This is a guest post for Silent London by Sean Crose, author of Catholic Girl: The Life and Times of Mabel Normand, published by BearManor Media. To order this biography of the iconic silent comedienne, click here.
“My first parts were all in tragedies,” Mabel Normand told the Los Angeles Examiner in 1924. “Mr Griffith never could see me as a comedienne.” Sure enough, Mabel, the pioneering comedic icon of the silent era, got her start in film doing tragedies for director DW Griffith. Difficult though it may be to imagine, Mabel was more apt to be found on screen back then trying to steal the husband of Mary Pickford’s character than performing the groundbreaking, sometimes quite dangerous, slapstick she would become famous for. Over ninety years after Mabel’s death at the far-too-young age of 37, it’s worth asking how she made the transition from tragedy to comedy so masterfully.
The truth is, it all happened quite suddenly – and randomly. “My chance in comedy really came as an accident,” Mabel was to later claim. “There was nothing for me to do, one week, and Mr Griffith sent me down to Huntington, L.I., where the Biograph comedy unit was making a funny picture.” Mabel soon learned the comedy unit had about as much use for her at that moment as Griffith did. Finding herself with nothing to do, Mabel – who grew up swimming off the coast of Staten Island – decided to frolic in the water. And that’s when everything changed.
“As I was diving and swimming around,” Mabel recalled, “it occurred to Mr Powell (the director) that it would make a good scene for the comedy if one of the characters watched me through a pair of binoculars. So they ‘shot’ him as he peered through the glasses and then they came down to the pier and turned the camera on me for a dive or two.” By gleefully frolicking in the water that afternoon the young performer unknowingly presented herself in a new light. Perhaps she wasn’t meant to be a drama queen after all. Mabel suddenly found herself transferred to Biograph’s comedy division.
“I thought it was terrible of Mr Griffith to farm me out to the comedy company,” she later recalled. “Gone were all my dreams of tragedy, of stalking across the set, with the spectators sighing and shuddering at my art.” It didn’t take long, however, for Mabel to understand where her gifts truly were to be found. “I didn’t know my luck,” she later admitted. “Opportunity was knocking and I was totally deaf to her insistence.” In short time, however, Mabel had transformed into “a determined and unrepentant comedienne”. A star was soon to be born, but first Mabel had to find her way in a comedic world where women were sadly the butt of jokes rather than the sources of them.
“I had nobody to tell me what to do,” Mabel would go on to say of her early days in comedy. “Dramatic actresses had the stage to fall back on, the sure-fire hits of theatrical history in pose and facial expression; but I had to do something that nobody had ever done before… I had no precedent, nothing to imitate, for Flora Finch’s art, based as it was on her angularity and candidly exploited homeliness, never would have fitted me. Other comediennes with equal frankness got their laughs with their fat bodies or their somewhat ghastly grotesquery of gesture.” Mabel, however, was slight and attractive.
“Since all previous laughs had been achieved through the spoken word and, in our early days, through slapstick hokey,” she would recall, “I had to cleave a new path to laughter through the wilderness of the industry’s ignorance and inexperience. I created my own standard of fun, simply letting spontaneity and my inborn sense of what is mirth-provoking guide me, for no director ever taught me a thing.” Needless to say, Mabel’s “own standard of fun” meant defying conventions.
She was pretty; she was photogenic; she was energetic; but Mabel was also daring, allowing herself to be literally dragged through the mud in one film (A Muddy Romance, 1913), or flown in a dangerously primitive airplane in another (A Dash Through the Clouds, 1912). Mabel could literally play with a bear (The Brave Hunter, 1912), hang out a high window (Mickey, 1918), lead a lion around on a leash (The Extra Girl, 1923), or go tit-for-tat with the likes of Ford Sterling (Barney Oldfield’s Race for a Life, 1913) and Charlie Chaplin (Mabel at the Wheel, 1914). Mabel more than made audiences laugh, she redefined what women could and couldn’t do on screen. Sure enough, Mabel would send up the damsel-in-distress trope by handling matters on her own, or sometimes by saving the male lead. When one of her damsels DID pass out from the madness around her it was apt to happen twice within seconds just to make sure the satirical nature of the film was complete.
Besides being a comedienne, Mabel was also a director, produce and even a studio head. Above all, however, she was an artist. Just like other true artists, she took a form of entertainment and made it something greater, something beyond what was before one’s eyes. That, perhaps more than anything, is why she should be held in high regard today.
By Sean Crose
- There was no one like her. A self-taught performer who redefined screen comedy, Mabel Normand rose from a humble background to become one of the most popular and wealthy entertainers on earth. Here was a woman who did her own stunts, directed, and mentored Charlie Chaplin (who was older than she), associated with royalty, and who ran her own studio before the age of 30. And all at a time when women weren’t allowed to vote in the United States. Unfortunately, Normand’s enormously influential life has at times been overshadowed by scandals and unfair accusations. Her legacy deserves better. Here’s the incredible story of a true Hollywood pioneer. Click to buy from Amazon.
- Read more about Mabel Normand.
- Looking for a female version of Laurel and Hardy?
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