Alice Lake — It’s a Hard Life! (1918) 🇺🇸
Alice Lake, the brunette “vamp” of the Mack Sennett and Roscoe Arbuckle comedies, told a nice little fib about her age. This, in itself, is not unusual. Mack Sennett beauties have been telling little stories about that same important (?) subject ever since it became a moving picture tradition that none of them should be over sixteen. However, Alice Lake’s case is unusual because she didn’t get away with it.
by Elizabeth Peltret
“William Davis knew too much,” she said in explanation. “The whole trouble was that I lied to him once before and he had not forgotten. That was six years ago, when I was fifteen years old. I was going to public school in Brooklyn, New York, at the time; but the one thing I wanted more than anything else was to be an actress, so I dressed myself for the part as I imagined it, and went to the Vitagraph studio looking for work.
“I wasn’t trying to look funny, but I did. My head dress was, oh, so elaborate, and I wore a big ruff around my neck a la Valeska Surratt. Will Davis was directing there at the time and he put me in his picture. I remember that, in addition to some other wild fiction, I told him that I was nineteen years old. That was the first picture I ever did. All I remember about it is that I vamped a man and then, adding insult to injury, stabbed him in the back and finished up by acting all over the place.
“I had forgotten all about it until one day last week when I met Will Davis who had just come out here to do some pictures for Metro.
“‘By the way, Alice,’ he asked, ‘How old are you now?’
“‘Sixteen,’ I answered gravely.
“‘Great Scott!’ he said, ‘How time do creep!’ We talked about other things for a while but he couldn’t get over it.
“‘Gosh, Alice!’ he said later, ‘you must have been young when you were working for me!’”
Alice Lake told this story on herself which goes to show that she is very unaffected and entirely without “pose.” Also that she isn’t worrying about her twenty-one years even though breaking an “unwritten law” in admitting it.
She is an exceptionally bright girl; talented; full of fun; fond of crowds, and lights and theatres and music. In her dressing room, she has a phonograph — on the q. t. it squeaks — and all her records are either old and sentimental or new and sentimental. She hasn’t one single piece of rag time. And yet when she is out evenings she likes to hear rag time — the wilder the better — and above all she likes to dance.
“Speaking of dancing,” she went on, “it was once the cause of my leaving home. That was when I was doing these wild vamps at the Vitagraph studio in New York. Mother didn’t mind my working in the pictures but didn’t want me to go to dances. One day, I went to her and told her that I was going to leave home. I expected her to make a scene and I loved the idea of it; but instead, she just said calmly, ‘All right; I’ll help you pack,’ and she did! I didn’t have a trunk or even a suitcase, so she just wrapped all my things up in bundles and handed them to me; I walked out bawling. A week later, when my rent was up, I went home. I had thought I was going to have a good time but I hadn’t been to a single dance; I had just gone directly to my room from the studio and sat there and cried.”
However, she won her point. From that time on she was allowed all the good times she wanted. Afterwards, she became a professional dancer working at the studio daytimes and dancing at the Waldorf Astoria two evenings a week.
One of the best stories she tells on herself is how, during a number in which she was supposed to be a statue come to life, she slipped and fell thus earning for herself the nickname of the “fallen idol.”
In four years of work in “slapstick” Alice Lake has had but three accidents which were at all serious. One happened during the making of Moonshiners, a recent Arbuckle [Roscoe “Fatty” Arbuckle] comedy, when a horse she was trying to mount stepped on her foot (she is not a particularly good horsewoman). Fortunately she was standing on a sandy surface, so that no bones were broken, but she suffered with her foot for weeks afterward. Again, in “Her Nature Dance” she had her feet and ankles bitten by a dog which should have been somewhere else. This too, was painful, but owing to prompt attention, without serious results.
“The funniest looking accident we ever had,” she said, “was when Roscoe Arbuckle was making The Bell Boy. A crazy old elevator we were using fell to pieces and I was dangling in mid-air on the end of a rope. One of the boys was inside of what was left of the elevator and I was left whirling around in space while he was being rescued from the debris.”
Of all her pictures, the one she likes the best is “Come Through” with Herbert Rawlinson. She liked Roscoe Arbuckle in The Cook but she said, “I was terrible in it.”
She really is “a fan.”
“I’ve noticed this about comedies,” she remarked. “The gags that seem funniest at the studio, will often look dead on the screen, while something which hasn’t made you smile on the set, will make you shriek with laughter when you see it in the picture!”
At this point a waiter interrupted to hand her a small piece of chicken and a note from a Mack Sennett director sitting over on the other side of the room. The note read: “Do you really think you are eating enough?”
“Look at that!” she exclaimed. “They’re always making fun of me because I’m trying to put on a few pounds: I only weigh 110. Most of the folks at the studio have to diet in order to take it off, while I can eat anything I like. Let them laugh; I don’t put on flesh without eating!”
Who ever heard of a moving picture “Vamp” trying to get fat? Here was another tradition broken. She’s a surprising young lady.
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Alice Lake and Al St. John in a “Fatty” Arbuckle comedy.
Alice Lake is very unaffected and entirely without pose, and she isn’t worrying about her twenty-one years. She admits it.
Photos by: Stagg
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Alice is genuinely interested in all moving pictures. Here she is watching Mary Thurman — only you can’t see Mary.
Collection: Photoplay Magazine, December 1918