Zena Keefe — Zena’s Zenith (1920) 🇺🇸
“Say! How do ye get that way?”
by C. Blythe Sherwood
It was an officer who growled the anthem. As Anthony Paul Kelly was so fond of describing his nautical rank and appearance last year — a C-O-P, who thuswise addressed Zena and me.
“Why, Mr. Policeman,” pouted Zena, débutanting, “what do you mean?”
“What do I mean?” He dramatically swept his club along the landscape of New Jersey. “There! What do you mean?”
Zena and I peered thru the glass of the coupé. A line of thirty or forty machines purred impatiently and were honk-konking their temperament. Thirty or forty machines — and Zena, who had arrived in the little brand new Hudson but a moment before, headed the pageant!
“Oh, Mr. Policeman,” continued Zena the débutante, “I’m so tired. I’ve been working at the studio all day. And I do want to get home.” Tears glistened. Ingénue disconsolance prevailed.
Rome has fallen. So has Sennett [Mack Sennett]. And Enright’s [Transcriber’s Note: Richard Enright, NYPD Police Commissioner in th e 1920s] bluecoats are not impervious to charm. “All right, then. You can fight with the others on the ferry.”
Zena threw her in first. She crushed the claxon and laughed into the thirty or forty claxons shrieking behind, and prepared to lead the file aboard. “Dear Mr. Policeman, thank you so much!” she bade him au revoir.
“There ain’t much nourishment in that,” he groaned, but Zena and I had already settled in front of the Fort Lee.
“I absolutely could not have waited until all those other cars got aboard,” Zena sighed. Relief and waited suspense illuminated her eyes. “I’m going to the theater tonight and I’ll die if I miss that show.”
“Which show?”
“I don’t know exactly which, but I told mother to get tickets for The Crimson Alibi, At 9:45, A Voice in the Dark or Those Who Walk in Darkness. I’ll enjoy any of them, so it doesn’t make much difference. I’m crazy about mystery plays.”
“You don’t get much time for theater tho, do you?”
“I should say I don’t. We’ve had to work late so often ‘Piccadilly Jim’ that by the time I did get home I was afraid to take a tubbing for fear I’d fall asleep therein. But one thing nice about being with the people of Piccadilly is that we are all as young and as strong for holidays as for work! Owen Moore made it a rule that we would never have to keep shop on Saturday night, and Wesley Ruggles, a peach, tho a director, was only happy, too, to pass.”
Manhattan slowly shifted its skyline as we sailed nearer. Manhattan is marvelous at all times but especially exquisite under the iridescence of sunset. The west was aglow, and the windows we approached gleamed like orange lanterns behind a veil of rose chiffon. I looked at Miss Keefe, in her black velvet toque, and her squirrel-trimmed suit. Orchids lent an extra tint to the picture that I sensed she so completely harmonized.
Manhattan spells expectation. And Manhattan at twilight spells fulfillment. Zena Keefe, sitting beside me, vibrant, alive to influence, keen to interest, spelled expectation… and fulfilment… and expectation all over again.
Zena comes from San Francisco where at an early age she became a vaudeville artist. Mrs. Keefe recognized that the only way to gain development is to go after it. So Mother Keefe and Baby Keefe rolled up their tent-flaps and went on circuit tour.
Zena laughs now. “At every different town we visited I was enrolled in a new school. I’m not the least bit sorry that I didn’t get the academic training in one particular school because now that I look back” — which isn’t so awfully, awfully far — “I think the course laid out for me did much more good.” “The rules were few. Tersely I believe I was drilled to work and play as much at one as at the other — and enjoy both.”
The primer of “Never to Be Bored” is as innate in Zena Keefe as A-B-C. She claims that working as she did when a child has not taken away her youth but if anything has shot it out ahead preceding her. All the work that she did then has been balanced by all the play she can afford today. She says this, but Zena makes me feel sure that when she slept even she giggled, and when she wept — if ever — she is not the weeping-willow sort — she’d jazz her sobs into oblivion. Zena may some day catch up to her kidhood, but she will never entirely grasp it so that it can absorb.
Zena may be of footlights, but like all compensations that run true to Emerson, Zena is essentially an outdoor girl. When she told me that skiing and riding and skating were middle names and found it happy surprise, Zena smiled: “Yes indeedy! I may look fragile but if I bend over I won’t break my back.” The one expectation of her heart not yet fulfilled is to — fly!
Zena let ‘er out again, and this time whizzed past the freshmen. “I wish some kind fan would give me an aeroplane for Christmas,” she whispered to the wind.
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Zena Keefe comes from San Francisco.
She was a vaudeville artist to begin with. Then Mamma Keefe and little Zena headed for New York — and fame.
Photo by: Alfred Cheney Johnston (1885–1971)
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Collection: Motion Picture Classic Magazine, March 1920