Edith Storey — The Story of Storey (1918) 🇺🇸
Most screen stars have done a life’s work at twenty-five. If they live to eighty their biographies may be longer, but will they be more varied, or richer in observation and incident? Not very much.
by Julian Johnson
What does the future hold for these ancients of twenty years — for these unmarried girls who have delineated every female emotion, joy and sorrow from youth to age? An astounding craft has compelled them to write an Encyclopaedia Britannica of life even before life has ceased to bewilder them; what can they add to that text when life becomes a casual thing?
They finished the grammar grades of acting in their teens. Most of them are in their high school seniority. The flower of maturity — the great and mysterious tomorrow of our reconstructed world — will be their artistic college course. Art is always long; it is building, study, observation, infinite practice — therefore it is not impossible nor even improbable that in the years to come a few of them may become the most finished and fluent dramatic interpreters the world has ever seen!
Consider, for a little while, that very interesting young woman and artist, Edith Storey: there’s a bet, if you’re picking tomorrow’s world-series actresses.
Wanted: a queen of Egypt, a Spanish dancer, a Russian heroine, an Italian adventuress, a daring damsel of the plains, a poised society woman, a country girl, possibly an eccentric comedienne — boy, for any of these, page Edith Storey.
Your memory will give you a better description of her acting than any words of mine. It is the personality of the girl herself — what she is, and how she lives and works, which is even more interesting, and which gives that calm promise of resultful years to come.
Edith Storey is not yet past her middle twenties. Like most photo-play actresses she is a citizen of the United States; that is to say, she knows California as well as she knows New York, although it is the latter town she calls home, and in which she was born.
It was in a New York apartment-house — on Riverside Drive, with the Hudson flowing in front, and the vast city flowing behind — that I found her on a cool evening after a hot August day.
“Here are father, and mother,” she said, in informal introduction “— here we all are except Sooner, my little white dog, who’s on Long Island, and Dick, my brother, who’s on a torpedo-boat.”
While she told me about Dick, and Sooner, I became acquainted with Mr. and Mrs. Storey. You who have imagined her a Russian, or a Jewess, or a Castilian woman, or French, can chuck these illusions when I tell you that the parental interests can only be described in that substantial American phrase, Connecticut Yankee. Like Sam Clemens, the literary courtier of Europe, or Nordica, the supreme Wagnerian, Edith Storey, the star foreigner of the screen, is as domestic as a wooden nutmeg.
She leaves the actress stuff in her dressing room with the costumes and the stick of yellow grease paint. But her voice and her enunciation — the one rich and vibrant, the other crisp and complete — are not the speaking practice of the careless and untrained woman.
“I was depending on my voice,” she said, “before I ever thought of making my living in front of a camera. I began on the stage When I was eight. All sorts of kids, from a youngster in Mrs. Wiggs of the Cabbage Patch to little princesses and such.”
At thirteen, she made her motion picture debut.
You see, she and pictures can’t remember the time when they didn’t know each other. Neither turned to the other; rather, they collided when they were pups, and played in the same back yard till they reached years of accountability.
She was with Vitagraph, and Méliès, and Vitagraph, and then here and there, and then with Vitagraph. Now, she is with Metro.
“Those were great days!” she sighed, after the manner of a seventy-year-old Bernhardt looking back upon Victorian triumphs. “Two reels was a special feature, for a set you borrowed somebody’s pergola, and for light you trusted God to aim the sun just right. And God was the picture pioneer’s most reliable backer; often everything else failed, but the sun shone, and we took our moving photographs just the same.”
Miss Storey rocked back and forth, under the shaded lamp. The wind from the river rustled her dark hair, casting rippling shadows over her sun-browned cheek, and pressing the silk of her thin blouse tight against her superbly muscled arms and shoulders.
She was knitting. When a woman purls and counts, conversations lags.
“What do you read?” I asked, floundering.
“I don’t read,” she murmured. “One… two… I just knit. Last winter I knitted seventeen sweaters! All for the navy. My brother, on patrol duty in New York harbor, had to wear four sweaters at a time.”
“But you do read,” I contradicted. “Under your yarn, there, is Loti’s Mme. Chrysanthemum, and Edith Wharton’s Kingu.”
“Oh, well; I don’t read — much. And above all things, I don’t want to strike a pose about it!”
Which last, I guess, was the truth.
We talked of acting, and acting associations, and favorite parts.
She has a personal definition of acting which struck me as original.
“Acting, to me, is being a real woman wholly different from Edith Storey.”
Which, when you analyze it, is a pretty good one-sentence summary. We talked a little more, and got into a wordy fight.
“You’re wrong. I like to play Russians, and Spaniards, and dance hall girls — not because they’re what they are, but because they’re all absolutely different from me! I don’t think a girl, or a woman, who walks on a stage or in front of a camera to be herself, and to get renowned for her ‘personality,’ has any right to call herself an actress. She’s only a model.
“If I have a favorite part, it is the Egyptian Princess in The Dust of Egypt. She was pathetic — and funny; majestic — and a little bit Marie Dresslery — an all-right girl in an all-wrong street.”
Bye and bye we talked of photoplays, and their general futility.
“You’ll see,” she said, “that the country’ll be saved in a play way by doing all the old ones over again. I don’t mean literally. I do mean that every situation has been exhausted without art; we’ll put some artistic touches — that’s reality and life, I think — into the old situations, and we’ll have new plays! It would be impossible to write new situations to keep up to the number the photoplays demand. There aren’t that many in a universe of worlds!” Silence.
Then, right in the middle of a purl, she giggled.
“You and your ‘foreign woman’ ideas about me! Will you tell them what I really am?
“I’m a farmer. I call my little Long Island place ‘the farm.’ Some day I’m going to have real farm, and I’m going to get my fun out of it by doing everything myself. Everything. Plowing and everything. That is. everything but the house-work. I’ll take care of the horses, milk the cows and put a new cylinder in the gas tractor, but I won’t wash dishes for hired men that drink out of their saucers and swallow their knives!”
“Going to get married?” I asked speculatively.
“Only fools ever say ‘yes’ or ‘no’ to that question,” returned the seeress of Riverside Drive. “I’ll say this: marriage may be a pastime for men. but for a woman it’s always a business if she makes a success of it. And nobody can have two businesses, or professions — or whatever you wish to call it. I have never wished to marry. I don’t wish to marry now. But if I ever do, I’ll quit acting, for as I see it, I couldn’t be an actress and a reliable wife at the same time. When I’m working I’m thinking situation, studying character, all my hours away from the studio. I might forget to get dinner, and if my husband asked me why. I’d probably bite him.”
Miss Storey has a best-beloved and a horrible example among contemporary screen actresses. She is an intense admirer of Pauline Frederick — though she admits she doesn’t like the majority of Pauline’s scenarios (neither do I!) — and for the horror —
“— I don’t know her at all, and some people have told me that personally she’s very nice, but in the rôles she plays I think Theda Bara is the last word in unreality and awfulness!”
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A Queen for an Hour, a two-reel absurdity indulged in by dramatic Edith while resting between “big” pictures. She enjoyed it immensely, she says. The lovely centerpiece of the legend was a rube servant girl.
In this presumptuous film entertainment Edith Storey made her screen bow. It’s a two-reel, Francesca di Rimini; or, the Two Brothers, and the shy lady accepting Hector Dion’s high-school diploma is Florence Turner. The little page back of Mr. Dion is Edith Storey, aged thirteen. The utterly nonchalant lad leaning on Miss Turner’s bench is Dick Storey, Edith’s brother, now a petty officer on an American torpedo-boat. Miss Storey’s only recollection of her initial picture part is that it was her first day in high heels, and in the course of the filming she fell down twelve times.
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A new portrait-study.
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In all reasonable weather she spends her Eastern hours in or about this sea-shore “farm” of hers, on Long Island. In severe winter days, however, she returns to her Riverside Drive apartment overlooking the Hudson river.
Her favorite rôle — the resurrected Egyptian Princess in The Dust of Ages, a 1917 Vitagraph, written by Alan Patrick Campbell, son of the celebrated English actress, Mrs. Patrick Campbell. Lieut. Campbell has since been killed in action on the Flanders front.
Miss Storey’s present dressing room, in the Metro studio in Hollywood.
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Collection: Photoplay Magazine, November 1918
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She doesn’t look much like the gallant leader of the Russian lady scrappers, but the signal to cease firing has been given — sorta twenty minutes for tea — so Edith Storey got out her knitting. You see Edith has a brother in the navy — American, not Russian — and this is going to be a sweater eventually, if not now. The background is a Russian village street constructed by Metro camoufleurs. Miss Storey’s chaperon is a fierce Siberian sniffhound that was captured by big game hunters in the wilds of Flatbush.
Collection: Photoplay Magazine, February 1918