Alma Bennett — The Girl Who Waited a Year (1924) 🇺🇸

“You can wait if you want to,” the boy in the office at the Lasky Studio used to tell Alma Bennett day after day, “but Mr. De Mille’s busy and won’t see you. There’s a chance he might see you some time, but what a chance!”

But even the office boy’s cynicism couldn’t ‘break down pretty Alma Bennett’s stubborn determination to see Cecil De Mille [Cecil B. DeMille] and try to get engaged as a regular member of the studio stock company. She waited a year before she succeeded in seeing him, coming to the office almost every day and patiently sitting on a bench in the outer office with dozens of others. But she was the prize sticker of them all. Even after all that time it was only because some of the boys who worked in the studio interceded for her that she got to see the grand mogul himself.

He had some tests made of her, and the result was a long-term contract with Paramount.

Alma Bennett was no screen-struck little girl from the Middle West when she started her year of dogged waiting. She had had considerable experience.

“My folks moved to Los Angeles a few years ago and like most youngsters, I was movie struck. Many of the casting directors told me to go home and finish learning my A B Cs, but finally one gave me a chance in a comedy. It was water stuff and I couldn’t swim, but I learned in three days.”

A contract with Goldwyn which netted little but extra work followed and then she played leads in a few Fox pictures. About that time Alma took herself into the corner where she does her deepest thinking and decided that she simply wasn’t getting anywhere at all!

“Nervy of me, I know,” she told me, “but I picked Cecil De Mille and Paramount as the ones I wanted to work for. A director who has the time and inclination to develop new talent, a big concern that will give you all sorts of parts and back you up with publicity seemed to me the only ones who would get me anywhere. So I began to camp there and in almost a year I got to see Mr. De Mille.”

There isn’t anything unusual or startling about Alma Bennett, except perhaps a fleeting resemblance to Bebe Daniels. She is about nineteen, plays the violin nicely, likes outdoor sports and lives at home with her family. But she showed dogged determination that one would never expect of her — and she may surprise us again in her screen work.

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Photo by: Eugene Robert Richee (1896–1972)

Collection: Picture Play Magazine, June 1924