Helen Chandler — The Rainy Thursday Girl (1931) 🇺🇸
Rain and Thursday are two pet aversions of most women. The first because it spoils new frocks and straightens waved hair. And the second because it means the maid’s day out and therefore a more complicated existence.
by Mary Howard
To Helen Chandler, neither one is an annoyance. In fact, when the Weather Man reports rain on the day the calendar pad shows up Thursday, Helen starts the day with the high assurance that important things are under way for her.
“Although I never think about it at the time, looking back I always find the big events happen on Thursdays,” declared this young actress. Important things began happening when she was eight years old and got her first stage job through her own efforts. When she was fifteen she was a leading lady on Broadway. Later she became known as a fine player of dramatic rôles with the Theatre Guild and in numerous Broadway productions. In talking pictures she is identified with “Outward Bound,” “Mother’s Cry,” “Dracula,” “Daybreak” and “Salvation Nell.”
As for rain — Park Avenue was flooded with rain on the morning in February, 1909, when she was born at the Hahnemann Hospital in New York City. The diary which Helen kept faithfully for more than ten years hadn’t been launched at this early date, so the report on climatic conditions in New York on this important date comes from her mother.
There was never any difficulty about keeping little Helen indoors studying school lessons on an average sunny afternoon. But let dark clouds begin to gather in that section of the heavens that weather experts always know means rain and Helen would remember she had an errand four blocks away. And she would make her calculations so perfectly that she would always come home muddy and drenched to the skin, with eyes shining.
When she was older she must have realized that rainy weather enhances the beauty of a natural curl. But at the age of eight, when she accidentally stumbled into her first job, it was rain for rain’s sake and let the long yellow curls take care of themselves.
“It was drizzling on this particular afternoon when I left school with a chum. This little girl was stage-struck and would often go to the different theatres where they were casting children’s parts,” said Helen.
“The idea of going on the stage didn’t interest me at all. But when this little girl said she was going to ride to a certain theatre in the subway — well, that settled it. I had never ridden in the subway. I always came straight home from school each afternoon in a cab. That ride is even more vivid in my mind than my first interview with a producer, which happened a few moments later.”
Arthur Hopkins was casting for Barbara. Helen remembers that she stood in the alley by the stage door while her friend went inside. A man bundled up to the eyebrows who looked as though he were freezing to death stopped as he was entering the stage door. He shivered as he saw her half socks and short little mackinaw and told her to step inside out of the wind and the rain.
“I found out afterward it was Arthur Hopkins. He hated the cold and the rain. After he had talked to half a dozen children he called me over and asked me how I would like to play in Barbara.”
Helen told him, she couldn’t, thank you, because she was going to have tea with her mother.
“Come tomorrow and bring your mother,” said the producer.
So Helen became an actress and found it so entrancing that it wasn’t long before she knew her way around to all the theatres and would dicker for jobs like an old-timer.
“I was always most ambitious on rainy days. I’d let whole weeks of sunshiny days go by and never bother about going out to look for jobs. But let it start raining and I would dig up my old coat with the moth-eaten collar and start out to conquer the world. When there was a whole stretch of rainy weather I would have so many jobs lined up that I would make my little brother take one of them. Oooh, how he used to hate me for that! He didn’t want to be an actor in those days.”
Helen remembers when she was about eleven years old she played in Rex Beach’s The Barrier. There was a little boy and a little girl rôle in the play.
“I liked the boy’s rôle best so I persuaded my little brother Leland to play the girl’s part. He did it under duress and gave me a big hoot when the first night notices came out and the critics had me credited with the girl’s part and he the boy’s!”
When The Wild Duck was to be staged in New York Helen set her heart on a part in it. She was fifteen and just at the age, she said, when her hair seemed suddenly to go straight and she looked just like every other little girl of fifteen. In despair at the long, lanky locks, her mother did them up in rag curls.
“I wailed when I looked at my fuzzy head. On the way to the theatre the dampness frizzed up my hair worse than ever. I looked like a blonde pickaninny. It surprises me yet that I got the part.”
As little Hedwig in The Wild Duck Helen received splendid notices without an exception.
During the years that followed, Helen played with John Barrymore in Richard the Third and with Lionel Barrymore in Macbeth. She was the original Marjorie Jones in Penrod. The Constant Nymph, Hamlet, Faust, The Silver Cord, and Mr. Pim Passes By further established her ability in dramatic work.
Helen was a student at the Professional School for Children when she got her first picture work. It was in Allan Dwan’s “The Music Master.”
“All the other girls in my class seemed to be growing up into young beauties,” said Helen, in explaining how she happened to get into film work. “I would hear about the spending money they earned doing little parts in pictures in addition to stage work. And all because they had nice long eyelashes, smiles that photographed, and the general appearance of being young ladies instead of a child, as everyone regarded me.”
Helen decided to slay her inferiority complex in regard to pictures once and for all. She would show them! When they had class discussions and the others got up and told about their experiences working in films, she would have something to say herself!
It would be raining the afternoon she walked to the Fox studio. She was spattered with mud by the time she reached the big red brick building on Tenth Avenue. Before she ducked inside she noticed a very long car parked outside with the initials “W. F.” [William Fox] on the door. “Aha,” she thought “the big boss himself is here.” She did not know that Fox was not the one to interview for film work, that his interest was in the distribution end.
Inside, Helen found an office filled with hopefuls. She noticed that those who asked for the director were sent to the assistant director. And those who asked for the assistant director — waited.
“So I decided that the sensible thing was to ask for Mr. Fox,” laughed Helen. In a few seconds she was scooted into an office and found she was standing before Allan Dwan.
“You have an appointment with Mr. Fox?” she was asked.
“No,” replied a very dignified Miss Chandler, “I only said I wanted to see him.”
After an astonished silence, the director asked her if she would like to take a test for The Music Master. A make-up kit was handed her and, to use her own words, “she used a little bit of everything.”
The test was hopeless, of course. Helen had never used a bit of make-up in all her stage work and knew nothing about handling the cosmetics.
Dwan scrutinized her face carefully and said: “Go wash your face and let’s see how you look.”
“So I washed my face clean and started my picture career — with plenty of things to talk about in class discussion from then on.”
When Helen Chandler came to Hollywood to work in pictures it was March and raining — in spite of Hollywood Chamber of Commerce reports and Southern California weather enthusiasts.
And it was still raining, a few weeks later, when the romance started which today means that she signs checks for the water and gas bills of a Hollywood hilltop home with the distinguished signature, Mrs. Cyril Hume.
Helen met the noted novelist and film writer at a dinner party. Several days later she was just hoisting her umbrella to search for a cab to take her to a luncheon date with Joan Bennett when there was a toot of an automobile horn at the curb and Cyril Hume suggested taking her where she was going.
“Cy had a new green car that had a good engine but sat up in the air like a bath tub. He had just bought it that day and hadn’t had a chance to get a perspective view of it. Incidentally, I embarrassed him for months afterward by getting in the wrong car. There were so many just like it — all long on good engines and short on good looks.”
Several hours passed by over the luncheon table. When Helen finally left Joan Bennett and looked for a cab, she spied the green “tub” down the street, waiting. It was Cyril Hume.
“I thought you were a writer,” she said.
“I was,” he replied, “but today I’m a cab driver. Step in.”
One Sunday afternoon the two were out riding. Helen said she, being used to the rolling country of Connecticut, liked hills. When they spied a hill in the distance, Helen said: “Oh, let’s drive up there.”
They drove and drove and drove and when night came they were still driving — and it was raining. The hill had begun to assume unending proportions.
“When we finally landed on top we found we were on Mt. Wilson, one of the highest mountains in Southern California,” laughed Helen. “And I had an early call at the studio. We snatched a quick dinner and started back down again.
“It was so dark and rainy by the time we skidded to the bottom of the mountain again that we didn’t know which way to turn. So when two little boys asked for a lift we said all right — provided they would direct us back to Hollywood. They agreed. But after we had dropped them off at their destination we found we were in some place called San Fernando. Seven times we drove back into San Fernando until we finally found the road back to Hollywood.”
And she still likes the rain!
The Humes are one of those young couples who are always celebrating something. The anniversary of the day they met. Or the commemoration of the day they were engaged. Or a wedding anniversary.
During the last rain, a rain which Southern Californians will remember because it marooned beach residents and played havoc with lowlands — on that day the Cyril Humes were due for a celebration!
“I had a Ford convertible coupe that leaked,” reports Helen. “I picked Cy up at the studio and we drove down to a beach club for luncheon. I remember there wasn’t another soul in the club dining room that day except Cy and me. And coming home it got wetter and wetter. We found a fire truck stalled in the center of a big lake of water. The fireman called to us and Cy and I ‘Forded’ blithely through all the water and sent a rescue party back from the fire station. Oh, it was a big day!”
So the next time you wake up to find your bedroom windows drenched with showers, don’t think the whole world is joining you in lugubrious groans.
Helen Chandler is probably up and out, signing new contracts, grabbing life by its horns, and finding the world all wet — and a delightful place to live in!
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Lucky little Helen has a great part in the new Richard Barthelmess picture, “Spent Bullets.” She is the only girl in an all-man cast which includes John Mack Brown and Leslie Fenton.
Helen Chandler is married to Cyril Hume, the novelist who wrote “Wife of the Centaur,” which was one of Jack Gilbert’s best silent pictures — remember? Helen met Cyril on a rainy day, and married him on a rainier one. And she has had the best breaks when it rains, ever since she was born in Manhattan in 1909 — on a rainy morning!
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Joe Donahue — you saw him in “Sunny” with Marilyn Miller, and you’ll see him again in “The Reckless Hour,” with Dorothy Mackaill.
Collection: Screenland Magazine, July 1931