Anita Stewart — Why They Call Her “Daintiest” (1918) 🇺🇸
You’ve seen that in print a million times — more or less. So had I, long before I ever saw Anita, personally or on the screen.
by J. L. Mellon
Having met this fascinating child, I can assure you that Anita’s daintiness is more than screen deep.
(Pardon the paraphrased plagiarism, but it fits the spirit of this story.)
I think I have discovered why they call her “dainty Anita,” and I am indebted to a chance remark of her mother for the lead that brought about the discovery; which if you know Anita personally, is no discovery at all.
When I first came in contact with the screen world, I had some rather definite ideas about popular writings about the stars. In about twenty years of newspaper work in almost as many of these grand United States, I had met the genus press agent frequently enough to know that he was largely a snare and a delusion; a shell that covered an otherwise human being; a man whose sole ambition in life was the hypnotizing of trustful editors, and the invasion of newspaper columns consecrated to chronicling current history.
The story of the lady star’s wonderful wardrobe, I discovered was only a thinly veneered plot to exploit some modiste’s hysterical creations. The same disillusionment accompanied the milk-bath story, the stolen-jewels sensation, the special train, etc.
So when I became a chronicler of stage happenings, I determined to eschew all such ideas and methods.
But when I met Miss Stewart for interviewing purposes, there was one thing that acted like a burr on my conscience, to wit:
“America’s Daintiest Actress.”
I had read that many times, each time with increasing misgiving. Miss Stewart was ill when I first asked to meet her and even if she had not been, I couldn’t very well have gone to her and asked:
“Why do they call you ‘America’s Daintiest Actress?’”
She’d probably have summoned a cop or the headkeeper of Matteawan.
So I just waited and accepted it on faith; but with the mental reservation that some day, somehow, by fair means or foul, I should obtain an answer to that burning question.
Well, not long ago, up jumped the opportunity, and I welcomed it with the same fervor that the Rainbow Division grasped the chance to separate ill-advised Huns from their Kaiser
Anita had just returned to the Vitagraph studio, with which she was then associated — nestling in the classic precincts of Flatbush — after an absence of months, which served to rest her completely and to restore her to normal good health. I saw her working in a set for “The ‘Mind the Paint’ Girl,” the Pinero play. I was introduced by her director, Wilfrid North. It was a rather formal affair, that meeting, and I didn’t dare ask the question I most desired to have answered. Besides, Anita was dressed in a little gingham frock, which struck just below her knees, and in her hair she wore an enormous bow of vivid plaid ribbon. She looked like a child of about twelve, and she was very sad. She had been crying, because her father (in the play), a kindly old English green-grocer, was dead.
The whole situation made a somewhat gloomy atmosphere in which to pop that disturbing question. But I did not give up hope. Instead, with the craftiness of a Machiavelli, I said to myself:
“Not yet, but soon! I’ll get her when she’s in a daintier mental mood.”
Of course, neither she nor her director — no one, in fact, but myself — knew this deep plotting was going on right there in that saddened spot.
My chance was coming sooner than I expected. Fate was on my side.
Three days after that first meeting, Anita — you see, I call her by her first name, because in the light of my great discovery I feel justified in assuming a bit — and her director, with a company of about twenty, were returning to the studio when they met with an accident that just skimmed the edge of fatality. A temperamental Brooklyn trolley car, resenting Anita’s auto crossing its right of way, displayed its nasty disposition by bumping into the automobile and knocking it indiscriminately about the surrounding landscape. The auto landed against a motor bus, in which were about a dozen of Anita’s company.
was more or less hurt, but her director were so badly injured they were under care of physicians for a week. As a matter of cold fact, Miss Stewart came perilously near to having her neck broken.
When this happened, I thought I was farther than ever from the realization of what had now become an active and irritating ambition — to have answered that question:
“Why do they call her ‘America's Daintiest Actress’?” But the fates were with me. Each day I called up Anita’s home to learn of her condition, and each day I spoke with her mother. Soon Mother and I became very chummy — over the phone — and I thought of asking her to ask Anita THE question. To prepare myself with facts in case we got into a discussion of the matter, I went to the dictionary and copied the definition of “dainty.” Here’s what I got:
DAINTY — Refined or particular as regards taste fastidious. 2 — Delicate and elegant in appearance; well-formed; graceful. 3 — Nice or refined in behavior; decorous. 4 — Of fine sensibilities; sensitive.
Thus armed, I was prepared for a debate. But I never got a chance to argue, for one day, during our conversation over the phone, Mrs. Stewart answered my question for me without my asking and without knowing what she did.
“This accident,” she began, “is more than an injury to Anita.”
“Why?” I asked.
“Because it upsets our plans so. We had hoped to take over a place at Bayside this week, so that Anita could have something to eat —”
“What!” I exclaimed, startled at the thought of this fair young girl suffering the pangs of hunger.
“Yes,” continued Mrs. Stewart. “You see, for more than a year we have had no home life. We’ve been traveling from one place to another in order to build up Anita’s health. First, we were up in New England, then we spent a long time at Hot Springs, Va., then we went to Atlantic City for a time, and returning to New York, we took apartments at the Plaza.
We remained there all winter, and now have apartments in a quiet little hotel in Brooklyn.”
“But that’s a nice hotel where you are now — why do you wish to leave it?” I interrupted.
“Because it’s a hotel.”
“Oh!”
“Yes, hotels are all alike — only the nicer they are, the more ‘hotelly’ are they.”
Which, come to think of it, is pretty sound reasoning.
“No matter what one pays,” Mrs. Stewart was speaking again, “or how choice the food one gets at a hotel, it is not home cooking, and that’s what Anita is pining for. The poor child hasn’t had a real home meal in so long she has almost forgotten what they taste like.
“You know, this meal business was one of the chief causes of Anita’s breakdown last year. The exigencies of picture-making are such that no matter how hard the company tries to provide suitable meals for the players, it often happens that they cannot do so. This was the case with Anita. Sometimes the locations where they were taking scenes would be so far away from the studio or any place else, they would have to depend on sandwiches and cold tea or milk. Often I would cook something nice that I knew Anita liked and would send it to her, but by the time it reached her it would be cold and hardly different from the meals which had been prepared by the studio caterer.
“It was this unsatisfying food as much as Anita’s previous illness which broke her down, because Anita has always been a particular child —”
Oh, how I loved that word “particular!” I was about to realize my ambition.
Anyone else would have said “dainty,” but the mother would say “particular.” And she went on:
“Ever since she was a little bit of a thing — all eyes, it seemed to me — Anita has been particular. No matter what our financial circumstances, everything had to be ‘just so’ for her. Her clothes had to be immaculate; her little bed had to be white and pretty. She could not finish a meal if she happened to soil a table cloth. At school, she was cleanliness personified and her books never seemed to be old. She would fidget almost to distraction if she soiled her hands or her boots and could not clean them at once.
“Another thing — she’d never wear anything but her own. I remember one time when she was only about five years old I made over a hat for her, which I had bought for Lucille Lee, her sister. It was a beautiful little hat, and I had paid $12 for it. I fixed it up so it looked like a new bonnet, and I put it on Anita.
My hitherto obedient baby took it off and announced that she would not wear it. I put it back on her head and started her to Sunday School, about a block away, where her grandmother was waiting for her.
She was back in about five minutes, and I asked her why she was not at Sunday School.
“’Grandma wouldn’t let me go in,’ she said.
“’Because I didn’t have on my hat.’
“And it was true.
The child had taken off the hat as soon as she was out of sight and when she met my mother at the church, mother insisted on her wearing the hat. Anita refused and mother sent her about face. I saw that it was not rebelliousness which actuated Anita — it was actual pain for her to wear that bonnet — and so I did not insist.
“Thus she has been all her life, and she positively has a passion for beautiful things — both in her home and in her work. She responds to beautiful music, to flowers, to pretty clothes. When she can, she revels in good books. She seeks people whose tastes are similar to her own, and she is very easily wounded in feeling, just as she was that day when I tried to make her wear that hat.”
Wow!
Here I had the answer to my question without my asking for it. I ran over in my mind the various definitions of “dainty.”
“1 — Refined or particular as regards taste; fastidious.” Surely the incidents of her childhood fitted that.
“2 — Delicate and elegant in appearance; well-formed; graceful.” Yes, she’s all of those, as every motion-picture lover knows.
“3 — Nice or refined in behavior; decorous.” Everyone who knows her says she is delightful, so I guessed she would fit that phase of the subject.
“4 — Of fine sensibilities; sensitive.” The affair of sister's bonnet would seem to prove this.
So there we were — my question answered. Still, there was a void in my life, and I discovered it was a desire to see with my own eyes — to talk with Anita and form my own estimate of her. And when, a few days later, she returned to the studio, I decided to visit her and talk with her. When I arrived, Miss Stewart and the rest of the company were just starting out on “location” — a little park in Brooklyn.
“Fine!” thought I. “Now, I’ll get her alone; away from the studio, and we’ll have a chat.
The park, which was our destination, is one of those neighborhood affairs — a God-given patch of green grass and shady trees, set down in the midst of one of the congested sections of the city which supplies New York with the crowds that throng the subways and Brooklyn Bridge twice each day.
Anita’s car was the first to arrive, and by the time we got there she was already busy with mirror and powder puff, retouching her make-up. There was no chance for a chat then; nor was there when she had finished, for everything was ready to “shoot” — camera up, etc. — and Anita started work at once.
It was all over in about fifteen minutes, and I thought surely I would get my chance. But no! About nine million kids, more or less, surrounded her and followed her to the railing running along one side of the park. They made her one of them. They clung to her hands, her cloak, her dress, and she chattered with them as she walked. Then she hopped up on the railing and sat there with the youngsters pressing around her.
They wanted a speech.
“What shall I speak about?” she asked.
And young America responded lustily:
“The war!”
“All right,” said Anita; and she delivered a serious little speech on patriotism. She made every kid there promise to buy War Saving Stamps, and if they all keep their word, Anita has given McAdoo a big lift.
When she had finished, Anita, looking like one of the children in her gingham frock and “Tam,” skipped merrily to her limousine, and with a plea to me to “pleasesee that none of the children were run over,” was away.
There was I, waiting at the curb, cheated of my chat again.
I climbed into the car with the cameraman and pursued her to the studio, for all the world like a villain in the movies pursues the heroine. Arriving at the studio, I made my way at once to her dressing room. She was changing to her street attire — one of those new “fringey” things, bought at a Fifth Avenue shop — and it was some minutes before I was admitted. She had with her a woman newspaper writer, her secretary and Miss Virginia Nordon, her close friend and confidante.
That was a fine place for a confidential chat, wasn’t it?
However, while I waited for Anita to get her little toque on her brown curls, I looked around the dressing room. It’s a regular, practical dressing room, but it reflects its “particular” owner. The furniture was white enamel, trimmed in light blue, the “things” on the dresser are silver, and the wardrobe closet, with its white lace curtains, is like a vision of fairyland. There’s more pretty, colorful gownery in it than I ever saw in my life before.
That was about all I had the time to observe, when Anita seated herself and I followed suit.
“I want to write a story about you,” I began, “but first of all I want to ask you a question —”
“I’ll answer yours if you’ll answer one for me first,” she challenged.
“Surely I will, even if I have to lie — what is it?”
“Can you tell me,” she asked, “why you writers persist in calling me ‘America’s Daintiest Actress?’”
Here is another of those “latest photographs” that we always receive, when our particular idol is concerned, with “bated breath.” This was worth taking, don’t you think?
Miss Stewart advising the purchasing of Thrift Stamps “somewhere in Brooklyn,” when the show was obsolete.
Here is a photograph which will some day find a place in Miss Stewart s biography. The caption will read something like this: “On her return to the Vitagraph studio the star, all ready for work, was greeted by Wilfred North, Director.
Collection: Photoplay Magazine, December 1918