Madge Kennedy’s Bow to the Movie Fans (1917) 🇺🇸
She wore shell-rim glasses that imparted a professional air. On her small, well-built head was a Dutch bonnet — because she is Irish — and her shoes had low heels and square toes. Her dark gray suit fitted well and was unobtrusive.
by Louis Lee Arms
“Heavens,” I thought, “is this the girl who plays vampire parts to syncopated accompaniments? Or the thoughtless, feather-headed wife who is constantly inspiring her husband to look for a lawyer or a gun? Can this be Madge Kennedy?
It was — and is.
Being a conspicuous model of propriety, whose publicity is confined to the dramatic departments of the newspapers instead of spread over first pages, it is the law of opposites, or some such, that has made Madge Kennedy our best-known erring-wife. Her school of scandal is conducted from 8.15 to 10.50 P. M — matinées twice a week — and the skeletons in her closet rattle only to an exit march by Irving Berlin.
“Pardon, Miss Kennedy?”
“Yes?” questioningly.
“The editor of a Philadelphia magazine wants you to tell his public why you have gone into the movies. He wants something different.”
“Funny,” she mused.
“Quite funny, indeed; I know him,” I said.
“I mean it’s funny about wanting something different. I’ve been interviewed ten different times since coming to the movies, and each of my interviewers has confided that he wanted something different.”
“Yes?”
“Yes.”
“Maybe we can talk about the architecture of the ancient Aztecs or the political significance of the Boston tea party,” I suggested.
“Or the belated efforts of General Grouch at Waterloo, or the Leclede expedition down the Mississippi,” she retorted.
So we sat down.
“Speaking of moving pictures,” I said, “and keeping in mind the major fact that we desire something different, how do you think you are going to like them — in comparison to the speaking-stage?”
“If my answer is the same as that made to ten others who were also pursuing the same equation, I should say that I will like them much — do like them much, for I am speaking now as one who has finished a photo-drama and can distinguish a ‘fade-out’ from a ‘circling in.’”
“What do you miss most?”
“An audience.”
“Why?”
“An audience laughs.” “Doesn’t a picture audience laugh?” “Yes, but I don’t hear them.” “You like laughter?” “A good laugh is a physician carrying tonic to the soul.”
“But you will make millions laugh in the pictures where hundreds laughed on Broadway.”
“But I won’t hear them.”
“Irrevocably true.”
“Take ‘Baby Mine,’” continued Miss Kennedy. “There are situations in that which I have been assured by Miss Margaret Mayo have never failed to nurse a chuckle or a howl. I labored over these scenes and put into them everything comic that is in me. The camera-man was very sad. The director looked downright sorry.”
“Hard-boiled eggs when it comes to laughing,” I said.
“I thought I had bungled up the funniest scene in Baby Mine; it was received so quietly. I suggested to the director that I be given another chance at it. ‘What for,’ he said. ‘It couldn’t be any funnier. Now in the next next scene — He measures his humor with a yard-stick.”
“You’ll get used to that,” I retorted.
“I’m used to it now. I’m never going to expect a laugh in the studio, and therefore I’m never going to be disappointed. But when my first picture is released, in September, I’m going to reserve a seat by the week, and I hope to absorb sufficient laughter to carry me over a desert of the utmost professional calm.”
“Is the studio work harder than the stage?”
“Yes, but the hours are nicer.”
“Evenings off?”
“And mornings up. Do you know I haven’t seen a sunrise for four years — that is before I signed my contract for two years with the Goldwyn Pictures Corporation. I forgot which side of Manhattan the sun appeared on.”
“It’s still doing business in the east.”
“There’s no east or west to a Broadway electric sign, and signs have been my suns, moons and stars since I have been on the spoken stage.”
“How did you happen to go on the stage?”
“I should like to tell you something different, but unfortunately I only reached the stage in one particular way, and I have been unable to improve upon the story of it. I came from California with my mother to study art. We summered at a New England beach colony which presented an amateur theatrical. Henry Woodruff was at our colony and played the leading role. I played the feminine lead, and his praise of my work encouraged me to the extent that I seriously set about to study drama. I played stock in Cleveland and then took the leading roles in two of Philip Barthelmae’s plays. They were Over Night and Little Miss Browne.
“In each of these I played the part of a silly young girl of about the age I really was, who had an inordinate capacity for getting into compromising situations. I was astounded myself by the reality that I seemed to impart to my waywardness. The success of my first two roles served to identify me as a farceur, and Miss Margaret Mayo’s Twin Beds and Mr. Avery Hopwood’s Fair and Warmer have done the rest. Consequently I have deserted the palette and brush as a profession and have made it a pastime. I still like to think that I should have made a distinguished artist.”
Miss Kennedy’s own simple story does not do justice to one who is among the ablest young comediennes in America. As Ripley Saunders, now deceased, once a distinguished St. Louis dramatic critic, has said, the parts portrayed upon the stage by Miss Kennedy that have made thousands shriek with laughter would in themselves have been outrageous if played by one whose wholesomeness did not continually shine through her hypothetical self. No artistry in the world could supply that requisite quality. It was Miss Kennedy’s charming naïveté.
The little girl who came out of California to write her name on Broadway is personally as popular as she is professionally, and that is saying much. There is nothing “up-stage” or temperamental about Miss Madge Kennedy. There is, to be sure, a certain democracy about film drama in the making, and we have been regaled with press agent yarns how famous actresses have stepped from the dining rooms of the Ritz to the wooden tables of the studio dining hall and enjoyed it. We even have seen pictures of this astounding fact, and a press photograph, of course, cannot tell more than one or two lies at a time. As a matter of fact, as registered by a well-known motion picture critic in New York City, nine-tenths of the stars of cinema have a permanent address and residence ‘phone number “up-stage,” and do not care two whoops who knows — except the public. When Miss Madge Kennedy signed her Goldwyn Pictures contract and was ready to step over from Broadway to Fort Lee, the studio manager and his studio cabinet put on rubber heels, rubber gloves and a number of other things that are supposed to act as non-conductors for violent shocks when in the act of handling electric starred personages.
The only shock Miss Kennedy handed them was when she stepped off a Fort Lee street car — her electric car being non compos mentis for the nonce — with her mother and walked into the studio office announcing that she was ready to start her new career. A Broadway star without a maid, a couple of flunkeys, a poodle dog and the junior member of a stock and bond firm! The studio manager did not pinch himself for fear he would awaken.
The unobtrusive way in which one of Broadway’s most charming stars made her appearance at the Goldwyn studio, they knew afterward, was the only way that ever could be expected of her. For a long time Thomas Jefferson has been called the world’s greatest democrat, but he’s held the championship long enough.
“I had never been in a motion picture studio until I started work in one,” continued Miss Kennedy. “I marveled and still marvel at the effect which may be produced by incomplete stage settings. On the spoken stage the scenery is, of course, incomplete, but it is more so in motion photography.
“In Baby Mine Mr. Hugo Ballin built a reproduction of a Riverside Drive apartment, complete in every detail, except that each room lacked one to two walls. It was a beautiful little apartment and would have cost a heap of money had it been across the river and complete. It stood in one end of the studio, five adjoining rooms with bath, like an open-faced watch, and the incongruity of it never failed to amuse me. One did not take the trouble to come through the door when he stepped into the drawing-room. There was no door except that which led to the bed-room. The drawing-room was reached via the dining-room or by stepping off the main studio floor into the Brussels carpet which indicated the drawing-room.
“In this set, by the way, Mr. Ballin went to no little pains to depict such an apartment as the type of wife I am supposed to represent would be expected to furnish. Chintz curtains, wicker furniture and triplicate mirrors psychologically convey somewhat the spirit of the story which is a point that is being stressed in the manufacture of our photodramas. So little attention has been paid to the detail of photodramatic sets, yet the importance of appropriate scenery cannot be exaggerated. Scene builders have taken much for granted, just as a dramatist always assumes that a detective wears his hat in the house.”
“Are you always going to play farce?” I asked.
“I hope some day, whether it be in picture or on the stage, I will be given a chance to do straight comedy,” she answered.
“How about a real dramatic heroine,” I suggested.
“Never,” she protested. “To me there is nothing deadlier nor duller than a part which is tailor-made fat. There is something unreal about the average stage heroine in a straight part that would make a dramatic bankrupt of me, I fear. I like farce because it is fast, and comedy I should like for the same reason and because it is more real; but drama, pronounced with a Boston a, I never shall essay. A comedienne should stick to her laugh.”
“Speaking of laughs,” I answered, “who laughs first, man or woman?”
“My experience has been that man is the pleasantest, easiest and most unaffected laugher. I could even undertake to prove that man has the more humor, if I used my own experience behind the footlights as a criterion. Generally speaking, a man will laugh where a woman only smiles, and when a woman reaches the point of laughing a large majority of men will be emitting side-splitting whoops. Perhaps it is because a woman is more repressive, but as an encouragement to a good time I would rather have one fat man in the first row than an entire Woman’s Literary Society.”
“In other words,” I said, “a man would find more laughs in Baby Mine because man is naturally more humorous.”
“Either that, or because a woman wrote it,” countered Miss Kennedy, which seemed to leave the subject open to a future debate.
“Are you athletic?”
“Not guilty. I don’t swim, golf, tennis or play any one of a number of sports that I understand are so popular. I would rather knit a sweater than drive a motor, and my wildest athletic outburst is riding a well broken horse through Central Park. I have finished three sweaters for our marines and am at work on my fourth.” Lucky marines!
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Madge Kennedy at home and supremely happy
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One of Miss Kennedys late poses
Miss Kennedy playing the game of romance
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After the movies
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—
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Ask Murine Eye Remedy Co., Chicago, for Free Book
Collection: Photoplay Magazine, September 1917
(The Photo-Play Journal for September, 1917)