Miss DuPont — A Prohibition Beauty (1922) 🇺🇸
“She was born in old Kentucky” — and that’s pretty near as good a start for a woman as it is for a race horse.
by Joan Jordan
Certainly old Kentucky can add another name to her list of beautiful daughters, which is mighty near as long as her war record of colonels.
Of course there’s one. other thing the state’s famous for — but wouldn’t be any use mentioning it now. And it wouldn’t be much good as a descriptive or a comparative, because Miss DuPont is sort of a prohibition beauty anyway— not much kick.
She is more like a pineapple ice cream soda than a mint julep.
Hers is the cool, perfect beauty of the Swiss Alps — the serene loveliness of the Italian lakes — the scentless perfection of a hothouse Bride rose.
But beauty she actually has and it is her complete justification for screen and star existence. For beauty is apparently becoming rarer and rarer. We are going in so much for charm, personality, kick, prettiness, sex appeal, and exotic appeal that we have almost forgotten the days when Lillian Russell and Maxine Elliot reigned supreme.
I sat in the hot November sunshine, in a small white-painted arbor outside her dressing room, and looked into her lovely face, and actually failed to miss the conversational brilliance of a Priscilla Dean, the intellectual stimulus of a Helen Ferguson, or the pervading hypnotism of a Gloria Swanson.
We have had on the screen three definite types of beauty — the Mary Pickford type, under which fall such stars as May Allison, Mary Miles Minter, Marion Davies and Wanda Hawley; the sex type, including Corinne Griffith, Bebe Daniels, Gloria Swanson, Phyllis Haver, Betty Compson and a long list of others; and the Katherine MacDonald-Elsie Ferguson school, where we find Betty Blythe, Florence Vidor, Harriet Hammond, and now Miss DuPont.
(Of course that doesn’t pretend to be a complete explanation, but it’s my idea of the different types of physical beauty that have been successful on the screen.)
The last-named classification is the only one founded on the Greek theory of perfection of line, feature and repose.
Miss DuPont has the big, clear, perfectly shaped blue eyes, the finely arched brows, nostrils and mouth, the oval chin line, the pronounced classic nose. Her hair is golden and heavy, and her skin is very fair. As yet she is a trifle heavy and she has not acquired that stateliness of manner and queenly poise which go with her type and which make Betty Blythe, for instance, such a constant joy to the eye.
But she can acquire all that if she cares to, and I rather think she does.
For aside from her beauty, there is another thing very much in favor of this newest Universal luminary.
She is quite simple and unaffected and timid about herself and her work. She has a little trick of looking straight at you and turning her palms outward and upward almost supplicatingly, as though she sweetly asked your lenience and your affection. If she can get that over on the screen, it should add the one touch necessary to her beauty to make her a real star, which after all only the public can do.
She seems to say, “Here I am — making my first bow to you all. I’m going to do my best. Please like me.”
“Please, please don’t say I was made overnight,” she said to me, and her voice is pleasantly soft and sweet. “It seems to me I’ve been at it forever.”
So I won’t say that she was made overnight, but her sudden rise to stardom has actually been one of the quickest cases on record and one of the very few of its kind of recent years.
When I first met her I kept trying to remember where I’d seen her. It wasn’t until just before I left that I succeeded. A couple of years ago I went into an exclusive and expensive shop in Los Angeles to look at dinner frocks. A tall, beautiful blonde girl modeled them and tried to make me believe I’d look like she did in them.
That mannequin was Margaret Armstrong, whom Universal has rechristened “Miss DuPont.”
She has been advised, I believe, to keep silent about that chapter in her life. I don’t know why. She was a very good model. The most interesting thing about her to me is her climb to fame, and it is the one thing that makes me think she will climb higher.
She gave up modeling and did small bit in pictures. Then Eric von Stroheim [Erich von Stroheim] was told about her by another director for whom she had worked, Sam de Grasse. Von Stroheim was looking for just the right woman to play the lead in his expensive spectacle, Foolish Wives. And Miss DuPont proved to be just the right woman. He used her — and was so satisfied with the results that when he showed them to Universal, they decided to star her.
So she was very fortunate in her opportunity.
She lives with her mother and brother, and everyone who knows her and works with her declares that she is a nice, quiet, sweet-tempered kid. Which is saying a good deal.
She has made a couple of starring vehicles since Foolish Wives, but she is impatiently waiting for the public to see her in it.
“I worked over a year on it — and I want people to see it, because then maybe they’ll remember me,” she says.
I shouldn’t be at all surprised. It will be difficult to forget the real beauty of that face.
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Miss Dupont is the cool, perfect beauty of the Swiss Alps
Her new Hollywood bungalow
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Read the remarkable fashion announcement on Pages 58 and 59. It is of paramount interest to every woman. A Bon Ton Pattern — absolutely without cost!
Every advertisement in Photoplay Magazine is guaranteed.
Collection: Photoplay Magazine, February 1922
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Miss Dupont really won her stellar spurs as the attractive, but vapid wife in von Stroheim’s Foolish Wives. At present, she is appearing in the theaters showing this production. The absence of a given name lends an atmosphere of mystery
Photo by: Edward Thayer Monroe (1890–1974)
Collection: Motion Picture Magazine, June 1922