Florence LaBadie — Sans Grease Paint and Wig (1914) 🇺🇸
Flo LaBadie was curled up on top of a steamer-trunk with her head on a sofa-cushion and her feet dangling their patent-leather pumps over the trunk’s edge. Her blonde curls were long and heavy and they fell over the design of green and gold poppies which had finishing honors at the top of her turquoise-blue silk kimono.
by Mabel Condon
It was the LaBadie [Florence La Badie] hour of rest, after a busy morning in the Thanhouser studio. And she was resting, in spite of the fact that she had loaned her dressing-room — all but the trunk corner — to the dresser whose duty at that particular hour, was to dress three small boys in Lord Fauntleroy costumes and send them forth into a court scene.
The girl in the turquoise-blue kimono obligingly woke up. She smiled with her pretty mouth and with her eyes (they matched the turquoise of her négligée), and she did it as though she liked being waked in the middle of her rest-hour. For a whole minute the three small boys, in various stages of disarray, ceased being “small boys” and remained quiet, to the intense relief of their dresser. They concentrated with eyes and ears.
“‘Lab-a-die’ is the correct way, but I don’t mind how it is pronounced. It should have been ‘Smith,’” was what the three miniature gentlemen heard. “It’s French and I’m German and French,” continued the girl with the curls that half hid the silken poppy design. “My father is distinctly French and there’s a title in his family — Count ‘de Caciac’ is the way it sounds. I really should be a very good French scholar, but I’m not.”
A book of instruction as to how to become a master of French and several books written in that language, were scattered over the broad window-sill. “Oh yes, I read them, but —!” said Miss LaBadie, intimating that that, really, was nothing at all.
The threesome, who had lost their interest in the trunk-corner, in the process of being inveigled into blue velvet knickerbockers and be-ruffled shirt-bosoms, were making the life of the dresser one not to be envied.
“Like dressing worms,” commented the latter to the threesome.
“It’s only about three years since I began work for pictures,” Miss LaBadie was saying. “I started with the Biograph. Before that I had been with various companies on the road; Chauncey Olcott’s was one of them. Mother always traveled with me, she does yet whenever I go on long trips, out to the coast or down south.
“I posed for front covers of magazines before I went on the stage and afterward, between shows. That was what made me think I would fit into work for the screen. Mary Pickford is a dear friend of mine and it was Mary who suggested I try pictures. I was with the Biograph Company for a year, thence here — and while I live in New York, I love New Rochelle. There’s the river right back of us here, you can almost see it from this window, and in summer I swim and row there every day. See — my arms are sun-burned yet from last summer! Lots of times, I was down there in my bathing-suit when I should have been up here ready for a scene, and somebody would have to race madly down and get me. It’s so easy to forget scenes and things in a hot studio, when you’re in a bathing-suit and a boat!”
In front of the mirror the dresser beseeched one of the court gentlemen to not screw up his face and to not try to talk while she was trying to get his make-up on even. The court gentleman, thus adjured, closed his mouth and one eye, and with the other watched his two companions lest they escape without him.
“No, I detest snakes, but in that picture somebody had to be the dancer and wrap the snake around her and as nobody was more afraid than I was, I guessed I might as well try it. I didn’t mind doing it because I felt the thing wasn’t going to hurt me. For days afterward, I could feel it about my neck — Ugh! But if another such role were given me, I would not hesitate to do it. For disagreeable things aren’t always as disagreeable as they seem,” she philosophized, in the quiet, languorous voice that is so expressive of the speaker who, herself, is both quiet and languorous by nature.
It is said that nobody at the studio has ever seen her angry and ‘tis also said that she never indulges in the use of slang. Neither of these virtues are hers by reason of aloofness, for she is especially companionable and always ready to join in anything that promises fun and adventure. But she does not go forth to seek opportunities for either; she lets them come to her. Thus, is she languorous. And she is quiet in that she is not of the nervous-energy type, though she loves skating and dancing and is proficient in all the latest steps of the latter. She is popular, very popular, as everybody knows, and she is of the caliber designated as being “true blue.”
“Charles, the plume in your hat does not droop over your face. And Harold, your make-up is off again — come here! The minute I finish with one of you, another needs attention. Now stay put!” Then the dresser marshalled her band of three out into the studio court setting.
And I left the girl in the blue kimono to pin up her gold-spun curls and leisurely dress for the 3:10 train.
Collection: Motography Magazine, April 1914