Enid Markey — Re-discovering an ingénue (1919) 🇺🇸

We left her on that beach at Waikiki. It was on the sands, and Enid wore a grass skirt and lots of hair. Eyes — Enid’s. Willard Mack was there, too. And he and we said “Aloha Oe” — and then the lights went up.

by Arabella Boone

We found her again. “Up in Mabel’s Room.” An entirely new Enid. The same hair and the same eyes — but, suddenly, a Voice. Of course Miss Markey has done a lot of things in a dramatic way since Aloha Oe for Ince-Triangle — not only has she found her voice, but a new confidence in herself.

Here, she says, we have the Reason. The reason for the budding-forth of this little film ingénue into a sparkling farceuse in a New York hit. “I have changed.” she spoke seriously, opening her wide eyes wider — not for the purpose of impressing me, but because she was pulling the make-up from her long lashes — “I have decided to develop the Ego. One never gets any place so long as one is truthful about oneself. They used to ask me how I liked myself in pictures and I used to say, quite frankly, I think I’m perfectly awful in that one.’ I did, really. So I think, now, that I am very good indeed as Geraldine, in Up in Mabel’s Room.”

We were up in Enid’s dressing room in the Eltinge Theater; Enid kept descending and scaling the tiny flight of stairs to and from the stage where the company was rehearsing a new actress for a part in the play. I caught alluring glimpses of one blonde. Hazel Dawn, and flashes of another, Evelyn Gosnell. There were Johnny Cumberland and Walter Jones and Lucy Cotton — but I always came back to Enid.

As the wife of comedian John Cumberland in the Woods farce that, like Tennyson’s brook, has been running on, and on, Enid Markey has scored a hit — and it is the first definite hit of her career. It is also her first real part on the speaking stage, which speaks pretty well for the ex Ince lustrous brunne.

It’s been almost a year since she has done anything at all before the camera, except to pose for stills at the photographer’s. And she is homesick — homesick for California and the film folks, homesick for the studios and for location jaunts, homesick —

“Every chance I get I go to a movie theater and watch a picture. I see all my old friends and then I go home and cry.”

She is an actress, every minute, while she’s on the stage — back of the lights, or under them. But she has not, as yet, been able to submerge Enid the girl in Enid the actress. She will, when she is a little older and has had a few more years on the stage. But I wish you could see her right now.

She is one of these utterly charming and utterly inconsistent women. She started out to bob her heavy, glossy black hair, got half way. changed her mind, and hid the scissors.

She has a contract with A. H. Woods which has still another year to run. Next season may see her as a dramatic actress — she hopes so; but it is even more probable that she will have a sort of Madge Kennedy part in some farce which will run a year on Broadway and revolve about a bed. She has, in Up in Mabel’s Room, the chance of a lifetime to imitate Madge Kennedy or Francine Larrimore — Miss Larrimore, playing now in “Scandal,” is the Constance Talmadge of the legit. — and she does neither. She is a new sort of ingénue; she is charming, but perverse. You would like to “spank her until she glows.”

Enid’s mother came in — she has always been with Enid ever since, as a little girl with long black braids and very wide brown eyes — Enid trotted away from school one day and announced her intention to study roles instead of arithmetic. Her mother has been with her, and for her, and has followed the Markey path up and down the long state of California, from picture camp to camp, and finally across the continent on this same path that lead to Broadway. Now Enid and mother have a cosy little apartment on 86th street in New York, and their days are full of work and study and new clothes and meeting old friends and making new ones.

This little Miss Lochinvar came out of the west with a perfectly serious determination to conquer New York. And the amazing thing about it is, she did. You and I know her because it has been our duty and pleasure to follow her films — but whoever thought that the little western girl would come to Manhattan where she actually didn’t know a soul, and jump right into a part in a Woods success and land firmly on both small feet?

The Ego doesn’t seem to matter much, in Enid, personal. A small sailor with red hair and freckles sat in a lower box night after night on his leave in Gotham watching Enid, his former celluloid idol, in the flesh. After one week of it, he sent back a note, some poetry, and flowers. “Please,” he concluded his glowing tribute, “please throw convention to the winds and speak to me at the stage-door after the performance.” Enid took mother along, after closing the door of convention; and that sailor carried back home with him a large photograph of Enid with a long autograph scrawled all over it. “That,” she said to me. “is one of the nicest things I have to remember about my work.”

“Jim Grimsby’s Boy” — that she did with Frank Keenan — was one of her favorite parts. She was one of Bill Harts first screen leading women, in such corking Ince dramas as “The Darkening Trail” and “The Devil’s Double.” She was in “Shell 43,” with Warner; in “Civilization.” We have mentioned Aloha Oe.

“And then,” said Enid regretfully, “I left Ince. I played in a terrible thing called ‘The Curse of Eve; or Mother, I Need You’ — of which,” laughing, “Julian Johnson said in his Shadow Stage, ‘You certainly do, Enid — also a good story.’ Then I was with Fox. in several things; one with George Walsh. I’ve been in a Stage Woman’s War Relief Picture since coming east. And that only made me all the more eager to get back. But I don’t want to go into anything again that I’m not sure of — I mean by that, I don’t want a cheap story; I want something big.

“I should like to do the sort of thing Norma Talmadge does so well. If I could just hit on some characterization. I have had a story in mind for a long time — it’s about a girl who, through an hereditary influence, takes dope — and her fight to redeem herself.”

You cannot understand velvet-eyed Enid enthusing over a part like that but you can readily appreciate Enid the actress undertaking it. And then, too, she would like to create a new kind of ingénue on the screen. All in all her ambitions are big enough to keep her busy for a long time. Her preparations haven’t taken her long — it wasn’t half a dozen years ago that she began in a film under the direction of Joe de Grasse, now Dorothy Dalton’s dramatic conductor. Then Thomas Ince [Thomas H. Ince] discovered her. For the rest, she was born in 1896 in Dillon, Colorado; she was educated in Denver. Then the family went to California and Enid into Burbank stock. Her next brief stage bit was with Nat Goodwin, on tour. Soon after, the films. We forgot to mention that in the Tarzan series “Tarzan” and “The Romance of Tarzan,” Enid was responsible for the romance.

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Below — a scene from “Shell 43,” the thrilling war-film, in which she was support for H. B. Warner.

“I think I am very good indeed as Geraldine in ‘Up in Mabel’s Room.’” (You see, Enid Markey has decided to develop the Ego.) This scene shows her with John Cumberland in that farce playing at the Eltinge Theatre in New York.

Photo by: White

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With Willard Mack in the old familiar Ince-Triangle picture, “Aloha Oe.”

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Collection: Photoplay Magazine, September 1919