Helen Mundy — Her Red-Letter Day (1927) 🇺🇸

Helen Mundy asked for a chocolate sundae after school, and got a five-year contract — and with Famous Players, too! How this extraordinary good fortune came about is one of the most interesting stories of the movies ever told.

by Alma Talley

Of course, you may not believe this story. It’s one of those tales of a fairy godmother who makes your wish come true overnight. Really, you know, such things don’t happen!

This is one of those stories, the only difference being that it is true; it did happen, and because of it an unknown girl named Helen Mundy is on her way to stardom in the movies.

Helen is a little Southern girl of seventeen, five foot two, with eyes of brown. Until last April she was placidly going to high school in Knoxville, Tennessee, and living alone with her widowed mother who taught school for a livelihood. Helen was hard at work studying for examinations, and her graduation in June. She was vaguely movie struck, of course — almost all girls are — but what of it? It’s impossible to get into the movies these days, with all the thousands of extras you read about who flock around the studios.

So little Miss Mundy discouraged her ambitions and went on studying. Until the big day, the red-letter day in her life. It started out just like any other day — school, and then after school a stroll with a group of boys and girls, and into a Knoxville drug store for sundaes.

Then is when it happened. For no sooner had Helen walked into the store when a man came up to her and said, “How would you like to play the leading role in a movie?” Just like that.

“Ha-ha!” said Helen, just as you would do if a perfectly strange man asked you that. “Don’t be silly!” — and ordered a chocolate nut sundae.

“And then I started home, not thinking much about it,” explains Miss Mundy, in her soft Southern voice, “or at least, it just struck me as rather a crazy thing to happen to me. It was one of those days when everything goes wrong — the kind of day when things keep annoying you.

“They kept on annoying me. I reached home and began taking a bath, and the phone rang. Mother was out. So I had to get out of the tub to answer it. Then it rang again, and I had to dash out, dripping wet, a second time. Hardly had I got back to finish my bath when the doorbell rang. By this time I was getting crosser and crosser. But I grabbed a dressing gown, and there at the front door was a chauffeur, with a beautiful car out in front of the house.

“He handed me a card, with the name Paul Wing on it, and a note scribbled in pencil, ‘May I see you tonight at eight — on business?’”

Miss Mundy’s eyes grew wide and bright as she told her story, over the lunch table. She has eyes like Clara Bow’s, with unbelievably long lashes, and they looked very brown and sparkling under her tiny brown hat. She wore a dull-orange coat with a brown fur collar.

“Well,” she said, in her naive way, “I’d never heard of Paul Wing, and I’d never had anything to do with business — sixteen, just going to school every day. What business could he have with me? But of course I was curious, so I said all right, I would see him.”

And isn’t it lucky for her that she did? For Paul Wing proved to be the man in the drug store, the assistant director of the Famous Players picture, Stark Love.

“When he first spoke to me,” Helen continued, “I thought he probably worked for some dinky little company, perhaps one of those fake picture companies you read about. When he said, ‘Famous Players,’ I just couldn’t believe it. I couldn’t imagine such a thing happening to me. Mother and I were quite suspicious at first.

“‘How do we know,’ asked my mother, ‘that you really do represent Famous Players?’ So Mr. Wing told her to call up the chamber of commerce and they would vouch for him.”

Well, it was all true. It really was Mr. Wing of Famous Players and he had been looking for a girl to play in his picture. And then the whys and wherefores all came out.

Famous Players had sent a company of two directors, camera men, script workers and all that, down into the mountains of North Carolina to make a “native picture,” with scenes of the “poor whites” just as they really are. There were to be no stars, just a real-life film of the illiterate mountaineer people, on the order of Nanook of the North with its Eskimo life, and “Moana.”

So Carl Brown, the director, and his assistant, Paul Wing, were sent down to take charge of the proceedings. There turned out to be only one difficulty. They did want a pretty heroine — one mustn’t forget the box office — and among the slatternly, uncouth women of the mountains there was not a pretty girl to be found. The company had been down in the district for two months, and the picture was not even started. The New York executives of Famous Players were getting annoyed. Two months — all those men down in the mountains on expense accounts, and not doing anything! The New York office kept sending wires: “Get to work; the picture must be started.” Mr. Brown and Mr. Wing became quite desperate.

They gave up trying to find a suitable mountaineer girl, and crossed over the State line into Tennessee. Mr. Wing wandered into the drug store. “Don’t you know of any screenstruck girls here in town?” he asked the cashier, half in fun, half in desperation. The cashier thought a moment.

“Why, there’s Helen Mundy,” she suggested finally, “she’s a cute little thing, and she’s kinda movie struck.”

Just then — this, as I said, being one of those stories you won’t believe — Helen walked in, with her group. “There she is now,” said the cashier, and Mr. Wing briefly studied her screen possibilities.

Big brown eyes like Clara Bow’s, set far apart, and a mouth like Renée Adorée’s. Long brown hair — which she has since bobbed — yes, she looked as if she might do. Not a beauty, certainly, but she would photograph like a million. So the film expert decided hastily, and then went over and asked her that perfectly incredible question, “How would you like to play the leading role in a movie?”

So that is how it came about. Mrs. Mundy was not very pleased at. first; her two other daughters are married and live in distant cities; Helen was the only companion she had.

She listened dubiously while Mr. Wing told her the plans. Nothing, of course, was definite, he explained, until Miss Mundy passed a screen test. The camera men were in North Carolina, a few miles away, and it would be necessary for Helen to go there to be photographed. It would take about a week to make the screen tests and get them to New York to be O. K.’d.

“Oh, well,” decided Mrs. Mundy, “perhaps the tests won’t be O. K.’d anyhow. And, Helen, I think the week’s rest and change will do you good. You’ve been studying so hard and you’re all tired out.”

That, explained Miss Mundy, was really the reason her mother let her go. Neither of them really expected that she would be gone more than a week. She got the few days off from the school authorities, and confidently told every one she would return in about seven days.

But she didn’t, of course. When the Knoxville High School held its commencement exercises, there was no Helen Mundy in the class. She was having a commencement all her own — the beginning of her screen career.

“We went up into the mountains on location,” Helen said, “and lived in tents. I was the only player in the cast who wasn’t a real mountaineer. Most of the others couldn’t even read and write; they had to sign their agreements with the company by marking an “X,” because they couldn’t write their own names.

“I was the only girl among all those people living on location. Oh, yes, there were other women in the cast, but they lived in the hills near by and came to work by the day. So there I was, with all those men; they pitched my tent between Mr. Brown’s and Mr. Wing’s, the two directors, for protection. One night a feud started among the mountaineers — a man had stolen his brother’s still. In the middle of the night, I was awakened by bullets whizzing through my tent — you can imagine how scared I was, and no woman within miles to run to. Finally, I got so frightened I dressed and ran into Mr. Wing’s tent and woke him up. I sat there for hours, waiting until they could quiet the rioters.”

Except for that bit of excitement, the picture was finished without any further difficulty. They found that Helen Mundy was a surprisingly good little actress; with the aid of music she could cry or do anything that was required of her. An orthophonic victrola was shipped all the way from New York to help her emote. And when the film was finally completed. Famous Players decided that Helen was a real “find” — though she doesn’t like herself on the screen at all.

“They made me wear a blond wig in the picture, for one thing,” she explained, “and I don’t think it was very becoming. For another, I was not allowed to use any make-up, because this was a sort of ‘nature film,’ with all those people just as they really are. Make-up makes such a difference on the screen. Without it every little flaw in your skin shows up, and my face looks all splotchy and dirty.”

But, splotches and everything, Miss Mundy photographs marvelously. The Famous Players executives held a conference after seeing Stark Love, and Helen was sent for to hear those magic words, “a five-year contract.” Like most such contracts it has a renewal option every six months, with an increase in salary. So Helen has to make good constantly.

Undoubtedly she will. She had just been tested for a part in “Love’s Greatest Mistake” when I saw her.

and hoped to start work on that picture. Was she all atremble at this sudden opportunity that would thrill — and terrify — almost any girl? She was not. Helen Mundy, aged seventeen, who had never done anything in her life but just go to school, is as much at ease as if she had spent years before the camera. This amazing bit of luck she accepts quite as calmly as you or I would take a piece of pie. No danger of its going to her head.

She hadn’t been around the studio long enough to have made many friends. One day she had a chat — she chatted at least — with Lya de Putti, which was rather amusing.

“I was just rattling on and on, as I always do,” said Helen, “and I thought Miss de Putti was rather rude and inattentive. And finally after I had been talking — it must have been half an hour — she looked up and said, ‘I’m sorry, but I do not understand English!’”

Miss Mundy perhaps does not know it, but I fancy that she had a certain stigma to live down among the other players at the studio. They knew that she had played the heroine in Stark Love, a picture with an “all-native cast,” and they naturally assumed that she was one of the mountaineer illiterates herself. Perhaps she couldn’t even write her name!

However, they will soon get over that notion. They have only to talk to Helen Mundy to realize that she is not only a person like themselves, but that she is particularly intelligent. She did not seek an opportunity for a career in the movies, but she knew how to make the most of it when it came; and some day she will be famous, this little girl who had a film career thrust upon her!

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Helen Mundy, a Southern schoolgirl of seventeen, without experience in pictures, was given the leading role in , and came through with flying colors.

Photo by: George Peter Hommel (1901–1953)

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Stark Love, a story of mountaineers as they really are, was filmed in North Carolina. With the exception of Miss Mundy, the cast was made up of natives of that locality.

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Collection: Picture Play Magazine, February 1927