Yvonne Stevens, Interviewed
February 12, 2001
SLIDE: Was your mother on stage with Mack Sennett?
STEVENS: No.
SLIDE: Who took care of you while your mother was working?
STEVENS: First of all, my grandmother. Then my grandmother gave me away a couple of times and sold me. So Mother, when she came home, she put me with these very good friends of hers, Jack and Millie Kennedy. Millie was with the Tiller ballet, the British ballet [the Tiller Girls]. And Jack was with the Keith-Orpheum, in the orchestra. He was a drummer. So I stayed with them for four years.
SLIDE: Did they take care of you in Los Angeles?
STEVENS: Oh, no. I lived with my mother in Los Angeles.
SLIDE: So when she went to the studio she just left you at home?
STEVENS: Oh, no. She was doing very well. We had servants.
SLIDE: What is this about being “sold”?
STEVENS: You don’t know what money was back in those days. I think the lady gave my grandmother fifty dollars, and she said, “You can have her.” Anyway, of course, when my mother came home she bought me back.
SLIDE: Did you stay with Jack and Millie in New York or South Carolina?
STEVENS: Well, I went down to South Carolina two or three times. Wonderful. His father was chief of police in Greenville, South Carolina. Just marvelous people. To go down on the train with all the porters, it was just wonderful.
SLIDE: So your mother when she came out here, she brought you with her right away?
STEVENS: Oh, no. She came out here not to go into the movies, but because my stepfather was supposed to have tuberculosis. And it turned out much later that he didn’t have it. Everybody had to come to Arizona or California. They stopped off in Arizona for five days, and my mother said it was hopeless. There was nothing there at all. I think he had been in a vaudeville act with Mack Sennett.
SLIDE: So once your mother got settled here, she called for you?
STEVENS: She brought me out from New York.
SLIDE: You were in New York four years?
STEVENS: Four years with the Kennedys.
SLIDE: Did your mother ever mention Chaplin, what she thought about Chaplin?
STEVENS: Well, everybody liked Chaplin. Well, I mean, he was a worker and demanding. My mother was here before Chaplin. She came in 1913, and he came in 1914.
SLIDE: Did she ever talk about people like Mack Swain, Fritz Schade, or Joe Swickard?
STEVENS: They were just friends, and we’d go to each other’s homes for dinner. Mack Swain, I don’t remember going anywhere with him.
SLIDE: Did she like Sennett or not?
STEVENS: Well, he was by himself. He never showed up. People never saw him. He wasn’t on the set.
SLIDE: Do you think in creating the grotesque outfit, she could have been influenced by Chaplin in any way?
STEVENS: No. I don’t think, being a woman, she copied him at all. She was tall, that was why she had to become a comedienne. Everybody else was small. She was five foot, six. Very tall. She played different parts. She wasn’t just one character. You did whatever they told you to do.
SLIDE: At L-Ko, did she mention any of the other women she worked with?
STEVENS: No.
SLIDE: I wondered if the other women resented your mother becoming a star there?
STEVENS: I don’t remember any women being important. She was a comedienne. They were not comediennes.
SLIDE: The Stern Brothers. Did she get on with them?
STEVENS: Well, nobody liked them. You stayed with them because you needed the work. Christie [the Christie Comedy Company] was across the street you know.
SLIDE: Do you remember Gale Henry?
STEVENS: Vaguely.
SLIDE: Do you think your mother was against Gale Henry’s coming to the studio?
STEVENS: Oh, no. She had already made her reputation. She took all the money and bought real estate.
SLIDE: I wonder if your mother ever mentioned a 1917 film called Cupid and the Scrub Lady?
STEVENS: No. It sounds like it would be a title at that time.
SLIDE: What was the relationship between your mother and Jack Blystone?
STEVENS: He was crazy about her. All the men were. She was so beautiful. She really was. And she had a gorgeous figure. He was a nice man.
SLIDE: Do you think they could have had an affair?
STEVENS: No. My mother was never like that. Not like that terrible man she married. She just gave up her life to him. Jack Blystone was a wonderful director—good movies.
SLIDE: Could he possibly have wanted to have an affair with your mother and been rejected?
STEVENS: Of course.
SLIDE: It seems that without Blystone your mother doesn’t know what to do with her career.
STEVENS: I think the contract was up.
SLIDE: Then after Century, your mother really does nothing any more.
STEVENS: That’s right. I know that she was not stage crazy or anything. She just wanted money. She went out and bought real estate, while everybody else was in the stock market. And they thought she was crazy.
SLIDE: She went to Reelcraft in Chicago. She spent six months in Chicago.
STEVENS: I don’t know. I was little.
SLIDE: Did you go with her?
STEVENS: No, I didn’t go with her.
SLIDE: In 1918, were you here yet?
STEVENS: I think I was.
SLIDE: Your mother and Dick Smith both went to Chicago?
STEVENS: Oh, yes, she went to Chicago and worked. She didn’t stay there.
SLIDE: What about a guy named Frederick J. Ireland?
STEVENS: I don’t know him.
SLIDE: You were born in 1905. You came out here when you were ten years old?
STEVENS: Nine or ten years old. I think I came in 1917.
SLIDE: Have you ever heard of a woman named Helen Howell?
STEVENS: No.
SLIDE: Have you ever heard of the Sun-Kist Comedy Company?
STEVENS: No.
SLIDE: Did you know your mother came back to Universal in 1924? She doesn’t seem to have made any comedies between 1921 and 1924. Do you know anybody at Universal who might have hired her?
STEVENS: We didn’t discuss anything like that. They would have come to dinner. There were no restaurants at all, and everyone would come to each other’s house for dinner. There would be five or six people, and they would all be from vaudeville. Everyone had a piano, and Earle [Foxe] had a saxophone. And they could all sing. “Babe” Hardy had a gorgeous voice. So they’d go to each other’s house for dinner. And I was the only child.
SLIDE: Do you remember Neely Edwards?
STEVENS: I just know he was a good comedian. I think I worked extra in some of his shorts.
SLIDE: Could you have worked extra in any films that your mother was also in?
STEVENS: No.
SLIDE: And what about Bert Roach?
STEVENS: Big, heavyset guy. Yes, I knew Bert Roach.
SLIDE: Was there any suggestion that your mother should team up with either of these guys?
STEVENS: Oh, I don’t think so. Well, maybe Neely Edwards. Everybody was just fooling around.
SLIDE: What about director William H. Watson?
STEVENS: I didn’t know a director named Watson.
SLIDE: After Universal, your mother seems to leave films. But then in 1926 and 1927, she comes back and works at Fox.
STEVENS: I seem to remember her working on Western Avenue [site of the Fox studios in Hollywood]. Her real interest was in real estate. So all those times you say she wasn’t doing anything, she was buying or building something.
SLIDE: But why would she keep coming back to films?
STEVENS: Oh, just the money. We always had a beautiful house and we always had the servants, so she must have been doing all right.
SLIDE: As late was 1930, she still lists herself as available and is trying to get work.
STEVENS: I wouldn’t be surprised. But she was busy with other things.