Edith Hallor — The Camaraderie of Edith (1920) 🇺🇸
Houses have souls — they are susceptible to a degree to the influence of those who kindle the home fires on their hearthstones, and invariably they reflect the character of their occupants.
by Adele Whitely Fletcher
There’s the house where the angry words of petty disturbances and irritations seem to lurk in the shadows of every corner and where so many factions constantly operate that one instinctively guards their every word for fear of making a faux pas.
Then there’s the house where the soft-tinted walls themselves echo the musical laughter of happy hours, where the very arrangement of the furniture breathes a spirit of rest and repose.
Such is the delightful atmosphere which pervades the luxurious apartment which Edith Hallor calls home. The big easy chair drawn up beside the spacious bookcases suggests hours with the master minds whose works adorn the shelves; the boudoir, in cream and wine color, brings to mind a lazy morning and frilly négligées; the beautiful grand piano in the artistic drawing-room invites a séance with Mozart, Rubinstein or Chopin, whose selections lay scattered on the music-rack, left there hurriedly, perhaps. And the dining-room, with its massive furniture and dull silver candlesticks and pink candles, suggests the gay dinner parties which have faded into memories, while the spacious white-tiled kitchen — well, one thinks of taffy-pulls, fudge parties, mellow roasted apples and the wholesome laughter of the partifiers.
These and other mental pictures flitted thru my mind in kaleidoscopic fashion while I sat in the sunny window of the drawing-room and waited for Edith Hallor to return from the downtown office, where she had been detained at a conference with her director.
For weeks I had been trying to see her, but her leisure hours are things rare indeed, for she’s returning to the screen in Lawrence Weber productions, to be released thru World, at the same time as she is appearing in a new musical play on Manhattan Isle’s Gay White Way.
When she came into the room, her cheeks flushed from hurrying uptown, I knew the home had given a true impression of its mistress,
A head of burnished hair, laughing brown eyes and a complexion like the petals of a wild rose — these things make Edith Hallor beautiful — but it is the spirit of camaraderie, which she possesses to a marked degree, that makes one think of her as far more than just a beautiful girl.
Heaping the shirred cushions of taffeta and gay silks behind her on the deep lounge, she looked at me inquiringly.
“Washington pleads guilty as my birthplace,” she began, in answer to my question, and her brown eyes crinkled up as I learnt they do when she is amused. They’re the merriest eyes, filled with highlights, but not incapable of sympathy and great depths.
“I often wish I could live those Washington high school days over again. Isn’t it funny how we never know the true value of things while we have them? It was while at school that I decided to join a local stock company. Father tabooed the idea immediately, for he’s of the good old- fashioned school which thinks girls should marry and settle down. But mother believed that my life was my own and knew I would have to live it for myself, so I joined the stock company and father gradually came to know it was for the best. I didn’t know a thing about acting, for the family is not at all theatrical, but I could sing and dance, and bit by bit I learnt the subtle points of the profession.”
She was endeavoring to have the facts out of the way and talk of other things; one could readily see that. But it was evident, too, that the years she was speaking of had been happy years. She’s that sort. If there was a vestige of fun. of happiness in a thing, she would root it out and make the most of it.
“You’ve played in movies before, haven’t you?” I queried.
“Yes, for William Fox, but only in a few productions and that was some time ago. I’ve been so devoted to Broadway productions lately that I’ve had time for nothing else, and I love the movies. On the stage one works all the time, mostly in the evenings, and that is so unnatural, while in the movies you’re like any other human being, with your evenings to yourself, to entertain your friend or to be entertained.
“Of course, I won’t have days or nights to myself now, and I may find it’s too much playing on the stage at two matinees and every evening and at the studio the rest of the time. I’m going to try, tho, and I feel sure I can do it. And I’m going to do the kind of play I like — not a musical comedy, rather a comedy with music.”
“What did you do when you first came to New York?” I asked, endeavoring to bridge the lapse of time between the Washington stock company and today.
“Oh, I was in The Century Girl, in the Ziegfeld productions and recently in Leave It to Jane. I loved the role of Jane so well, in fact, that I went on the road with the play.”
As she sat there in the autumn sunlight, the burnished wisps of hair curling beneath the wide brim of her black hat. essentially the retiring, unassuming girl, I found it not a bit difficult to realize that she had been lauded by critics, praised by the public and advertised in huge electric lights before the leading theaters — she looked more like the idol of some pretty suburban town, more like the belle of a country club dance, more like a popular sorority girl. She’s just the sort of person who would be showered with offerings of orchids and pink rosebuds, sweet peas and lilies of the valley from every eligible man in town. But in her case the girls would readily see “what the boys saw in her.”
“I’m going to take two or three weeks between my pictures to shop,” she was saying, “for I love pretty clothes, do better work when I have them and feel sure the public likes them too. I’m so glad I may wear them as the young society wife in my first picture, ‘The Blue Pearl,’ which is taken from the stage success of last season.”
If one may judge the young wife’s clothes by the black velvet frock generously embroidered in old blue floss which she was wearing, they’ll be inspirations — it was the most beautiful thing!
“I do hope the public will like me — the movie public, I mean, for I like the movies so that I want to remain in them. So many folks of the footlights have failed to equal their success on the screen. And isn’t it strange the way the camera sees you — I photograph quite dark.”
That’s going to be the pity of it — the silversheet won’t give us Edith Hallor’s beautiful burnished locks or her pink and white skin. But it will give us her laughing eyes, her spirit of girlishness which fears mice and feels “sort of creepy alone in the dark” — and, above all else, her spirit of camaraderie! I don’t think Edith need worry about success… I think the success of Edith is going to take care of itself.
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A head of burnished hair, laughing brown eyes, and a complexion like the petals of a wild rose — these things make Edith Hallor beautiful— but it is her spirit of camaraderie which makes one think of her at far more than just a beautiful girl.
All Photos © by Ira L. Hill
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She reminds one of the idol of some pretty suburban town, of the belle of a country club dance, of a popular sorority girl… she’s the sort of person who would be showered with offerings of orchids and pink rosebuds… sweet peas and lilies of the valley
Photo © by Ira L. Hill
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Collection: Motion Picture Magazine, February 1920