Ethel Shannon Gets Confidential (1924) 🇺🇸

Do you think your “fan army” would be interested in some “Heaven-help-the-poor-working-girl” experiences told by herself?

The last time I [Ethel Shannon] had tea and cakes with a writer she giggled heartlessly when I told her how I landed my first real part with Bill Hart [William S. Hart] in John Petticoats and what an uproarious finish I had when I forgot myself and dived headlong into the Mississippi River. “Put it on paper. It will give the screen-struck girls an idea of what to expect in pictures,” she remarked. So here I am, slaughtering myself to make a Roman holiday for your readers.

I had been a three-dollar-a-day extra, playing small bits at hve per and crawling along the best I knew how with my limited experience, when I heard that Bill Hart was looking for a leading woman. I was terribly green — only six months in Hollywood — but I had plenty of confidence and flew to the Hart studio in pursuit of that job.

The “two-gun” screen star was very businesslike. “Do an emotional scene with plenty of tears,” he requested. The stage was “cold.” I mean no music, no lights, nothing to stimulate one. It looked discouraging and I guess that was just what I needed, for the tear scene I staged was a wonder. I wept all over the place. The amiable Bill was delighted. He didn’t know the tears were prompted by pity for myself. He thought it was acting and signed me up for the undreamed-of sum of seventy-five dollars a week.

The Hart company went to New Orleans to make scenes for the picture. I had set my mind on making good if it killed me, which, by the way, it nearly did. One scene was shot on a high wharf, twenty feet above the river. I was playing a broken-hearted girl, bent on suicide. It had been arranged to have a boy, dressed like me, to do the leap into the water after I had completed a highly emotional scene in a close-up shot.

Here is where I showed them how Nellie would do it. I was excited — terribly excited. Instead of stepping back and allowing the double to do his part, I made the leap myself, before I thought. I could not swim a stroke and shot to the muddy bottom of the river like a rock. The double dived in after me and pulled me out, but we both nearly drowned. Hart was tickled pink with the scene, but I was sick in bed three days from the shock. My very first job was bridesmaid in a wedding scene with Phyllis Haver. That was three years ago. I am now finishing my first feature rôle and I have high hopes that I have set my feet on the road to success. When Maytime is shown, we’ll see.

Photo by: Albert Witzel (1879–1929)

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Collection: Picture Play Magazine, March 1924