Bubbling Bessie Barriscale (1917) 🇺🇸
There are very few people who have the privilege of really knowing Bessie Barriscale.
by Dick Willis
Those who are lucky enough to be on her visiting list know her, and the artists who have worked with her in the studio know her, but the majority of actors and actresses around the Culver City plant see her as she goes to or returns from her work, a serious girl with thoughts centered on her art. The moment Miss Bessie leaves the studio entrance, and indeed up to the time she enters it, she is quite another person, full of fun and mischief, bubbling over with the joy of living and ever thinking of her friends.
She does not drive alone — in fact, she scarcely ever drives a car herself — she leaves that to her hubby Howard Hickman.
There are two things which Miss Barriscale insists on at home, plenty of fun and comfort. They like home, these two delightful people, and spend most of their private time there. The white lights of the Pacific-coast-Broadway sees but little of them, and their downtown pilgrimages are nearly always made to view the latest photoplays or to attend the theater. There is a motion picture house just “round the corner” from where they live, and they are well known there. In fact, the proprietor always tries to see that they get the same seats when they attend.
She is entirely unaffected, and her astonishing success has not turned her pretty head in the least. It must be remembered that she had a distinguished stage career, and that Richard Walton Tully wrote The Bird of Paradise with Miss Barriscale in view for the main character, and that she created the role which has also helped to make famous three other actresses who followed her. She has invariably set a good example to follow too. She also created the part of Rose in Rose of the Rancho on the speaking stage, a part which she also starred in for the Lasky company, it being her first picture experience. Among her many other successes have been “Plain Jane,” “A Corner in Colleens,” “The Snarl,” “Cup of Life,” “The Painted Lady,” “The Mating,” “The Payment,” “Bullets and Brown Eyes,” and “The Reward.”
At home she attends to her pretty garden, confesses to reading a lot and to writing a little, to enjoying comfy clothes and talking quite a little, the Howard Hickman person being an excellent listener. By the way, he contributes to the gaiety of the household, for he has a most even temper, and is a good business man to boot, and, put your ears close — he is actually in love with that pretty wife of his, which may be bad news to some gilded youths, but it is a fact which cannot be overcome, strange though it may appear.
And besides these accomplishments we are told that Miss Barriscale knows how to bake a pie. A real lemon meringue a la Barriscale. And, if we are to believe those who have tasted a sample, it is some pie. Not a Keystone or “prop” pie, and assuredly not the baker’s product one sees piled high on the marble slabs of the quick lunch emporium. But a real old-fashioned lemon meringue pie that “melts in the mouth.”
One of these pies was prepared and eaten by this dainty little star and her leading man, Charles K. French, in one of the last scenes of the latest Triangle Kay-Bee production, “Hater of Men.”
Miss Barriscale could have easily “faked” the scenes, which show her, making this pie, but she desired to convince her associates of her ability as a pastry mistress. And, after partaking of it, the members of the company insisted upon having a recipe.
“Oh, I can make better pastries than that,” Miss Barriscale says. “I think if I hadn’t gotten into the theatrical profession, I would have been a specialist in cooking.”
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Collection: Photoplay Magazine, August 1917
(The Photo-Play Journal for August, 1917)