Alice Joyce — Alice for Short (1917) 🇺🇸

“What do you think of the screen as a career for a girl?” I asked in an inspired moment. Inspirations like this come rarely on a hot summer day, even if you are close to the sea with a pretty girl sitting before you in a charming little bathing suit.

by Frederick James Smith

Alice Joyce laughed and kicked one sun-burned foot skyward.

I repeated my question impressively.

But Miss Joyce merely giggled, seized the aforementioned foot and placed one sandy toe gracefully in her mouth.

What?…

Of course, this was Alice Joyce Moore, Jr., aged twenty months. I say this to allay the anxiety of apprehensive movie fans.

Alice Joyce Moore, Sr., has some interesting thoughts on the subject of work for women in general — and Alice, Jr., in particular.

“I could never be dependent,” said Alice, Senior. “Never — I believe every woman should have some work in life. I feel that I must earn my pocket money. I could never see a gown in a Fifth Avenue shop window and then hurry home to ask the lord of the manor for the wherewithal to buy it.

“No, indeed, I must earn my own money. I want Alice to be self-supporting, too.”

“Are you planning a screen career for her?” I asked.

“I don’t think she will be a picture actress,” replied Miss Joyce. “The stars say other things are in store for her. But, if she does decide to follow me, I shall help her in every way. The screen and the stage offer no more dangers to a young woman than any other business. It all depends upon the girl herself.

“But I do not want her to be a stage child. I shudder every time we use a typical theatrical kiddie in a photoplay. They’re wise beyond their years, precocious, old in everything but age. Poor children, they lose out on their share of childhood. Instead of living in the kiddie’s world of dreams and make-believe, they’re dragged from studio to studio by thoughtless, money seeking mothers.”

I reminded Miss Joyce of her remark anent the stars’ prophecy for Alice, Jr.

“They say that she will be a great musician,” explained the star quite seriously. “Probably a violinist. I hope so, for I dearly love music. Besides, it is a profession away from all commercialism.”

Miss Joyce believes that one’s name has a vital part in bringing about success or failure. It all depends upon the sound vibrations, or something like that, said the star, who further remarked that, in order to get Alice’s vibrations just right, a middle name had been omitted. She’s just plain Alice.

Mamma Alice Joyce is an interesting student of the motion picture. “I’m not a great actress,” she says frankly. “I realize all that. I’m at my best in simple, direct rôles — rôles that avoid over-emotionalism. I believe that’s the serious fault of screen acting. Either one overacts or under-acts, according to the director’s or one’s own lack of discrimination — or both.”

Miss Joyce glanced at herself in her little vanity case mirror — and smiled. “I’m distinctly not a tailor made girl, neither am I a clinging vine,” she said. “I’ve never been able to understand just why I seem always to be cast for the leader of a band of crooks, counterfeiters, moonshiners or occasionally detectives. Take my part of Mary Turner in ‘Within the Law,’ for instance. I am not a leader. I can readily assimilate the ideas and suggestions of others, but I couldn’t march ahead.

“I want little Alice to understand her limitations if she becomes an actress. Perhaps she will have all the things I lack.”

Little Alice didn’t seem exactly worried about the future at that moment. She was doing a doubtful Charlie Chaplin walk across the bathing beach.

“What type of rôle do I like?” continued Mama Joyce, adjusting her parasol at just the right angle to permit observation of Baby Alice. “Not a sex analysis. I detest that. Not a colorless ingénue. I can’t do that silly sort of thing. I like a part that provides some depth or shading of character. I’m woman enough to like a rôle with an opportunity to dress. I guess most of all that I like photoplays with distinct atmosphere.”

Miss Joyce says she detests the conventional screen star. “They simply play themselves — with now and then a moment of over-acting, called the ‘big scene.’ Perhaps that’s why I love Mae Marsh. She lives a part.”

Miss Joyce has all the beauty that brought her from art model to movie star with the Kalem company back in the screen’s palmy days. Her personality is yielding and gentle. You would half expect her to be an old-fashioned girl.

But she isn’t. No Alice-Sit-by-the-Fire is Miss Joyce. She is frank in analyzing herself. There is no make-believe about her. “I like the open country pretty well,” she explained. “But not deeply. I like to take a walk in the woods sometimes. But not alone. I’m not fond of solitude. I love to go about in the evenings. The theater, the cabaret, the midnight city life quite appeal to me. Not every night, of course, because one couldn’t do it and keep up with the strenuous studio life.

‘Only a little while back I lapsed into the habit of remaining at home each night. The studio days seemed so hard. I let things slip. And I became morose. I wept if any one as much as looked at me. So I decided that I wasn’t built for solitude.”

All of which may surprise the Joyce fans who have worshipped her as a simple country lassie since she used to play mountaineer girls opposite Carlyle Blackwell in the old Kalem days.

The Joyce career has more of a touch of romance than is usual even in the movie world of romance. Alice Joyce was born in Kansas City in the late ‘80s, her father, John Joyce, being a smelter worker. The young woman received her education in a convent at Annandale, Md., and, when financial conditions at home became pressing, she came to New York to earn her living. Miss Joyce’s first position was that of a telephone operator in the Gramercy exchange. Her unusual type of beauty began to attract attention and she came to pose for artists. It was but a step from art model to the picture studio. Back in those days the director demanded daring as well as prettiness. Alice Joyce passed the test — and the days of struggle as a ‘phone girl became memories.

I attempted to shake hands with Alice, Jr., at parting. But the future violin virtuoso wept — loud and lustily.

Perhaps she had the right idea about interviewers.

She kicked the sand. “Wow-ow!” she shrieked, with the accent on the first syllable.

I intend to ask her later just what she meant by that remark.

—

Alice Joyce and her baby daughter, Alice Joyce Moore.

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A recent portrait of Alice Joyce by Campbell Studio

Miss Joyce has mastered the difficult art of make-up. Here she is seen in her dressing room adding the final touches to her toilet.

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Five Years Ago This Month

Elbert Hubbard contemptuously dubbed them “movies.” The word “photoplay” was used so seldom that the opinion was current among those in the know that it wouldn’t last long.

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Broncho Billy Anderson’s name was a household word. Out in Niles, California, he was turning out “westerns,” at the rate of one per fortnight, which earned for him the title of “the world’s most popular picture star.”

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Congress first took notice of the moving picture business. The copyright law was amended so that it became illegal to make adaptations from popular novels for the screen without first securing the author’s permission.

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Jack Kerrigan and his company of cowboys rode up the main street of Santa Barbara and inaugurated America’s studio in that town. That was at the time when Jack sent a box of candy along with every letter he wrote to his matinee-girl retainers.

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Little Mildred Harris was attending school at a convent in Santa Monica and acting in Bison films after school hours.

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Prize fighting pictures became a thing of the past in the United States when the House passed the Senate bill prohibiting the transportation of such films between the different states and territories and from foreign countries.

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Then, Mr. Thanhouser [Edwin Thanhouser] invented the “split” reel. He found that the film of “Miss Robinson Crusoe,” when trimmed off, only lasted for a reel and a half, so it was necessary, in order to give the exhibitors their money’s worth, to add another five hundred feet of “animal stuff” from the New York Zoological Park, and so achieve the customary two reels.

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Helen Gardner was claiming the distinction of being the first vampire, while Louise Glaum was playing ingénues in stock company in Chicago.

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“The Coming of Columbus” with three-hundred people in the cast, among whom were Marshall Stedman (Myrtle’s husband) as the king, Kathlyn Williams as the queen and Charles Clary as the Genoese navigator, was not a commercial success. It was three reels long, and two reels for a nickel was the rule. So what could an exhibitor do with three reels?

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A saloonkeeper of Chicago observed a falling off in his trade. A few doors from his saloon he found the youth who had patronized his place, with hats off, enjoying a picture show. Then one started on the other side of his saloon. This was too much. He sold out, went into the moving picture business and made more money, with a clearer conscience, than in his former business.

—

John Bunny returned from fourteen weeks spent in England filming “Pickwick” and other distinctively English subjects.

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The “movies” first broke into society. This was accomplished when the Selig Company produced a “stupendous thousand-foot feature” (they measured them with a foot rule in those days) called “The Polo Substitute.” Hobart Bosworth played the lead, but three titled Englishmen, in Pasadena at the time for the international polo matches, condescended to appear as “extras.” It was doubtless this fact which induced the manager of the “richest suburb’s” fashionable hostelry, the Hotel Maryland, to offer Director Colin Campbell the use of his premises and servants for some of the scenes, and to entertain the entire company at luncheon afterward.

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They were letting Marshall Neilan play second leads then, and regarding him as “a young man of promising ability.”

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It was first suggested that the filmatis personae, or cast of characters, be placed before the public in conjunction with the film itself. The producers were beginning to think that people might like to know who the players were.

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Wilfred Lucas, Fred Mace, Mack Sennett, Charles Mailes, Dell Henderson, Eddie Dillon [Edward Dillon], Blanche Sweet, Clara McDowell, Dot Bernard [Dorothy Bernard], Mabel Normand (known as “the diving girl”), Mary Pickford and Kate Tanquary were on Biograph’s payroll in Los Angeles, but their salaries didn’t cut so many figures then.

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Three hundred dollars was the average cost of production per reel, all salaries included. The possible exception to this was in the case of Sarah Bernhardt, the first important stage star to turn to the screen, and who received the princely sum of three hundred dollars all by herself from a Parisian film company.

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The first under-water pictures were taken, in Scotland, by Dr. Francis Ward, who used a concrete tank fitted with a window, behind which his camera was focused on the otters and water birds he was experimenting upon.

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The press agent had not yet come into being, as far as pictures were concerned. It was generally maintained that the film business was not a show business, but an industry, and, as such, required no press agenting. Shortly after this, however, Charles Clary rescued two members of his company from a burning building; Anna Nilsson was operated upon for appendicitis; William Duncan, doing prison stuff at the Colorado State Penitentiary, was mistaken for an escaping convict by the guard and shot at; Ruth Stonehouse. Helen Dunbar, Francis Bushman [Francis X. Bushman], Bryant Washburn and the rest of their company were marooned on Devil’s Island, in Wisconsin, in a terrific storm; and Evebelle Prout narrowly escaped drowning.

Collection: Photoplay Magazine, October 1917