Sex Appeal, Babies and Alice Brady (1922) 🇺🇸
Crimson sunset across the green of a golf course… The amber of Long Island Sound at sundown… A huge baronial dining room with massive fire places… Two candles gleaming across the table… and Alice Brady.
by Frederick James Smith
A picturesque interview setting. To be truthful, one should explain that the place is merely rented by Miss Brady for the summer. Also that the baronial dining room was achieved by putting together two sectional houses. And that the original builder had kept on adding sections until the residence — one story high — had the sprawling, general shape of a horseshoe. “The place has its quaint qualities,” sighed the actress. “One of them is the way golf balls from the course out there keep bounding against my windows every Sunday.”
As odd as the background is Miss Brady’s own personality. There is tremendous and amazing vitality to her. A curious consuming fire. A rambling interest in everything. You imagine that she works hard and plays hard — and then you discover that she doesn’t play. That she never rests. That she hasn’t a single athletic interest.
Miss Brady has been living all alone in the bizarre Great Neck place since her married life went on the rocks. As her conversation ran rapidly across many topics, we caught a faint glimpse of the careful guard she had put around her own experiences.
Yet she spoke frankly of her baby boy, Donald Crane. We had been talking of the value of actual experience in the artistic career of an actress — of pain and travail shaping the player’s mimic depiction of life.
“Maybe,” mused the actress, “but I really think we humans have built up a stock set of conventional ways to portray life on the stage and in literature: marriage this way, birth so so, motherhood on its lofty pedestal, and so through the events of existence. These ways are all very nice. Poets and novelists have gilded them with Pollyanna touches to please us — but they aren’t very genuine.
“One thing the baby has taught me: that story-book motherhood either doesn’t really exist or I am terribly different. I look at my baby and wonder. I haven’t any of that maternal instinct you read about; the burning love, the all centering interest, the spirit of self sacrifice and all the rest. I look at my baby with a curious, almost impersonal, interest. I can hardly believe he is mine. Motherhood means just one big thing for me, a tremendous absorption in how he develops, how he grows day by day.”
Miss Brady paused in her confession. “He is a boy. I shall watch his mind grow with a vast interest. His future? I do not want him to become an actor. Acting is not a profession for a man. It is wrecking in the way it breaks down male ideals. It is too great a tax upon the vanities. On the other hand, if my baby were a girl, I would want her to follow the stage. It is the one field of big reward for a woman. It is almost the one field where she can be individual, where she need not warp herself to circumstance even if she lacks in strength.”
Miss Brady absently considered the flickering dinner candles. “I want him to be a business man. Alert and active. And not concerned in self. Hard working and fearless.”
She smiled. Her mind jumped with the speed of the self-centered. “Do you know I wanted to name my baby Felix after the character in Floyd Dell’s Moon Calf but my relatives were aghast. So we compromised on the name of Donald.”
“A dreamer’s name for a business man?” we gently protested.
“Why not?” responded the star. “Aren’t business men dreamers — if they’re successful?”
We retreated behind our salad.
We have said that Miss Brady is self-centered. We do not mean that she likes to be aloof from people and things. “My favorite study is the human,” she says. “Yet sometimes I find animals kinder and more understanding. Human beings build up a wall around themselves. Frequently we call it personality. But most of the time it is only a sham. Animals — dogs, for instance — are much more real.” Yet Miss Brady actually isn’t embittered. She has too passionate an interest in life.
At that we’re with Miss Brady anent the honesty of animals. Our best friend was a cat, wise and sympathetic, but now, alas, passed to the happy hunting ground of cream and catnip.
Alice Brady is the daughter of William A. Brady, the theatrical producer, and, like all 1922 daughters, she rather looks down upon him. “Dad’s one of those commercial managers,” she explains. “All last season he’d just snort when I would try to drag him to see Eugene O’Neill’s play, The Hairy Ape. Sometime I want to do O’Neill’s short play of the sea, Ile, in vaudeville. Dad just groans when I mention it.”
“Parents are so provincial and reactionary,” we admitted.
The star sees motion pictures from a very sane angle. She believes there is too little acting and too much posing. She likes Pola Negri, for instance, because of her lack of the usual cinema restraint.
“I want to do character roles on the screen,” went on Miss Brady, “but the managers want me merely to go through the usual polite experiences in pretty frocks. I’m beginning to think the screen is afraid of acting. And they want to keep life dressed up like a department store Santa Claus, expecting us to believe it is so.
“Consider my own personal predicament,” went on Miss Brady. “Because I weigh but 98 pounds, they tell me I lack sex appeal. As far as I can gather from them, sex appeal goes hand in hand with plumpness. They want me to get up around 120 pounds. Of course, I had always supposed avoir dupois was a popular thing in the far East but not in Western lands. But I have discovered I am wrong. I’m only 98 and I utterly lack sex appeal. So you see I’m dieting to achieve it.”
We passed the potatoes to Miss Brady. “Have some sex appeal,” we begged.
Miss Brady frowned. “You don’t take my problem seriously. I study calories night and day.”
“Forgive our utter lack of sympathy,” we admitted. “We’re enjoying ourselves. Everyone we interview is dieting to get slender and it ruins our digestion. These are the first potatoes we’ve interviewed in months.”
“Do you think sex appeal is a matter of weight?” Miss Brady demanded.
“Er — er,” said we, judiciously, “er — have another potato.”
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“Sometimes I find animals kinder and more understanding than human beings,” says Alice Brady
Miss Brady in her newest picture, “Missing Millions”
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Miss Brady in one of her first screen vehicles, “La Bohème”
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Every advertisement in Photoplay Magazine is guaranteed.
Collection: Photoplay Magazine, October 1922
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see also Alice Brady is Like That! (1934)