“Actress Profile: Colleen Moore” by S.M. O’Connor

“Colleen Moore” was the screen name of Kathleen Morrison (1902-1988), a silent film star who made a second fortune for herself through stock market investments. Her younger brother, Cleeve Palmer Morrison (1904-1954) acted under the name Cleeve Moore. Their first cousin, Jack Stone, son of their aunt Beatrice Kelly Stone (later Beatrice Warren), also appeared in her films.[1] Not many people watch silent films these days, but there are certain silent film stars whose names are familiar to living film buffs. The reason is that when film buffs read books or articles about later films written by film critics in the mid-20^th Century who remembered silent films, they would make references to silent film stars who left an impression. In Colleen Moore’s case, she is remembered for having been the model for the flappers of the 1920s and for building a magnificent dollhouse with she toured in the late 1930s to raise money for children’s charities and has been on display at the Museum of Science and Industry since 1949: Colleen Moore’s Fairy Castle.

She was born to Charles Morrison and Agnes Morrison (née Kelly).[2] Her biographer Jeff Codori argued Kathleen Morrison may have been born on August 19, 1899 instead of August 19, 1902, but she may also have had an elder sister with the same name who died in infancy.[3] [Back in the bad old days when infant mortality was high, it was common for parents to name babies after elder brothers or sisters who had died in infancy or early childhood.] She was a Yankee born in Port Huron, Michigan who grew up in the Deep South.[4] She spent much of her childhood in Atlanta, Georgia and Tampa, Florida.[5] Between 1908 and 1910, the Morrison family and Agnes Morrison’s mother, Mary Kelly (née Moylan) lived at 301 Capitol Avenue, 41 Linden Avenue, and 240 North Jackson Street in Atlanta.[6] She likely attended the school of the Shrine of the Immaculate Conception while her younger brother, Cleeve, went to a boarding school.[7] By 1911, the Morrison family and Mrs. Kelly had moved to Tampa, Florida, where they resided at 215 Magnolia Street.[8] She attended at the Academy of the Holy Names, where she studied piano.[9] On May 28, 1911, she and Cleeve received First Communion at Sacred Heart Catholic Church.[10] Her parents hoped she would become a concert pianist, but she wanted to become an actress and she and her brother performed plays (written and directed by her) in the back yard as The Hyde Park Stock Company.[11]

In her autobiography, Silent Star, Colleen Moore revealed that many of the teenage actresses who became featured players, if not film stars, had their big break as a result of a “payoff” as she termed it, a social favor a filmmaker owed someone outside the film industry, and she was one such star.[12] In her case, the filmmaker was D.W. Griffith, the first American director of epic films – Birth of a Nation (1915) and Intolerance: Love’s Struggle Throughout the Ages (1916) – and the person he owed a favor to her was Uncle Walter, a newspaper editor in Chicago.[13] The second husband of her favorite aunt, Elizabeth Liberty (“Libby”) Kelly Board Howey, was Walter Howey, Editor of the Chicago Examiner.[14] [Her first husband had been J.L. “Lew” Board.[15]] Libby Howey was the first wife of Walter Crawford Howey (1881-1954), a legendary newspaperman who worked in Chicago and Boston, broke the story about the Iroquois Theater Fire in 1903, was closely associated with William Randolph Hearst (1863-1951), and was the inspiration for the newspaper editor in The Front Page. Cathleen Moore’s biographer, Jeff Codori, noted, “They were both energetic, exciting people whose epic arguments, were the stuff of legend, at least in Kathleen’s mind.”[16]

Lib and Walter’s arguments were loud and dramatic, epic opportunities to ‘try out their vocabularies.’ They were small dramas for Kathleen to watch, each as exciting as any film or play. At times they would argue over Kathleen; Liberty doted on her, calling her the ‘child of her soul,’ while Walter would reply she was the ‘child of his imagination.’ It made her feel like ‘some pumpkins.’ They both adored her.[17]

One of the things young Kathleen Morrison loved about visits to her aunt and uncle in Chicago was that she could take the streetcar from their apartment to the Essanay Company movie studio at 1333-1345 West Argyle.[18] When Walter & Libby resided at 4161 Sheridan Road, the Northwestern L ran past their apartment building.[19] Kathleen could board at Buena Station and two train stops later get off at Argyle at 1118 West Argyle. [20] [The Argyle stop is now on the Red Line Chicago Transit Authority’s “L” (elevated railroad).] The route remained the same when Walter & Libby moved to 4942 Sheridan.[21]

Griffith owed Howey a favor because Griffith screened Birth of a Nation in the roadshow format, taking it from place to place, where he or a promoter would screen it in an auditorium, but it was difficult to show the extremely controversial film Birth of a Nation in Chicago, where he had trouble with the censors, and Howey helped him deal with the censorship board.[22] When Griffith answered critics who were angered by Birth of a Nation with his lavish production Intolerance, it, too, had difficulty getting past the Chicago censorship board and once again Howey aided Griffith negotiate with the censors.[23] In gratitude, Griffith asked Howey how he could repay him and Howey explained he had a young niece down in Florida who wanted to become an actress.[24] Griffith was dismayed because he had many such requests, but felt obliged to give the girl a chance.[25] One long-distance telephone call from Chicago to Tampa, and the Morrison family learnt that Griffith was offering fifteen-year-old Kathleen Morrison a six-month-long contract.[26] She related in Silent Star that Carmel Myers (1899-1980); Mildred Harris (1901-1944), whom Charlie Chaplin (1889-1977) wed when she was just sixteen; and Winifred Westover (1899-1978) were payoffs like her.[27]

It was Howey who chose “Colleen Moore” as the screen name for Kathleen Morrison.[28] He felt Colleen would appeal to Irish-Americans and replaced Morrison with the shorter Moore because it would more easily fit on a cinema’s marquee.[29] Moore was a family name as the younger of Charles Morrison’s two older sisters, Lizzie, had married a grocer with the surname Moore.[30] Kathleen Morrison’s grandmother, Mary Kelly, accompanied her to Hollywood to act as her chaperone.[31] First, though, Kathleen Morrison, her mother, Agnes, and grandmother, Mary, went to Chicago where Kathleen underwent a screen test at Essanay Studios to ascertain if her eyes looked alike in front of a motion picture camera at a time when the irises of blue-eyed people sometimes looked white.[32] [Kathleen had one brown eye and one blue eye.[33]] There, Colleen met the youngest actress on the lot, Helen Ferguson, who noted Kathleen was able to cry on command.[34] The difference in color of her eyes were not a problem.[35] Subsequently, Agnes signed the contract for Kathleen.[36]

Uncle Walter saw Colleen Moore, Agnes Morrison, and Mary Kelly off at the train station in Chicago on Tuesday, November 21, 1916.[37] He gave Agnes a newspaper with an article about the new actress Colleen Moore and he gave Cathleen a letter that read, “Hollywood, where you will now be living, is inhabited by a race of people called Press Agents. The studios pay them a lot of money to think up stories about the players under contract and to persuade the editors like me to print their stories. So the moral of this letter is: never believe one damned word you read about yourself.”[38] Her grandmother helped her negotiate subsequent contracts.[39] [Under the old studio system, instead of actors and actresses (as well as directors, screenwriters, technicians, artists, craftsmen, and laborers) being paid per film or per television show episode, they were paid under studio contract on a weekly basis.] Her grandmother encouraged her to ask for more money after each motion picture was released.[40] When she finally signed a contract for $10,000 per week, her grandmother replied, “You should have asked for $20,000.”[41]

Between the ages of seventeen and twenty-one, she appeared in nineteen films. Colleen Moore’s first film was a five-reeler called The Bad Boy and she found out from other actresses the studio provided nothing so she would have to both supply and apply her own makeup.[42] Youth was everything. Writing about what Klieg lamps and Cooper-Hewitt lights did to the appearance of skin, Colleen Moore later noted, “Only the youngest, clearest, wrinkle-free skins could stand up to the scrutiny of closeups under their harsh glare.”[43] In her L.A. Times obituary, Burt A. Folkart noted, “The executives and the men who ran the studios were not much older than the stars they partied with: Irving Thalberg was 28 and shortly would be the power behind Louis B. Mayer’s throne at Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer; Bud Schulberg of Paramount was 33, Bernie Fineman, who would head RKO, was 30 and John McCormick, Western representative of First National Studios, was 29. He became the first of her four husbands.”[44]

America was preoccupied by such youth. And actresses who photographed much beyond the age of 16 often found themselves returning to their hometowns via bus. Enter Billy Bitzer, a Griffith cameraman who had taken a piece of fine net used normally for veils and placed it over the camera lens.[45]

She noticed that Robert Harron, her leading man in The Bad Boy, who wants to back out of a bank robbery when he sees his childhood sweetheart, was more subdued in his gestures then the silent film actors she had seen before on screen.[46] Sometimes, her grandmother would meet her at the studio and they would walk home together.[47] At night, she would go over lessons that arrived weekly from the convent school with a tutor.[48]

In March of 1917, D.W. Griffith severed his ties with the Fine Arts Film Company and Triangle Pictures and went to Europe to film Hearts of the World at the instigation of the British War Department.[49] Consequently, Colleen Moore found herself unemployed, but the way she found out is that when she showed up to collect her paycheck, instead of a check there was a note in the envelope that read, “We regret to have to dispense with your artistic services.”[50] She was afraid her grandmother would pack up and they would leave, but instead she told her she had some money saved up and Colleen should remind the studio she was under contract.[51] Frank Woods told her she was a good employee, her contract would be honored, and she could stay on for at least six more months.[52] When Griffith summoned many of his stock company players to join him in France, including Harron and the Gish sisters, Colleen was not among their number.[53] She sat around with Eli Clark Bidwell waiting to hear what she should do next until director Rupert Julian at Universal asked her to join his next production and John A. Barry approved her being released from her contract with Triangle for five weeks.[54] It took only two weeks in August for Colleen to film her supporting role in The Savage (1917).[55] She returned to Bidwell, who wrote Griffith’s lawyer in New York City, Banzhaf, to ascertain if it was all right to resume paying Colleen her $50 per week salary she had been paid since the studio closed.[56] In late September, Banzhaf authorized Bidwell to pay her $100.[57] By the end of October, Bidwell informed Banzhaf Colleen was broke.[58] A month before her contract expired, John A. Barry, the newly-elected Secretary of DWG Incorporated renewed her contract.[59]

In 1918, she signed a contract with Selig Polyscope, which filmed productions at Eastlake Park, a location where Col. William Selig also had the Selig Zoo, and she enjoyed playing with the tigers.[60] She went for an interview with director Colin Campbell, who asked her, “Are you related to Lib Howey?” She replied, “Yes, she’s my aunt,” and he responded, “You have the job.”[61] At the height of his fortunes, Col. Selig had owned three movie studios, one in Chicago and two in L.A., but he had been forced to sell his Edendale studio to William Fox (1879-1952), the founder of Fox Film Corporation, in 1916.[62] Consequently, Col. Selig had consolidated his California operations at his studio on Allesandro Street, where he also had his private zoo.[63] One of the causes for Selig’s decline in fortunes was that at a time when Griffith was making longer and longer films and inspiring other filmmakers to make long films (at least as long as what became standard feature-length films), Selig was convinced there would be more demand for short films and continued to make two reelers.[64] At Selig Polyscope, she filmed A Hoosier Romance (1918) and Little Orphan Annie (1919), both inspired by poems by James Whitcomb Riley (1849-1916).[65] The interior scenes for A Hoosier Romance were filmed at the studio on Allesandro Street, but the script had been written in Chicago on La Salle Hotel stationary.[66] Campbell told the press he had found her in a high school production of The Cornhuskers at Lakeview High School in Chicago.[67]

Her grandmother had been encouraging her to ask for double what studios offered, and Colleen Moore thought she was supposed to be paid $150 per week for Little Orphan Annie, and was angry when the contract called for her to be paid $125, but Selig’s manager in L.A., James L. McGee, assured her this was a mistake and the real contract mailed to Agnes to sign was for $150, but this was a lie.[68] Riley himself appeared in the film posthumously, which was possible because Selig Polyscope had filmed him for the Inter-State Historical Pictures Corporation.[69] Exterior shots were filmed in the San Francisco Bay Area in December of 1917.[70] After production of Little Orphan Annie wrapped up, Colleen Moore was concerned about the future of Selig Polyscope, started to negotiate with a prospective new employer, and in September of 1918 sent Col. Selig a telegram in Chicago in which she asked to be released from her contract, but he did not consent and she dropped negotiations with the other company.[71] On October 17, 1918, she wrote Col. Selig a letter in which she stated Mr. McGee had told her that her contract would not be renewed, although she had read in the press Col. Selig did intend to begin producing films again, and she did enjoy making the two Riley films, especially Little Orphan Annie.[72] Less than a week later, on October 23, 1918, she wrote “Mr. Col. Selig” again.[73] She wrote, in part, “All the misunderstandings about ulcers was too bad and things have been wrongly represented to you – that’s one reason I want to go East, to see you and straighten things out myself. But I cannot afford to go and not received my money. I didn’t know you would care, as I do nothing but loaf, and go to school now.”[74] Little Orphan Annie, which was based on a poem by James Whitcomb Riley years before the comic strip heroine existed, was a success at the box office upon its release in December of 1918, but the studio folded in 1919, and, once again, Colleen Moore was unemployed.[75] This is her oldest film that we can still watch today. Eric Grayson has restored the film (as much as possible) from different prints with the cooperation of the Library of Congress and a combination Blu-ray/D.V.D. is available with a commentary track by Colleen Moore’s biographer Jeff Codori. Agnes Morrison joined her daughter and mother in California and her husband and son followed her.[76]

Colleen Moore next went to work for Fox, where she became the leading lady for cowboy movie star Tom Mix (1880-1940), a silent film star who is still so famous he could be name-dropped as having been a pallbearer at the funeral of Wyatt Earp in the closing narration of Tombstone (1993). The last line of the film is “Tom Mix wept.” Colleen Moore’s other early leading men included John Gilbert (1899-1936) and John Barrymore (1882-1942).[77]

She made at least two films with Tom Mix: The Wilderness Trail (1919) and The Cyclone (1920). The Wilderness was set in Canada, but they filmed it in Flagstaff, Arizona after a snowstorm late in the winter of 1918-1919.[78] After she filmed The Wilderness, Colleen Moore went to work again for Universal, which reunited her with her with Monroe Salisbury from The Savage, but she would be the leading lady in Devils Have Their Friends, which Universal released as The Man in the Moonlight.[79] This was another film set in Canada.[80] Director Paul Powell filmed interior scenes at Universal City and exterior scenes in the San Bernardino Mountains.[81] The fact the French-Canadian villain, Rossignol (Monroe Salisbury), dressed as a gaucho from South America[82] suggests an inability or unwillingness on the part of Powell or Salisbury to distinguish between the cultural characteristics of different Latin, Catholic ethnic groups. Rossignol dies in the arms of the woman who loves him and Rosine (Colleen Moore) weds Sergeant O’Farrell (William Stowell) of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police after he resigns and they move to the U.S.A.[83]

Next, she made The Egg Crate Wallop (1919), a comedy the Thomas H. Ince Studio made for Paramount Pictures.[84] This production reunited her with director Jerome Storm (1890-1958) and leading man Charles Ray (1891-1943).[85] Ray played Jim Kelly a weight-lifter-turned-boxer who clears his former boss, railroad express agent Dave Haskell (J.P. Lockney), of a crime so he can wed the elder man’s daughter, Kitty Haskell (Colleen Moore). An interest in making comedies despite the fact they had less prestige than dramas led her to strike a deal with Charles Christie of the Christie Comedy Company whereby Christie would pay her $200 per week but she could also “rent myself out” as she later put it.[86] Accompanied by her mother, in October of 1919, she made The Cyclone in Prescott, Arizona with Tom Mix, who wanted to work with her again.[87] She was eager to acquire new skills and Buck Jones (1891-1942), another cowboy star like Tom Mix, taught her how to use a lariat and roll a cigarette one-handed.[88]

Colleen Moore was sufficiently self-aware to know while she was attractive she was not classically beautiful, yet she had a knack for comedy, so she studied with director-producer Mack Sennett (1880-1960), who had coached Charley Chaplin, as well as with Chaplin.[89]

Colleen Moore was younger than Lillian Gish, Mary Pickford (1892-1979), and Gloria Swanson (1899-1983), all of whom were in their early twenties when she was in her teens, but they were still playing teenagers.[90] She was definitely a success, but she had trouble moving up at First National Pictures, also known as First National Studios, from being a featured player to being a full-fledged star.[91] All of that changed when she wed John McCormick (1893-1961), who was a press agent for First National Pictures.[92] They were married from 1923 to 1930. He was astute at promoting himself as well as her pictures, and soon after they became engaged he was promoted to the position of assistant to the head of production.[93]

In her previous virginal roles, her long hair had often been curled in a process that took several hours each day.[94] Following the conventions of the late Victorian and Edwardian eras when filmmaking was invented, both as a technology and as an industry, actresses had long hair, worn down if they were maidens, and worn up if they were matrons.[95] To get the lead role in Flaming Youth (1923), she cut her long hair short.[96]

This film was an adaptation of the risqué novel of the same, written by Warner Fabian, which was the nom de plume used by the muckraking journalist Samuel Hopkins Adams (1871-1958). Her uninhibited character in that film, Patricia Frentiss, did things like wear her galoshes unbuckled so they flapped, because it was fun.[97] The scandalous film was banned in Boston.[98] So many college co-eds emulated her, getting their hair bobbed and wearing their galoshes unbuckled so they flapped, that they became known as flappers.[99] “I was the spark that lit up Flaming Youth,” said F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896-1940), whose novel This Side of Paradise also helped capture the zeitgeist of young Americans in the 1920s. “Colleen Moore was the torch.” [100] When John McCormick and Colleen Moore went on their honeymoon in Europe, throngs of fans greeted them at every turn. When they returned to Hollywood, she was offered a contract for $4,000 per week (a phenomenal sum when a person could eat for less than a $1 per day) and he was promoted to production head.[101] The Library of Congress has a single reel of Flaming Youth, so it is a lost film.[102]

Cleeve Moore appeared with her in We Moderns (1925).[103] Alfred E. Green (1889-1960) directed Ella Cinders (1926), which was a twist on Cinderella where instead of going to a ball at the royal palace and marrying a prince, the heroine goes to Hollywood, wins a contract with a studio, and reunites with her football player boyfriend. The movie paired her with Lloyd Hughes (1897-1958), who was also her leading man in Irene (1926). Shortly before Irene was released, the studio released to the press a short autobiography Colleen Moore had written, The Story of My Life.[104]

She recounted in Silent Star that people in the movie industry did not mix socially with others whom she called “private” people in Los Angeles.[105] To the public, John and Colleen’s lives seemed idyllic, but in reality they were deeply troubled because he went on drinking binges every month-and-a-half-to-two-months, starting with their wedding night.[106] As a devout Catholic, she could not get a divorce, and she forgave him after each episode for years.[107]

Colleen Moore had a deep appreciation of the Book of Kells, which she (accurately) described as a “beautifully illuminated manuscript of the Latin Gospels.”[108] When she was a little girl, her grandmother told her about it and as an adult she was able to see the book for herself at Trinity College during a trip to Dublin (specifically to see the book) in 1926 while she was in London to film exterior shots for a film.[109] She made at least two films that were set in Ireland: Come on Over (1922) and Smiling Irish Eyes (1929). Samuel Goldwyn (1879-1974) produced, Rupert Hughes (1872-1956) wrote, and the aforementioned Alfred E. Green directed Come on Over, the basic plot of which was recycled in Smiling Irish Eyes. In both films, she played an Irish lass whose sweetheart emigrated to the U.S.A. with a promise to send for her only for her to join him there and see him with another girl, leading to a misunderstanding. Smiling Irish Eyes was the last film produced by the Colleen Moore unit at First National.[110] She played Kathleen O’Connor and James Hall (1900-1940) played Rory O’More.

In County Kerry, Rory O’More, a musician who works in a peat bog, writes the song “Smiling Irish Eyes” with his sweetheart, Kathleen O’Connor. “Black” Barney O’Toole (Tom O’Brien) breaks his violin and steals her pig. The next day, she catches the greased pig at the fair and wins enough money to send Rory to America to study music. In New York City, he faithfully writes her a letter every day, but the fool does not mail them because he wants to wait until he had good news to send them. Feeling neglected, she borrows money to emigrate herself. In the Garrick Theatre, she finds him playing “Smiling Irish Eyes” on stage while a girl kisses him, and consequently she flees back to Ireland. He follows and they reconcile in the Old Country before the family, as a whole, emigrates. American critics tended to single out Colleen Moore as having given a good performance in a bad film.[111] From the premise, this seems like a story that Irishmen in Ireland and the Irish Diaspora around the world would love like The Quiet Man (1952), but in Ireland there were complaints about “stage Irishness” when it was screened at the Savoy Cinema in Dublin in 1930. There was a demonstration four days after the film’s debut there and the exhibition of the film was cancelled. Mary Manning opined in the Irish Statesman that the studio must have run out of Irish costumes because in crowd scenes she spotted “Breton fisherfolk and Tyrolese peasants.”

Colleen Moore’s parents moved to Hollywood so they could more readily offer her comfort.[112] While on vacation with her parents in Hawaii in 1928, her father, Charles Morrison, suggested they build her largest dollhouse yet to contain her expansive collection of miniature furniture.[113] Charles Morrison was chief engineer and superintendent of the project, and was assisted by master-technician Gerald (“Jerry”) Rouleau, Senior.[114] Architect Horace Jackson (1898-1952), who was a set designer for First National Studios, drew the blueprints.[115] Harold Grieve, who had designed the interior of her mansion, designed the interior of her dollhouse-castle.[116] Colleen Moore spent almost twice on the construction of her dollhouse-castle what she spent on construction of her Bel Air mansion.[117] She embarked on this mission about the same time that Hollywood was making the transition from silent films to talkies.

Singer, comedian, and stage and screen actor Al Jolson (1886-1950) starred in the first talkie, The Jazz Singer (1927), and it ushered in a new era for the moviemaking industry. Actors and actresses could no longer simply pantomime performances they would have performed on stage if they were stage actors (or actresses) or in imitation of stage performers if they had no such experience. They had to develop a new style of acting suitable for audiovisual recording and playback in cinemas where every audience member could hear their lines, unlike in traditional theaters, where actors and actresses had to perform physically and vocally in such a way that audience members in the very back could understand what was happening on stage. This lead to underacting on screen, which can be as unrepresentative of how people act and react to events in real life as overacting on stage. Actors and actresses also had to learn to redub their lines in postproduction when something went wrong with the process of audio recording their lines on set during production. The owners of cinemas also had to install speakers in auditoriums, which was a not inconsiderable expense.

Not all silent film stars were able to make the transition to talkies, which inspired the romantic comedy/musical Singin’ in the Rain (1952).[118] Terry Ann R. Neff gave Norma Talmadge (1894-1957) and John Gilbert as two examples. “Famous silent-screen beauty Norma Talmadge destroyed her sultry, exotic image when her first speaking roles revealed her thick Brooklyn accent. The high-pitched voice of American heart-throb John Gilbert, the love of Greta Garbo’s life, clashed with his silent-movie image.”[119] Colleen Moore did not suffer this fate, as her career continued into talkies, so she was not strictly a silent film star. William A. Seiter (1890-1964) directed her in two musicals: the aforementioned Smiling Irish Eyes and Footlights and Fools (1929). Cleeve Moore appeared in the latter film with his sister.[120]

To distract herself for her deteriorating marriage, Colleen Moore devoted her mental energies and material resources into the construction of a mansion, the interior design of which was handled by studio art director Harold Grieve.[121] She spent $250,000 to create her estate in Bel Air.[122] The mansion had separate suites for Colleen and John.[123] As his drinking problem grew progressively worse, he packed on weight and wrecked his liver.[124] After their contracts at First National expired, he promised he would negotiate new contracts with a different studio.[125] He managed to pull himself together while Footlights and Fools was in production and their mansion was under construction, and during this period he gave her a bracelet she treasured, but he got drunk and disappeared again the day before they were due to move in.[126] As a result, she moved in by herself.[127] A few days later she received a phone call from Hollywood Hospital, where he had turned up.[128] This time, instead of rushing to his side, she called his parents, and they brought him to her.[129] His mother begged Colleen not to give up on him and she agreed to give him one more chance to embrace sobriety.[130] He managed to resume work as a producer.[131] She feared if she was not gentle in her treatment of him he might relapse and complied when he asked her to call him “Daddy,” as she had in the past.[132] He fell off the wagon again after two weeks.[133] He continued to operate as her business manager and tried to negotiate a deal for the creation of another Colleen Moore production unit, this time at United Artists.[134] After he told her in a drunken rage on the evening of September 18, 1929 that he had made her a star and could unmake her, they separately moved out of the mansion the next day.[135] She moved back in with her parents.[136] For a few weeks, they tried to maintain the appearance of being married.[137] She would return to her ostensible home, the Bel Air mansion, in the evening, only to go to her parents later each night.[138] She would entertain friends at the mansion.[139] In October, she and John went to New York City for contract negotiations which either broke down or were abortive on October 20, 1929 when she suffered an attack of appendicitis.[140] Her parents flew to New York City, and the three of them flew back to L.A., where she underwent an appendectomy at Hollywood Hospital.[141] Finally, she and McCormick legally separated and she began to date another man.[142] On another drinking binge, he tried to commit suicide by swimming out into the Pacific Ocean, but friends rescued him.[143]

Their marriage inspired What Price Hollywood? (1932), a pre-Hayes Code film based on a story by Adela Rogers St. Johns (1894-1988). It was directed by George Cukor (1899-1983) and starred Constance Bennett (1904-1965) and Lowell Sherman (1885-1934). David O. Selznick (1902-1965) produced this film and R.K.O.-Pathé released it. The marriage of John McCormick and Colleen Moore also inspired A Star is Born (1937),[144] which has been remade thrice, and recycled the basic premise of What Price Hollywood? but turned the alcoholic director who kills himself when his self-destructive behavior begins to wreck the life of his protégée (as well as his own) with a gunshot into an alcoholic actor who kills himself by swimming out to sea. It also combined the characters of the alcoholic director who is the patron of the waitress who wants to become an actress with that of the husband.

Selznick also produced A Star is Born (1937), which was a Technicolor film released by United Artists. William A. Wellman (1896-1975) directed it. He wrote the story with Robert Carson (1908-1983) and the husband-and-wife screenwriting team of Alan K. Campbell (1904-1963) and Dorothy Parker (1893-1967) wrote the final script. Janet Gaynor (1906-1984) played the aspiring actress Esther Blodgett. Frederic March (1897-1975) played the alcoholic matinee idol Norman Maine, who plucked Esther from obscurity and launches her career only to destroy his own. Maine suggests to his producer friend Oliver Niles (Adolphe Menjou) that he cast Esther as Maine’s leading lady in his next film. Niles gives her the screen name Vicki Lester. Soon after they wed, the ascendant Vicki wins an Academy Award for Best Actress, only for a drunken Maine to spoil the moment for her, which leads him to spiral farther downward. Wellman and Carson won an Academy Award for Best Writing (Original Story) and cinematographer W. Howard Greene (1895-1965) received a Special Academy Award “for color photography of A Star is Born.” The film received six other Oscar nominations. Cukor also directed A Star is Born (1954), a musical that the Warner Brothers billed as the comeback of Judy Garland (1922-1969). [This was her first film after she left M.G.M.] Moss Hart (1904-1961) wrote the screenplay. Judy Garland played Esther, who this time was a singer as well as an actress and English movie star James Mason (1909-1984) played Norman. They both won Golden Globes. The second remake veered even more into music. Barbara Streisand played folksinger-songwriter Esther Hoffman and Kris Kristofferson played self-destructive rock star John Norman Howard in A Star is Born (1976). Streisand produced it with Jon Peters and Warner Brothers released it. In the forthcoming A Star is Born (2018), Lady Gaga will be the ascendant star Ally and Bradley Cooper will be the descendent star Jackson Maine. Clint Eastwood is the director. Warner Brothers will release the film in October.

In her thirties, Colleen Moore did not want to keep playing ingénues. She considered The Power and the Glory (1933) with Spencer Tracy (1900-1967) to be her best film, but over the course of that it her character aged thirty years and her fans did not want to see her in such a role.[145] In the film, a friend of Tom Garner (Spencer Tracy) reflected in flashbacks on the character’s rise in a railroad company from section hand to the presidency and the cause of his suicide. Colleen Moore played Sally Garner, his long-suffering wife. The famous playwright, screenwriter, and, later, film director, Preston Sturgis (1898-1959) wrote the screenplay. Pauline Kael, the film critic for The New Yorker from 1968 to 1991, pointed out the film was precedent for Citizen Kane (1941).

In Success at Any Price (1934), she played the girlfriend of Douglas Fairbanks, Jr. (1909-2000), who was ten years younger than her. According to Codori, “She was still able to pull it off.”[146] I agree, but I think it has as much to do with Fairbanks looking mature for his age as her looking good for her age (which in her early thirties would hardly be old). Her last film was The Scarlet Letter (1934). It was an adaptation of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s novel The Scarlet Letter: A Romance, published in 1850, and a remake of the silent film The Scarlet Letter (1926). Colleen Moore played Hester Prynne, the part Lillian Gish had played nearly ten years earlier. Henry P. Walthall played Roger Chillingworth in both films.

Codori noted, “The Scarlet Letter was the only film she made strictly for the paycheck. The film was not very good, especially when compared to Lillian Gish’s version made seven years earlier, which was a masterpiece of silent cinema, but it gave her an opportunity to gather many people she had worked with in the past. It allowed her to kick off the tour of her doll house, and when the tour began Colleen considered herself retired from motion pictures.”[147]

After Colleen Moore finally broke down and divorced McCormick in 1930, she wed three more times. Her second and third husbands were both stockbrokers. The third, if not the second, taught her how to make sound investments. From 1932 to 1934, she was married to New York City stockbroker Alfred P. Scott.[148] In 1935, she took the dollhouse-castle on a national tour to raise money for children’s charities, and ultimately raised $650,000.[149] Colleen Moore wrote The Enchanted Castle, a story book set in the dollhouse-castle, published by the Garden City Publishing Company in 1935. Colleen Moore’s Doll House: The Most Exquisite Toy in the World, also published by the Garden City Publishing Company in 1935, is often attributed to her, but I do not believe she wrote it. For one thing, every other time she wrote non-fiction, she wrote in the first person (“I”), whereas in Colleen Moore’s Doll House: The Most Exquisite Toy in the World, she is referred to as Colleen Moore or Miss Moore. [Unless one is Julius Caesar, one should not refer to oneself in the third when writing one’s memoirs.] Furthermore, the name F. Josephine Fallon appears inside the front cover.

Figure 1 Credit: S.M. O’Connor Caption: One of two books Garden City Publishing Company, Inc. published about the dollhouse-castle in 1935 was The Enchanted Castle written by Colleen Moore (1900-1988) and illustrated by Marie A. Lawson (1894-1956).

In 1937, Henry Ford became the first celebrity to sign the Fairy Castle’s autograph album.[150] Colleen Moore was on a stop in Detroit during her national tour with the Fairy Castle when she received a phone call from Mrs. Henry (Clara) Ford.[151] Mrs. Ford wanted to see the Fairy Castle and Colleen Moore assumed she wanted to bring her young grandchildren, but it was really Henry Ford who wanted to see it up close.[152] He examined the Fairy Castle for two hours and then he enthusiastically signed the autograph album.[153]

The next year, Colleen Moore encountered Lord Halifax on a boat in the English Channel during a voyage from Paris to London.[154] [Edward Frederick Lindley Wood (1881-1959), who was styled Lord Irwin from 1925 until 1934, Viscount Halifax from 1934 to 1944, and 1^st Earl of Halifax from 1946 until his death, and served as Viceroy and Governor-General of India from 1926 to 1931, as Foreign Secretary from 1938 to 1940, and as Ambassador to the United States of America from 1941 to 1946.] According to Colleen Moore, when he met the former movie star, Lord Halifax was on his way back to London from Munich with Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain (1869-1940), who had just signed the Munich Agreement with German Führer and Chancellor Adolph Hitler (1889-1945).[155] He told her, “Tomorrow this may be a very bad name for your book.”[156]

The love of her life was Homer Pearson Hargrave, Senior (1895-1964), whom she met in Chicago.[157] He was one of the founders of Merrill Lynch.[158] They were married from 1937 until his death while on vacation in Phoenix, Arizona in 1964.[159] Homer Pearson Hargrave, Sr. was a widower and she retired from acting in part to finish raising his children, Homer Pearson (“Buzz”) Hargrave, Jr. (1923-2011) and Judith (“Judy”) Hargrave (later Mrs. Roger Jackson Coleman), whom she considered her own.[160] She adopted them. Their mother, Homer Hargrave, Sr.’s first wife, had been Leah Lose Hargrave (1898-1933).[161]

In 1919, Homer Hargrave, Sr. had joined the William H. Colvin firm and in 1926 it merged with E.A. Pierce & Company.[162] Thirteen years later, after another merger, Merrill Lynch, Pierce, Fenner & Smith incorporated and in 1940 Hargrave became a general manager.[163] From 1947 to 1949, he was Chairman of the Chicago Stock Exchange and, subsequently, from 1949 to 1953, he served as Chairman of the Midwest Stock Exchange.[164] He was a Director of the Chicago Board of Trade from 1943 to 1951.[165] For part of that time, from 1949 to 1951, he was Vice President of the Chicago Board of Trade.[166]

In Chicago, every adult in the room would know she was former movie star Colleen Moore, but as a high-society matron she would also be referred to as Mrs. Homer Hargrave. Meanwhile, Colleen Moore retained ownership of her Hollywood mansion as an asset and rented it out to tenants who included Errol Flynn (1909-1959) and Marlene Dietrich (1901-1992).[167] Colleen Moore continued to get signatures for the Fairy Castle’s autograph album during the Second Great World War.

Ignacy Paderewski (1860-1941) was a famous pianist and composer who had been the first Prime Minister and Foreign Minister of the Republic of Poland, and was on an American fundraising tour for Polish Relief when Colleen Moore obtained his signature.[168] She attended his concert and approached his secretary during the intermission, and he told her that Paderewski was a fan of hers because she had made comedies and Paderewski, who was a resident of Switzerland, needed to laugh.[169] Consequently, she was invited to coffee the next morning in the private railroad car of the former Polish premier in the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe Railway yards.[170] Ushered into his bedroom, she handed Paderewski her autograph album, who was lying in bed, and she felt in awe of the elderly musician-composer-statesman.[171] Two weeks later, he was dead.[172]

In 1945, she asked her friend Edward Kelly (1876-1950), Mayor of Chicago (1933-1947), to get the signature of General de Gaulle, who was the head of the French Government-in-Exile.[173] De Gaulle was a on a tour of the U.S.A. to get support and Mayor Kelly held a luncheon for him at the Palmer House (now the Palmer House Hilton). “I can understand why Churchill calls De Gaulle his Cross of Lorraine,” Kelly said of de Gaulle, who had left halfway through the speeches, when Kelly handed back the autograph album, he said.[174] “He even signed your book upside down!”[175]

When it was time for Judith Hargrave to have her debutante ball, in 1949, Mrs. Hargrave persuaded the ladies of the Woman’s Board of Northwestern Memorial Hospital that instead of holding thirty coming-out balls, they should consolidate them into one single cotillion that would be a fundraiser for Northwestern Memorial Hospital.[176] [The consolidation of debutante balls and use of them as charitable fundraisers was already the practice on the East Coast.][177] The first Passavant Cotillion and Christmas Ball was held at the Stevens Hotel (now the Chicago Hilton) on December 23, 1949.[178] That same year, she met Major Lenox Lohr (1891-1968), and he persuaded her to lend the Doll House to the Museum of Science and Industry (M.S.I.).

Major Lenox Lohr, President of the M.S.I. (1940-1968) and also of the Chicago Railroad Fair, Inc., had a private train car as an office on the fairgrounds in which he would sometimes entertain people doing business with the Chicago Railroad Fair (1948-49), M.S.I., or the Citizens Committee of the University of Illinois in Chicago.[179] As recounted by Herman Kogan in A Continuing Marvel: The Story of the Museum of Science & Industry, at a dinner reception for the Chicago Railroad Fair in its second year, 1949, Maj. Lohr was seated next to the wealthy Chicago stockbroker Homer Hargrave, one of the founders of Merrill Lynch, and his movie star wife, Colleen Moore. In the second book on the history of the M.S.I., Inventive Genius: The History of the Museum of Science and Industry, Jay Pridmore relayed that Maj. Lohr was a movie buff.[180] Whenever he had guests over to his home in north suburban Evanston, he invariably showed them old movies in the home cinema in his basement, and silent films were his favorites.[181] He enjoyed being able to entertain stars of stage and screen at the Chicago Railroad Fair.[182] Thus, he was in a good condition to discuss Colleen Moore’s films Flaming Youth and Lilac Time with her.[183] Seizing upon the opportunity, Maj. Lohr broached the subject of her placing her famous castle dollhouse on display at the M.S.I.[184]

Mrs. Hargrave was originally dubious about the prospect of placing her dollhouse, which had toured the country on a fundraising campaign to care for crippled children, raising $650,000, at a science museum, but Maj. Lohr assured her it was appropriate as a diversion for people uninterested in science.[185] Then, as he explained to the M.S.I.’s Board of Trustees, he deliberately placed it in a corner of M.S.I.’s Central Pavilion near fire-fighting equipment so people drawn to the allure of Colleen Moore’s Fairy Castle would have to walk through scientific exhibits on energy to get there, in the hopes that something educational would catch their eyes along the way.[186] Back then, the Museum of Science and Industry had no admission charge, and, according to Jay Pridmore, one of the selling points Maj. Lohr had for Mrs. Hardgrave was that at the M.S.I. children would be able to see her famous dollhouse for free.[187] [The M.S.I. did not charge an admission fee until 1991, when it became necessary to pay off $15,000,000 in bonds issued through the Illinois Educational Facilities Authority to pay for repairs to the M.S.I.’s home, the Palace of Fine Arts.[188]] On Saturday, October 29, 1949, Colleen Moore and Major Lohr held a private teatime preview of her dollhouse Fairy Castle. On Monday, October 31, 1949, Colleen Moore’s Fairy Castle went on public display.

Colleen Moore continued to persuade dignitaries and celebrities to sign the Fairy Castle’s autograph album and acquire furniture for it. She obtained the signature of Pablo Picasso while on a visit to Cannes with Homer Hargrave, Sr., through an intermediary.[189] Their chauffeur overheard her complain to her husband that her efforts to get Picasso’s autograph had failed and he told her that his girlfriend was Picasso’s maid so she left the autograph album with him he could get it signed.[190]

Sir Winston Churchill, who was Prime Minister of Great Britain from 1940 to 1945 and from 1951 to 1955, was painting something he saw outside his window of his room at Waldorf Towers in New York City when he paused to sign the autograph album.[191] [The grandson of John Winston Spencer-Churchill (1802-1883), 7^th Duke of Marlborough, and son of Lord Randolph Henry Spencer-Churchill (1849-1895) and his American wife Jennie Spencer-Churchill (1854-1921), he was in his mother’s hometown at the time.] Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II and Prince Philip signed the autograph album when they visited the Museum of Science and Industry in 1959.[192] To mark the occasion of M.S.I. being visited by Canada’s head of state (Queen Elizabeth II) and chief of state (Prime Minister John Diefenbaker) on July 6, 1959, booklets about the capture of the U-505 with personal greetings from Admiral Gallery, were bound, along with booklets about Colleen Moore’s Fairy Castle, in white leather bound books on M.S.I., with gold-etched dedicatory inscriptions and white silk linings.[193] Major Lohr presented Queen Elizabeth & Prince Philip with one each for Prince Charles and Princess Anne. A third book was given to Prime Minister & Mrs. Diefenbaker.

Jawaharlal Nehru signed the autograph album while he visited the Museum of Science and Industry with one of his sisters.[194] Colleen Moore noted, “Nehru knew all the fairy tales represented in the castle and recognized the characters with delight. He was more impressed with the castle’s diminutive size than with the splendor of its materials, for in India it is possible to see full-scale palaces walled with mother-of-pearl and imbedded with precious stones.”[195]

Colleen Moore also personally obtained what is, for Catholics, by far the most valuable object in the Fairy Castle from Clare Boothe Luce (1903-1987). While Mrs. Luce was Ambassador to Italy, Pope Pius XII gave her a gold medallion inside of which was a shard of the cross upon which Christ was crucified almost 2,000 years ago.[196] When Mrs. Luce was on a visit to Chicago to see Mrs. (Philip) Helen Atwater Wrigley (1901-1977), Colleen Moore took them for a private viewing of the Fairy Castle during which the exhibit (if not the Museum of Science and Industry as a whole) was closed to the public.[197] As they listened to the organ play in the Chapel, Mrs. Luce tearfully told Colleen Moore about the medallion and that she wanted to give it to go in the Chapel in memory of her daughter, Ann Clare Brokaw (1924-1944), who had died in an automobile accident at the age of nineteen.[198] The shard is now in a 4” x 1 ½” x 1 ½” gold monstrance (also known as an ostensorium) designed by New York City jeweler David Webb (1925-1975), which sits at the center of the altar.[199]

Colleen Moore was active in Chicago socially in other ways, too. She helped found the Chicago International Film Festival.[200] Michael Kuttza, a filmmaker and graphic artist, founded the Chicago International Film Festival in 1964.

By the late 1960s, if not earlier, she was dividing her time between Illinois and California, but considered Chicago her “home base.”[201] She continued to visit her Hollywood mansion, and, on one of these occasions, she took Greta Garbo with her.[202] Greta Garbo turned and said, “Ah Colleen, those were the good old days.”[203] Doubleday published her autobiography, Silent Star, in 1968. Her biographer, Jeff Codori, noted, “The autobiography has the virtue of being an honest account of her feelings during important events in her life, though it suffers from many minor inaccuracies. It was written, after all, 40 years after the events described. While Colleen had excellent recall, the book was written with the aid of her friend Adela Rogers St. Johns, a former Hollywood columnist with a tendency to embellish stories.”[204] Her daughter, Mrs. Roger Jackson (Judith) Coleman, and daughter-in-law, Mrs. Homer Pearson (Alice) Hargrave, Jr., held the book launch party for Silent Star, on February 12, 1968.[205]

Doubleday published her third book, How Women Can Make Money in the Stock Market, in 1969. Doubleday published her fourth book, Colleen Moore’s Doll House, in 1971. The book was illustrated with photographs by photographer Will Rousseau of New York City. The Fairy Castle exhibit had closed for a month in 1970 while he took pictures, which necessitated the temporary removal of exterior glass.[206] “Each room has been cleaned,” Colleen Moore told the Chicago Tribune’s Sheila Wolfe. “We’ve used boxes and boxes of Q-tips.”[207] Her granddaughter, Kathleen Coleman, redesigned the Magic Garden and participated in the annual cleaning of the Fairy Castle.[208] When Mrs. Hargrave wrote Colleen Moore’s Doll House, she suggested to Mr. Rousseau that they leave their mark, with the result that he made scaled-down photographs of them, and she chose to have her framed portrait placed on the silver table in the Great Hall.[209] Rousseau chose to have the scaled-down photograph of himself placed on the dressing table of the Princess.[210]

Figure 2 Credit: S.M. O’Connor Caption: In 1971, Doubleday & Company published Colleen Moore’s Doll House. The silent film star wrote the text herself.

In 1976, Colleen Moore donated her Fairy Castle to the Museum of Science and Industry. The official ceremony occurred on Wednesday, December 29, 1976, with Colleen Moore Hargrave and M.S.I. President & Director Daniel Miller MacMaster, Sr. (1913-2005) aided in the ribbon-cutting ceremony by two wee little girls, Ashley Anderson and Fiona Hunt. [211]

On Monday, May 10, 1982, Colleen Moore visited Elain Diehl at her MinElain’s Miniatures workshop in Sedona, Arizona to see her nine-foot-tall Astolat Dollhouse Castle. [212] Ms. Diehl later recounted, “I was so excited, I think the whole town heard me squeal.”[213] One of the things Colleen Moore admired about Astolat Dollhouse Castle was a replica of a 17^th Century spinet it contained that had been made by George Becker of Denver in 1978, and she later had Becker make a harpsichord for the Fairy Castle.[214]

Colleen Moore was married to builder Paul Maginot, whom she had hired to construct a residence for her in Hidden Valley south of Paso Robles, California, from 1983 until her death in 1988.[215] Colleen Moore succumbed to cancer at her ranch near Paso Robles on Monday, January 25, 1988.[216] Her funeral was held at St. James Episcopal Church in Paso Robles.[217] Colleen Moore’s collection of thirty-six scrapbooks of newspapers clippings can be found in the Colleen Moore Collection of the Margaret Herrick Library of the American Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.[218]

Colleen Moore had a fine legacy of which anyone could be proud. Arguably, the most important thing she did was something the public only glimpsed occasionally, which was to be the stepmother who finished raising Homer Hargrave, Jr. and Judith (Hargrave) Coleman after their mother died. She built the Fairy Castle, which gave hundreds of people work, and which she used to raise money for children’s charities and has been seen by millions of visitors to the Museum of Science and Industry. Lastly, she made over fifty films, which gave her an outlet for her creativity, brought joy to millions of movie fans, and producer her the fortune than enabled her to do build the Fairy Castle.

Homer P. Hargrave, Jr. resided in Paso Robles at the time of her death.[219] His first wife was Alice (“Ittie’) Pirie Hargrave. After they divorced, she wed William (“Dollar Bill”) Wirtz (1929-2007) in 1987, as a result of which she became known as Alice Pirie Wirtz. Meanwhile, Homer P. Hargrave, Jr. wed Sally Howell. He was preceded in death by his second wife, Sally Howell Hargrave. Homer Hargrave, Jr. died in 2011, after a brief illness, at Swedish Covenant Hospital in Chicago. He was survived by his sister, Judith Coleman; his children, Charles P. Hargrave (Kathryn), William A. Hargrave, and Alice Hargrave Wallon; as well as by stepchildren Deedie Boyle de Torres and Mallory Boyle; grandchildren Sara Hargrave Noland (Dan), Kathryn Hargrave, Charles Hargrave, Jr., Ezra Wallon, Gabriel Wallon, and Joseph Hargrave; and step-grandchildren Sally Kriete, Alex Baires, Andrea Nochez Boyle, Christopher Baries, and Philip Baires.

END NOTES

[1] Jeff Codori, Colleen Moore: A Biography of the Silent Film Star. Jefferson, North Carolina: McFarland & Company, Inc. (2012), 257

[2] Codori, pages 7-9

See also Terry Ann R. Neff, Within the Fairy Castle: Colleen Moore’s Doll House at the Museum of Science and Industry, Chicago. Chicago: Museum of Science and Industry (1997), p. 106

[3] Codori, p. 9

[4] Codori, pages 9-17

[5] Codori, p. 17

[6] Codori, p. 17

[7] Codori, p. 17

[8] Codori, p. 19

[9] Codori, p. 20

[10] Codori, p. 20

[11] Codori, p. 20

[12] Robert Sklar, Movie-Made America: A Cultural History of American Movies. Random House, 1975. Revised and Updated. Vintage Book, a division of Random House (1994), p. 75

[13] Codori, pages 14,

Neff, p. 108