The Roll-Call of the Old Guard (1926) 🇺🇸
Former stars — working as extras. Old-time favorites — battling for recognition. Dethroned idols — hunting the casting offices. That’s fame in the movies!
by Alice Tildesley
The heroes of other days are now character men. Great beauties are playing “bits.” And former boy prodigies are vainly seeking work in the studios
The heartaches of Hollywood.
Former favorites entering the Montmartre, leaving studios, driving or walking the boulevards without creating a ripple of interest.
Florence Lawrence of early fame receiving like a blow in the face word from a prominent casting director “Not known.”
Billie Rhodes, so short a time ago in the starry heavens of cinema-land, glad to play atmosphere in Gloria’s [Gloria Swanson] picture.
Frankie Bailey, “the girl with the classic legs” of old Weber and Fields [Lew Fields | Joe Weber] days, from whose slippers gilded youth of not-so-long-ago once drank champagne. Frankie Bailey doing bits.
Toby Claude, topliner in English vaudeville, cast as a maid in a current production, appearing mostly as “the face on the cutting-room floor.”
Maurice Costello visiting the sets whereon his daughters work…
Noah Beery [Noah Beery Sr.] told me about the reception given Maurice Costello in Madison Square Garden when the dimpled Costello was at the peak of his popularity.
“That’s a big place,” said Noah, “and it was crowded — people standing up. When Costello appeared, they whistled, they shouted, they clapped and they stamped their feet. Never heard anything like it. Never will again, I think.”
But if the passing of Maurice Costello on a Hollywood street goes unnoticed, he has compensation. The delectable Dolores [Dolores Costello] is his daughter. Dolores, presented to her public by John Barrymore, as “That artist — I may say that great artist — whom I consider one of the significant figures on the screen.”
There is Florence Turner, “the Vitagraph girl” beloved of the first fans, battling for recognition again.
“There is a genius!” cried Irving Cummings, director. “Florence Turner can out-act any of our modern stars. She’s the most remarkable, most pathetic, most delightful of all the women that ever moved before a camera!”
Florence may have a heartache, but she does not go about in tears. She does not take you into a corner and threaten suicide, or complain because reigning beauties do not reach out helping hands. She is always gay and gallant, ready with a joke, telling you how brilliant her director is, how kind that old friend and how good this new one.
Her first job came to her because of what she could do, not how she looked. The man at the old Vitagraph studios glowered at the little fifteen-year-old — the six hundredth pretty girl of that day to ask for a chance.
“You think you can go in pictures?” he sneered. “What can you do — for instance?”
Florence’s tone matched his in insolence. She crossed her eyes, dropped her jaw. “I can do this — for instance!”
Next day she played the lead in a short picture — a rôle lasting three full hours — and after that worked steadily, doing everything from old women to boys, painting scenery, writing stories, getting properties, growing with her new art. Her charm reached out from the screen and her public demanded her name.
In 1913, Florence took her own company to England, invested all her savings in studio and equipment, and began to make pictures there.
Then came 1914 and war. Everything shut down. In the middle of a picture the leading man would be rushed to France — before a second start was made, the heavy was taken — it was hopeless to try to finish a picture when even the cameramen were never the same two weeks running. Air-raids began. Florence left the Princess Road Station in Edinburgh not ten minutes before it was destroyed. What was left of the company were nervous wrecks.
Three or four years away and the picture world had changed. Other stars had risen. A period of free-lancing ended in an offer from England, and its acceptance. But the war had left England’s producers in a sad state. The industry languished and apparently died.
For some months Florence and her mother, in London, were desperately hard up. Perhaps the river Thames had a fearful attraction for them then. People say drowning is an easy death…
This is the part of the story that Florence loves to tell.
“I didn’t know Marion Davies,” she says, “I don’t believe she had ever seen me.”
But somehow or other she heard how things were. One day her London agent came to see us, said he was authorized to pay our expenses back to New York, and that we were to go as Miss Davies’ guests. Later she brought us out here. And here we are!”
She is working in Padlocked now, doing the abused wife, and she has just finished a rôle in “The Gilded Highway” for her old director, J. Stuart Blackton.
“She can play anything!” says Mr. Cummings, and a glimpse of her character studies would seem to bear him out. The imitation of Chauncey Depew, for example.
Irving Cummings himself graduated into directorship from the matinée-idol class. He was the first leading man to get the munificent sum of a hundred dollars a week.
“Crane Wilbur was getting his five a day when I was brought in at the unheard-of hundred a week. Now he’s writing plays that show on Broadway. George Siegmann and Ralph Lewis and I used to be called the ‘Big Three.’ We could wear each other’s clothes, and I remember that whoever got to the studio first used to get the pick of the wardrobe.”
The work of Francis X. Bushman in this classic is commented on also by Lois Weber, who is still our only successful woman director.
“His virility in Ben-Hur showed me that he can come back. On the strength of that performance I engaged him for the lead in The Star Maker [Transcriber’s Note: probably The Marriage Clause (1926)] and I think, with the right parts, he can return as a prominent screen figure.”
Finding the right niche after you have fallen out of your old one is not so easy, but it has been done.
Lou Tellegen, once leading man to Sarah Bernhardt, Réjane and Duse [Gabrielle Réjane | Eleonora Duse], who made flapper hearts palpitate when he was a picture star, has found his niche as a heavy. That first “panther man” took his public so by storm that New York police still speak of the rioting women and girls who tried to tear his buttons off for keepsakes and succeeded in cutting off almost every shred of his clothes.
Yet now Lou Tellegen delights in his “men of sin” and says he was never so happy when he was playing leads, for a lead puts his brains in his make-up box and merely looks the pretty boy.
Henry Walthall’s Little Colonel [Transcriber’s Note: Henry B. Walthall’s role in D. W. Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation (1915)] will be talked of whenever pictures are mentioned. Ill health and circumstances kept him off the screen for years, but now he seems to have found his niche in character rôles. That moment in Three Faces East where he, as the soldier’s father, waits for the mother to finish welcoming his son stands for me as an illumined moment comparable to the home-coming of the Little Colonel in Griffith’s masterpiece.
Will Bryant Washburn find his niche?
Once upon a time, all old men parts automatically went to Bryant, just as all “rube constabules” went to Francis X. Bushman.
“That’s what we liked,” says Mr. Washburn, “we were both kids and we thought characters were more fun than straight leads. I played everything and enjoyed it. But I made my first big hit in Skinner’s Dress Suit and was condemned to play Skinner for the rest of my screen life.
“It was lack of stories that made me leave Hollywood. I went abroad, made a few pictures, free-lanced awhile, and now I’m a new kind of comedian. At least, I hope so.”
Discouraged souls point to the coming back of Blanche Sweet and Dorothy Phillips as evidence that former favorites need not forever languish. But the attempts of Theda Bara to regain a portion of her early popularity have been in vain. And where is Dustin Farnum?
Oh, the Old Guard! There’s Virginia Pearson, one of the first sirens of the screen, doing character rôles, and Rose Tapley, an early-day ingénue, doing mother parts.
Only the other day, J. Farrell MacDonald, who is an old-timer, altho success came late, was talking pictures over the necktie counter in Blackstone’s with a youth who had called him by name.
“And do you remember a little boy named Kenneth Casey?” said the youth who sold the ties.
“Sure! Sure I do — he was the Jackie Coogan of his day!” cried J. Farrell.
“Well… I’m Kenneth Casey.”
For which chance meeting casting directors may either bless or curse J. Farrell MacDonald, since Kenneth Casey has ever since then dogged their heels.
When this character actor directed for Universal years ago, Harold Lloyd, Hal Roach and Fred Newmeyer [Fred C. Newmeyer] were what he called “regular extras.” He brought Jeanie MacPherson, now De Mille’s [Cecil B. DeMille] scenario writer, to the Coast as his leading woman. Edwin August was his leading man.
“This is a funny business. People say it is a cruel business. But when I definitely gave it up, after the war, and decided there was nothing in it for me — it wanted me back. I had gone to Santa Barbara and started the art colony there. I was going to paint pictures instead of making ‘em, And Universal wired me to come and do a part in Marked Men — and I’ve never gone back to the colony!”
Cissy Fitzgerald, once a favorite on the musical-comedy stage, is doing character parts and is seldom out of work. Trixie Friganza is in demand, and now there is Richard Carle.
Richard Carle, you know, was a top-notch musical-comedy star, who wrote his own things and packed houses from coast to coast for “The Spring Chicken” and Mary’s Lamb. Being William Boyd’s father in Eve’s Leaves is his present occupation.
“I remember when we all looked down on pictures. We wouldn’t know anybody who worked in them. Think of that! We didn’t know what a science the thing is — how carefully you have to create your character and just how to get your effect. I have so much to learn and I’m bound to learn it.
“What gets me is that it is all so final. On the stage, on first nights I was always watching the audience, seeing what went over and what didn’t and later I amended the show. You can’t do that in pictures. It must be right the first time.
“But it’s a great life.”
“It’s the only life!” says Robert Edeson, the most popular matinée idol of his day, when the “All-American Three” were at the head of American drama. Richard Harding Davis wrote the plays. Augustin Daly produced them, and Bob Edeson played the husky young American then in favor.
“People talk about the dear old golden days,” says Mr. Edeson, “but that’s mostly bunk. The golden days are right here now, and anybody who wants one must learn how to enjoy it and he can have it.
“Yes, I thought I was sitting on the world when we were doing Soldiers of Fortune and the rest of the clean, stirring comedy dramas we boys made: when folks liked romance instead of intrigue and a good fight rather than a dissertation on
“But look at me now — working outdoors all day in California sunshine doing something different all the time — learning something new every minute.
“The way to be a success in this business, I think, is to put every ounce of energy into it and get every ounce of joy out of it. It’s intensely interesting. You couldn’t lure me back to the stage!”
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Once the most famous chorus girl. Now just a good type. That’s the story of Frankie Bailey. And there are hundreds of other such stories in Hollywood.
The girl whose legs were once the toast of New York is earning a modest living in the studios. Yes, it’s Frankie Bailey. Ask Dad — he knows
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Virginia Pearson, who was Theda Bara’s greatest rival as a siren, is playing character parts now.
And Richard Carle (left), musical comedy star, is working in secondary rôles. But he says it’s a great life!
Lou Tellegen was once leading man for Sarah Bernhardt. And he had a brief vogue as a screen hero. Tellegen has turned to movie villains. He says he likes his “men of sin”
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Left: Irving Cummings was once a popular leading man. He had the good sense to turn director, thereby insuring his future.
Photo by: Max Munn Autrey (1891–1971)
Bryant Washburn (right) left Hollywood because he couldn’t find fine stories. Now he wants to re-establish himself as a new kind of comedian
Photo by: Melbourne Spurr (1888–1964)
Florence Turner was saved by Marion Davies from hopeless obscurity in London. She is in Hollywood, glad to be playing small parts
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Collection: Motion Picture Magazine, June 1926