Louise Huff — When Louise Was a Kiddie (1918) 🇺🇸

Of course we all know that Southern girls are either born flirts or acquire the art at a tender age. It is, therefore, not surprising to learn that Louise Huff makes the confession that she had a beau almost as soon as she could, walk.

by R. W. Baremore

She recalls with apparent delight the wonderful event in her life when her sweetheart’s dad gave him the enormous sum of twenty-five cents and John asked her to go downtown, with him and get an ice-cream soda. Then, of course, like the eternal feminine, she ordered a ten-cent drink, made her escort take one that only cost a nickel, and induced him to squander his remaining wealth on candy.

And the candy! It seemed to Louise that they bought all there was in Columbus. The kind they bought will make any one look back at his kiddie days with a sigh of pleasure. Several pennies worth of “jaw-breakers,” several rounds of “all-day suckers,” while the rest went for those long, elastic licorice sticks that we used to call “shoe-strings.” After this debauch Louise further confesses that her mother spent the night in a vain endeavor to cure a youthful “tummy-ache.”

Was there ever a youngster that didn’t have these “tummy-aches” and that did not gladly suffer the consequences of too much candy? And was there ever a youngster that didn’t give “shows”? We can ‘most all of us look back on the time when we used to use mother’s best spreads for a curtain or her best sheets to make a screen for a magic-lantern exhibition. Louise Huff was one of the greatest showmen that Columbus, Georgia, ever boasted. Out in the barn she rigged up a stage, with the help of her little friends, and there they gave entertainments and were not bothered by admission prices or war taxes. Anything from two pins to a penny would entitle a patron to the best seats in the house. The “shows” consisted of anything from an interpretative dance to a very thrilling love-scene, but perhaps it is best to let Miss Huff tell about this herself.

“I loved to dance,” says the little Paramount star, “and my contribution to the program was usually a series of more or less fancy steps or some sort of an acrobatic stunt such as balancing some little girl on my feet while lying flat on my back. And at one time I really had the ambition to become an acrobat, and I still think that I had some gifts along that line, altho none of my friends gave me much encouragement. Perhaps because I went into pictures some vaudeville act lost a shining example of its art — who knows? Just the same, I’m glad now that I never had to join a ‘dumb act,’ for I know I never could have stood the strain. It’s hard enough not to be able to talk lines and not to have them heard when appearing in photoplay.”

While in school Miss Huff took up drawing, and once she did such a true likeness of one of her homely teachers that she was sent home to repent. A landscape, drawn when the actress was but eight years old, is still in the possession of Mrs. Huff, who takes great pride in showing it to all visitors; this much against the wishes of Louise. You know, boys, it’s like having fond mamma -show your best girl pictures of yourself when you were a sweet-faced baby sitting on a fur rug sucking your thumb.

Photo by: Fred Hartsook (1876–1930)

Photo by: Ralph Willis Brown

Powdering her nose in preparation for having her miniature painted

Collection: Motion Picture Magazine, April 1918