Constance Talmadge Tells Her Untold Tale (1928) 🇺🇸

Constance Talmadge Tells Her Untold Tale (1929) | www.vintoz.com

March 09, 2023

This is the second article of a series called Confessions of the Stars. Stories they have never told before. Facts never before divulged. It constitutes proof positive that there is something new under the sun, former opinion to the contrary.

by Gladys Hall

Probably no one has been more extensively publicized than the debonair Constance Talmadge. Her views on men and marriage have become frayed with rewriting. Her love affairs. Her day-to-day philosophy of life. A casual, careless Constance, reckless and devil-may-care. But there is another Constance Talmadge. There is a Constance you have never met before, never read about, the existence of whom you have never been even vaguely suspicious. A Constance who has donned the cap and bells, the merry motley, to conceal a tender heart, a passionate profundity. A Constance who weeps as well as laughs, who prays as well as plays.

This Constance represents new and incontestable proof that comedy and tragedy are blood-kin.

We introduce you to this new Constance Talmadge. — Author's Note.

"I was the stupidest child ever born.

"I spent my school days learning nothing and pulling wool over the teacher's eyes.

"I was kidnaped, and all but headed for a life of sin when I was seven.

"I had the most hectic First Love in the world, bar none. I was nearly murdered and the gentleman in question bears a scar to this day.

"I'm tired of being 'The Life of the Party.' I'm not the person people think I am. I have another face and I'm going to show it — for the first time.

"These are the five factors in my life I've never revealed before. Never.

"I'll begin at the beginning:

"I was, actually, the stupidest child ever born. Where Norma and Natalie had been bright and precocious, I was dull and slow. When I was eighteen months old, my mother. Peg [Transcriber's note: Margaret L. "Peg" Talmadge], would wring her hands dramatically and wail 'What have I here?'

"I neither walked nor talked, nor did I show any intention of ever doing either. I paid no attention to the world about me. I didn't sit and think: I simply sat.

"I was nearly two years old before I took one single step.

"Until I was six or seven I never played with other children. I made up endless games with paper dolls. These flimsy make-believes were my sole companions. I created families of them and was absorbed in the imaginary lives of these bits of paper for days and weeks at a time. If it had not been for Natalie, who constituted herself my slave and admirer from the moment of my birth, I should have been a female hermit. Incidentally, our more-than-sisterly devotion has never wavered.

A Passion for People

"When I was seven, the Great Change took place. I've been going ever since. My indifference to people changed to a passion for people. I would grab at them in the streets, shout at them from the windows. I would have brought just anyone home with me to stay if I could have got away with it.

"It was my confidence in people that precipitated the first great dramatic event m my life.

"I was kidnaped.

"It happened like this: I was about seven and I was going to Jersey to stay with an aunt. Peg put me on the ferry-boat on the New York side and my aunt was to meet me in Hoboken. I received explicit instructions to speak to no one en route and to stand quietly on the pier until my aunt salvaged me.

"On the way over a nicely dressed, middle-aged woman came up and began to talk to me. Of course I talked back. I told her the entire story of our lives — with considerable embroidery. I threw in little bits about the family mansion in Brooklyn. I omitted to say that it had been loaned to Peg by a friend who was familiar with our straitened circumstances. Nor did I say that they were always straitened. The friend owned the house and could neither sell it nor rent it. While it was on the market, she let us occupy it. Neither did I see fit to tell my ferry-boat friend that we only occupied three or four rooms of it and were hard put to it to heat them.

"She admired my new shoes and I told her, grandly, that my sisters and I each had several pairs. It didn't seem necessary to say that Peg had found a sample shoe shop where shoes were to be had for seventy-five cents and a dollar a pair. Norma and Natalie and Anita Stewart and I shopped there for years. Only recently did Peg find out that Joe Schenck used to be playing cards with the owner of the sample shoes — in a back room — at the very time 'us girls' were shopping there.

Fast Work, Fast Friends

"Well, by the time we reached Hoboken I was gratified to see a veritable blaze of admiration — and something else — in my new friend's eyes. I had managed to convince her that she had a che-ild of wealth in her clutches, and she was going to keep the clutches.

"When the boat docked, no aunt was in evidence. The crowds milled about us to such an extent that I couldn't have seen her if she had been there. I didn't try very hard. I had my first attentive audience, and I was glue.

"The 'kind lady' told me that she would take me to a waiting-room a few blocks away. People always waited there for little girls, she said. Not being an experienced traveler — this was my first sea trip — I trotted along, firmly held. She also informed me that she would like to have me visit her for a while. She would telephone my aunt all about it. She had a lovely house, she said, where lots of young girls stayed and wore pretty clothes and were visited every evening by handsome young gentlemen. This sounded great.

"She kept piloting me along rather strenuously. Two blocks, three, four. Her grasp tightened, dug into me. I felt that she was changing. She no longer called me honeyed names. She seemed to be in a terrific hurry. Where were we going?

"Peg's warnings came back to me. I asked her where we were bound for and she told me to shut up. I began to howl. I kicked and screamed. She tried to act like a worn-out mother subduing a rebellious child. I bit and screamed. people began to stop and stare. It was growing more and more noisy and intense. Finally, abruptly, the woman released her grip and fled. That was the end of her. It might well have been the bitter end of me. I retraced my footsteps and found a frantic aunt. My first faith in human nature had been bruised.

Miscarried Missives

"I was kinda dumb in school. Never cared anything about it.

"The teachers made a weekly practice of sending Peg notes of complaint about me. She never got them. Norma and Natalie and I put our heads together and concocted a workable scheme. We told the teachers that Peg was dangerously ill. In bed with a trained nurse. The doctors had said that the least shock, the least unpleasantness might prove FATAL. We dared not give her the notes. The teachers, not wishing to be parties to matricide, accepted the story. They may have wondered at Peg's continued invalidism, but they did nothing about it. This did I skid through school and into the old Vitagraph studio.

"My first love affair.

"It was red hot. Hectic. Murderous. Dripping with romance and tragedy. One of the clinging, sickening kind that makes trysts and talks about death being better than separation and the possible desirability of double suicide.

"I'd never had any childhood romance. Boys had seemed to prefer to make me a target for mud pies, or an object to be pushed out of trees and off fences.

"When the First Dark Romantic Love came along, we took it violently. I wasn't used to being a goddess, adored and supplicated. We were just horribly in love. I can't imagine why we didn't do some of the lurid things we threatened to do. Sixth sense, perhaps. We're good friends now — and laugh about it together. But First Love is always a little sad, even in retrospect.

All Strangled Up

"One dark and stormy night we were coming home from a party in a taxicab. I had smiled once or twice at some other youth. Whatever it was, he tried to strangle me. And he very nearly succeeded. It wasn't make-believe. His fingers twisted round my throat and for the first time in my life I saw the light of the killer in a man's eyes. I thought my hour had come and I didn't know whether I was more terrified or more thrilled. It was pain and it was pleasure. After all, wasn't I being the heroine of a ten-twent'-thirt' mellerdrammer?

"I was, indeed. I bore the imprints of his fingers for days to come. I finally managed to gasp out an appeal to his Better Nature and after a few more twists of my throat and several muttered threats and curses he decided to let me live.

“Eventually I met Another Man. The answer to that is: I would! I was very young and very inexperienced and a new love affair was, to me, a new book that had to be read. I felt more like a heroine than ever. I had now to tell my First Love that Was Over. I told him in my dressing-room at the studio and — another tragedy took place.

"He didn't look pale and interesting and fall on his knees to me, as I had fondly imagined. He looked green and sick and he fainted, head on to the glass cover of the dressing-table. His head was gashed open and his blood dripped on my hands and on the door. I thought I'd killed him. I hadn't, but he bears the scar to this day.

"I'm tired of being 'The Life of the Party.'

"I'm deathly tired of it.

"It seems to me that the first role you play in life is very much like the first roles you happen to play on the screen. You're never let off of them. You never get away from them.

Condemned to Comedy

"I liked fun and I started in by playing the clown. I can't stop being the clown now, now that I am weary of it. I started by being a screen comedienne and I can't break away from that, to date. I wanted, desperately, to play Sadie Thompson. Jeanne Eagels wanted me to play it. Do you suppose anyone at the studio could see me in that role? Don't be hysterical. I was a comedienne, wasn't I? Then how, how, they wanted to know, could I play the devastated Sadie Thompson?

"Some of my tears were shed over that. No one wants to laugh all the time. No one cart. No one does. I don't. But try to make people believe that. Try to stop being the life of the party. If I try to stop it, if I go out and am quiet, people say to me: 'What's the matter. Don't you feel well?'

"Rather than explain my state of health and my state of mind, I get into the step expected of me and let it go.

"It's a painful and a difficult process, this turning of a hidden side to the public. Difficult for me to explain that the self I am has never been known because it has never been revealed. Because, really, it has never been asked for.

"It sounds dramatic to tell of the tears I have shed and the dark hours I have known and the fears and regrets I have endured. But if I must say it, how say it any other way?

"I don't suppose there are many people who worry over things more than I do. Or anyone who has a more shrinking dread of the future. If I had to worry about money, too, I think I would go mad. But thanks to Peg, that ogre is spared me. A year or two ago she created a trust fund for me so that even if I should never work again I could continue to live as I do for one year or one thousand. In the event of my death the money goes to Peg and in the event of her death, too, it goes to Natalie's boys.

Afraid to Have a Baby

"I wish I had had a baby. I wish I had had one when I was married the first time. I adore children and I wish to God I had had one when I was very young and not afraid of pain. I am afraid of pain now. My dentist doubles his price to me because I am so ghastly to work on. Physical suffering is an ogre I do shudder to face.

"I like to read. I like to be alone. I like a few parties because I love many people. The endless words that have been written about my living from day to day are false. Rot. Untrue. Few of us in public life create ourselves. We create a first impression and that remains.

"I'm tired of being a comedienne, skimming the surfaces of things. Now that I am through at United Artists I want to get down to the roots of things. Be real Be myself. Not a mere facet of myself, one light tune endlessly harped on."

Photo by: Irving Chidnoff (1896–1966)

Photo by: Russell Ball (1891–1942)

Photo by: Charles E. Bulloch

Betty Compson's Certified Confession

Constance Talmadge's disclosures concerning the secret passages in her life, made public for the first time in the November issue of Motion Picture Classic, are startling.

But they constitute only the beginning of a series of revelations equally astounding by a number of stars equally notable.

Next month's — the December — Classic will bring to you the third of these confessional articles.

It will be the story, the courageous and simple and outright story, the hitherto hidden phases of the career of Betty Compson.

This astonishing magazine feature will relate to you, exactly as Miss Compson has related it to us, the intimate chapters of her life's history which up to the present have been jealously withheld.

They comprise things not only, until now, never before published, but things never before told — to anyone.

And this, as well as their truth, is certified by Miss Compson's own affidavit, properly witnessed, notarized and sealed.

Watch for Betty Compson's real story. It will reach you November 10 — the day when your newsstand will have for you your copy of the December

Motion Picture Classic — It's the Magazine with the Personality

Collection: Motion Picture Classic Magazine, November 1928

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Confessions of the Stars series: