Asked about her hobbies: “Just say I like to pinch babies and twist their legs. And get drunk.”
The leading lady of Mack Sennett’s Keystone Studios, Mabel Normand became the greatest female comic of the silent era. As a teenager, Normand modeled for illustrated postcards and magazines, and in her early films she was cast as a “bathing beauty.” But with Sennett, Normand would quickly demonstrate a remarkable gift for comedy. Appearing in almost two hundred films, she was the first actor to execute the signature gag of silent film comedy: throwing a pie in someone’s face, on film. She is best known for frequent work with Chaplin and for her “Fatty and Mabel” series with Fatty Arbuckle. Her nickname outside Hollywood was the “Queen of Comedy”; her nickname inside, the “I Don’t Care Girl.” One of the first women to write, direct, and produce, Normand eventually ran her own eponymous studio.
YOU COULD SPEND HOURS WAITING outside Irving Thalberg’s office. Nicknamed the “Boy Wonder,” Thalberg was running production for Universal by the time he was twenty-one. For over a decade, he would produce MGM’s most literary and prestigious films, but getting his ear wasn’t easy. It became a joke. Didn’t matter when you had a meeting or how important it was, and the worst was if you were a writer. Outside the office there was “the million-dollar bench,” so named for all the talent that had sat there. An example of this is the time Harpo, Groucho, and Chico Marx were made to wait so long they actually built a small fire outside Thalberg’s door. The smell of smoke managed to flush out the young executive.
Director King Vidor recalled one day in particular, in February 1930, when he and the writer Laurence Stallings ran in wearing tennis clothes for a story meeting about their new project, Billy the Kid. With a draft in hand, it turned out, they didn’t have to wait this time at all. Instead, the secretary hustled them into Mr. Thalberg’s limousine. Thalberg was sitting in back talking numbers with MGM exec Eddie Mannix. The limo pulled out and Vidor and his writer just sat and listened. There had yet to be any acknowledgment that they were even in the car. Finally, Thalberg looked over. “Let’s hear what you have,” Vidor recalls him saying. And with that King Vidor dove headlong into his pitch and paid no attention to where they were driving until the car stopped in a driveway. It was then the director looked up and saw a long line of other limousines, men in gloves, and a large crowd further away, many of them crying. They were at a funeral.
Thalberg got out. Vidor and his writer were a bit self-conscious now—should they know who died? And as they’d come in tennis clothes, how could they explain attending a funeral in white trousers and sweaters? Director Marshall Neilan helped them out of the car. He was crying, too. They had to go in. They were too mortified to ask anyone about the deceased until they were seated next to Mannix. When he told them, Vidor was in shock: It was Mabel Normand.
Chaplin was still lamenting that his only chance to touch her perfect lips was in front of a camera. Samuel Goldwyn once declared her “the most valuable property in Hollywood.”
Vidor had fallen in love with Normand when he began working as a ticket-taker in Texas nickelodeons. He wasn’t alone; for almost a decade, Hollywood moguls sparred over her. Mack Sennett built a studio and gave it to her. Thirty years later, Chaplin was still lamenting that his only chance to touch her perfect lips was in front of a camera. Samuel Goldwyn once declared her “the most valuable property in Hollywood.”
Normand was the icon of a preflapper generation of girls called Sports. The distinction between flappers and sports really just boiled down to the haircut. Sports smoked, drank gin, and talked like sailors. Normand’s friends seemed to agree that her fatal mistake was taking the role far too seriously. She drank constantly. She stood aloof and smirked at serious advances from serious men. During a lunch at the Savoy Hotel in New York, she ordered nine martinis, a Baked Alaska, and a hundred Melachrinos (Egyptian cigarettes) to be delivered at once. In time, Mabel started snorting cocaine. The drug had in fact been legal before the war, but now forced her to run with a shadier crowd. She somehow ended up in the vicinity of a couple of murders.
Vidor hadn’t read a paper in days, and he hadn’t heard much about Normand recently. Still, he did recall something about the scandals. Thalberg leaned over and whispered, “Too many murders.” Vidor nodded, “Shame, shame.” Then Thalberg leaned over again and added, a bit too loudly, “The audience won’t accept it.”
Apparently, he was talking about Vidor’s project, Billy the Kid.
If MGM production chief Irving Thalberg could trust anyone to pull this off, it’d be filmmaker Woody Van Dyke. The workmanlike director was nicknamed “one-take Woody” for the speed with which he’d complete a shoot.
A few weeks earlier, Van Dyke had told Thalberg he wanted his next movie to be something different and ambitious. What Thalberg ended up suggesting was more along the lines of flat-out crazy: He wanted to make a film version of the popular book Trader Horn, based on the life of explorer Alfred Horn. And he wanted Van Dyke to shoot on location, with a full Hollywood crew—in Africa.
The crazy part? Thalberg would let Van Dyke set sail with an unlimited budget and half-baked script. When the cast and crew landed in Mombasa, they slowly marched inland to their first location—225 people and ninety tons of equipment.
Almost every American caught malaria within a week. Lead actress Edwina Booth was particularly besieged by insects due to her skimpy outfit; she also got dysentery, fell out of a tree (almost fracturing her skull), and claimed she was “forced” to sunbathe nude on the ship to get the tan required to make her role believable. (It took her six years to regain her full health, after which she never made another film.) As for the director, Van Dyke figured he could inoculate himself from any parasites by drinking gin and more gin. Which he reportedly did.
After a few days of shooting, Thalberg sent an insane order of his own: Start over, using sound. Nobody cared about silent films anymore, and they’d care even less when this epic finally premiered in a year or two. Trader Horn had to be a talkie. Now they needed sound equipment (none of the crew had made a sound picture before), not to mention an actual script. Three weeks later, a huge shipment of sound equipment arrived and was promptly dropped into the ocean by dockworkers. An “accident.” It’d be several weeks before a replacement set arrived and made it safely to shore.
With little to do but sweat, the cast and crew followed their director’s lead and drank “at least three fingers of whiskey every morning and three more every night.” Unsurprisingly, everybody soon dismissed this odd notion of a script. And so, after two months of accomplishing exactly nothing, the Trader Horn cast and crew finally descended into the African jungle to make the most ambitious moving picture of all time.
Seven months later, the ragtag crew came stumbling out. One crew member had been eaten by a crocodile. Another was horned to death by a rhino. Everyone was drunk, sick, or both. Van Dyke returned to Hollywood with an astounding 4 million feet of film (around 600 hours)—and announced he needed to shoot more. MGM had already spent $1 million, so Thalberg and studio chief Louis B. Mayer decided they’d better watch some of the dailies before pouring more money into it.
The footage was disastrous. A sauced Van Dyke had shot way too much, but despite that, there was no story, no discipline, no sense. Mayer thought they would have to cut it into shorter travel films. Thalberg insisted on seeing it through. He put his best writers on it. Six months later, they, too, had nothing. Thalberg was growing increasingly resigned to abandoning the film. Then one of the writers had the novel idea to see if the original book (from which the film was adapted) could be of use. This led to Thalberg’s fantastic discovery that there wasn’t a single copy of the book on the entire lot. He bought one from a bookstore, and the stunned writers found the perfect structure that had previously eluded them. Reshoots began almost immediately.
Despite his frequent inebriation, Van Dyke had had the sense to bring back the African actors who played major roles. The biggest role was Horn’s gun bearer, played by Mutia Omoolu. The tribesman agreed to travel to America if a thatch hut was built for him. It was—on Studio Lot Three. Tall, his head shaven, a ring through his nose, Omoolu had sex with prostitutes whenever possible and ended up in the hospital with a veneral disease. During publicity, he declared the MGM lion too fat. Finally, two years later, Trader Horn was released. It was MGM’s biggest grossing film of 1931, made the studio a million dollars, and was nominated for a best-picture Oscar.