Despite what had been their romantic relationship, Sennett had been working Mabel to the limit at Keystone from day one, while at the same time taking advantage of her inexperience with big money to pay her at a salary much lower than a star of her magnitude was entitled to. His reason for doing so may have been based on the idea that when he finally married her he would be providing for her. Yet in addition to limiting her wages, his rigid control of production cloyed her creatively, as had been the case with so many of his best Keystone players. So notwithstanding what's been said elsewhere and though we have no reason to think Sennett didn’t actually mean well, Mabel had as many, or more, professional grounds, as she did personal ones, to be dissatisfied with him. Not so surprisingly then, she left the studio in early 1916 -- with Arbuckle, as well, following her just a few months afterwards.
Sennett was initially bitter, and behaved as if he could easily replace her with Gloria Swanson or someone else. However, when trade headlines stated that she was going to work for Thomas Ince, and who had reportedly promised Mabel her own studio, he scrambled. With Adam Kessel’s permission and backing, he went so far as to generously offer her her own film company, including a studio facility of her very own. This she happily agreed to, and it was thus, in April 1916, the short lived Mabel Normand Feature Film Company came into existence.
As ostensible studio head, Mabel now had the power to chose her own material and people. For director of her first film with the company, she first selected James Young (husband of silent star Clara Kimball Young.) When Young didn’t work out to her liking (this was in June 1916), J. Farrell McDonald, assisted by Arvid Gillstrom, was her next choice. Yet finding them also unsuitable too, they too were dismissed. She then finally settled on 22 year old F. Richard Jones. Sennett wasn’t all too pleased about this prospect since Jones had, up to that time, only directed one and two reel slapstick films. Yet Mabel had her way; which was just as well and her choice could hardly have been better. Not only did Jones go on to prove himself very much up to the task, but in succeeding years, he would direct more Sennett feature films with her, while also becoming instrumental in the early success of Hal Roach’s Laurel and Hardy and Our Gang comedies. For her cast, Mabel brought in several friends and Keystone co-workers, including Minta Durfee and Minnie Devereaux; former Keystone director, George “Pops” Nichols. In addition there was Wheeler Oakman in the part of the leading man and Lew Cody as the villain.
Mickey, although not without its shortcomings, is a most unique and for some precious film. It is the first feature length comedy to have allotted top billing to a single star comedienne – whether male or female. Its story centers on a puckish girl from the wild mountains and backwoods of California who is sent East by her loving, if simple minded, step-parents to live with her high society relatives. Besides the new environment and lifestyle she finds herself in, Mickey is forced to contend with two quite different suitors: one, a brave and thoughtful gentleman; the other, a wily and conniving rake -- played by Oakman and Cody respectively. Though the comedy and melodrama overlap, most of the film's comic moments occur in regard to Mickey’s frontier life and her adjusting to the world of society’s wealthy. Its melodramatic aspects are played out in the love and action scenes with the two suitors.
Although the plot is at times a bit meandering and haphazard, these weaknesses are more than counterbalanced by Mickey’s jaunty pace and Mabel’s combined comic and dramatic virtuosity. As Chaplin’s tramp embodied the “little guy” who tries to live by his wits in a frequently changing and not always friendly world, Mabel’s Mickey did something not so dissimilar for the “little gal.” Though later events made it impossible for Mabel to ever develop her character anywhere near to the level that the tramp reached, in Mickey (allowing for illness suffered in the latter part of filming) she maintains a level of humor and pathos worthy of her former co-star; and the film despite the considerable lapse of years still has the power to cheerfully entrance and amuse like few others. Besides Mabel, the persons responsible for making it all happen are a believable cast, and F. Richard Jones’ inspired directing. Rather than make her personality suit the film, he strove to make the film suit her personality. As he himself put it, “I try to draw out the individual personalities of the players. And for this reason I never act out any of the play for them. As we pay for personality, why not develop it rather than endeavor to work it into something else.”
Whether because (as later reported by Sennett) distributors didn’t like it or due to unpaid bills, Mickey stayed on the shelf for about a year after its completion in 1917. Mabel, in the meantime, having grown weary of the delays and his business shenanigans, had signed a five-year contract with mogul Samuel Goldwyn. Yet when Mickey was finally brought forth to the public in early December 1918, it became an almost immediate sensation. Its plucky optimism and playful innocence, backed by some smart promotion, had a tremendous appeal to war weary America. It became, as Sennett termed it, “the mortgage lifter,” and overtime (including re-releases) grossed huge sums, ranking it as one of the most successful films of its era in that category. Although many were made rich by the film, Mabel, because of the Byzantine dealing going on among the producers, wasn't one of them. Neither, as it turned out, did Sennett himself reap much benefit. Since to make up for shortfalls incurred by other Triangle Film Corporation endeavors and promotions which (in contrast to Mickey) had financially failed, he wound up losing his holdings in the film to the Aitken brothers.
The Goldwyn Films
By the time she was signed with Goldwyn’s newly formed production company in July 1917, Mabel had become wan and worn out, ostensibly as a result of bouts of both illness and, by drug abuse. The drug use, somewhat like Wallace Reid’s, was medical in origin and had started with her taking medication to remedy the pain caused from her head injury and other illness. Minta Durfee spoke on this topic in an interview conducted by Hollywood archivist and historian Don Schneider:
“And that is why it is so mean of people to make remarks about her, because I'm telling you, I know this! That she never loved any other man in the world but Mack Sennett. And at the ending of her life, after she had been struck on the head by this Mae Busch, and she had refused to go back into the studio again, because she already had her wedding dress ready to marry, and this woman came and was with us and no one liked her when she came, this Mae Busch, and then at the end of her life, when she finally became tubercular, and I worked in, and played the heavy and finished my four years contract in ‘Mickey’ -- and that little thing would have a hemorrhage of the lungs and then she would take a swig out of a bottle, to stop the bleeding, and the coughing, and do all of her own stunts, nobody ever did any stunts for her, and if you've seen ‘Mickey’ you'll be amazed to see that girl sliding down, where she'd fallen, she’d have been not only killed but she'd been crushed to pieces -- from this mansion where we made ‘Mickey’ over on Western and 24th Street -- and that day, in the morning, she and I were talking, she said, ‘Oh, I better take my goop,’ -- she always called it ‘goop,’ ‘Because I feel like I’m gonna have a little hemorrhage.’ ‘Well,’ I said, ‘Don't do your work, don't do that scene today, do something else dear.’ And she said, ‘Oh, no, that's the way the schedule goes. No, I’ll do it.’”
To those who saw her after these accumulated setbacks to her health, her appearance and voice had changed. Very young as she still was, all but vanished from her dusky eyes and smiling countenance were the boundless gaiety and high spirits of previous years.
Besides her severe coughing spells, and the effects of reported fast living, it has come to light in Betty Fussell's Mabel: Hollywood's First I-Don't-Care Girl, that, in consequence of an affair with Goldwyn, she allegedly became pregnant and had a miscarriage. In short, all these problems and misfortunes, for obvious reasons, had a pernicious impact on her health; and help to explain what had happened to her. This said, there is certainly much more that we don’t know about all this than what we do know, and it would be not a little rash to summarily jump to conclusions about what most brought her to this pass.
Although Goldwyn it is said tried to tame her wild habits and smooth off her rough edges, Mabel seemed to have jettisoned some of her earlier diligence and discipline. Eating ice cream for breakfast, playing practical jokes and partying long into the night were only some of her reported antics. It was not unusual for her to often show up late on the set of a film she was working on, and which upset Goldwyn. She was, however, reputed to be one of his most lucrative stars, and for a while her box-office contributions would seem to have more than compensated him for any inconveniences otherwise.
Only one of her sixteen Goldwyn films survives, so it’s naturally difficult now to gauge their quality. Contemporary reviewers usually gave Mabel’s performances high marks. The photographic quality of the Goldwyn films, based on What Happened to Rosa, surviving stills and contemporary reviews was superior to the early and late films she made with Sennett. Still, for the most part, the critics apparently found the films as vehicles for her silly and unsatisfying, though there was enough in them to keep them marketable with general audiences. If Rosa can be more or less considered typical of these, their assessments were probably correct. In a New York Times footnote review for Upstairs, for instance, the reviewer writes, “Mabel, under the direction of Victor L. Schertzinger does some of her best pantomimic work. She takes the part of a kitchen drudge who is lured upstairs to the dancing room of a gay hotel. She is in trouble most of the time, and most of her troubles are laughable. There is not enough in this farce, however, to make all of its five or six reels entertaining.”
The independent minded, at times inexplicably eccentric, and “Sennett-free” Mabel of this period was presumably not what the movie going public preferred. At least this is what biographers and historians, with some justification, are wont to assert. In any event, when Goldwyn’s company went under in a takeover, Mabel was forced to leave the studio, as was ultimately Goldwyn himself.
Before the eventual collapse, Goldwyn, contracted with Sennett to have Mabel do the film Molly O’, an opportunity Sennett the while had been waiting in the wings for. It was his intention to play up the nostalgia by bringing back the more down-to-earth, less flighty Mabel of the Goldwyn period. F. Richard Jones directed; using a script (ostensibly) put together by Sennett, who took particular care and pride in the project. Advertising read: “You remember Mickey -- here’s the same trio back again in a picture greater than Mickey!” Its cast included Jack Mulhall, George Nichols, Jacqueline Logan, and Lowell Sherman.
Molly O’ was well received, both by audiences and critics alike, and definitely rates as one of her best features. Sometime in the early 1990’s it was rediscovered in the Gosfilmofund archive in Moscow, Russia, and about a decade later beautifully restored by the film department at UCLA. While it mostly acquits itself as an entertaining, and in its way even great, picture, this is as much due to Jones direction and the ensemble as a whole, as Mabel herself. And though she does shine nicely and handles herself competently in a few spots, her comedy and acting overall are not exceptional or such as to evoke superlatives. Most of the success of the film then, unlike most of Mabel’s previous feature films, lies in the team effort of the cast, rather than a stand out performance on her part.
To Continue....
Mickey
