Norma Talmadge — My Ammunition Plants (1917) 🇺🇸

November 11, 2024

Of course, as yet I am only a rookie and not a regular farmer or farmerlette, as they call them at the New York State School of Agriculture’s farm college at Farmingdale, but after my summer of intensive training in the trenches of the garden of my country home at Beachurst, L. I., I will be better equipped to comply with Photo-Play Journal’s request for an article on wartime gardening.

by Norma Talmadge

Right now I have only general ideas about the subject, some water blisters on my hands and a respect for tillers of the soil that is nothing short of scandalous adoration. That the hoe is mightier than the sword is an opinion I heartily concur in; likewise it is much more difficult to handle, or, at least, such is my observation based on encounter with the hoe. However, this should not be taken authoritatively, as I have never had any experience with a sword, even in the movies, where anything can happen — and does.

Being city-born-and-bred, it wasn’t to be expected that my knowledge of gardening should qualify me as a female Hoover. Before undertaking to do my bit for my country by raising my own vegetables and thereby helping to conserve the world’s food supply (no reflection being intended upon the eating capacity of my household), I couldn’t distinguish in its native lair a rutabaga from a radish.

While I did know that setting a hen on an egg plant wouldn’t produce a litter of eggs, I am afraid I did betray an ignorance of produce-growing that must have seemed as absurd to my gardener, a most conscientious man, but one singularly devoid of imagination. I am certain I have been a terrible trial to him, and, for that matter, still am, for, as I said before, I am only a volunteer farmer, and not even a common or garden variety of one — yet.

However, if my hands and health hold out and my gardener’s exasperation doesn’t snap under the terrific strain, I’ll make him sorry for all the unkind things he has thought about my encroachments upon his sacred precincts. While he has never dared say so, at least not in my hearing, I suspect from the manner in which he looks at me at times that he feels the German occupation of Belgium was an offense of minor importance as compared with my invasion of his turnip territory.

Nevertheless, I am proud of my ammunition plants, for such I designate my garden. To my way of thinking, “it is just as important these days to raise calories as cannons. As fighting machines must have munitions to consume, so must the fighters have food, and if I can produce sufficient vegetables for my own needs, the quantity, while perhaps not enormous, thus saved for our forces at the front will help some. Of course, it may only be a widow’s mite, but still it isn’t so insignificant at that, for 1 do a great deal of entertaining during the summer. Anyway, I am complying with President Wilson’s request and incidentally getting a whole lot of healthy, outdoor exercise.

And with the exercise I am absorbing a lot of knowledge — learning things that otherwise I would never know. For instance, I have discovered that the potato bug is the most highly intelligent insect known to man. In school books children are made acquainted with the industry of bees and ants, but the potato bug is shamefully neglected. You have got to have your own patch of “Murphies” to appreciate his superior mental development over all other forms of minute animal life.

Vine feeders, grasshoppers, locusts and beetles all have their individual peculiarities, but when it comes to downright, deep-rooted duplicity, deliver me from the potato bug. Smoke them off vines, spray them with poison, pick them off and stamp them into the earth — no matter what you do— they’ll outwit you,, and the minute your back is turned resume their nefarious business. But how in the name of common-sense can they? — I can hear the gentle city reader ask. Simply because they have the art of “playing dead” reduced to an exact science, and because they play upon your sympathy and credulity.

Why, they are so gifted in these arts that when they hear you coming their way they will drop on the ground flat on their backs and lay there absolutely still until you have passed by, thinking they are dead. Once you have gone beyond point of observation, they will sneak back on the potato plant and resume their feeding where they left off at the interruption.

They will even deceive a person familiar with their ways and suspicious of their behavior. Many’s the time I have rolled over with a stick a supposedly extinct potato bug, satisfied myself apparently that life had departed, and then rustled the plants to make believe I was walking away, only to see the “dead” spud-sponger open his eyes, twist over on his belly and start back for the vine. And so supreme are they in the confidence of their ability to pull the wool over us poor mortals that it is a 100-to-1 shot the bug when detected in this subterfuge will have the affrontery to flop over on his back and “play dead” all over again! There is absolutely no limit to their nerve.

My gardening in war times has its horrors for my friends as well as its delights for me. For a long time I didn’t know what the trouble was until my mother suggested the solution to the puzzle of why guests invited to week-end visits suddenly found so many excuses for not accepting my invitations.

In the beginning they all expressed delight when I told them they could eat at my house personally conducted vegetables. Everybody loves fresh garden truck, and city folks’ imaginations run riot at the mere thought of getting freshly plucked cabbages, newly-mown lettuce and recently harvested beets. But unfortunately the early summer visitors were doomed to disappointment, for the only product in my garden mature enough to serve were scallions. All I could do was to show them where the other subjects of the vegetable kingdom were in the process of training and feed them on young onions.

The first three of four week-end parties proved martyrs to my new movement and consumed my home-trained scallions for three meals a day with apparent relish, if concealed regrets, but on returning to the city I suspect they started in circulation rumors of an unsavory nature that influenced prospective guests to cancel their reservations with me. Some people are so sensitive that a breath of scandal will swerve them from their course.

However, the fault was not mine, but was due to the cold and rains of the early spring, which set my garden back six weeks, and it was some time before it yielded me anything but young onions and I could retrieve myself. During that period our beans and peas came from cans or from the village market, but so far as I know none of my guests ever discovered the difference.

I could fill a magazine the size of PhotoPlay Journal recounting my experiences as a novice farmerlette, but to fully appreciate the thrill and glory of wartime gardening one must go through the experience for one’s self. After you have, you can understand the feelings of the city chap sent out to dig potatoes when he came back to the farmer and indignantly demanded that he go get them himself, as he had planted them and knew best where they were hidden.

There is so much to learn and apparently trivial things enter so largely into the cultivation of a garden that the rookie is absolutely confounded. For instance, the gardener nearly suffered a

stroke of paralysis because I insisted on picking the pea blossoms from the plants. How was I to know that if left to themselves they would in due time turn into nice green pods of peas? I thought the peas grew in the ground like potatoes.

One morning he discovered me pulling up radishes and sticking them back in the soil again because I thought they should grow some more, and he had the hardest time convincing me that this method of gardening was altogether too futuristic for practical purposes. The beans, too, every morning had a habit of popping out on the surface, and I spent many an hour carefully thrusting them back into the ground until he detected me and initiated me into the error of my ways.

Since then I have discovered a lot of things which I never suspected before about the whims of vegetables and, of course, I have a whole lot more to learn; but I have seen enough to convince me that raising war brides in a garden ammunition plant is a task so gigantic that even George Creel, with his extraordinary skill at “elaboration,” couldn’t begin to do justice to the theme with all the United States army and navy behind him!

Norma Talmadge — My Ammunition Plants (1917) | www.vintoz.com

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Norma Talmadge in the oval and in her garden twice

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Helen Royton — From Grand Opera to Grand Cinema

Magnetism of the camera proves irressistible

by C. Stearns Clancy

The strange fascination — but perhaps not so strange — that photoplay acting holds for people of all classes and types is well illustrated by the case of Mlle. Helen Royton, international favorite of the operatic stage, now the favorite heavy of one of the large Western studios.

Mlle. Royton, as regal as her name, is not the first prima donna to “work in pictures,” but hers is a shining example of the unexpected that so often happens to professional people. At the time Mars started operations in 1914 she was in Paris, having spent the winter season on European stages in the roles of “Micaela” in Carmen, singing in French; “Elsa” in Lohengrin, singing in German, and “Nedda” in Madam Butterfly, singing in Italian. She made her escape from the French capital when the German army was but a few miles from the city gates, and after much hardship succeeded in reaching her home in New York with merely the clothes she had on.

Finding the business of grand opera in America on a slump for the time being, Mlle. Royton decided upon a vacation trip to Los Angeles, to get as far from the war as possible. While visiting a studio at Long Beach she appealed to a director as a “type” he happened to be looking for, and “just for fun” was prevailed upon to accept the role of “Perda Brentane,” in the feature entitled “Mentioned in Confidence,” then in course of production.

And now the spell of the camera began to work. “Acting with only the camera for my audience seemed so queer and novel, especially as I was not allowed to look at it, that the work fascinated me at once, and I put forth my best efforts,” Mlle. Royton explains, and her ability as a photoplay actress was quickly established.

Before her second picture was half finished Mlle. Royton had the misfortune to sustain a broken leg in an elevator accident and was forced to chaff with inactivity for six weeks. Upon leaving the hospital, however, she was again tempted with the offer of a promising part in a big picture under production in a Hollywood studio, and now is giving every indication of becoming one of the most widely-admired of screen actresses.

“My studio work is so absorbing,” Helen Royton declares, “that I shall be sorry when the time comes for me to return to the stage.”