Few stars can match the mysterious glamor of Garbo, the smolder of Valentino,
or the daring charm of Louise Brooks, but silent film stars faced all manner
of hurdles, including persistent racism, homophobia, rabid tabloids, and much more.
The idea of celebrities had already been established by theater actors in the centuries
leading up to the first films of the late 19th century. Yet filmmakers weren't initially keen
on making actor-centric narratives, sometimes preferring to wow audiences with special effects,
or simply showing something as it happened, documentary-style. Humans
were almost an afterthought, though some forward-thinking producers called upon
already well-known performers, like dancers and vaudevillians, to grace the screen.
Things began to change around 1907 when the growth of the film industry
meant that film actors got more regular work. Still, it was hardly prestigious
and studios were inconsistent when it came to promoting their emerging stars.
"Moving pictures were not considered legitimate theater, and some stage actors,
who might make a film for money, didn't want their name associated with it."
America's first movie star is considered to be Florence Lawrence, who began her career
in vaudeville, then went on to become known as "The Biograph Girl." Though Lawrence would
be known by name and would be the subject of a major studio PR campaign, most studios of the
time preferred to keep their stars anonymous for fear of having to pay them a higher wage.
At one point or another, Florence Lawrence may have wished to be anonymous. Sure, she
went from being the mysterious Biograph Girl to a genuine celebrity, but fame came with a dark side.
Lawrence once attended a premiere where fans tore the buttons from her coat. Producer Carl
Laemmle even went so far as to claim she'd died in a street car accident,
just to increase sales for one of her films.
Tabloid-style gossip began as early as 1913, focusing on stars' glamorous lifestyles.
Studio representatives presented stars' private lives as squeaky-clean examples of morality,
thereby elevating the previously unsavory reputation of the young film industry.
Early fan magazines tended to burnish the rough edges of scandals, too. Photoplay
magazine reported on the 1920 marriage of Mary Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks, who'd ditched
their previous spouses to get married. It did so in such a gentle way that it seemed hardly worth
commenting on. But just eight years later, Photoplay published a far more graphic and
invasive exposé of Clara Bow's difficult life. So much so that fellow actors were alarmed at
the precedent. They had a right to be. As time went on, celebrity reporting only got worse.
Child stars aren't new. Perhaps the most famous child star of the silent era is Jackie Coogan.
In 1916, at just 18 months, Coogan appeared in Skinner's Baby, though his big break was
in the 1921 classic, The Kid, alongside Charlie Chaplin. He earned fantastic amounts of money,
but later learned that his parents had spent it all. His experience led to the passage offered
pthe Child Actors Bill in California, more commonly known as the Coogan Law,
which still regulates the contracts of child actors and how their income is managed today.
Coogan was far from the only kid to face the unregulated and often uncaring Hollywood machine.
Diana Serra Cary, once known as Baby Peggy, told The Guardian she wasn't formally educated
and often faced dangerous situations on set. Her earnings were also wasted away by careless parents
who seemed more interested in putting her to work than making sure that she was educated,
safe, or loved. Cary, who died in 2020 at age 101, went on to write at length about her experiences.
Cocaine was temporarily falling out of favor in the U.S. by the 1920s,
but it remained prevalent in Hollywood. Rumors swirled about the habits of actors,
from overly peppy comedians to exhausted stars who needed a pick-me-up to keep going. Actress
Barbara La Marr died at only 29 years old, after a career spent indulging in all manner
of substances. Her son, Don Gallery, told the Los Angeles Times that she regularly used heroin,
and even went so far as to leave a container of cocaine out in the open on her piano.
Actor Wallace Reid infamously lost both his career and his life in the wake of a morphine
addiction. After a bloody train accident on a film set, a studio-supplied doctor gave
Reid morphine to keep him working through his injuries. After he'd seemingly healed,
Reid couldn't quit the opiates. He died on January 18, 1923, of what another doctor said
was kidney failure and pneumonia made all the worse by morphine withdrawal.
Stunt performers appeared as soon as 1903's The Great Train Robbery, yet,
stars like Buster Keaton insisted on performing some of their own stunts, no matter how dangerous.
Keaton did all kinds of death-defying stunts, relying on his physical comedy experience from
the vaudeville circuit to stay alive. He cited his immense "body control" as one of the reasons
he survived. The most famous and terrifying of his stunts comes from 1928's Steamboat Bill,
Jr. There, Keaton stood completely still as the façade of a massive house fell on top of him,
hoping he'd still be standing when it hit the ground around him.
Keaton came through that stunt whole, but he wasn't always so lucky. He'd
been knocked unconscious on set, suffered broken bones,
and even fractured his neck during one stunt. Harold Lloyd, another silent film comedy great,
suffered a 1919 accident where half of his right hand was obliterated in an on-set
explosion with a prop bomb, which made his later stunts all the more impressive.
"The bomb went off. Went right straight up and blew a big hole, about that big, in the ceiling."
Other actors suffered frostbite, bone-shattering wagon crashes,
and even fatal drownings after being thrown from a horse.
One of the earliest movie blockbusters, 1915's The Birth of a Nation, hinged on
deeply racist depictions of Black Americans. Reactions to the film included riots, bans,
and the rise of the modern Ku Klux Klan. Inside the film industry, it wasn't much better.
As the British Film Institute reports, Black filmmakers like Oscar Micheaux and performer
Paul Robeson continued to operate as independent creators outside of the
growing Hollywood system. They worked in what were known as "race films" that
catered to Black audiences. Filmmakers had a complicated relationship with this setup,
which allowed them to create movies with all-Black casts and sometimes crew,
but in a segregated system with low budgets and little to no access to Hollywood resources. Some
worried they were playing into stereotypes in order to sell tickets and distribute films.
But many artists were compelled to take part in the developing form, creating and distributing
stories that spoke to an audience being neglected by Hollywood. Many of those films were direct
responses to the overt racism of Birth of a Nation, including one titled The Birth of a Race.
"By reclaiming that space in the culture,
you could show positive images of Black people outside of the white context."
Few of these race films have survived, meaning that researchers rely on things like posters and
advertisements to prove that these works ever existed. Yet the independent Black
film industry continued operating well after the introduction of talkies, into the 1950s.
Sessue Hayakawa was a skilled, naturalistic actor whose work was a stark contrast to the
stiff performances of other silent era film stars. With his athletic build and smoldering good looks,
he was a hunk. But opposite white costars, Hayakawa was often cast as the villain or
rejected lover. Despite this, Hayakawa had a long career that saw him establish a production
company, work in Europe, and star opposite Alec Guinness in 1957's The Bridge on the River Kwai.
Anna May Wong was also a bonafide movie star, though she too seemed to be perpetually
sidelined. She broke through as the tragic lead in 1922's The Toll of the Sea. Wong's character,
Lotus Flower, is an abandoned single mother previously married to a white man,
the father of her child. Going forward, in order to work, Wong gritted her teeth and
took roles as pliable damsels, vampy villainesses, and other stereotypes.
"Pathetic dying seemed to be the best thing I did."
Like Hayakawa, Wong continued to work well into the talkie era, though she rarely got
a leading role and even reportedly lost the lead role of O-lan in 1937's The Good Earth,
even though the film is set in China. The role, and the Best Actress Oscar,
instead went to German-American actress Luise Rainer in yellowface.
Queer people in Hollywood faced a difficult choice: live openly and lose their career,
or stay closeted and keep acting. Some were able to balance both for a time,
like actor William Haines, who lived openly with his partner until his career wound down and he
became a successful interior designer. Others kept their personal lives on intense lockdown.
Famed drag performer Julian Eltinge made some silent films based on his popular stage acts but
was secretive about his private life. He engaged in performative straight behavior like smoking,
drinking, and getting engaged, but never married, to multiple women.
"I've seen pictures of you, Mr. Eltinge, and you were dressed just like a lady."
"Yes, but don't forget, I always had a cigar in my mouth."
Women were hardly exempt from the homophobia of silent-era Hollywood.
According to Diana McLellan's The Girls: Sappho Goes to Hollywood , Greta Garbo
and Marlene Dietrich carried on an affair that both would deny to their dying days.
"Did you know her personally?"
"No, no, I did not."
"You did meet her?"
"No."
"Never?"
"No."
Others saw that their sexuality remained a stumbling block, no matter how secretive they
were. According to The New York Times, in 1919 actress Jean Acker found herself in a lavender
marriage with Rudolph Valentino, meant to obscure her sexuality. The pair soon divorced, but after
his second marriage ended in a similar fashion, speculation soon turned to Valentino himself.
With so much sexual debauchery running rampant in Hollywood, some actresses hoping to break into
the movies were presented with an unseemly proposition. As a 1920 article in Photoplay
described it, rumors swirled that aspiring stars had to disappear into a backroom with
some powerful executive or producer to get a key contract. The article ultimately deemed the
accusations to be largely unfounded. Yet, with modern casting couch rumors still a part of the
entertainment industry, it's hard to dismiss the older stories of silent film stars like
Louise Brooks, who claimed to see one woman get a contract at MGM after a meeting with a higher-up.
"I do want the job so, but I – I can't."
There was even a stag film titled The Casting Couch released in 1924,
which showed just such a scenario.
However, it wouldn't be fair to pretend that all women in
Hollywood were helpless waifs thrown at the feet of drooling predators.
"You know, the nice thing about buying food for a man is that you don't have to laugh at his jokes."
The silent film era actually held room for many female creators,
including not just actresses, but writers, directors, and producers. It was only
during the transition to talkies and with increased budgets requiring major financing,
that women were forced out of positions of power in Hollywood.
There's a popular idea that many silent film actors didn't
transition to the talkies because their voices were unfit to record.
"Pierre, you shouldn't have come."
"Pierre, you shouldn't have come!"
The classic 1952 musical comedy Singin' in the Rain hinges on this,
as fictional actress Lina Lamont struggles to drop her thick, squeaky Brooklyn accent.
But was this really the case? Movies Silently points out that many actors
made the transition to sound just fine, though some experienced a few speed bumps
along the way, like actress Marion Davies who suffered from a stutter.
While the epicaricacy-infused image of silent film greats stumbling over something as simple
as talking may have been overstated, a few stars really did hit a wall when presented
with a microphone. For example, actor Karl Dane's career did begin a downturn as talkies rose,
though his thick Danish accent was only part of the problem.
Perhaps the poor reputation of silent film star voices also had something to
do with the movie studios. As former child star Diana Serra Cary, aka Baby Peggy,
told The Guardian, film executives talked trash about silent films to make it seem
as if the more expensive and complicated sound movies were worth all the effort.
Some silent stars, herself included, saw their lights fade as a result.