Blanche Sweet Tells Her Untold Tale (1928) 🇺🇸

March 10, 2023

No miner trying a played-out mine has more difficulty than has the fan magazine writer of today trying to get "new stuff" from old and still reigning favorites.

by Gladys Hall

Gloria Swanson, the Talmadge sisters, Tony Moreno, Lon Chaney, Lillian Gish, the Barrymore boys — they and others like them have told and retold the stories of their lives. Time and time again. From first one angle and then another. Their love affairs. Their marriages. Their divorces, if any. Their opinions on women, if they are men; and on men if they are women. Their favorite songs, books, colors, candies, complexes and perfumes. The roles they yearn to play. Their favorite parts in the past. Practically everything that one human can reveal to other humans and still leave a vestige of covering about his denuded personality.

What to do about it?

People still want to read about these First Favorites of the Films. But nobody wants to read pre-digested prattle, no matter how rabid their fan-worship may be. It must be something NEW. Something never printed before. Something never before revealed in any magazine or newspaper.

With this all but impossible goal in view, I approached Blanche Sweet. I went prospecting with pick-axe and shovel, with drag-net and dredge. We sat across luncheon tables for hours, Blanche and I. We lolled on the hot gold sands of the Pacific coast, talking, talking, talking. Analyzing and fine-combing the publicized past. Sifting events as we sifted the grains of sand. Reminiscing, questioning, prompting and suggesting. Hours of discarding.

And finally there emerged a story of Blanche Sweet that has never before reached the public eye. The actual, complete truth about her birth and childhood. Elements that have gone to make up the Blanche Sweet we have admired through the years. Admired for her very real artistry. Admired for the personality she has kept intact through suffering and disillusionment, through the crucible known as living. Admired but never understood.

Here it is, then, a story about Blanche Sweet never before published in any newspaper or magazine, pamphlet or book. — Author's note

"I never knew who my father was. Not for years and years.

"I had a very dramatic childhood and the child I was has become the woman I am.

Her Life Before Birth

"Most peoples' lives begin before their birth. So did mine. "My mother was a dancer. She danced herself to death. Literally. And despite my knowledge of this, my passion for dancing persists. I would rather dance than eat or sleep, swim or work. Anything.

"My father — my long unknown father — was the son of a good family. One of the kind of men who possess a fatal attraction for women. Charming manners, a roving nature, great abilities and no industry. He had been married twice before and there were five children by the previous marriages. He was years older than my mother.

"His people objected to the marriage. The course of their young love ran far from smooth. A dancer! In those days men of good family didn't marry people of the footlights. There was that well-known prejudice, now outgrown. Time has changed all that. People today are rather proud of theatrical alliances.

"Curiously enough my mother's people also objected to the marriage. On the grounds that my father was too old for my mother, that he had been married twice before — that they were afraid of him.

"They were married anyway, of course.

"I was en route to this earth from wherever it is we come, when my father up and migrated to San Francisco. To make his everlasting fortune. Again.

"By some chain of circumstances the letters he wrote to my mother went astray. Never reached her. Letters concerning his prospects and plans for her joining him so soon as I should be born. She never got them.

"That he really did write I know because they eventually came to light and are in my possession now. It was carelessness, nothing worse.

Deserted and Desperate

"My mother supposed that he had deserted her. And it did something to her. Something irremediable. She went back to her dancing in order to provide for my advent. She could have appealed to his people, who were very well off, but she wouldn't do that. Both she and my grandmother felt that they had had enough of that family.

"The dancing killed her.

"She died of peritonitis when I was a year and a half old. Caused, the doctors said, by a tumor formed before my birth.

"She was probably heart-broken, too. I'm glad I've never been sure about that. She didn't do much talking, my grandmother has said, about herself or her own feelings. But I imagine she was sadly glad to go.

"At any rate, I was born, and just as soon as she was able, before she was able, in fact, she went back to the stage and died as the immediate result.

"At eighteen months I was alone in the world save for my gallant grandmother. Alone and with the stage as the sole support.

"My grandmother took complete charge of me. Through all the years there was nothing she did not do for me. No task too hard, no duty too rigorous, no care too tender. My father's family offered to care for me. The offer was declined, with or without thanks — I don't know which. And when she did hear directly from my father, she disregarded his letters. She hid me so that he couldn't find me.

"She didn't want him to have me or to know anything about me. She hated men in general and my father in particular for the things he had done to my mother.

The Stage Her School

"For years I led the gypsy life of the stage. I was actually one of those many who were 'carried on' in their first part. My grandmother was untrained in any field of remunerative work. She was untrained in the world of the theater, too but through my mother connections had been established.

"I didn't go to school, I didn't play with dolls. I didn't have any little girl or boy friends. I didn't do any of the things most children do. I knocked head-in to life first-hand. No text-books, teachers or school rooms served as intermediaries. I was a happy child so far as I can remember. An angelic looking little creature with long golden ringlets and a hellish disposition. Chin thrust out. Nose in the air. That kind of a little brat. I often think that the child I was then is, really, the woman I am now. Only I hide it better.

"When I was nine, we were touring the country with Chauncey Olcott and his wife. They were, by the way, delightful to me in every way. Whenever I was ill, they had me at their own hotels and cared for me personally. They even offered to adopt me and send me through school and college, but my grandmother refused the offer. She wanted me herself. I was all she had. I didn't want to be adopted, either. Whenever my grandmother wished to punish me, she would threaten to 'give me to the Olcotts.' They had a convent in mind for me and a convent didn't appeal to me. It doesn't now.

"The year I was nine we were playing in San Francisco.

"One night — true to the best 'meller-drammer' — my father was in the audience.

"I was billed as Blanche Alexander, the grand-maternal name I used. My grandmother was also billed under that name, her own. She occasionally played small parts with the company, both because she was clever and because her playing reduced expenses.

Found by Her Father

“My father recognized the name. He also recognized my grandmother. He didn't, of course, recognize me. He had never laid eyes on me before.

"After the performance he came back-stage. And for the first time in my life I was face to face with a father! A very large, imposing, dramatic father at that.

"This is a curious commentary, I think: I had never even thought about a father!

"It had never remotely occurred to me that I should have had one or that I didn't have one. I'd simply never thought about the matter at all. My grandmother, of course, had never referred to the missing parent. She didn't want to. Nor did I miss my mother. She had died too young for me to remember, and my grandmother had been both father and mother to me. In every way.

"It seems to me that this fact tends to dispel the amount of hokum that is written, talked and sung about the mother and father bond. About blood being thicker than water and all that. I don't believe it. There's something wrong somewhere. It isn't as vitally important as it is made out to be. Because, when I didn't have them I didn't think about it. Nature rang no bell in my heart. Instinct didn't point a lack. I just didn't know it. I commend the solution of this to the probing psychologists.

"There was my father.

"He made a scene, of course. He was the type who would. His little lost daughter again. That sort of thing. He told a vivid, tragic story of his long and fruitless search for me. His finding of clues only to lose them again. And suffer heartbreak afresh. I think it probable that he did make desultory efforts to trace me. I don't think it probable that they were very sustained efforts or that the heartbreak was chronic. He wasn't that sort.

Rescued for the Theater

"At any rate, he announced, clutching his golden-haired darling to his heaving chest, at any rate, now that he had found me he was going to keep me. He was going to care for me, educate me properly. No more of this.

"My grandmother, not without qualms, acquiesced. She raised no objections at that time. She felt that fate had taken a hand and that it might be better to let fate ride the wheels for a time. Perhaps she felt too, that I had done enough trouping about and that I was entitled to the advantages my father promised me.

"We took an apartment in the city, my grandmother and I. And I was sent to a very exclusive boarding school in Berkeley My father had married again and was living in another part of the city.

"I had the most gorgeous years in that school. One of my life-long dreams came true. They braided my hair. I had always despised my long, theatrical curls. I had yearned for the day when I might be decently braided like 'nice little girls.' They couldn't get it tight enough to please me. I went about looking like Sis Hopkins, wanted to be like other girls.

"No one in the school knew that I had ever been on the stage. If they had found out, I should have been compulsorily removed. It was that kind of school.

"I loved the dual role I played. Here I was, with all my experiences of life behind me and at the same time living a nice-little-girl life in a carefully regulated school. Frequently, during geography lessons, when some particular city or state would be under discussion I would long to announce that I had been to those places, knew all about them and could impart a fund of information. But I never did. I never breathed a syllable. Life had taught me, even then, to keep quiet about myself. To be reticent and guarded. I've never unlearned that lesson.

Blanche's Barroom Life

"Every Saturday or Sunday, sometimes both, my father would come for me and we would set forth on enchanting adventures. Or they were enchanting to me. He treated me as a pal, not as a child. As a boy, not a girl. He had wanted a son when I was born. For no good reason, considering that he already had two perfectly good sons by his previous marriages. At any rate, he took me trolley riding and taught me to jump off and on while the cars were in motion. That was sport. He took me to barber shops and let me have shampoos while he had hair cuts. He took me into bars and let me put my foot on the rail and listen to him talk to his various cronies while I sipped root beer and he sipped other things. I never saw my father drunk, but I know that he liked his liquid refreshment. I learned about life this way.

"After two years of this my grandmother abducted me. Actually. Like two Arabs we folded up our tents and stole away in the night leaving no word behind us. She had personal reasons for the move. She didn't like the way things were going. She mistrusted my father's influence.

"We went back to New York and got work there. It wasn't always easy and there were many barren periods, but I never remember starving or sleeping on park benches.

"We went back to San Francisco once more and I had some further schooling in the public schools. It didn't last long. My father was not a consistent man. Either in his enthusiasms or anything else. And he didn't interfere very strenuously with our disappearances.

"I played around New York until I began my work on the screen and after that pretty nearly everything has been written.

"Not everything. I've often wondered what my life might have been had I stayed on at that Berkeley School, married some suburban chap, settled down to a regular suburban life. A life of bridge and babies and gossip.

"I know what would have happened: my life would have eventually become exactly what it is. I don't believe that changes of circumstance matter. I believe that changes of character do. And had I changed my character, everything might have been different. Had only circumstances varied, things would have turned out pretty much as they have. Being the me I am, I don't believe I would ever have been content with a settled, domestic life. I would have broken loose. I would have wrecked other lives. My own would have been the same.

"Nor am I one who says, 'If I only could do it over again!' I haven't any regrets. For I am, in the main, what I was destined to be. Not by reason of supernatural agencies. I don't believe in them. I don't believe in anything. But by reason of the kind of person I am. The person I didn't change.

"There is one exception here: I have changed from a confirmed pessimist to an embryonic optimist. I have changed from suicidal depressions to philosophic depressions. I've done it consciously. Deliberately. Before this change, when I felt an attack of acute blues coming on, I girded up my loins and went forth to do battle with it. I worked or read or went out — tried in every way to distract myself and so ward off the dark hours. I don't do that now. I let myself sink into the slough of despond. I help myself to sink. I go down, down, down, as far down into the murky, suicidal depths as I can get. On purpose. I know that when I strike rock bottom, when I wallow in the sink to its depths, the inevitable rebound will take place. It always does. It's a simple curative and I recommend it. Simply take a day or two off, get as wretchedly indigo as possible and then recover. This happens to me with clock-like regularity every so often.

"I can't tell of any great or numerous romances in my life. Micky is the only one.

"I can't say what I am going to do about my work because I am superstitious about making announcements. The fatal fiasco of 'The Green Hat' has taught me that. I was heart-broken about it. I've had to rally. You always have to rally from defeat — that's life. When you cease to rally — that's death."

This is the story of Blanche Sweet. The true story. The new story. The confession never made public before.