Ben Turpin — The Life Tragedy of a Sennett Beauty (1923) 🇺🇸

November 21, 2024

I pressed the door button. And waited. I pressed again. Not a stir, though a light shone through the tight-drawn shades. Then, as I turned to go, the lower corner of a window shade lifted furtively, and I saw peering up at me two eyes that looked as one.

by Herbert Howe

Need I add that I was at the portals of Chez Turpin?

For several minutes the eyes looked me straight in both ears until the lobes tingled as though pierced for pearls.

Then the curtain dropped. A pedal patter. A great clicking of locks and shifting of bolts. The door opened narrowly and out shot a head like a Jack in a Box.

“‘Lo,” it croaked,” ‘lo. Been waitin’ up for you.”

“What time is it?” I asked apologetically.

“Almost nine,” croak, croak. “C’m in.”

Stepping across the threshold I was in the presence of Ben Turpin, the Mack Sennett beauty, famous as the Shriek of Araby. He towered to the romantic height of my top vest button, with his neck fully stretched. His head juts up like a turkey gobbler’s. It looks to me as though his neck had intended to stop and form a head at the Adam’s apple, but, suddenly growing ambitious, had abandoned the original plan and shot on up to the present knobby eminence. As a result, there is an intense rivalry between the head and the apple, both for size and animation.

Ben would make a lovely gargoyle for a cathedral, except for his language. He grows extremely Biblical at times when things go wrong. Ordinarily he is good-natured. He feels he is too good-natured. They don’t treat him with no respect. It grieves him. Ben is a serious comedian.

“They don’t treat a comedian with no respect any more,” he deplores. “It hurts. I’m sensitive, I am.

“If they treated a five thousand dollar race horse like they do a comedian he’d go blooey. But they don’t treat no five thousand dollar race horse like they do a comedian.”

There was almost a sob in his croak. The sob of an artist unappreciated.

“They’re always having me run and doing falls. I’ve done more falls than any acrobat alive. Falls! I’ve done so many falls I can’t stand the sight of a sidewalk. I’m sensitive, I am. They don’t treat a comedian with no respect.

“I can’t stand falls like I used to. I’m fifty-seven years old.” His croak became emotionally husky again, though he tossed his white mane proudly — a mane on a knobby head, like the tassel on corn.

He had conducted me to his den, pattering ahead in his brown-stockinged feet. It is his custom, I take it, to remove his shoes promptly after the final dinner course.

The den was what you might expect of a cross-eyed sheik. From the walls the beautiful eyes of countless sirens focus fondly on Ben, each fancying, no doubt, that Ben’s glance is for her alone. In reality, his gaze is fixed steadily, though circuitously, upon his wife.

When he entered the lists as a rival of Valentino, and the theaters advertised “The Shriek vs. The Sheik,” Ben haughtily called attention to the fact that he has held one woman for seventeen years, which was more than Valentino could say.

You may think this a jest, but Ben doesn’t. He’s incredibly serious, as serious as Merton. When he stoops to jest it is with obvious condescension; there’s nothing funny about it.

When I referred to his competition with Valentino, he smiled deferentially.

“Oh, I don’t pretend to be no Valentino,” he chortled modestly. “He does his stuff and I do mine. There’s room for both of us, I figger. There’s room for all of us in this bizness.”

The women are crazy about him. He admits it. Ever and anon he makes shy reference to his fan mail, “mostly from women.”

He accounts very simply for this. It’s the old sex attraction.

“An actor’s gotta have sex attraction these days,” he croaks solemnly. “I don’t claim to be no Valentino — I’m fifty-seven — but I’m gettin’ just as big bizness in some places. That’s what gets me. I make ‘em the money, but they don’t treat a comedian with no…”

I hastily interrupted to ask if his eyes had always been as sexy as they are at fifty-seven.

Ben bounded up, gestured for me to follow, and away we pattered to the front room. He switched on the front room lights. It was a regular front room with rose drapes, blue and rose shade on a gilt lamp, mahogany table and a mantel adorned with objets d’art, including the photograph of a Young Man in a Wing Collar, not a bad looking young man — quite a ‘andsome ‘Arry, in fact — with a slim neck arising like the Eiffel Tower from a highly-polished collar and crowned by a highly-pomaded dome.

“That’s me,” exhibited Ben, with an attempt at modesty. “Taken in N’Orleans when I was nineteen.”

The dark eyes of the youth looked squarely at me.

“But them eyes, Ben!” I gasped. “Them eyes are straight.”

“Sure,” he croaked. “That was afore I crossed ‘em.”

I learned then of the sacrifice Ben had made on the altar of art. He was not born optically askew. He crossed ‘em for art’s sake while playing the character of Happy Hooligan on the vaudeville stage over thirty years ago. He made as many as ten crosses a day. One day they didn’t untwine. His fortune became permanent.

Since Nature did not endow Ben with this baffling, enigmatic expression, as it did Rodolph, it seems to me he deserves a great deal more credit as a sex attraction.

Ben, like all our sheiks, admits he came of noble family, the very flower of French aristocracy in New Orleans.

“My grandfather,” he says, with a touch of old-world pride, “was the best auctioneer in Loozyana. And my old man kept a candy story ‘til he went broke.”

It was after his father’s failure in trade that Ben, like many another scion of nobility, was forced to the stage. Then commenced the long series of falls that landed him in his present position and gave him his poignant aversion to sidewalks.

He’s a rich man at fifty-seven, a millionaire, perhaps. Next to his home in Hollywood he is erecting an apartment house, and he has many other property investments around Los Angeles that represent solid values.

His fame is world-wide. Tributes to his genius pour in from everywhere. If you have seen “Where Is My Wandering Boy This Evening” you will recall that, in carving a fowl, Ben dropped his bow tie in the soup. It was a tragic moment that touched the heart. A few days ago Ben received a big card fastened with six brilliant Grip Bow ties from the Grip Bow Tie Co. of Omaha, with an apologetic letter, saying: “Several members of this firm who recently saw your excellent production were genuinely distressed over the fact that you lost your Grip Bow tie in the soup. We have therefore made up a selection of offerings, expressly for your own use, which we are enclosing herewith.”

Such tokens of esteem make up somewhat for the respect a comedian don’t get no more.

But that which Ben desires above all else is denied him — a daughter. He offered to adopt his brother’s child, to educate her in the best finishing school and, at the age of twenty-one, to endow her with twenty-five thousand dollars. The offer was gently refused.

Sympathizing with Ben in his disappointment, his dog straightway brought two pups into the world. And to the inexpressible joy of the household, one of them actually was born cross-eyed. There’s certainly something in pre-natal suggestion.

The dogs help to while away the long evenings from six until eight-thirty, when Ben precipitately retires.

Occasionally, when he feels the desire for cutting up. Ben goes out on a busy corner of the boulevard near his home and acts as traffic cop while the regular officer is having dinner. Within ten minutes after taking his stand he has worked havoc with his hands and eyes.

“You!” he’ll croak belligerently, looking in two directions and pointing in another. “You! Drive on!” And six bewildered little Fords will leap at one another simultaneously. A frenzied melee ensues. Frightened lords squeal and proud Pierces honk indignantly. When things seem as tangled as the European situation, Ben puts his hand over one eye, shakes’ his Lloyd-Georgian locks and, with a lift of the hand, quells the riot.

With such pastimes he gets his mind off the indignities to which a comedian is subjected these days.

“I started wrong in this business,” he sighs. “I ought to be upstage. But I can’t. It ain’t in me. They don’t show no respect. And that hurts.”

I soothingly suggested that his Sennett contract would soon expire and he could seek more respectful quarters.

“Leave Sennett!” he barked fiercely. “I’ll never leave Sennett. Every dollar I made I made through Sennett. I owe everything to Mr. Sennett and Mr. Chaplin [Charles Chaplin] — and the public. The public is the one I owe most to. Yes, sir, I owe everything to the public.”

He’ll never leave Sennett! They don’t show him no respect, but he’ll stick. He’s fifty-seven, and he’ll stick till he’s eighty. Die in the harness, he will, unrespected.

Before he dies he craves just one thing. A dying wish. He wants to make a serious drama. He says serious dramas are funnier than comedies. In serious dramas an actor is treated with…

“Nowadays they don’t treat a comedian with no…”