Harry Northrup — Sans Grease Paint and Wig (1913) 🇺🇸
It was the day Harry Northrup and his athletic eye-brows got back to the Vitagraph studio from their ten days’ work in Boston, that I crossed the Brooklyn Bridge to get acquainted with them.
by Mabel Condon
It was rather an unfortunate day as Mr. Northrup was tired and dusty and had a cold in his head and all he wanted was a handkerchief, a bath, some lunch and a nap. All I wanted was ten minutes’ worth of information about his eyebrows, so we found a table and two chairs behind a piece of scenery and Mr. Northrup carefully placed his derby on the colored table-cloth, smoothed his smooth black hair with one hand and elevated the center of each eyebrow with the one word, “Well?”
“Where were you born?” (That really wasn’t the issue though it was remotely connected with eye-brows.) “Paris, France — my full name is Henri Stabo Wallace Northrup, and every drop of blood in me is Scotch.” “And after Paris?”
“Rome, when I was one year old. I was educated in San Francisco, graduated from Berkley and my first time on the stage was in Shenandoah in San Francisco. After two years with the Frawley Stock Company, I went to New York and was leading man with E. H. Southern’s The King’s Musketeer, Song of the Sword, The Sunken Bell and Hamlet: leading man — got that down, ‘leading man’! — with Henry Miller in Heart’s Ease, Richard Savage and The Only Way; leading man with Mary Mannering in Janice Meredith; took the leading heavy part in The Heir to the Hoorah and The Round-Up; supported William Faversham in The Squaw-Man; played lead for Florence Roberts in Strength of the Weak; starred for two years in Clyde Fitch’s last comedy, Girls and supported Wilton Lackaye in The Stranger. That was three years ago and was my last appearance on Broadway.
“And then?”
“The Vitagraph company; I’ve been here three years and am never going to work in any other studio.”
“That’s a funny thing to say — how do you know you’re not?”
“Because I like it here and am going to stay.” A decisive straightening out of the Northrup eyebrows settled the matter, if the expression of the hazel eyes underneath them had not already done so and Mr. Northrup looked his readiness for another question. It was, “Married?” and the answer was:
“Yes, and furthermore, my wife and I not only speak to each other but we occupy the same house; it is at 90 —” something that counded like Burr-rr-rr street, Sheepshead Bay, “and we own it.”
“Shall I say that you’re married?”
“Certainly; why not?”
“Why not, because married picture actors don’t usually want it known; says it hurts their popularity.”
“Well, it can’t hurt my popularity, because the only popularity I’m interested in keeping is with the cashier, down-stairs.”
“But don’t you care about being popular with the people?”
“Not a bit; don’t care whether they like me or not. After twenty years of dramatics, I know what I’m capable of doing and I do it; so I don’t care. My wife is Merceita Esmonde, leading woman in Frohman’s The Conspiracy; she’s from Philadelphia and her father was William Esmonde, general passenger agent of the Erie road for fifteen years.”
“A regular E. T., Harry!” I thought, and he said that of all the roles he has played he likes best that in “The Test;” next to that, the role created by William Faversham in “The Squaw-Man” but, after due deliberation, with the left brow low and the right brow high, he concluded that The Test shows his better work.
“And now about your eye-brows, Mr. Northrup, please — you know you have eye-brows.”
“Yes, oh yes — certainly!”
“And that they ‘put over’ fifty per cent of your work?”
“They’re absolutely essential.”
“Then tell me about them.”
“They’re not so pronounced now of course, without any make-up,” he enlightened, running a fore-finger over the dark tapering length of each and continued: “As the mouth can express nothing, in pictures, the eye-brows can do this for it. I have positive eye-brows, and I have complete use of them; I can express any emotion, interrogative or otherwise, with my eye-brows.
“For instance,” resting his gaze on the cloth back of a prop tree, “I say, I love you, I love you with all my heart, with all my soul!’”
At the first “amo te,” the Henri Stabo Wallace Northrup brows quivered, at the second effusion they drew upward at the inner corners and at the third declaration, three horizontal forehead lines sprang into being to serve as a boundary for the energetic brows and three small perpendicular ones prevented the meeting of the corners at their highest point of elevation.
While they were still holding the pose, Kate Price came from behind the tree and wanted to know “why” the excitement, “when” Harry got home, and “how” he was and Harry answered “Nothing; today; rotten!”
I was afraid he would remind himself that he was tired and hungry and wanted his handkerchief, but he didn’t and when Mrs. Price had sailed into her dressing-room, commented on the interrupted eye-brow performance, “You’d know I loved the girl, and meant it, and that I was telling her so and not ordering coffee and rolls.”
“Would you mind saying it, now, without your eyebrows?” I asked.
The hazel eyes found the back of the prop tree; “I love you; I love you with all my heart, with all my soul” chanted Mr. Northrup. “Absolutely expressionless,” he said. “See the difference?”
Could I have helped but see it?
“My eyes are not very strong, these studio lights bother them” he went on. “I try never to look right at them, but always at an angle. When I was with Mr. Sothern in The Song of the Sword, he accidentally shot me in the right eye and broke the main artery. Ever since I’ve had trouble with it — you can see how bloodshot it is there to the right.” I saw. “I put drops in it every so often to help the blood scatter.”
“Wouldn’t glasses aid you?” I was so unfortunate as to ask.
“Glasses!” the disdain in his voice told me just how unfortunate.
“I despise the thought and appearance of glasses — here are some dark glasses I rest my eyes with very often, but I would never wear them: My wife has a fondness for a lorgnette; I haven’t. When we’re going to the theater, I ask, ‘My dear, where is your lorgnette?’ ‘Here, dear.’ ‘Well, we’ll leave it right at home.’ I’d feel uncomfortable were she to use it when she’s with me. A man with glasses makes me think of old age creeping on, and making him miserly with every dime. No, I’ll never wear glasses.”
“Oh Harry! When did you get back, how are you, did you have a nice time?” enthusiastically inquired a dark-haired, slender girl, with much make-up on.
“Yes, but I have an awful cold —”
“Good! I’m so glad you had a nice time!”
“Good what — that I have a cold? Your sympathy —” the girl laughed herself away, and Mr. Northrup began feeling of his pockets, patting them on the outside — you know, the way men do, when they’re sure their handkerchief is there, whether they can find it or not — so I left him to his search.
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New Brands on Exclusive Program
Western features, long wanted to balance the Exclusive Supply Corporation program, will now be available in abundance, three companies releasing aggregately between six and eight features monthly, have signed contracts with Joseph R. Miles, general manager of the Exclusive Supply Corporation.
One of the companies, the Ammex, is not unknown, but the two others, the Laclede and Great Western, will start fresh. From the viewpoint that a new broom sweeps clean, and considering that their personnel includes men of wide experience and established reputation, their outlook is cheerful. All three companies will begin releasing in the early part of November, and judging by the high quality of the samples shown privately in the Exclusive’s projection room, their product will be well received.
British Cinematograph Registrations
For the month of August of the current year registrations of cinematograph companies in the United Kingdom numbered 27, and represented an aggregate capitalization of $606,850, in contrast to 33 registrations, with $466,700 capital, in the corresponding month of 1912, 16 companies and $185,400 capital in 1911, and 9 companies and $437,685 capital in August, 1910. In the first eight months of 1913 there were 349 such registrations with a total capital of $9,030,765.
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Prominent Exhibitors
Harry H. Lightwood is an Englishman by birth, and has during his eventful career been a sailor, a soldier, a broker, a merchant, and an actor, but now is proud of the fact that he has settled down to the more or less prosaic career of a motion-picture exhibitor. He went to sea when a lad of fourteen and at twenty-seven was in command of a small steamer on the China coast. He spent twenty years in China, India, Japan and Australia and finally joined a comic opera company under the banner of J. C. Williamson. From Australia he drifted across to New Zealand and later to San Francisco, finally buying himself a home in Cullman, Alabama, where he erected the first motion-picture theater in that vicinity. Today he regards the pictures as the miracle of the age, particularly in regard to their educational features, for it is possible now for him to see on his screen in Alabama scenes and places in distant lands which are as familiar to him as his own street. Mr. Lightwood is inclined to believe the motion picture has the familiar “hands across the sea” backed off the boards as today we can say “the pictures around the world” and mean it literally. The theater operated by genial Mr. Lightwood is unfortunate in that it is located on the second floor, but it has a seating capacity of over 500 and the programs are so excellent that he has no trouble in filling it to capacity several times nightly. Careful projection, good music and courteous attention to his patrons has built up a business of which any house manager might well be proud.
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Down in Monroe City, Missouri, the Gem theater, airdome and summer garden is operated by Richard A. Kirby, known throughout that territory as “the special feature shark,” who was at one time manager of a branch film exchange. Born in Monroe county, Missouri, on January 17, 1881, he was raised on a farm near the little town of Stoutsville. At the age of fourteen he left the farm and was employed for some time in newspaper offices and in retail stores. During the last eight years he has been revenue collector at Monroe City, a position which he still holds and to which he has four times been elected by his constituents. His theater was the first to be opened in the county for the exclusive showing of pictures and was erected in March, 1909. Since that date he has had several partners in his venture but on account of his wide knowledge of the pictures has been manager of the house since its inception. He has time and again been complimented for running one of the host and cleanest theaters in the State and aims at all times to select only the class of films for which he knows his patrons have a particular liking. The Gem theater seats 300 and is filled four times nightly, three reels of film being shown for a dime. The airdome. used during the summer months, has a seating capacity of 1,000 and is used for both stock and pictures, 10 and 20 cents being the admission fee. Mr. Kirby advertises his house as “the most novel picture resort in northeast Missouri,” a distinction to which it seems eminently entitled, and its patronage and good will are steadily growing as they will do when a theater is properly conducted.
Collection: Motography Magazine, November 1913