Carol Dempster — D. W. Griffith Presents — (1921) 🇺🇸

January 20, 2024

I went to see “The Love Flower,” because D. W. Griffith had made it, and because I would no more think of missing one of his pictures than I would think of missing Christmas dinner on December 25th. The picture proved to be frank melodrama, but Carol Dempster lifted it for me to what some people might call art. She held me, anyway.

by Malcolm H. Oettinger

When the picture was over, an elaborate notice was flashed, stating that Mr. Griffith and Miss Dempster were scheduled to appear in person at eight that evening. I looked at my watch. It was six o’clock. I sherlocked within myself as follows: there are two places where celebs dine in Boston, and D. W. G. would be at one of them with his little star. I made for the Touraine first, because it was nearest. Hardly had I stepped inside the lobby when I spotted the man who made The Birth of a Nation strolling toward the elevator. A slender, squirrel-coated girl accompanied him: Carol Dempster. I hurried over to him.

“Pardon my intrusion, Mr. Griffith, but the readers of Picture-Play Magazine want ten minutes of Miss Dempster’s time.”

He turned and smiled and said: “All right.” Then D. W. Griffith presented — not in the usual silver-sheet way, but in a highly informal manner — Miss Carol Dempster in “Ten Minutes.” We stood chatting for a minute, whereupon the directorial genius left to greet a delegation of exhibitors, and we were alone.

The elusive, antelope eyes are exactly the same in lobby life as on the screen. And her hair is the color brown that you would expect, but her height surprised me. The whole girl can’t be more than five feet two, and as for weight — she hasn’t any! Ninety-one light pounds, but her personality is there.

She wasn’t used to being interviewed, she told me. and she simply felt that she wanted to be with Griffith always, and stay in pictures forever, and do things as interesting as she has been doing.

Carol Dempster has a slender little face, with delicate features, and big, expressive eyes. Her hair is crinkly and a deep, serious brown; her hands are long and slim, and so are her ankles. In her squirrel coat and squirrel turban, she looked like nothing quite so much as a boarding-school product, in town for tea and fun. It’s next to impossible to sit and ask such a girl about her “future,” there is obviously so much of it, and it’s evident that she would rather chat about the Follies, and “whether the music is good for dancing at the Copley-Plaza. She did tell me, however, in a very low, quiet little Voice, how she started to flicker.

“I’m about the luckiest girl in the world, I think,” she said. “I was studying under Ruth St. Denis out at Denishawn when Mr. Griffith came over one day to get some dancing girls for the bacchanale in Intolerance. He liked me well enough to tell me that he would really use me in a picture part some day, and for two years I didn’t hear a word from him. Then, just as I was finishing high school, he offered me a part in ‘The Girl Who Stayed at Home,’ and I almost went wild with joy.

“He’s been perfect to me, and he has taught me absolutely everything. Since that first picture I’ve done ‘Scarlet Days’ and ‘The Love Flower.’“

“And some day,” I suggested, a bit cynically, “you’ll be a star, who merely ‘started with Griffith.’“

She shook her head vehemently in denial. “I’ll stay with Mr. Griffith,” she assured me, “just as long as he’ll have me. He’s an inspiration, not only to the actor and actress, but to every one on the set, from camera man to prop boy. I’ve never met such a remarkable man before. I never expect to again, either.” she added.

It has been said that Griffith robs his people of their personality and substitutes his own instead. I asked Miss Dempster about this.

“It depends upon the individual,” she replied. “If the actress has no originality, she will simply do as Griffith does. She will mimic him. He is a wonderful pantomimist. I’ve seen him do everything, from a child to an old woman. He gets the conception across remarkably. Now to an intelligent actress it seems to me, this is a help, but not a substitute for her own methods. It is always possible to utilize Mr. Griffith’s suggestions. But he does not make you sacrifice your own ideas. The idea is to blend your personality with his hints on how it might most effectively be done. The result is true to life, usually. And there is no doubt that he should receive a major portion of the credit. His inspiration is invaluable to all of us.”

Besides being deeply appreciative of the Griffithian art. Carol Dempster swears by Ruth St. Denis, Kipling, George M. Cohan, and parfaits, any flavor. I didn’t hear her rave about her work, although she did rave about her discoverer, in no uncertain terms. And she requested that I mention one thing for her, as a special favor.

“It’s a little thing, I know,” she said, “but I do want people to know that I made that high dive in ‘The Love Flower,’ and that no one doubled for me in the underwater scenes, either. It’s just a childish matter of pride, I guess. But I was scared to death at the thought of that dive, and after I did muster up enough courage to go through with it, and then heard people assuring me that I couldn’t have been so foolish, I really want them to know I did do it.”

When I had seen it, I was a bit skeptical about the identity of the Kellermann [Annette Kellermann] queen in question, but now I harbor nary a doubt. Carol Dempster did it herself. She says she did! And if you had heard her say that she did it herself, you would be equally as convinced as I am.

Before leaving I asked her a very personal question. And the answer was short and whispered.

“Nineteen!”

Several weeks later when I watched her at work in the studio at Mamaroneck, near New York City, I decided that she had exaggerated. She couldn’t possibly be more than sixteen!

The scene she was working in was a carnival, supposed to be in the crowded streets of lower London. There must have been two hundred extras on the set, all rushing about, blowing horns, and throwing streamers in the air, but one little slim person dominated the whole scene. Unfortunately, the screen can never record her sparkling laughter of that day, but it will show such vivacity as you rarely see on the screen or anywhere else. Carol Dempster was quite obviously having the time of her life. She was irrepressible, irresistible. And sixteen seemed almost too many years to grant her!

Later in the week I visited the Griffith studio again, and discovered one of the reasons for Carol Dempster’s amazing development as a pantomimist. She never stops. No matter who is working on the set, Carol Dempster is somewhere near by, watching Mr. Griffith and carrying out all his orders. Hour after hour while he worked with Ralph Graves on some particularly difficult close-ups, a party of visitors at the studio — including, by the way. Ethel Sands — were chatting and laughing a few feet away from the set. Most young actresses would have fluttered toward that crowd as naturally as a bee toward honey, but not Carol Dempster. She sat just outside of the range of the camera and worked over and over that scene, just as hard as though it had been hers.

Late that afternoon, when almost every one else had gone, she was still there, flitting from one facile expression to another, her hands and feet, even, seeming to tell their part of the story. Let the others be concerned with the making of “Flaming Lamps.” Carol Dempster was busy on “The Making of Her Career.”

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Carol Dempster — D. W. Griffith Presents — (1921) | www.vintoz.com