Alice Joyce — Sans Grease Paint and Wig (1914) 🇺🇸
“Stay just where you are!” Keenan Buel directed his company and then sat down upon an inverted camera-box to wait for the sun to come from behind six or more clouds.
by Mabel Condon
So the woman’s club at attention on the Kalem out-of-door stage at Cliffside, N. J., remained so and Mr. Burgess and another man who were of the picture but not that scene, passed away the time in respective employments;
Mr. Burgess by practicing a double shuffle with one foot and the other man by meditatively walking the length of the platform and flapping the tails of his afternoon coat at each turn.
Still the clouds remained; still Director Buel telepathed them to move on; still Mr. Burgess shuttled and still the other man meditated and flapped.
“That’s all for today,” he of the camera-box finally and wearily announced, and the stage emptied. Alice Joyce was the last one to leave. Mr. Buel commended us to each other and we went up into the big house which is owned by George Laird, the man who about sixty years ago invented the “Bloom of Youth” complexion beautifier, and who is responsible for various warnings posted about the studio grounds, one of which reads, “$5 Reward for the Arrest or Conviction of the Thief Who Is Caught Stealing This Fence.”
Part of the big house is given over to the Kalem Company for dressing and dining rooms. Miss Joyce’s dressing-room is on the second floor and we had just reached it when the sun came from behind the clouds and shone brightly. “Maybe they’ll want you now,” I suggested as I sat down in the portion of the big rocker that did not say.
“No, not now.” Miss Joyce returned, slipping into a blue crepe kimona and applying cold cream to her make-up, which promptly and obligingly came off on the end of a towel. Then she applied some powder from a red satin, heart-shaped box and began to brush out her hair. Between strokes she said she would be glad to get back into New York to live, that it was getting too cool for comfort at the open-air studio and that she liked even better to be with the company that goes to Florida for the winter.
“It has been nice out here for the summer, but in the fall one wants to be right in New York; there is everything one wants in New York.” She paused while she twisted her hair into a rope, made a figure eight of it and settled it down nicely on top of her head. “But my best reason is that I have just bought a new car and have to leave it in a garage in Manhattan every night and then ferry over here. And that’s inconvenient.” She deftly slipped bone hairpins into the pile of soft brown hair, tucked an extra pin into it at the back and the result was a becomingly simple coiffure.
“So often,” I remarked from the portion of the big rocker that did not sag, “your hair looks as though it had only about three pins in it.”
“And often it only has about three in it,” she replied, debating in front of her wardrobe as to what she should wear.
“But always its arrangement is artistic,” I finished, and then we talked about clothes — Miss Joyce’s clothes — and she brought out several gowns that she made herself.
“These are just ‘camera clothes’ because I only wear them in pictures,” she explained, producing a dress that looked like silk but that was crepe. “I get an expensive pattern, but inexpensive material, and I choose something that I’m sure will photograph well. Then, in a short scene, a kind of a ‘fill up’ scene, I wear one of these dresses and in a longer scene I wear really good clothes. But now that I have experimented,” she went on, hanging away the several dresses, which were tributes to her industry during waits between scenes, “now that I know I can sew, I’m going to try making something really nice.”
Taking a tailored blue suit from the wardrobe, she reflected upon it, at arm’s length, and then decided it would do. She examined the effect of a turquoise blue vest showing beneath the navy blue coat, decided also that it would do and while she donned this costume talked about her work both before and since she became a Kalem star.
“I’ve worked since I was thirteen,” she began with the first hook on the turquoise blue vest. “I was born in Missouri but lived in the South — the South was my father’s home and the West my mother’s. Then my mother and brother and myself came East and I went to work as a switchboard operator in a hotel. And there’s where my chance to do modeling came to me.”
She paused to decide between the choice of a black or blue velvet tie for the top of the vest that was a turquoise shade, and selecting the blue, she continued:
“An artist who used to come often to the hotel asked me to pose for a head he was doing one day, and that was the first of many sittings. I did that entirely for a while and worked for many artists. C. D. Williams was the one I have known the longest; I frequently meet him and his wife and it seems a long time since the days I worked by appointment in the different studios. I used to meet Florence La Badie often then; she was doing the same kind of work I was, modeling for front cover designs, mostly. And Gertrude McCoy was one of us, too.
“After that I did photographic modeling, fashion plates and posing for shampoo ads because there was more money in it. Then a friend suggested my trying motion pictures. I came to the Kalem Company on trial and this is my fourth year with them. Until last winter I worked in New York, but last year I went to Jacksonville, Florida, and was there for months, and this winter I hope to do the same.
“And Mr. Moore? You don’t play together now, do you?” I asked, thinking how well a coral touch would become the black hat with the gray feather she was tacking on it.
“No, right after we were married he was made a director and has his own company in New York. I suppose I could work with him if I requested to,” she added, viewing the effect of the dull blue ribbon she had knotted at the base of the gray feather. “I don’t like that,” she commented, discarding the blue ribbon.
“Coral would be beautiful there,” I suggested from the rocker that was deep and that now sagged on one side “I run to one color at a time,” offered Miss Joyce as she looked through a box of ribbons and bright beads. “Just now it’s blue; I’ve worn blue things for days and I have no idea what color it’ll be next. Sometimes it’s brown or black — I wonder how this would do?” holding up a string of coral beads. They “did” beautifully across the soft gray feather.
“You were talking about Mr. Moore’s directing,” I reminded her when the beads had been securely placed.
“Yes,” she resumed, “I suppose I could play opposite him again but I think it better for us to be in separate companies. I believe that married people make the mistake of being together too much; were I in his company I might want things one way and he another. We might hurt each others work that way. Besides, we would have nothing new to talk about in the evening. So I think it better the way things are.”
The hat with the feather and the coral touch was wonderfully becoming and we started out for the ferry that would bring us to Forty-second street, New York. Miss Joyce talked of her mother, who is at Asbury Park, and of her brother, who is dancing at New York theaters, and she told of her marriage to Tom Moore last spring. And as she talked patrons of the ferry and the Forty-second street car discovered in her the person they had seen many times on the screen.
“We had been chums for more than a year” — she referred to Tom Moore — “then we had a quarrel and didn’t speak for months. It was while we were in Jacksonville that we made up and one night in a restaurant, decided Ave would get married. We left the table and when we came back after the ceremony it was just as we had left it, so we had our wedding supper there. Arthur Houseman of the Edison Company was with us and we had a jolly party.”
The car stopped at Broadway and we elevatored to the tenth floor of the corner building. There, in the room of the green rug, Alice Joyce selected the spot whereon her picture is to hang, and when seven o’clock came round she left to keep her seven-fifteen appointment with Mr. Moore.
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“The Butterfly” Is Next
The World Film Corporation announces that Clara Kimball Young’s second feature film is to be based on Henry Kitchell Webster’s story, The Butterfly, which is one of the most popular of the current works of fiction. It enjoyed great popularity when it appeared as a serial story in the Saturday Evening Post. Clara Kimball Young is finishing the work on “Lola,” the Owen Davis story, which shows her in a field that is uniquely her own, and one in which her admirers will be glad to see her. In “Lola,” James Young appears, as well as Ola Humphreys, the famous dramatic star who has just returned from a prolonged tour of Australia, where she has appeared as a star. It is planned to release “The Butterfly” in December.
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“Three Weeks”
B. S. Moss, president of the Reliable Feature Films Corporation, 701 Seventh avenue, New York City, on Thursday evening, October 8, offered at the Maxine Elliott Theater, New York City, a five reel adaptation of Elinor Glyn’s celebrated love drama “Three Weeks” at a private showing to a specially invited audience. The picture was adapted and directed by Perry N. Vekroff, and was so satisfying from the standpoint of photography, acting and stage direction, that already the Reliable Corporation is said to be flooded with rental offers. The action of the story is laid in Veseria in the Balkans and in Lucerne, Switzerland, and follows closely the Glyn novel. Briefly Queen Sonia of Veseria. temporarily exiled from her kingdom, journeys to Lucerne and there encounters Paul Verdayne, who immediately falls in love with her. By chance Sonia discovers that Paul is the exiled crown price of Veseria, who disappeared some twenty years before. Sonia then yields to Paul’s love-making and is even spurred on by a desire to give Veseria an heir to the throne of whom the country shall later be proud. News that the king is dying sends Sonia hurriedly back to Veseria with her child, and results in Sonia being killed by the dying monarch, who hopes to end the succession to the throne by her death. In the epilogue of the picture we see Paul, years later, at the cathedral where he obtains his first glimpse of the child king. When the cathedral is cleared of its worshippers Paul comes from behind a pillar, kneels before the altar and prays for the welfare of the young king.
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Mrs. Laemmle and Children Safe
President Carl Laemmle of the Universal Film Manufacturing Company, received a telegram from Rotterdam which informs him that Maurice Fleckles has succeeded in obtaining the release of Mrs. Laemmle, Mrs. Fleckles and the two Laemmle children, Julius and Rosabelle, who have been detained in Germany since the beginning of hostilities. This greatly relieves the tension, inasmuch as nothing had been heard from them for over a month. The party sailed from Rotterdam October 15, and will arrive in New York the twenty-fourth, on the Holland-American liner, Rotterdam.