Doris Grey — And They Made Her a Star (1917) 🇺🇸

August 08, 2026

It is easy to make a girl famous — it is harder to make her popular. But it can be done as Doris did it.

by J. B. Griswald

Abraham Lincoln may not have known a great deal about the motion-picture business, but he left to posterity a line that applies to certain conditions in the realm of the celluloid drama. Lincoln opined that you can’t fool all of the people all of the time, which can be paraphrased into a movie maxim, ‘you can’t make a star with publicity alone.”

The motion-picture business has been crowded with meteoric careers. A girl was pretty and so they made her a star. A girl was ambitious and her father had money, or she had influence, or she was cute, or she could drive a flying machine, or she had fallen off a ten-story building and had landed unhurt, or she had shot her husband, or she had won a swimming contest, or she had a pet chimpanzee, or she had invented a new way to make fudge, or the camera man had some unexposed negative he didn’t know what to do with, or the general manager was trying to cut expenses — and so they made her a star.

She was a star for from three to five reels, and then nothing but a cinder, burned out.

That was in the olden days. The very star system itself has protected the public and has driven out the incompetents. Now a girl must be an actress before, not after, she gets her name on the three sheets and her picture in the magazines. It was the ill-advised motion-picture magnate who tried to make an incompetent famous, and, hoist by his own petard, he has perished.

The companies that have survived are the ones that early in the game conceived the idea — at that time quite radical — that a play should be acted by actors and actresses, not by acrobats or persons notorious. These companies, for the most part, were headed by men who had been theatrical producers before they went into motion pictures, and who realized that the motion-picture play was to be something more than something to look at; it was to be something to think about.

A motion-picture play must have a star. Some authorities will say the star system is wrong, but stop and think. How do you pick the pictures you are going to see? Do you say, “Let’s go over and see The Sins of the Populace, or The Undertaker’s Bride?” Of course you don’t. You say, “Let’s go see Mary Pickford,” or Theda Bara, or Florence La Badie, or Marguerite Clark, or Gladys Hulette, as the case may be.

Motion-picture fans follow stars. Advertising may make the patrons go see an actress once, but if she doesn’t satisfy they never go to see her again. The better she is advertised the more easily they remember that they don’t like her. It’s the same theory that is used in selling soap or breakfast food or smoking tobacco. The publicity may make you take a chance, but if the product is no good you don’t try it again.

All of which has made motion-picture producers careful about selecting stars. They try them out first, and they do not open a big advertising campaign until they are sure that they are going to make good.

The stars you see in motion pictures to-day get their names into the electric lights because they have made good, because men who make it their business to know talent when they see it have decided that the girl or the man has talent, that the public is going to like her or him and will pay money to get in for a look at five thousand feet.

There’s no sentiment in it now. It’s business.

Now we’re into the story. That was just the introduction, meant to lead you on, to instruct you so that you would understand the why of the announcement from Edwin Thanhouser that he has decided to star Doris Grey and Wayne Arey. Doris Grey was the prettiest girl at the ball given by the Boston motion-picture exhibitors in Boston last December. Mr. Thanhouser had agreed to take the prettiest girl and put her into a picture. He promised nothing more than that. He had not promised to make her a star. In fact, he had not expected to.

Doris appeared in a three-reeler called What Doris Did. Doris did various things. Until she joined the Thanhouser Company she never had seen a motion picture in the process of making. Her histrionic efforts had been confined to amateur entertainments at Dorchester High School, and what she had learned in a Boston school of expression. You probably imagine that she was pretty bad. You’re half right. She was pretty, but not bad.

Doris did surprisingly well, so well that Mr. Thanhouser, who had expected to let her go after making the one picture, made her a member of his stock company and instructed his directors to help her in every way possible. Mr. Thanhouser was a man of wide theatrical experience before he went into motion pictures. He was one of the most successful stock producers in the country, with companies of high standing in Milwaukee and Chicago, when he decided to try his luck in celluloid. He knows an actress when he sees one, and he saw that Doris had talent.

For eight months Doris Grey went to a motion-picture school at the Thanhouser studios. She appeared in all sorts of parts, and was given every opportunity to learn the art of pantomime.

Doris has made good. She has withstood the test. Now she is a real star. Mr. Thanhouser believes she is destined to become a great motion-picture actress. If he didn’t believe so, he would not have signed her to a longtime contract at a large salary.

Doris is only nineteen years old. Her success has not changed her in the slightest particular. She is a good friend to everybody, and she still cannot understand why she has been selected to receive this great opportunity. When she attended the motion-picture, ball at Boston she accompanied her little cousin. Doris had no intention of competing, but she entered her cousin in the contest. The judges ignored the cousin and chose Doris. So works fate.

While Doris Grey was being developed in the Thanhouser studios a young man also was rising to stardom. He was Wayne Arey, who is co-starred with Miss Grey. Mr. Arey had a long stock experience before he went into pictures -and had had important parts in Belasco and Frohman productions. Mr. Thanhouser recognized that Mr. Arey would make good, and gave him a chance to prove it.

Now, under the direction of Ernest Warde, Miss Grey and Mr. Arey are doing excellent work. Miss Grey and Mr. Arey have proved to be good players,

And so they made them stars.

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