Wallace Beery — Sans Grease Paint and Wig (1914) 🇺🇸
“I’ll know Wallace Beery by is feet,” I wagered with myself as I sat down in the lobby of the Biltmore to wait for the Essanay “comedienne.”
by Mabel Condon
“If I don’t I walk back to Broadway — If I do, I ride.” I felt certain of riding for I had seen Mr. Beery in his “Sweedie” series often enough to make me believe I’d recognize his feet anywhere. Remember the film in which he tapped a man on the chest with one of those feet and the man keeled over without an argument? Well, that’s the kind of foot I expected would bring along its mate and Mr. Beery that day in the Biltmore. So of course I paid no attention to the patent-leathered, gaiter-topped variety that came and went. And that’s how I lost my wager. From the pointed patent-leather toes, be-gaitered and buttoned, that advanced toward me proved to be the rightful property of the “Sweedish Girl,” alias Wallace Beery.
“I walk,” I admitted to myself and did — to the palm room guided thither by the touch of strong fingers on my arm. It was not until Mr. Beery had accommodated his height to the small chair at the other side of the small table, that the opportunity afforded for noting that the Beery hair is blonde and pompadoured, the Beery eyes are deep-set and brown and the Beery smile is wide and friendly. Also, the Beery voice is big without being loud; the kind that would suggest a perfect rendition of “Asleep in the Deep,” on a victrola. And it is a singing voice and was one of the Beery qualifications that went toward keeping him in musical comedy for about six years.
“I played in almost every theater in New York, up till two years ago,” Mr. Beery said and ordered lemonade, for one. He had been joyously imbibing of soda down in the grill, so he said, when he had been paged to the upstairs lobby; hence the single lemonade. “Four years ago when Raymond Hitchcock was suddenly called out of his part at the Astor theater, I was sent in to fill his place. I was signed with Savage for four years, was starred in The Yankee Tourist and played with The Red Widow throughout its run.”
The lemonade arrived, so also did E. H. Calvert who was the personal conductor of the Essanayers on their recent but-a-few days’ stay in New York.
“I have to have your name on these tickets,” said Mr. Calvert, hurriedly.
“All right, let’s have them” said Mr. Beery calmly, as he reached for the tickets and flourished an indelible pencil.
“No, has to be done in ink — won’t take a minute,” induced Mr. Calvert and hurried the one-whose-name-was-necessary-to-the-tickets, to the writing table.
“And now I have to get over to the Pennsylvania depot, see about the baggage and —” he was gone. Mr. Beery reseated himself and sighed, “If I had only had my car sent on! I’ve never before been away from it this long. It’s a racer and it has made me a strong champion of Chicago boulevards. You know what splendid boulevards and what a park system Chicago has?” I knew. Down to the lake and from one park to another; a dandy drive. “All the kids near the studio know me and every night they stand out around my car until I come out; I pack six or seven in and the rest hang onto it thick, like flies and I give them a ride. They know me so well they call me Wallie!” he laughed.
The laugh was big and contagious, the hour was the unfashionable and deserted one of three and Mr. Beery could twirl his cane between two fingers without any danger of molesting the passers-by who were not, so he twirled and laughed, brought the cane to a standstill, folded his hands across its silver-tipped head and I asked, “What part of the West are you from, originally?” You’d know him to be from the far West, where men and trees and things grow big.
“Nowood, Wyoming,” he answered and then imparted the startling information, “I trained elephants.” “For a living?” It was a senseless question— but who wouldn’t have been surprised into asking a senseless one? Of all occupations to precede that of “comedienne” — an elephant trainer!
“For two years,” Mr. Beery was saying. “I liked elephants; I had always liked elephants. In school, the animal ‘elephant’ was my favorite topic. I was as husky as I am now when I ran away from home and joined Ringling Brothers’ circus. The man I approached asked me what I wanted to do, when I asked for a job, and I replied ‘train elephants.’ ‘Any experience?’ and I told him yes, two years. The only experience I had had was in books. But he hired me and I was assistant for a while and then head trainer. I had a class of twenty-six elephants and it was just fool luck that I wasn’t killed. I had several accidents but none were serious.
“I’m going to put on an elephant comedy in a few weeks,” he went on, his smile expressing his belief that it was going to be great fun, for him. “There’s an act in vaudeville with four of them in it,” he said. “It’s going to finish in Chicago and I have arranged to use the elephants in a picture. It will be the first time I will have worked with them, in pictures.
“But there’s nothing like pictures!” he digressed with enthusiasm. “I tell them at the Essanay studio that the only way they’ll get rid of me is by the use of a stick of dynamite. I’ve been there a year and a half, and I love it. I write, produce and take the lead in my own pictures. And I do two a week. My record so far is to write and produce a picture in six hours. Easy!” he commented, tapping the cane against one of the patent-leather toes. “I’ve discovered,” he added “that we work quicker in the western studios than in the eastern ones.” And I guessed that Wallace Fitzgerald Beery was right.
After all, I didn’t walk out my wager, for Mr. Beery with his cane and cap in hand, was sufficient signal for a taxi. Within five minutes we had passed the mob, dense at all hours of the day and night, in front of the war bulletins on the Times building and across the street I said good-bye to the Essanay “comedienne” and his taxi became a part of the Broadway whirl.
Collection: Motography Magazine, November 1914