Alice White — Naughty Baby Quiets Down (1930) 🇺🇸

February 10, 2023

What is it that Alice White has, or hasn't, which occasions an increasing controversy? A curious situation is that, though the fans antagonistic to her appear to outnumber those laudatory, her films make money. Discussion of her personality, or aspersion of her merits as an actress constitutes Hollywood bridge-table talk.

by Myrtle Gebhart

If she fulfills the faith of First National, who even hints at undeveloped dramatic power, it will be an anomaly — a success based upon and caused by criticism! Not speculation or debate — disapproval!

Even report, sluicing the information that love had softened the "Dime-store Diana," left me unprepared for the change. Quick, sharp impressions — a silhouette slimness, somewhat clouded eyes. A pathos hung about her, a vaporous melancholy. Thin almost to nothingness. In her pale face, no longer masked outrageously with cosmetics, a numb waiting, in every look a sense of lurking tears.

Where was the snap and crackle that used to be amusing, the provocation of the vest-pocket Venus, where that gaucherie that had grated?

"Why so doused in indigo? Hear you're really in love, tired of the hey-hey whirl," I remarked, and added, with a trace of mockery, "just what is love? I can spare a whole day. Begin."

As she paced the room in quick, nervous strides, and shook her blond head, a tremor passed over her.

"Sacrifice." Her voice quavered. "Pain." The raillery provoked by the thought of flip little Alice going in for heavy suffering slid into a musing wonder, half convinced.

"Not your line, baby. Rehearsing a vaudeville playlet?"

She looked at me. I stopped before her eyes, eloquent with appeal.

Love to Alice, I reflected, had always meant gay times, presents, and most of all, flattering attentions. Her swains had been temporary decorations.

Alice was in love with a person, no longer in love with being loved.

"They exaggerate things about me. At school in New Haven, we kids used to hang out the window watching the Yale students who passed, idolizing them. That was told with the inference that even as a child I was boy-struck. Because I say what I think to faces, instead of behind backs, I have been called rude and ill-bred. I liked to dance and be rushed, so people said I was traveling a swift gait. I was partly to blame. I wish I hadn't flirted." The regret breathed out on a wistful sigh.

She exaggerates the importance of those amourettes. Alice is realizing that the celluloid shoot-the-chutes, with all their bumpy thrills, constitute no permanent plane for self-respect, happiness, or achievement. In Hollywood's complicated fabric the personal is too often dramatized. Balance is achieved only through evaluation and by evolving two selves, two views, the one distinctly professional, the other separating all that appertains to private convictions into a hidden niche. It requires intuition, determination, and experience to effect this differentiation.

Alice is contemptuous of self, afraid of self and the world.

She will get over the contempt! And, quite likely, the fear.

The vagaries of her quicksilver feelings, always her impetuous guides, heretofore proved shifting buoys. She is clinging to an anchor, the first steady, sensible affection ever accorded her.

Sidney Bartlett, with a combination of tact and firmness, is piloting her through a period of inventory, uncertainty, and renovation. He saw beneath the gewgaws a clever girl, a mind spending itself on superficialities, a talent being frittered away. I like him, clean-cut, with a keen, level gaze, despite the handicaps of a Byronesque forehead and a mop of curly, dark hair. A college man, newspaper reporter, stage actor, roamer, he tackled Alice's problems shrewdly.

A muffled Alice, constrained and inarticulate in an experience wondrously sweet and strange, her eyes trail him. He manages her welfare without causing illfeeling, by avoiding interference professionally, though he considers her puff pictures scarcely gratifying to his belief in her talent.

Moderation marks her interests now; her scale of living is simpler, her surroundings less disordered. They go riding horseback together, and in the evening go to the movies, or read.

"Gone Shakespeare?" I quoth. "Et tu, Alice?"

"No, we couldn't translate the dialect." A little of the old humor appeared. "Only magazines and current fiction."

Her danger is the frank confession of love which she holds there, for all to see,

in the dark-brown eyes, the only color in her thin face. Flattering to a man, such numb adoration — at first.

One smiles at young love. But concerning an actress, whose entire cycle tends to over-evaluate self, it is often of major effect in shaping character.

"Mind if my honey lunches with us?" All vibratory nerves, a quivering tensity, and brooding, hungry eyes — I was alarmed.

Mr. Bartlett's arrival calmed her. She creeps into that shielding love, looks out from it, her humor twinkling again. She is spellbound by chivalry and sweetness — a precious protection. Though her manner had scratched, she had always been gentle of thought. It required, apparently, but a touch of tenderness to melt the tin of her.

A half belief in her possibilities and an unwillingness to foster a prejudice enabled me to overcome an initial dislike of Alice. This baby spot, spewing its little light so badly, irritated me. A shrill personality. Grasping the spectacular, stepping in staccato tapping through a papier-mache sensationalism. A firecracker that tried to be a Roman candle. A parade of migratory affections, each emotional breeze swaying her — stunt aviator, camera man, star, business man, director. Ambition had no place in her romantic marathon. And never a trace of malice followed. A mercurial manner adapted subconsciously to the ideals of each, making her life as mutable as these transient feelings. Lapping up what she thought was experience.

A miniature "Follies," crudely staged. Cheap jewelry, clanking. Brief, loud frocks. Pet Chows in a yapping whirl. Peppery chatter of dates and the contemporary flame, piped in a thin, high voice. Squabbles and reconciliations. Brash, the light released by this thirty-watt incandescent.

Why? Because she knew no better. She lacked neither courage nor tenacity, but a selective instinct. Drawn into the limelight, flattered by loose, extravagant praise, she was thrown upon her own resources with no reserve of training, power, or perception.

Involved in complexities, she is entering that period negotiated, not without heartache, by Joan Crawford, Mary Nolan, and others who thought to make a fete of life, the consequences of which are not lived down easily. Her guide was the momentary heart attack. Everything revolved about the current emotion. Her brain was indefinite and flaccid, swamped in personal issues.

A handicap was her imitation of Clara Bow, either at the instigation of others, or her own unwise idea. Constant references to their resemblance spread the thought of a race, based upon identity of personality, from Hollywood conversation into public powwow. Bow fans resented the claim of similarity; Alice's supporters denied the implication of copyist.

Alice was accused of being only a Bow road company No. 4. Her brown tresses went yellow, red, and vermilion in echo of Clara's changes. There was a to-do of rivalry over petty fads, the shouts louder from the White bleachers. The disputed resemblance was voiced, crassly, by the "friends" exploiting Alice.

Only before the camera is the Bow possessed of audacity. Offscreen, Clara slips into a dun bewilderment, at times sullen, ordinarily pensive, occasionally streaked with a rebellious and superficial gayety. Shadow Clara is imaginary.

Her flapping prototype erred in deeming it necessary to italicize her screen self by a personal temperature matching that sustained by her mad movies. Alice also was misguided in seizing such obvious methods of climbing.

Verbal contest is waged over actors' merits; our stellar system is built largely on such competition, with the fans active as seconds. But the consideration is usually of talent. Alice's present disinclination to force comparison gives her a chance to stand upon her own merits, which are not meager, to develop her own personality, blanketed and twisted by this tailored-to-Clara garment.

Her career reflects the jumpy continuity of her brief life. Alva White lived with her grandparents until she was six. After schooling in a convent, at a Connecticut seminary and at Virginia College, in Roanoke, she followed her grandparents to Hollywood. She was secretary to Billy Joy, Leatrice Joy's brother, worked the switchboard at the Writers' Club, was a clerk at the Universal studio, addressed envelopes for a business firm, rang doorbells for a real-estate agent, and finally held the script on Chaplin's "A Woman of the Seas," a film never released. Either these jobs did not interest her, or she was incompetent.

A photographer suggested snapping Alva. She wore an old sweater and tarn, but he knew his hypo and the pictures turned out well. Tests for the "Collegian" series were terrible, but they won her a First National contract and a role, her first acting, in "The Sea Tiger."

Reviews lauded her. Then began her flapper fancies, her attraction of notice by flagrant and cheap publicity. Either she didn't care that people talked, or, befuddled, she thought to bluff it out. Her salary had climbed to six hundred dollars. She pertly demanded fifteen hundred. Rumor mentioned temperament. Her acting, for a disciplinary time, was confined to being the foil in tests of others. Her contract was completed, and not renewed immediately. The scare sped self-confidence; bravado was partly assumed to cover a timidity engendered by repeated criticism, and by her own fear.

Stardom meant hard work. She trouped, she tried. Nobody has ever taken her seriously. That galled. Her untrained intellect seized the only way it knew to meet gossip — with a loud laugh.

"The girl with the million-candlepower eyes," they publicized her.

"Why so archaic?" she sniffed. "Give me a break. Make it air beacons."

Atta girl! Step, baby! Cute baby! Hollywood hugged her and ridiculed her. One of our charming social customs, that.

The critical faculties of the young Bartlett brain appeared on the crest of this second success. I like his reticence, his paucity of phrasing personal feelings.

"Miss White has exceptional ability," he said, tersely, when I complimented his salutary influence. "Though familiar with many aspects of this hectic business, she knows little of the commonplace world outside, and has no real comprehension of values. She was miserably trying to kid herself. She must have every chance for her happiness and for her talent's progress.

"My position is not a nice one. I do not relish being called 'the current suitor.' Every' girl, particularly in pictures, has attentive boy friends. Miss White has been the target for unfair, malicious gossip. Ridiculous, yet it must be lived down — by ignoring it."

Her work will follow much the same formula as in the past, except that it will be vocal. "Broadway Babies," "The Girl from Woolworth's," Playing Around — all for the audible screen, entertaining or silly, according to your taste. Show Girl in Hollywood sequels Dixie Dugan's activities.

Recently, the company tore up her contract and gave her a new one at a four-figure salary. Such magnanimity is occasioned only by cold calculation of box-office power.

"My fan mail is next to the highest on the lot, between thirty and forty thousand letters a month." The pathos which veiled her dissolved in flashing pride. "Why do so many who don't like me bother to write to 'What the Fans Think' in Picture Play? Last month one defended me. She was sweet."

Her fluty voice trills acceptably. Her talent has been called the kettle-drum of the orchestra — it must be played with hammers. That's rather unfair. True, her ability being less mental, sympathetic and expert direction is required. The prattling pictures, in depriving her of atmospheric stimulus, left her floundering around, the cold, silent stage lifting a blank wall against which her fluttering emotion quickly beat itself out. Now she is becoming accustomed to evoking feeling by thought, less sensible to surroundings.

Stumbling through this present fog will deepen the shallowness of her work. Fighting a hostility she cannot understand, evaluating everything according to the personal equation, when she learns to discipline imperative feeling and discards false principles, she will grow appreciably.

"Put something in the story about my honey, will you?" Solemnly I gave assurance that I would mention Sid.

"It will last, so far as I am concerned." Fear stalked her eyes again. "And I know my honey isn't the changing sort." A smile zigzagged.

His love will endure as long as she needs him; man glories in solving the problems women get themselves into. It may prove permanent. If this protective affection continues, she will emerge from her little trial a more lovable person. If her bubble bursts, the crash either will send her out to a what's-the-use giddiness, or, if she has the basic fine stuff, settle her upon a steady path.

Whether the finale be sadly cynical, or trimmed with Lohengrin and lace, I have an idea — because I, too, believe in her — that it will be the making of Alice.