Romances of Famous Film Folk — King Vidor and Florence Vidor (1921) | www.vintoz.com 🇺🇸

“Saw an awfully pretty girl downtown to-day. Fellow with me said her name was Florence something. Do you know her?”

by Grace Kingsley

It was a regular city slicker from New York — in Houston on business — who spoke and King Vidor looked up from some ads of motion-picture cameras he had been examining.

“I guess you mean Florence Arto [Florence Vidor],” drawled King in his nice Southern way. “Yes,” he went on rather proudly, for you see Florence was something of a belle in the just-out-of-high-school set. “Yes, I reckon I know her well enough to call her up on the phone and go to see her if I want to.”

“Take me with you,” quickly demanded the city slicker, following up his advantage.

But, of course, that New Yorker never did make good with Florence Arto. And let me say right now it’s hard to create suspense in a story like this, because, of course, you all know how it comes out. But just read on, for even though you do know, there’s some exciting stuff coming pretty soon.

King Vidor, of course, had to show that he really could call on pretty Florence Arto, even if he didn’t feel very keen about taking a fellow along who knew all the jokes from the New York shows and wore silk shirts every day. He himself didn’t think so much of silk shirts — they seemed a bit sissified to him, but how could a fellow ever tell what unreasonable notions a girl might take?

He was just a great big boy, was Vidor, same as he is now, and always will be, I reckon, kindly and courteous, with that fine Southern courtesy, and talking with that nice little Southern drawl that is so disarming, and as he spoke the city slicker thought to himself he was going to have an awfully easy time of it with Florence Arto.

But King Vidor was a canny and resourceful youth. Not for nothing did he come of pioneer stock. When he accompanied the other fellow to the Arto home, he took along with him the script of one of his scenarios, a bit of film, and last, but not least, a mighty good hunch.

Miss Florence herself answered the door when the young men called, and they went in and sat themselves down on the horse-hair furniture of the Arto front parlor. Naturally among three young people the weather didn’t last long, and then the metropolitan youth launched forth into his most brilliant jokes gleaned from the New York shows, which naturally dazzled the feminine part of his audience a bit.

Sitting quiet meanwhile, Vidor listened a while, and then he hauled the bit of film out of his pocket and began looking at it.

“What’s that?” demanded Florence, interrupting the New York youth right in the midst of one of his best jokes.

“Oh, just a little piece of film!” answered Vidor nonchalantly, pretending he was going to put it back in his pocket.

“And so,” went on the New York man, swelling with triumph, and not knowing that he was riding for a fall, “and so when somebody asked the chicken why a chicken crossed the street she said it was nobody’s busi—”

“Let me see that film, please!” coaxed pretty Miss Florence, in her most wheedling Southern belle manner.

“Oh, all right; it isn’t anything much,” explained King Vidor, handing it over.

“Why, you’re making moving pictures!” cried Florence.

Suddenly the New Yorker found himself all out in the cold. He gave a little surprised blink, glowered a little at his rival, and finally hid his face from the ignominy of defeat behind the family stereopticon. After all these small-town girls really didn’t know how to appreciate a regular fellow. Why, he could have looked himself cross-eyed through that stereopticon thing for all that Arto girl cared!

Florence and King sat with their heads together, looking at the film, and once his hand closed over hers, but she drew it away pretty quick. Then he began talking about his latest scenario, telling her the story, and not letting her in on the fact that he had written fifty-two and had sold only one — to the Vitagraph for thirty dollars; and though the New York caller coughed twice King never looked his way once, and Florence merely glanced around, suggested a cough drop, and said in that artless, Southern way which goes to the head if one doesn’t watch out: “Why, you’ve got an awful cold. I’m so sorry. Don’t you want to listen to Mr. Vidor’s story? It’s wonderful.” Then she turned around and promptly forgot him in her absorption. “And what did the heroine do then?” she demanded of King. But King Vidor knew then just as he knows now, how to strike when the iron is hot. Instead of answering, he demanded in thrilling tones:

“Would you like to play in pictures?”

Miss Florence was a very quiet and cool-headed young lady, even if she did come from an old Southern family, but she had always wanted to go on the stage, and even if she didn’t exactly clap her hands now, she did exclaim softly, in intensely thrilled tones and with sparkling eyes: “Oh, do you think I could?”

Then more than ever engrossed in King’s plans, they chattered along until the New Yorker coughed again and said he guessed it was time to be going, and the two young men went away together, but not until King Vidor had pressed Miss Florence’s hand in entire understanding.

But he got an awful jolt next day, when he met Florence’s brother on the street.

“What do you think,” demanded Florence’s brother, “some guy had the nerve to come to the house last night and ask my sister Florence if she didn’t want to go into the movies!”

“You don’t say so!” echoed King, swallowing hard. “Why, I wouldn’t let that kind of a fellow into my house if I were you!”

The remainder of Miss Florence’s family didn’t appreciate the honor, either.

“I thought my family would be delighted that I had the chance to become a picture actress,” said Mrs. Vidor, when she was telling me about it, “but when I broached the subject, next morning at breakfast, they surprised me by putting their foot down hard on the idea. I didn’t say anything more, but “

She and young King Vidor used to go out together a good deal after that. They used to drive and walk together, and she entered into all his enthusiasms about moving pictures, till all of a sudden she found herself all wrapped up in her lover’s bright dreams and ambitions. But she went quietly on in her own fashion, saying nothing at all at home about their ambitions. So, through several months, the two young people grew to be closer and closer friends.

But it was a long while before young Vidor dared aspire to kiss his goddess because there was something about Miss Florence that somehow kept a fellow at his distance, even when near.

“Will you kiss me?” he asked her suddenly, one night when they had come home from a party.

“How dare you?” demanded Florence Arto, just as any girl would have done, but probably secretly wishing all the time he hadn’t asked, but had just done it.

“He wasn’t a cave man, I must admit!” laughed his wife, in telling me about it.

“Aw, I just did that to give her confidence — let on I hadn’t had any experience!” chuckled King in his own unctuously droll, twinkling way.

Anyway, next time he didn’t ask. He just did it. And neither remembers when he proposed. Anyhow, they say they don’t. Maybe he never did. Maybe the friendship and companionship just grew naturally into love, and somehow they just took marriage for granted. They did get married, too. as soon as King Vidor had finished some pictures which he wanted to take to New York to sell.

So their New York trip was their honeymoon, and the month was lovely September.

“I went around to the studios to see how pictures were made after I had been making them!” chuckled Vidor. “I was only twenty years old then, but I had already made a great many pictures. I had no studio. I made ‘em with all the interiors front porches” — Vidor grinned humorously. “My father gave me some money, I earned the rest, and I used the simple village folk in most of my stuff. Lots of bits and incidents I use now in my small-town pictures are adapted from people and things I really saw either in Houston or in some sleepy town near by. I made some industrial films and a few stories with the meager facilities I had. I directed the stories, and sometimes I acted in them, too, and then I’d get some kid to turn the camera while I performed. It got so the kids would pay for the chance to grind.”

He has a droll little wit all his own, has Vidor, and many of the flashes of this native and always kindly humor appear in his screen stories. He has a shrewd, keen mind, which, however, is singularly free from unkindly criticism of anybody. Mrs. Vidor is sweet, homey, conventionally nice and well bred and charming, thoroughly interested in her husband’s work and in her own, but with a marvelous gift for home making despite her work. Though both accomplish so much, they never seem to be in a hurry.

In short they’re real folks, the Vidors. Baby Suzanne is just two years old. She’s a brilliant tot with big, brown eyes and yellow hair, and the evening I was out there her beauty had been somewhat damaged by the fact that she had a swollen lip due to having tumbled down on her inquisitive little nose and knocked two of her front teeth down her little throat. But though this hampered her style a bit, it didn’t keep her from giving a very graphic rendition of that childhood epic concerning Mary’s lamb, nor did it subtract greatly from the inherently dramatic effect of Jack and Jill’s adventures. If the Vidors are going to a party or to the theater. Baby Suzanne has to be put to bed by them first, and any old party can wait, too, for she has to have her little hour with her parents after dinner, the only time they have to give their baby. when she tells them in very good English all about the things that have happened to her during the day, things to them, plays with her dollies, and hears one or two records on the phonograph. Father and mother may have to be up at six in the morning, but they never steal any time away from that after-dinner hour with their baby. Of course, unprofessional mothers may think that’s in awful thing to do with a two-year-old — letting her stay up until nine o’clock or half past — and maybe it is; but one thing is certain, they are establishing a companionship with their little one which can never be broken, a precious thing not to be bought with all the gold in the world.

Being put to bed by Mamma Florence, small Suzanne fell asleep at once, and then I heard the rest of their story.

Theirs was a real story of adventure, for after they had sold the pictures they decided they must go to California. And for that trip they bought a flivver and traveled all the way to the Coast in it!

“We camped along the way, cooked out-of-doors, and slept in the open or in barns, and, of course, we made a travel picture by the way. At one place in Montana we were held up by gypsies, and everything but our flivver and fourteen dollars in money we had hidden was taken away from us.”

It was late fall, and was beginning to be very cold in the mountains, as the travelers made their way through Nevada and Colorado. Once in Colorado they had to push their flivver up a steep mountain road to the very top, and both just about passed out before they got there. But they were young, and everything that happened was merely an adventure, so they laughed and went on. They were hungry sometimes, because it was a long time between towns, and once they stopped and actually — well, yes, they did — they stole some fruit and vegetables from a ranch! That was when they discovered their provisions were all gone, it was nearly night, and the nearest town was twenty-five miles away.

It began to rain, one night, after a miserable day spent in the Nevada mountains, and they were beginning to feel very woe-begone. wondering where they could camp for the night. Suddenly as they topped a hill, they spied a schoolhouse. They made for it, and inside they found a stove and plenty of wood and coal. They made a fire, cooked some meat and potatoes they had bought in a village that day, and spreading their blankets they said a prayer of thankfulness for shelter, and fell asleep. Bright and early, before school opened the}’ went on their way, and probably the school children and teachers up there are wondering to this day who occupied the schoolhouse that night.

The plucky pair had found when they reached Salt Lake City that they had only fourteen dollars to last them till they could reach San Francisco. That money Mrs. Vidor had tucked away in one of her shoes, and the gypsies hadn’t found it. But they never even thought of turning back.

“I had told my father I was going to California to make pictures as good as anybody’s,” said Vidor, “and it would have taken a good deal more hardship than we suffered to have made me turn back.”

Even the delicately nurtured girl, who had never known hardship before in her life, bore every burden uncomplainingly, though lots of times during the journey she must have thought of the banker’s son back home who had been devoted to her, and of the half dozen other young men who were her slaves, with none of whom would she have had to travel a couple of thousand miles in a flivver, often cold and sometimes even hungry, but if she did she never let on to her young husband; and as for King Vidor, his good nature never failed.

Twenty cents was all the money they had in the world when they got into San Francisco. They got there at night, and King found a pawnshop where he pawned his revolver to pay a night’s lodging in a hotel.

“It was a modest little hotel,” said Mrs. Vidor, “but never, never. I am sure, shall I forget how wonderful it seemed to sleep in a real bed once more, and to have a warm bath before retiring.”

“The trip had been one of suspense.”-said Vidor, “because every town we struck we had expected to receive a check from the New York firm to which I had sold my pictures. But in every place we were disappointed. In San Francisco finally we did get the money. Then we came down to Los Angeles by boat.”

That was just six years ago. King Vidor was engaged by Vitagraph to write scenarios, after they bought one of his old stories. Mrs. Vidor went to work for the same company at ten dollars a week. But that seemed a wonderful thing at the time, she says, as she tells about it laughingly now — to be a real actress with a real salary! She stayed with Vitagraph about eight months, getting exactly the experience she needed.

Then King Vidor went with Universal as property man, at twelve dollars a week, because he wanted to learn every angle of the picture business. After that he became assistant director to Carter de Haven, and next was engaged to direct the first picture ever made on the Christie [Al Christie] lot, and then became director for Tudge Brown, making twelve boy pictures.

Next Mrs. Vidor made a spectacular hit. Everybody was talking of the beautiful girl in William Farnum’s picture, “A Tale of Two Cities,” who appeared with Sidney Carton on the scaffold, giving such a remarkable performance of the mere bit of a role that her success was assured from that moment. She played leads always after that, being almost at once engaged by Lasky, and making a special impression in the roles she played opposite Sessue Hayakawa.

Then we lost her for a while from the screen, after she had whispered something to King Vidor. Her husband in the meantime wrote. The Turn in the Road, and produced the picture which made him famous all over the world. He went to New York after that, and got offers from literally every producer in the film business, signing up finally with First National. That was just four years after he had come to California in his little old flivver. And he’s only twenty-six now.

That was a red-letter year for King Vidor, anyway. For the very night of the opening of The Turn in the Road, when all the critics were buzzing its good qualities, little Suzanne was born. So King Vidor’s cup of happiness was full.

Mrs. Vidor returned to the screen, prettier and sweeter than ever, and the future looks very bright for these two. Not only has Mr. Vidor built a big studio which is one of the show places of Hollywood, but the very first home they have ever owned is now being built in Laurel Cañon, Hollywood. The house is in the old English style, picturesque, roomy, sunny, and delightful, with a big garden, sleeping porches, swimming pool, and a large nursery for Suzanne. A feature of the house will be an organ, for Mrs. Vidor plays beautifully, while King Vidor has a fine baritone voice; he also writes music.

If I have told a good deal about their professional progress, it’s because their work is so inextricably a part of their life romance, their love and work and play all so essentially a part of themselves, and their lives so utterly interdependent, their companionship so complete, that one must tell about it all in order to give any idea of their happiness and its sources.

We took a good-night peep at the rosy little Suzanne in her slumbers.

“Is she going on the screen?” I whispered.

Mrs. Vidor started to shake her head, then she smiled, remembering her own family’s objections to her career.

King Vidor’s eyes twinkled, and he smiled.

“I s’pose she will,” he drawled, “if she wants to!”

—

Every one remembers beautiful Florence Vidor after they have once seen her.

—

 Nothing is allowed to interfere with Suzanne’s bedtime hour with her parents.

—

—

A Proposal Before the Camera

Priscilla Dean is never serious in real life. So, when Wheeler Oakman proposed to her in a picture, he seized the opportunity and made it a real proposal. What happened then will be told by Grace Kingsley in the next of the Romances of Famous Film Folk series. Don’t fail to read it.

—

Collection: Picture Play Magazine, May 1921