Mabel Won and Lost
By Graham Fuller in The Movie, The Illustrated History of The Cinema 1985
Like many other skilled comedy actress-including Harlow, Lombard and Monroe-who never lived to fulfill their immense potential, Mabel Normand is shrouded in legend. But the faded, flicking quality of those of her films that survive, and the knowledge of the craving and hurt behind her vivacious smiles, lend her legend a peculiarly ghostly edge.
Mabel Normand was the dark, pretty girl who fluttered her eyelids at Charlie Chaplin and Fatty Arbuckle in countless comedy shorts made at Keystone at the time of World War I. Everyone who has seen one of those Golden Age of Comedy or similarly titled compilation films will have seen Mabel too-pursued in pajamas by an ardent Charlie (from Mabel’s Strange Predicament, 1914), thrown off his motorbike into mud (from Mabel at the Wheel, 1914), unknowingly washed out to sea in a house with her lover (from Fatty and Mabel Adrift, 1916) She would blush and simper, but she was never a coy little thing and generally gave as good as she got. So although Charlie, as a frustrated suitor, gives her a kick on the backside in The Fatal Mallet (1914), and, as a racetrack thief, wrecks her hotdog business in Mabel’s Busy Day (1914), she is perfectly able, as his henpecking wife, to batter him about the head in His Trysting Place (1914). Indeed, when not sweet and innocent, Mabel had certain feistiness with a sardonic edge to it-her heavy-lidded eyes and thin-lipped mouth, parted in contempt or curved in petulance, gave her an air of knowingness that complemented her talent as the first great screen comedienne.
It still comes as a surprise to learn two additional facts about Mabel Normand: that, for someone who played so many charming but innocuous working-girls who lives are beset by mishaps, she was, herself, at the age of 20, directing her own films; that ‘Mabel’ – the-girl-next-door incarnate – was played by a woman whose life was eventually wrecked by drugs and murder-scandals.
Normand was born in Boston in 1894, the daughter of a Frenchman and his Irish wife. (Mabel Normand was born in New York, November 9, 1893) The child was beautiful and at 13 was already a photographer’s and artist’s model. She joined Biograph in New York in 1910 and (after a spell at Vitagraph[h) became a star at the studio in 1912, diving backwards into a river for D. W. Griffith in The Squaw’s Love (1911) and working mostly under the direction of Mack Sennett with whom she began a long and tempestuous love affair.
In 1912 she accompanied Sennett and his comedians, Ford Sterling and Fred Mace, to Los Angeles where Sennett’s new Keystone Film Company had started to churn out two-reel comedies. Normand herself appeared in well over a hundred. She was not, however, just a pretty face and leading lady (for years the highest paid star on the Keystone lot), but a guiding force behind the studio, with only Sennett himself and the director Henry Lehrman exerting more creative power. She was even a threat to Sennett. Kalton C. Lahue has written in Mack Sennett’s Keystone:
‘…her intuitive feeling for a comedy sequence sometimes annoyed Sennett…and the resulting clash of creative personalities would sometime reverberate across the studio lot for days at a time.’
In 1913 Normand began to direct as well as star in her own comedies, among them Mabel’s Nerve, Mabel’s New Job (both 1914), Mabel’s Busy Day and Mabel’s Married Life (1914) – the last two co-directed with Chaplin. It was Normand who reputedly threw the first custard pie in films, and who initially spotted the talent of Chaplin and Arbuckle. Egos continued to clash at Keystone and there is the famous incident, recounted in Chaplin, My Autobiography, in which Normand, directing Chaplin on location in Los Angeles, ordered him to get on with a scene rather than fool around with a hose-pipe gag:
‘…she shut me up quickly: “We have no time! We have no time! Do what you’re told.” ‘That was enough, I could not take it – and from such a pretty girl. “I’m sorry, Miss Normand, I will not do what I’m told. I don’t think you are competent to tell me what to do”.’
Such was Normand’s standing at the studio that it seemed Chaplin and Keystone might part company, but the rift was temporary and shortly afterwards the two stars shared the triumph of the formative comedy feature Tillie’s Punctured Romance (1914). Normand and Chaplin remained friends, though by his own admission Chaplin would have taken the friendship further. The actress was still infatuated with Sennett when the romance was punctured in 1915 by his affair with her friend Mae Busch, a comedy actress best known in films as the wife of Laurel or Hardy.
Through 1915 Mabel worked with the popular Arbuckle, mostly in New York where Sennett had sent them. But once back in Hollywood Normand, tired of slapstick shorts, demanded better roles in longer films and to this end Sennett established the Mabel Normand Film Company. But when in 1916 he cast her in the lead role of Mickey (1918), a seven-reel comedy about a tomboy from the country introduced to society. Normand, by now dependent on drugs and an increasingly unreliable employee, fell ill. Sennett began to scout around for a replacement and Normand miraculously recovered. After a year on the shelf, the film proved a great commercial success and Sennett tried in vain to entice her back from Sam Goldwyn, for whom she was working – on such films as Sis Hopkins, When Doctors Disagree (both 1919), The Slim Princess and What Happened to Rosa? (both 1920).
In 1922 Normand was implicated in the murder of William Desmond Taylor, a director at Famous Players-Lasky, with whom she had been having an affair and who may have been trying to cure her of drug addiction. She was cleared but the scandal did irreparable damage to her image. She had since returned to Sennett for Molly O (1921), the release of which was delayed following the Taylor furor. Sennett persisted with distributors and it eventually became a hit. The Extra Girl (1923), an inspired comedy with Normand as a Hollywood’s hopeful leading a lion around a film studio thinking it is a dog in disguise, was similarly delayed by another scandal when Normand’s chauffeur was discovered standing over the corpse of Hollywood millionaire Cortland S. Dines holding a gun belonging to his boss. (Cortland S. Dines was shot but not killed at a New Years party 1924. The case was dropped because Dines refused to testify.) Again Normand was cleared, but her popularity waned and she finally succumbed to two-reel comedies again, not for Sennett but his rival Hal Roach. She had long since ceased to direct.
As a last attempt to re-order her life she took a husband, the actor Lew Cody, who had played the villain in Mickey. In 1930, ravaged by drugs, alcohol, pneumonia and tuberculosis, Mabel Normand died. She was just 35, but she was a star who had burned out long before.
The photos captions: Below left Mabel Normand plays The Extra Girl bring terror to a studio. Below far left: Mabel as the naïve country-girl in Mickey. Above left: signing-up for Mack Sennett. Above Normand and Chaplin as a couple who meet in a park and are caught Getting Acquainted (1914) by their respective partners, played by Phyllis Allen and Mack Swain. Above right: with Fatty Arbuckle as lovers all at sea in Fatty and Mabel Adrift.