Helen Jerome Eddy — We’d Hate to Eat Her Biscuits! (1921) 🇺🇸
Nobody I have ever met had been so grossly misrepresented to me as Helen Jerome Eddy.
by Arabella Boone
Simplicity — frankness — a sort of wholesome sincerity — are the characteristics for which she has been celebrated, both pictorially and in her off-screen life. She has portrayed simple, good women, easy to understand, ever since she made her first sensational hit in King Vidor’s picture, The Turn in the Road, over three years ago.
But to me she appeals as something absolutely different.
To me, she is an Italian — the type of the Renaissance.
How Browning would love to have written about her!
How del Sarto and da Vinci would love to have painted her!
She has the smooth, placid, infinitely subtle beauty of a Mona Lisa the beauty Browning meant when del Sarto called his wife “my moon.” It is so even of tone and line, it affects you firstly as plainness.
Slow of speech, of expression, of movement, she suggests the sixteenth century madonnas, with their perfect brows, and long, wise eyes.
Her skin has the pure cream of the magnolia — absolutely without color. And her hair — so smoothly drawn from her serene forehead — her eyes, her brows, and lashes, all one harmonious, even note of brown. Her body has a long, slender roundness that goes naturally with the oval of her face.
The first time you look at her she seems plain. The second time, sweet. And as you look you find this subtle, deep,
baffling something and your mind slips noiselessly into —
“That’s my last duchess painted on the wall,
Looking as if she were alive —”
And —
“That fawn-skin-dappled hair of her —”
After all, Miss Eddy’s path in pictures has been chosen for her. She has created skillfully and well some fine characterizations of the kind she is identified with most — simple, natural, mother or sister types. She has made, since her advent in pictures five years ago, a unique place for herself. But I saw her once not long ago in some one-act thing at the Community Theater in Hollywood — where she played an Italian lady of the seventeenth century, a deep, designing, passionately loving lady — and she was quite remarkable. And lately, she was Francesca in Paolo and Francesca at the same place. In these things she seems to have found a new path to follow which I believe will eventually lead her to a new line of parts on the screen as well.
Her reading shows a love for painting, poetry, — and a radical thought in politics. Her home follows the new ideas in decoration — a few very good pieces of furniture, good rugs, a picture or two — all soft in coloring.
She dislikes home-work — cooking, house-keeping, sewing. Instead of being the simple, home type of girl, she is intellectually inclined, very much the modernist in thought and action. She discusses art schools, governmental problems, and social evolution much more readily than she does household economics.
“My grandmother”; who was a famous teacher of elocution and dramatic reading, and was once a well-known actress, used to read me to sleep when I was a very little girl with The Raven, she told me. “And the first thing I ever learned was The Ancient Mariner.”
She lives with two other young women, both earning their own fixing and both successful in literary work in studios. She is, in character, distinctly a twentieth century evolution — the sort of young woman who a decade ago led the suffrage movement and today is rapidly succeeding in every line of business and profession.
Though she looks so Italian — and I mean by that the high class Italian lady, the most delicate in the world, and not the black-eyed, striking peasant type we know best — she is actually Irish.
“But then,” she said laughing, “It is rather the fashion to be Irish nowadays, isn’t it? Almost everyone is Irish.”
She prefers silence to speech when the choice is hers. Another characteristic of the Mona Lisa type — and her smile is — it is really — not unlike that lady’s celebrated smile.
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Miss Eddy in the garden of her new Hollywood home. It’s the nearest she ever gets to the kitchen.
Photo by: C. Heighton Monroe
Collection: Photoplay Magazine, April 1921
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