Mabel normand

182 It was during her stay at the Coronado Hospital that Mabel met Norman Church, whose divorce case she was later named in.

183 This Florence Lawrence incidentally is not Florence Lawrence, the famous “Biograph girl,” one of the very first very well known mvie stars. It just so happens that this columnist and the actresses had, as a matter of coincidence, the same name. Florence Lawrence, the “Biograph Girl,” was, of course, the first star widely recognized by their name in the history of American motion pictures. Prior to her fame, film companies were reluctant to promote their stars for fear that it would make them more expensive to contract - which, needless to say, is exactly what did happen when the star system kicked in. For Florence Lawrence, like numerous other early film stars, acclaim and success was very brief. In her later years, she played small parts where she could find them, but ended up living in poverty. Much else of her time, she spent writing what has been described as “morbid” poetry. Sadly, she ended up committing suicide in 1938. My thanks to William Drew for clearing up this business of the two names.

184 Leatrice Joy: “Paul Bern was a very dear friend of Mabel Normand and she used to come over and have dinner with us, but I never knew her very well. One time Paul bought a magnificent watch bracelet for Normand. He had it fixed in a little flower bouquet and said he was going out with her to have dinner and ask her to marry him. When he came back, he grabbed this box with the beautiful bouquet and the million-dollar diamond bracelet and threw it in the canyon. All of us in the house, including the Chinese help, went down trying to find it. I don’t know whether it was found or not. So when I think of Mabel, I think of that and Paul Bern,” from Speaking of Silents by William Drew

185 This is an interesting little anecdote about Mabel’s early film days which is not known to be reported elsewhere. The Reliance film company, which was run by Carlton Motion Picture Laboratories, was one of the first production companies of Kessel and Baumann’s New York Motion Picture Company.

186 Bruce Long: “These last two articles were written by Edward Doherty. In his autobiography, Gall and Honey: The Story of a Newspaperman, Doherty told of visiting Mabel Normand in the hospital at a later date, at which time she told him: ‘Eddie, I thought you were the devil himself, because you always quoted me exactly as I talked. Yes, you hurt me. But I’ve called you all the different kinds of s.o.b. a woman can call a man. Now I see you’re a nice Irish Catholic boy; and I’ll bet your mother makes you go to church when you’re home, doesn’t she? Like mine. Kiss me again, and let’s be friends.’” Doherty continues: “We were friends until she died, and I had several opportunities to say nice things about her while she lived. So did Mildred, who was then writing a column called ‘Hollywood Society.’”

187 All one-time cab drivers should be so lucky in their former employers. This raises the question, was Greer possibly in the pay of someone else when he was working for Mabel? See Truman B. Handy’s article “Will Hays Battles Kid Vice,” Movie Weekly, June 24, 1922, contained in this volume, on the subject of agents and operatives planted in movie stars’ households to keep an eye on them.

188 This report should be taken with some circumspection as it seems to suggest that Mabel, and in an absurdly careless manner, is deliberately trying to cover up something or that the attorney was not acting according to a pre-arranged script. At the same time the clipping does not refer to what she was questioned about, or in what specific context her response came. Yet if this account is otherwise accurate, it could be that she was angered at the cross-examining attorney’s belligerent treatment of her, and insulting insinuations he was making. Bruce Long offers this observation: “It is possible that [her] clash with the defense attorney came after he had focused on a discrepancy in her testimony. For example, at the preliminary hearing she reportedly testified that she did not notice a bottle in the room; at the trial she remembered it very clearly and even remembered having a drink from it.”

189 The acquittal of Greer, not surprisingly, raises some interesting questions. Clearly, there was some kind of cover up going on, but about what exactly? Three possible explanations might be these: (1) Dines’ account of what happened (see Los Angeles Examiner, Jan. 3, 1924) suggests that Greer felt he needed to act on Mabel’s behalf because Dines (perhaps because Dines was drunk or because he thought he was acting in her best interest) would not let Mabel leave when she wanted to. Dines resented the chauffeur’s impudence when Greer challenged him, with the result that Dines was more adamant about not letting Mabel go. Greer then took matters into his own hands. Since this behavior on Dines’ part would possibly show him in a bad light, and since he had already suffered more than enough, it was decided to drop the matter. (2) Mabel’s perhaps conflicting sentiments about whether she wanted to go or stay caused the two men confusion as to what she wanted or needed. This, needles to say would, not put her role in a positive light. Alternatively in this regard, Adela Rogers St. John, in Love, Laughter and Tears, states that the shooting occurred because of an insulting remark Dines made to Mabel when Greer was present. It may be that what Mrs. Burns overheard on the phone sounded either insulting or threatening to Mabel, and it was on this basis that Greer decided to take along the revolver. Perhaps it was thought best not to have a trial which, if it took place, would bring out either the confusion Mabel possibly brought about or the purported insult, causing her to suffer further in the press -- something both Dines and Greer wanted to avoid. (3) Greer was secretly in the pay of someone else whose identity it was thought best to leave concealed.

190 That Asa Keyes re-opening of the Taylor case in 1926, coming precisely as it did at the time of Mabel’s comeback, no doubt contributed to its bitterness to Mabel.

191 The accident referred to here occurred during the filming of One Hour Married.

192 Born Louis J. Cote, in Waterville, Maine, Feb. 22, 1888, he attended medical school in Montreal, and later went into acting, first vaudeville, the stage, then pictures, initially working for Balboa Film Company and Selig. Other companies he subsequently worked for included Paramount, Jewel, First National, Selznick, Metro-Goldwyn Mayer, Tiffany-Truant As often as not he was cast as the romantic lead or the villain (as, for example, in Mabel’s film Mickey), sometimes as an urbane, no-nonsense hero. Legally, Cody was a Canadian citizen. He died on May 31, 1934 of Myocardial Insufficiency (heart failure.) He was quite popular with men and woman alike, and with a gritty sort of masculine (Clark Gable-like sounding) voice, faired relatively well when sound came in. His career probably would have continued successfully but for his early death.

193 In the final scene of Suzanna (1922), Mabel and the groom are obliged to kiss wedding guests according to an “old Spanish custom.”

194 Lists stars with accompanying photographs.

195 Dazey’s practice included many movie folk, and it has been unofficially alleged that he supplied some stars with illicit narcotics, including Mabel Normand. In 1931 he unsuccessfully filed suit against the Normand estate for purported unpaid bills, relating to thirty six professional visits he had made to the Normand home in 1927 and 1928. Most interesting, in 1940, District Attorney Burton Fitts office brought charges against Dazey for allegedly murdering his wife, Doris Scwuchow Dazey. Her death was first interpreted as suicide. However, a number of reports came forward from people, claiming to be eye witnesses, who said it was murder. The motive alleged for the murder was that Walter Kendall, Dazey’s son was not actually his child at all but sired by another. Though ultimately acquitted, Dazey lived to 1943, when he died on pneumonia. The story behind this case is as lurid as any of the Hollywood mystery scandals. And despite the court’s verdict, Dazey’s guilt or innocence have never been far from ever being satisfactorily established. And even if he was innocent of the crime as he claimed, there still remains a great puzzle as to how the “conspiracy, “ from which he alleges the charges and accusations sprang, exactly ever came about. Special thanks to Patrick Jenning for his concise 11 page account of Dazey’s career and murder trial, “Bay City Doctor,” from which this information was taken.

196 Her death certificate lists the cause of death as Pulmonary Tuberculosis.

197 In 1945, Mabel’s brother Claude Drury hanged himself in the basement of the family home at St. Mark’s Place. “The family said he was despondent over injuries incurred when a tractor ran over him and crushed his legs while he was working as a carpenter at Halloran Hospital. Thirteen years earlier, in an interview with The [Staten Island] Advance, Claude Normand had acknowledged the family suffering brought on by his famous sister’s escapades.” Staten Island Advance, Nov. 8, 1973.

198 Minta Durfee, from interview with Don Schneider: “And one of the nice things I want to tell you about him (Cody), when Mabel was getting so bad, in such BAD condition, and she had really made her will, but she was going to will something to Lew Cody, he said, ‘Don’t you dare to do that, because I’ve never supported you.’ They’d only been married a couple of years when she died, and then he died. She died out at Monrovia, of tubercu­losis, and I was living in New York and my sister was here, and she saw her the day before she passed on. And Lew Cody passed on out here.”

199 The same as Mabel’s home address.

200 Noticeably missing from this list of mourners is F. Richard Jones who had himself contracted tuberculosis in August 1929, his illness therefore preventing him from attending. He died “unexpectedly” of the illness on December 14, 1930. Jones left a wife, Irene, and one child, a daughter.

201 Los Angeles Times, October 1, 1916.

202 This article is one of the very first, if not the first, of background biographies about Mabel which perpetrated many subsequent errors about her life. Here, for example, it says she was born in Boston, was granddaughter to a governor and attended a convent school, all of which are, of course, pure fabrications.

203 See remainder of this article at Los Angeles Herald, Nov. 18, 1919 in earlier part of this book.

204 I.e. Dodging a Million

205 It is a bit puzzling exactly what this film was that Mabel first appeared in. In two earlier interviews she states concerning this film that “I don’t remember the name of the picture - all I recall is that the wonderful creature I had seen was a blind sculptress” (New York Morning Telegraph, November 24, 1918) and “I forget the name of the picture, but Florence Lawrence and Marion Leonard and Dell Henderson and Henry Walthall were the principals” (Photoplay, August 1918.) Unfortunately, a close examination of the list of Biograph films (contained in D. W. Griffith and the Biograph Company, by Graham C. Cooper, et, al.) covering this period yields no film that fits this description. For one thing, Florence Lawrence left Biograph for Imp prior to the time Mabel might have made her film debut. Also, there is no Biograph film made between 1909 and 1912 which has in its cast Walthall, Leonard and Henderson all at once, though all three were with the company at that time. It might seem to be implied that Wilfred Lucas directed the film, but Lucas did not direct any Biograph films during this period. The most likely person to have directed the film would have been Griffith or Frank Powell. It is difficult then to know what to make of this story that, incidentally, is repeated in Sennett’s King of Comedy.

206 Bunny, along with Augustus Carney and Billy Quirk, one of the very first of the great American film comedians. He died of a combination of Brights disease and over exertion in April 1915, after a very successful publicity tour of many major American cities. With his passing, Flora Finch was simply lost without him as her co-star - or at least so the public apparently seemed to think - and her popularity declined. The “someone” perhaps alleged to as displacing Mabel herself in the public’s esteem, is apparently Clara Bow.

207 Although Fred Mace was among the founding and most prominent early stars at Keystone, little if any mention of him was made by either Mabel or Sennett in their respective “autobiographies.” The apparent reason for this was perhaps the nature of his Mace’s death. In March 1917 (see Motography March 10, 1917), he was found dead in his Hotel Astor apartment in New York reportedly of apoplexy, but later suggested to be suicide. This unexpected event, and his meteoric fall in general, perhaps accounts for Mabel and Sennett’s reticence.

With ideas of doing as well as Sennett had done for himself, Mace’s set out upon an independent career in April 1913. What ensued was all manner of setback and misfortune, including, in one instance, the accidental death of the main co-star of his revived “One Round O’Brien” effort. Sennett, in 1915, afterward very graciously took him back, and he starred again with Mabel in the Triangle demi-feature My Valet. His career however, for reasons really not all that clear, continued on a pronounced downward spiral. Although he has been largely overlooked by film comedy historians, he, nonetheless, had his moments, and could bring a warm jollity and understated zaniness to the occasion; such as we see in shorts like Helen’s Marriage (Biograph) and The Bangville Police (Keystone). It was he, by the bye, who first directed Arbuckle and Minta Durfee to seek work at the Keystone company. At present, probably the best biography available on Mace is that contained in Kalton Lahue’s Mack Sennett’s Keystone.

208 It was Beery who, in 1916, was actually first hired by Sennett, and Swanson, already then his wife, who was, just incidentally, hired along with him. Yet it was Gloria, of course, who, of the two, became a big success at Keystone. Perhaps the “begged” referred to here, took place after Swanson’s star had risen and Beery’s had suffered a setback.

209 Chaplin‘s first film in which he appeared in his tramp costume (his actual first film being Making a Living in which he wears non-tramp garb) has traditionally been thought to be Kid Auto Races, which Mabel did not appear in. David Robinson in his Chaplin biography, however, makes a very good argument that Mabel’s Strange Predicament was actually his first tramp film. Finally, the film to which she refers to here, in which her character has some hot dogs stolen from her, is neither Races or Predicament, but rather Mabel’s Busy Day -- though the setting in that short is the auto race-track also.

210 Although Chaplin did make a film Caught in the Rain, Mabel is not among the cast. Similarly there is a Keystone film calling Leading Lizzie Astray, starring Arbuckle, yet in this case neither Chaplin or Mabel appears in it.

211 Again Mabel’s (or perhaps Sutherland’s) memory seems to be failing her here. The film in which she presses Charlie’s pants would be His Trysting Place, not Mabel’s Married Life. As to the business where she forces a smile with her fingers, there doesn’t appear to be any surviving record - it certainly doesn’t occur in either His Trysting Place or Mabel’s Married Life. Why then is this statement made with such seeming conviction? It is possible Mabel used this gesture in a film that is now lost: more likely a Goldwyn film than a Keystone. In the portrait photo used for the dusk jacket cover of Betty Fussell’s book, dated around the Goldwyn period, Mabel is seen making a gesture similar to the one described.

212 Arabelle Flynn (or Arabella Flynn) and Dodging a Million are actually the same film.

213 The Harold Lloyd film mentioned here was A Sailor Made Man.

214 This would be Mr. Lawrence. See Appendix D.

215 “Joe Kelly” is, of course, Horace Greer. Joe Kelly was the false name Greer had assumed for himself, unbeknownst to Mabel, when he had come to start a new life in Los Angeles.

216 Mabel states here that it was Mamie Owens who sent Greer, i.e., Kelly, over to Dines’ apartment, but it was Mabel’s housekeeper Edith Burns who dispatched Greer, not Mamie. That Mabel (or Sutherland) should make such an obvious mistake perhaps suggests some subsequent resentment toward Mrs. Burns. Shortly after the incident, Mabel quarreled with Mrs. Burns, and, indeed, fired her. Things were reportedly patched up afterward and Mrs. Burns was rehired. However it might be inferred from all this that Mrs. Burns was somehow responsible, at least in Mabel’s eyes, for bringing about the Dines shooting. The reason for this would seem to be connected with Mrs. Burns reporting to Greer what she overheard on the phone speaking with Mabel earlier in the evening. (See LA Examiner, January 2, 1924 and January 13, 1924)

217 The dating here is incorrect. Mabel did not spend the summer of 1924 in Europe, but rather 1922. The Coronado Beach incident occurred in August 1923, not the Autumn of 1924.

218 Another version of this letter has “spontaneity” in place of “personality.”

219 The racy drug stories about Mabel contained in Berg’s book, incidentally, are classic examples of gross rumor and hearsay presented as learned history. Berg also makes reference to the article in a “family magazine” in which Mabel reportedly called Mary Pickford a “prissy bitch.” While I have heard often about this quote and article, I myself have yet to ever see it. If it does actually exist, perhaps a good someone will send me a copy (with citation). Pickford was very praising of Mabel, publicly supported her comeback in 1926, expressed at times a desire to emulate her character, and did much to protect the Normand family in their testate litigations after Mabel’s death. That Mabel should have spoken of her this way attributed then seems rather unlikely.

220 A reference to the satirical poem of that title by 18^th century English poet William Cowper.

221 The vast majority of articles presented in this section are taken from this rich resource, currently located at: http://www.angelfire.com/az/Taylorology/

222 [Footnote added in 2013] There is a most vivid “bad boy,” immoral and anti-religious side shown in Taylor’s 1920 film “Huckleberry Finn,” and it seems in retrospect, and contrary to my broad brush earlier characterization of him as a “good man,” it may be that Taylor at the time of “Finn” was foolishly pandering to and seeking to curry favor with sordid interests in Hollywood, or on the fringes of Hollywood, as a measure of political self-interest. Later, he probably found this all just too distasteful and then endeavored to distance himself from such bad elements in the indutsry. Perhaps therefore it was such as these whose ire he incurred.

223 William Desmond Taylor A Dossier, p. 216-217

224 Los Angeles Herald, Dec. 17, 1921.

225 Mabel Normand, who said she was standing outside while it was taking place, was suspicious of this call as well. However, it is since generally accepted (though we can’t know for sure, of course) that the call was from actor Antonio Moreno, and according to Moreno was of merely a routine business nature.

226 see also Los Angeles Express, Feb. 2, 1922

227 Taylor may have fired his chauffeur Earl Tiffany, in Aug. 1921, because he believed Tiffany was in league with Sands. See Dossier, p. 218.

228 It’s worth noting in this respect that Sands was publicly promised by the police that if, unless guilty of the murder itself, he came in for questioning, no charges would or could be filed against him for the earlier robberies since Taylor, the only one who could accuse him in court, was dead.

229 See N.Y. Herald, Feb. 6, 1922, T62.

230 Someone objected after reading this conclusion that the dubious sort of evidence I speak of is as much as one could possess regarding such a claim, short of an open avowal by Taylor or else his being criminally convicted of sodomy. My response – even if we assume Taylor was homosexual, this does little or nothing to change the gist of my explanation and interpretation of the case.

231 L.A. detective William Cahill believed Taylor’s killer embraced him before hand, and in this posture shot him. Moreover and partly due to this conjectured embrace, Cahill thought the culprit to have been Charlotte Shelby acting out of amorous jealousy.

232 The latter would seem to imply Mary Miles Minter would be such a person; however, it seems unlikely she would have been involved in this “secret” search. The explanations for the blonde hairs and silk nighty, as explained by Bruce Long, can be explained on the basis of:

The 1926 press reports (after Keyes’ briefcase was stolen) only said that blonde hairs were found by King on Taylor’s body. King’s 1930 article discusses finding the hairs on p. 288 of my book, but it’s unclear which date he is referring to. However, since King was not assigned to the case until Feb. 3, then the hairs were not found before that date. Possibilities:

a. On Feb. 3, Minter visited Taylor’s body at the undertaker’s, which is where the hairs were later found on Taylor’s clothing. Could Minter have touched and hugged Taylor’s clothing, when she was there? If so, that is a possible explanation for the hairs being there.

b. In King’s article, he admits fabricating a previous public statement (regarding a psychic’s phone call) in order to hopefully draw an incriminating statement from Shelby/Minter. Although blonde hairs were certainly found on Taylor’s body, perhaps the identification of the hairs as belonging to Minter was similarly fabricated. Indeed, if the hairs truly had been identified as belonging to Minter, then it is very strange that Sanderson doesn’t mention it in his 1941 letter, which leads me to feel that the hairs may not truly have been identified as Minter‘s.