Stars In Her Eyes
Maisie in Hollywood, Part Three / Queens to the Camera Coast
Read part two at: https://medium.com/the-haven/maisie-pals-with-fanny-brice-in-the-ziegfeld-follies-53f4a7d947f9
Maybelle (‘Maisie’) Snodgrass had come a long way.
And I don’t mean miles-wise, though she’d relocated herself as far from the cornfields of Kansas as it’s possible to do without leaving the country.
She hadn’t fit in back home. She didn’t fit in in New York either. For one thing, she read. For her kind (a movie-starlet in the making) to read–unheard of! For her to read Schopenhauer, and Proust–was it a ploy, to attract attention? It put people off. She was considered a real weirdo.
She read, didn’t care who found it hilarious. She wasn’t tempted to feign conventional tastes, to refrain from challenging suppositions of who she was and what she could be. She insisted on being herself, come what may.
There are entertainers who find their groove and stick with it forever-and-ever-amen.
Mae West would be one such. The world moves on, they don’t. They become caricatures of themselves.
Humphrey Bogart, also a stick-with-it type, was smarter about it. He expanded our notion of what makes for a tough-guy. His tough-guy has depth. He’s a complicated though often inarticulate man dealing with the fruits of his poor choices.
His tough-guy was initially an act. He liked the feel of it, adopted the stance off-screen with his hard-living ways. He was raised the privileged son of a foremost illustrator, Maud Humphrey. Considered a handsome young man, he made a name on Broadway playing male ingenues–well-mannered college boys and gentlemanly cads. That sort of role has a short life-span, one ages out with depressing certainty. His career was going nowhere until he found his inner thug in The Petrified Forest. He found his groove. It boosted him to super-stardom.
Fanny had found success with her low comedy. She had a fine singing voice, with torch songs her specialty, but her just-off-the-boat schtick is what had gotten her where she was, she didn’t dare discard it.
Her baby-talking Snooks character was one step above Saturday-morning-cartoons. Maisie begged her to smarten it up. “First off,” she said, “cut back on the mugging. Mugging is no substitute for wit.” Fanny’s humor was a blunt instrument. She beat you over the head with it.
“You don’t get it,” Brice replied. “I’m playing to the slobs in the second balcony.”
“You don’t need to be so dumb about it. Aim for sly, rather than third-grade silly.”
“A nervy nobody from cornball Kansas calls me dumb! Okay, big brain. Give me a for-instance. How do I do it?”
I’ve watched a lot of video clips of Brice the last couple of days, and I’ve listened to a good number of her radio broadcasts. I should do more research before I throw this out but, at the moment, I feel I have an acceptable scenario. I’ll modify my position when I find info to the contrary. And I’m writing fiction, don’t forget that.
In the videos, Brice mugs up a storm. I’d say it was her instinctive reaction to a live audience. In the radio shows she seems to be of a calmer disposition. I imagine the grimaces were kept to a minimum, no peanut gallery (at best, a small one) to play to. In a theater setting she cut loose with her facial antics. On the radio, unseen, she toned down. When she got into film, manic got the upper hand once again.
Another possibility: she understood that the act was pablum, and tried to distract from the obvious.
Maisie was ahead of her time. She went for natural exposition ten years before the style came in. In the mid-thirties English actors demonstrated to the belting-their-lines Americans how it was done. You spoke to your fellow cast members, not at them. (Leslie Howard taught Bogart the trick, and Bogart ran with it.)
Mulot had Brice’s best interest at heart. The goofy-immigrant accent wouldn’t go out west. Baby Snooks was both more palatable and more fixable. Maisie doctored lines. Brice rejected the revisions. Snooks remained the dopey portrayal of a dopey tyke we see on YouTube, overacted in the accepted, and expected, over-the-top, daffy delivery of the day.
Maisie had tried. She washed her hands of the business. Psychologically, she was already headed for the exit.
Bill Fields had been busy talking her up.
She had an offer from Paramount, and one from MGM. Her dream was still to become a great dancer, but this was an opportunity she could not pass up.
In Walter Wanger, a Lasky’s producer, she found a second protector–Ted Shawn had been the first–who, recognizing that her blasé insolence was a masquerade, took her under his wing. He was, according to Mulot, a brilliant young man with a tender heart. He brought her along, gave her faith in her screen personality and her acting ability.
He advised her, in a fatherly fashion. During an intimate dinner in his apartment he told her, “We must sign you with MGM.”
Shocked, she began to sob. “You don’t want me?” she squealed. “You don’t think I can act?”
“Don’t you see,” he said, “your friendship with me would put you in a vulnerable position at Paramount. Everyone would assume you owed your contract to me, you would be treated accordingly. At MGM you start fresh, completely on your own.”
She signed with Paramount. She and Wanger continued their close (unhealthily so, it was said) relationship. They were gossiped about all over town, but she didn’t care.
Her Astoria-made films were uniformly forgettable.
The neophyte was given cardboard roles in cardboard capers, short films, costing little to make. She made the most of them. In Rolled Stockings, she danced up a storm. Classically trained, she put her companion flaming youth to shame.
The studio saw immediately that they had a small sensation on their hands and gave her prominent billing on their movie cards, posters, and etcetera. She was paraded at press conferences; she always put on a good show for them. She made for good copy, the press clamored to interview her.
She’d been the most unpopular girl in the Follies. She was now the most unpopular actress at Lasky’s, stealing everyone’s thunder.
Wanger was on her team, insisting she be given meaty (not purely novelty) parts. She was Marlene, a run-away fleeing an abusive home (who danced, naturally) in Belinda of the Bowery. She was the best friend of a supper-club chanteuse (a piece of cake for her, as you can imagine) in Diary of a Lost Girl.
She’d been typecast. She vowed to break out of the narrow range of roles she was offered, as she’d broken free of the God-ordained path of a field mouse on the plains of Kansas.
She was up against some heavy-hitters. She begged to play St. Clair Van Corntassel in An Untamed Lady, but lost out to the more experienced Gloria Swanson. The female lead was pronounced beyond her. It was a ho-hum storyline: a wealthy society girl with an unmanageable temper is brought down to earth by the man who loves her.
Honestly, the part wasn’t worthy of her, and, per usual, she would have been expected to dance on table tops. When studio execs looked at her, they thought, champagne-glass-strewn table top.
She was torn. She was accepted by movie audiences as the twinkle-toed cut-up, she had a solid standing on those terms. It was not Denishawn-level artistry, but she found a way to live with it.
Maisie had the edge over her co-stars as a dancer, and she had the edge in another way. Let us not forget that, growing up a mouse, teaching herself to speak (in an understandable way) with enormous effort, she was a master of body language.
I’ve watched as many of her films as I’ve found on YouTube. A slight twitch of the head, a fleeting expression in the eyes, telling manipulations come and go so quickly we don’t realize that we notice them, but they register nonetheless.
The furrowing of the glabella (the area between the eyes) says she is troubled, even before she emphasizes it with a shake of the head. The lopsided frown indicates she is thinking about something very precisely. She leans in slightly, and arches her eyebrows. Mulot, of course, didn’t have eyebrows, but she did a damn good impression of having them. She was a sophisticated non-verbal communicator, a skill essential to silent films.
Do I endow her with an emotional intelligence she did not, in fact, possess? I assure you that I do not. We laughed together, we cried together, we sure enjoyed that weekly feast together. When I was flush I sprang for a bottle of so-so champagne to go with it. And she, who had consumed barrels of the best bubbles in the world, sipped it with murmurs of appreciation, as if it were Dom Pérignon.
She had mellowed since her fly-off-the-handle youth. She erupted now and again, but don’t we all? I took it in stride. She cherished my friendship as much as I cherished hers.
In 1927 the Astoria studio was closed. Maisie was shipped from its cozy closeness to the factory coldness of Hollywood.
Bill Fields was also being relocated. The studio booked them a first-class compartment on the ‘Crescent Limited’, running between Penn Station in Manhattan and Union Passenger Terminal in New Orleans. There they hopped another plush-express that whisked them through arid, big-sky vistas to the up-and-coming Movie Mecca, Los Angeles.
Facing an uncertain future in the shark-tank of Hollywood, they hard-partied for three-thousand miles. Three-thousand miles with W.C. Fields! That’s fun to think about, isn’t it? I’ll have more to say about that joyride by and by.
Fields was a troubled man, but not the buffoon he played on-screen. I’m going to humanize him for you. That’s what Maisie would want me to do. She was very, very fond of him.
In 1928 Wanger left Paramount, after which Mulot had no sympathetic ear in the executive-suite whatsoever. There was no one to act as a buffer between one of a rebellious nature and the big guns, determined to make a quick buck off her.
The phrase go along to get along meant zilch to her. Her popularity was growing by leaps and bounds. Before too long she would be next to impossible to rein in.
Read Maisie in Hollywood / Part Four / One.Tough.Town. at
