StarD_Bean_1910s_final

by Ellen Dawson

  In contrast to her presentation of herself offstage as businesslike, down to earth, and dedicated to her art, Farrar actively sought out the roles that would give scope to her conception of her stage persona as passionate and even sensual. While Wagenknecht sees Farrar’s stage persona divided into two character types, the spiritual (the Goose Girl in Die Koenigskinder or Elis-abeth in Tannhäuser, for example) and the earthy (Carmen or Zaza) (“Geraldine Farrar”), it is clear that for film, at least, Farrar wanted vehicles that spoke to the earthy side. When Goldwyn offered her society dramas without spice, she protested. In a letter written during the filming of The Hell Cat in summer 1918, Farrar expressed her serious dissatisfaction with Goldwyn’s taste in scenarios:

  Do you realize how badly you need to give me the right kind of story? I wish I could impress it upon you how vital such a subject is for my screen appearances. . . . Please get me material in modern dress that has guts in it, like

  “Tosca,” “Fedora,” “Resurrection” and “The Pirate Woman.” Don’t bother to consider the race track story because I fear . . . that the advertisement of the Saratoga race track as the biggest asset of the feature . . . is not the material for me. I think this story much better for the ingénue type of woman.

  (FP, box 9, folder 26)

  That Farrar was actively looking on her own for sources to be adapted into screenplays with “guts” may possibly be surmised from an undated letter from Belasco to Farrar responding to her request for performance copies of The Girl of the Golden West, Adrea, The Darling of the Gods, and Madama Butterfly (BP, box 1, folder 48). The presence of two titles that were already well established in the opera canon suggests that this request was almost certainly for the purposes of adapting one as a screenplay or perhaps attempting to provide a model to Farrar’s Goldwyn scenarists.

  The failure to find good scripts at Goldwyn was probably one of the contributing factors to the waning of Farrar’s box office draw, but another was certainly the distraction caused by her marriage to Tellegen in 1916 and its prolonged breakup until the divorce decree was granted in 1923. Tellegen apparently attempted to upstage Farrar when they appeared together in

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  films, and he ultimately became persona non grata both in Hollywood and in New York before his suicide in 1934. Belasco, for example, delicately wrote to Farrar in 1919 claiming that he would like to supply a part to Tellegen,

  “but when I got the translation in cold type, I found it was fundamentally a woman’s play and that all other parts were bound to be subservient” (FP, box 8, folder 5). Farrar’s position as half of a star couple consequently did her career more harm than good, leading not only to her departure from Famous Players–Lasky but also creating friction with Goldwyn, particularly on the matter of the billing of Tellegen (Goldwyn 150–53), who starred opposite Farrar but made only a fraction of her salary ($600 per week to her $18,750 [GP, file 5042, 24 July 1919 memo of contract]).

  When film historians look at cinema’s associations with high culture in the first and second decades of the twentieth century, they have typically viewed them as the means by which canny producers leveraged snippets of

  “genteel” culture in order to garner more of the middle class for cinema audiences and to elevate the cultural prestige of film generally. Those desires are certainly visible in the decision to hire Farrar. At the same time, however, I want to suggest that the “genteel” culture imported into film might not have been quite so genteel as it is usually regarded; indeed, I have argued that Farrar’s association with racier roles on the stage made her the ideal stalking horse for their respectable importation into cinema.

  In seeing Farrar as to some considerable degree desiring to command the roles associated with her, it is perhaps more possible to see the texts associated with Farrar as continuous with the texts of the 1920s, such as The Sheik, that have received feminist readings from scholars such as Gaylyn Studlar. Farrar’s autonomy as a star, commanding a prestige that owed nothing to the film industry, rigorously trained in an art that, again, owed nothing to the film industry, gave her an authority that was positively masculine. Goldwyn noted that

  Miss Farrar is, like Mary Pickford, a captain of industry. She has the same masculine grasp of business, the same masculine approach to work. The difference between them is construed not alone by the immeasurably greater cultural equipment of Miss Farrar but by many temperamental divergences.

  Whereas Mary Pickford’s manner and voice are always marked by the feminine, almost child-like appeal to which I have referred, the prima donna’s speech has a man’s directness of import. She picks her words for strength, as might a Jack London sea-captain or an Elizabethan soldier.

  (85–86)

  That Farrar combined this masculine presentation of the offstage self with her self-confessed delight in playing the range of sexually vulnerable and sexually powerful figures that embraces Cio-Cio-San and Carmen suggests

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  that we need to sift the stereotypes both of the early female star and early roles for women with more nuance.

  Genteel is not always milk-and-water, and the film industry’s apparently radical mores in the 1920s may owe more to nineteenth-century high culture than at first it might appear. Farrar stands as an important, if forgotten, foil to stars such as Pickford, on the one hand, who combined offscreen business sense with onscreen childlike innocence, and Bara, on the other, a fellow “feministe” in seduction parts without Farrar’s wholesome offscreen reputation. Farrar consequently emerges as a female star who combined authority and femininity in a compelling and idiosyncratic fashion, as her legions of female fans demonstrated. Indeed, the physical dimensions of her performances in Carmen and Joan the Woman, which spoke very much to an embodied heroine who could dance, ride, and fight, paved the way for the more masculine, yet sexual, heroines of the 1920s such as Clara Bow.

  N OT E S

  I would like to acknowledge gracious support for travel to archives from the Melbern G.

  Glasscock Center for the Humanities and Texas A&M University. Barbara Hall of the Margaret Herrick Library, Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, was extremely helpful in arranging for access to screenplays, stills, and papers from special collections for this project. I would also like to thank the librarians at the Library of Congress and the Billy Rose Theatre Collection of the New York Public Library for assistance with those collections, and Peter Bentley for permission to quote from Farrar’s papers.

  1. For the purposes of space, the following acronyms are used for citing special collection sources: BP, Belasco Papers, Billy Rose Theatre Collection, New York Public Library; FP, Farrar Papers, Library of Congress; GP, Goldwyn Papers, Margaret Herrick Library, Beverly Hills, California; SC, Special Collections, Margaret Herrick Library.

  2. The original spelling of the family name, retained by William and his daughter Agnes, was de Mille. Henry and his wife, Beatrice, preferred “De Mille,” while Cecil fluctu-ated among three variants but generally used “DeMille” for professional purposes.

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  George Beban

  Character of the Picturesque

  GIORGIO BERTELLINI

  George Beban was arguably the only Anglo American film

  star of his time never to have played the role of an Anglo American character. Beginning in 1915, his feature-length cinematic impersonations of charming but ill-fated Italian immigrants catapulted him to stardom. Yet both the form and significance of his characterizations may be perplexing unless placed within the wider context of how American culture as a whole aestheticized racial diversity. Furthermore, without Beban’s popular and sympathetic characterizations, one of the next decade’s superstars, Rudolph Valentino, might never have emerged.

  George Beban, undated photo. From the author’s collection.

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  Born in San Francisco in 1873 of an Italophilic father, Rocco Beban, who had migrated from southern Dalmatia, and an Irish mother, Johanna Dugan, George Beban started his stage career at the age of eight with the Reed and Emerson Minstrel shows. In the 1890s, after years of close contact with the New York scene of American and foreign stage companies, he made a name for himself in the vaudeville circuits as a comedian. By 1908, he was regularly cast as a French count in George M. Cohan vaudeville productions (Odell 419; Brownlow 319). Initially uninterested in moving pictures, his aspiration was to embark on serious, dramatic stage performances. He was unable to find suitable material and persuade stage impresarios, however, and in 1909 he co-wrote the short play The Sign of the Rose: A Play in One Act with a successful Broadway playwright, Charles Turner Dazey. It was the heartbreaking story of an honest Italian immigrant who endures first the loss of his daughter in an automobile accident and subsequently an unjust criminal indictment. In the early 1910s, Beban staged the play and impersonated the role of the main character throughout American stage circuits and even in England. In 1914, the play became the basis for a nine-reel film, variously titled The Sign of the Rose or The Alien, produced and directed under the supervision of Thomas H. Ince for the New York Motion Picture Corporation and released in 1915. Together with The Italian, also released in 1915, the adaptation launched Beban’s film career and made him a household name. Until his accidental death in 1928 as a result of injuries sustained after being thrown from a horse, Beban acted in eighteen films, wrote either the story or the script for eleven of them, and directed three—all were mostly about Italians and, to a smaller extent, French characters.

  Unlike many of the stars discussed in this anthology, such as Mary Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks, George Beban has not enjoyed a sustained global and perpetual fame. Over the decades, his name, face, and characters have not been instantly and widely recognized. The archival record, in and of itself a symptom rather than a cause of enduring oblivion, is not in his favor either: only one film, The Italian (1915), is widely available for study or public viewing. In order to rediscover and appreciate the fabric of Beban’s once extensive and intense popularity, this chapter draws a broad aesthetic trajectory. Since most of his films are either set in New York or resonate with iconic New York settings and characters, the rich palimpsest of sociological studies and multimedia representations of the city’s modern development and diverse populations acquires central critical relevance.

  This once familiar cultural universe played a central role in how Beban constructed and developed his characters—narratively, visually, and ideologically—and how contemporary American audiences made sense of them.

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  Directly and indirectly, Beban adopted the familiar lessons of social progressives concerned about immigrants’ living conditions and the agenda of tourism promoters boasting of the city’s attractive monuments and exotic immigrant quarters. His characters also embodied the lowbrow appeal of vaudeville traditions and the middlebrow one of Italian opera and stage performers. Still, while differing from the sensationalist film productions about Italian American criminals, Beban’s films were not just entertaining renderings of Italians’ folkloric life, performed through highly melodramatic and, at times, even populist tones. Instead, they also resonated with the recent, modernist, and all-American incarnations of the Picturesque—

  an established European painterly tradition that American visual culture had used for decades to represent its once pristine natural sceneries and, more recently, its fast-growing urban settlements. The same fascination for the aesthetically pleasing coexistence of modern urban sights with unspoiled natural sceneries that informed the design and experience of Central Park also sustained the representational appeal of uncouth immigrants’ colorful city quarters. Between the second half of the nineteenth century and the early twentieth, this well-codified convergence of ethnog-raphy and aesthetics imbued a vast array of American cultural productions, from literature and stage plays to photography and moving pictures.

  In this sense, and unlike the global appeal of many contemporaneous stars, Beban was first and foremost an American star on American soil. His characterizations were attractive to native Anglo-Saxon audiences and foreign immigrants, not just Italian newcomers, because both old and new Americans were familiar with the history and the dramaturgies of transoceanic adaptation. Further, the heightened and stylized realism of his Old World impersonations touched both artistic and sentimental cords. In 1915, the Fort Wayne Journal-Gazette (Indiana) praised one of his films as “a work of art from the beginning to the ending” (16 November 1915, 10).

  “Never in the history of the photodrama,” boasted the Fresno Morning Republican, “has any singlehanded portrayal ever even remotely touched the appealing and heartrending performance of Beban” (26 September 1915, 19). More specifically, his characterizations were described as “picturesque and pathetic,” as two midwestern dailies put it in April 1916 with regards to his role in Maurice Tourneur’s The Pawn of Fate (1916) ( Waterloo Times-Tribune, 2 April 1916, 14; Sheboygan Press, 15 April 1916, n.p). Two months later, the Nevada State Journal resorted to the same trope when advertising the film as a “picturesque story of deep pathos and compelling human interest” (11

  June 1916, 4). As artistic and universal as his picturesqueness was, however, Beban could not maintain the same high degree of popular appeal

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  over the following years. By the early to mid-1920s, a decade that displayed what Lea Jacobs has called “the decline of sentiment,” Beban’s quaint, sentimental, and by then quite repetitive performances seemed outmoded and old-fashioned.

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  ✩ Sympathy for the Picturesque

  Over the course of the second half of the nineteenth century, New York had come to personify both the most dynamic manifestations and the most detrimental excesses of capitalist modernity. As converging social and economic forces propelled the elevation of daring skyscrapers upward, mass circulation and mobility demanded the extension of complex rail transportation systems and the completion of impressive interborough subway lines. Meanwhile, plebeian multitudes of poor American workers and foreigners of different races, religions, and cultures crammed the lower, darker, “pathological” organs of the city—the dreary quarters of shady alleys, filthy boarding houses, opium dens, and all-night dives of the

  “Lower” East Side, of Hell’s Kitchen, and of East Harlem.

  The sensationalist coverage of newspapers, magazines, and novels identified the “invading” multitudes of millions of immigrants from Europe and Asia as the cause for New York’s (and urban America’s) social disorder.

  Politicians’ speeches, newspaper editorials, and cartoons expressed fierce opposition to the unrestricted arrival of strangers crossing once foreboding oceans and displaying a disturbing degree of diversity in dress, customs, and religion that far surpassed that of earlier immigrants. Furthermore, immigrants’ deplorable living conditions and visible squalor, stemming from labor exploitation and prohibitive rents, became a common subject of interest for a range of urban, “ethnographic” discourses. Urban life and racial characters were favorite subjects for mainstream (and sensationalist) journalism: reformers’ writings; pioneering social and pictorialist photography (from Jacob A. Riis and Lewis W. Hine to Alfred Stieglitz); the Ashcan school of painting; the new “realist” literature of William Dean Howells, Theodore Dreiser, and Henry James; and the so-called tenement melodramas of Abraham Cahan, Fanny Hurst, and Israel Zangwill as well as countless vaudeville scenarios. This ethnographic interest often oscillated between two extremes, one of social dystopia and one of aesthetic appreciation.

  Hailing their creed as a pillar of the American social order, apprehensive moral crusaders and reformers translated the sensa
tionalist literary and journalistic exposés through the scripts of the new social sciences—Social Darwinism and eugenics. Through their reports, they broadcast a depress-

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  ing view of New York “as solely the site of urban problems” (Blake 19).

  With regard to immigrants’ role in the city’s much-publicized predicament, the reformers blamed either the immigrants themselves or the environment in which they happened to live, particularly the corrupt political leadership of Tammany Hall. Over time this dualism deeply affected American media’s racialized dramaturgy. If the first position augmented narrative determin-ism, the second allowed for a range of tales of immigrants’ endeavors to adapt and adjust to America’s physical, social, and moral environment.

  Beban, as we shall see, belongs to this second strain of dramaturgic options.

  While reformers voiced concerns, tourist operators, real estate develop-ers, and business groups established an influential constituency that had a vested interest in broadcasting positive and appealing images of the city.

  They endeavored not only to represent New York’s diversity and uniqueness from the rest of the United States, but also its quintessential American character. Rather than promoting a “topography of social problems located in isolated urban pockets,” these commercially oriented proponents stressed the city’s “topography of ‘sights,’” which included monumental skyscrapers, new shopping districts, Central Park, and immigrant quarters (Blake 50).

  “In no place on this continent,” boasted the tourist guidebook The Hints for Strangers, Shoppers, and Sight See-ers in the Metropolis (1891), “can a visitor view such a kaleidoscopic scene as is continually presented by the crowds upon our streets” (Blake 71). Through postcards, stereographic views, and photographic albums, American tourism patterned a respectable sightseeing experience of Chinatown and the “Ghetto,” which would anticipate, inform, and later parallel film spectators’ voyeuristic access to immigrants’