Dale Fuller — Dale the Dependable (1923) 🇺🇸
It was characteristic of Dale Fuller that when I phoned her I wanted to interview her, but was buried in work, she didn’t talk about her own appointments — though she was in the last-minute rush of packing to go on location — but hauled out faithful “Nellie,” her gas filly, and hustled over to my house. Always thoughtful and considerate, her many little kindnesses to me and to others are illustrative of a woman whose own path has been rocky and who will go to any trouble to make thing’s easier for another.
by Myrtle Gebhart
“I’ve been packed for two weeks,” she cried, a bit breathlessly. “Remember, the last time you were over, the rows of pink doo-daddles all laid out on the bed, bows just so, everything spic and span to be packed? We’ve been on the verge of leaving for three weeks — and now, after all that labor of getting ready, everything’s dirty again! I’ll have a staggering laundry bill when I reach San Francisco— if I ever do!”
Dale Fuller — of whom you doubtlessly have heard little, as she is not the type that flutters in the limelight — is to have her chance, after years of thankless, unrewarded dramatic training, in the leading role of McTeague [Greed (1924)],” Von Stroheim’s [Erich von Stroheim] first production for Goldwyn and the picturization of the famed Frank Norris novel. Her engagement for roles in three ten-reel productions consecutively — Foolish Wives, “Merry-Go-Round,” and McTeague — all with the same director, establishes a record. Incidentally, this leading role in McTeague has brought her out, vitalized her, until she’s much more animated than she has ever been in the past.
Dale Fuller feels that the part she is playing in Von Stroheim’s production of Frank Norris’ McTeague is an opportunity in a million.
It’s a pity you don’t see a great deal of Dale in Merry-Go-Round, the Universal extravaganza begun by Von Stroheim and completed by Rupert Julian, though originally her part was a prominent one.
But you can’t keep a worthy talent down — so here was Dale, excited out of her customary reserve at the opportunity to prove herself again, as she did as the unforgettable maid in Foolish Wives.
“I can almost qualify for the black-and-blue drama,” she laughed, as she hurried out to the back yard to see how the baby chicks were doing. She has a regular menagerie of her own — canaries, dogs, doves, cats, parrots, all living together strangely amicable. “In Foolish Wives I committed suicide, in Merry-Go-Round I was choked to death, and in McTeague I get my throat cut. But Mr. Von is giving me a husband — Cesare Gravina — and a baby, and they’re things to be grateful for.”
Rather reserved, it is very difficult to become acquainted with her. I had known Dale, intimately, too, for over a year before she gave me those confidences that mark the real friendship. It is not that she is shy, for she’s capably self-confident and composed upon all occasions; it’s that she has life catalogued, in her quiet, thorough way, takes from it what she wants, passes up what does not interest her. Her mind is a definite one; her ideas well thought out. If she has no opinions upon a subject, she tells you frankly, she doesn’t try to sheathe her ignorance of it with vague comments.
Sometimes I think it’s easier to write about those you know only casually than those who are the closest to you, for one loses perspective. One hardly knows, from the mass of incidents that fill the past, which to select as illustrative of the person under the microscope. But, in a general way, the qualities about Dale Fuller that have won my admiration are her absolute thoroughness, her sincerity and frankness, and her hatred of pretense. A bit didactic in her opinions, varying often from the public trend, she seldom changes them; she is for or against a thing and no fear of public ridicule causes her to veer from her beliefs.
A while back, after the flop of Foolish Wives, a number of those who had strongly tooted for Von Stroheim welched, squirmed under cover, some even changing to the other side of criticism. Not so Dale.
“He is the master director,” she has stuck to her guns under fire. “Beside the artistic sense, he has the detail mind. He will spend hours seeing that the insignia on a soldier’s coat is just so. A waste of time, perhaps? There is no such thing as time, when one wants to attain artistic perfection. Better ten years to do a thing well than a hodgepodge of weeks. Mr. Von’s pictures are technically correct in every detail.
“Beside this attention to detail, Mr. Von has that magnetizing gift for going right to your soul, bringing things out of you. With other directors I always have a sense of pretense; I am a puppet who goes through certain grimaces and motions to earn my salary. Few people realize that good direction demands a feeling of power over, at least understanding of, the actors; Mr. Von has that sensitized thing difficult to put into words and the lack of which makes so many poor directors, the thing that brings out your bottled-up repression.
“There is no spectacular background in McTeague. It is a grim, gruesome story, laid in San Francisco’s junk alleys and tenement sections. I am glad that the settings are so somber — a spectacular background is for people who can’t act. It cannot but dwarf any real acting that is done — it is impossible to make your work rise above gilt stairways and marble buildings.”
That Dale will give to the role of the vivid Maria Macapia the same intensity that characterized her maid portrayal in Foolish Wives is assured by her earnestness, her feeling of having found herself again under Mr. Von’s tutelage after wallowing aimlessly in the mirage of others’ less’ skilled direction.
Dale’s reward has been justly earned by a hard apprenticeship in thankless roles. After a girlhood in stock and repertoire where the business of acting was ground into her, she played for four years her caricatures in Mack Sennett comedies.
“I want to be an actress,” she continued, somber brown eyes flashing with new sparkle. “Not the word as interpreted to-day; but, as years ago, when the term was distinctive, meaning a woman bred and reared to the spirit of the theater, one who mimics the realities of life.”
She lives alone — except for her menagerie — in half of a big green old-fashioned house on top of a hill, a homy place, dark and restful. Bereaved of loved ones at nineteen, a succession of accidents and illnesses that confined her to her bed for many months at a stretch, the struggle to get ahead in a business where beauty counts more than brains — her path has not been rose-strewn. Now, at twenty-six, we have an actress trained in emotional repression and response, who knows life and is not afraid of it and does not do it up in tissue and pink ribbon. Matter-of-fact, an individual who believes in making good to herself rather than to the public — which, after all, cannot but follow — Dale Fuller stands now on the threshold of the great things that she has earned.
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Photo by: Clarence Sinclair Bull (1896–1979)
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Collection: Picture Play Magazine, October 1923