Lila Lee — Cuddles Grows Up (1929) 🇺🇸
They called her Cuddles, because she was such a cute, chubby little girl. And the name was all right, in its way, when she was a child in the Gus Edwards Revue. Then she went into pictures and they renamed her Lila Lee. But the curse of Cuddles still pursued her.
by Katherine Albert
On the screen Lila drank ice cream sodas, which were fattening and uninspiring. She looked pale and wan when the villain eyed her. And all the time she wanted to do the vamping.
She was a pretty bad actress back in those early days. She was a bad actress but a good woman, and maybe that’s how all the trouble started. The producers got their adjectives mixed.
Three things have happened to Lila simultaneously. She has grown up, she has made a comeback and she has turned bad. Her life was so crowded with events that it was difficult for her to get in any thinking. Experiences came too fast to be analyzed.
At thirteen she discovered herself a Paramount star. At eighteen she was the wife of James Kirkwood and at nineteen, the mother of a baby son. It is just recently that she has been able to solve the real meaning of these happenings.
Now, at twenty-four, she finds that she has been piling up experiences that serve her right royally.
“It’s like putting money in the bank,” she said. “You keep on doing it, week after week, and all of a sudden wake up to the fact that you have quite a lot stored away.”
Lila has quite a lot stored away. She’s just beginning to use it. She’s just beginning to get back of herself and find that she’s a person — quite a sophisticated, humorous person.
Her comeback has already been entered in the film history books. It takes so little time to make history in Hollywood.
When she discovered that she was over-publicized as a star and that her public would have no more of her, she went to New York and found work on the stage. When she returned, Hollywood had forgotten her and she thought herself foolish to have left.
But it was that very stage experience that brought her back to the screen when the talkies came into vogue. Otherwise she might still be an over-publicized failure. But when the microphone did become important and there was a demand for Lila Lee, she woke up to the fact that her forte lay, not in sweet, ga-ga roles, but in something more serious and vital.
She overcame the Cuddles handicap in Dick Barthelmess’ new picture, Drag.
Dorothy Mackaill was slated for the part, but she couldn’t get through her own picture in time. Dubiously, director Frank Lloyd interviewed Lila.
“You think you can play this part?” he asked. “You think you could really be a bad woman?”
Lila, not the little, timid creature of a few years ago, but a poised young woman with a nice sense of humor, shrugged her shoulders. “I’m supposed to be an actress,” she said.
Lloyd wanted a little more animation. He was used to eager young ladies who acted all over his office to prove how great they were.
“Yes, yes, I know,” he said. “I know you’ve been doing nice little parts, but this girl is hard and scheming and bad and I’m wondering if you could play it. “
Lila stuck to her story. She was an actress. She could play whatever part was set before her. .And as she talked she knew that she could do a bad woman. She knew that she was not cut out for dear little ingenues whose greatest tragedy was the death of the family puppy.
But Frank Lloyd couldn’t get Cuddles out of his mind. For all the fact that he saw before him a smart young divorcee with a windblown bob and slim legs encased in the sheerest of silk hose, he remembered a little kid with two enormous braids wrapped around either ear. Against his better judgment he gave Lila the script to learn. He said he’d make a test the next day.
Lila appeared before him. She read three or four lines.
“No use for a test,” said he. “You’re O. K. now. Report for work Tuesday morning at nine o’clock.”
And thus Lila became a bad woman. Thus she grew up, cinematically speaking, and renounced the ice cream sodas and the braids.
“That was the most awful way of wearing my hair,” she said. “Nothing could be so unbecoming. It makes your nose turn up and your chin turn down. I looked horrible. And every time I saw girls who imitated it I felt guilty for spreading so much ugliness in the world.
“It held me back, too. It typed me. I was allowed to play just one role and while I was playing that role all the publicity men at Paramount were grinding out copy about what a great bet I was, what a swell actress, what a big find.
“Why, I didn’t know the meaning of the word actress. I did what I was told, that was all. I walked through parts because I discovered myself in front of a camera with a lot of grease paint smeared over my face. I was just a kid.
“I was just a kid when I married. No wonder it failed. What was I to know, at eighteen, about love and life?
“And I’ve only just begun to know. Now. at twenty-four, it’s just beginning to percolate.
“I’m the luckiest idiot in the world. After Drag I had more offers than I could take. I’m starting right away on another picture. And the very stage experience that I thought had ruined my career is the thing that has let me work in talkies. I am, for the first time in my life, finding myself.
“I know what I don’t want, which is the first step toward finding what I want. I know that I don’t want to be a sweet soul with a ga-ga heart.
“And behold — here am I, a bad woman on the screen. And here am I a mother who, for the first time since her motherhood, realizes the importance of being one.”
Cuddles Edwards is no more. Sing a requiem for her demise. But shout for joy over the new Lila Lee. The smart, sophisticated, sparkling Lila Lee who has, even at this tender age, found herself.
Once she was a chubby little girl known merely as Cuddles, which was no name to thrust on an unsuspecting child
At eighteen she married James Kirkwood and left the screen to go on the stage. The marriage was a mistake but the stagetraining proved invaluable to Lila
You can see by the expression on Director Millard Webb’s face that he doesn’t care for brunettes — even of the glorified variety. Now if that were blonde Mary Eaton in the polka-dotted bathing suit —! Incidentally, Director Webb’s opus, Glorifying the American Girl, is going to be something new — a backstage drammer, no less, showing us how the chorus girls really talk. Why not begin numbering ‘em? For instance Broadway Melody could be X1394, Broadway X1993, etc.
Although she has been in lots of pictures, you never really saw this girl on the screen until the presentation of Drag. She is the new Lila Lee — sophisticated, clever and beautiful. At twenty-four Lila, with a lifetime of experience, starts on a new career. On the opposite page you will find the story of the courageous child actress who wouldn’t be forgotten.
Photo by: Lansing Brown (1900–1962)
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Collection: Photoplay Magazine, September 1929