Margaret Morris — Dollars and Doughnuts (1924) 🇺🇸
“It takes money and pull to get you into the movies!” wail the disappointed pilgrims to the fount of make-believe. But be it known by all those present, the wailing little girls don’t know what they are talking about.
Margaret Morris, Universal leading lady, stands five feet something in refutation of that oft-heard complaint that “the girls with money and pull can get in.” Margaret’s father, a Minneapolis business man, is very well to do; Margaret had “connections,” through which she got nothing but vague promises that never materialized; it cost her, with apparently every asset, over two years and much heartbreak to crash through the portals of filmdom, where competition is the most keen in all the world, where personality, not beauty and wealth, is the only sesame.
We shared our early struggles and our tears, Margaret’s cash and my doughnuts, for we roomed at the same house. What a disheartened trio we were! Margaret had failed to make any noticeable impression upon the casting directors; another girl writer had had her scenarios rejected; I couldn’t get my articles accepted by the magazines. Except for the checks that came to Marg from home and which she generously shared, we were pretty much in the same boat. Of an evening, we would drown our sorrow in onion sandwiches, tea and soggy doughnuts, and analyze Margie. It got to be a pastime with us, considering her qualifications through the eyes of critical friends.
Her charms were manifold. Pretty, graceful, trained in dancing and deportment since her infancy, a product of one of those finishing schools where fashionable young ladies are polished off and given a discreet shine, her wardrobe boasting the most heart-palpitating array of lovely clothes, we all thought that Margaret’s screen debut would be an easy matter. But we all thought wrong.
“What’s the matter with me?” she used to ask in her low, sweet voice — dulcet, modulated, a keynote to her whole personality of quiet charm. “I’m not beautiful, but I’m what they call pretty back home. I have loads of clothes and I do know how to wear them. I photograph well. Can I act? How do I know.’ They won’t give me a chance to find out! They are courteous to ‘me; father’s influential friends here arrange interviews for me; the casting directors give me vague promises — and bow me out politely — boredly.”
Sitting there around the kitchen table, our woebegone eyes rested upon a pretty, slim young creature of eighteen in an old blue bathrobe — mine, for the simple reason that I had got to hers first, an exquisite thing of velvet and fur. Calm brown eyes met ours, their sweet womanliness lightened by an appreciative twinkle. Brown hair exquisitely coiffed, with always the correct fashionable “do.” She had instinctively those little right touches and graces of breeding.
“Trouble with you, Margie,” vouchsafed Mrs. K., our landlady, who had seen so many girls come, stay a while and go home heartbroken, “is that you’ve no push. You have to be known to be understood, brought out. Flip young things with half your looks and none of your training and breeding whirl in and on the strength of snappy personalities attract interest. Brazen, fresh, you aren’t — and you’ve got to have more self-confidence to break into the movies. You’re too well-bred to stand out in a crowd.”
But Marg couldn’t learn how to “stand out.” Her aristocratic mother and moneyed father had too firmly implanted in her being the roots of breeding and taste. It was instinctive for her to dress exquisitely but too quietly — one day we succeeded in getting a scarlet frock on her amid her tears and protestations, but back she came in five minutes, her face red with mortification because a fellow had called, “Hello, kid!” Instinctive, too, for her to step aside, wait to be served rather than to push up, demanding. A gentle rose was Margaret, a pale, shell-pink rose, among vivid hollyhocks, and perky snapdragons, so no wonder she failed to rivet attention.
Roses are easily crushed, but she stood her disappointments, as day after day she made the rounds of the studios seeking work, usually without the faintest encouragement, with a surprising fortitude, a quiet pride. A few extra engagements came her way, bits in Wanda Hawley’s and other films, and a fairly good rôle in one of W. Christy Cabanne’s pictures.
But after that nothing more for a while. She had no cause to worry except that desire for self-expression, to do something worth while and not always be known merely as a rich man’s pampered daughter. Generously she shared her shekels with us less fortunate sisters in misery. One day, though, during the Cabanne picture, some extra made a thoughtless, unkind remark, “Oh, well, no wonder she gets a good rôle, look who her people are. Pull!”
Marg cried ail night, for surely no “pull” had greased her path. Next day she wrote Father Morris that thereafter she intended to be strictly on her own and wanted no help.
“I guess,” Margie set her teeth grimly, “if these poor girls struggling for a foothold in the movies can get along, so can I. It will be good for me. Suppose something should happen that would really throw me on my own resources? This has certainly shown me my own incompetence and the uselessness of the education girls of means are given today. I can’t do anything but wear expensive clothes well — and that isn’t getting me anything to write home about!”
The family did prevail upon her though to accept the small monthly income check from a part of the property left her by her grandmother. “Life-saver,” we called that check, for not only did it help out the earnings of her one-or-two-days-a-week picture work but also it brought necessities for us, for Marg would give the very food off of her plate, and did often, doing without herself, when I was ill and needed things. One month “life-saver” would pay overdue room rent, next it would buy Margie a new dress, again it would mean the payment of part of my doctor’s bill. For two weeks, when we were both “low,” we lived on fifty cents a day — and how we did connive, with crackers and peanut butter and doughnuts!
Finally the struggle proved too hopeless in outlook and Marg’s resistance wore out. Letters from home entreated — father was ill, mother worried, they were lonely. She could have a car of her own, clothes, travel, anything, if she would give up this foolish movie business. When they consented to her trying to get into stock there, Margaret gave up and went back.
“Call me a quitter if you want to,” she cried the day she left. “But I admit it’s too much for me, this heartbreaking movie game.”
For a while she reveled in the contentment of home, of having her breakfast in bed, of little attentions by doting parents. Then the old rebellion surged in her again and she secured an engagement in stock there in Minneapolis, working like mad, giving one play while rehearsing the next week’s and learning her lines for the third following week. The raining was what she needed to bring out her poise, the confidence of doing something, however unimportant, well.
Eight months ago she came back again for another and a final try at the movies. The sweetness of her still there, but accented somehow in her poise. Forward she never could be, but she had the confidence she had lacked before, and the stage training had taught her to accentuate her natural graces. In little indefinable ways she stood out, seemed to irradiate more personality in place of the self-restraint that had so held her back before.
Almost immediately she secured a “bit” at Universal, which led soon to a South Sea Island rôle in the serial, “Beasts of Paradise,” following which she was costarred with Pete Morrison in another serial. “The Ghost City.” Now she is commencing a third, “The Iron Man,” with Luciano Albertini.
She has to swim, ride like a cowgirl, fall down cliffs, do all the strenuous things of serial action. Many a bruise has that fair skin suffered; many a time has that carefully nurtured body rebelled at the long hours and arduous athletic labor. But not once in the past few -months has Margie called quits. And now, selected by the Wampas — publicity men — as one of the “Baby Stars of 1924,” having in view as a reward rôles requiring more acting and less stunting, her star glows bright with promise.
“I don’t know which has been harder — the struggle of breaking in or the stunts I’ve had to do in these serials,” she smiles reminiscently when we manage to meet for hurried luncheons. “I anticipated nice, quiet, acting rôles, society drama, the sort of background I’d been used to. I never dreamed,” the placid brown eyes twinkled, “I’d develop into k harum-scarum Western heroine. But it was a chance, so I decided I would do the best I could in this stunt-action stuff and . perhaps the other will come later.
“Dollars didn’t help me any. I wonder what really did get me in? I’ve given up trying to figure it out — it just finally happened.”
“Didn’t,” I always reply stoutly, for the past couple of years have taught me things too and I can see the stamina that those months of hardship and struggle forged in her malleable character, I can see the qualities that she herself is either blind to or else too modest still to admit. “It was doughnuts that did it — the idea of being on your own. Grit. Determination.”
So you see even a little rich girl can succeed eventually in the movies — provided she doesn’t die of old age first. I say “even” for I think I have shown you, in the case of Margaret Morris, that the way is no easier for one possessing money.
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Photo by: Edward Bower Hesser
Collection: Picture Play Magazine, June 1924