Marguerite Clark — You Can’t Tell Marguerite (1921) 🇺🇸
“Don’t do it,” her friends urged, years ago, when Marguerite Clark insisted that she was going to act in motion pictures. “It will ruin your career.”
by Caroline Bell
It took more bravery than one would expect of four-feet-ten of piquant laughter and curls to disregard their advice, forsake a successful stage career, and go in for motion pictures when most people were still quite dubious about them. But Marguerite just cast her advisers one of her droll little smiles that says, “Wait and see.”
The next they knew of her every one was saying, “Have you seen Marguerite Clark in pictures? She’s adorable.” Or perhaps the adjective would be “wonderful,” or “exquisite,” or any of a dozen others. Almost from the first she was ranked with Mary Pickford, and there were some, of course, who liked her even better.
“Just play fairy stories and kid parts,” her friends advised when she had made several phenomenal successes in such pictures. “Don’t try to change your type and do grown-up stories.”
This time she answered with an airy little twirl and a bow that would have been a credit to a prima ballerina. It was her sweet little way of not refusing them. The next they knew of her she was playing flapper parts. The “Bab” stories introduced a new Marguerite Clark to the screen, a Marguerite as captivating as the dear little girl in the first fairy stories. And still people didn’t stop advising her.
“To your public you are just a charming little girl. You owe it to them never to marry.” She heard that on all sides. But, of course, she did. And the public loved her more than ever.
The great disappointment, the only disappointment, that Marguerite Clark gave to those vast audiences that love her was when she stopped making pictures about a year ago. She went down to her home near New Orleans then, forgot all about pictures for a while, and became just a little lady of the old South. She wandered through her gardens that she had known before only during hasty visits, learned the names of the different varieties of roses from the old gardener, explored the treasures of her linen chests, and gave big entertainments in a charming, leisurely way. She became as much the darling of society in a few months as she had been the darling of theatergoers. And she loved the peace and quiet of it all.
For a time her friends stopped advising her, but her public didn’t. They clamored for her as strongly at the end of her year of retirement as they had at the beginning. They begged her by letter, by telegram, and in person, not to retire permanently from pictures. She had always been as unwilling to tell her plans as she had been to take advice, but she didn’t like the assumption that she had retired. She had been playing steadily on stage or screen since 1895 — twenty-one years. Couldn’t she be allowed to seek a change for a while?
She really hadn’t the slightest intention of retiring. But she gave her audiences the satisfaction that she had never given to her personal friends — she appeared to take their advice. She came to New York, bought the screen rights to “Scrambled Wives,” a successful stage comedy, and organized her own company. Soon you will see her on the screen again.
She wants to take the public into her confidence now, so that there won’t ever be another serious misunderstanding about her plans. “I am not ever going to retire permanently from the screen,” is her message to her friends.
So in the future, won’t you let her have a few months of rest at the lovely old home in the South, let her have plenty of time to find the stories she wants to screen? If you will, then she will always come dancing back to you as merrily as ever.
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Marguerite Clark returns to the screen as captivating as ever.
Photo by: Underwood & Underwood
Collection: Picture Play Magazine, April 1921