Laura La Plante — Without Benefit of Fireworks (1930) 🇺🇸

February 15, 2023

"Laura La Plante remains perennially a favorite, because she is not a great artist. She is a more permanent box-office star than the genius."

by Myrtle Gebhart

Thus spoke Doctor William M. Marston, formerly of Columbia and New York universities, who analyzes plays and actors and public reactions, and blends film emotions for Universal. Holding degrees of B.A., L.L.B., and Ph. D. from Harvard, and having practiced legal psychology as a member of the Massachusetts bar, he knows his stuff.

"Laura's popularity lasts, while many sensational successes ricochet into failure, because she is the best balanced in emotional values. Her equal possession of submission and compliance results in a tranquil temperament and consistently good, conscientious work. She has sufficient dominance to drudge, but not enough drive to push herself. Her leading quality is inducement, projecting a lovely, refined personality.

"She can be depended upon to give pleasant, skillful performances, never emotionally great. No ecstatic, imaginative flights ever will high light or mar her serene career."

The primitives, it seems, are dominance, compliance, submission, and inducement. Various combinations produce those emotions which we have designated, erroneously, as love, hate, and so on. Inducement is the ability to project attraction; compliance means adaptability.

Doctor Marston was dissecting players at my behest. He enjoyed the panic which his. position caused, until the actors got used to being told they lacked inducement. Now, he is "psyching" plays for values to produce public submis — er, I guess I mean applause. But applause isn't a primitive! We'd better get back to Laura.

Such a satisfactory person to get back to! Her theme song might well be I Ain't Got No Blues!

She is as real and friendly — as primitive — as a geranium in a garden of exotic flowers. One of those comfortably commonplace people who subscribe to no extremes, she is neither very expressive nor inhibited; neither extravagant nor disinterested in material things; neither gladly exuberant nor morose. A normal, contented person, she has reduced the exaggerations of a film career to an ordinary, lusterless routine.

There are two sides to this placid picture which is Laura La Plante.

For seven years she has been a Universal star, according to record. During her ten years in pictures, she has never missed a weekly salary check. She has provided well for her family. Her work never has been severely criticized, nor has she personally ever made the slightest censurable gesture. She has maintained a happy marriage — her husband is the director William Seiter — without propounding a single theory.

Turn the canvas from the light. Not shadowing, but faintly misting this bright, smiling face are these facts. None of her starring films has had a showy premiere. Often, agreeably consenting to featured rating, she isn't certain of her own standing. Though her salary is sizable, many with far less experience make much more. Not once has her work occasioned particular acclaim. Her private life is so prosaic that frequently she shops and attends shows without being recognized.

Her success has been achieved in a sensible way, proving that quiet determination is more effective than explosives for a continuous career. She hasn't even in brief spasms attempted culture on the large and conscious scale affected by many players. She would ask why should she? With a childlike simplicity, she professes intellectual ignorance; yet, without seeming to, she has picked up a surprising amount of knowledge. She knows some French, and more than a bit of history, and is not art dull.

There can't be much about motion pictures that she doesn't know, though she thinks her own films not important enough even for a failure to rate mention! She has played everything since, at fifteen, she added her chubby self to comedies. She feels no urge, however, to deliver diatribes concerning the producers' mismanagement of the business, believing it guided as sanely as possible, all factors considered. Her opinions can be forceful, and as such are freely expressed. but never orated as critical platforms.

"Gosh!" she murmured feelingly, when I related the doctor's deductions.

Laura can say a great deal very simply.

No repressed yearnings annoy her. Her wish for a car — sleek, dark, unobtrusive — was gratified. Such clothes as she desires she buys; sport dresses with gay collars and cuffs and lacy, feminine frocks.

Their apartment gives an effect of discreet elegance. The furniture is French of no particular period. Their beach place is thirty or more miles from Hollywood, a distance beyond the once-secluded Malibu. It has rugged comfort. On one side of the sandy yard is a tennis court, on the other a very young garden. Two bath houses, the walls of the men's being adorned with La Vie Parisienne covers. Around the house are verandas, arbors, trailing vines, unexpected nooks for settees.

"This," I remarked, "proves that you have inducement. You have induced a lot from a gentleman whom I would mention if he would come up out of that book and notice us."

"She boop-boopa-doops me." A good-natured grumble issued from the bulk of masculinity sprawled inelegantly into and over an armchair.

"Brute!" said Laura amiably.

You very seldom read interviews with her, because she has nothing sensationally important to say, and thinks it too much bother, and also ridiculous, to develop affectations. She has no extravagances or fads. That she has survived without startling publicity indicates appreciation, by a steady public group, of her saner, sweeter attributes.

"When I was promoted from a Christie guarantee of twenty dollars a week to a straight salary of fifty, I went haywire. I bought two pairs of slippers, at twenty-seven fifty each." Curled up on the couch covered in rough, tan cloth, she looked like such a little girl, a slightly chubby little girl, in her beige flannel, with its red tie and cuffs. Confiding a dream for ermine or diamonds would have seemed appropriate. Instead, she yawned and replied, "Didn't I have nerve? I don't pay half that for shoes now. I couldn't be so wasteful. I shop around, and I won't be overcharged."

Sensibly recognizing her own limitations, she turns over her affairs to ones more competent. For years the same person has taken care of her fan mail, which has maintained an even pace, reflecting the measured, leisurely tread of her life and work. Faithful Polly keeps her books and makes investments for her.

"I like to come home and boast, 'Dear, I made such-a-much on that Blink stock' and get a kick out of his pleased, 'Fine, baby, you're a smart girl.' But I know that I would be sunk without their advice and management. And my husband," she said, winking, "tells me what to do. He is very, very clever."

"Doctor Marston says," I murmured, "that women don't admire dominance in men; it irritates them; submission appeals to them, men they can captivate." That brought only a grunt. "Furthermore," I tried again, "he insists that in apparently idealizing women, men pay homage to their own reflected fineness and gentleness which they have hidden, fearing their fellowmen will ridicule them as weaklings, and with which they endow women."

"Absolutely!" A wide grin overspread the Seiter features. "Never knew Marston had so much brains."

We left him and went house touring. The long, beamed living room has low, fat chairs and divans, gayly cushioned window seats, brass and bronze and wrought-iron knickknacks. Down one hallway one makes a world tour. It is papered with maps, bordered with humorous, colored drawings. Though the furniture is substantial, the new note is in modernistic boxes and French comic pictures and gay china. One's pano. ramie gaze meets one novelty after another. Nothing is very expensive, or at all ornate, yet the combination achieved is pleasing.

"How long have you been a star, Laura?" I asked at dinner.

"Am I one?" The amused quirk in her voice lifted an ironic question mark. "I often wonder. I get the billing — off and on. I am starred, then I feature with Schildkraut or Boles. My contract stars me, though."

"Too good-natured." Mr. Seiter's grumble was mitigated by his enjoyment of the well-cooked dinner served by the Filipino boy. "If they told Laura that she was to do a two-reel Western next, she would merely ask, 'And what sort of clothes shall I get?'"

"I have some gumption!" Her protest was not vehement. "I once quarreled beautifully. I wanted more money and better stories and stayed home. But I was frightened and cried and went back. Eventually I got the money. Sometimes I believe

I would have done better had I raised a fuss more often — and stuck to it. Again when I see temperament wrecking careers, I am satisfied to let things work out logically. Any growth, to be genuine and lasting, must be slow, normal, gradually progressive. Anything meteoric is bound to react.

"At times I have envied the overnight successes. They are so breathlessly thrilled. Exciting, wonderful things, all bunched. Probably they are so dazed that they realize only a part of it."

Because she is invariably sweet, interested but not absorbed, her humor appreciative rather than assertive, some have wondered if she ever has moods. In six years I have never met the slightest variation of manner. No nimble, erratic impulses ever rub her tranquillity.

"I've had lots of disappointments, but they do not seem as tragic as in my early days, just as then I thrilled over little victories — the lead in the 'Bringing Up Father' series, with Tom Mix, in a broncho opera, the heavy in a couple of wild melos."

Unaccustomed to and embarrassed by introspection, she makes a little fun of herself. "It all evens up. If I lose one role I want, something else as good comes along. I have only to be patient."

Though she may lack dominance, she has will power when goaded by sufficient incentive. Didn't she, at sixteen, walk halfway up Laurel Canyon and back every day, and eschew sweets, in order to lose fifteen pounds in two weeks, because she was considered for an important picture?

Didn't she, when up for roles, go to painstaking effort to dress herself to make appropriately realistic impressions? She is conscientious, with that attention to detail of her plodding, thorough type. A limited vision, however, restricts her; no doubt a good thing for her. Her dreams never will be greatly glorious, nor her defeats spectacular.

Her responsibilities have been shouldered with courage, even temper and common sense. Her mother is settled in a lovely home. Her young sister's inability to decide upon a career, handicapped as actresses' relatives are by a reflected glamour, is a vague worry rippling beneath her placidity.

Husband and servants baby Laura; protective smiles follow her around. But have you ever known domestic efficiency to be achieved when its feminine head had a helter-skelter brain?

Other Hollywood wives, older women, some without careers, should ask her how she does it, and save their guests the embarrassment of hearing servants reprimanded, and that uneasy tension of a home hadly managed. At the Seiters', from the moment that Mr. Seiter looks up over his book and greets you heartily, "Hello, babies! Hungry?" to the time that, hours and miles later, the chauffeur unwinds you from the fur robe and hopes, in a tone full of chuckling solicitude, that you enjoyed your sleep driving home, you feel a quiet, happy affection anticipating your wants, pleased that you are there.

What is the most important thing she has got out of it all?

"Contentment. That grows from a happy home life and fairly interesting work. In missing many of fame's thrills, I suppose I have also been spared its headaches."

"A pretty good kid," Mr. Seiter sums her up. "No indigo baths. Occasionally pouty, but it blows over in a twinkle."

As interludes between "Show Boat" and the most dominant role she has ever had, in "La Marseillaise," she played in "Scandal" and a couple of light talkies. As "The Torch," leader of the mob in the French revolution play, she had to display exceptional spirit. She was co-starred with John Boles, as Rouget de Lisle, composer of the revolution's battle hymn.

For it she had to dye her hair brown. Ever since I have known her she had been blonde. What was she, naturally?

"Just mousy," she grimaced. Who else could have refrained from a detailed dissertation on bleaching, why, when, and its effects on personality and future plans?

To be prepared, she took dancing lessons during her last vacation. The criticism of the vocal doubling in the "Show Boat" singing aroused her to the point of looking for her voice. She has produced one, by no means strong, or as yet very definite, but suggesting the possibilities of a sweet, light soprano. It is being coaxed by dutiful practice, with the hope that when she can trill her high C's and range down to a wistful, wishful hum of "blu-u-ues!" they may put her in a musi-movie.

"It makes me feel badly at times," she muses, infrequently, "that in ten years I haven't done anything."

I suppose when they put a gendarme uniform on her, give her a little baton to wave, and a powdered male chorus, and let her warble a tune for some rollicking revue, she will feel a sense of accomplishment!