Alice Calhoun — A Home-Made Star (1921) 🇺🇸

October 21, 2024

“You would like Alice Calhoun, I know,” an official of the Vitagraph Company told me. “She is the most genuine, most unaffected girl I ever knew. There is no pretense about her — she didn’t acquire a new manner when she became a star. She —”

by Barbara Little

I interrupted his effusive description of the little lady at that point to ask what seemed to me a pertinent question.

“Who made her a star?”

“Nobody,” he answered, unruffled. “She just was one.”

A few days later he telephoned to ask if I would have dinner with her. “Gladly,” I murmured. “And where?”

“Oh, at her home, of course,” he answered.

“Home? Don’t be funny, you know we’re in New York, and no one has a real home here.”

But Alice Calhoun is different. If you don’t live in New York you can’t realize how unique she is, and if you do, you have a right to be as skeptical as I was. “Real Alice Calhoun’s home folks,” he had said. It greatest gift is hardly seemed possible in what her genuineness, has been called the city of a thousand home-like hotels and a hundred thousand hotel-like homes.

A few nights later when my taxi had successfully buffeted the frosty wind that was rushing down the Hudson and Riverside Drive, and had successfully climbed the hill at One Hundred and Fifty-first Street I looked out. Before me was a huge, white stone building, impressive in its simplicity, and domineering in its height, but hot very inviting, or homelike. “Well,” I sighed, “this may be his idea of a cozy little home, but it’s not mine.”

“Alice ought to be here right soon,” her mother explained, a few minutes later. She had taken me into Alice’s room to take off my things, and then we had gone into the parlor to wait for her. On the way I stopped to look at a large photograph of a very beautiful girl in Old English costume. “To my darling mother,” it was autographed, “the dearest woman in the world, my guiding star, from her little girl.”

Something tugged at my heart then; here was a girl who did things in a whole-hearted way, even though she did live in an age of disdainful flappers.

If Miss Alice had stayed away five minutes longer, I should have hugged the rubber plant or Mrs. Calhoun or Uncle Joe or all of them. We three were sitting there comfortably in deep, leather rockers, with the leaves of the rubber plant nodding benignly at us in benediction, as though we had known each other always. And the glow from the lamp gave a warm look to everything without being too bright, and a tempting odor of broiling beefsteak hovered in the air. It was the sort of scene that, put on the stage, makes hardened New Yorkers break down and weep. It was home — the sort of home one dreams of after years of studio apartments and buffet suppers, and meeting one’s family only at breakfast.

The scene was disturbed at last by a series of sharp, staccato raspings of the doorbell. Mrs. Calhoun rushed away, and in came Miss Alice like a gust of wind.

“Hello-o-o-o, everybody,” she called from her mother’s shoulder, as she twined her arms about Mrs. Calhoun’s neck and kissed her tempestuously.

“She always comes in just like a hurricane,” her mother explained, when little Miss Alice had gone to take off her things. “We’d know something was wrong if she acted dignified.”

It was a more subdued Alice who returned to us, an Alice demure in a simple black satin dress, and with her wavy hair brushed primly back.

When I finally persuaded her to tell me how she happened to go into pictures, she curled up into a corner of the big davenport looking for all the world like a girl at boarding school, preparing to tell about her vacation adventures.

“I never went to a dramatic school or anything like that,” she said. “I just went to picture shows all the time. When mother wanted to find me, she went to our neighborhood theater, down to the very front row, and there I’d be.

“In those days whenever I was trying to persuade my brother to do something, I’d say: ‘You’d better, or I’ll run away and marry Maurice Costello.’ He was my favorite. Imagine how funny it was to play opposite him in my very first picture.”

“But how did you start?” I insisted, wondering what could bridge the gap between this home and a motion-picture studio.

“That was awfully funny. One evening, about two years ago we went over to spend the evening at a friend’s house, and there we met a Mr. Thompson. He told me that I was just the type he needed for a motion picture he was directing. I thought he was joking, but next morning, sure enough, he sent for me. It was for a Bessie Love picture, ‘How Could You, Caroline?’ And my part took just two days. But almost right away another director sent for me, and then another and another — and that’s all there is to it. I just became a motion-picture actress without knowing it.

“Some of the pictures I played in were ‘Belle of New York,’ ‘Echo of Youth.’ and ‘The Thirteenth Chair.’ Then I was costarred with Charles Richman in ‘Everybody’s Business.’ That picture made lots of friends for me in England. ‘Princess Jones’ was my first star picture.

“I think people ought not to study acting before going in pictures,” she went on. “If their hearts don’t tell them what to do. and if the click of the camera doesn’t just change them into another person — then I think they can’t appear natural on the screen. And I can’t understand some actresses practicing expressions before their mirrors. They can be sure of looking prettier when the time for the scene comes, of course, but not nearly so natural or intense.”

There is a newspaper man out West who calls Alice Calhoun “The girl with the thousand faces,” because her pictures look so unlike each other. As I looked through a scrapbook in which she had pasted some, of them I agreed with him. “That one is you!” I exclaimed. “But who are the others?” And later, “That looks like May McAvoy, and that one like Ethel Barrymore, and Pauline Frederick.”

“But I don’t want to look like them,” she exploded. “If I am just like something people have already seen, what’s the use of my going on?”

At dinner she looked distinctly relieved when the large coconut cake her mother had baked that afternoon was left uncut. “Now I can take it over to the studio to-morrow,” she said. “And we’ll have a picnic with the electricians and everybody on the set.” Later I learned that she takes one almost every day. I learned other things, too — some of which are: that she doesn’t know many other people in pictures, that she puts her car in storage in the winter and rides to and from the studio — forty-four miles altogether — in the subway, that she keeps her Cleveland high-school yearbook on the parlor table so that she can glance it over frequently, that she loves emotional roles — and would like to play a real shrew just once, and that she does not like being kissed by actors!

Later, when Uncle Joe escorted me over to the Fifth Avenue bus, it occurred to me what had made her a star. It was her home.