Dorothy Sebastian — Little Alabam (1929) 🇺🇸

Let me begin by giving you a picture of the Dorothy Sebastian that Hollywood thinks it knows. She is the best scout in town. Known to her gay friends as “Little Alabam,” she’s always the life of every party.

by Katherine Albert

She is always happy, always good natured, always in high spirits.

“Alabam won’t mind. She’s a regular fellow.”

The little whoopee girl.

But that isn’t the real Dorothy Sebastian. Behind the gayety and bright spirits is a hungry little heart and a strange, mysterious misery.

She isn’t a Pagliacci. Far from it. They’re getting to be so commonplace in Hollywood, anyhow. Dorothy has never told the incidents of her pitiful life for publication. She is not one to dust off her troubles before the world. Interviewers have discovered her to be gay and wisecracking and maybe just a bit hard-boiled.

I came to Dorothy not as an interviewer but as one of her best friends. Our companionship began geographically. We come from the same part of the country. There’s an invisible bond between people who stand up when the band plays “Dixie.” I’ve often wondered if citizens of South Dakota or Colorado feel as close to each other as people who happen to be born in any of the Southern states. I rather doubt it.

When I say that I know the unhappy side of Dorothy Sebastian, the groping, restless, melancholy side that cries vainly for self-expression, I don’t mean that we’re always swimming around in indigo when we’re together.

We’ve laughed together, certainly, but more important, we’ve wept together. Tears are more binding than laughter.

You may laugh with your cook. You don’t cry with her.

Confidences and details of personal misery are given rarely (unless only for effect) except to one’s intimate friends.

Dorothy left Birmingham to go on the stage. She brought a broken heart to Broadway instead of acquiring it there, as is the usual procedure. Her girlhood had been made miserable by a circumstance that I cannot touch here. Few people know it.

For six weeks, while George White’s Scandals was in rehearsal she lived on sixty dollars, part of which went for dancing lessons.

The very last cent was gone when the company played Atlantic City before going into New York. She had nothing to eat and was too proud to ask one of the girls for a loan, draw on her salary from George White or write home for money. On her way to the theater she used to pass a candy shop and she vowed that the minute she got her week’s salary she would buy a whole pound of fudge and eat every mouthful herself.

She got paid. She bought the fudge and carried out her threat. The result was that she was too ill to eat for three days. The ludicrous becomes woven up with the tragic.

Hollywood has added bitter experience to the pattern of her life. I once saw her play scene after scene gayly, bravely and chat between times with the people on the set when, concealed in her bag, was a telegram she had just received — a curt, ten word message that had made her heart snap in two.

I once saw her dominate a situation that might have involved a friend of hers in a front page scandal.

She’s one of the bravest little troupers I know and I flounder when I try to find the incident that shows most clearly what manner of gal she is.

I believe it’s the “Tempest” story.

I was at Dorothy’s sweet little Brentwood house the night she got the part. I was ahead of her. I always am. Dorothy is usually late. That comes from being born in Alabama. When she did arrive she stepped into the room very grandly and, making a haughty gesture, said:

“Meet John Barrymore’s new leading woman.”

I fell in a swoon upon the floor and had to be revived.

We were very grand that evening. We were full of high hopes and great ambitions. What swank Dorothy would put on when she attended the premier performance of Tempest.

How she got the part in the first place is a neat little story itself.

It concerns a bewildered foreign director named Tourjansky, who came to this country under contract to M.-G.-M. and cooled his heels at the studio for eight long months. Just before his contract expired he was given the job of directing Tim McCoy in a Western.

It doesn’t sound reasonable for a sensible studio to assign a famous Russian director to a Western. There are very few reasonable things in Hollywood.

Dorothy was given the lead in this picture. The girls never act in Westerns. They walk through them with their other expression and constantly complain at a horrid old fate that makes it necessary for them to succumb to being carried into a sunset on the horn of a cowboy’s saddle.

Dorothy really trouped in this inconsequential drama. She did it for the little Russian director who was going back home humbled and broken in spirit. She gave her best to him to help him when the others laughed at his absurd English and his ignorance of American ways.

Dorothy had no ax to grind, certainly. Nobody of importance would ever see the film and Tourjansky was going away. She felt sorry, that was all. So Dorothy put the little picture and the little director out of her mind until, instead of going back to Europe. Tourjansky was signed to direct John Barrymore’s picture, Tempest.

And, when they asked Tourjansky for his choice of leading woman, he called for Dorothy Sebastian.

When this all came about I made three salaams toward Mecca and decided that there was a just Allah hovering somewhere in the vicinity of Hollywood, after all.

Those were happy days for Dorothy. Barrymore’s leading woman.

Loaned from M.-G.-M., she received more attention at United Artists than on her home lot.

A star’s dressing room. A maid to attend her on the set. And the knowledge that she was doing good work. She gloried in it as every girl would.

For three months she was Barrymore’s leading woman. And then the blow fell. Tourjansky was taken off the picture. Sam Taylor was put on as director. Camilla Horn arrived from Germany. Dorothy was taken out of the picture, Camilla put in. The real reason for all these political changes has never been known. One of the theories was that Taylor wanted full credit for the film and saw no better way of getting it than to change leading ladies. As a selling point Camilla was under contract to U. A. and Dorothy wasn’t. I have my personal opinion about it. They can’t shoot me at daybreak for that.

“The minute I heard about the tragedy I went to Dorothy. She hadn’t come from United Artists yet. I waited. A big box of flowers arrived. It looked like a coffin. I sat in the room with the ghastly thing. I felt like a funeral.

At last I heard the purr of her car in the driveway. She opened the door. There was not a sign of weeping on her face. She looked as pert and gay as you please.

“Hello, honey,” she said to me. “Have you had your dinner?” People always say such meaningless things in crises.

And suddenly we fell into each other’s arms and wept together. I told her what a bunch of meanies I thought all producers were and the bunch at United Artists in particular. Dorothy smiled wanly and opened the box.

There were dozens and dozens of red roses from John Considine, the head of United. The note was to tell her that in all his years as a producer he had never seen such a fine display of real trouping as he had that day.

“What did you do, Dorothy?” I asked.

“I didn’t do anything but go into his office and grin from ear to ear and tell him that I loved every minute I had worked with him and that I was glad to have had the opportunity of playing with Mr. Barrymore, even if three months’ effort would never be seen on the screen and that I hoped some day to have the pleasure of working at his lovely studio again.”

I smiled wickedly. I, too, love a beau geste. “And you meant it?”

“That,” said Dorothy, “is my own business.”

“And you didn’t cry?”

“Don’t be silly. Not before HIM. Not before anybody at the studio. Wasn’t that other girl, Camilla Horn, taking a test? Taking my part? Going to wear my clothes and do my scenes? Do you think I’d cry? Oh, honey, I thought you knew me!”

And we both fell to weeping again.

The phone began to ring. The cameraman called her, the assistant called, the prop boy. All wanted to tell her how sorry they were.

We sat there while Dorothy told me how much the part meant to her.

“We’re going to the Ambassador to dance and dine,” she said suddenly.

I couldn’t have faced the music that night, for when the four of us (our young men had arrived by this time) stepped into the Cocoanut Grove (it was movie night, too) there was whispering and conjecture. Why had she lost the part? Was she a rotten actress? Had she been temperamental?

And Dorothy, her head held high, nodded brightly to her friends, danced as gayly as any and was, as usual. Little Alabam, the life of the party.

I never saw Tempest. I couldn’t bear to look at it, but there’s a strange tag to the story. Camilla Horn was tested for a speaking part in “The Green Ghost.” The character was supposed to have an accent.

It would have kept Camilla from being sent away to Germany. Camilla lost the part and now Dorothy has it!

Bound up in a political mess at M.-G.-M., Dorothy has not had, until recently, the parts she deserved. But she has never fallen down on an assignment. She gave an outstanding performance in A Woman of Affairs, and I guess there’s no argument about her work in Spite Marriage. It wouldn’t be right if Dorothy were kept out of good roles.

I’m glad Dorothy is the way she is. I’m glad she’s not the roisterous kid Hollywood thinks her. But I’m happy that they know her as “Little Alabam.” I couldn’t bear a Pagliacci. I couldn’t stand a person who prated of being unhappy and misunderstood.

I’m proud that Dorothy is exactly like she is and one of my best friends.

[a]

Dorothy Sebastian’s career has been full of heartaches. She lost the leading role of Tempest after months of work. But now she’s a Hollywood hit

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Collection: Photoplay Magazine, August 1929