their challenges without complaining, and make the best of their economic
and social situations. Neither resorts to the sort of escapist fantasy that Tessie and
Mayme indulge in. While both Betty Lou and Maggie ultimately live out the
Cinderella fantasy by marrying the boss’ rich son, their romantic interest is not
financial, as Maggie is initially unaware of Joe’s real identity, and Betty Lou’s
interest in Mr. Waltham seems to be primarily based on sexual desire.
Perhaps not surprisingly, Betty Lou and Maggie demonstrate a greater level
of comfort with modern life than Tessie. Tessie struggles against the modern city,
and the city seems to have declared war on her, as a passing car covers her with mud,
a subway door closes on her, and she’s almost crushed by the hoard of commuters
riding the subway. [Figure 4-8] The fantasy world that Tessie takes refuge in is
decidedly old-fashioned, as she first strikes classical poses for a sculptor and then
masquerades as a member of the deposed Russian aristocracy. Betty Lou and
Maggie, on the other hand, seem to thrive on the excitement and activity of the big
city. Betty Lou is especially attuned to modern life; with her energy and restlessness
she is the embodiment of modernity. When Mr. Waltham’s friend, Monty, asks
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Betty Lou if she’d like a ride home from work, she playfully agrees, but only if they
take her car – a double-decker bus packed with commuters. As she herds Monty
Figure 4-8 – Manhandled (1927): Tessie (Gloria Swanson) struggles against hoards
of commuters
up the stairs to the upper deck, his obvious discomfort is met with her laughter; the
upper-class Monty is ill at ease riding public transit, while Betty Lou is entirely at
home in the middle of a crowd. Like Betty Lou, Maggie is comfortable navigating
the city. Maggie saves bus fare by riding home in the back of a delivery truck, and
in an attempt to pull Joe’s attention from some flirtatious women outside the store
she “accidentally” drops her purse just as the truck is pulling away – an update of the
familiar feminine gesture of dropping a handkerchief that makes use of her urban
surroundings. Joe picks up the purse and darts through traffic to catch up to her; as
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soon as he does, she playfully knocks another package off the truck, prompting him
to chase her again, until he finally jumps on the back of the truck and joins her on her
ride home. [Figure 4-9]
Figure 4-9 – My Best Girl (1927)
Both Maggie and Betty Lou are energized by the modern city, and the city plays an
important role in their courtships. Betty Lou takes Mr. Waltham to the epicenter of
modernity, Coney Island, on their date, while Maggie and Joe spend their first date
wandering the city streets, fully at ease despite the rushing traffic, throngs of
pedestrians, and pouring rain. [Figure 4-10]
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Figure 4-10 – My Best Girl (1927): The city plays an important role in Maggie and
Joe’s courtship
Betty Lou and Maggie are less at ease when in the more formal haunts of the upper
classes. The normally confident Betty Lou becomes self-conscious about her
appearance while dining at the Ritz, altering her dress to fit in with the wealthy and
elegant women surrounding her, and Maggie refuses to let Joe take her to a posh
restaurant, and is nervous and jumpy when he takes her to dine at his mansion
(although she’s still unaware that it’s his home and thinks that they’re crashing the
boss’ house). The staid and formal environs of the well-to-do are too far removed
from the energy and excitement of the city for Betty Lou and Maggie; they are much
more comfortable enmeshed in the thrilling modern city. This alignment with
modernity serves these women well in the workplace, as they’re able to face the
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bumps and bruises of their hectic jobs with much more resiliency than Tessie, who
can only dream of escape.
Whether appearing off-screen as successful actors, writers, producers and
directors, or on-screen as shopgirls, servants or secretaries, the comedienne as
working girl was absolutely identifiable to female spectators. Colleen Moore, who
was the prototypical Cinderella on-screen, claimed that she was “just like ten
thousand other girls,” and Alice Howell, who often played servants, drew from her
own past experiences of financial need in creating characters that working girls
would recognize: “I often felt then like the down-trodden, put upon, much abused
slavies that I struggle to portray humorously to-day. Most of my scenes are broad
farce, of course, but when I get an opportunity I try to register faithfully the character
of such a girl.”
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Comediennes could serve as role models for spectators as real-life
examples of women who succeeded in business. They could also be objects of
identification for working-class women who fantasized about escape from their
difficult lives, or aspired to find a way to coexist with and even thrive in the modern
city.
“When Women Will Wear Mustaches”
In 1928, eight years after F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Bernice bobbed her hair, and
five years after Colleen Moore created a sensation in Flaming Youth (1923) with her
new page boy cut, Mary Pickford had to plead with her fans to allow her to cut her
hair. In an article titled “Please May I Bob My Hair?”, she made the case for cutting
304
off her famous curls, saying that “comfort and beauty are not necessarily
irreconcilable qualities.” The 36-year-old Pickford announced that she was “now
planning to play slightly older roles, and if I am going to represent the modern girl I
must look like her.”
81
[Figure 4-11] Bobbed hair was more than a fashion statement;
it represented a break from earlier styles and values and an embrace of a modern,
more active lifestyle. When Pickford cut off her curls she stepped into a public
debate that many other comediennes had already entered into, as their flapper
characters popularized a hair style that many found to be unattractive at best, and
immoral at worst.
Figure 4-11 – Mary Pickford: Bobbing her hair gave her the freedom to play more mature roles.
When Colleen Moore started in films she had the same curls as Mary
Pickford and played similar ingénue and girl-next-door roles, but by the early 1920s
305
she began to feel a disconnect from those wholesome, old-fashioned characters. She
first began to form an idea of a more fitting character type when she met her
brother’s college-age girlfriends, women that Moore felt “represented the wave of
the future.” Moore describes how she “shared their restlessness, understood their
determination to free themselves of the Victorian shackles of the pre-World War I
era and find out for themselves what life was all about.”
82
Understanding that she
was not an ingénue type, Moore cut off her curls and lobbied her studio for the
flapper lead in Flaming Youth. The film was a tremendous success, prompting
young women across the country to copy Moore’s Dutch bob and adding fuel to a
national debate that had already been smoldering. The tenor of this debate can be
seen in opposing letters that were printed in Photoplay, accompanying a picture of
Moore that showcased her short hair:
Bobbed hair – and particularly this new method of shingling it – is
another defi [sic] that the girls of today are hurling into the teeth of
their elders. They’ve been telling us for five years that it is their self-
expression that counts, and they’ve sneered at the delicate, feminine
instincts that distinguished their grandmothers. And to back up their
arguments about being intellectual equals of men, they shave their
necks. It’s barbaric.
Dean Marion Talbot
Women’s Department, University of Chicago
********
Long hair can carry germs and, undoubtedly, it often does. It
naturally collects more dust and dirt than the shorter hair, which can
be more easily covered and washed.
Dr. F. J. Monaghan
Health Commissioner of New York
83
306
Bobbed hair became a national obsession. A Los Angeles-area drug store ran a
contest offering $150 in gold for writers of the best arguments for and against the
bob (the “for” letters outnumbered the “against” by more than a two-to-one margin),
local theaters ran beauty contests for women with bobbed hair, and the press
speculated about the expenses of maintaining a bob (estimates ranged from $5 a
week for Colleen Moore to $18 a day for Mae Murray – reduced to $15 a week when
she wasn’t working on a film).
84
Bobbed hair became the required look for
comediennes who played in flapper films and light comedies, such as Clara Bow,
Constance Talmadge and Betty Compson, as their modern characters demanded a
modern look. [Figure 4-12]
Underlying this anxiety over bobbed hair was the concern that women were
losing their femininity, that short hair on women would somehow blur the constantly
changing boundaries between male and female. Writing on “The American Girl of
Today,” Colleen Moore acknowledged that “Some people will say the flappers today
are too masculine in their manners,” but went on to say, “I can’t see where
womanhood is turning to the masculine trend in mannerisms, except for bobbed
hair.”
85
Despite Moore’s protestations that women were not becoming more
masculine, many understood that bobbed hair, along with women’s increased
presence in the workforce and the passage of the 19
th
amendment, was yet another
component of women’s increasing move toward social and political equality with
men.
307
Figure 4-12 – Constance and Natalie Talmadge: “Constance
Talmadge caught at her favorite indoor sport: bobbing.”
Anxiety over the increasing “masculinization” of women played out in
comedies that imagined societies where women’s and men’s social roles were
reversed. Unlike the utopia imagined by Charlotte Perkins Gilman in her 1915 novel
Herland, where a race of women has evolved beyond the need for men, gender-
308
reversal comedies present these societies as places of chaos and anarchy, where the
natural order has been hopelessly disrupted. These discourses imagine two clearly
defined, essentialist positions for men and women, with little room for deviation. An
example of this occurs in the 1912 vaudeville skit entitled In 1999, which presented a
futuristic society in which women have become the dominant sex, taking over men’s
jobs and social roles, while men were forced to stay at home and do housework. In
describing the audience’s reaction to the skit (which was written by Cecil B.
DeMille’s brother, William), one vaudeville theater manager stated: “The idea of
social conventions, customs, etc. applying to the man instead of the woman is the
nucleus from which are evolved any number of laughs. The acts seemed to find
instant favor with both sexes, and the women were especially delighted.” Another
manager claimed that the playlet appealed to “particularly the feminine portion of the
house.”
86
In 1920 the topic of possible gender reversal in the future was addressed in
the Gale Henry film Her First Flame. The opening title sets the scene for the
audience: “Just suppose this were the year 1950 – and the occupation of the sexes
were reversed – the women earning the bacon while the men take care of the
offsprings.” This is followed by scenes of a “female ‘Speed Copess’” writing out a
speeding ticket for a male motorist (and then tearing up the ticket when the driver
starts to cry), and a “Lady Trampess,” who menaces an aproned man hanging
laundry in his yard. In the film – which involves an election for fire chief with
Minnie Fish (Phyllis Allen) and Lizzie Hap (Henry) as the candidates – each gender
performs as caricatured stereotypes of the other gender. The men in the film are
309
shown wearing aprons, pushing baby carriages and coyly flirting with women. At
one point Lizzie breaks up a crowd of men listening to Minnie’s speech by sending a
wind-up mouse into their midst. The men scream and faint, and when Lizzie “kills”
the mouse with a stick the men gratefully follow her to hear her speech. Later, after
Lizzie has won the election, she finds her firefighters (all young and attractive
women) gambling and leering at pictures of men. This trope of the women as sexual
aggressors continues throughout the film. Lizzie gives her boyfriend Willie a box of
chocolates and steals a kiss from him, and later Minnie attempts to seduce Willie by
plying him with sarsaparillas and then luring him to her apartment, where she locks
him in and kisses him.
The comically anarchic gender reversals found in Her First Flame and In
1999 are symptomatic of generalized anxiety felt by many as women were gaining
more social, financial and political power. Comedies dealt with this anxiety just as
comedies often do, by making fun of it and therefore diffusing the threat. By
showing the absurdity of societies in which gender roles are reversed, these comedies
were making an argument for maintaining traditional gender roles, at least to some
extent. At the same time, their arguments were undermined by the performances and
personas of their stars. While Lizzie Hap may be a dismal failure as a fire chief,
Gale Henry is a resounding success as a comic performer, and, as I discussed earlier,
as an athlete and a businesswoman. Certainly, audiences could laugh at Lizzie’s
comic attempts to woo her boyfriend or put out a fire, but these same audiences
would also be familiar with Henry’s success as a writer, director and producer, her
310
impressive abilities as an athlete, and her strong comic performance in the film. The
message in these films, then, would be mixed at best, as the diegetic argument
against powerful women is complicated by the extradiegetic endorsement of these
same women. Furthermore, the sheer absurdity of some of these predictions could
cause audiences to see through the gloom and doom predictions of some social
conservatives. A tongue-in-cheek newspaper article from 1924 illustrates this point.
Titled “Here Is Peep into Future When Women Will Wear Mustaches,” the article is
accompanied by doctored photos of female actresses with different types of
mustaches. According to the writer,
There will be as many women as men with beards and mustaches
if women persist in bobbing their hair the physician declares. The
beauty specialist adds that if women won’t let the hair grow on their
heads, it will grow on their faces and arms. That is what happened to
men, he says. And it will happen to women…
Cute mustaches for flip flappers! Dignified Van Dyke beards for
professional women and society leaders. Full-grown beards for
matronly women. Dashing mustachios for the adventuress and the
athletic girl. Why not?…
Step by step women have been advancing in the freedom enjoyed
by men. They cast the vote. They affect knickers. They cut their hair
and smoke cigarets [sic]…
But think of the thousands of men who will be affected by women
raising beards. The men will be the real victims.
With the barber shops adopting the ship slogan of “Women and
children first” in hair cuts now, men are hard put for a place to have
their locks shorn. The long-haired sheik is the logical result.
What will the condition be when women’s order includes a shave
or a beard marcel as well as a haircut? One may look for a return in
Biblical hair fashions for men.
311
A permanent wave in the Van Dyke as well as in the bob would
put a decided crimp in the purse of husband and dad.
87
This article takes the prevalent question of whether the trend of bobbed hair would
rob women of their femininity, and carries it to an extreme. But readers would
certainly understand that bobbing hair wouldn’t really cause women to grow facial
hair, and the overblown hyperbole in this article, as well as in films such as Her First
Flame, might cause audiences to question hyperbolic statements in the type of
socially conservative rhetoric that opposed women’s enfranchisement and equality
with men. In gender-reversal comedies, on film, stage, or in print, the consequences
of women’s increased mobility and power is an extreme restructuring and
rearticulation of gender roles, with women wearing mustaches and seducing men,
while men cry on cue and faint at the sight of a mouse. As comedies, these texts can
present and play with these issues, allowing audiences to laugh at the absurdity of
these situations while questioning the implication that the futures that these texts
posit could in fact become reality someday. As the article quoted above points out,
barbers “report that the number of women having their hair cut increases daily,
despite the fact that the women might increase their orders to ‘haircut and a shave’
within a few years.” In spite of the possibility of a complete reversal of gender roles,
women were still willing to take their chances with bobbing their hair, going to
work, voting, and fully participating in modern life.
312
Conclusion
The intense changes taking place in the 1910s and 1920s were no doubt
unsettling to a great many people. As cities expanded, immigration increased, and
women became increasingly visible in the public sphere, it was clear that social and
political roles would be redefined. Comediennes played an active role in redefining
women’s place in and relationship to the modern world. Their activity, athleticism,
energy and vitality, both on-screen and off-, were the perfect parallel to modernity.
When comediennes embraced daring and dangerous stunts in their films and engaged
in thrilling activities off-screen, they provided an example of how women could
successfully navigate the modern city, and turn its dangers and threats into fun and
excitement. Furthermore, comediennes and their characters used the anonymity of
the modern city to playfully reinvent themselves, a tactic copied by their fans.
Finally, as working women who were unafraid to question and challenge traditional
gender divisions, comediennes helped set an example for women who were still
trying to figure out how to negotiate the constantly changing modern landscape.
313
Chapter 4 Endnotes
1
Unidentified clipping, ca. 1917, Polly Moran clipping file, NYPL.
2
Willis Goldbeck, “Stuff of Gold,” Motion Picture Magazine, November 1921, 95.
3
Ben Singer, Melodrama and Modernity: Early Sensational Cinema and Its
Contexts, (New York: Columbia University Press, 2001), 294.
4
Susan A. Glenn, Female Spectacle: The Theatrical Roots of Modern Feminism,
(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2000), 41.
5
Pittsburgh Leader, 21 March 1910, Eva Tanguay clipping file, NYPL.
6
Singer, Melodrama and Modernity, Jennifer M. Bean, Bodies in Shock: Gender,
Genre and the Cinema of Modernity, (Ph.D. dissertation, University of Texas at
Austin, 1998), Leo Charney and Vanessa R. Schwartz, eds., Cinema and the
Invention of Modern Life, (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995).
7
Singer, Melodrama and Modernity, 70.
8
Quoted in Singer, Melodrama and Modernity, 74-89.
9
Bean, Bodies in Shock, 55.
10
Jennifer M. Bean, “’Trauma Thrills:’ Notes on Early Action Cinema,” in Yvonne
Trasker, ed., Action and Adventure Cinema, (New York: Routledge, 2004), 20.
11
Dramatic Mirror, January 6, 1915, Eva Tanguay clipping file, NYPL.
12
“Boots” review, Wid’s Daily, 2 March 1919; “The Hope Chest” review, Wid’s
Daily, 12 January 1919; Dorothy Gish clipping file, AMPAS.
13
“Mabel in a Hurry,” Motion Picture Magazine, November 1918, Mabel Normand
clipping file, AMPAS.
14
“The Song and Dance Girl,” unsourced, Dorothy Devore clipping file, NYPL.
15
Picture-Play, April 1920, Constance Talmadge clipping file, NYPL.
16
“A Captivating Colleen,” Pictures and Picturegoer, October 1924, 41; Helen
Klumph, “Flapping Her Way to Fame,” Colleen Moore scrapbooks #2, AMPAS.
17
Colleen Moore scrapbook #2, AMPAS.
18
Grace Kingsley, “The Wild Woman of Babylon,” Photoplay, May 1917,
Constance Talmadge clipping file, AMPAS.
314
19
Bean, Bodies in Shock, 98.
20
“Alice Howell of L-Ko Makes a Tackle,” 15 August 1916, Alice Howell clipping
file, NYPL; Dorothy Faith Webster, “The Bear Facts About Gale Henry,” Photoplay,
January 1920, Gale Henry clipping file, NYPL.
21
Untitled, Photoplay, January 1919, Polly Moran clipping file, NYPL.
22
Photo caption, ca 1915, Mabel Normand clipping file.
23
Jennifer M. Bean, “Technologies of Early Stardom and the Extraordinary Body,”
in Jennifer M. Bean and Diane Negra, eds., A Feminist Reader in Early Cinema,
(Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002), 424.
24
For a discussion of nervous disorders associated with modernity, see Singer,
Melodrama and Modernity, 59-99, and Bean, Bodies in Shock, 38-71.
25
Unidentified photo caption, Dorothy Devore clipping file, NYPL.
26
“Fay Tincher Game,” unsourced, June 1915, Fay Tincher clipping file, NYPL.
27
James R. Quirk, “The Girl on the Cover,” Photoplay, August 1915, 40.
28
“Feature Films of the Week,” New York Dramatic Mirror, 6 October 1915, 28.
29
Leo Charney, “In a Moment: Film and the Philosophy of Modernity,” in Charney
and Schwartz, Cinema and the Invention of Modern Life, 281.
30
Charney, “In a Moment,” 281.
31
“Roping Her Romeo” review, Moving Picture World, 13 October 1917, Polly
Moran clipping file, NYPL
32
“Norma’s Sister Constance,” Chicago News, 7 September 1916, Constance
Talmadge clipping file, NYPL.
33
Walter Vogdes, “Twenty Minutes with Constance,” Select Pictures Magazine, Vol
IV, #11, ca. 1918, 5, Constance Talmadge clipping file, AMPAS.
34
Unidentified clipping, ca. 1922, Constance Talmadge clipping file, NYPL.
35
“Colleen Has Definitions For Flapper,” Los Angeles Examiner, July 1924, Colleen
Moore scrapbook #2, AMPAS.
315
36
“The Hope Chest” review, Wid’s Daily, 12 January 1919, Dorothy Gish clipping
file, AMPAS.
37
Louise Fazenda, “How to Get In!,” Motion Picture Magazine, December 1916,
Louise Fazenda clipping file, AMPAS.
38
“Miss Greenwood’s Comedy,” Boston Transcript, ca. 1914, Charlotte Greenwood
clipping file, NYPL
39
“Movies’ Speed Queens Hurl Auto Defis - Marie Dressler and Mabel Normand to
Clash in Big Race Duel,” Los Angeles Evening Herald, 8 May 1914.
40
Grace Kingsley, “The Wild Woman of Babylon,” Photoplay, May 1917.
41
Adela Rogers St. Johns, “The Most Versatile Girl in Hollywood,” Photoplay, June
1925.
42
“Regarding Bebe Daniels in Jail,” The Morning Telegraph (New York), 1 May
1921, Bebe Daniels clipping file, AMPAS.
43
H. C. Carr, “Where Does Mack Sennett Get ‘Em?” Motion Picture Classic,
October 1918, AMPAS.
44
“What They Want to Do When They Are Fifty,” Motion Picture Magazine,
October 1925, 34.
45
Unidentified clipping, ca. 1922, Constance Talmadge clipping file, NYPL.
46
“Convalescing With Constance,” unsourced, Constance Talmadge clipping file,
NYPL.
47
Unidentified clipping, Charlotte Greenwood clipping file, NYPL.
48
“Movies Spoil Her Outdoor Sport,” ca. 1923, Colleen Moore scrapbook #1,
AMPAS.
49
“Alice Howell,” Moving Picture World, 29 September 1917, Alice Howell
clipping file, NYPL.
50
Colleen Moore, “The American Girl of Today,” ca. Jan. 1925, Colleen Moore
scrapbook #2, AMPAS.
51
“Please May I Bob My Hair?” Liberty Magazine, 30 June 1928, Mary Pickford
clipping file, AMPAS.
316
52
On the rise of ready-to-wear fashion in the United States, see Joshua Zeitz,
Flapper: A Madcap Story of Sex, Style, Celebrity, and the Women Who Made
America Modern, (New York: Three Rivers Press, 2006), 161-172.
53
Susan A. Glenn, “’Give an Imitation of Me:’ Vaudeville Mimics and the Play of
the Self,” American Quarterly, Vol. 50, No. 1 (March 1998), 47.
54
New York Telegraph, 12 December 1925, Elsie Janis clipping file, NYPL.
55
“Stars in the Film Firmament,” January 1928, Marion Davies clipping file,
AMPAS.
56
“Something Just as Good,” New York Pictureplay Magazine, April 1922, and
“Colleen Moore as Impersonator,” unsourced, in Colleen Moore scrapbook #1,
AMPAS.
57
Mary Ann Doane, “Film and the Masquerade: Theorizing the Female Spectator,”
in Screen 23 (1982), 78-87.
58
Glenn, “Give an Imitation of Me,” 67.
59
Herbert Blumer, Movies and Conduct, (New York: The Macmillan Company,
1933), 34
60
Blumer, 43.
61
Blumer, 52.
62
Israel Zangwill, “Actress versus Suffraget,” The Independent, 67, December 2,
1909, 1248-1250, quoted in Glenn, Female Spectacle, 135.
63
Glenn, Female Spectacle, 13-14; Anthony Slide, The Encyclopedia of Vaudeville,
(Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1994), 489; Robert W. Snyder, The Voice of the
City: Vaudeville and Popular Culture in New York, (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 1989),
47; Joe Laurie, Jr., Vaudeville: From the Honky-Tonks to the Palace, (New York:
Henry Holt and Company, 1953), 254, 247.
64
“What They Get,” Variety, 10 January 1913, quoted in William Thomas Sherman,
Mabel Normand: A Source Book to Her Life and Films, (New York: The New York
Times Company, 2004), 66.
65
Variety, 17 April 1914, quoted in Sherman, 66, 71, 221, “Ban Is Extended On
Normand Films,” New York Times, 5 January 1924, 3.
317
66
Mary Pickford studio biography, ca. 1921, Mary Pickford clipping file, AMPAS.
67
Herbert Howe, “Is Mary Pickford Finished?” The Pre-View, 25 March 1925, 7.
68
Fritzi Remont, “Featuring Fay,” Motion Picture Magazine, August 1918, 29.
69
“The Big Four of Educational,” Moving Picture World, 23 April 1927, 709.
70
Biography of Gale Henry, Paramount, 7/19/29, Gale Henry clipping file, AMPAS.
71
Goldbeck, “Stuff of Gold;” Richard Willis, “Dot Farley – Comedienne,
Tragedienne and Photoplaywright,” Photoplay, November 1914, 140.
72
James R. Quirk, “The Girl on the Cover,” Photoplay, August 1915, 41.
73
Allen Corliss, “Fazenda – Comic Venus,” Photoplay, April 1918, 67.
74
“Fay Tincher, the Inimitable Comedienne, Thinks it Easy to Imitate Her,” Fay
Tincher clipping file, NYPL.
75
Los Angeles Examiner, 18 September 1921, Colleen Moore scrapbook #1,
AMPAS.
76
“Mary Doubles in Shop Role,” Los Angeles Examiner, 18 May 1927, Mary
Pickford clipping file, AMPAS.
77
“Ella Cinders,” Liberty Magazine, 24 July 1926, Colleen Moore scrapbook #13;
“Her Wild Oat,” St. Paul Pioneer Press, 25 December 1927, Colleen Moore
scrapbook #18, AMPAS.
78
“Colleen At Library in ‘Her Wild Oats’ [sic],” Huntington (PA) News, 29
February, 1928, Colleen Moore scrapbook # 18, AMPAS.
79
Blumer, 64.
80
J. Francis Perrett, “The Colleen of the Movies,” Extension Magazine, November
1926, Collen Moore scrapbook #15, AMPAS; “Alice Howell,” New York Tribune, 2
September 1917, Alice Howell clipping file, NYPL.
81
“Please May I Bob My Hair?” Liberty Magazine, 30 June 1928; Unsourced, 25
June 1928, Mary Pickford clipping file, AMPAS.
82
Colleen Moore, Silent Star, (Garden City, NY: Doubleday & Company, Inc.,
1968), 129.
318
83
Photoplay, ca. 1923, Colleen Moore scrapbook #2, AMPAS.
84
Advertisements for The Owl Drug Co., June 1924; “Flappers in Contest at
Olympia,” New Bedford (MA) Times, 9 September 1924; “Billion For The Bobs:
Film Actresses Tell of Enormous ‘Overhead’ in the Upkeep of Short Hair,” Tacoma
(Wash) News Tribune, 28 July 1924; Colleen Moore scrapbook #2, AMPAS.
85
Colleen Moore, “The American Girl of Today,” ca. January 1925, Colleen Moore
scrapbook #2, AMPAS.
86
Quoted in M. Alison Kibler, Rank Ladies: Gender and Cultural Hierarchy in
American Vaudeville, (Chapel Hill, N.C.: The University of North Carolina Press,
1999), 49-50.
87
Margrete Daney, “Here Is Peep into Future When Women Will Wear Mustaches,”
Toledo News-Bee, 11 October 1924, Colleen Moore scrapbook #2, AMPAS.
319
Conclusion
Contrary to popular mythology, the introduction of sound technology didn’t
bring about a drastic overnight change to the motion picture industry. Synchronous
sound was seen by many inside as well as outside of the industry as a fascinating, if
temporary, fad, and silent films continued to be made for three or four years after the
1927 release of The Jazz Singer, typically regarded as the “first” sound film.
*
At the
same time that the film industry was transitioning to talking pictures, the United
States was undergoing dramatic transformations, presaged by the stock market
collapse in 1929. Silent performers, then, not only had to contend with changing
technology, they also had to adjust to changing cultural expectations and mores.
While some silent performers were able to reinvent themselves and flourish in the
new climate or successfully transfer their silent-film personae to talking pictures, a
great many silent actors retired from motion pictures, unable or unwilling to adapt to
the new demands of the industry.
The coming of sound created an obstacle for performers from all genres. Up-
and-coming young stars such as Carole Lombard, Gary Cooper, William Powell, and
Norma Shearer benefited from the fact that their screen identities were not
completely set, and created new personalities to carry them into the 1930s. Some
performers who were already stars in silent films – including Joan Crawford and
*
Naming anything the “first,” of course, can be slippery. The Jazz Singer was one of many films that
included synchronous sound sequences in an otherwise silent film. To varying degrees, the technical
and box office successes of these films helped convince Hollywood to shift to fully synchronous
sound production by the late 1920s (see Crafton, 516-31).
320
W.C. Fields – managed to reinvent themselves to suit the new technology and social
climate, and other stars – including Greta Garbo and Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy –
had screen identities that transferred readily to sound film with minimal retooling.
Comedians, both male and female, had a fair amount of difficulty
transitioning to talkies, perhaps more so than actors in other genres. Whereas
dramatic actors could move from silent to sound films with only minimal
adjustments to their performance style, comedians specializing in physical comedy
would have to make wholesale changes to their routines, gags, and essential personae
to succeed in talking pictures. Adding to the problem for comedians was the fact
that the bulky cameras and microphones used in early sound technology tended to
limit motion and inhibit spontaneity, as all on-screen activity needed to be
meticulously blocked to accommodate the movement of boom microphones and
cumbersome cameras. While most comedy production had moved away from the
technique of early Keystone shorts in which a relatively static camera was set up and
the actors were free to invent their own gags, there was still a fair amount of freedom
and spontaneous movement in later silent comedy that was inhibited in early sound
films. The coming of sound also meant that stage comedians whose routines were
based in verbal gags and language play, such as Mae West, the Marx Brothers, and
George Burns and Gracie Allen, found success in Hollywood and provided
competition for established film comics.
321
Silent comediennes approached talkies in a number of ways.
†
Some, like
Constance Talmadge, retired from acting without ever making a sound film.
Although Anita Loos claims that Talmadge “abandoned her career for marriage,” it
seems unlikely given her previous insistence, repeated after her divorces in 1922 and
1927, that women should not let marriage interfere with their careers: after her first
divorce she explained that her husband “wanted me to give up my movie career. But
I cherish that career as I do life itself. He wanted me to give it up and merge my
individuality with his. Of course, I refused. So in course of time there must be a
divorce.”
1
After Constance’s sister, Norma, had her speaking voice criticized by the
press after appearing in her first sound film, Constance cabled her to “Quit pressing
your luck, baby. The critics can’t knock those trust funds Mom set up for us,”
2
indicating that the Talmadges’ personal wealth lessened their financial incentive to
stay in motion pictures, while the criticism of Norma’s voice leads one to wonder
whether the sisters’ Brooklyn accents were insurmountable in talking pictures.
Constance Talmadge was not the only comedienne to leave pictures at the dawn of
the sound era: Dorothy Devore and Fay Tincher both made their last films in 1930,
and Dorothy Gish abandoned Hollywood for the stage after making her first sound
film, although she would eventually return to the screen and work in movies, theater
and television until the 1960s.
Flapper actresses were not only challenged by the new technology, they were
also handicapped by the fact that they represented an earlier era, one that
†
Mabel Normand died in 1930, without ever having the opportunity to make a sound film. Alice
Howell retired from the screen in 1926, before sound was a factor.
322
increasingly seemed out of place. The two most successful flappers of the 1920s –
Clara Bow and Colleen Moore – tried their hands at sound film, but each eventually
left acting after making a handful of unsatisfying films. Clara Bow was at the height
of her popularity when she made her first talkie, The Wild Party, in 1929, but in the
rush to release the film she wasn’t given time to rework her performance style to
accommodate the new demands of the medium; as biographer David Stenn claims,
“In two weeks’ time, Clara was expected to transform herself from a visually to a
verbally communicative actress. To an innate talent without theatrical training or
studio support, it was all overwhelming.”
3
Bow’s “mike fright,” along with a string
of scandals (some of which were capitalized on in her films)
‡
, and her increasingly
fragile mental state, led to her retirement from pictures in 1933, at the age of 28.
Colleen Moore also had difficulty adjusting her acting style for talking pictures,
resulting in a first effort that she described as “the longest, slowest, dullest picture
ever made.”
4
Her later films include dramatic turns as Spencer Tracy’s long-
suffering wife in The Power and the Glory (1933) and Hester Prynne in a 1934
remake of The Scarlet Letter, her last film. Neither Bow nor Moore was able to
translate her flapper stardom into success in Depression-era cinema, and, unable to
transform their earlier unruly personae, they retired from the screen.
Mary Pickford, easily one of the biggest stars of the silent era, also had
trouble adjusting to the new medium. Significantly, Pickford’s first sound film was
also the first film in which she appeared wearing her newly bobbed hair, signaling a
‡
Her Wedding Night (1930) was a nod to Bow’s numerous sex scandals, and No Limit (1931)
contained references to her legal entanglement with a Cal-Neva casino owner.
323
complete departure from the innocent little girl characters that had made her famous.
The film, Coquette (1929), presents her in a very different role from the feisty waifs
and noble working girls she played in her silent films. Instead, Coquette features
Pickford as a flirtatious Southern belle who becomes engaged in a sordid affair that
ends with her father murdering her lover and then committing suicide. Although
Pickford received some good reviews (and the Academy Award) for her
performance, the cumulative effect of her new, startling image, her bobbed hair, and
her uneven Southern accent was too much for some of her fans. Like the flappers,
Pickford’s familiar screen persona was hopelessly out of date by the 1930s, and, like
Bow and Moore, she simply wasn’t able to remake herself in a way that resonated
with fans. Pickford made a total of four talking pictures before retiring in 1933.
Marion Davies had a longer sound career than Pickford, starring in 15 sound
features before her retirement in 1937, although it’s impossible to know how long
her career would have lasted without the backing of Hearst-owned Cosmopolitan
Pictures. Many of Davies’ sound films feature her in the same type of light comedy
roles that she played in the silent era, including turns as a chambermaid posing as the
most beautiful woman in Hollywood in Page Miss Glory (1935), a waitress-turned-
dancer-turned-waitress in Cain and Mabel (1936), and a scatterbrained fiancée in
Not So Dumb (1930), a remake of Constance Talmadge’s 1923 film Dulcy. As in her
silent films, Davies alternated light comedies with melodramas and historical
dramas, and in at least two films – The Floradora Girl (1930) and Blondie of the
Follies (1932) – her early years as a chorus girl in the Ziegfeld Follies are
324
referenced. Davies’s retirement at the age of 40 was voluntary; as she recalled, she
“just didn’t want to work in pictures anymore. I’d been working awfully hard for a
long time. At that time Mr. Hearst was about seventy-eight or so, and I felt he
needed companionship.”
5
Interestingly, the comediennes who had the longest careers after the
introduction of sound were often slapstick performers. Louise Fazenda made close
to 60 sound films, playing mostly supporting and character roles in genres ranging
from musicals to melodramas to comedies, before her retirement in 1939. In her
sound films, as in her silent films, she was not strictly limited to one type of role;
instead, she played a range of parts from businesswomen and society matrons to
unglamorous roles as servants, shopgirls and waitresses, and she would revisit her
farm girl role in several sound films, including two from 1938: Down on the Farm
and Swing Your Lady, in which she played a wrestling blacksmith from the Ozarks.
She received top billing in most of the shorts and B-movies that she made during this
period; however, in her A-movies from this time she appeared almost exclusively in
character or supporting roles, often as comic relief.
Polly Moran also made numerous sound shorts and features, including a
series of films with Marie Dressler. Like Fazenda, Moran primarily appeared in
supporting roles in her feature films, and, like Fazenda, she played a wide variety of
mostly working-class characters (frequently named Polly), in both comedy and
drama films, including a maid in The Unholy Night (1929), a wardrobe mistress in
Chasing Rainbows (1930), a schoolteacher in Two Wise Maids (1937), and the Dodo
325
bird in Paramount’s star-studded 1933 production of Alice in Wonderland, which
also featured Fazenda as the White Queen. Moran’s last film was in 1950, two years
before her death.
Marie Dressler, who was a star on Broadway before finding some success in
motion pictures in the 1910s, had perhaps the greatest career resurgence of any silent
comedienne after the introduction of sound. Dressler spent much of the 1920s
struggling to find work on stage or screen, but her career was revived when she was
offered a pivotal role in the 1930 adaptation of Eugene O’Neill’s play, Anna
Christie. Although the film garnered tremendous attention as Greta Garbo’s first
talkie, Dressler’s performance was widely heralded and led to a career revival that
made her a top box-office draw until her death in 1933. Although Dressler’s role in
Anna Christie was largely dramatic, she continued to play comedy roles in her films
with Polly Moran, as well as in some of her features, including Let Us Be Gay (1930)
and Dinner at Eight (1933).
The fact that slapstick comediennes were able to find a measure of success in
talking pictures speaks to the flexibility and fluidity of their screen personalities.
Flapper and light comediennes had a much narrower range of roles that they could
play, due in large part to the fact that those roles were often tied to their youth and
beauty. Because most flapper and light comediennes were so strongly associated
with a small range of eternally young and beautiful characters – the wild co-ed, the
irrepressible waif, the vivacious dancer, the feisty shopgirl – it was difficult to create
new, more suitable roles that took into account their age, the changed social
326
conditions of the 1930s, and the demands of sound film. Furthermore, in the silent
era comediennes such as Bow, Moore and Talmadge appeared almost exclusively in
starring roles in films that were written specifically for their talents, and so taking on
supporting or character roles in sound films that showcased other actresses would
have been an unacceptable step backward in their careers. Slapstick comediennes,
however, had already been playing a broad range of characters and types throughout
their careers – for example, Fazenda, who was only about a year older than
Constance Talmadge, was playing mothers of adult children when she was barely 20
years old – and so were more readily able to accept the servant and spinster aunt-type
supporting roles that were available to them in talking pictures.
Despite their limited success in talking pictures, the impact of silent-era
comediennes could be felt long after the advent of sound. The 1930s brought a new
group of comediennes to Hollywood and new types of film comedy, from daring pre-
code comedies starring Mae West and Jean Harlow, to anarchic screwball comedies
starring Katharine Hepburn, Myrna Loy and Jean Arthur. These films were often
quite different from the slapstick and light comedies of the silent era, and yet the
comediennes in these later films in many ways drew from and continued the cultural
work begun by the comic actresses of the 1910s and 20s. Clara Bow’s performance
of playfully aggressive sexuality can be seen as a precursor to Harlow’s more
blatantly seductive characters, and Marion Davies’ quirky characters bear more than
a passing resemblance to the screwball heroines of the late 1930s.
327
Like comediennes in the silent era, comediennes in the 1930s and beyond
presented a version of femininity that questioned and challenged the concept of ideal
femininity. Certainly, the early 20
th
century image of the ideal woman as refined,
beautiful, chaste, and domestic has changed somewhat over the last 100 years, and
comediennes have adapted their performances to suit their own cultural moment.
Depression-era comediennes reacted to the chaos and disorder in the world around
them by incorporating these tropes into their performances, embracing unruliness
and anarchy and eschewing refinement and staid domesticity. Early television
comediennes such as Lucille Ball and Gracie Allen used their comedy to reflect
societal ambivalence over traditional masculine and feminine roles, as their
characters feigned submissiveness to their husbands while simultaneously asserting
their own independence and power – a dynamic that was reinforced by the fact that
Desi Arnaz and George Burns played straight man to their wives, who were the stars
and the comedic centers of their shows. Stand-up comediennes and sit-com and
variety show stars of the ‘60s and ‘70s, including Phyllis Diller, Joan Rivers, Mary
Tyler Moore, Bea Arthur and Carol Burnett played with societal expectations for
women and acknowledged the struggles and goals of second-wave feminism in their
performances.
Present-day comediennes continue to use humor to break boundaries. While
the specific elements of “ideal” femininity may have changed since the early 20
th
century, the media still promote standards of femininity that are, for many women,
unattainable or undesirable, and female comics still challenge those standards.
328
Roseanne Barr’s crass and unruly “domestic goddess” character forcefully
contradicted the idea of women as naturally refined and domestic, while Whoopi
Goldberg’s early character comedy – particularly her self-titled, one-woman stage
show from the early 1980s – echoed the tropes of transformation, mimicry and
mutability found in silent comedies, and highlighted the instability of both racial and
gender roles.
§
Although her methods are certainly different from silent comediennes
Sarah Silverman’s combination of a sweetly innocent persona with crude language
and provocative subject matter demonstrates a way that contemporary comics
challenge cultural expectations about appropriate behavior for women. Other
women today similarly continue the trend, found in the silent era, of using comedy to
draw attention to, and make fun of, societal restrictions and expectations for women.
Amy Sedaris cheerfully dons fat suits and unflattering hair and makeup in her film
and television work, and subversively slips a prosthetic arm into what is otherwise a
typical “cheesecake” photo. Margaret Cho bases much of her comedy on her
appearance, including her attempts to lose weight in order to more closely fit in to
Hollywood’s beauty standards; in a stage performance, however, she embraces her
figure by appearing nude. Like Sedaris, Cho doesn’t simply display her body;
instead, she creates dissonance by showcasing, rather than hiding, her belly fat, and
by attaching a phallus to her g-string. Tina Fey contradicts the stereotype that
women – particularly attractive women – can’t be funny, through her very successful
work as a comedy writer and performer. [Figure 5-1] Like the silent comediennes
§
Goldberg played both male and female characters in her act, as well as characters of various races.
329
who came before them, present-day female comics continue to break boundaries by
questioning, challenging, and mocking social and cultural expectations of gender
roles.
Figure 5-1 – Amy Sedaris, Margaret Cho, Tina Fey
Silent comediennes were, of course, products of their own historical moment,
and their performances and personae reflected contemporaneous social, cultural and
political discourses. As women in the early 20
th
century fought for the right to vote
and work outside the home, for reproductive and sexual rights, and for equitable
legal and economic treatment with men, the popular understanding of “femininity”
was increasingly a source of anxiety and debate. This anxiety can be traced in the
films of silent comediennes, and the popular discourses surrounding these women.
In this dissertation I have argued that silent comediennes played an integral
role in helping to reconceptualize notions of femininity and womanhood in the early
20
th
century. Of course, women’s lived experience of femininity was always
multiple and variable – there was never just one way to be a woman – and yet a great
330
many traits were commonly held to be essential elements of the ideal woman. By
being bold and unruly instead of restrained and passive, homely instead of beautiful,
aggressively sexual instead of demure and chaste, and relentlessly visible and
modern instead of home-bound and conservative, comediennes were demonstrating
that there was more than one way to be feminine. While this certainly wasn’t news
to women, in forcefully and convincingly repeating this argument every time they
appeared in films, magazines or in public appearances, comediennes were chipping
away at narrow and restrictive conceptions of femininity that would keep women
socially and politically subordinate to men.
Certainly, comediennes were only one of many groups of women who were
helping to break boundaries at this time. Suffragists and other political activists,
social workers and reformers, female daredevils and barnstormers, and athletes and
stuntwomen all contributed in major ways to changing views of femininity. Perhaps,
compared to Alice Paul, Emma Goldman, Jane Addams, Bessie “Queen Bess”
Coleman, and Gertrude Ederle, the impact of a slapstick clown such as Polly Moran
or a light comedienne such as Constance Talmadge may seem insignificant. And
yet, like other barrier-breaking women, silent comediennes were a vital factor in
questioning, challenging, and redefining what it meant to be a woman in early 20
th
century America.
331
Conclusion Endnotes
1
Anita Loos, The Talmadge Girls, (New York: The Viking Press, 1978), 2; “Lure of
Screen Wrecks Romance of Constance and Greek Husband,” Toledo Blade, 19
November 1921, Constance Talmadge clipping file, NYPL; Helen Louise Walker,
“For To-morrow We Die,” unsourced, ca. 1927, Constance Talmadge clipping file,
NYPL.
2
Loos, 2.
3
David Stenn, Clara Bow: Runnin’ Wild, (New York: Cooper Square Press, 2000),
160.
4
Colleen Moore, Silent Star, (Garden City, NY: Doubleday & Company, Inc.,
1968), 198.
5
Marion Davies, The Times We Had: Life With William Randolph Hearst, (New
York: Ballantine Books, 1975), 261.
332
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UCLA: University of California, Los Angeles
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343
Appendix A: Selected Filmographies
Following are brief biographies and selected filmographies for key comediennes
discussed in this dissertation. This list is by no means comprehensive – I have
included only surviving films (unless noted with an asterisk), and primarily
(although not exclusively) comedies made during the silent era. The information
given here is intended to provide the reader with an overview of each comedienne,
and a starting point for further viewing.
Films discussed in this dissertation are marked in bold.
Archives:
LOC – Library of Congress
UCLA – University of California, Los Angeles
AMPAS – Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences
GEH – George Eastman House
MOMA – Museum of Modern Art, New York
BFI – British Film Institute, London
ITC – Cineteca Italiana, Milan
DEN – Danish Film Institute, Copenhagen
FRA – Lobster Films, Paris
Clara Bow (b. 1905, Brooklyn, NY; d. 1965, West Los Angeles, CA)
Bow was the only magazine beauty contest winner to achieve significant success in
Hollywood. Bow came to be associated with flapper characters and other vivacious,
free spirited types, and was known as the “It Girl” after appearing in the film version
of Elinor Glyn’s short story, “It.”
Parisian Love (B. P. Schulberg Productions, 1925) Dir. Louis Gasnier. Cast: Clara
Bow, Donald Keith. Archive: UCLA, LOC
The Plastic Age (B. P. Schulberg Productions, 1925) Dir. Wesley Ruggles. Cast:
Clara Bow, Donald Keith, Mary Alden. Archive: LOC, UCLA, AMPAS
The Primrose Path (Arrow Pictures, 1925) Dir. Harry O. Hoyt. Cast: Clara Bow,
Wallace MacDonald, Arline Pretty. Archive: GEH, UCLA
Dancing Mothers (Famous Players-Lasky, 1926) Dir. Herbert Brenon. Cast: Clara
Bow, Alice Joyce, Conway Tearle. Archive: LOC, GEH, UCLA, AMPAS
Kid Boots (Famous Players-Lasky, 1926) Dir. Frank Tuttle. Cast: Clara Bow, Eddie
Cantor, Billie Dove, Natalie Kingston. Archive: GEH, LOC, MOMA
Mantrap (Famous Players-Lasky, 1926) Dir. Victor Fleming. Cast: Clara Bow,
Ernest Torrence, Percy Marmont. Archive: LOC, GEH, UCLA
344
My Lady of Whims (Dallas M. Fitzgerald Productions, 1926) Dir. Dallas M.
Fitzgerald. Cast: Clara Bow, Donald Keith. Archive: LOC, UCLA, AMPAS
Hula (Paramount Famous Lasky Corp., 1927) Dir. Victor Fleming. Cast: Clara
Bow, Clive Brook. Archive: LOC, UCLA, GEH
It (Famous Players-Lasky, 1927) Dir. Clarence Badger. Cast: Clara Bow, Antonio
Moreno. Archive: LOC, UCLA, AMPAS
***
Mae Busch (b. Annie May Busch, 1891 (?), Melbourne, Victoria, Australia; d.
1946, San Fernando Valley, CA)
Known as “the versatile vamp,” Busch played in vaudeville before making a string
of comedy shorts with Keystone. In the late 1910s and ‘20s she appeared in
numerous features, both comedies and dramas, as well as in a number of Laurel &
Hardy shorts for Hal Roach. Busch worked steadily in sound films throughout the
‘30s and ‘40s.
A One Night Stand (Keystone Film Co., 1915) Dir. Horace McCoy. Cast: Mae
Busch, Charles Murray, Chester Conklin. Archive: LOC, AMPAS
Wife and Auto Trouble (Keystone Film Co., 1916) Dir. Dell Henderson. Cast: Mae
Busch, William Collier, Blanche Payson, Alice Davenport. Archive: GEH,
LOC, MOMA, AMPAS
Souls for Sale (Goldwyn Pictures, 1923) Dir. Rupert Hughes. Cast: Mae Busch,
Eleanor Boardman, Barbara La Marr, Richard Dix. Archive: MOMA
Fools of Fashion (Tiffany Productions, 1926) Dir. James C. McKay. Cast: Mae
Busch, Marceline Day. Archive: BFI
Love ‘Em and Weep (Hal Roach Studios, Inc., 1927) Dir. Fred L. Guiol. Cast: Mae
Busch, Stan Laurel, Oliver Hardy. Archive: LOC, MOMA, UCLA, AMPAS
***
Betty Compson (b. Eleanor Luicime Compson, 1897, Beaver City, UT; d. 1974,
Glendale, CA)
After beginning her career in vaudeville – billed as “The Vagabond Violinist –
Compson signed with Al Christie and made a series of two-reel comedies with him
in the 1910s. She continued making comedies, along with dramas, melodramas and
westerns, until the late 1940s.
Inoculating Hubby (Cub Comedies, 1916) Cast: Betty Compson, Neal Burns.
Archive: LOC
345
Almost a Bigamist (Christie Film Co., 1917) Dir. Al Christie. Cast: Betty Compson,
James Harrison, Eddie Gribbon. Archive: LOC
Betty’s Big Idea (Christie Film Co., 1917) Cast: Betty Compson, Jay Belasco.
Archive: LOC
Her Crooked Career (Christie Film Co., 1917) Dir. Al Christie. Cast: Betty
Compson, Eddie Barry, Neal Burns. Archive: LOC
The Enemy Sex (Famous Players-Lasky, 1924) Dir. James Cruze. Cast: Betty
Compson, Percy Marmont. Archive: LOC
Paths to Paradise (Famous Players-Lasky, 1925) Dir. Clarence Badger. Cast: Betty
Compson, Raymond Griffith. Archive: LOC, UCLA, GEH
***
Bebe Daniels (b. 1901, Dallas, TX; d. 1971, London, England)
Known as “the good little bad girl of the screen,” Daniels appeared as Harold
Lloyd’s leading lady in a series of “Lonesome Luke” shorts, then went on to play in
light comedies and comedy-dramas throughout the late-‘10s and 1920s. She
appeared in several musicals in the 1930s, and eventually starred in a radio show,
“Life With the Lyons,” with husband Ben Lyon.
All Aboard (Rolin Film Co., 1917) Dir. Alfred Goulding. Cast: Bebe Daniels,
Harold Lloyd, 'Snub' Pollard. Archive: MOMA, UCLA, GEH
The Dancin’ Fool (Famous Players-Lasky, 1920) Dir. Sam Wood. Cast: Bebe
Daniels, Wallace Reid, Raymond Hatton. Archive: MOMA
Why Change Your Wife? (Famous Players-Lasky, 1920) Dir. Cecil B. DeMille.
Cast: Bebe Daniels, Thomas Meighan, Gloria Swanson. Archive: GEH,
MOMA, AMPAS
The Affairs of Anatol (Famous Players-Lasky, 1921) Dir. Cecil B. De Mille. Cast:
Bebe Daniels, Wallace Reid, Gloria Swanson. Archive: GEH, LOC, UCLA
*The Speed Girl (Realart Pictures, 1921) Dir. Maurice Campbell. Cast: Bebe
Daniels, Theodore von Eltz, Frank Elliott.
Monsieur Beaucaire (Famous Players-Lasky, 1924) Dir. Sidney Olcott. Cast: Bebe
Daniels, Rudolph Valentino, Lois Wilson. Archive: LOC, MOMA
Miss Bluebeard (Famous Players-Lasky, 1925) Dir. Frank Tuttle. Cast: Bebe
Daniels, Robert Frazer, Raymond Griffith. Archive: GEH, UCLA
The Campus Flirt (Famous Players-Lasky, 1926) Dir. Clarence Badger. Cast: Bebe
Daniels, James Hall. Archive: UCLA
346
Feel My Pulse (Paramount Famous Lasky Corp., 1928) Dir. Gregory La Cava. Cast:
Bebe Daniels, Richard Arlen, William Powell. Archive: LOC
***
Marion Davies (b. Marion Douras, 1897, Brooklyn, NY; d. 1961, Hollywood,
CA)
Davies began her career as a dancer in Broadway musicals and the Ziegfeld Follies,
before making her first film in 1917. Although the majority of her films were
dramas (possibly at the urging of William Randolph Hearst, with whom she had a
34-year relationship), she made a number of light comedies throughout the 1920s
and 30s and was widely regarded as a gifted comedienne.
Getting Mary Married (Cosmopolitan Productions, 1919) Dir. Allan Dwan. Cast:
Marion Davies, Norman Kerry, Matt Moore. Archive: LOC
When Knighthood Was in Flower (Cosmopolitan Productions, 1923) Dir. Robert G.
Vignola. Cast: Marion Davies, Forrest Stanley. Archive: LOC
Tillie the Toiler (Cosmopolitan Productions, 1927) Dir. Hobart Henley. Cast:
Marion Davies, Matt Moore. Archive: GEH
The Red Mill (Cosmopolitan Productions, 1927) Dir. Roscoe Arbuckle (as William
Goodrich). Cast: Marion Davies, Owen Moore, Louise Fazenda. Archive: LOC
The Fair Co-Ed (MGM, 1927) Dir. Sam Wood. Cast: Marion Davies, John Mack
Brown, Jane Winton. Archive: GEH, LOC
The Patsy (MGM, 1928) Dir. King Vidor. Cast: Marion Davies, Orville Caldwell,
Marie Dressler, Jane Winton. Archive: GEH, LOC, UCLA
Show People (MGM, 1928) Dir. King Vidor. Cast: Marion Davies, William
Haines, Dell Henderson, Polly Moran. Archive: LOC, MOMA, UCLA
The Cardboard Lover (Cosmopolitan Productions, 1928) Dir. Robert Z. Leonard.
Cast: Marion Davies, Niles Asther, Jetta Goudal. Archive: LOC, UCLA
***
Dorothy Devore (b. Anna Inez Williams, 1899, Fort Worth, TX; d. 1976,
Woodland Hills, CA)
Dorothy Devore started out as a singer at a Los Angeles café before signing with Al
Christie’s studio in 1918. Devore made a series of one- and two-reel light comedies
with Christie in the late 1910s and early 1920s before signing with Warner Bros.,
and eventually producing films through her own company, Dorothy Devore
Comedies, in conjunction with Educational Pictures. Although she appeared in light
347
comedies, Devore often incorporated a great deal of physical comedy and stunts into
her films.
Know Thy Wife (Christie Film Co., 1918) Dir. Al Christie. Cast: Dorothy Devore,
Earle Rodney, Leota Lorraine, Archive: AMPAS
A Flirt There Was (Christie Film Co., 1919) Cast: Dorothy Devore, Lucille Hutton,
Jay Belasco. Archive: MOMA
Kiss the Bride (Christie Film Co., 1919) Cast: Dorothy Devore, Bobby Vernon.
Archive: LOC
Should Husbands Dance? (Christie Film Co., 1920) Dir. Al Christie. Cast: Dorothy
Devore, Neal Burns, James Harrison. Archive: LOC, GEH, MOMA, AMPAS
Nearly Newlyweds (Christie Film Co., 1920) Cast: Dorothy Devore, James Harrison.
Archive: LOC
The Tomboy (Chadwick Pictures, 1924) Dir. David Kirkland. Cast: Dorothy
Devore, Herbert Rawlinson, James Barrows. Archive: LOC
Hold Your Breath (Christie Film Co., 1924) Dir. Scott Sidney. Cast: Dorothy
Devore, Walter Hiers, Tully Marshall. Archive: UCLA
***
Marie Dressler (b. Leila Marie Koerber, 1868, Cobourg, Ontario, Canada; d.
1934, Santa Barbara, CA)
Dressler was a major star on Broadway and in vaudeville before coming to
Hollywood to star in Keystone’s landmark six-reel comedy, Tillie’s Punctured
Romance in 1914. After making a few other films in the late 1910s, Dressler
returned to the stage, but by the mid-1920s she had difficulties finding work in either
theater or film. Dressler made a series of comedies with Polly Moran in the late
1920s and early 1930s, and, after her career was revived by her appearance in Anna
Christie (1930), became one of the top Hollywood box-office draws until her death
in 1934.
Tillie’s Punctured Romance (Keystone Film Co., 1914) Dir. Mack Sennett. Cast:
Marie Dressler, Charles Chaplin, Mabel Normand. Archive: LOC, MOMA,
AMPAS
Tillie’s Tomato Surprise (Lubin Mfg. Co., 1915) Dir. Howell Hansel. Cast: Marie
Dressler, Tom McNaughton, Eleanor Fairbanks. Archive: LOC
Tillie Wakes Up (World Film Corp., 1917) Dir. Harry Davenport. Cast: Marie
Dressler, Johnny Hines, Frank Beamish. Archive: MOMA, UCLA, AMPAS
The Scrub Lady (Dressler Producing Corp., 1917) Cast: Marie Dressler. Archive:
LOC
348
The Red Cross Nurse (Dressler Producing Corp., 1918) Cast: Marie Dressler.
Archive: UCLA
The Joy Girl (Fox Film Corp., 1927) Dir. Allan Dwan. Cast: Marie Dressler, Olive
Borden, Neil Hamilton. Archive: MOMA
*The Callahans and the Murphys (MGM, 1927), Dir. George Hill. Cast: Marie
Dressler, Polly Moran.
*Breakfast at Sunrise (Constance Talmadge Productions, 1927) Dir. Malcolm St.
Clair. Cast: Constance Talmadge, Marie Dressler, Alice White.
The Patsy (MGM, 1928) Dir. King Vidor. Cast: Marion Davies, Orville Caldwell,
Marie Dressler, Jane Winton. Archive: GEH, LOC, UCLA
*Bringing Up Father (MGM, 1928) Dir. Jack Conway. Cast: Marie Dressler, Polly
Moran.
***
Louise Fazenda (b. 1896 (?) Lafayette, IN; d. 1962, Beverly Hills, CA)
Fazenda began her career with Universal’s Joker Comedy unit, before moving to
Keystone in 1915 and eventually to Warner Bros. in the mid-1920s. Dubbed “Queen
of the Screen Comediennes,” she was a tremendously popular performer, appearing
in well over 200 films before her retirement in 1939. Fazenda initially engaged in
knockabout slapstick, but transitioned to character roles in the late 1920s and 1930s.
Ambrose’s Fury (Keystone Film Co., 1915) Cast: Louise Fazenda, Mack Swain.
Archive: LOC, UCLA
Willful Ambrose (Keystone Film Co., 1915) Cast: Louise Fazenda, Mack Swain.
Archive: AMPAS
Hearts and Flowers (Mack Sennett Comedies, 1919) Dir. Edward F. Cline. Cast:
Louise Fazenda, Ford Sterling, Phyllis Haver. Archive: MOMA, AMPAS
Down on the Farm (Mack Sennett Comedies, 1920) Dir. Erle Kenton. Cast: Louise
Fazenda, Bert Roach, Harry Gribbon, Marie Provost, Ben Turpin. Archive:
LOC, MOMA
*The Beautiful and the Damned (Warner Bros., 1923) Dir. William A. Seiter. Cast:
Louise Fazenda, Marie Prevost, Kenneth Harlan.
The Lighthouse by the Sea (Warner Bros., 1924) Dir. Malcolm St. Clair. Cast:
Louise Fazenda, William Collier Jr., Rin Tin Tin. Archive: GEH, LOC, UCLA
Footloose Widows (Warner Bros., 1926) Dir. Roy Del Ruth. Cast: Louise Fazenda,
Jacqueline Logan, Neely Edwards, Jason Robards. Archive: LOC
349
The Red Mill (Cosmopolitan Productions, 1927) Dir. Roscoe Arbuckle (as William
Goodrich). Cast: Marion Davies, Owen Moore, Louise Fazenda. Archive: LOC
The Cradle Snatchers (Fox Film Corp., 1927) Dir. Howard Hawks. Cast: Louise
Fazenda, Ethel Wales, Dorothy Phillips. Archive: LOC
*Tillie’s Punctured Romance (Christie Film Co., 1928) Dir. Edward Sutherland.
Cast: Louise Fazenda, W.C. Fields, Chester Conklin, Mack Swain.
***
Dorothy Gish (b. 1898, Dayton, OH; d. 1968, Rapallo, Italy)
Dorothy Gish began her career appearing with her sister Lillian in a number of D.W.
Griffith films for Biograph. She soon established herself as a talented light
comedienne, although she alternated between drama and comedy throughout her
career.
A Cure for Suffragettes (Biograph Co., 1913) Dir. James Kirkwood (?). Cast:
Dorothy Gish, Blanche Sweet. Archive: MOMA
*The Suffragette Minstrels (Biograph Co., 1913) Dir. Dell Henderson. Cast:
Dorothy Gish, Gertrude Bambrick.
Liberty Belles (Biograph Co., 1914) Dir. Dell Henderson. Cast: Dorothy Gish,
Gertrude Bambrick, Jack Pickford. Archive: LOC, MOMA
*The Suffragette's Battle in Nuttyville (Majestic Motion Picture Company, 1914) Dir.
Christy Cabanne. Cast: Dorothy Gish.
Stagestruck (Fine Arts Film Co., 1917) Dir. Edward Morrisey. Cast: Dorothy Gish,
Frank Bennett. Archive: LOC
*The Hope Chest (New Art Film Co., 1918) Dir. Elmer Clifton. Cast: Dorothy
Gish, George Fawcett, Richard Barthelmess, Carol Dempster.
*Boots (New Art Film Co., 1919) Dir. Elmer Clifton. Cast: Dorothy Gish, Richard
Barthelmess, Fontine LaRue.
The Country Flapper (Dorothy Gish Productions, 1922) Dir. F. Richard Jones. Cast:
Dorothy Gish, Glenn Hunter, Mildred Marsh. Archive: GEH, UCLA, AMPAS
***
Charlotte Greenwood (b. Frances Charlotte Greenwood, 1893, Philadelphia,
PA; d. 1978, Beverly Hills, CA)
Greenwood was an established star in vaudeville and on Broadway before making
her first film in 1915. She based much of her comedy on stage and in motion
350
pictures on her long, limber arms and legs, using gangly mannerisms and high kicks
to accentuate her tall and lanky frame.
Jane (Oliver Morosco Photoplay Co., 1915) Dir. Frank Lloyd. Cast: Charlotte
Greenwood, Sydney Grant. Archive: LOC
*Stepping Some (Universal Film Manufacturing Company, 1918) Cast: Charlotte
Greenwood, Eddie Lyons, Lee Moran.
*Baby Mine (MGM, 1928) Dir. Robert Z. Leonard. Cast: Charlotte Greenwood,
Karl Dane, George K. Arthur.
So Long Letty (Warner Bros., 1929) Dir. Lloyd Bacon. Cast: Charlotte Greenwood,
Claude Gillingwater, Patsy Ruth Miller, Bert Roach. Archive: UCLA [both
sound and silent versions were made]
***
Phyllis Haver (b. Phyllis O’Haver, 1900 (?), Douglass, KS; d. 1960, Sharon, CT)
Haver got her start in film as one of Mack Sennett’s original Bathing Beauties. She
eventually became a skilled light comedienne, starring in pictures for Christie, First
National, and others throughout the 1920s, including a starring turn as Roxie Hart in
the 1928 film adaptation of Chicago.
Hearts and Flowers (Mack Sennett Comedies, 1919) Dir. Edward F. Cline. Cast:
Louise Fazenda, Ford Sterling, Phyllis Haver. Archive: MOMA, AMPAS
Love, Honor and Behave! (Mack Sennett Comedies, 1920) Dir. Richard Jones. Cast:
Phyllis Haver, Charles Murray, Ford Sterling, Marie Prevost. Archive: LOC
A Small Town Idol (Mack Sennett Productions, 1921) Dir. Erle Kenton. Cast:
Phyllis Haver, Ben Turpin, James Finlayson, Marie Prevost. Archive: GEH,
MOMA
The Perfect Flapper (First National, 1924) Dir. John Francis. Cast: Colleen Moore,
Phyllis Haver, Sydney Chaplin. Archive: LOC
The Nervous Wreck (Christie Film Co., 1926) Dir. Scott Sidney. Cast: Phyllis
Haver, Harrison Ford, Chester Conklin, Mack Swain. Archive: GEH
Up in Mabel's Room (Christie Film Co., 1926) Dir. E. Mason Hopper. Cast: Phyllis
Haver, Marie Prevost, Harrison Ford. Archive: MOMA
The Battle of the Sexes (Art Cinema Corp., 1928) Dir. D. W. Griffith. Cast: Phyllis
Haver, Jean Hersholt, Belle Bennett. Archive: GEH, UCLA
Chicago (De Mille Pictures Corp., 1928) Dir. Frank Urson. Cast: Phyllis Haver,
Victor Varconi, Virginia Bradford, Eugene Pallette. Archive: MOMA, GEH,
UCLA
351
***
Gale Henry (b. Gale Trowbridge, 1893, Bear Valley, CA; d. 1972, Palmdale,
CA)
Henry was a leading comedienne in both the Joker Comedy Company and Powers
Comedies in the mid-1910s, starring in slapstick shorts including the Lady Baffles
and Detective Duck series in 1915. She worked steadily throughout the silent era,
appearing in leading roles in short films and supporting roles in features. In the late
1910s she produced two-reel movies through her own company, Gale’s Model
Comedies.
Lady Baffles and Detective Duck in the Great Egg Robbery (Powers Picture Plays,
1915) Dir. Allen Curtis. Cast: Gale Henry, Max Asher. Archive: LOC
Lady Baffles and Detective Duck in When the Wets Went Dry (Powers Picture Plays,
1915) Dir. Allen Curtis. Cast: Gale Henry, Max Asher. Archive: LOC
*Art Arches (Joker Comedies, 1917) Dir. William Beaudine. Cast: Gale Henry,
Billy Franey, Milburn Morante.
The Detectress (Model Comedy Co., 1919) Dir. Bruno C. Becker. Cast: Gale
Henry, Milburn Morante, Hap H. Ward. Archive: LOC, AMPAS
Her First Flame (Model Comedy Co., 1920) Dir. Bruno J. Becker. Cast: Gale
Henry, Phyllis Allen, Milburn Morante, Hap H. Ward. Archive: GEH, LOC,
AMPAS
Soup to Nuts (Christie Film Co., 1925) Dir. William H. Watson. Cast: Gale Henry,
Neal Burns. Archive: MOMA, UCLA
Mighty Like a Moose (Hal Roach Studios, Inc., 1926) Dir. Leo McCarey. Cast:
Gale Henry, Charley Chase, Vivien Oakland. Archive: AMPAS
Two-Time Mama (Hal Roach Studios, Inc., 1927) Dir. Fred L. Guiol. Cast: Gale
Henry, Vivian Oakland, Anita Garvin. Archive: MOMA
***
Alice Howell (b. Alice Clark, 1888, New York, NY; d. 1961, Los Angeles, CA)
A former vaudevillian, Howell appeared in a number of early Keystone shorts –
including Tillie’s Punctured Romance – before moving to L-KO in 1915. She was
known for her scrub lady character, an unflappable clown with vacant eyes and a
wild mass of hair. Howell primarily performed in slapstick comedies, primarily
shorts, throughout her career, although she had supporting roles in a few feature
films in the 1920s.
352
Their Last Haul (L-KO, 1915) Dir. John G. Blystone. Cast: Alice Howell, Hank
Mann, Wallace MacDonald. Archive: LOC
Sin on the Sabbath (L-KO, 1915) Cast: Alice Howell, Billie Ritchie, Louise Orth.
Archive: MOMA
How Stars are Made (L-KO, 1916) Dir. John G. Blystone. Cast: Alice Howell,
Richard Smith, Raymond Griffith. Archive: BFI
In Dutch (Century Film Corp., 1918) Dir. John G. Blystone. Cast: Alice Howell.
Archive: LOC
Hey, Doctor! (Century Film Corp., 1918) Dir. John G. Blystone. Cast: Alice
Howell, Russ Powell, Eddie Barry. Archive: LOC
Cinderella Cinders (Reelcraft Pictures Corp., 1920) Dir. Frederick J. Ireland.
Cast: Alice Howell, Richard Smith, Rose Burkhardt. Archive: GEH, AMPAS
Distilled Love (1920) Dir. Vin Moore & Dick Smith. Cast: Alice Howell, Dick
Smith, Oliver Hardy. Archive: LOC
One Wet Night (Universal Pictures Corp., 1924) Dir. William Watson. Cast: Alice
Howell, Neely Edwards, Bert Roach. Archive: GEH, AMPAS
Under a Spell (Universal Film Manufacturing Company, 1924) Dir. Richard Smith.
Cast: Alice Howell, Neely Edwards, Bert Roach. Archive: MOMA, GEH,
LOC, AMPAS
That’s the Spirit (Universal Film Manufacturing Company, 1924) Dir. William
Watson. Cast: Alice Howell, Bert Roach, William Fletcher. Archive: LOC
Madame Dynamite (Fox Film Corp./Imperial Comedies, 1926) Dir. Zion Myers &
Eugene J. Forde. Cast: Alice Howell, Eddie Clayton, Della Peterson. Archive:
GEH, UCLA
***
Leatrice Joy (b. Leatrice Joy Zeidler, 1893, New Orleans, LA; d. 1985,
Riverdale, NY)
Joy often played tough, independent women, both in her comedies and in the dramas
she made with Goldwyn Studios and Cecil B. DeMille. Her sometimes mannish
characters were signaled by her close-cropped hair – in fact, she was one of the first
Hollywood actresses to appear in public with bobbed hair.
Manslaughter (Famous Players-Lasky, 1922) Dir. Cecil B. De Mille. Cast: Leatrice
Joy, Thomas Meighan, Lois Wilson. Archive: GEH, LOC, MOMA
353
Changing Husbands (Famous Players-Lasky, 1924) Dir. Frank Urson. Cast:
Leatrice Joy, Victor Varconi, Raymond Griffith, ZaSu Pitts. Archive: LOC,
UCLA
The Clinging Vine (De Mille Pictures Corp., 1926) Dir. Paul Sloane. Cast:
Leatrice Joy, Tom Moore, Toby Claude. Archive: LOC, UCLA
Man-Made Women (De Mille Pictures Corp., 1928) Dir. Paul L. Stein. Cast:
Leatrice Joy, H. B. Warner, John Boles. Archive: LOC
***
Beatrice Lillie (b. 1894, Toronto, Ontario, Canada; d. 1989, Henley-on-Thames,
Oxfordshire, England)
Billed as “the funniest woman in the world,” Lillie was primarily known for her
work on stage, in revues and comedies. She was an immensely popular comedienne,
although she only made a handful of films (and only one silent film).
Exit Smiling (MGM, 1926) Dir. Sam Taylor. Cast: Beatrice Lillie, Jack Pickford,
Doris Lloyd, De Witt Jennings. Archive: GEH, UCLA
***
Colleen Moore (b. Kathleen Morrison, 1900, Port Huron, MI; d. 1988,
Templeton, CA)
Moore began her career playing bit parts and ingénue roles for D.W. Griffith. After
stints with Selig and Christie, Moore signed with First National in the early 1920s.
Moore’s appearance in the hit film Flaming Youth in 1923 made her a star and led to
years of typecasting as flappers and other vivacious, fun-loving girls.
*The Wall Flower (Goldwyn Pictures, 1922) Dir. Rupert Hughes. Cast: Colleen
Moore, Richard Dix, Gertrude Astor, Laura La Plante.
Flaming Youth (First National, 1923) Dir. John Francis Dillon. Cast: Colleen
Moore, Milton Sills, Elliott Dexter. Archive: LOC
The Nth Commandment (Cosmopolitan Productions, 1923) Dir. Frank Borzage.
Cast: Colleen Moore, James Morrison, Eddie Phillips. Archive: LOC.
The Perfect Flapper (First National, 1924) Dir. John Francis. Cast: Colleen Moore,
Phyllis Haver, Sydney Chaplin. Archive: LOC
*We Moderns (John McCormick Productions, 1925) Dir. John Francis Dillon. Cast:
Colleen Moore, Jack Mulhall, Carl Miller.
Ella Cinders (John McCormick Productions, 1926) Dir. Alfred E. Green. Cast:
Colleen Moore, Lloyd Hughes, Vera Lewis. Archive: GEH, LOC, MOMA,
UCLA.
354
Irene (First National, 1926) Dir. Alfred E. Green. Cast: Colleen Moore, Lloyd
Hughes, George K. Arthur. Archive: GEH, LOC, MOMA.
Her Wild Oat (First National, 1927) Dir. Marshall Neilan. Cast: Colleen Moore,
Larry Kent, Hallam Cooley, Gwen Lee. Archive: AMPAS.
Orchids and Ermine (John McCormick Productions, 1927) Dir. Alfred Santell.
Cast: Colleen Moore, Jack Mulhall, Gwen Lee. Archive: GEH, LOC, UCLA.
Naughty But Nice (John McCormick Productions, 1927) Dir. Millard Webb. Cast:
Colleen Moore, Donald Reed. Archive: ITC.
***
Polly Moran (b. Pauline Moran, 1883, Chicago, IL; d. 1952, Los Angeles, CA)
Moran had a lengthy career in vaudeville and musical theater before making her first
film in 1914. In her films with Keystone – particularly her Sheriff Nell films – she
generally engaged in rough-and-tumble slapstick. Beginning in the late 1920s
Moran teamed with Marie Dressler for a series of short and feature films.
Her Painted Hero (Keystone Film Co., 1915) Dir. F. Richard Jones. Cast: Polly
Moran, Hale Hamilton, Charles Murray. Archive: LOC, AMPAS
Those College Girls (Keystone Film Co., 1915) Dir. Mack Sennett. Cast: Polly
Moran, Charles Murray, Mae Busch. Archive: AMPAS
Love Will Conquer (Keystone Film Co., 1916) Dir. Edwin A. Frazee. Cast: Polly
Moran, Harry Gribbon, Fred Mace, Mack Swain. Archive: MOMA
Cactus Nell (Keystone Film Co., 1917) Dir. Fred Hibbard. Cast: Polly Moran,
Wallace Beery. Archive: UCLA
Sheriff Nell’s Tussle (Keystone Film Co., 1918) Dir. William S. Campbell. Cast:
Polly Moran, Ben Turpin, Billy Armstrong. Archive: DEN
*The Callahans and the Murphys (MGM, 1927), Dir. George Hill. Cast: Marie
Dressler, Polly Moran.
*Bringing Up Father (MGM, 1928) Dir. Jack Conway. Cast: Marie Dressler, Polly
Moran.
While the City Sleeps (MGM, 1928) Dir. Jack Conway. Cast: Polly Moran, Lon
Chaney, Anita Page, Mae Busch. Archive: GEH [silent with sound sequences]
***
Mabel Normand (b.1893 (?), Staten Island, NY; d. 1930, Monrovia, CA)
Known as “the Queen of Comedy,” Normand was one of the most successful
comediennes of the silent era. She began her career as an artist’s model in New
York, and around 1910 began making movies for Vitagraph and Biograph, and
355
shortly thereafter moving to Keystone. Normand soon began directing films for
Keystone as well as starring in them, and directed several of Charlie Chaplin’s early
films. Normand made a number of shorts and features into the 1920s, but her career
was cut short by a series of scandals, followed by her death in 1930 from
tuberculosis.
Mabel’s Dramatic Career (Keystone Film Co., 1913) Dir. Mack Sennett. Cast:
Mabel Normand, Mack Sennett, Alice Davenport, Ford Sterling. Archive:
MOMA, UCLA, AMPAS
That Ragtime Band (Keystone Film Co., 1913) Dir. Mack Sennett. Cast: Mabel
Normand, Ford Sterling, Alice Davenport, Roscoe Arbuckle. Archive: LOC
A Strong Revenge (Keystone Film Co., 1913) Dir. Mack Sennett. Cast: Mabel
Normand, Ford Sterling, Mack Sennett. Archive: FRA
The Water Nymph (Keystone Film Co., 1913) Dir. Mack Sennett. Cast: Mabel
Normand, Mack Sennett, Ford Sterling. Archive: UCLA, AMPAS
Tillie’s Punctured Romance (Keystone Film Co., 1914) Dir. Mack Sennett. Cast:
Marie Dressler, Charles Chaplin, Mabel Normand. Archive: LOC, MOMA,
AMPAS
Mickey (Mabel Normand Feature Film Co., 1918) Dir. Richard Jones. Cast:
Mabel Normand, George Nichols, Wheeler Oakman, Minta Durfee, Lew Cody.
Archive: LOC, MOMA, UCLA
What Happened to Rosa? (Goldwyn Pictures Corp., 1920) Dir. Victor
Schertzinger. Cast: Mabel Normand, Doris Pawn, Hugh Thompson, Tully
Marshall. Archive: LOC
The Extra Girl (Mack Sennett Productions, 1923) Dir. F. Richard Jones. Cast:
Mabel Normand, Ralph Graves. Archive: GEH, MOMA, UCLA
The Nickel-Hopper (Hal Roach Studios, Inc., 1926) Dir. F. Richard Jones and Hal
Yates. Cast: Mabel Normand, Theodore von Eltz, Michael Visaroff. Archive:
GEH, UCLA
Anything Once! (Hal Roach Studios, Inc., 1927) Dir. F. Richard Jones and Hal
Yates. Cast: Mabel Normand, James Finlayson Theodore von Eltz, Nora
Hayden.
Should Men Walk Home? (Hal Roach Studios, Inc., 1927) Dir. Leo McCarey.
Cast: Mabel Normand, Creighton Hale, Eugene Pallette, Oliver Hardy. Archive:
UCLA
***
356
Mary Pickford (b. Gladys Smith, 1892, Toronto, Ontario, Canada; d. 1979,
Santa Monica, CA)
Known as “America’s Sweetheart,” Mary Pickford was one of the biggest stars of
the silent era. She began her career on stage, and then in 1909 signed with Biograph;
in 1916 she formed her own production company, and in 1919 formed United Artists
with Douglas Fairbanks, Charles Chaplin and D.W. Griffith. Pickford was primarily
known for playing little girl roles, and she continued to play these parts into her 30s.
100% American (Famous Players-Lasky, 1918) Dir. Arthur Rosson. Cast: Mary
Pickford, Loretta Blake, Monte Blue. Archive: GEH, LOC, UCLA
Stella Maris (Pickford Film Corp., 1918) Dir. Marshall A. Neilan. Cast: Mary
Pickford, Conway Tearle, Marcia Manon. Archive: GEH, LOC, MOMA
Johanna Enlists (Pickford Film Corp., 1918) Dir. William Desmond Taylor. Cast:
Mary Pickford, Anne Schaefer, Fred Huntley, Monte Blue, Douglas MacLean.
Archive: GEH, LOC
Amarilly of Clothes-Line Alley (Pickford Film Corp., 1918) Dir. Marshall A. Neilan.
Cast: Mary Pickford, William Scott, Norman Kerry, Ida Waterman. Archive:
Suds (Mary Pickford Co., 1920) Dir. Jack Dillon. Cast: Mary Pickford, Albert
Austin, Harold Goodwin, Rose Dione. Archive: GEH, LOC
Through the Back Door (Mary Pickford Co., 1921) Dir. Alfred E. Green. Cast:
Mary Pickford, Gertrude Astor, Wilfred Lucas. Archive: GEH, LOC
Little Annie Rooney (Mary Pickford Co., 1925) Dir. William Beaudine. Cast: Mary
Pickford, William Haines, Walter James. Archive: GEH, LOC, AMPAS
My Best Girl (Mary Pickford Co., 1927) Dir. Sam Taylor. Cast: Mary Pickford,
Charles “Buddy” Rogers, Sunshine Hart, Lucien Littlefield, Carmelita Geraghty.
Archive: GEH, LOC, AMPAS
***
Edna Purviance (b. 1895, Paradise Valley, NV; d. 1958, Hollywood, CA)
Purviance was Charlie Chaplin’s leading lady from 1914 until 1923. She had
starring roles in two movies in the 1920s – A Woman of Paris, which was a box-
office failure, and A Woman of the Sea, which was never released.
The Tramp (Essanay Film Mfg. Co., 1915) Dir. Charles Chaplin. Cast: Charles
Chaplin, Edna Purviance. Archive: GEH, LOC, MOMA, UCLA, AMPAS
Behind the Screen (Lone Star Corporation, 1916) Dir. Charles Chaplin. Cast:
Charles Chaplin, Edna Purviance, Eric Campbell. Archive: GEH, LOC,
MOMA, UCLA
357
A Day's Pleasure (First National Pictures, 1919) Dir. Charles Chaplin. Cast: Charles
Chaplin, Edna Purviance. Archive: GEH, UCLA
The Kid (Charles Chaplin Productions, 1921) Dir. Charles Chaplin. Cast: Charles
Chaplin, Jackie Coogan, Edna Purviance, Carl Miller. Archive: GEH, MOMA,
UCLA
A Woman of Paris (United Artists Corp., 1923) Dir. Charles Chaplin. Cast: Edna
Purviance, Adolphe Menjou, Carl Miller. Archive: LOC
*A Woman of the Sea (Charles Chaplin Productions, 1926) Dir. Josef von Sternberg
and Charles Chaplin. Cast: Edna Purviance, Eve Southern, Gayne Whitman.
***
Gloria Swanson (b. 1897 (?), Chicago, IL; d. 1983, New York, NY)
Although best remembered as a dramatic actress, Swanson was a versatile comic
actress, appearing in everything from slapstick shorts to drawing room comedies
directed by Cecil B. DeMille. Even after she became a major dramatic star she still
punctuated her later comedies with moments of slapstick, remnants of her early days
at Keystone.
The Danger Girl (Keystone Film Co., 1916) Dir. Clarence G. Badger. Cast: Gloria
Swanson, Bobby Vernon, Helen Bray, Mack Swain. Archive: GEH, UCLA,
AMPAS
Teddy at the Throttle (Keystone Film Co., 1917) Dir. Clarence G. Badger. Cast:
Gloria Swanson, Bobby Vernon, Wallace Beery, Teddy the Dog. Archive:
GEH, LOC, MOMA, UCLA, AMPAS
The Pullman Bride (Keystone Film Co., 1917) Dir. Clarence G. Badger. Cast:
Gloria Swanson, Mack Swain, Chester Conklin, Polly Moran. Archive: GEH,
UCLA
Don't Change Your Husband (Famous Players-Lasky, 1919) Dir. Cecil B. DeMille.
Cast: Gloria Swanson, Elliott Dexter, Lew Cody, Sylvia Ashton: Archive:
GEH, AMPAS
Why Change Your Wife? (Famous Players-Lasky, 1920) Dir. Cecil B. DeMille.
Cast: Gloria Swanson, Thomas Meighan, Bebe Daniels. Archive: GEH,
MOMA, AMPAS
The Affairs of Anatol (Famous Players-Lasky, 1921) Dir. Cecil B. De Mille. Cast:
Gloria Swanson, Wallace Reid, Bebe Daniels. Archive: GEH, LOC, UCLA
Manhandled (Famous Players-Lasky, 1924) Dir. Allan Dwan. Cast: Gloria
Swanson, Tom Moore, Lilyan Tashman. Archive: GEH, LOC, UCLA
358
Stage Struck (Famous Players-Lasky, 1925) Dir. Allan Dwan. Cast: Gloria
Swanson, Lawrence Gray, Gertrude Astor, Marguerite Evans, Ford Sterling.
Archive: GEH
*Madame Sans-Gêne (Famous Players-Lasky, 1925) Dir. Léonce Perret. Cast:
Gloria Swanson, Emile Drain, Charles De Roche.
***
Constance Talmadge (b. 1897 (?), Brooklyn, NY; d. 1973, Los Angeles, CA)
The youngest of the three Talmadge sisters, Constance Talmadge was the
comedienne of the family, while her older sister Norma was the tragedienne.
Constance rose to fame as the Mountain Girl in the Babylonian sequences of D.W.
Griffith’s 1916 epic Intolerance, and soon made a name for herself in slightly racy
light comedies, often written by Anita Loos and John Emerson.
A Pair of Silk Stockings (Select Pictures Corp., 1918) Dir. Walter Edwards. Cast:
Constance Talmadge, Harrison Ford, Wanda Hawley. Archive: GEH
*A Virtuous Vamp (Constance Talmadge Film Co., 1919) Dir. David Kirkland.
Cast: Constance Talmadge, Conway Tearle, Harda Daube, Jack Kane.
A Temperamental Wife (Constance Talmadge Film Co., 1919) Dir. David Kirkland.
Cast: Constance Talmadge, Wyndham Standing, Eulalie Jenson. Archive: LOC
In Search of a Sinner (Constance Talmadge Film Co., 1920) Dir. David Kirkland.
Cast: Constance Talmadge, Rockcliffe Fellowes, Corliss Giles. Archive: LOC,
UCLA
*Polly of the Follies (Constance Talmadge Film Co., 1922) Dir. John Emerson.
Cast: Constance Talmadge, Kenneth Harlan, Billie Dove.
*Dulcy (Constance Talmadge Film Co., 1923) Dir. Sidney A. Franklin. Cast:
Constance Talmadge, Claude Gillingwater, Jack Mulhall, May Wilson.
Her Night of Romance (Constance Talmadge Productions, 1924) Dir. Sidney A.
Franklin. Cast: Constance Talmadge, Ronald Colman, Jean Hersholt. Archive:
LOC
The Duchess of Buffalo (Constance Talmadge Productions, 1926) Dir. Sidney
Franklin. Cast: Constance Talmadge, Tullio Carminati, Edward Martindel.
Archive: GEH, MOMA, UCLA
Breakfast at Sunrise (Constance Talmadge Productions, 1927) Dir. Malcolm St.
Clair. Cast: Constance Talmadge, Marie Dressler, Alice White. Archive: GEH,
LOC
Venus of Venice (Constance Talmadge Productions, 1927) Dir. Marshall Neilan.
Cast: Constance Talmadge, Antonio Moreno, Julanne Johnston. Archive: GEH,
UCLA
359
***
Fay Tincher (b. 1884, Topeka, KS; d. 1983, Brooklyn, NY)
Tincher was a star in vaudeville and musical theater before starting in motion
pictures in 1913 with D.W. Griffith. In 1914 she starred as a gum-chewing
stenographer clad in black and white stripes in the popular “Bill the office boy”
series of comedies for Komic. She later signed with Christie, where she blended
light comedy with some slapstick in one- and two-reel films. From 1923 to 1928
Tincher starred as Min Gump in “the Gumps” comedy series for Universal.
Leave It to Smiley (Komic Pictures Co., 1914) Dir. Edward Dillon. Cast: Fay
Tincher, Tammany Young, Tod Browning. Archive: LOC
The Housebreakers (Komic Pictures Co., 1914) Dir. Edward Dillon. Cast: Fay
Tincher, Tod Browning, Edward Dillon. Archive: LOC
Bill Spoils a Vacation (Komic Pictures Co., 1914) Dir. Edward Dillon. Cast: Fay
Tincher, Tammany Young, Tod Browning. Archive: LOC
Bill Joins the W.W.W.'s (Komic Pictures Co., 1914) Dir. Edward Dillon. Cast: Fay
Tincher, Tammany Young, Tod Browning. Archive: LOC, AMPAS
*Ethel Has a Steady (Komic Pictures Co., 1914) Dir. Edward Dillon. Cast: Fay
Tincher, Tammany Young, Tod Browning.
Music Hath Charms (Komic Pictures Co., 1915) Dir. Edward Dillon. Cast: Fay
Tincher, Tod Browning, Augustus Carney. Archive: LOC
Sunshine Dad (Fine Arts Film Co., 1916) Dir. Edward Dillon. Cast: Fay Tincher,
De Wolf Hopper, Chester Withey. Archive: LOC
Rowdy Ann (Christie Film Co., 1919) Dir. Al Christie. Cast: Fay Tincher, Eddie
Barry, Katherine Lewis. Archive: LOC, MOMA, AMPAS
*Oh! Min! (Samuel Van Ronkel Productions, 1924) Dir. Norman Taurog. Cast: Fay
Tincher, Joe Murphy, Jack Morgan.
Andy's Lion Tale (Samuel Van Ronkel Productions, 1925) Dir. Francis Corby. Cast:
Fay Tincher, Joe Murphy, Jack Morgan. Archive: LOC, MOMA

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Asset Metadata

Creator Anderson, Kristen Michelle (author)

Core Title Comic venus: women and comedy in American silent film

School School of Cinematic Arts

Degree Doctor of Philosophy

Degree Program Cinema-Television (Critical Studies)

Publication Date 03/06/2009

Defense Date 01/15/2009

Publisher University of Southern California (original), University of Southern California. Libraries (digital)

Tag comedy,film history,modernity,OAI-PMH Harvest,silent film,Women

Language English

Contributor Electronically uploaded by the author (provenance)

Advisor McPherson, Tara (committee chair), Gambrell, Alice (committee member), Jewell, Rick (committee member)

Creator Email kristena@usc.edu,kwagner412@gmail.com

Permanent Link (DOI) https://doi.org/10.25549/usctheses-m2005

Unique identifier UC148133

Identifier etd-Anderson-2634 (filename),usctheses-m40 (legacy collection record id),usctheses-c127-219472 (legacy record id),usctheses-m2005 (legacy record id)

Legacy Identifier etd-Anderson-2634.pdf

Dmrecord 219472

Document Type Dissertation

Rights Anderson, Kristen Michelle

Type texts

Source University of Southern California (contributing entity), University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses (collection)

Repository Name Libraries, University of Southern California

Repository Location Los Angeles, California

Repository Email cisadmin@lib.usc.edu