Carmelita Geraghty — Child of Fortune (1924) 🇺🇸
Recipe for one very intriguing personality: Mix the lambent fires and the languorous grace of a Spanish ancestry with the aggressive spirit and the bubbling wit of the Irish, place the concoction in colorful Hollywood, season slightly with distinguished family to add poise, and you’ will have one interesting and lovely young person named Carmelita Geraghty.
Carmelita is in pictures — heart and soul in them. Carmelita’s mother is of the old Spanish De Casseres family — the “tree” goes back to the thirteenth century, its branches having held the torches of many glittering achievements in Spain’s political and military history — and to her daughter she has given a gracious background. And Carmelita’s father is Tom Geraghty [Thomas J. Geraghty], who has two claims to fame — one that he is supervising director of Paramount productions and a scenario writer of note, the other that he wears the most weird and yet intriguing neckties in Hollywood. Only an Irishman could get away with the ties that Tom Geraghty wears without a blush.
A child of fortune, indeed. The doors of California’s Spanish social world are eager to receive her — and those doors are closed impregnably to the new rich who haven’t generations of tradition back of them. She has maids at her beck and call and a lovely home. It is a wonder that Carmelita has not been spoiled. On the contrary she is determined to rise or fall by her own efforts. She insists upon paying her mother board and buying her own clothes, and Mrs. Geraghty, being wise as well as gracious, permits her to do so.
Carmelita is clever. In her acting she has had as yet little opportunity to express her personality, but she has a little wav of getting what she wants that is going to mean a great deal as she goes on. Still on the sunny side of twenty, naive, childish at times, she has bred in her that feminine allure of her Spanish ancestry, which serves to temper with discretion the do-it-or-die spirit of the Irish.
If the director wants a scene done one wav and Carmelita. knowing what the girls of to-day would do in a certain situation though the wisest of directors sometimes don’t, thinks it should be done another, she does not argue. Ah, no, not Carmelita. One killing glance from those big, brown baby-vamp eyes, the slurring cadences of that soft voice, “Of course you are right, you are so clever and know all about those things — but won’t you, just this once to please me, let me try it my way too?”
The director humors her — what man wouldn’t, with Carmelita focusing her batteries full upon him? The scene is shot both ways; and when both are viewed in the projection room, nine times out of ten her method wins.
“Mother couldn’t see at first why I should want to work at anything, when I had all the money and clothes I needed or wanted,” began Carmelita, lounging indolently against a pile of cushions, flashing brown eyes and expressive hands italicizing each word. “But, even while I was going to high school, I got tired of being called ‘Tom Geraghty’s daughter.’”
“Daddy wanted me to write, but I was crazy to act.”
It is to her credit that she began as an extra, setting that firm little chin against her father’s coaxing that she let him pull a string or two for her.
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Photo by: Edwin Bower Hesser
Collection: Picture Play Magazine, April 1924