Priscilla Dean Moran — Priscilla’s Erratic Good Fairy (1924) 🇺🇸
Good fairies haven’t gone out of business, though some folks scoff at their existence. Even the know-it-alls should be convinced of this by the story of Priscilla Dean Moran.
Once upon a time a baby girl came to bring sunshine into the home of a theater manager in a roughneck Oklahoma town. The rollicking cowboys who stormed into the show on pay-day night said what they thought of the pretty, doll-faced stars in mighty strong language and didn’t like any of the actresses except Priscilla Dean. Once the little show was about to close, because there wasn’t any money. But the posters announced a Dean picture and, lo and behold, so many quarters tinkled into the little window that evening that the little show pulled through.
So the manager named the new baby at his house Priscilla Dean Moran [Priscilla Moran] and decided she just must be an actress. As soon as she could toddle around, he began to train her, and later mother, daddy and Priscilla came to Hollywood. The Good Fairy, still on her job, must have whispered a word in the ear of a nice, plump, shiny gentleman named Joseph Schenck [Joseph M. Schenck], because he engaged her for a rôle in East is West, following that with another in The Toll of the Sea.
But evidently the Good Fairy had business somewhere else about that time and forgot her protegee. Anyway, Priscilla’s mother got terribly sick one day and finally closed her eyes and they took her away somewhere and Priscilla never saw her again. Daddy was sick, too, and there wasn’t any money, so a very nice lady named Dorothy Dalton took her for a lovely trip.
After that, Priscilla went to live with a little boy and his parents. The little boy — his name was Jackie Coogan — acted too, and he was real polite to Priscilla, considering she was a girl. He even let her ride his scooter. And she played before the camera again, what she most loved doing, in a picture called “Long Live the King.” But even these flattering attentions couldn’t quite make up for her loneliness. She wanted her daddy, who had gone back to Denver to look for his health. Finally he found it — or a part of it — and came to Hollywood and vowed he’d never part with Priscilla again, no matter how many nice, important people wanted to adopt her.
He is still awfully sick, poor daddy, and can’t work, so Priscilla is acting at the Warner Brothers’ big, white studio. And now it does look as if the Good Fairy has done her job right well.
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Photo by: Nelson Evans (1889–1922)
Collection: Picture Play Magazine, March 1924