Mary MacLaren — An Everyday Diana (1919) 🇺🇸
A terrible thing has happened to me. For years it has hung above my head, a sort of dread sword of fancy. At last it has descended.
by Louise Catherine Anderson
I have been interviewed — and am now writing an interview — with a perfectly normal person.
I know it may not sound so terrible to you. But think — think of the weapons, the ammunition of which I am robbed at one fell swoop. Nobody ever writes about perfectly normal things. Just glance through your copy of the morning paper, or your favorite monthly magazine, and see if I’m not right. They may admire, reverence and acclaim — but they don’t write about ‘em.
Probably the rarest thing in the world is a perfectly normal person. Do you know any? I once heard a famous lawyer deliver a brilliant address upon the subject “Are we all crazy?” Before he got through I was beyond argument. In a long and varied career of interviewing every kind of person from a President to a lizard that could go nine months without water, I have found but two — before. As for my personal acquaintances, my relations — let us draw a kindly veil. Of those two one was a six-day-old baby born in a jitney bus, and the other was a widow with a past. Perhaps hers was merely fatigue.
Mary MacLaren is the third.
Mary the normal had just reached home after a hard day’s work at the Universal studio when I found her. At least she said it had been a hard day, but there was nothing in her serene, girlish face and figure to support her statement. She looked as fresh, as wholesome, as delightfully arcadian, from her shining, smooth hair to her pretty, slippered feet, as a hollyhock in an English garden.
She has a pretty, interesting, intelligent face. She has a well modulated, medium-pitched voice. She is of a pleasing soft blondness that gratifies, but does not startle. She has all the qualifications of your sweetheart’s sister — if you know what I mean. You could like her and admire her and enjoy every minute of her society and think she was the best scout and the finest kid and the squarest little sport without ever having it affect your loyalty to your own sweetheart in the least.
And that, I decided, is the hold which she has acquired and is daily increasing, upon a public that first learned to know her in that famous Lois Weber production “Shoes.” She’s made a chum of her public and that sort of regard will outlast more violent infatuations.
“I often think,” she said, settling back against the cushions, “that sometimes I feel rather like Cinderella and her glass slipper — only without the prince.” And she was able to blush, a vivid, healthy blush, which any psychologist will tell you is a normal thing for a girl to do when talking about the inevitable awakening prince.
“As I look back over the years since I left the chorus of the Winter Garden Company, and realize how many of my wishes have come true, I feel that a fairy godmother has watched over me.
“When we first came to Los Angeles, my mother and I, we used to take the street car and ride through the beautiful residence districts. We weren’t — exactly terribly poor, you know — but we weren’t rich, either, and there were just us four women, my mother and my two sisters and myself. I’d lean out the car windows, and look at the big, rambling California houses set back in their rolling lawns, and I’d say, ‘Oh, mama, if we could just live here and have a home like one of those!’ I didn’t dream then, nor when I got a chance as an extra girl at Universal, that it was going to come true in four short years.”
She lapsed into silence, her blue eyes taking in the details of her lovely home, the slope of lawn through the French doors in front, the shining roadster in the sweeping driveway.
“It seems too wonderful sometimes. I suppose it seems strange, too. I’m nineteen now, you know. Wasn’t it a lucky omen — I was nineteen on the 19th of July, 1919.
“It is my chief regret that I didn’t get a chance to go to college. That is a foundation that can never be replaced. Every girl should go if she can, should take advantage of every possible educational advantage that is offered her.”
It is rather characteristic that Mary does not live in the famous movie colony in Hollywood.
“How do you happen to live way over here instead of in Hollywood?” I asked her.
“I think I need a change of atmosphere,” she said slowly, as though considering it herself. “When working hours are over, I want to forget the actual mechanism of my work. It doesn’t broaden one’s outlook, you know, to keep within the same small circle. Besides, we girls have always been used to a quiet home life and mother likes it that way, so we live very quietly. I work awfully hard. I have set hours for study.
“When I took my vacation this summer, mother and I went to Coronado, and I went under my own name, Mary McDonald. I look a bit different off the screen, — younger and all, and no one recognized me. I knew some boys in the aviation and the navy down there from our home town, of Pittsburg, and I met a great many charming young people. We swam and motored and danced and rode, and do you know, they never guessed I had anything to do with the pictures at all? When they were told after I had left they were so surprised.
Now, that experience gave me a viewpoint, a mental rest, that I couldn’t have acquired in my professional character.”
“Is it true that you teach Sunday School?” I questioned.
“Oh dear,” she cried, half between anger and laughter, “yes, it is true that I did have a class. But it’s been a regular bugaboo to me. Everybody seems to think it’s so queer or so funny, that I’ve stopped ever mentioning it anymore.”
There you have her — Mary MacLaren, screen star. She has no startling characteristics, no marked tastes, no vivid idiosyncrasies. It only goes to show that it can be done.
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The picture at the right deserves a poetic caption, but, looking at Mary, as you doubtless are and as we know we are — how can one write about the ocean?
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She has no startling characteristics, no marked tastes, no vivid idiosyncrasies — it only goes to show that it can be done.
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A rumor is going the rounds in picture circles that an exhibitor in Kentucky cancelled “Lips that Touch Liquor Shall Never Touch Mine” on the grounds that the subject is untimely. The facetious report goes further to say that the exhibitor owns and manages the Oilcan Theater.
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An exhibitor advertised Eugene O’Brien in “The Perfect Liver.” [Transcriber’s note: A charming typo. The correct title of the movie: “A Perfect Lover (1919)”]
Collection: Photoplay Magazine, December 1919