Bobby Vernon — On and Off (1927) 🇺🇸

The conversation had evidently reached a critical stage, for the young man was too busy to answer and merely pointed to the comic figure on the lithograph. The little boy stared, unbelievingly.

“Aw gwan!” he hooted, derisively, “that’s Bobby Vernon — and he’s ten times crazier’n’ you are!”

by Renee Ross

You might have agreed with the little boy if you had come to the Christie Studio with me the other afternoon and watched Bobby Vernon work in his latest comedy. Bobby Vernon off the set is a normal and likeable young man, but Bobby Vernon on the set is ten times crazier than any human being that ever lived.

It was a court room set with a sober, glum-looking judge on the bench. Before him stood two figures — a fearsome, awe-inspiring guard from the jail towering above the shaking, chubby boy in ill- fitting blue prison jeans with a funny little square cap wobbling over his frightened eyes.

“P-please, judge, I g-gotta graduate this afternoon!” stammered the prisoner, all blue-eyed innocence.

“You’ll graduate to the rock pile,” rasped the grim dispenser of the law.

Bobby’s round face was a kaleidoscope of emotion...

No, on second thought, I can’t explain how crazy Bobby is on the set. If you want to enjoy a hearty laugh, go to the nearest picture theatre running a Bobby Vernon comedy and see for yourself.

He came off the set with a charming smile. “Lookit, what I got!” he beamed, pulling up his sleeve and exposing an angry-looking, jagged cut on his wrist.

Just been working one day on this picture and see what happens. Lots of fun playing in comedies. Want to feel this finger? I broke it last year and it didn’t mend right, but I’m a lucky fellow — only had minor accidents so far.

“’Course in that Catalina picture we did, I nearly croaked. I had to hang onto a torpedo and be chased through the sad sea waves by a swordfish. Knowing the picture business, you have already guessed they picked the coldest winter day on record. I had a cold anyway, so I borrowed a rubber suit to wear under my clothes in hopes of keeping some of the water out. The fool thing sprung a leak, filled up with most of the ocean and made me heavy as lead — if I hadn’t held onto the torpedo like grim death and yelled bloody murder. I’d be fish-food in Davy Jones’ famous locker this minute!”

All this with a happy smile — Bobby does seem to enjoy everything so, even flirting with death.

He’s such a school boy sort of person it’s difficult to believe he’s had as much stage and screen experience as lies to his credit. At the mature age of eleven, he faced his first audience back of the footlights in a five-cent musical comedy.

“Roscoe Arbuckle was the head of the company,” remembered Bobby, setting the crazy little cap more firmly on his head, “I thought he was the cat’s pajamas and used to hang around the theatre every minute I could escape from school or home. Finally, just to get rid of me he offered me a part in the show.

I talked my folks into letting me do it and earned a whole dollar a week bringing a message to the queen every night. Gee, I was proud!”

Once inoculated with the insidious virus of the stage, there was no going back. After the company disbanded. Bobby was forever entering try-outs for local theatre amateur nights. This ended abruptly one disastrous evening. The ambitious young actor was in the middle of his black-face singing act when he saw a broad grin on the piano player’s face, felt an unaccountable draft, looked down and discovered that his trousers had parted company from his shirt and were making rapid progress down his short legs!

It was not long after this that his father persuaded him to take a job in a jeweler’s shop.

“Dad hated the stage and thought if he could once get me started in a real business, all would be jake. I had to wrap packages in the store but the trouble of it was there was a piano playing all day upstairs — and I couldn’t make my feet behave. The boss seemed to think I could wrap more and better packages if I wasn’t dancing all the time, so you can see my experience in the business world was what you might call limited.”

Soon he discovered that he possessed a singing voice and it was this that won him a part in Kolb and Dill’s musical comedy.

“Picture actors say to me, oh, I should think you’d get so sick of doing the same thing night after night on the stage, pictures must be a relief. But it isn’t the same every night. New business is added or you see a better way to do the old, or accidents happen or a thousand and one things. Stage life has plenty of variety, at any rate.” Bobby was sure of this.

Back to the set again... The frantic young prisoner starts to leave the court room with his fierce-mustachioed guard; both their backs are toward the heartless judge. Written in chalk on the broad, blue back of the guard is the scrawled plea; “Please, judge, have a heart! If you don’t let me go, I can’t graduate and I’ll lose my girl.” The stern face of justice thaws a trifle and he calls the prisoner back to the bar...

Bobby bounded off the set to greet a round little Irish peasant who had wandered in from an adjoining stage. Kissing her enthusiastically, he dragged her over to me.

“Guess who this is!” he demanded, boyishly.

The same clear eyes of blue, the same chubby innocent face — it didn’t take a scientific mind to discover the relationship between the two. Bobby’s mother is just as enthused with the screen as her son and takes a delight in playing neighborhood busybodies, sweet mother roles or Irish peasants.

“I’ll never forget the first time Bobby played in pictures,” she began, cosily, as if we had always been friends, “His father and I lived in San Francisco and Bobby came home for a visit after his first screen engagement.

“‘Why, mom,’ he said, ‘there’s a funny guy in little boy’s clothes who talks through a cornucopia and tells everybody what to do. In one picture, there was a poor actor on the floor supposed to be dead, with two fellows fighting all around his body; and he pokes his head up and yells: “‘Get off my face!” and the guy with the cornucopia bawls him out. “But they’re stepping on my face!” “That’s all right,” says the boss, “we gotta get this picture.” Well, we laughed and laughed over Bobby’s experiences.

Bobby’s mother owes her quaint little accent to the fifteen years of her life spent in the North Friesian Islands. These islands lie in the North Sea between the British Isles and Schleswig-Holstein and were settled by the Vikings but came under German domination in 1864.

“It’s very cold there and I used to dream of California. I’d read everything I could about it and drew pictures of palm trees on the frosted window panes. My father would tell me not to be foolish. And then one day, in looking over some old family papers, I came on a scribbled address — Something Watsessing Street, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, U.S.A. I rushed to my father with it, and he explained that a remote connection of the family had gone to America many years before.

“He discouraged me by telling me they hadn’t been heard from in years, but I wrote them a letter telling how I longed to come to America and by return mail came my passage money. Weren’t they good?’’ her blue eyes sparkled with tears, “I was just fifteen and had no English. How my father hated to see me go! Nothing could stop me — Philadelphia was not California, my land of dreams, but it was at least a step toward my goal.”

A transformed Bobby interrupted us. Gone were the dreary prison clothes while the latest collegiate mode adorned his person. Bell trousers so long and so wide they completely engulfed his feet and hid the fancy socks and shining shoes; the last word in campus headgear topped his sleek hair and a glorious blazer covered his silk shirt and showed a natty tie.

With Bobby was his charming leading lady, Frances Lee. Frances is a Wampas Baby Star this year, but she isn’t the first important person to play opposite the comedian. Gloria Swanson, Louise Fazenda, Laura La Plante, Mary Lewis, grand opera prima donna, and Dorothy Devore are among the well-known names that have been featured with Bobby Vernon.

It was at Universal that he met Louise Fazenda. The sparkling comedienne was not much past sixteen and the two young actors gaily experimented with a different make-up for each two-reeler. They played papa and mamma to a leading man on the shady side of forty — long beards, ferocious whiskers, putty noses and wads of gray hair disguising their youth.

When they both went over to the Sennett lot (through the kindness of Ford Sterling) Bobby lost his playmate and found another in Gloria Swanson. He and Gloria romped through numberless comedies with the villainous Wallie Beery pursuing them. One day, feeling that Mr. Sennett did not truly appreciate their art, they went together to a rival producer and offered themselves at a cut rate. Looking at the chubby boy and the bit of a girl, he shook his head. He didn’t feel he could risk his money on either of them.

Almost every actor in Hollywood who amounts to anything has been directed at one time or another by D. W. Griffith... So has Bobby. It was his first and last experience in heavy drama. “The Black Sheep” was the name of the picture and our hero played the title role, doing ever nothing but steal the pennies from his dead grandmother’s eyelids and only omitting this villainy because the script didn’t call for a grandmother.

Laura La Plante and Dorothy Devore were among his leading ladles at the Christie Studio, but the leading lady of his heart has never been on the screen. Mrs. Bobby Vernon has a life-sized career of her own — by name, Barbara Vernon, age five years.

“My mother used to like me until Barbara came along,” teased Bobby, but something in his smile told me that he’d have a poor opinion of anyone who didn’t adore his beloved daughter.

Bobby Vernon, with Florence Gilbert and Louise Fazenda — two of his former leading ladies.

Collection: Motion Picture Director of Hollywood, February 1927