Tod Browning — The Personal Side of the Pictures (1914) 🇺🇸

The show business got into Tod Browning’s blood with the lure of the sawdust. He was sixteen when he ran away from Louisville, Kentucky, and joined a circus.

Under the big top he formed a partnership with a young man who did the handcuff act. From him he learned the art of freeing himself from manacles without using a key or breaking the handcuffs. It was this trick which first won him fame, and which even now might not come amiss, should the Komic star’s speeding mania get him into trouble.

The circus struck Jackson, Miss., on a night when a handcuff king, who had been billed at the Opera House, at the last moment disappointed the management.

Browning and his friend volunteered and made a tremendous hit. Shortly after they left the circus and for two months throve on the proceeds of their handcuff exhibitions.

It was as the Living Hypnotic Corpse, however, that Browning became the talk of the country. When the celebrated hypnotist, with whom he had formed a partnership, fixed upon him his mesmeric gaze, he would fall into a trance. Then he would be lowered several feet under ground and the earth thrown over him. A wooden shaft permitted the wonderstruck crowd, one by one, to gaze down upon his inert form at the bottom of the pit — and incidentally supplied him with air. Sometimes, during an exhibition, he would have to stay buried forty eight hours at a time.

Before interment, he would fill his shirt with malted milk tablets and strap on an empty hot water bottle. Then, in slack moments, the hypnotist would lower a cord to which Browning would tie the water bottle which presently returned, filled for his refreshment. On one occasion, in New Orleans, Browning was obliged to be underground thirty-eight hours without water. This was too much, and after nearly two years’ brilliant business, he deserted to a black face singing and dancing act.

An engagement with Willard and King showed him the world and brought him back to Buenos Ayres, from whence he made a bee-line for Chicago. Here, with the World of Mirth Comedy Company, he was featured in some of the most popular comic character sketches that the vaudeville stage has produced. He was the original “Mutt”’ in Mutt and Jeff, and he played the title role in Silk Hat Harry.

About a year ago Mr. Browning went to D. W. Griffith, then chief director of the New York studio of the Biograph, and captured comedy roles with Charles Murray. When Mr. Griffith became production chief for the Reliance and Majestic companies, he made Mr. Browning leading man with the new Komic brand of the R.&.M. organization. In a very few months, Mr. Browning and Fay Tincher, in their inimitable team work have built up an unique reputation for the Mutual and the Komic Brand.

This versatile comedian is precisely six feet tall in his stockings. He weighs only 130 pounds. And he has a genius for make-up. When a really good-looking young man cheerfully makes such a guy of himself for the delectation of thousands, as Mr. Browning does, that’s some devotion to the high call of the movies. In the “Desperate Rudolph,” all-round-bad-man caricature, in The Last Drink of Whiskey, he, perhaps, is seen at his best. But there is virtually no limit to the number and variety of weird absurdities which he is capable of putting over when the opportunity offers.

A role which Mr. Browning delights in perpetrating in private is that of expert spaghetti cook. Every fortnight or so, he gives a feed à I’italienne to his friends at the studio.

The Biographer.

Almost ready to go on

Tod Browning in one of his many weird “make-ups”

Cranking this auto

Collection: Reel Life Magazine, July 1914

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