Virginia Valli — From Stenography to Stardom (1918) 🇺🇸

August 15, 2024

A little less than four years ago Virginia Valli was a stenographer in a shipper’s office on South Water Street, Chicago.

by Frances A. Ludwig

Today she’s playing leads with Essanay on pretty, shaded Argyle Street, Chicago. It’s a big jump, and this is how it happened:

There is fascination in following a chain of circumstances to its outcome. If Miss Valli, upon her graduation from high school, had chanced to become a stenographer in some well-appointed, mahogany-lined office, under a considerate “boss” and with pleasant companions, the chances are that she would still be tapping an Underwood with her slim fingers and contentedly cashing her weekly pay check — cashing it, you understand. As it is, Virginia is able to deposit a good many checks beautifully and satisfyingly intact.

But you see, she went to work on South Water Street. To a native of the Windy City, that is enlightenment enough; but for the benefit of the uninitiated we will interpolate a little explanation. South Water Street is the market district of Chicago. It is only eight blocks long, but it has traditions of its own, which traditions haven’t changed since the year of the Chicago fire.

When Miss Valli turned the corner which led to her employer’s office, she would instinctively press her handkerchief to her nose. This was necessary to keep from being asphyxiated by the distinctive South Water Street aroma — formed by a combination of green hides, live poultry, wagonloads of bananas, decayed pineapples, vegetables in all stages of dissolution, and cheese in all periods of ripening. Holding her skirts high, she would be obliged to step over a crate of chickens, dodge between trucks propelled by voluble sons of Italy, and then slip on a spoiled tomato. She would climb a long pair of dingy, half-lighted stairs, go into a dingy, half-lighted office and spend long hours writing letters to complaining grocers or figuring out the freight charges on carloads of cabbages.

Miss Valli didn’t like it. She had to work from eight until six, she couldn’t keep herself neat and dainty, and she had to endure being ogled by express drivers and roustabouts whenever she went down the street. Sometimes she cried after she got home. But there was mother, and little sister, and the home. Virginia must do her share.

Virginia’s mother sympathized with her. She wanted her to find a more pleasant, heartening occupation. But they pay pretty good salaries on South Water Street, so Virginia stayed — quite a while. Finally, she couldn’t stand it any longer. So one sunshiny morning she handed in her resignation.

About this time the dancing furor was at its zenith. Virginia, being lithe and slim and especially designed by nature for pirouetting, became a dancer.

Ah, this was the life! So thought Miss Valli. No more climbing out early in the morning, no more hanging onto a strap in an illy ventilated street car, no more hideous chicken coops, no more tiresome dictation from a man who wore his hat the while he mumbled his utterances through a cloud of tobacco smoke.

But Mother didn’t like it very well. Virginia got home pretty late, and Mother grew pretty tired, sitting up and waiting for her, sometimes. Mother worried a good deal, too. Virgie wasn’t looking well — her cheek bones were beginning to show; and she was irritable and drank too much strong coffee and didn’t seem to have any appetite. Mother got a tonic for her from the doctor, but it didn’t seem to help a bit. The doctor said Virginia needed fresh air and to get to bed with the chickens. It was a hard problem.

Then one day Virginia chanced to visit the Essanay plant with a friend who was a friend of one of the directors. She saw how pictures were made and the process was most interesting. She went home and told her mother about it.

Virginia and her mother talked things over. The Essanay company employed girls, pretty girls, without stage experience, sometimes. Why mightn’t there be a chance for Virginia? There surely would be, for — this was Mother’s private opinion, of course, — there could be no prettier girls there.

So Miss Valli went back to Essanay and registered her application for work. Knowing a director who was a friend of a friend of hers, made it a little easier. Then she went home and waited.

She waited two weeks and she didn’t get any word from Essanay. She wondered if it could be possible that they had her address wrong. She decided she’d go again to see them, and— Oh, well, sort of refresh their memory.

“And when I went,” so said Miss Valli, “the director wouldn’t even see me; didn’t remember anything about me!

“I went back three times before he would see me, but persistence finally won; and then I told him over again who I was. Then I kept going every day and just sitting there. I think I went every day for four months before I got even the littlest bit of a chance.”

But she didn’t give up, you see. That’s the whole story. Probably if she had wanted to, her mother wouldn’t have let her.

Finally a chance did come — but, Oh, such an ordinary little chance! The Essanay people produced “In the Palace of the King” and in it Virginia was given a place as court lady, along with dozens of other court ladies all alike as two peas. She was way back in a corner, where she hardly showed at all.

Then there was more waiting, but little by little, Virginia edged in. She played all sorts of parts; she says she was everything from a stenographer to a “scrub lady,” and in “The Little Girl Next Door,” Essanay’s violently discussed picture, she played the part of a dope fiend. No one, seeing her, could imagine it.

And all the while her mother encouraged her and kept telling her that her time would come.

Her first real chance came one day when directors were pacing the floor and tearing their respective hirsute thatches because a certain actress from the stage play Experience, then running in Chicago, hadn’t showed up for her part in a picture, for which she had been engaged. Everything was at a standstill. Somebody else must be given the part, quick. But who? Could Valli dance? Valli could. Could Valli swim? Like a fish. Valli got the part.

Well, after that the worst was over. In a very short while Virginia was given leads. She was “Mary Pierce,” with Taylor Holmes in his first picture, “Efficiency Edgar’s Courtship,” and has just finished “Uneasy Money,” in which she played opposite Mr. Holmes. She also played with Bryant Washburn in “The Golden Idiot” and “The Fibbers.”

Miss Valli is 20 years old and was born in Chicago. She comes of a patriotic family, for her only brother is in training at the Great Lakes Naval station, and Virginia is extremely proud of him.

Now listen! It is not necessary to wear curls in order to “break into” the movies. Miss Valli is living proof of this assertion, no matter what reliable authorities there are to the contrary. Virginia has straight heavy dark hair which she parts and combs back from her forehead without wave or adornment of any kind. It is a very trying mode, but it seems to suit her extremely well.

Also, Miss Valli says she doesn’t know how to “act.” She just tries to do, naturally, what the director tells her to.

Virginia has delicate features, a fine skin, and her Irish blue eyes were “put in with a smutty finger.” Irish? Well, here’s something that everybody doesn’t know. “Virginia Valli” has a lilting rhythm, but she was born Virginia Helen McSweeny. And if anyone wants to know the kind of a girl she is, the fact that she hasn’t the slightest hesitancy to owning up to “McSweeny” will give them the desired information.

She’s just that kind of a girl.