Mary Duncan — Hollywood’s New Slayer (1929) 🇺🇸
Snapshot of Mary Duncan at age of six: Axe in one hand, gentleman’s scalp in other…
by Herbert Howe
Just about the time you despondently decide Hollywood has been o’ertaken by the lock-step of civilization, to become as standardized and zipless as near beer, a new siren arrives to shoot the pulse up.
So it is with cries of Hallelujah that I introduce Miss Mary Duncan, with an exclusive snapshot of her at the age of six: axe in one hand, gentleman’s scalp in the other. A highly promising kiddie.
The unnecessary axe has been thrown aside but the scalps multiply. Mary’s debut in Hollywood society brought frightened clucks from the matrons. Les dames regarded her as a stalker of men, not because of the maniacal nymph she played in The Shanghai Gesture, but because in Hollywood drawing rooms les hommes gravitate helplessly to whichever corner Mary chooses.
Mary is accused of making eyes. Mary doesn’t make them, she just naturally has them. But it isn’t the eye so much as the sirenic laugh that draws the mariner into the Charybdic whirlpool.
Like all the great charmers, she has a spontaneous wit and, what is even more enchanting, a hilarious appreciation of it. Nothing is more alluring to the male than an appreciation of his bon mots. And did not Scheherazade hold the sultan captive for a thousand and one nights by her wit and delicious lies?
I can personally testify to Mary’s human wreckage with exhibit I. What was left of my social position collapsed when I met Mary. Invited to a dinner by one of our society leaders (Hollywood has become very Long Island), I dropped in for a cocktail with a friend. Mary also dropped in.
At fifteen minutes to dinner I called my prospective hostess to ask if I might bring bella Duncan. In a voice of sherbet, my-never-again-to-be hostess informed me that she expected me to take another lady in to dinner. Mary, it seems, had unconsciously “lured” hostess’ husband at a party. Of course, I never did get to the dinner. But, as Eva Tanguay once shouted, who cares?
In view of the kiddie snapshot of Mary with the scalp and axe, you’d never suspect she comes of a fine, old Southern family. Even fine, old Southern families suffer atavism, with cave-ladies recurring. And, despite the snapshot, Mary reminds me not so much of a cave lady as of a character from an old English novel: the one described as a veritable little devil, tossing her saucy curls and driving her horse full canter. Spirited, as they say.
Mary’s parents spent part of each year in their Washington residence while Mary and her younger brother remained with tenants on one of the Virginia farms — plantations, they used to call them.
Being spirited. Mary devised games for self and brother. In one of her prankish Indian dramas she bashed buddy with an a.\e and he, in turn, cut off a portion of her left thumb.
Then a game in which the tabloids would describe her as an “ape woman.” Detecting a toupee on a gentleman caller at the farm, she took to the trees and hung suspended for days over the gate. Opportunity finally came. She snatched the gentleman’s scalp and went scampering through the branches with hilarious jabberings.
Mary’s father had reason for feeling she should study law. She’d need it sooner or later. At the proper age she was packed off to Cornell to study ways of evading justice. There she joined Chi Omega sorority and a dramatic class, and never did study how to achieve heart balm.
Mary never, never will need heart balm; others may.
In her sophomore year she responded to impulse, characteristically, and ran off to New York, with the determination of being an actress. Being cut off from the Virginia base of supplies, she sold herself to the Schrafft candy stores as a dietician. Every day she made a sniffing tour of the kitchens, muttering “O. K.” She was born an actress.
Yvette Guilbert was as much impressed as the Schrafft executives by her histrionic ability and chose her from applying thousands for an exclusive dramatic class. Eleanora Duse, in turn, accepted her as a pupil for a school which that incomparable Italian projected before her death. Mary Garden declares she is the only one of the younger actresses with a flame. Garden graphically said it. Duncan is flamboyant and buoyant and wholly reckless. In this she is also true to type.
Screen sirens, including Mary, have been presented as very designing operatives. Life sirens rarely are. Or rather, their designs are so sub-conscious that they are free to give all their power to charming and being charmed. By sireny I do not mean the go-gatting ladies who get headlines about their diamonds, their alimony and other loot. That’s not witchery, that’s burglary.
It is time that the bunk about IT is exploded. Everyone has sex but everyone hasn’t the courage to be herself, and that’s what personality demands. The individual is reckless, instinctive and without design. He is so confident that it never occurs to him to pose or plot.
Mary doesn’t play a game. Most women do; charming women never. Mary is direct. She will hail you as marvelous, with out-flung arms, or she will forget you exist the moment after introduction. The fact you are marvelous doesn’t mean that you can bank on the future, because in another moment the out-flung gesture may be accorded another. The true siren lives for the moment with perfect confidence of the future. If you brought up the problem of sex she’d explode with laughter, for, as I’ve said, all great charmers have a natural sense of humor.
When it was decided that Mary should go to London to appear in The Nervous Wreck, following her dramatic success in New York, she wired her sister to join her.
“You have nothing to worry about, dear,” said Mary. “I have plenty of money. All you need to do is go draw it out and spend it.”
Sister went to the bank and discovered exactly seven dollars.
It was during The Shanghai Gesture that Broadway was bowled over by Mary’s lightning. She played a well-bred young lady who went violently man-mad. To get the role to a nicety she inveigled one of her society friends to give a party to which the debutantes and their gen’l’mun friends were invited. One of the debs, after several cocktails, became the unconscious model for Mary’s role.
In pictures Mary has been criticized for an obvious vamping. Thedabarish, was the opinion of some. Her directors have been blamed, and not without justice, because a director, in his effort to put over an ultra-charming personality, is liable to fall into stereotyped lines.
But I suspect much of the fault has been with Mary. Her exuberance, the fascination of her confidence and her natural effervescence have bedeviled directors into letting her do her stuff. Not knowing the camera and its hyperbole, she has overemphasized. Stage technique becomes oratorical in pictures.
Mary, however, has too much wit and observation to continue long in error. She’ll get herself on to the screen very soon and fling her axe into box office records. And then, gentlemen, hang on to your toupees!
Collection: Photoplay Magazine, August 1929