Florence Vidor — Old Lives for New (1921) 🇺🇸
“A woman who has a definite talent does more for her family by working out her happiness than by denying it.”
by Joan Jordan
Florence Vidor — for a number of reasons — is and always has been one of the most interesting women in pictures. She is interesting not only as a person, and not only because of her unusual beauty, but as a vital and definite development of Twentieth Century woman.
There has existed a tradition that the Great Public likes to have pretty romances and delicate fairy tales woven about its cinema pets. (Sounds like a new sort of lizard, but it isn’t.)
To me that idea is as old-fashioned as bustles.
Because the truth is not only stranger than fiction but a darn sight more entertaining.
I have known Florence Vidor intimately for rather a long time. It is impossible for me to write a story composed of platitudes about her favorite fruits and vegetables, when I remember the real things I know about her.
I have studied her as a supreme example of the struggle between the old and the new woman, more than as a screen star.
She is a screen star for three reasons — her beauty, which of itself would be sufficient, her temperamental, though as yet only slightly expressed, dramatic ability, and her possession of those rare qualities which go to make up a gentlewoman.
But it is as a woman — wife, mother, housekeeper, — that she is most to be reckoned with. The woman — torn at every step of her progress between the old ideals of woman implanted in her by her southern ancestresses, cherished by her own nature growing to womanhood in a southern home in a southern community amid southern traditions — and the new ideals of woman, forced upon her by a slow but remarkably fine intelligence, a vibrant love of things dramatic and her unsought, almost undesired, success.
Florence Vidor, since the day of little Suzanne’s birth over two years ago, has been the victim of a constant pull between her home and her career — not always consciously perhaps, but just as certainly. She had not accepted even for consideration the new and successfully demonstrated theory that a woman may do actual justice to both a home and a career. To her, a woman was either a homemaker — or something else.
Failure, that would have taken the decision out of her hands, would at times have been welcome. Instead, success literally dragged her on.
“My intelligence told me absolutely that I must go on with this work that is inside me — this thing that first led me to the screen and has made me love my work. My intelligence told me that I was happier at home, more gentle, loving, helpful, when I left the routine work of physical care of house and family to someone trained for that. Vet my heart, which is entirely bound up in my home and my husband and my baby, enforced by my education and inherited instinct, told me a woman’s place was in the home and the home only, never separated from her baby or her husband,” she once said.
Florence Vidor came from an old southern family. Her maiden name was Florence Arto, and there are many in the south who still remember the grandmother who apparently passed on the exquisite beauty that made her a belle to this lovely namesake. She attended a southern “finishing school” where girls graduated into marriage and social position.
The spark that has fired her screen work answered the same spark in a boy of her home town — King Vidor — and caused them to join their loves and lives and futures.
Today she is one of the successful actresses of the screen. If she is not a star in fact it is because she has lacked the push and personal effort to gain that for herself. From her bit in “The Tale of Two Cities,” where she rode in the death-cart to the guillotine with Sidney Carton, (William Farnum) to her charming performance in Cecil de Mille’s [Cecil B. deMille] “Old Wives for New” and her recent triumph in Ince’s [Thomas H. Ince] Lying Lips, she has shown tremendous charm and ability. Her personal beauty is astonishing.
She is a hard actress to direct, because of the wall of reserve she lives behind, the natural instinct of a southern lady to conceal rather than reveal her emotions. But her emotional force is tremendous. When she docs reach the place where she can let herself go, she unlooses volumes of feeling.
She is lazy — like all women of her type. Without that divine thing breathed into her spirit in the last moment of her creation, she would have been eminently content to slip easily through life, have her breakfast in bed, give little luncheons with salted almonds and after-dinner mints, go to fashionable hotels to tea and dine with friends. She hates to get up in the morning. She postpones everything in the world to the last moment. She tackles every new part that is literally forced upon her — for I know that Tom Ince made trip after trip to her home to beg her to play the role she has done so well in Lying Lips — with reluctance.
She would much rather not. Yet the call gets her.
She is charming — utterly charming — in her home. She has all the renowned graces of the southern belle. She is the most comfortable, fascinating person to be with. She adores her home — her husband — and her baby, and she is full of sweet, pretty little ways with them all. She cannot ignore anything about them entirely.
She has, too, a sort of reluctance about being as successful as her husband, and she is the victim of hundreds of social traditions, like dinner balls, and myriads of Christmas presents.
So, as I said in the beginning, as an example of the conflict between the old traditions and instincts of the past generation, and the equalizing instincts of the new, she has been enduring a supreme “melting pot” of character building and emotional growth for many, many months.
And at last she has reached an understanding that will enable her to continue her work with a clear conscience, if without a wholly light heart, though there was a time when I was sure she would retire from the screen altogether.
For she has determined that she would not be happy without her work. And that determination convinced her that she can give more spiritual and mental happiness, more helpful loving character-formation to her daughter, more strength and inspiration and companionship to her husband, by going on with her career.
“I believe more than anything else in right mental atmosphere, right thinking, serenity and happiness of spirit,” she said to me. “Thoughts are things. It is more important to my home that my husband and my baby should have my happy, contented, upward-climbing thoughts than that they should have my constant bodily presence.
“Today I believe absolutely that a woman who has a definite talent, a real, deep undeniable craving for a certain form of self-expression does more for her family by answering that call and working out her happiness, than by denying it.
“I feel that such a woman need not be deprived of her home life any more than a man. Though she may take time away from them, she makes up for it by her mental alertness, her increased understanding, her happiness and serenity of mind.”
Her husband, King Vidor, once said to me of her, “Florence is the only human being I have ever known who is absolutely honest with herself and everybody else about everything.”
Not a bad recommendation from a husband, is it?
[a]
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Florence Vidor the actress — who first won fame as the girl in the death-cart in “A Tale of Two Cities.” It was Photoplay, by the way, which first called public attention to her ability.
[b]
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Florence Vidor — wife and mother. The above theory seems to work in the Vidor household. From left to right. King, Suzanne, and Florence.
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Told on Broadway
Right off Times Square, New York, there stands a motion picture theater that enjoys the reputation of running pictures that only their own director could love. The news review is the only thing on the program that can be watched without eye strain. The theater has the soundest sleeping patrons of any playhouse in town.
One afternoon, the roar of the subway aroused a patron from sleep.
“What’s on now?” he asked his neighbor.
“Still the feature.”
“Well, wake me up when the news review starts,” he answered as he settled down to a long winter’s nap.
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Here is another one on Samuel Goldwyn, hero of more anecdotes than any other man in all the fillum business.
Goldwyn was attempting to enlist the services of a highly paid continuity writer to polish up the work of his batch of trained eminent authors. After offering her the advantages of working in his studio and fare to the Coast, he rose to a climax and offered her two hundred dollars a week.
The scenario writer objected and told him that two hundred dollars a day was nearer the mark.
“But just think,” Goldwyn argued, “in a few months two hundred dollars a week will be as good as four hundred dollars a week. Look at the way prices are coming down!”
Collection: Photoplay Magazine, April 1921