Edith Allen — A Girl of the Ritz (1924) 🇺🇸
It is interesting to find a girl who has no pose other than the one Nature and her own experiences endowed her with.
Such a person is Edith Allen. She is as attractive and as modern as the advance Paris styles she usually wears. In the Ritz she is a consistent part of the gathering of last year’s debutantes, next year’s prima donnas, and the rest of the younger element of the world of fashion. In Hollywood her modish clothes brought not a few giggles — according to her own spirited account — from the flat-heeled, sports-clad sisterhood.
The story of Edith Allen’s, entry into pictures has often been told, but it is so unusual that it is worth repeating. Rex Ingram and Alice Terry saw her dancing at Montmartre in New York, found a mutual friend to introduce them, gave her a test and took her to Hollywood to play the rôle next in importance to Alice Terry’s in Scaramouche.
“To tell the truth, that wasn’t my first experience in pictures. More than two years ago I wanted to find out what I’d look like on the screen. I went to see Harry Rapf, lied to him and said I had had experience, and got the part of a maid in Why Girls Leave Home. I looked so awful on the screen I thought I would never try again. I went back to vaudeville. But people raved so about the wonders Rex Ingram can do with beginners that I thought I’d see what he could do with me. You’ve seen Scaramouche now and you know. Do you suppose I’ll ever look that nice again?” A male interviewer couldn’t have been restrained at that moment from saying, “Yes, right now.”
Miss Allen had plenty of opportunities to play in other pictures as soon as Scaramouche was shown, but one thing and another interfered. When she was on the verge of starting one picture, the hot weather descended like a blanket over all New York and she fled to Saratoga and the horse races. Another time a company tried to tie her down to a five-year contract but that sounded like too long a time to guarantee that she would continue doing anything. But eventually — really a matter of a few months — Whitman Bennett came along and decided she was the very girl he had been looking for to feature in a series of pictures, the first of which is “Virtuous Liars.”
If all the screen-struck girls in the United States were forced to tell the truth about their ambitions I believe that at least 90 per cent of them would wish for a career like hers rather than a more ambitious one dedicated to art with a capital A. She is young and pretty and vivacious and her responsibilities rest on her shoulders lightly enough, so that she will probably continue to be like that. Her ambition is to live at the Ritz, spend a fortune on clothes, and have time between pictures to go to lots of theaters and parties. She covets the mantle of Irene Castle rather than that of Duse [Eleonora Duse].
—
Photo by: Richard Burke
Collection: Picture Play Magazine, June 1924