Clara Kimball Young — Sans Grease Paint and Wig (1914) 🇺🇸
Seemingly, Clara Kimball Young was lost. Nobody had seen her come into the studio; nobody had seen her go out of it.
by Mabel Condon
Samuel Spedon dispatched three boys to look for her. “Jimmy” Young [James Young], her director-actor husband, postponed the taking of an interior, to find her. Hughie Mack, who was sitting on a table just within the entrance-exit door, for the simple reason that ordinary chairs weren’t large enough and he had to sit somewhere, volunteered to “keep an eye on the door.”
“She must be home,” “Jimmy” decided when neither Mack’s eye, the boys nor himself had succeeded in locating Clara. “If you’d care to go over, it’s the first house, next to the vacant lot on the second street around the corner from here.”
Sounded simple. “Let’s look again,” I suggested. We started all over and the first place we looked we found her. It was the projection-room. Mr. Young recognized her voice from without the door.
“Fat?” the voice was saying, “It’s the new kind of skin-food I’m using!”
“We’ve been looking for you for hours, dear,” Mr. Young announced. Fifteen minutes would more than have covered the hunt.
“I came in the other way,” Clara explained. “It was shorter.” I remembered that Mr. Mack still had his eye on the front door.
Clara announced she knew where there was a secluded bench and she invited me to share it. Mr. Young came, too.
Mr. Young’s wife looked lovely and Mr. Young told her so. She wore a long seal coat over a pretty afternoon gown and her hat was black with a bird of paradise tipping its saucy turn. Clara is pretty, much prettier than the screen shows her to be.
“Going somewhere?” Mr. Young wanted to know with an expression which signaled either utter forgetfulness of something or a desire to establish belief in a forgetfulness which was not.
“Jimmy!” He was discovered. “Aren’t you coming to the tea, too, dear?”
“I don’t like teas!” “Jimmy” protested, wrinkling his nose and running his hand through his hair to make it stand up straight, by way of illustrating just how much he didn’t like teas.
“But this tea, Jimmy! Really, I’d like to have you come!
“Jimmy” remembered of a sudden that the interior in the studio upstairs was still untaken and he hurried away to see to it.
“Mr. Young told me last summer about how you and he came very nearly never meeting each other,” I suggested, hoping to hear her version of the romance. And she told me.
“It was in Chicago that we didn’t meet,” she began. “I was born in Chicago and went to St. Xavier’s Academy there. That was when I was grown up though; when I was a kid, I traveled all over the country with my father and mother [Edward Kimball | Mrs. E. M. Kimball]. They were both on the stage. I got a little schooling everywhere we stayed for more than a month, and then, when I was sixteen, my mother decided I should stay at one school for two years, so I went to St. Xavier’s.
“That was where I didn’t meet Jimmy and all because I hated lectures! One was announced one day to be given by Mr. James Young. I declared to the girls that nothing could persuade me to attend a dry old lecture so I found some excuse to make for my absence and didn’t go. He came to the academy once or twice later, but each time I managed to excuse myself from the lectures.
“It was after I had left school and taken up private theatricals that we finally met. Jimmy was looking for somebody to play opposite him in a vaudeville act and I happened to suit, so we tried it. H. B. Harris’ musical comedy had afforded me experience previous to that. We married while playing in vaudeville and were considering another offer on the road when an opportunity to work in pictures presented itself and we came to work for the Vitagraph. It must be four years ago, though it seems much less.
“Now, we wouldn’t care to go back to the stage. Pictures are much more interesting and more satisfactory, too, I believe. For you get nearer the people when they see you every night. I enjoy all of my work, even though I don’t get much of a chance to do the kind I like the best.”
“And that is?” I asked, as she paused to tighten her gray silk veil, through which her dark eyes looked soft and regretful.
“Dramatics,” she answered, tucking the ends of the veil into the rim of her hat and adjusting the front of it snugly under her chin. “I love dramatic parts and invariably I am cast for comedies. I don’t know why they make me play comedies. I feel sure I never was meant to. Since Mr. Young has been directing I play in his company mostly, and when he arranged to produce that three-reel comedy for the Vitagraph theater and insisted that I play the feminine lead I gave up all hope of ever convincing people I was meant for a tragedy queen. Hereafter when comedies are thrust upon me, I’m going to take them and rejoice.”
“Rejoice at what, my dear?” came Mr. Young’s voice, followed by Mr. Young, as he hurried down from the studio and began fussing with the files in the office, in which the bench was a decoration. “Have you decided to give up the tea idea?” he asked hopefully.
Clara didn’t have time to answer just then as she, the bench and I were saying goodbye to each other. But as I opened the door I heard her reply, “No, indeed: And Jimmy dear, it’s time you went over home and changed your things.”
And as I closed the door, Mr. Young’s answer was discernible. It was, “I hate teas! And besides, I have enough work to keep me here till six o’clock.”
Ten minutes later as I waited on the Avenue “L” platform for a Brighton train, I saw a man leave the studio, walk to the second street from the corner, cross the vacant lot and enter the first house.
It was “Jimmy.”
—
Marion Leonard Rejoins Warners
The past week marked the return of Miss Marion Leonard, one of the most popular idols of the motion picture fans, to the program of Warner’s Features, Inc. When interviewed, Miss Leonard expressed great delight over the reports that she had received from various parts of the country, indicating that the lovers of motion pictures were demanding more of her splendid productions.
Her first release will be entitled, “The Rose of Yesteryear,” a powerful love drama in which Miss Leonard does some of the finest work of her career. Her second release will be entitled “Donna Isola,” and the third release will be entitled “Judgment.” The recital of Miss Leonard’s experience in motion pictures takes one back several years to the period when she appeared under the Rex brand, and later starred in several other of the leading brands. About a year ago she branched out and began to make her own multiple reel productions.
The story of The Rose of Yesteryear opens with Miss Leonard, now a woman past the prime of life, relating the sad, romantic story of her life to her dearest niece who is engaged to be married. As in a vision, the story shifts back forty years and discloses the interior of an orphan asylum. Three babies are there — two boy babies and one baby girl — awaiting adoption into good homes.
Years pass and the orphaned children have grown up in three different homes. Miss Leonard’s dearest treasures are a pair of tiny baby shoes and a faded plaid shawl given to her foster parents by the asylum nurse. Of her twin brother she knows nothing, except that he too has a tiny pair of shoes like those in her keeping.
She loves and is loved in return by a dashing chap whose mother had adopted him when a baby.
They decide to elope but are stopped by the groom’s mother, who thinks she has discovered that Miss Leonard and her son are brother and sister — at least the baby shoes tend to prove it.
In a quiet village Miss Leonard discovers her real brother, a clergyman, whose foster parents had lost his tiny shoes at the time of his adoption.
She returns to the city and witnesses the marriage of her beloved to another woman. So ended her romance while all the years she treasured the tiny baby shoes that had brought her face to face with a great tragedy.
Marion Leonard in The Rose of Yesteryear.
Collection: Motography Magazine, March 1914