Louise Dresser — The Mothering Heart (1930) 🇺🇸

Louise Dresser — The Mothering Heart (1930) | www.vintoz.com

February 16, 2023

The Motion Picture Academy of Arts and Sciences was bestowing its awards. Youth and beauty had been paid their customary honor.

by Myrtle Gebhart

"Louise Dresser!" a voice rang out, calling to recognition the middle years' accomplishment. The tribute was made to Mamma Pleznick for the unforgettable etching of an immigrant's bewilderment in "A Ship Comes In," a little, pictorial gem that seldom made the first-run theaters.

Mothers — tender or harsh, weak or strong, they are given to the films by a woman's longing for a child of her own. Their glow is the reflection of a sunny, compassionate woman who keeps open heart to the world.

At forty-seven she is the only feminine star of the sunset years. Her Fox agreement designates her as star, though she accepts lesser billing in order to play desired roles. She does not dwell in mist-shrouded lanes of memory; her eyes are on the future. Between fifty and fifty-five she expects to do her best work!

An invincible spirit and a tolerance rooted in deep sympathy have taken her, plugging and climbing, from a simple Hoosier home into theatrical prominence, through an intricate pattern of experience. With all its tests, she wouldn't trade her life, not a tiny one of its precious pains and pleasures, for throne or fortune. But she would, for a baby, dump it all out instantly.

You know her as a stage star, as a screen artist whose work rings true, and as a clever, cultured woman.

Do you know that for eighteen months she lay ill, uncertain that she would ever walk again?

That, at forty-six, she lost seventy-six thousand dollars, most of her life's savings?

That this splendid actress constantly fears that she will never do anything worth while, requiring the exertion of much will power to achieve any degree of confidence?

You can't know, until you have shared her gayety and tears, reassured her in moods of self-deprecation, and tagged her sympathy around others' troubles, how great her heart is, and how rich its understanding.

No material substance ever tantalized one wrapped up in the earthiness of living and working and feeling. Her only great yearning has been for a child. And in this denial lies, I think, her power.

"At sixteen I wanted a baby dreadfully. It was an actual ache, that need. As my work engrossed me, the longing left me. During my twenties and thirties, I never gave it a thought." Part of her abundant charm is the ingenuous candor with which she reveals herself. "In my forties it rushed back suddenly."

Intensified, perhaps, by that long while of disinterest, this maternal quality pours into her roles. You sense it, though in the story she may be childless, too. All the force of her vibrant, strong character is full of its yearning.

Parting from her screen children at each picture's completion is a wrench. Kay Johnson is her pet. "Ah, those dear eyes," she will muse. "She has audacity and tenderness, so much sweetness."

She sees a beneficent purpose back of all her personal disasters.

"I needed that accident." It occurred at a theatrical charity benefit. Her foot caught in an unfastened carpet; the fall inflicted a serious fracture. During her hospital sojourn it became the custom of medicos and nurses to congregate in her sitting room, to be buoyed by her jollity.

"I was riding too high. After all those grubstaking years — gray towns, dreary seasons, hunger — I hit. For nine years I never left Broadway. I would casually buy a forty-five-hundred-dollar rug, or a lovely painting. My extravagance was reckless, unmotivated caprice, rather than acute desire. But I wasn't grateful enough.

"I fell out of the theater, out of an easy, successful, happy circuit, out of thoughtlessness into reckoning. Out of New York into California!" When brushing over a personal tragedy she tacks on a humorous flip.

To speed her convalescence, and that the kinder clime might benefit her mother's health, her husband, Jack Gardner — whom she calls "daddy" — brought them West. Her salary had been seventeen hundred and fifty dollars a week. To occupy herself and to please her friend, Pauline Frederick, she took her first picture engagement for three hundred a week.

When roles did not follow rapidly, she suffered a nervous apprehension that she had failed in the new field. She always will be harassed by this inability to attain the artist's ever elusive, ever progressive goal. Time and again she had her trunks packed and was on the verge of departure.

"Dear Jim Cruze understood me best. He taught me and patiently endured my stupidity. It took me so long to learn the movies."

Still, there was quite a lot of money. One morning, suddenly, there wasn't. Seventy- six thousand dollars rolled off her bank account, through financing a relative in a business venture.

"Investments made on daddy's or mother's advice succeed; my impulses prove costly. Some day I may realize that I have no head for business."

That loss taught her economy; she allows herself only moderate luxury.

"Funny, I don't miss the gewgaws. It's much nicer to have chairs you can sit on. Antiques make me nervous. I'm all for comfort."

There did come a truly dark hour, one of those professional interludes. Even after the sensational Goose Woman, producers debated whether picturegoers would accept her regularly. A middle-aged man, Lewis Stone or Wallace Beery, yes; but femininity must be provocative. Gradually there developed a definite demand for her.

On the set she is composed, conscientious. Her poise and practicality impress one, through her concentration. Such social life as she has time for, she endows with a gracious charm. It is only in her home, however, that you see the woman herself. You laugh at and with her. There, where love folds her in, she expands in the freedom of complete self-revelation. There, curiously, she is easily upset. A change in a picture schedule is a cataclysm. Though she superintends the household and the garden with a certain precision, she glories in being babied. Others' personal dramas, grazing her life, are keenly felt. A friend's toothache is a matter for concern.

She rushes about, chatting with neighbors, worrying over something, or happily recounting some one's good fortune. Joys and sorrows tumble about in an agitation not too nervous. All in a flutter, she dresses in five minutes and is ready two hours before it is time to leave.

From the old-fashioned home in rural Glendale they recently moved to Beverly Hills. Their ten years' seclusion was broken by the cutting of a new road and the whir of traffic. Three weeks ahead everything had been packed. Even the peaches were picked and separately wrapped.

Her favorite trees had been uprooted. Brown patches on the green lawn indicated the removal of prized shrubs.

"Fred," she would call to the colored boy, "take this up. You know I can't leave my baby walnut."

"Yassum," the boy would reply, "an' where'll Ah put it when Ah brings it back? Same place?"

From her riotous gardens, stretching seemingly into the purple-misted Sierra Madres, she took enough green stuff to stock a nursery — and brought most of it back again.

"It's such a small house, what shall we do?"

"Give it time," Mr. Gardner called. "It'll be a house by and by."

Except for a needy cause, she never has been known ta throw anything away. She can't part with the bag that So-and-so brought her from Paris, and who could think of putting great-grandma's chair in the attic? So she has another room, or a wing, built on periodically.

"I'm not sentimental," she maintained, when I remarked that she probably had every doorknob named. "But it's hard to tear up roots. We've been so very happy here. It will amuse people. I can imagine them saying, 'At last Louise Dresser is going Beverly.' But though we're leaving a street for a drive, it's the other part of Beverly, not the fashionable section."

Her furniture is so antique, she says, that it antedates all periods. Heavy mahogany, exquisite linens and laces, faded photographs of celebrities, friends of a quarter century ago. Daguerreotypes of relatives, funny, old-fashioned, dear.

Her treasures are things that bring people close. Until her twenty-first anniversary she had never had an expensive bracelet. Her husband's gifts had always been things for the house. When, elaborately casual, he dropped a diamond bracelet in her hand, she was speechless. It takes time to get such a gem insured, and she wouldn't risk it away from herself for a minute. She wore it to bed, to breakfast, to work. "Did people think I'd gone loco? I loved it so that I actually hated, finally, to put it in the safety box." Her reading reflects her vital but unquesting mind, satisfied to consider the thoughts bred by each experience, with tranquil valleys for browsing between these peaks. Biography, fiction — interesting, amusing things. She will order everything a pleasing author has ever written. No rhyme or reason to her at all. She reads Skippy aloud to her mother and faithful, chocolate Annie. The cartoon fascinates her. She insists, with that twinkle in her pale-blue eyes, that some day Skippy is going to dance right off the page and into the room!

In her fine honesty, no ridiculous effort is made to camouflage time's faint record. A dab of powder, a swift coiling of her silky, yellow hair into a knot at the back.

"Those heavy wigs and dark make-ups," she said, with a laugh and a sigh, "they're ruining my hair. It's broken off until it's almost a fashionable shoulder length, see? I'll be up to date yet, if they only wait long enough."

A robust enjoyment of life and of hard work has molded this very energetic woman, whose Indian summer is packed with activities. Glance back over the album tucked into her memory, to Evansville, Indiana. Louise Josephine Kerlin had a gift of excitement. She played with her brother and her boy cousins. She cultivated a child who lived on a river scow, that she might see a certain river character perform aquatic stunts. Found on the river boat, greasy and grimy, screeching encouragement, she was taken home to a sequel far less pleasant. Many hairbrushes were worn out on the Dresser anatomy.

Her father, a railroad engineer, was killed in a wreck when she was fourteen, leaving them very poor. At fifteen, with eight dollars and a natural singing voice, she joined a show. It proved to be a burlesque; she quit immediately. Despite childhood's escapades, she had ingrained in her a rock-ribbed, country morality. She couldn't wear tights. Peck's Bad Boy later started her career, at eighteen a week, barnstorming. Rough goings for a kid — one-night stands, dingy hotels, not enough clothes.

This rocky road is marked, in memory's path, with oases of helping hands. The greatest of all was Paul Dresser. An awkward eighteen, she had an audience with the Irving Berlin of his day. The huge man rolled his three hundred pounds around in his swivel chair, fired questions at her, and gruffly bade her sing his On the Banks of the Wabash and My Gal Sal.

He had been a candy butcher on her father's train. He told her how the men had made his obesity the butt of their jokes, of how Dad Kerlin had protected him. He put her on the Chicago stage as his sister, singing his songs. Thus she came by the name to which she has always tried to give her best.

Paul Dresser and Theodore Dreiser were brothers. Paul died with but one stray penny in his pockets. His all had gone to the poor. To his protegee he left a rich heritage — faith in the human heart. Years later she sang his songs for a president, at Washington, and for seven years, in vaudeville, she sang them.

She was considered a "discovery" among Lillian Russell, Ethel BarrymorePauline Frederick, Doris Keane, and others in full flower of youth and beauty. Twenty-one years ago she married Jack Gardner, the handsome Chocolate Soldier. He now is a casting director and manager.

What a career is foundation to her to-days! With Lew Fields — Frohman's "Girls of Gottenberg" — Dillingham — the Winter Garden — DeWolf Hopper — a silver loving cup is engraved with the names of the original "Potash and Perlmutter" cast — Barney Bernard — "Cordelia Blossom"— a Cohan revue — theatrical history— thirty-two years of a colorful parade.

When her contract is up this winter, she may return to the stage.

"Tell you why." Her speech is spontaneous and emphatic. "More old ladies write me, nice old ladies, 'I don't like the way my daughter-inlaw is raising the children. I'd like to talk it over with you.' A Texas woman wrote, 'We'll have lots in common. I'm seventy-seven.'"

At seventy-seven she will be trouping, happy and worrying.

Three recent peasant characterizations have worried her. The Alsatian of "Twelve Hours of Love" was the easiest, being a powerful figure in war's grim drama. But she thinks she does not know well enough their racial traits, local psychology, and native temperament. Reluctantly will she play a role she does not feel is right, as in "Not Quite Decent." She refused to do a tarantella for "Three Sisters," because she could not match the Italian extras' abandon. Everything must be plausible and real. Her characters are taken from life. As Ma Quail, in "Mother Knows Best," she bunched all the stage mothers she had ever known.

Along the road of life, where solacing a bruised fellow passenger has muffled her own hurts, she learned her fine art, with its humanness so delicately shaded. Her work wells from a fund of emotion.

"Technique? Ridiculous! You can't simulate feeling. "William DeMille leads me, so gently. It's as though his outstretched hand, merely touching my finger tips, guides me. I know instantly just what he wants. Bill Howard exerts the same strange sentience. It is distressing to change directors, but I suppose I'll never be able to stand on my own feet unless I do."

The chattering snapshots worry her only when they go high pitched and tea-ish. The actor's accent is suitable for drawing-room comedy, but she is armed to fight for her mid-Western nasal twang in American plays.

If she doesn't work for a week, she is harried by the fear that nobody wants her. True mark of humility, true spirit of the heart great with giving; the dread that its service will bore.

With her absolute lack of conceit's faintest trace, she is restlessly ambitious.

"I want to do something with my life!" she insists.

Well, do you think she will ever develop into an actress?

Louise Dresser and her husband, Jack Gardner, keep their eyes on the future

Photo by: Russell Ball (1891–1942)

Miss Dresser early in her stage career.

At forty-six Miss Dresser saw most of her life's savings swept away.

Photo by: Russell Ball (1891–1942)

Louise Dresser's Alsatian mother in "Twelve Hours of Love" is enriched by a deep fund of personal emotion.

Collection: Picture Play Magazine, January 1930