by Joshua Zeitz
It was good advice. By the time she became Hollywood’s flapper queen, Colleen Moore would read a great many things about herself that didn’t ring true. As far as the world knew, D. W. Griffith had “discovered” Colleen one night while dining at the Howey residence in Chicago. With the approval of her mischievous aunt and uncle, the spunky sixteen-year-old had donned a maid’s outfit and tried to pass herself off as a house servant. By the time dessert rolled around, Griffith was so smitten by the Irish lass who had taken his coat and served up his potatoes that he grabbed his hostess by the arm and announced, “Mrs. Howey, you’ve just lost a maid, and I’ve gained a new movie star!”6 It was a good story, anyway.
According to a 1921 biographical index card she filed with Goldwyn Pictures Corporation, where she made several films after Griffith shut down his West Coast operations in 1919, Colleen arrived in Hollywood standing five feet three and three-quarter inches and weighing 110 pounds.7 She had long, reddish brown hair and dark brown eyes that didn’t do much to set her apart from the dozens of other young leading ladies who were also trying desperately to emulate the wholesome girl-next-door look that was working such wonders for Mary Pickford’s artistic career and bank account.
If Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald were setting the world on fire with their well-orchestrated apotheosis of the New Woman, Hollywood still seemed to prefer Plain Jane to Flapper Jane. What were Colleen Moore’s pastimes, according to her file card at Goldwyn Pictures? Dancing and swimming. Her hobbies? “None—plain person.” Reading interests? Blank. Ambition? “To become famous.”
Colleen didn’t become famous overnight, but between 1916 and 1923 she appeared in at least thirty-five feature-length films, almost always as a “leading lady” (playing a supporting role to the male star) or a “feature player” (appearing with a troupe of three or four prominent actors and actresses, all of whom shared equal billing). She was earning exceptionally good money—upward of $750 each week, or just shy of $40,000 per year (equivalent in today’s money to an annual salary of $430,000).
At first, Colleen’s appeal was her innocence and youth. Her long, curly hair—which photographed black, even though it was closer to auburn—and wide eyes lent her a look of incorruptibility, as did her well-practiced facial expressions. “There was a stage melodrama of many years before my time in Hollywood,” she explained years later, “in which an innocent young thing turned to her father to ask in wonderment, ‘Papa, what is beer?8’ That line carried over into vaudeville sketches and into the lingo of the silent film directors. The director would say to the girl playing the young, pure, innocent heroine, ‘Get that “Papa, what is beer?” look on your face.’ ”
Colleen admitted that “this look was on my face through a great many movies—too many movies—too many made long after I knew full well what a beer was, and a number of other things as well.”
Not that she had completely hit a rut. Colleen enjoyed opportunities to work with the motley assortment of characters who converged on Southern California just before and after World War I—men like Tom Mix, a marine veteran who was rumored to have fought in the Boxer Rebellion in China and the Boer War in South Africa, clocked time as a local sheriff in Oklahoma, and boldly escaped a firing squad in Mexico, where he fought with Francisco Madero’s rebel forces, who were then in a pitched battle to overthrow President Porfirio Díaz.9
Actually, none of this was true. Mix was a native Pennsylvanian who joined the army during the Spanish-American War and went AWOL in 1902 without seeing any action. He didn’t escape a Mexican firing squad, but he did manage to elude both his first wife and the military police, who wanted him on charges of desertion.
Mix moved west to Oklahoma and reinvented himself as a sometime cowboy, cattle rancher, saloon keeper, and movie impresario. A veteran of the Miller Brothers 101 Real Wild West Ranch—a combination ranch and Wild West show—he proved such a skilled horseman, and so uncommonly nimble with a lasso, that he soon caught the attention of several filmmakers, who brought him to Hollywood to help invent the industry’s stock country-western hero. Decked out in ten-gallon hats, expensive leather cowboy boots, and embroidered shirts, he circled around the set on his prized horse, Tony, to the delight of his adoring co-stars.
Colleen, who was still a teenager, appeared opposite the thirty-nine-year-old Tom Mix in several films and developed a hopeless crush on him.
Then there was Al Jennings, a rehabilitated train robber whom the big movie moguls recruited, predictably, to play the stock part of the villainous, horse-riding train robber in a series of boilerplate westerns. Jennings had done hard time in prison, but by the time Colleen had the chance to work with him in the feature production Hands Up!, his reputation for dastardly deeds far exceeded any crimes he might have committed in real life. Like many of the other leading ladies, Colleen was captivated by the onetime outlaw and trailed him around the set for weeks.
If life was good—and, to be sure, it was—Colleen nevertheless understood by 1923 that it was make or break time for her career. The “Papa, what is beer?” routine had brought her a long way from Tampa, but the headliner roles still eluded her.
“I just wasn’t the accepted-and-acceptable model for a sweet young thing in the throes of her first love,” she admitted. “The necessary curls I could manage, the same way Mary Pickford and the others did, with time and effort. But no amount of either could make my five-foot-five boyish figure into a curvy, petite five-foot-two or transform the sauciness of my freckled face with its turned-up nose into the demure perfection of a Mary Pickford.”
Either Colleen would have to tap into a new aesthetic ideal or her days in pictures were numbered. “That was where my brother Cleve came in,” she later wrote. “Cleve, and a man named Warner Fabian.”
Cleve was now attending Santa Clara College in Northern California, and on the weekends he often came to visit Colleen—usually in the company of a different college girlfriend. Colleen had never met women like this before. “They were smart and sophisticated,” she remarked, “with an air of independence about them, and so casual about their looks and clothes and manners as to be almost slapdash. I don’t know if I realized as soon as I began seeing them that they represented the wave of the future, but I do know I was drawn to them. I shared their restlessness, understood their determination to free themselves of the Victorian shackles of the pre–World War I era and find out for themselves what life was all about.”
Around the same time, someone loaned Colleen a copy of author Warner Fabian’s best-selling novel Flaming Youth, a second-rate knockoff of an F. Scott Fitzgerald flapper tale. When First National—Colleen’s new studio—bought the rights to Flaming Youth, she knew she wanted the lead role.
The question was, how? Flappers didn’t ask, “Papa, what is beer?” They didn’t dress like Victorian debutantes or spend hours combing their long, curly hair. They hardly had any hair.
Colleen’s mother had the answer. Without any particular qualifications as a hairdresser, she picked up a pair of household scissors, walked over to her daughter, and, “whack, off came the long curls.” Sculpting Colleen’s hair into a Dutch bob, she instantly transformed her into the archetype of the collegiate flapper. Colleen breezed through her screen test and won the part. The movie, in turn, became a blockbuster hit. And Colleen Moore became one of the highest-grossing actresses in Hollywood, to the tune of $10,000 per week.
Hollywood had discovered the flapper.
“I was the spark that lit up Flaming Youth,” Scott Fitzgerald wrote in the wake of the film’s success.10 “Colleen Moore was the torch.”
Famed director D. W. Griffith (seated) and screen legends Douglas Fairbanks and Charlie Chaplin (first and second from left) and Mary Pickford (far right).
21
OH, LITTLE GIRL, NEVER GROW UP
BY THE TIME Kathleen Morrison—rechristened Colleen Moore—hopped the Santa Fe Chief for Los Angeles, the film industry had traveled a long road from guardian of Victorian morality
to purveyor of youth culture.
In its first two decades, the motion picture industry left a lot to be desired.1 For one, the technology was bad. Rudimentary film projectors caused moving images to flicker and pulse. The film often came apart and crumbled after only a few screenings. Because projectionists still rotated the reels by hand, screen images often moved at erratic speeds.
But the problem wasn’t just with the machinery. The plotlines were weak. Short clips featured everyday people engaged in mundane or humorous activities. Juggling. Running. Swimming. Sleeping. It didn’t take long for people to realize that they could watch their husbands and wives do the very same things—but in real life, and for free. Somewhat more engaging, though salacious, were short takes like What Happened on 23rd St., NYC (the answer: The wind blew a woman’s skirt over her head); What Demoralized the Barber Shop (the answer: A woman’s skirt got snared on a foreign object and revealed some skin); and The Pouting Water Model, featuring a nude young woman with her back to the camera.
Around 1895, Alfred Clark, an early director, thought it might be a good idea to stage dramatic productions for film. His early short, The Execution of Mary, Queen of Scots, starred a male actor playing the lead role; just as the executioner’s ax was set to fall on Mary’s neck, Clark stopped the reel, substituted a dummy for his feature player, and resumed filming. The movie proved a sensational hit with audiences and inspired other attempts at plot-driven movies. The most ambitious of these projects was The Passion Play, a fifty-five-minute feature filmed in 1897 on a New York City rooftop. It was popular in theaters, but costly and difficult to produce. Another fifteen years would go by before motion picture directors revisited the idea of feature-length films.
Instead, early directors spent the next decade perfecting short, ten- or fifteen-minute movies. Edwin Porter, one of the industry’s pioneers, raised the bar high with The Great Train Robbery, a path-breaking production that used twenty separate shots, including close-ups, and several different indoor and outdoor sets. Audiences had never seen anything like it.
But nobody—not even Edwin Porter—appreciated the industry’s potential for artistic growth more than David Wark Griffith. Born just ten years after Lee’s surrender at Appomattox, Griffith—the son of a Kentucky planter who fought for the Confederacy—grew up as a displaced member of the old southern aristocracy. The emancipation of their slaves and the death of his father when David was just a boy left the family in a precarious financial situation. When David was fourteen years old, his mother was forced to sell the plantation and move to Louisville, where she operated a boardinghouse. It was a long way from the idyllic land of magnolias and mint juleps that David would later mythologize in his screen work.
Griffith spent his teenage years knocking around. He worked for a dry goods store and then a bookstore. He tried his hand at writing fiction and joined a traveling theater troupe that performed throughout the lower Midwest and California. He was going nowhere fast.
The dawn of the new century found Griffith in New York City, where he scratched out a living by selling short-story treatments to the Biograph Company—America’s leading producer of motion pictures—and appearing in occasional film and stage productions. In 1908, the principals at Biograph decided to give Griffith a shot at directing a short feature, The Adventures of Dollie. It wasn’t his most memorable work, but it did the trick. Within a few months, they offered him a contract to serve as Biograph’s lead director.
Five months into his tenure at Biograph, he wrote and produced an experimental feature, After Many Years, adapted from Tennyson’s Enoch Arden—the tale of a shipwrecked man who finds his way back to civilization, only to discover that his wife has remarried and his children have grown up and forgotten him.
The bigwigs at Biograph didn’t know what to make of the film. Whereas other directors kept the camera at a respectable distance from the players, thus creating a sensation akin to that of attending a stage performance, Griffith moved it nearer the set so that his actors filled the entire frame. In some shots, he inched the camera so close to the action that the players appeared larger than the frame and were visible only from the waist up. Moviegoers could now study the actors’ facial expressions.
Griffith also shot the same scenes from multiple perspectives and skipped back and forth between two complementary plotlines—the husband’s ordeal on a desert island and his wife’s perseverance back in civilization.
Not everyone was enthusiastic about these bold departures in filmmaking. “How can you tell a story jumping around like that?” one of the Biograph bosses asked him. “The people won’t know what it’s about!”
“Well,” Griffith replied, “doesn’t Dickens write that way?”
Though he didn’t necessarily pioneer every new technique in the business—Edwin Porter had experimented with close-ups and multiple perspectives in his early work—Griffith soon acquired a reputation as the industry’s most daring and innovative practitioner of the new art of cinematography. He placed cameras on rolling dollies so that he could follow his actors as they moved, thereby eliminating the vast, black space between the lens and the stage that occupied the bottom third of frames in other early productions. He merged short cuts from different perspectives to achieve a sense of action, motion, and complexity. In 1908, he even went so far as to use forty different shots in a single ten-minute film.
Almost single-handedly, he made the movies modern. His 1915 masterpiece, The Birth of a Nation, cost a record-breaking $60,000 to produce and ran over three hours.2 Filmgoers were enraptured by its intertwining plotlines, its colorful and detailed set designs, its intricate character development, and its dramatic historical reenactments. The climactic scene depicted hundreds of white Klansmen on horseback, galloping off to save white womanhood from the black rapists whose primitive fury was unleashed by emancipation and radical Reconstruction. It was bad history and suffused with the sort of Jim Crow mentality that pervaded American culture in those days. But because—not in spite—of that, the audiences loved it.
If he was the industry’s leading trailblazer in those days, Griffith remained stubbornly backward in his social outlook. His films exalted the bygone world of the nineteenth century and scored the new urban-industrial order in which men found themselves wage slaves and women found their virtue compromised by the vice and corruption of the metropolis.
Lillian Gish, a popular actress who starred in many of Griffith’s early masterpieces, believed the great director was fundamentally a solitary and forlorn figure who glorified Victorian femininity on-screen but was terrified of women in real life. His heroines weren’t the “buxom, voluptuous form popular with the Oriental’s mind,” she observed with a tactlessness common to the time, but delicate, ghostly images who were the “very essence of virginity.”
Lillian and her sister, Dorothy Gish, were exactly the kind of leading ladies whom Griffith favored. Growing up in the Midwest, they had attended convent schools. Lillian had even thought of becoming a nun. On the set, they were closely chaperoned by their mother. There was little chance they would try to circumvent the director’s famously severe strictures against vice and intemperance.
So as to avoid even the “taint of scandal,” Griffith forbade his women players to entertain men in their dressing rooms.3 They faced dismissal if they developed blemishes on their skin, as such imperfections, Griffith claimed, were surely a mark of a debauched character. And they were subjected to endless sermons on the virtues of clean living, for “women aren’t meant for promiscuity,” he explained. “If you’re going to be promiscuous, you will end up with some disease.”
So insistent was he on maintaining stringent standards of feminine virtue that Griffith forbade his on-screen characters to kiss. They could only embrace.
Though he used African American actors to play the parts of slaves in The Birth of a Nation, when the script called for black characters to assault white women, the director used white actors in blackface. It simply wouldn’t
do to have black men touching white women. Not in a D. W. Griffith production, anyway.
Griffith placed his leading ladies in front of white sheets, which reflected back the powerful glow of strobe lights and created a kind of “hazy photography” that served, in his mind, as “a great beauty doctor.”4 The frail, angelic women who received this treatment personified the director’s larger moral scheme. The movies were America’s new, national pulpit, and Griffith eagerly ascended that pulpit to preach the nineteenth-century virtues of self-ownership, independence, reticence, sacrifice, and asceticism.
“It was all nonsense about youth going away from the old morals,” he maintained. “Never since the beginning of time have there been so many girls and boys who were clean, so young, their minds are beautiful, they are sweet. Why? To win the dearest thing in the world, love from mankind. That is the motive that separates out civilization from dirty savages.”
Griffith was well within the currents of the early motion picture industry. Most first-generation filmmakers were Protestant moralists who used the new medium to drive home the importance of virtue in an unvirtuous world. And this went double for women, whose intrinsic goodness was surely subject to a grave challenge from the forces of modernity.
Early movies like The Fate of the Artist’s Model (1903), in which an innocent young lass is seduced into a sexual affair by a lecherous artist who then leaves her high and dry, and The Downward Path (1900), the story of a young country girl who is tricked by a depraved theater agent into becoming a soubrette and commits suicide before her parents can come to her rescue, continued to inform Griffith’s style well into the late 1910s.5
Writing a few years later, in 1925, the actress Linda Arvidson Griffith, Griffith’s wife, acknowledged that this plotline was growing increasingly irrelevant in the years leading up to World War I.6 “We were dealing in things vital in our American life,” she observed, “and [were] not one bit interested in close-ups of empty-headed little ingénues with adenoids, bedroom windows, manhandling of young girls, fast sets, perfumed bathrooms or nude youths heaving their muscles.”
