Bebe Daniels Tells Her Untold Tale (1929) 🇺🇸

March 03, 2023

We all know her work, we have been told that she lives with her mother and grandmother, that she is an athlete, an adventurer in the realms of air and sea and earth, that she is a good business woman, a pet of Paramount Pictures. But there has been that closed, page. The page of Bebe' s romances. There have been rumors of an interest here, a reported engagement there. That is all. The rest has been left to conjecture, to imagination.

For the first time in any publication Bebe tells the real story, the full story of her love affairs.

by Gladys Hall

More than this: she tells something she has never told before to any living soul except her mother. The story of her first great love, the love that ended in death, the love that has tinged, colored, softened and saddened all the years that have come between. Bebe Daniels: (Author's Note.)

'Yes, I have known one great love. The complete love: mental, emotional and spiritual.

I've never talked about it before. I — I haven't been able to. It's long ago. It's over; he is gone.

Perhaps this love explains a great deal of what came after. Perhaps not. I'm not sentimental enough to say that I never could love again or never have loved since because I lost the first love. That would be morbid emotion. False.

"This man — he must be nameless — came into my life right after Harold and I had decided to take separate paths. I came to Famous Players with the hope of doing dramatic work. Harold went on with comedies. He was, of course, my very first sweetheart. My girlhood sweetheart. The first boy I had ever gone out with. And he was very sweet. Kind and protective and clean and nice.

"Then this other man. He was a Greek god to look at. A scientist. A scholar. A thinker. A doer. An athlete. He was interested in the world of the theatre. He was interested in every thing. He had an immense capacity for living — and loving. "I developed a fearful crush on him. At first he didn't pay much attention to me. Then I think it came to him that he had never known my sort of girl before. His ways had taken him among women of another calibre and point of view. He fell in love with me. The kind of love only a man like that could know.

"I found out that there was between us — an insuperable obstacle. My mother told me things she knew about him. His Past. Something dark and dreadful and mysterious.

The cold and ghastly shock of that discovery overwhelmed me. Then he told me about it himself. And I didn't know what to do, where to turn. Caught up as I was in the strangle hold of my own emotions, brought up to believe that black is black, white white, right right and wrong wrong, with no middle ground possible, the romance with this man I loved seemed to be one of the things one simply doesn't do.

"I told him we would have to end it all. Childlike, really. It seemed so dramatically easy to say, so terribly impossible to do. He said that so long as I loved him it would never end. And he pleaded with me to go with him to the Italian lake country, alone, apart, forever and for ever. He drew a beautiful, haunting picture of a beautiful, haunting life, living on love, in Paradise.

"I wanted to go with him. You see, I loved him. But I couldn't. Not only did I shudder from the fear of damnation involved in such a step but I had, also, my mother and my grandmother to think of. My mother had suffered so much, worked so hard, done so much for me. When I was very tiny, a sad thing happened in my mother's life. It nearly broke her heart. She mended it and went on — for my sake.

"I told the man I loved so much how impossible it all was. And he persisted in saying that nothing was impossible, that he would never give up so long as I loved him.

"He pleaded with me. He vowed that he would abandon every hope he held, every prospect, every ambition. And always he would end his pleas by saying 'So long as you continue to love me it will never end.'

A Dance Like a Dirge

“Then it came to me what I must do. There was, at that time, a man in New York who had once told me that he would at all times be willing to do anything I might ask of him, no matter what. I took him at his word. I asked him to take me out quite a lot. To dinners and theaters, to dances. It was like dancing to a funeral march. He was as good as his word. I told him I wanted it circulated about that I was in love with him. He agreed to that, too. He was game, that man. Perhaps he saw the heartbreak in my face. "I went to the man I loved with all my heart and dared to tell him, ‘I am in love with —'

"He wouldn't believe me. With his face whiter than death, he refused to believe me. I persisted, 'I am! I am!' I was young and I thought I was doing the right thing, the gallant thing, the only thing. Because my heart was breaking made it seem all the tighter. "Then he said, 'Ah right; if you are in love with him, you are — but I shall go the dogs. Completely. I'll do everything I shouldn't do, in every way, from this day forth.'

"Of course I didn't believe him. I thought he was trying to frighten me, to be dramatic. "But he did.

"I spent a great deal of time right then going back and forth between Hollywood and New York. After the night I told him I didn't love him any more I didn't see him again for a year. When I did see him, he was an old man. Worse than old, he was sick to death. Dissipated. Hollow-eyed, all the joy of living gone from his face, his eyes.

I don't know how I stood it. I couldn't stand it now. The teens are iron years.

The Inglorious End

"I had heard that he was about to make a dangerous, daring trip by airplane. One of those first, very experimental flights. I went to him and asked him if he would promise to do something for me, just one thing. He said 'Anything, so long as you do not ask me to stop my present mode of living.' I told him what it was I wanted him to promise; and I shall never be able to forget the look in his eyes when he said, 'If it had been anything but this. Don't you see, I shall be dead a year from now and I should like to go out with my head high, adventuring.'

"That is my great, my chief regret — that I asked him to give that up for me. For in a year's time he was dead, after months of pain and hideous suffering and ignominy. Dead. And I might have let him die as he had wanted to die, in the air, adventuring.

"It was all so very young and so bitter and tragic and so sweet. We might have handled it all better, more happily if we had been older, less afraid of the conventions, of what people might say.

"And yet even now, in memory, I know that I should do very much the same thing over again. Brought up as I was brought up, it was the only thing I could do.

"I can't say and I don't say that this great love has been the reason for my never marrying, I've been in love or I've thought I was in love many times in the past years. Only there has always been something to stop me just in time. Some fear, some in compatibility, some little lie told to me that need not have been told. Time and time again I've asked myself the question, 'Could I make him happy?' And then, 'Could he make me happy?' It takes two, not one. I've never understood women who think only of their own chances for happiness and never whether they have happiness to give as well as to get. Men are more unselfish than women.

Scoffing at Sincerity

There was the famous stage actor who came into my life a few years back. He had the reputation of being disillusioned, a cynic, a scoffer, a mocker. Fond of experimenting, especially with women; and then lampooning them afterwards.

"He came to see me work. He called me by another name. A secret name. He sent me little notes that were poems, every one of them, I laughed at him up my sleeve. I thought, 'You think you are having me on, my lad, but the shoe is on the other foot this time.' I ridiculed him and made little of him. Sent him to wrong addresses when we were to meet at parties. In every way I tried to play the game I thought he was playing. Then I learned that I was wrong. He came one day with a beautiful diamond brooch. He had bought it with the first big money he had made in years. He asked me to wear it as an informal engagement present. He told me what he really felt, really thought, showed me those secret places of the heart that show you the man. And in all my life I have never felt so small, so mean, so contemptible, so unworthy. I couldn't have married him. I wasn't in love with him. But I did admire his brain, his great powers and, what was worse, I found that I had made mock of the most sensitive, most human human being I had ever known.

"He has never forgiven me, I think. Why should he when I can never forgive myself?

"Men are either too possessive, too jealous or too much afraid of screen stars Most of the real men are afraid to ask us to marry them unless they are very wealthy men in their own right and in that case they object to a wife with a career. Most of the men I have known have asked me to give u my career after marriage. I've never care enough. If I did, if ever I do, I shall be glad to give it up, eager to. It would be fair. And I often look back and wonder. I've had the luxuries, of course, and all women love luxury. I've enjoyed the fame and the money and the things I've been able to do for those dear to me. But I wonder. I wonder whether I haven't missed the most precious things in life. I rather think I have.

Bill, the Masterful

There was Bill. He was clever and gay and attractive. And I liked him. Rather more than liked him. One night we went to a party. I saw a man there, an old friend I hadn't seen in years. I put my arms, about him and told him how delighted I was. Bill came up to me, his face white. He said, ' I am taking you home and I am taking you home flow!' I said, 'Oh, no, you're not. I'm not going home now. Without one other word, in view of the entire gathering, he picked me up, carried me bodily out of that house, put me in his car and drove me home at the rate of seventy miles an hour, dodging other cars, careening around corners with every turn of the wheel. I was so terrified I was limp when we finally arrived, whole by a miracle. He said, 'This will teach you a lesson, I think.' I said, 'I think not. But it will teach you the lesson that you are never to see me again.' He never did. But for months he put my poor mother through a course of horrors. He had a peculiar spotlight on his car and he de- lighted to spend his nights training it on our house, especially on the windows of my rooms. I ignored it, and him, and eventually he faded out of the picture.

"There was Vernon. He was a business man. Lots of money, position, all that sort of thing. He never believed anything I told him. If he phoned me and I told him I was due at a conference or had just been to a conference, he would say, 'That's all very well, but whom did you have luncheon with?'

Her Lover Turns Detective

He spent most of his time — and mine — trying to catch me at something. He'd call the house at all hours of the night and early morning to find out whether I was really at home or not. He never did catch me in anything, but that didn't seem to help any. And as I usually had to be on the set at eight in the morning, the midnight phone calls didn't help any, either. He would come to the studio to watch me work and every time I had a love scene to do I'd have another kind of a scene with him. No amount of telling him that I had never fallen in love with any of my leading men had any effect whatsoever. Nor did the fact that I had never lied to a man in all my life have any weight. He just didn't believe in me. I finally had to say farewell to him. He was wearing us both out.

"There was Jim from San Diego. I had never been very nice to Jim and he was always being nice, doing charming things for me and for my mother and grandmother. One night a friend of mine called me to account for my coolness to him, told me I might be a little bit decent to him. I spent that evening trying to atone for my former indifference. The very next day he informed my surprised mother that I had accepted him, that we were engaged and that he was having my ring and engagement presents made up for me. I left for New York and upon my arrival there found a diamond ring the size of an egg, and bracelets and pearls. I didn't know what to do so I took the feminine line of least resistance and wrote him a note telling him I was sorry, he had made a mistake, I was returning the gifts, and so forth.

"There was a writer at the studio. He was the helpful type. He was constantly sending waiters bearing mammoth trays of food into my dressing-room. He was as constantly sending me notes containing mystic circles with crosses in them. Flowers. Always running unnecessary errands and picking things up for me. That sort. One bright day he went to see my mother and asked her for her daughter's hand. Mother said, 'Aren't you a bit premature? I thought you were married.' He explained that he was but that a divorce — 'But,' said mother, 'what does my daughter think of all this?' It then occurred to him that he had omitted to ask me. Mid-Victorian, that man was, in his way. I had been very fond of listening to him talk and he had ascribed my interest to other motives and had acted accordingly.

Shoes Innumerable

Years ago, when I was just a kid, there was a man a great deal older than I who took a great interest in me. Chiefly, I amused him. I was young and naive and not the gold-digging type to which he had been used. One night, dancing with me, he stepped on the toe of my new slipper. I promptly and crossly told him about it. The next day I was the recipient of an unlimited order blank from a large bootery in Hollywood. I was furious. I thought I was disgraced. I rushed down to the bootery, told them it was all a mistake and that I wouldn't have one shoe, let alone an un limited order. I asked them to be so kind as to tear up the blank at once. He was more amused than ever. And he begged me to accept a town car and to go about with him for six months at the end of which time I was to marry him if I had come to care; and in any case I was to keep the car. I didn't accept the proposition.

"I've never been able to take things from men. I can't imagine keeping an engagement ring after the engagement is over. Gifts of sentiment — sometimes. They can be repaid in one way or another. Hut just to take things! I have no gold-digging alloy, I think, whatever else I may have.

"Married men are another anathema to me. The instant I know a man is married or engaged or even going about with some girl, he immediately becomes sexless to me. He might as well be another girl as a man.

"I've always wanted to find the kind of man I could lean on. I've usually found men who lean on me in one way or another.

"Out of these experiences — and others — I believe I have emerged with little or no loss of faith, with little cynicism. True, some times when men say things to me I find myself thinking, 'Is zat so!' But for the most part I have kept my faith and my belief in men and in women.

"I've been engaged, sort of engaged, twice in the past year or two. I'm not engaged now. I'm not in love. I'm having a good time and that's all. And perhaps, some day, if the perfectly right man does come along I shall know him and marriage will be the result. Hut unless I do, unless I can be very sure, not only for myself but for both of us, I shall go on to the very end — as I am."