Last month marked the 100th anniversary of the first appearance of a movie icon.
But, if it weren’t for the intervention of another film comedy pioneer, his first appearance might have been his last. On February 2, 1914 Charlie Chaplin appeared in a Keystone comedy called Making A Living. He hadn’t discovered the Tramp character yet and he wasn’t very funny. Some of that had to do with the fact that the director cut out most of his comic bits but Keystone head Mack Sennett was ready to give him the boot.
Enter Mabel Normand. She was already, at 22, a full fledged comedy star and also happened to be Mack Sennett’s significant other. She urged him not to give up on Chaplin just yet. “Let me handle him” she said, and she did. She directed Chaplin’s next film Mabel’s Strange Predicament and gave him the time to elaborate on his classic English Music Hall character “The Inebriate.” It was also the first time he wore “The Tramp” costume. The results were very funny. In his next appearance Kid’s Auto Races in Venice (California), a star was born.
Years later in his autobiography Chaplin mentions Normand’s prowess as a performer but says nothing about her as a director or writer even though they appeared in several films together including the first full length comedy Tillie’s Punctured Romance. Poor Mabel. Everyone acknowledged her genius as a comedienne but few knew about her skills as a writer-director or that later she even had her own studio for a brief period of time.
Mabel, like her good friend Mary Pickford (and Chaplin for that matter), came from very humble beginnings. She was born in Staten Island in 1892. Her mother was Irish and her father French Canadian. He worked as a carpenter at a local home for elderly seaman, but Mabel, who was attractive at an early age, began modeling to bring in extra money. At 15 she was posing for famed illustrator Charles Dana Gibson and entered the fledgling movie industry a year later.
Starting at the Vitagraph studios in Flatbush, she was noticed and picked up by D.W. Griffith for the Biograph Company and made a number of shorts before meeting Mack Sennett in 1911. They set out for California in 1912 where Sennett founded Keystone Studios and American silent comedy was born.
By 1914 she was writing and directing in addition to starring in comedy shorts and this is when Chaplin enters the picture. She later struck gold in a series of comedy shorts with Roscoe “Fatty” Arbuckle and they became the “Lucy and Ricky” of the silent era. By 1917 she and Roscoe had left Sennett and signed lucrative contracts elsewhere. Arbuckle went to Paramount while Mabel signed with Samuel Goldwyn for whom she made a number of features. Only two survive today and they’re not in good shape. In 1920 she became head of her own studio.
It was at this time that Mabel became addicted to cocaine which aggravated the tuberculosis that she had contracted as a child. The big blow came in early 1922 when her friend and mentor, director William Desmond Taylor, was found murdered in his bungalow. She was the last person to see him alive. Although acquitted of any wrongdoing in his death, the negative publicity seriously damaged her career.
In 1924, insult was added to injury when her chauffeur shot and wounded a millionaire playboy. Her film from the year before, The Extra Girl, had been a success but again negative publicity ruined her comeback. By this time she was off cocaine but had turned to the bottle. She married silent film actor Lew Cody in 1926 but they lived in separate houses.
Her friends in the movie business got her work with comedy producer Hal Roach and she made a few successful two reelers but by 1927 it was too late. Her tuberculosis had worsened and she had to stop working. She died in a sanatorium in 1930 at the age of 37. Having made no sound appearances, she was quickly forgotten. This neglect would last for more than a quarter of a century.
In the late 1950s, silent comedy was rediscovered and Mabel’s appearances with Chaplin and Arbuckle were seen and appreciated, but for the next 50 years only her screen appearances were recognized. Slowly but surely more information was uncovered that showed her additional contributions on the other side of the camera. In 2010 her “long lost” comedy Won in a Closet that she wrote and directed was discovered in archives in New Zealand and has been restored and is now on DVD.
Hopefully more of Normand’s work will be discovered and restored so that a proper revaluation can take place. Along with Alice Guy and Lois Weber she was one of the principal woman pioneers in cinema back when women were considered as capable as men before the rise of Hollywood put a stop to equality behind the camera.
