“You can take Hollywood for granted like I did, or you can dismiss it with the contempt we reserve for what we don’t understand. It can be understood too, but only dimly and in flashes. Not half a dozen men have ever been able to keep the whole equation of pictures in their heads.” ― F. Scott Fitzgerald
By Gregory N. Joseph
MARY MACLAREN AND THE 20TH CENTURY WERE BORN a few short days apart, with the future Hollywood star taking her first breaths on Jan. 19, 1900.
But on a crisp, clear Southern California afternoon 81 years later almost to the day, the former actress who had risen to stardom in silent films was holding court not for throngs of adoring fans, but for a sprinkling of sadly curious and sympathetic neighbors as they quickly swept by her as she sat in the shadows on the dilapidated porch of the once grand house off Hollywood’s famous Sunset Boulevard that she had bought for herself and her mother in 1917.
Back then, her career, like the town itself, was new and young and blossoming.
But Hollywood would move on without her all too soon, even by Hollywood’s fickle and often cruel standards.
A first-person article she wrote in “Photoplay” magazine in 1933 carried a headline that said it all: “I Was Once a Star — But Today I Must Take My Place in the Ranks of Countless Extras.”
On the day in 1981 I visited her for a newspaper article I was writing about her, MacLaren was embroiled in litigation for control of her home with a rotund former magician who referred to himself as “the bishop” of what he called “the Evangelical Catholic Church of Jesus Christ” (not related to the Roman Catholic Church). MacLaren won a court battle, and the “bishop” moved out.
In 1982, the year after our meeting, the house she shared with five dogs and four cats would be condemned by the Los Angeles County Health Department as unfit for human habitation. And that was before a fire nearly destroyed it; which was all right, she told officials, because, she explained, she could see the sky from her bed through a hole in the roof.
She continued to live in the place until 1983, when it was auctioned off. But she fought to stay as long as she could.
No, Mary MacLaren was not crazy, far from it. She was simply of another time, and her thoughts were always of that time.
And what a time it had been.
Born in her father’s Arlington Hotel in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, next to the famous Alvin Theatre, Mary was the youngest of three daughters, all of whom became actors (another sibling, a brother, died at birth). By 1910, her parents had divorced.
Her mother worked as a dressmaker to support the girls, then in about 1913, mother and daughters moved to New York City, with all three of the young women modeling, performing in minor roles in plays, or dancing in revues, anything they could get to help pay the bills.
To help her mother make ends meet, Mary began her stage career at New York’s iconic Winder Garden Theatre with a job in the chorus line of a show starring none other than Al Jolson.
When the show moved west, MacLaren and her mother went with it. Mary was all of 14 years old at the time.
Lois Weber — described by some as the most important female director in American film history and among the most important and prolific film directors of the silent film era, who, along with D.W. Griffith, has been referred to as American film’s first auteur — eventually spotted MacLaren, who was by then working in another musical revue, inviting her to try out for Universal.
MacLaren auditioned, and was signed to a contract.
The studio at first put her in a small role in a film starring Tyrone Power Sr. By 1916, MacLaren had become a full-fledged “flickers” star with the lead in Weber’s hit movie, “Shoes.” MacLaren, whose career had taken off, subsequently went to court to break her $45-a-week contract.
Jesse Lasky, the American pioneering motion picture producer who was a founder of what would become Paramount Pictures, offered MacLaren a five-year contract for a million dollars. But her older sister, Katherine, advised against it (her sister, actress and producer Katherine MacDonald, was an even bigger name, renowned for her looks, “The American Beauty” of silent films, a favorite of President Woodrow Wilson’s who made $10,000 a week — her star can now be found on Hollywood Boulevard’s Walk of Fame.)
So, as a free agent, MacLaren made two films for William Horsely Studios, home of Marie Dressler (a Canadian stage and screen actress, comedian, and early-silent and Depression-era film star, who was in the first full-length film comedy in 1914 and would win an Academy Award for best actress in 1931), and several others for Hearst Studios, the latter including the 1921 silent swashbuckling epic, “The Three Musketeers,” based on the 1844 novel “The Three Musketeers” by Alexander Dumas, pere. Directed by film pioneer Fred Niblo (who, four years later, in 1925, would be the principal director of one of the great cinematic spectacles, “Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ”), it starred Douglas Fairbanks Sr., then at the top of the Hollywood firmament, in one of his most famous roles as the dashing swordsman D’Artangnan. MacLaren was cast in the pivotal role of Queen Anne of Austria.
“Musketeers” was Fairbanks’ longest (120 minutes) and most expansive effort to date, a rousing costume adventure easily surpassing in scope and production values his immensely popular 1920 adventure, “The Mark of Zorro.” In short, it was a very big deal indeed.
The New York Times, among others, cheered “The Three Musketeers,” and by any definition, the film was, as Hollywood still likes to say, a smash hit. The dazzling glitterati seated out in the audience when it premiered the night of Sunday, August 28, 1921, at the Lyric Theatre on New York’s famous 42nd Street included figures recognized across the planet, from boxing great Jack Dempsey to The Little Tramp himself, Charlie Chaplin.
Also in the audience was Fairbanks’ wife, the silent film superstar Mary Pickford, the toast of Hollywood, and for that matter, the entire world. To MacLaren, this was especially important. But not for the reason one might suspect.
Pickford (nee Gladys Marie Smith), a Canadian-American stage and screen actress and producer, called “America’s Sweetheart” and “the girl with the curls” in film’s silent era, nicknamed “the Queen of the Movies” in the 1910’s and ‘20’s, co-founded Pickford-Fairbanks Studios and United Artists and was one of the 36 founders of the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences. One of the first to be billed under her own name and one of the most powerful figures in early Hollywood, man or woman, she helped develop what we now recognize as film acting (she was awarded the second Academy Award for best actress, for her first sound role in the 1929 film, “Coquette”).
As MacLaren explained it, Pickford’s presence made her nervous not just because of Pickford’s lofty status, nor because of her performance playing out up on the screen in front of this great star, although, she admitted, the weight of both were palpable.
No, it wasn’t that.
“I remember when we were making the movie,” MacLaren recalled. “Doug Fairbanks would come sit in my dressing room every day. I started to get nervous and couldn’t figure what was going on. A girlfriend said, ‘My dear, he wants to have an affair with you.’
“I could never do such a thing. Mary Pickford was one of my idols. A few years before, I was a schoolgirl running down the street to see her movies.”
Instead, MacLaren said, she focused her attention on a single young man who was making his own headway in films: Rudolph Valentino.
She was referring to Italian actor Rodolfo Pietro Filiberto Raffaello Guglielmi di Valentina d’Antongoulla, better known as Rudolph Valentino, whose simmering starring roles in American silent films like “The Sheik,” “The Four Horseman of the Apocalypse” and “Blood And Sand,” combined with some of early Hollywood’s most imaginative huckstering, brought him the sobriquet, “the Great Lover,” establishing him as the movies’ great sex symbol of the 1920’s.
His death at age 31 in 1926 from peritonitis resulted in not one but two ballyhooed funerals, the first, with 100,000 swooning admirers lining the streets, at New York’s Saint Malachy’s Roman Catholic Church, sometimes referred to as “the Actor’s Chapel,” and the second in Beverly Hills, after his remains had been transferred by train with much folderol to the West Coast. For years after his passing, a mysterious “lady in black” visitor to his crypt in Hollywood on the anniversaries of his death made international headlines. He became a cultural icon, his image and name transcending time and place, the very name “Valentino” conjuring glamour, sex appeal, and in no small way, the confused concept of what passes for stardom in Hollywood.
“We were different types and never made any films together,” explained MacLaren in claiming that they were an item. “But we were very fond of each other and would see each other all the time. He was 21 and I was 16 … He called me once and wanted me to come away with him, but my dear, sweet mother intervened.
“I’m sure I would have been the first Mrs. Valentino.”
MacLaren also recounted visits to her home, this very house where we now sat on the front porch, by many other luminaries over the years including Jolson, Fairbanks Sr., Tyrone Power Jr. — and even J. Paul Getty.
Getty was an American-born British petroleum industrialist who at one time was named by Fortune magazine as the richest living American and later by the Guinness Book of Records as the world’s richest private citizen, rated by one book as the 67th richest American who ever lived.
Money can buy you a lot, but apparently not quite enough.
Getty, MacLaren said, “Dressed well, but had the ugliest face you ever saw.”
Unlike many silent film actors, she managed to successfully make the transition into sound productions, continuing to perform occasionally in movies throughout the 1930s and into the ‘40s, although now in character and bit parts. The stock market crash had wiped out her fortune. Her stardom was a thing of the past, and Hollywood had moved on.
She retired from films altogether, she said, after being struck by an automobile in Griffith Park, an accident that left her with a six-inch steel plate in her right arm.
Still, she managed to keep busy.
In 1952, she co-wrote a novel, “The Twisted Heart,” with James Caine (she reportedly had to pay for the 200 copies that were published), and for years she continued to be active in animal welfare groups.
MacLaren surfaced occasionally to attend memorial services for her beloved friend Valentino, and a 1970 Hollywood Citizen-News article reported after one sighting of her at an event that she was “still going strong.”
But her behind-the-scenes life was increasingly difficult.
According to an item on the Internet Movie Database (IMDb), when her sister Katherine died in 1956, leaving MacLaren an inheritance of $10,000 (about $110,000 in 2022 money), “it had been embezzled by her nephew.”
MacLaren was married twice, both times under less than ideal circumstances.
Her first husband was George Herbert Young, a Scottish colonel, whom she wed in 1924. But she left him after four years, in 1928, because, she said, she could not live with a man “who loved to kill animals.” (She studied and believed in astrology — she married the colonel, she confided, because a fortune teller had predicted a man would enter her life just then.)
Her second marriage was to Robert S. Coleman, a blind, wheelchair-bound World War I veteran and “one-time animal trainer,” from 1965 until his death in 1971, a union she described as “one of mercy.” He was, she explained when they were wed, “a very interesting man and companionable and he loves me.”
Shortly after my story about her was published, I was contacted by an admirer of hers asking if I would take part in a campaign to help secure a star for her, like her sister Katherine’s, on Hollywood’s famous Walk of Fame. As a result, I wrote to the Hollywood Historic Trust, which maintains the Walk of Fame, asking that she receive a star of her own. I was told the submission would be considered that fall. I never heard back.
On November 9, 1985, a little more than four years after I met her, Mary MacLaren passed away at the age of 85 of respiratory problems at the West Hollywood Hospital after being taken there from a Hollywood convalescent home.
The Los Angeles Times ran a large obituary about her. If anyone had forgotten, readers were reminded that once many, many years before, Mary MacLaren had been a star.
