Carol Dempster — The Mystery Girl of Pictures (1925) 🇺🇸
Even after three years in pictures, she remains detached yet not disinterested, impartial and yet vitally concerned.
by Dorothy Herzog
Our interest in Carol arose when we saw her in Mr. Griffith’s Dream Street and when he said to us:
“Miss Dempster came to my studio one day while I was producing in Hollywood. At the time, she was studying dancing with Ruth St. Denis, who claimed her ‘potentially the greatest prospect in classical dancing since Pavlowa’s time.’ Now anyone with the poise and grace to become such a potentiality as a dancer undoubtedly had ability to rise to similar heights in an allied art if properly developed. I kept an eye on her and when I decided to produce Dream Street selected her as the most likely candidate for the leading feminine role.”
After that, of course, nothing would do but we interview Carol, so a luncheon was arranged at a quiet tearoom on 57th Street just west of Fifth Avenue. For the first time in our experience, a screen star arrived before we did. Carol rose from her chair as we hastened toward her, the picture of wistfulness troubled by an attack of nerves that sent her long, slim fingers worrying over her light, brown sport hat, lips puckered, willowy body swaying like a stripling tree in the breeze.
“There is nothing of interest I can tell you about myself,” she murmured even before we swung into personalities.
A year later, we met Carol again with a mutual friend and hailed her with:
“My dear, I understand you are going to the Coast to be Ben Turpin’s leading lady.”
She chortled gleefully, head thrown back, hands clasped tight before her.
“But, seriously,” we went on, anxious to learn about the progress of her new picture.
“Oh, there is nothing of interest I can tell you about myself,” and her eyes grew suddenly fearful. As we became better acquainted with Carol, we discovered that one minute she is ready to weep over failure to find the right word in a cross-word puzzle, only to be stuttering with superlatives the next, telling you how splendid W. C. Fields is in “Poppy.”
We have sat by the half hour, listening to talk of her favorite stars, praising their ability and wondering if she will ever be numbered with them. She rates Mary Pickford, Norma Talmadge, and Gloria Swanson as the greatest of them. She will tell you what a wonderful man D. W. Griffith is — his extraordinary patience in directing players and allowing them time to study and work over parts.
Only recently, Mr. Griffith, who is loath to praise, remarked to us: “Miss Dempster has become very inventive in stage business, in individualizing the character she portrays.”
Yet no matter how well you may get to know this shy creature, the real Carol flees like the wind into the lonely confines of her being if you attempt to maneuver the conversation to herself.
“Oh, there is nothing of interest I can tell you,” she parries inevitably.
Carol’s worst fault is modesty, modesty that halts just on the abyss of an inferiority complex. When she started working at Famous Players’ Long Island Studio, she was as excited as a school girl going through a motion picture plant for the first time. She had always been accustomed to isolation at Mr. Griffith’s studio in Mamaroneck and now, for the first time, she had her own dressing-room in a big studio. She gazed awestruck at Tom Meighan [Thomas Meighan], at Bebe Daniels, at Richard Dix, at all the other popular celluloid lights.
“Why don’t you speak to them?” we suggested. “Pshaw, they wouldn’t know me.”
Then one day Mr. Griffith introduced her to Tom Meighan and that seemed to stimulate courage, for she commenced to nod to every one.
“You know,” she confided, “I’m just a country girl from a Mamaroneck studio and all country girls speak to neighbors in their home town. So that is what I am doing.”
Because of this eagerness to meet people, yet riotous confusion when she does, Carol has comparatively few intimate friends. Her constant companion is Mrs. Greathouse, wife of one of Mr. Griffith’s assistants. Her favorite orgy is — eating waffles.
Yet deep down beneath this self-consciousness, Carol nourishes a rich, nimble mind and the most extraordinary memory we have yet come in contact with. We once told her we would telephone her at a certain time. Failing to do so, she called us to learn why the neglect. This, mind you, despite the fact she was working in a picture and being fitted for clothes when not on the set.
She is only twenty-four and before her stretches a hazy future which can be as brilliant as she wishes.
“That youngster,” a mutual friend once averred, “can mold her career in any line and be a success. She has an amazing knack of getting inside a person. She attracts. She takes. She absorbs. Rarely does she give. And that retentive mind of hers files away what she has taken. When you think that Carol supplanted Lillian Gish as Mr. Griffith’s leading woman you have said everything. She wears clothes with a swank and an individuality few girls possess. Don’t forget she can act, too.”
But it took Mr. Griffith to summarize the real Carol in saying: “Miss Dempster achieved in ‘Isn’t Life Wonderful?’ the heights prognosticated for her years ago by Ruth St. Denis and myself.”
And that is praise, indeed.
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Since her first success in Dream Street, Carol Dempster has kept apart from the rush of the movie world. She has avoided the white light of publicity. Do you remember her in this scene with Edward Peil [Edward Peil Sr.]?
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Collection: Photoplay Magazine, July 1925
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