Carmel Myers — The Girl Who Cried (1920) 🇺🇸

Carmel Myers — The Girl Who Cried (1920) | www.vintoz.com

March 14, 2023

When one is born of a long line of dark-eyed, luscious-lipped femininity who might all have been called Roses of Sharon, when one has lived all of one's brief life in golden California — is it any wonder that, when the Big Chance comes, one simply loses control and lets one's emotions have everything their own way? Carmel Myers says it isn't.

by Gene North

Carmel isn't old enough even yet to reason it all out. In fact if she did, a fellow-philosopher wouldn't pay much attention to her, he would be so busy watching her tinted skin flush as she laughs, her olive-green eyes perform a hula-hula whenever she smiles. But it is true that as she comes across the big places in her professional — and personal — life, she becomes almost an Oriental Niobe or, to be more modern, a California-bred Alice in Wonderland, who floated to success in a flood of her own tears.

When David Griffith asked her how she would like to go into pictures under his direction, she looked up at him, her lip quivered. and she burst into tears. And later on, when another director tried to get her to cry for the camera, she couldn't. Until she ran to her mother and said, '"Mama, I simply cannot cry" — and cried then and there, and was pushed back in front of the camera by her mother before the fountain dried.

Universal wanted to star her. Mr. Laemmle called her into his office and talked over a contract.

"Would you like to be a star?” he asked, kindly. Carmel, again, seemed about to burst with joy. Mr. Laemmle looked at her in alarm. "There, there, little girl," he said, distressed to the point of withdrawing his offer — "don't cry!"

So one may imagine her perfect flood of tears when she was approached with an offer to become a legitimate actress. Something she had never done and accordingly yearned to do. You see, her only theatrical experience before her Griffith engagement was playing show with a small group of children. Carmel always managed to be the leading lady and the shows in which she starred were always well attended. She was, in fact, Hollywood's foremost amateur actress.

She and her mother were in her dressing-room at the Shubert Theater, where a Broadway success was playing — a musical comedy — "The Magic Melody." (Note: it's a "Broadway" theater and a "Broadway" attraction if it plays on any one of the middle-Forty side-streets that sprout from the Great White Way.) Carmel had made unto herself a little vow: that she would find a place for herself, no matter how small, in a Broadway cast, and stay there until she wanted to go back to pictures. She found it — and it wasn't so very small, either. She weathered a winter — her first — in New York, slid on the ice and plowed through the slush and got jammed in the subway and crushed in the cars. After a winter in New York, California's native daughter is homesick.

I should have called this story "Back to the orange groves." She longs to be back, and when I talked to her she was on the eve of signing a picture contract that would take her home — to the Myers' big Hollywood house, to her own little car, and to her father — who is a learned rabbi of Los Angeles. It is said the waiting-list for a position as chauffeur and gardener to the Myers menage is exceedingly large: it seems that Carmel drives the car most of the time, doubles as the mechanician, mows the lawn, and is a general handy-girl around the house. All the chauffeur has to do is look the part. That's what Mother says.

She's going back to pictures as soon as the Eastern tour of her play has ended. After her song-and-dance on Broadway, she decided that while she would look seventeen across the footlights five years from now, the camera is kind only to the really youthful. So she's taking advantage of her spring-time years to make hay in California sunshine, with Universal, the company she was with prior to her desertion of the films.

She was born in San Francisco, but was brought up in the City of the Angels and moving picture studios.

But if you think the way has been rather easy for this little brunette, consider that she has never stopped studying a minute — that when she is at home, she spends a certain time each day, or evening, in her father's study, wrestling with a dead language or a live problem in advanced algebra. In addition, she takes dancing lessons, and she also sings. So she hasn't much time to cry.

Collection: Photoplay MagazineJuly 1920