Shannon Day — Eyes of Promise (1924) 🇺🇸

You look into Shannon Day’s green eyes and see a brooding restlessness, something — you can’t figure out just what — that needs expressing.

Under heavy, slumberous lids those eyes sort of melt into your own, compel your attention, incite your imagination

They have experience in them at times they are cold and hard, shrewdly gauging; again they blaze and become alive with feeling.

This restlessness may be traced, to an extent, to her heritage of gypsy blood, that strange urge which neither time nor circumstances nor changed conditions ever can quite smother. Hungarian and Irish mingle in her veins— and what could one expect of a mixture like that but pride impetuosity oddly at variance with her somnolence, and forever that restlessness goading her on to she knows not what?

Her parents were immigrants, but two weeks in this country when she was born. Her childhood was spent mostly in dancing to the lure of the wheezy, jangling hurdy-gurdies along the sidewalks of New York’s foreign sections. Just one of a mob of excited, queerly dressed youngsters, neither of the Old World nor yet completely of the New. If she differed from her more phlegmatic companions, it must have been a subtle difference — perhaps that hint of hidden fires behind those strange green eyes that gleamed in a pale little face framed with a tangled mop of brown hair standing out every which a way. Or it may have been merely the grace of her nimble feet that made her the leader of those shrill-voiced kids.

“Dance?” she shrugs. “I always danced. Lessons? Never. I don’t know the first thing about the technique of it. Whenever the impulse came upon me to dance, to sing, to act, to draw, I just did those things. Always crudely, for I never had any training, and very little schooling. It seemed there was something that always bothered me. that I had to tell some way and couldn’t say in words, so I sort of danced and sang it out.”

Along in her teens, ambition flamed in that slim little body. She wanted clothes, lovely things that would lift her out of her surroundings so she could “be somebody.” The first chance that offered was posing for commercial photographers, illustrating children’s fashions. Dresses she bought, and cheap, odd jewelry of bright color, heavy chains to hang around her neck.

The second step was as salesgirl in a modiste’s establishment, where she also displayed the gowns on her own graceful figure. That led her to the “Follies,” and there her dancing feet found delight in a specialty number.

The movies next, of course. Publicity attended her arrival in Hollywood a few years ago. Her pictures in the papers, and so on. Another “Follies” girl to ornament the screen. For a while she did rather well. Some good rôles — but always too typically the pretty, vapid ingénue — were entrusted to her. Then something went wrong. Shannon thought things came so nicely, with such little effort, that she just quit bothering much, had a good time and told the calamity howlers to quit crabbing. She began to slip — and it is fatal, in Hollywood, to lose one inch of that so fiercely contested ground. Her rôles grew smaller, of less importance, until no longer would they trust her with a big part.

“It seemed as if fate was against me, pushing me away. I just missed chances — I was out when they called, or too late, or somebody else had a bit more ability than I. When I realized I was slipping here, I went back East, worked in a picture, and then, reading in the papers about the boom out here, came back to Hollywood. No sooner had I arrived than that slump came — and hit me harder, it seemed, than any one else.

“For months I couldn’t get even a ‘bit.’ I used to sit and cry. Then I’d wash my eyes with cold water, dab powder on my face and go out somewhere and smile — to let them see it didn’t hurt, so they wouldn’t laugh. They laugh here, do you know?” The green eyes brooded once again. “It hurts. They don’t care. You’ve got to put powder and a smile on, so it won’t show. The last thing to go is your pride — then you are done for. But I hung onto that.”

It held her rigid with determination. I used to see her around the studios, begging, demanding, wheedling for a chance to prove that she could yet learn to act — promising that next time she made good she would stay at the top. Finally her perseverance won and they gave her small rôles again and slowly she has been climbing that hard-runged ladder once more.

Now she is playing a gypsy violinist in Universal’s picturization of the “Information Kid” series and in the one titled “The Fiddlin’ Doll,” does her best work so far. An odd character, ideally suited to her, that: dreamy, stirred at times by strange, incomprehensible instincts that she obeys blindly, a girl who knows the bitterness — and, too, a bit of the joy — of life.

“Character ingenue, that’s my forte. I’ve had trouble, an unhappy romance. I can’t just smile and look sweet. I’m not pretty in the way these other girls are pretty. But I think I’ve got something inside of me that some of them haven’t. I don’t know yet just what it is. When things happen to me I just feel, at the moment; then afterward I try to think and understand why I felt that and how I acted, so I can put those real touches into similar incidents in scenes. I’m not as moody as I used to be. I forced myself to believe that there would be a turn in the road, and it has come now.

“Why, the encouraging letters I get from actors here that I wouldn’t think would even notice me, telling me I have pluck and they’re glad I stuck it out, and all. Even during those hard days there were letters from fans who had seen me on the screen before — and one wrote, in Picture-Play’s ‘What the Fans Think,’ that I should have a chance. She called me ‘little lady,’ too.” Shannon choked over the word, and the green eyes challenged. “Laugh if you want to — but I cried over that so. I cut it out and kept it under my pillow, nights. Now, laugh!”

I couldn’t laugh. I’ve been through too many of those hard times myself when a little friendly comment meant something to cherish.

“I believe I have some artistic ability in me, or I would have quit. The fact that I feel these things, sort of queerly, tells me I belong here. And I am going to keep on until I do make a place for myself. I’ll make everybody — not just one lone fan — call me ‘little lady’ and give me a chance.”

And I rather think she will. She’s quite small and not vivid in a striking, foreign way. She’s rather of the quiet, still-water-runs-deep kind. For a long while she will sit, inanimate, her colorless face expressionless save for that slow, speculative, crooked smile curving her full lips. Except for that brooding, restless quality that breeds a strange reflection in those green eyes, she is very ordinary. That feeling alone, though, is quite possibly going to bring Shannon Day again up the ladder. And the next time she gets there, it won’t be on the strength of “Follies” publicity, and I sort of have an idea she will stay put.

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Photo by: Roman Freulich (1898–1974)

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Collection: Picture Play Magazine, July 1924