Jean Paige — Of the Sub-Deb Squad (1919) 🇺🇸
Jean Paige is one of the more prominent members of our cinematic younger set.
by Wales Forthe
Do you remember that girl you went to school with?
The one, I mean, with slightly curly hair, and the very brief nose, and the mouth that was always a little parted to show her white and even teeth? When she laughed her nose crinkled — a little.
You carried her books; then, when you were both a little older, you took her to her first dance, and yours. You sent her something for her birthday. And, later on, you wanted very much to marry her.
Jean Paige is that kind of a girl. You associate her — even in a studio dressing-room — with sunny fields and wind-swept hills, soft brown forests, pools and winding lanes, dizzy sweet with the breath of honeysuckle.
But she roused us from our reverie. “Yes, I was born in Paris — Illinois,” she was saying matter-of-factly. “And I always did want to do something in a dramatic line.”
It wasn’t quite two years ago that she was part of the sweetness and light in Paris, Illinois. And all the time, of course, she was dreaming of New York. Her home surroundings were delightful. But that little bug called ambition bit her…
“And then,” she went on, “Martin Justice came to Paris — Illinois — on his vacation. I met him and — he changed my plans. No — you’re wrong! He saw in me — he said — the girl to play in some of the O. Henry stories he was dramatizing for Vitagraph, if I would come to New York. Would I? Well—”
Youth and a fresh beauty, transplanted to New York; adaptability to entirely new surroundings, but most of all work — hard work, made up Jean Paige’s success. She happened to be the ideal type to play the little girl he — the hero — left behind him; the child-woman who loved him all the time — he usually being Harry Morey. Or she does those shop-girls of O. Henry, the soul-bound young ladies who yearn for a freer expression and a broader horizon.
She puts much of herself into such characters, although Jean is really a contented person and shares the philosophy of a certain Little Disturber who once remarked via the subtitle, “If you don’t get what you want, want what you can get,” or captions to that effect.
“Picture audiences like sweet girls in their plays,” she believes, “but after a while they gel awfully tired of the self-sacrificing little female who stands calmly by and watches some gorgeous and willowy lady impose upon the affections of the man she loves. Because, after all, girls today don’t do that sort of thing. If things don’t go right, they mix in — and straighten things out There are mighty few Enoch Ardens today and Elaine the Lily-Maid simply doesn’t exist, that’s all. I have in mind several real women I’d like to do on the screen, sometime, and they’re all ladies who fight their own battles.”
You have probably seen her in “The Skylight Room,” “The Count and the Wedding Guests,” “Discounters of Money”— all Vitagraphs of sometime ago. With Harry Morey she appeared in such pictures as “Tangled Lives,” in which hers was one of the entangled existences, Harry’s and Betty Blythe’s, I believe, being the others. And in “The Desired Woman” — remember that one? — and “The King of Diamonds.” She is also in the Bushman-and-Bayne [Francis X. Bushman | Beverly Bayne] Vitagraph, “Daring Hearts.”
Jean is working right along, for Vitagraph, and as the Vitagraph studios are in Brooklyn, she lives there, so as to be near — and she likes it.
Furthermore, she has very blue eyes and one hundred and fifteen well-distributed pounds. And she’s just twenty-one.
—
She is of debutante age, but her philosophy is what you might expect of a young lady who at twenty-one is pretty well known outside the family circle.
Photograph by Alfred Cheney Johnston
Collection: Photoplay Magazine, December 1919