Mae Busch — Circe of Sunnybrook Farm (1924) 🇺🇸

November 29, 2024

Actresses are grown-up children.

by Malcolm H. Oettinger

The simplest way to induce a child to do something is to say “Ah-ah!” with, a rising inflection.

The simplest method of making a vamp out of a stella is to tell her enthusiastically that she is an ideal sister type.

Lila Lee admitted that she’d love to do character roles; Jetta Goudal withered me with a glance when I failed to imagine her as a child in a picture; the sartorial Swanson [Gloria Swanson] yearns for a part that does not call for support from Poiret, Lanvin, and the rest of the boys; Nita Naldi longs to get her hands on a “sympathetic sort of woman,” to show what she could do; and, to get to the subject at hand, Mae Busch, that svelte sister of sophistication, insists that she is an ingénue.

“I haven’t blond curls,” she said, blowing a perfect smoke ring, “but I can do country girls.”

As she told me this I was looking at her sleek, bobbed hair, her knowing eyes, her markedly effective figure sheathed in satin. She resembled a country girl as much as Bull Montana resembles Little Lord Fauntleroy. She looked as innocent of the ways of the world as the editor of a Sunday magazine section. Without moving, minus all mannerisms, simply as she sat there, she looked the perfect Circe, ready for any number of victims.

“I don’t want to do vamps,” she said calmly. “I can’t feel the parts. I’m poor at vamping.”

On the screen, what you feel apparently matters less than what you look, for Mae Busch is unquestionably one of the most potent sinsters on the perpendicular platform. Whether she thinks so or not, the fact remains that she is a vampiricist. Her features are regular; the ensemble is effective. She has beauty, but she lacks the softening touch that separates the vamp from the heroine.

When you talk to Miss Busch, you find her in a rather challenging attitude.

“This is what I think,” she seems to be saying. “Print it if you like, and let’s see if you can get it right!”

Of course she may have been thinking nothing of the sort. Perhaps inwardly she was cooing, “Oh, I’m being interviewed. Goody, goody!”

But I doubt it. Even though she aspires to be a pure, unadulterated ingénue, with a bunchlight picking up her tears, she would not say “Goody!”

Once upon a time, not very long ago, Mae Busch filled Lillian Lorraine’s shoes — and stockings — as soubrette extraordinary in a musical comedy. (The only thing that’s comical about a musical comedy, said Mae, is that it’s called musical.) Then Mack Sennett saw her and inveigled her into a one-piece bathing suit for his two-reel caper-chromos, featuring Charlie Murray [Charles Murray], Ben Turpin, and various forms divine.

Eric von Stroheim [Erich von Stroheim] rescued her from this watery grave by assigning her a highly spiced role in his first homemade feature of Continental flavor, “The Devil’s Passkey.” In this Mae furnished the high sex voltage, and began unconsciously to build what was to become a tidy reputation for seductive siren roles and things like that.

You would expect such an independent, spirited girl to freelance, and she has, extensively. Miss Busch has acted for almost everybody. After her sweeping success as Glory Quayle, in “The Christian,” she was deployed by Victor Seastrom [Victor Sjöström] for the lead in old Hall Caine’s “Master of Man,” alias, for all film purposes, ‘‘Name the Man!” That’s so much more exciting.

“Seastrom,” she said, “is the greatest director in pictures. He’s going to be the sensation of 1924 unless we’re all greatly mistaken. It was wonderful to work with him. We were all keyed up by the man — Patsy Ruth Miller, Conrad Nagel — all of us.”

Finding her enthusiastic was a surprise. I had supposed that she would be smartly cynical. I suspected that listening to her views would be akin to holding the mirror up to Nietzsche. Perhaps she decided to fool me; perhaps I was wrong. Both suppositions are highly tenable.

“Seastrom has soul. He has superb feeling for the drama of a situation. Tourneur [Maurice Tourneur] is a master of light and shade; Von Stroheim is all technique. Fine artists, both, but this man Seastrom tears a scene right out of your heart.”

She told me of some Griffithian [D. W. Griffith] touches that sounded highly interesting.

“In Name the Man! I play a country girl,” she said triumphantly. “Look at these stills, if you doubt me.”

There was a knock at the door of her suite, and Lew Cody was admitted.

Gentleman that he is, he told me that he was glad to see me again… There was talk of the picture he, Miss Busch, Claire Windsor and others had come East to make — “Nellie, the Beautiful Cloak Model.”

“No, it won’t be tunny,” said Miss Busch indignantly, in response to my question. “It will be interesting to do. Things have progressed so in picture making and construction that in all likelihood the thing will be a first-rate picture.”

She sounded totally sincere. It was bewildering. That one so obviously of the sophisticates could defend a drama of the stamp of “Nellie” out of the old ten-twent-thirt repertoire was inexplicable.

Truth is found in the confession of error, and I advised Lew Cody that this second meeting led me to believe that I had misjudged him when, after a half hour in his Broadway apartment, I went away with the idea that he was something” of an egomaniac.

“Oh, that was all right,” said Lew. “Just a matter of opinion. You were entitled to think whatever you chose.”

“Did you say Lew was self-centered?” demanded Miss Busch. “Well, you got him wrong. All wrong. He never talks about himself.”

The suave Cody hastened to my defense.

“I did talk about my work. You see, when Mr. Oettinger asked me what I had been doing on the Coast I couldn’t very well reply, ‘The cows are in the meadow.’ But it’s all over, and no one the worse for it.”

“Lew isn’t an I-man,” said Mae, patting him on the back. “Your mistake, sonny.”

There was talk of Broadway and Hollywood, the last prize fight and the recent World’s Series, the Chaplin drama, and that ever-interesting subject, Von Stroheim.

“Hughes is the greatest man to work for,” said Cody.

“Yeah, but this boy Seastrom can give them all cards and spades,” said Mae. “He simply takes your emotions and knocks ‘em for a loop. I acted for him. Really acted. He treats you like a human being instead of an automaton, and I guess I appreciated it.”

Then we happened to mention poetry. First exacting our promises not to make light of her efforts, Mae read us some of her free verse. It was all autobiographical, I gathered. It was frank and formless, but one little piece, a quatrain called “Hope,” was excellent. She was not surprised to hear me say so.

“I should publish some of it, I s’pose, but I have so much to do.” She shrugged her slim shoulders. “Writing the stuff is simply an outlet, anyway. Expression. That’s what we live for. Keeping things corked up is fatal.”

There is apparently no pose about her. She made no attempt to be very highbrow or, on the other hand, one of the girls. She restrained her expression of likes and dislikes and, as I have indicated, disliked fewer things than I had supposed she would.

She has played seriously in “Only a Shopgirl” just as she purposes to put her heart and soul into Nellie, the Beautiful Cloak Model, yet she has a sense of humor. She is slow to scorn and quick to praise — an unusual state of affairs when the subject seems sincere. And Mae is sincere. “Be yourself!” is her creed to all and sundry.

In Foolish Wives she was ideally cast, a fact that was forcefully demonstrated in “The Christian.” In that picture her early scenes lacked something of realism, while later, in and about the theater the Busch characterization left nothing to be desired. One of the most effective bits of the screen season was the dressing-room sequence with the scent from the Busch boudoir playing havoc with the staid Dix [Richard Dix] outside. Mae Marsh couldn’t have played the second part of Glory Quayle nearly so well, just as Mae Busch didn’t play the introductory episodes as Mae Marsh might have.

The point I am making is this: the bobbed-haired beauty with the Sphinxlike face is a fixture in the film firmament only so long as she is properly placed. In “Name the Man!” she plays another Mae Marshmallow, I am led to believe. Perhaps she does it well. But how much more effectively she could do the studio hostess in “Black Oxen” or even Savina Grove in “Cytherea.” Why fit a sophisticated, Manhattan type into wondering, wandering ingénue roles?

However, Mae Busch says it can be done, and, what is more, she avers that she is the one to do it.

And what Mae says is more than likely to go.