Episode 445: Less Sound, More Fury
It's a long proven fact of nature that rumbles between Vaudevillians and Silent Screen Actresses attract others of their kind to the scene, regardless of the distances involved. There's a branch of astrophysical information theory devoted to it, I'm pretty sure. Gish is doing the "talking" here, but my favorite, Miriam Cooper, showed on up as well. While I have the chance, here's the first bit from her 1973 autobiography Dark Lady of the Silents, which you should grab if you have the chance, and even if you can't, I figure a flavor of it is a fine thing:
Most little old ladies I know who are pushing eighty sit in front of TV sets in nursing homes. Not me. At the age of seventy-eight I started having a ball. Somebody sent a limousine 125 miles for me to be on TV. I made my first trip by airplane to talk to university classes. All of a sudden my little house was full of young people chattering away. All because somebody discovered what I had known all along - I'm Miriam Cooper.
For a long time if I'd made a statement like that you'd have said, 'Who the hell is Miriam Cooper?" I was completely forgotten and, to tell the truth, I didn't give a damn. Then people began getting interested in early movies. They're on TV every night. People even go to school and study them. And it came as a pleasant shock to me that all those people knew that I played leading roles in the two greatest pictures ever made, The Birth of a Nation and Intolerance.
Dozens of books have been written in the last few years about the silent films. People are always showing them to me. A funny thing is that the authors are usually young people who weren't even born at the time they're writing about. How can they do that? I know they look up things in books and magazines, but what makes them think what they read is the truth? When I was in pictures, back in the teens and twenties, the studio publicity people wrote more untrue stuff about me than you could imagine.
Well, just one more episode till Ye Scripting Baton gets passed back to Geoff for a storyline that stands to be the greatest Frederick tale yet! Stick around!
- Count Dolby von Luckner
