Anna Luther

Anna Luther Rides Again

“Ann Gallagher Finesse”

by Marilyn Slater

October 5, 2008

Anna Luther was making films as early as 1913, working for Reliance Film making “Hearts of the Dark” and “The Fly Leaf of Fate” She went to leads within two months after having been cast for her first screen drama. Anna entered motion picture as the result of a wager.  “I’m going to stay in the motion picture forever.” Little Miss Anna Luther in an interview stated as she showed her pearly white teeth in a fascinating laugh.

Anna Luther was known as the little lady who was not afraid to take a chance.  She was ready and willing to undertake any “stunt” that will add realism to the picture. Anna never appeared on the stage doing “spoken drama” but by 1914, she appeared in the serial “The Changeling” and “The Wolf” for Lubin working in Canada at Hudson, Quebec.  Anna was called a "Fifth Ave, Girl of Movies" when she was working at St. Augustine Florida.

In the Moving Picture World, dated December 12, 1914 was an article titled Anna Luther Supporting Tom Terriss.  Terriss started work at the Kinetophote studios at Coney Island, on the first of the series of famous Terriss plays, which he produced and starred in for the Kinetopote.  He chose “A Man’s Shadow,” which he wrote for his father, the great William Terriss of the London stage. Anna had been with Lubin for over a year after leaving Reliance Company when Terriss was signed her to play the part of the wife in “A Man’s Shadow,” later called “The Pursuing Shadow”.

Ben Wilson was in a film that was titled “Hounded” with Anna Luther, which received very good reviews in December 1914.  It isn’t listed in her IMDb list of films under that named.  It was a Sterling Feature about a criminal trying to go straight. The film created fan interest in Anna, with inquiries in “Fan Columns” about who she was.

It wasn’t long before Anna came west to join Selig Pacific Coast again in Moving Picture World dated May 8, 1915, is an announcement that Anna would be undertaking leading roles in dramas for Selig.  In previous motion picture dramas, Anna had been thrown from a yacht in mid-ocean, dropped from an airplane in a parachute but had never worked with animals.  “I want to work in a Selig wild animal picture; I am anxious for the opportunity.  I want to take a chance,” said Anna Luther and she smiled.

So began Anna in a number of Selig Polyscope, many directed by Mabel Normand’s friend and co-star, George Nichols, “The Scarlet Lady”, “When Love Is Mocked”, ”Mutiny in the Jungle”, “I'm Glad My Boy Grew Up to Be a Soldier.”   

“The Isle of Content” (Lubin 1915) was a three-act Lubin feature drama featuring Vivian Reed, Anna Luther and Eugene Pallette, a beautiful story, a love and sacrifice of a girl discovered on a desolate island by a shipwrecked man is cast up on the island and together they live happily and together they live happily for a year until he finds a bag of diamonds, then his desire civilization brings them back to civilization and later marries her rescuer.  He later tires of her and plans to elope with another woman.  His wife frustrating his plans by drugging him and taking him back to the island.  After seeing where he is and finding his wife bending over him, he holds out his arms and with one glad cry, she is in them.

Anna must have walked down the street to Mack Sennett’s Keystone Studios where she made “Crooked to the End,” which was released in December 1915.  Anna also worked for both Selig and Keystone in 1916 making; “Manicure Girl” (January - Selig Polyscope), “The Village Vampire”, (March - Keystone/Triangle), “Bath Tub Perils, (May - Keystone/Triangle),”  “The Sacrifice” (June - Selig Polyscope)

By February 1915, Mabel Normand and Anna Luther were on the same bill, although they were working for different studios and in very different genre, Mabel in “Mabel’s New Job” a two reel Keystone and Anna Luther in a powerful two reel drama, “Hounded.”

Anna Luther knew Mabel Normand, Minta Durfee and Mae Busch.  In a story in Don Schneider’s files, Minta said that there was a party (no date is given) where Mabel announced that she and Mack Sennett were going to be married Anna Luther was a guest along with Mae Busch.  There is a reference that the party was after Roscoe returned from a trip East but the facts that I have found in Minta’s papers indicates that his first trip East was in December 1915 with Mabel and a train full of Triangle cast and crew.  A more realistic time for the party would have been in September 1915.  Mabel had a bungalow by the beach, as did Sennett, and the Arbuckles.  A trousseau, a wedding dress, a secret marriage plan, a party and a few friends with the group ending up at Minta’s cottage in Ocean Park; the studio limousine to take the girls home driven by Mack Sennett, himself.  First, dropping off Mabel, then Anna and then…perhaps Mae?  Did Mabel show up unexpectedly at Mack Sennett’s place at Venice Beach? It’s the story.  In the book, Keystone by Simon Louvish, the story changes a little.  Mabel and her friend Anna Luther were just driving around, Anna told Mabel to go home, and she would find Mack with a woman named Mae.  It’s another story, but what seems to be a constant is Anna riding in a car with Mabel and they seem to be friends. 

There are no films listed at IMDb with both Mabel and Anna but Anna did make “Crooked to the End” (Keystone/Triangle 1915) before Mabel left California for Fort Lee.  Anna made “The Plumber Story” with Fred Mace and Hugh Fay.   

Anna was getting little stories put in the Daisy Dean, column, News Notes from Movieland by the Keystone Studio in May 26, 1916.  She was working at a 10 days shot at a comedy at Huntington Lake, in September 1916.

 According to an article in The New York Times in the week's specimen of studio repartee is taken from the Fox press bulletin.  September 17, 1916  (Hold on tight, for here it is) J

      "Here is the eighth wonder of the photoplay world: Anna Luther, the famous William Fox star, has a 125-power automobile and yet she has never, never been stopped for speeding.  Miss Luther boasted of this herself when Willard Louis cut in with:

      "'What's the matter?  Can't the cops catch you?'"

Anna Luther received her payroll in March 1917 from New York Motion Picture Corporation.  This was the company that Adam Kessel and Charles Baumann set up in 1909; Keystone became part of NYMP in 1912.  In 1914, Tom Ince and Mack Sennett had a meeting with Kessel and Baumann.  Soon after that, Sennett started to plan for his own company, in March 1917 Griffith left by June, Tom Ince formed his own company; so this check was one of the last, it was signed by E. H. Allen, it was just $100.  Her film made for “Kay-Bee” was released March 31, 1918 called “Marriage Bubble”. 

It was in the summer of 1916 that Anna again went to work on the East Coast, making the Fox serial “The Beast,” which was followed by “The Island of Desire”; Daisy Dean in “Notes from Movieland” wrote in January 28, 1917 that Anna was started her second five-reel Fox drama, directed by Otis Turner, in the cast were George Walsh and Patricia Palmer, who was also known as Margaret Gibson, yes that Margaret Gibson.  Anna also made  “Her Father's Station,” “Melting Millions,” “Woman, Woman!” filmed in Greenwich Village N.Y.  for William Fox, this film was advertised as “A powerful drama with a wonderful lesson” (I wonder). 

“Her Moment” (1918 Author’s Photo-Plays) Anna tried her hand at modeling during 1918, as a way to promote her motion picture career.  As a “role model”, she showed her fans the type of coat that promised "not to crush the daintiest of gowns as the smart little misses motoring during the summer".

In 1919, Anna was filming in Florida making “The Jungle Trail” in Miami & Everglades and in 1920, “Why Women Sin” (Barton King Pro/Wisteria filmed in Miami FL).

There were 15 chapter serials for Pathe, “The Great Gamble” and “The Lurking Peril”.  “The Great Gamble” was one of the films that allow Anna to show, what a very good actress she was.  Charles Hutihison co-stared with Anna; it was written and directed by Joseph Golden.  Charles Hutchinson was a real athlete, both a boxer and wrestler.  His skill as a motorcyclist was also used in the film.  He had a long stage career and had worked on a number of pictures playing leads and directing with Crystal Films.    It maybe that Anna aspirated to move on to head her own production company like Ruth Roland had done.  Anna had a good start, she had played important parts and with success in serials for Pathe in 1919, perhaps she could have her own company.  In 1920, newspapers referred to Anna Luther as (and I quote)…”one of the great actresses of the day.”

Weiss Brothers made a couple of Anna films back on the West Coast. Anna had become one of the feminine constellation of Pathe along with Frances Mann, “The Isle of Jewels”; Pearl White, “The Black Secret”; Eileen Perey, “The Third Eye”; Ruth Roland, “The Adventures of Ruth”, she was one a very heady group.

Anna made “Neglected Wives”, which was adapted from the stage success called “Why Women Sin” in Miami for Burton King Productions with Claire Whitney and Charles Gerard. There were a number of fascinating moments in the production including an “Apache” dance in a scene of the Parisian cabaret by Mlle Nana and Mons Alexis, the well-known eccentric vaudeville dancers.  It had tons of impressive exterior and interior sets. The film was shown though out 1921, Anna became a star with titian hair.

Burton King was reported to be one of the greatest serial directors.  Anna had made “The Lurking Peril” a classic serial with him for Arrow.

The comedy term of Gallagher & Shean were a tremendous hit at the Follies and at the peek of their fame, Edward Gallagher married Anna Luther in Greenwich, Connecticut just before Christmas on December 17, 1923.  Al Shean was the best man.  Anna and Ed separated in February 1924, just 2 months later, Ed continued to play on the road and Anna returned to making films. 

She was born in New Jersey on July 7, 1897, the daughter of a New York sewing machine sales representative, her mother’s maiden name was Limonick.   Anna had married a New York attorney by the name of Samuel E. Driboen in 1913, but it ended in divorce, at the time she started her film career, she loved  being in front of the camera.  Anna seems to be a woman of open passions.   

When Edward Gallagher married Anna he was a man of 50 and Anna admitted to being 26, she was wife number 4.  There is some indication that Gallagher and Shean made an early sound film in 1925 in Auburn, New York for the Theodore Case Studio, the film has not been found (yet).  Edward was born in San Francisco, 1873 and died March 28, 1929.

The vaudeville act was very successful but Gallagher and Shean were said not to like each other.  They first developed their act in 1912 but separated in 1914 until 1920 when they worked together again. In 1922, they were a feature of the Ziegfeld Follies earning an unheard high salary of $1,500 a week.  In 1925, Gallagher suffered a nervous breakdown perhaps due to stress, alcoholism and problems with his marriage to Anna, and other ailments, he entered the Rivercrest Sanitarium in Astoria, Queens, where he died.  Edwards’s third wife, a former Ziegfeld girl, Hilda Moreno cared for him, paying for his hospitalization.  Helen Gallagher (Hilda Moreno) opened the “Gallagher’s Steak House” in November 1927.

During the marriage to Ed and after their separation, opened a rather strange chapter in Anna’s life; it all began with Jack White, no relation to Standford White.  Jack White was a married millionaire, who undertook to promote Anna while she was in New York in 1923. Jack accompanied Anna to California in a private drawing room on their journey west, in violation of the Mann Act. The Act prohibited white slavery; it banned the interstate transport of females for “immoral purposes.” Its primary stated intent was to address prostitution, immorality, and human trafficking.

In 1917, the Court decided that the Mann Act applied not only to purposes of prostitution, but to other non-commercial consensual sexual liaisons. Thus consensual extramarital sex falls within the genre of “immoral sex.”

Jack (J. Frank) White had promised Anna a four motion picture deal that he would produce and she would star in once they got to Hollywood and he would pay her $1,500 a week.  Anna sued him for breach of contract for $100,000. Jack testified that Anna had a bad reputation and that she had solicited him to finance a corporation to make movies and that she told him that she was unmarried.  Jack demanding a return of $10,000 he had spent on her film career.  Jack maintained that Anna had attacked him verbally and physically when he told her that various sources had explained that she was a “has-been” without any prospect in the movie industry in California once they were in Hollywood.

Anna charged that Jack had made “violent love” to her during a transcontinental trip to Hollywood.  Both attacked the character of the other, which were bad enough that they couldn’t be printed in the newspapers.  The vivid stories of Anna’s romantic relationships were aired in court, however.  Anna explained that she was “duped into compromising situations.”

Anna was a friend of Peggy Hopkins Joyce and may have been taking lessons but Jack had a very good attorney.  He got Anna to admit that she only had $141 in the bank account and yet the rent on her place in Great Neck, New York was $2,500, the attorney claimed that Anna had told Jack to either pay her the money she wanted or “watch out for what happened to William Desmond Taylor”.  The judge stated that Anna had no contract and he dropped her suit. She filed a motion for a new trial, her list of parental witnesses included Charlie Chaplin, Syd Chaplin, his wife, Jean Acker, Evelyn Nesbit Thaw, Pearl White, Norman Kerry, Roscoe Arbuckle, Mabel Condon, Joe Engel, Hiram Abrams, Lord Auckland and Mabel Normand.  She brought unwelcome shame to the Hollywood community and the only thing that Anna got from court was a reputation to rival her friend Peggy Hopkins Joyce.  She became a social pariah.

Dagmar Godoswky was married to Frank Mayo, in March 1925; she found Anna Luther in her husband’s apartment and sued him for divorce naming Anna as co-respondent.

Anna and Ed had been separated in 1924, saying, “Ed and I have just agreed to disagree, I am going back to the films.”  The March 1924, newspapers reported that Anna had returned to Hollywood from New York to fill a picture engagement.

Again, Anna was found in another man’s apartment Evelyn Nesbit, best remembered as the wife of Harry K. Thaw. She was the “Girl on the Red Valet Swing”. Harry Thaw shot Standford White, Evelyn’s former lover it was all very messy. 

In April 1924, Evelyn and her second husband, Virgil J. Montani ("Jack Clifford"), a dancer were divorcing, Virgil charged Evelyn with misconduct. In counter claims on grounds of infidelity, Evelyn named Anna Luther.  She also complained to the district attorney of a plot to blackmail her, perhaps true; it was something of a pot calling a kettle black!

Anna Luther went to Paris to get her divorce from Ed Gallagher, in November 1925.  A news story carried by the New York World News Services with the dateline Paris, Nov. 28 by Arno Dosch-Fleurot, stated that Anna had arrived in Paris and announced she intended to start proceedings against Ed.  She said: “I had contemplated starting suit for divorce in New York, but when Mr Gallagher fell seriously ill I abandoned that idea and decided to come to Paris and go through with it.”

Asked what the grounds would be she said: “I have any number of grounds, but I am awaiting word from my attorneys.  I can’t say anything about that now.”  Ed Gallagher died penniless on May 29, 1929, in a sanatorium in Astoria where he had been since 1926,  his marriage to Anna had only been for a few months; his bills had been paid by his former wife, not Anna.

She continued to work in films throughout her life but after 1924, there are no films that list her name as a cast member that I have found, there are uncredited extra roles in a few, 1938, “There Goes My Heart”; 1940, “Tin Pan Alley”; 1944, “Casanova Brown”; 1953, “Easy to Love”, the Esther Williams film; 1957, “The Wayward Bus” seems to be her last film role as an extra.

At an annual get together of the Sennett’s Keystone Kops and Bathing Beauties in May of 1950, Anna insisted that she was one of Sennett’s few dramatic actresses because she never got hit with a pie. She laughed: “They just slapped me on the posterior.  That made me a dramatic actress.”

Hollywood didn’t forget its old-timers, as quickly as the public did.  A number were employed in bit parts in “The Wayward Bus” in 1957 at 20^th Century-Fox. The film stared Jayne Mansfield, Dan Dailey and Joan Collins and among the crowd-shots was not just Anna Luther, who had worked for Fox 40 years before but Grace Cunard, a star of westerns at old Universal, Minta Durfee and other.  Famous stunt men, George Bruggman, Irving Richardson, Duke Greene and Charlie Philips, some of whom had been hurt on accidents in movies got a few days work.

Anna lived her last 20 years in California, she died at the Motion Picture Home on December 16, 1960 and the burial was at Mount Sinai Memorial Park in Los Angeles, plot: Maimonides 1, L-9530, space 4.

In 1983, an article appeared in a bridge magazine about a rather esoteric bridge finesse.  The story begins, once upon a time, when movies were silent, there was a young actress named Anna Luther. She married and, as Anna Gallagher, became a habitué of New York bridge clubs. She earned a place in bridge mythology with her handling a trump combination. For people that understand the finessing of four low spades by leading with a jack to force a queen, than you know the “Ann Gallagher Finesse” A special sort of two-way finesse. Instead of deciding which way to finesse, though, declarer finesses both ways and for us that don’t play the story is more about Anna giggling and crossing to the dummy in a side-suit and saying: “Now let's see if I'm really lucky.” She then led low from dummy to the ten, this method of handling a two-way intuiting the play, became known as the Ann Gallagher finesse, and was a constant source of hilarity.

World War II came and went, and then, believe it or not, somebody in Europe produced a hand that vindicated the Ann Gallagher finesse. It appeared in the short-lived magazine European Bridge Review.   There was another article published by Alan Truscott January 21, 1995. Sixty years after Anna started to play bridge in the clubs around New York City she was still remember. Famous for her treatment of a two-way finesse for a queen. Not for her work as a movie queen but for giggling a little and announcing: "Now I'll find out if I'm really lucky."