Flapper (31 page)

“Intriguingly risqué but not necessarily offensively so,” one reviewer concluded.
¹
“The flapperism of today, with its jazz, necker-dances, its petting parties, and its utter disregard of the conventions, is daringly handled in this film. And it contains a bathing scene in silhouette that must have made the censors blink.”

“This girl plays a flapper the way Scott Fitzgerald writes one,” another critic wrote of Colleen Moore, the film’s lead player.
²
“She is an informer and a betrayer. And I think she is one of the most fascinating little devils on this or adjacent continents.” To yet another observer, Moore embodied “the young flapper to the tip of her bobbed head.… Perhaps college professors will call it trashy. But the people who should be pleased, those who pack the movie houses every night. Those are going to crazy about it.”

As far as story lines go,
Flaming Youth
left a lot to be desired. Colleen played the role of Pat Fentriss, the teenage daughter of well-to-do urban sophisticates. Pat’s mother and father host wild parties in the family mansion, complete with jazz music, bootleg liquor, and skinny-dipping romps in the swimming pool. They don’t set the best possible example for their daughter, and it shows.

Young Pat, still hemmed in by adolescence, is eager to emulate her parents’ fast life. So she skips town with a seductive violinist a few years her senior and sets sail for Europe on a yacht. Trouble quickly ensues when the violinist tries to seduce Pat. Realizing that she is in way over her head, and desperate to escape her sexually aggressive escort, Pat jumps overboard into the deep blue sea, only to be rescued by a sailor who proves far better mannered and better intentioned than the rakish musician.

Lessons learned, Pat is bound back safely for shore and then back to her mother and father. She doesn’t want to grow up too fast, after all.

The film told a new kind of story and provided a new kind of role for Colleen Moore.

Anyone who grew up with Moore, back when she was still Kathleen Morrison, must have known she was fated for the stage. When she was a girl of about nine or ten, someone in the neighborhood ordered a large upright piano for his family and disposed of the enormous wooden packaging crate outside his house. Before the garbage men could come to haul the box away, Kathleen—a short, precocious redhead with intense eyes—convinced her neighbor’s yard man to drag the crate, which resembled a small stage, over to her backyard. “The American Stock Company was now in business,” she remembered years later with a smile.

Kathleen wrote a series of short dramatic productions and recruited some of her friends to perform the supporting roles. The American Stock Company charged a penny per head for admission—a stiff price for ten-year-olds. “Business, unfortunately, was bad,” she recalled. “We played to very small audiences, sometimes as small as one or two. But my vanity wasn’t the only thing that suffered. I’ve always liked a paying business, and we sometimes couldn’t even get the ones who did come to pay the penny we asked.”

Sensing that her fledgling production company was about to hit the skids, Kathleen revamped her act. Hoping to capitalize on the success of Barnum & Bailey’s Circus, which had recently played to sold-out audiences in town, she plastered the neighborhood with boldfaced signs
—CIRCUS IN MORRISON’S BACK YARD—SATURDAY—NO BOYS ALLOWED.
It was a winning gambit. That weekend, her family’s well-manicured lawn took a royal drubbing from dozens of girls and boys who were eager to watch Kathleen and her troupe perform a dazzling display of acrobatics.

“I was so carried away,” she later wrote, “ … that when I performed an acrobatic stunt with Cleve”—her younger brother—“hanging by my knees from a gym bar and holding him dangling, a leather book strap around his middle and the end of it clenched in my teeth, I twirled him around so fast I broke the edge off my new front tooth.”
³

No matter. The show was a great success, and the end-of-the-day take—43 cents—was a vindication of Kathleen’s dramatic aspirations.

Kathleen Morrison was born in 1900 to a middle-class, “lace Irish” Catholic family in Port Huron, Michigan, but she spent the better part of her youth in Atlanta, Georgia, and Tampa, Florida, where her father chased a variety of career opportunities and where she acquired a distinctive southern-midwestern accent.

Later in life, Kathleen would trace the spark of her lifelong love affair with the acting profession to a magic Saturday afternoon when she was five. That year, her mother took Kathleen to see a stage production of
Peter Pan.
When the title character ran down the center aisle in a blaze of footlights and invited “all children who believe in fairies to raise their hands” to save Tinker Bell, Kathleen did the audience one better. She leapt onto her seat, flailed her arms in the air, and cried, “I believe in fairies, I really do!”

“The audience burst into laughter,” she remembered, “turning to look at me. I stared back at them, their laughter hitting me with a force I had never felt before. And when I realized that it was I—I—who was making them laugh, a curious feeling of power came over me—as if for those few brief moments I held that audience in my hand. That Saturday afternoon I knew—not hoped, knew—I would become an actress.”

Like millions of other girls who came of age in the years just before and after World War I, Kathleen soon transferred her love of the stage to a near obsession with America’s infant film industry.

As a junior high student in Tampa, each Friday afternoon she made
a frantic dash for the Bijou Theater, where, amid the dazzling crystal chandeliers and beautifully upholstered, plush red seats, she and her friends swooned at the sight of Francis Ford and were awed by the polish and poise of Grace Cunard in
Lucille Love.
On Saturdays they flocked to the Strand Theater—equally grand, equally majestic—where they studied Mary Pickford’s every move and gesture and mapped every line and curve on Marguerite Clark’s petite, four-foot-ten-inch, ninety-pound frame.

The girls wrote fan letters to their favorite stars, clipped pictures and movie advertisements from magazines, and kept intricately detailed scrapbooks, with separate pages for each Hollywood luminary.

When she read in
Photoplay
magazine that Norma Talmadge, a leading lady of wide renown, believed all great actresses should be able to cry a river of tears on demand, Kathleen practiced for weeks until she was able to sob convincingly at a moment’s notice. She cried on the way to school. She cried on the way back from school.

One day, when she was passing the time on a streetcar by practicing her mournful art, an old woman seated next to her asked, “What’s the matter, little girl?”

“Oh, nothing, ma’am,” Kathleen answered with a broad smile. Tears still streaming down her face, she explained, “I’m just practicing to be a movie actress.”

It wasn’t an uncommon story. Not by the dawn of World War I, anyway. Nevertheless, years later Kathleen would remember her Hollywood fixation as just a little exceptional. “The only difference between my movie scrapbook and those of my friends,” she asserted, “was that I left a blank page in mine for my own picture after I became a movie star. Because I didn’t just hope to go to Hollywood. I intended to.”

Of course, Kathleen Morrison had something that a lot of other girls didn’t: connections.

Walter Howey was the archetype of the hard-boiled newspaperman. He might have come straight from Central Casting, so convincingly did he play the part. A true son of the American heartland—born and bred in Fort Dodge, Iowa—as a young man,
Howey came to Chicago an ordinary hayseed without a clue about the big city and its alien ways. He spent the first two decades of the new century figuring it all out—scratching and clawing his way up the ranks of that city’s famously competitive, no-holds-barred world of print journalism.

Howey was clearly in a line of work that suited him well. He had an uncanny knack for showing up everywhere and anywhere there was a story. Police roundups, murder scenes, catastrophic fires, smoky backroom political deals … if there was a story, Howey was there, and what’s more, he was the first to get there. And when he committed his tale to paper, readers were enthralled.

His writing and editorial skills were so sharp that when he had a falling-out with the publisher of the
Chicago Tribune
, where he earned an annual salary of $8,000 as city editor, he stormed out of the office, slammed the door behind him, walked across the street to see William Randolph Hearst, and within half an hour scored a job as managing editor of Hearst’s
Herald-Examiner—
the
Tribune
’s chief competitor for the morning news market. His new salary was $35,000 per year.

Howey’s hard-driving style was media made, so much so that in 1928 Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur wrote a satirical play about the newspaper business,
The Front Page.
Anyone who knew anything about Chicago journalism knew that the lead character, “Walter Burns,” was patterned after Howey.
The Front Page
charmed audiences on and off Broadway for several years. In 1940, Hollywood asked Hecht and MacArthur to offer a new twist on their script for a second screen adaptation.

The result was
His Girl Friday
, featuring Cary Grant as a fast-talking, unrelenting big-city newspaperman. It immortalized Walter Howey for all time. Though they might not have known his name, millions of Americans came to know his type.

Lucky for Kathleen Morrison, the famous Walter Howey was also
Uncle
Walter.
⁴
His wife, Lib, was the younger sister of Kathleen’s mother. Lucky also for Kathleen that David Wark Griffith owed Uncle Walter a big favor.

Back in 1915, after he had sunk every penny of his savings into
The Birth of a Nation
, Griffith faced the dreadful prospect that his three-hour masterpiece might never see the light of day. Under pressure from the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, whose members objected to Griffith’s crudely racist treatment of black characters, local censors threatened to ban the film. Griffith, in turn, agreed to remove a few of the most objectionable scenes.

Not that this helped a great deal; the final print was still patently offensive. It even rankled the good citizens of tiny Lancaster, Pennsylvania, who objected to Griffith’s scathing treatment of Thaddeus Stevens, the antislavery politician who had represented the county in Congress during the Civil War and had championed the cause of emancipation and equal citizenship for black Americans. In Lancaster, as in many places, Griffith’s picture was non grata.

Fearing that any controversy was bad for his picture, Griffith asked a few prominent members of the press to lend him aid and comfort in the pages of the newspapers and magazines. Uncle Walter was one such supporter. When
The Birth of a Nation
emerged as the industry’s first real blockbuster, Griffith made it clear to Uncle Walter that he was eager to repay the favor. It wasn’t long before the Howeys cashed in.

At a dinner party one night, they made their move.

Lib Howey began, “We have a niece—”

“Not a niece!” Griffith moaned.

Walter smiled back. “I’m afraid so.”

Why not? Griffith thought. Such was the cost of doing business. His studio was already top-heavy with the daughters and nieces of big financial backers. What harm would one more “payoff” do? He’d put the Howeys’ niece on a six-month contract for $50 per week, and if she was any good, he’d keep her; if she couldn’t act—and they rarely could—then everyone would move on and there’d be no hard feelings. A handshake sealed the agreement.

Only one hitch remained: Kathleen’s father. The year was 1916, and Mr. Morrison was decidedly cool to the notion that his sixteen-year-old daughter, an innocent, long-haired lass who had attended Catholic convent schools all her life, should venture off to the wilds of California, alone, to keep pace with the fast set in Hollywood.
Only the winning combination of Kathleen’s tears—real ones—and Mrs. Morrison’s determined support won over the deeply skeptical family patriarch.

That, plus a new stipulation: Kathleen’s grandmother, a staid and proper Victorian, would accompany her out west and serve as her official chaperone. Sunset Boulevard was no place for unaccompanied young ladies.

A few weeks later, Kathleen and her grandmother packed their bags and set out by Pullman car for Chicago, where they would spend a few days with Walter and Lib Howey before boarding the
Santa Fe Chief
for Los Angeles. On their first night in Chicago, over a celebratory outing to the College Inn—“Aunt Lib told me it was a nightclub,” Kathleen later remembered. “When I asked her what that meant, Uncle Walter said, ‘It’s a place where they don’t have lunch’ ”—Walter raised a champagne glass and offered a toast.

“Here’s to Colleen Moore”—he beamed—“the newest Griffith discovery and a future movie star.”

Kathleen raised her eyebrows.

“That’s you, baby,” Walter Howey informed his bewildered young niece. A new career demanded a new name, he explained. Something flashy, something dazzling—and something with fewer than twelve letters, which was the industry standard. “Kathleen Morrison” simply wouldn’t fit on a movie billboard. “Colleen Moore” would. Also, Colleen Moore sounded Irish, and Uncle Walter “decided the time had come for introducing an Irish actress to the movies. There was a lot of good publicity in it.”

Before Kathleen Morrison—now Colleen Moore—boarded the train for California, Uncle Walter scribbled a few words of parting advice.
⁵
“Dear baby,” he began, “Hollywood, where you will now be living, is inhabited by a race of people called Press Agents. The studios pay them a lot of money to think up stories about the players under contract and to persuade editors like me to print their stories. So the moral of this letter is, never believe one word you ever read about yourself.”