Mary Nolan — "The Glory Girl" (1930) 🇺🇸

February 14, 2023

The moment I saw Mary Nolan I knew she was a "glory girl." Not for her coloratura prettiness — gentian eyes, blond marcel, full lips artfully pinked, svelte grace in pale-pink pajamas, a touch of jade. Not for her frilly, orchid room with its dumb zoo — teddy bears, a ga-ga bird, a green frog-footstool. Not so much for the worldly sheen about her, nor for the expert and instant poise.

by Myrtle Gebhart

Rather for the carefree spirit's radiance which leaped at me. Until recently I've known glory girls only casually. They are birds with the wind in their wings. The clipping of those wings is not accomplished without pain. Usually it is a swift process, an aftermath to realization of their precarious passage along this world. For the glory girl's brilliantly hectic "past" trails her relentlessly; its ribbons are tatters of gaudy color that she can never quite shake off.

Joan Crawford, once the hey-hey, almost danced her reputation to shreds before the wise, friendly ones reined her in. It wasn't easy to discard those incandescent evenings when she was the highest stepper among the dappled ponies. Joan symbolized superlative jazz; her domestication to pianissimo has been a plucky fight.

For a brief span Jane Winton thought to make life a holiday, running away from her guardian and flirting her sunlit personality through exciting adventures until it got her in the Follies. Matrimony's sedate routine capped her little fling.

There have been flocks of these gay birds of passage, awing to the rhythm of the wind. Lilyan Tashman's path was mercurial, until marriage steadied her. Kaleidoscopic was the progress of Louise Brooks, who shook the dust of the Kansas prairies from impatient heels in her eagerness to invade the land of glamour behind the footlights. Wise-cracking, pert Dorothy Sebastian, who slung verbal brickbats to conceal the hurt in her heart. Dorothy Mackaill's high-spirited ego talked her into an American career. Margaret Livingston smeared on a semi-sophistication and set out to match her wits against the world, thinking it one of those pastries she had neglected to gobble up in the pie-eating contest.

Show girls, most of them, flighty femmes, in a head-long, happily blind plunge toward that day of reckoning when gladly they would blot out the whoopee hangover; to find that only a term of application could convince observers of their new earnestness.

Glory girls are associated, in some mental recess of mine, with hotels. Revolving doors have always spewed forth a stream of glamorous women. Their representative effect goes back to a childhood impression of a world apart. Their smartness and poise intrigued me: a mysterious luxury surrounded them. Silk for serge, epicurean delights for pounded round-steak, opalescent uncertainties for grooved and drab steadiness.

Dross? I couldn't imagine it there amid all that incandescent glow. Hunger? Those gossamer ladies, so brightly brocaded, with pink cheeks against furs — impossible! Gilt edges tarnished? Wings tired, but daring not to droop, having no safe cage? It never occurred to me that their luminosity might be but a frail curtain of tinsel over a life at times harsh.

How illusion does blow its powder breath to tantalize earthbound eyes!

Glorious ladies I called them as a child, but knowledge has scuffed their gleams a bit. I see them differentlycrimson butterflies, caught in the topmost branches of the trees whither they once flew so buoyantly. At times I have doubted that they really know their own vagrant impulses.

Glory girls, merry and unfettered, imbibing some exhilaration above my muted desire. Yet, strangely, in transient moods envying me my homespun surety. They, the russet leaves; my kind, the roots.

I call them glory girls because with all their uncertainties, they hear the birds sing, and I the crickets' chirp.

Joan Crawford first drew the curtain, and later Mary Nolan, and I saw the gay courage of the glory girl, and its dissatisfied undercurrent masked by light mockery of life's sterner lessons.

Curiously, however difficult her situation, she seldom worries — as long as she is a glory girl. It is a peculiar blessing in her psychological make-up, to render her insecurity endurable, even thrilling. She is shut out. mostly, from my safe, four-walled life; for recompense, she vibrates to a higher key of enjoyment.

Mary Nolan bummed a hobo ride, ran away with gypsies, lived at an expensive London hotel, nonchalantly running up a large bill while possessing no funds. Mingled with the peculiar fascination of her type for phlegmatic me, I harbored at first a vague disapproval. Memory conjured an unpleasant newspaper story. She had tried to palm herself off on American producers as a foreigner. Her impudence added to my prejudice. Imogene Wilson — Imogene Robertson — Mary Nolan. At our first meeting she proved to be a girl at once blithely proud of, and attempting to discipline, her own turbulence. A glory girl not defended, but explained.

Though she was the antithesis of all that I value and cherish dearly, her candor and spunk awakened my respect. That has slipped into an affection not lacking in admiration. Facing criticism and a galling Nemesis, knowing her present motives to be right and herself a square shooter, she has fumbled her way without the guidance and influences of home-molded character.

At first she had acquaintances, but no close friends in Hollywood. Some players are merely uninterested or busy, others fearful of their own reputations. The cold shoulder for Mary, who had committed the unpardonable faux pas of getting the wrong newspaper headlines; kisses for those who, fully aware and coldly selfish in ambition, coat intrigues with sweet hypocrisy.

Of her personal problems we spoke little at that time, the glory girl's psychology interesting me more.

"We habituated ones envy you gypsies your migratory ways. Your nerve." I voiced my abstract thoughts. 'To us time clocks, transiency has appeal."

"By nature we are gay of heart, and afraid of the bonds that some elemental instinct wants. I have been through tough times. But this is no sympathy act." She hummed a tune. The desire for a saner existence, then slightly stirring, was to become definite; unsuspected was the unhappiness around the corner. "I despise cowardice. My mistakes have been my education — and parents. Girls reared in sheltered homes can never understand the dare girls. We sometimes would like their permanency, though we would tire of it."

She was sitting cross-legged on the bed, I across the little table.

I commented upon that quality, nerve, through lack of which I so admire. I am the sort who counts the pennies first, then waits for the dollars — and probably I shall still be waiting after the glory girls have strung the bright beads of their lives, linked with so much fun and fight and bravado.

"It is make a grand-stand play and win, or we're no worse off," she mused. "We have everything to gain, nothing to lose."

Her life has been anecdotal. Its tabloid scenes flash an apron-clad child on a Kentucky farm, romping over haystacks. An orphaned kid, miserably snubbed by the correct children in the convent where she was a "charity," working for her board. At nine. with a brother and cousin, bumming a freight ride to the limit of her horizon, a town twenty-five miles distant. Where was she going, and why? Away — because something made her. She couldn't learn lessons and obey the regularity of the bells. Being sent back, defiant. A smoldering turbulence. At fourteen, again on the wing. Pawning her petticoat for twenty-five cents — to buy doughnuts. Just a hungry kid, all mixed-up impulses. Relatives made New York possible. Had she saved the petticoat for New York, it would have brought more — at an exhibition of antiques!

Seventeen. Her prettiness another bright patch in the Follies. Her life governed by her own immature mind. Swept away by adolescent and impetuous emotion. Notoriety.

Doors that her eager hands had barely pushed ajar, slammed. She had enough for passage, and registered at the Ritz in London with one dollar in her pocket. She was gambling.

Ziegfeld publicity had labeled her the American Beauty. Reporters noted her arrival. She admitted that in America she was a great movie star. Agents asked to manage her. One introduced her to a German director then on vacation; three days later she signed a contract. Yes, they are naive over there. No, he never found out that she hadn't been a star.

"I had never been inside a studio. My make-up was wrong. I explained that our lights were different, and they showed me. My first scene was emotional. Only the memory of the American flag would draw the tears. If you are ever an exile, I promise you that one mental glimpse of the Stars and Stripes will make you howl. Technique? Bosh! Any woman can act — does act half the time." Thus she disposed of a topic upon which many players discourse. To the glory girl, work is largely a lark unless she gets steadied into a genuine ambition.

The gypsy episode occurred on an Italian location.

"Italy intoxicates me. The music, the flowers — a heady perfume. Nature puts on her festival dress; and there's a personal feeling, as though it's all for you. Gypsies would follow me around. I'd empty my purse; whether I ate or not, I scarcely knew. Three of them worked in our picture. I just went away with them, and they taught me to whistle, to strum the guitar and sing old Neapolitan songs.

They loved me." Wistfulness whispered through her voice. "Honestly they did."

When the company found her, after three days' search, all the discipline meted her was a round of scoldings.

Imogene Robertson is her real name. Before the United Artists contract was signed, her attorney informed Joseph M. Schenck of her identity. You could say that she was flippant and not prone to consider consequences, but you could not accuse her of cowardice or sham.

I thought I saw, during our first talk, a muffled overture of her grounding; there was beneath her frivolity something too fine to be tossed away. It was bound to assert itself.

Universal bought her contract and lent her for leads with Chaney and Gilbert, and to Paramount. Her forte was thought to be sophisticated drama, with a kernel of the primitive; the critics spoke of her "sultry charm." Life's seamy sides interested her, hearts struggling through ugliness and cynicism. Now that she herself has become more serious, she wishes to do light, amusing, silver silhouettes.

I have purposely postponed the chapter of her recent misfortunes and change of views, because it is not easy to write of some of its elements.

Universal's apparent neglect and subjection to petty indignities now are clear. On salary at four hundred, she was lent for fifteen hundred a week. Charged rental for her chair on the set. Consistently refused roles she wished and for which she was suitable. Given no work for weeks, or shunted to other studios. Her worst tests shown. Rebuked before extras for delays which others had caused.

Besides the personal animosity of one in authority, it was the glory girl's just desert. One does not expect her, surfaced with hard polish, to have a porous sentiment. Mary's frivolous indifference made officials wary of placing responsibility upon her shrugging shoulders. Whims dictated her moods. She was profitable when farmed out, and the anxiety less. Some of this, too, was discipline. More people believed in her than she then realized.

No system has been devised to transform a romany into a mole. In the throes of stabilization, going at it with the glory girl's helter-skelter impetuosity. Nemesis exacted toll. The flu was followed by an automobile accident. Despite serious injuries, she continued to the studio and collapsed. There were two operations. While she was in the hospital, a newspaper printed an article with most unpleasant inferences.

For days she cried, not in spoiled willfulness that some bright bauble was denied her, or some nomadic whim ungratified, but from the depth of a bruised heart. She had chosen fineness, once she saw and understood; why not let her climb in peace her own rocky hill? Must youthful mistakes always mock her? What keeps the thumbs pressed down? A wall of distaste for the spectacular in publicity shuts out names that have been bandied about, sometimes with unfair insistence. Men laughed when she called herself a pal, in imitation of other girls. Some were true friends, who helped, but many a heartache went into her efforts to inspire belief and plant roots.

Her dressing table is an index to her chameleon character. You see the gypsy, in cluttered, colorful knickknacks, the woman of the world — twenty-four! — in orchid cloisonne-and-silver things to smooth her prettiness into sleek perfection.

Men's pictures stuck in the mirror. Safely under glass, right in front, snapshots of her grandmother and of a stern and robust uncle, a missionary! Hunger there — confession of need, of wanting "folks."

Though sophisticated, the glory girls aren't common. Too much depends upon impression, and many have an innate refinement bequeathed by commonplace families. Plus an easier facility of expression, the glory girl has more than frivolous charm.

"A greater sense of appreciation, because of fewer real moments to close into our hearts. Keener sympathies give a deeper meaning to our work. We must cultivate charm, poise, and tact. We are apt and retentive, and have picked up a superficial culture. These all have screen value."

I wouldn't, now, want to exchange my precious heritage for the glory girl's light life. I know she would like, sometimes, to be ground-tied me, for I am spared her peculiar type of heartache during adjustment.

But for putting up a good, square fight against great odds, is not honor due? Let some tongues flay if they will — I champion courage.