She Came To Prominence As An Actress, But Her First Love Was Dance

Maisie in Hollywood / Part One / The Dancing Fool

Read the introduction at:
https://medium.com/the-haven/maisie-in-hollywood-fb46edded5b9

Marcelline Mulot infused her film roles with an erotic eloquence unmatched by that of any other female of her day.

The technique of the silents was exaggeration, big gestures, big expressions. Mulot acted with quiet intensity. She underperformed by the standards of the day. Some called her untalented. She was, in fact, supremely talented, with an unerring instinct for connecting with an audience. We have no footage of her dancing, but I do not doubt that she was equally captivating at that pursuit.

She was a born center of attention who, nonetheless, shunned the spotlight directed on her private life. The public, then as now, felt they owned you, demanding details of your most personal choices, and judging you for them. The studios felt likewise. You danced to their tune, or were denied first-rate roles, your career stalled, even ruined.

Having entered the infant industry at the Famous Players-Lasky’s studios in Astoria, Queens,(1) where off-the-set manipulation was less pervasive, Marcelline recoiled from the expectations of The Camera Coast, as it was called. Maisie refused to kowtow to businessmen-bosses. She was as fiercely nonconformist as she’d been back in Kansas.

Kenneth Tynan, who wrote the definitive profile of Mulot published in The New Yorker in 1979, quoted the film critic Ado Mucho as saying, “Maisie Mulot is the one being essential to an understanding of the evolution of film acting. She stood her ground artistically and philosophically. She had strong opinions and they were largely on-the-money. She was not putty in the hands of grasping bosses concerned only with making a buck.”

Mulot deserves to be celebrated for her strength of character, if nothing else. But there is plenty else to admire about her, I promise you.

Maybelle Snodgrass (nickname: Maisie) was born into a large, loving clan in the south-east corner of Kansas in the second decade of the twentieth century.

She had a storybook childhood–so it seemed to me. (I’d grown up in a small, troubled, every-man-for-himself situation.) She cavorted through lush corn and wheat fields, was blessed with an astonishingly indulgent (for the era) mother, and never lacked for playmates. I envied her cocoon of family. But it was not, apparently, sunny skies and calm sailing.

“Yes,” she told me, “I had brothers, sisters, cousins galore. But I was the oddball and they never let me forget it. I loved to dance. My dancing daughter, Mama called me. Can’t she keep those feet still for a blessed minute? Papa would grunt. Any new arrival to the homestead, my brothers introduced me as The Dancing Fool.

“My mother despaired of me ever settling down, a proper mouse-wife with a brood of my own. I’m going to go out into the world, I informed everyone, constantly, and do big things, just you see if I don’t! Folks like us, Mama would reply, do not do big things.

“She’s too clever for her own good, she told Papa. She’s in for an unhappy time of it. She fails as a social creature. She thinks highly of herself, expends no effort concealing it. She is known far and wide as “that Snodgrass snot.”

“My father, a peaceable soul, made a joke of it: “Our Little Monster. Nothing we can say is going to hold her back. All we can do is be here to welcome her with open arms when Broadway kicks her in the teeth, as it inevitably will.”

“We knew what was going on in the world, even out in Kansas.”

“I’d heard of the Follies, the Vanities. I had a friend in the rich man’s house on the hill. Her mother had a subscription to Vogue. Ella and me, we pored over each issue, tore out our favorite looks and papered her bedroom wall with them.

“The family possessed a gramophone, and a large number of recordings. Ell would make am up-tempo selection. We practiced our high kicks, splits, and cartwheels. She took classes at Miss Florinda’s Academy of the Acrobatic Arts. I was able to copy her moves exactly. She snuck me into the lessons, so I could have the benefit of expert coaching.

“How’d we meet? I’d listen to music from her porch, bobbing to the beat. Catching me at it, she encouraged me. Her ambition was to one day head a dancing school herself. I was a start along that path, her first pupil.

“Miss Florinda, a smart businesswoman, knew which side her bread was buttered on. The daughter of a leading citizen had her closest attention. Judge Hardy also happened to own the building the Academy was housed in. She got a nice break on the rent. What Ella wanted, Ella got.

“She wanted me costumed, costumed first-rate. No scrap of tulle rudely gathered and tied around my waist. A jeweled bodice, patent leather tap shoes. A tiara! She demanded we do a specialty number in the end-of-year recital, an opportunity given only to the older, most accomplished students.

“Miss Florinda, once she’d observed our sassy stepping, saw an additional pay-off. I was adorable, if I do say so myself. Every dance-happy girl in the city would be clamoring to attend her school, over the several others.

“Ella and me, we thought we were the cat’s pajamas until the Denishawn Dancers(2) came through. Our eyes were opened to the mediocrity of Miss Florinda’s methods. Florinda’s was not the place to explore up-to-date trends in dance.”

Ted Shawn and his wife Ruth St. Denis, Denishawn’s directors, conducted a summer school in New York. Shawn’s contribution consisted of inspirational demonstrations of his matchless balance and control. His assistants taught the nuts-and-bolts of his avant-garde conception of dance. The school was also a means to identify new talent for the touring arm of the enterprise, as essential to their bottom line as the ground-breaking instruction.

Ella begged to attend, begged for months. Her mother, excited for her, seconded the ‘chance of a lifetime’ argument. The Judge agreed to the foray when a middle-aged cousin, seeking to reinvent herself after a divorce, declared an intention of taking the course also.

Maisie smiled serenely, reliving a treasured memory.

“The three of us were bundled, our trunks packed with the smartest outfits to be obtained in Wichita, onto a train to Chicago. Two days later we were installed in a railroad flat at Eighty-Sixth Street and Riverside Drive, ten blocks north of the Denishawn facility, from which a professional troupe sailed forth each fall to dazzle the hinterland with a daring display and, hopefully, to seduce well-heeled parents into paying an astronomical tuition to enlarge the cultural horizons of apple-of-their-eye daughters.

“At summer’s end Ella and her chaperone returned home. I was lucky enough to be asked to join the new tour. Was that a tribute to my abilities? Please! I may be a mouse but I’m not simple-minded. I was a novelty act, no more, no less. But I had my chances to shine. My big number–I choreographed it myself. Uh-huh, ‘Afternoon of the Bumblebee’ was my creation. Guess what? Ted Shawn, that doll baby, loved it, didn’t change a thing. Put that in your pipe and smoke it.

“Here’s how it went: I paced before a screen painted with wildflowers of the lowest sort. My face said Huh! Nothing special there. Then my nose began to twitch. I’d caught a whiff of something grand. My eyes widened, my expression, my entire attitude, pure bliss.(3)

Maisie stood, wiggling her sweet pink nose vigorously, conveying the apprehension of an intoxicating scent. It was a bewitching bit of business.

“ The backdrop was slid aside, revealing a dozen long-stemmed beauties writhing fetchingly. I set to work collecting my pollen. It was a sort of intermission. The hot shots got a potty break and the juniors of the troupe had their moment in the sun, in theory, at least. I’m tellin’ ya, I owned that stage. No one out-dances me. Honey, them roses hated me like nobody’s business.”

I asked her once, Why me? Why do you open up to a loser like me, you who’ve hung out with the rich and famous?

“I like you,” she said. “I can spot a phony a mile away. You’re not trying to get away with anything. When you’re Maisie Mulot, everyone wants something from you. In the six years I’ve known you, you’ve never asked for a thing.”

“Forgive me for being blunt,” I replied, “but you’ve fallen far. What do you have to give, that anyone wants?”

She groaned. “Many a film student has tried to impress me with wildly uninformed flattery, expecting me to be a forlorn old actress full of gratitude, eager to share memories they might rephrase, sign their names to, and present to the teachers of their film classes as the result of weeks of research. It did not take me long to realize they’d seen few of my films. You’ve studied my work. You talk intelligently about it. Do you know how rare it is, to find someone like you?”

“I’m an introvert,” I said. “You know that. Film and books have been key to my survival. The world exhausts me. I tolerate it only in small doses.”

I took her many a night to hear jazz, folk, sometimes rock. She was no stick-in-the-mud, she loved music of all sorts. Okay, she didn’t go for Rap, but neither do I. Walking home, with her safe in my shirt pocket, we would discuss the merits of what we’d heard. People we passed seemed to believe I was talking to myself. We found that hilarious.

She’s gone now. I planted her in Central Park, near Strawberry Fields, she being big on the Beatles. Her resting place is unmarked, but I know the spot exactly. I visit there with a flask (natch) of Mulots (ditto).(4) I toast: Here’s to you, Maisie gal, I miss ya, babe. Life ain’t the same without you. I spill a good gulp down my throat, another over the grave. A ritual chomp on the celery–ya gotta have celery. No celery, it ain’t a Mulot–and I shove the stalk under a bush. Some poor critter thereabouts will appreciate it.

(1) Some of you will recognize that I’ve based Maisie’s formative years on those of the actress Louise Brooks. Many phrases here, messed with to one extent or another, have been lifted from LuLu in Hollywood, a collection of pieces written by Ms. Brooks (Intro by William Shawn, editor at The New Yorker; no relation to Ted Shawn), published by Alfred A. Knopf in 1983.

(2) Ted Shawn and his wife Ruth St. Denis, a dance innovator who influenced almost every phase of American dance, taught their method of “music visualization” — a concept that called for movement equivalents to the timbres, dynamics, and structural shapes of music in addition to its rhythmic base. The Denishawn School of Dance and Related Arts was the first major center of dance experimentation in the country.

(3) Were a mouse’s minuscule gyrations noted? High society flocked to those shows, toting their opera glasses. Dance students used them to scrutinize positions. The mamas admired Shawn’s magnificent instrument (his bod, folks, he was a stunning man). Devotees of the dance took in a show by the Denishawn spyglass in hand.

(4) For the history of the cocktail known as the Mulot, see the Introduction.

Read Part Two, Ziegfeld Girl here