Looking for Mabel Normand

Mabel was a “laugh-a-minute” girl

and

Helen was a “thrill-a-minute” girl

but were they friends? 

by

Marilyn Slater

Mabel Normand and Helen Homes knew each other at Keystone, working together on 2 surviving films, and perhaps others.

The Arcata Union (California), wrote that Helen and Mabel knew each other around 1911 in an article dated August 12, 1916

            "While on a trip to Los Angeles some five years ago, Miss (Helen) Holmes met Mabel Normand, who was at that time working with the Keystone Company and who later was with Charley Chaplin.  Having known her previously in Chicago, Miss Normand prevailed upon her to join the Keystone Company, with whom she remained a couple of months. She then went with the Kalem company, in which Mr. McGowan was the director and while working in this company, she won fame in her 'Hazards of Helen' pictures and also a husband, the director and the movie queen joining forces for a life partnership."

The silent film scholar, William Drew brought my attention to this friendship in an email over the weekend. “Did they indeed meet in New York around 1909 and 1910 and carry on a correspondence afterwards?  Helen, of course, was at Keystone for a while where Mabel was the star, and it's reported that Mabel helped recommend her for the roles she got at Kalem and introduced her to her future husband and director, J. P. McGowan... Given the supreme importance of both actresses in the history of American and world cinema as well as feminist studies, I really wish there could be more research about their relationship.” 

So what do I know:

Helen Holmes said she was born in South Bend Indiana in either 1893 or maybe 1892[1].  Mabel and Helen were the same age. She was a photographer’s model, debuted on Broadway in 1909 in a play called “Lincoln”[2].  At some point she moved to California to care for her brother who died of tuberculosis.

Helen is listed in the cast of “BARNEY OLDFIELD'S RACE FOR A LIFE”  and “HIDE AND SEEK”, so we can be pretty sure in April of 1913 they knew each other as they were working together[3].  Mabel might have known Helen in New York as they were both modeling and Helen was working in the theater in1909 and was in a play called “The Confession” in 1911 but I don’t know for sure. 

 Later in 1913 Helen signed with Kalem Studios and met her future husband John P. McGowan. Together John and Helen made oodles of adventure films. In November 1914, Kalem released The Hazard of Helen, a 26 part serial a “thrill-a-minute” staring Helen Holmes.  Helen became the iconic, strong, daring, independent, fast thinking; inventive heroine just perfect for the women’s suffrage movement.  Much like Pearl White, Helen did most of her own stunts. After her success for Kalem she and her husband formed her own studio called Signal Films Productions; this was about the same time Mabel was working on “Mickey” at her own studio.  

In the Motion Picture Magazine, December 1918 “The Motion Picture Hall of Fame,” Helen was more popular then Mabel - The Whirlwind Finish of the Greatest Motion Picture Contest Ever Conducted: Lillian Gish 37,340; Helen Holmes 37,111; Dorothy Gish 26,807; Constance Talmadge 19,634; Mabel Normand 19,605

Helen made a few Westerns and occasionally appeared on the stage but in the 1920s her popularity was declining.  John and Helen were divorced in 1925[4]. With her second husband, Lloyd Saunders, a film stuntman, she trained animals to use in movies.

By 1935 Helen had retired from the movies and had opened an antique shop and is said to of had an extensive collection of dolls.  Lloyd died in 1946, Helen had been ill with a heart condition since 1945; she died in 1950 in her Burbank home and was interred at Forest Lawn in Glendale[5].       

They may have been friends but the information is very thin other then 2 women who worked together in 1913 but more informations may turn up. .

Comments and information from William Drew

regarding

Helen & Mabel...

March 6, 2007

Dear Marilyn

  Thanks for the link and putting up the Helen Holmes information.  However, I'd like to add some more data here and to clarify my position on this.  First of all, I see no reason to doubt that, at least at one time, Mabel and Helen were friends, despite the obvious errors in the 1916 article (of which more later).  It is not disputed, after all, that Helen for a time was at Keystone playing small parts in films in which Mabel was the feminine lead.  Helen was clearly an outgoing, daring, thrill-seeking, fun-loving girl of Mabel's age, the very sort of person who would have been likely to pal around with Mabel in those days.  Mack's Edendale studio and the Kalem Glendale studio were in adjacent cities so, even after Helen moved over to Kalem, the two would likely have had opportunities to see each other socially at local gathering places on occasion for the next couple of years.  So yes, I see no reason to doubt they were social friends, although probably not what one would call intimate friends. By the end of 1915, Mabel was preparing to go to Fort Lee, while Helen and husband J. P. McGowan were busy making "The Girl and the Game" serial for their new company, Signal, part of the Mutual corporation and headquartered in Santa Barbara.

After that, it seemed, as so often happens, that Mabel and Helen just moved in different circles, so it's not likely they had much social contact in later years. 

  However, I don't think that the 1916 article was just making something up.  While one should not automatically believe everything published about film people, I think one should equally avoid regarding everything printed as the fabrication of a press agent.  If Helen or her press agents were striving in 1916 to furnish her with some sort of exalted early cinematic background, they would more likely have placed her by Griffith's side at Biograph since, after "The Birth of a Nation" was released, it seemed like everyone wanted to be able to say they'd gained their initial film experience with the great D. W.  In any case, by 1916, Helen had been a major star for well nearly three years, as big a name as Mabel at that time, so I doubt she needed to embellish her pedigree with tales of fictional friendships with other stars.  Even though some of the details in the Arcata article are incorrect, its description of a Mabel-Helen friendship is corroborated by other sources.  In particular, in a "Films in Review" article published in January 1968, Helen Gibson (Miss Holmes's successor in "The Hazards of Helen" and also her close, life-long friend) stated: "In '13 and '14 Helen Holmes was almost as well known as Pearl White and Grace Cunard.  She had started in Sennett's Keystone comedies, and while she was playing in them Mabel Normand introduced her to John P. McGowan, who was in charge of Kalem's studio in Jacksonville, Florida, and had been shifted to the Kalem studio in Glendale."  

  There are, however, some errors in the Wikipedia and IMDB articles on Helen which I'd like to correct.  First of all, there's no "maybe" about when Helen was born.  It was not 1893 but 1892.  This date was in her 1950 obituaries, it's in the California death records, and it's in the 1900 federal census.  Here, in fact, is what I found on her from that last record.  At that time, she was living in Chicago with her parents and siblings.  Helen's father, Louis E. Holmes, an immigrant from Norway born in October 1869, was then employed as a railroad clerk.  Since Helen's screen career so consistently involved films with railroad settings, it would seem this reflected a very personal interest going back to childhood.  Helen's mother, Sophia, born in April 1869, was from Indiana as were her parents.  According to the census, however, their three children were all born in Illinois--the son Frank, born in June 1889, the older daughter Helen, born in June 1892, and the younger girl, Florence, born in May 1896.  Also living with the Holmes family was their 15-year-old servant girl, Viola Meyer, the Illinois-born daughter of Norwegian immigrants.

   The Wikipedia article is likely in error in stating that the Helen Holmes of the silent screen ever worked on Broadway.  None of the biographical articles from the 1910s I've found on the newspaper archive make any reference whatever to her performing on Broadway, something I'm sure they would have been eager to claim had it been true since that would have given her an imposing resume.  I think this is simply an instance where she has been confused with another actress with the same name who is credited with appearing on Broadway intermittently from 1909 to 1935.  This is likely the same Helen Holmes who, according to "The Washington Post" of 1913, was a leading lady at one of the main D.C. stock companies then and was working with yet another Helen, a child actress by the name of Helen Hayes.  However, OUR Helen, the future daring serial queen, was at that time over 3000 miles away on the other side of the continent appearing in Keystone films and soon after making the big leap to stardom when, in the spring of 1913, Kalem hired her as their new leading lady.

   There is some discrepancy in the 1910s accounts of how Helen got her start.  One account says she began in a stage production of "Uncle Tom's Cabin," an almost cliché part of a female star's resume then, including, of course, Pearl with her mythical tale of starting her career as a "Little Eva."  Another article on Helen says she was raised in a convent and that she was a model for photographs published by a railroad.  There is a claim that she attended college; in one of her own statements, she said that she originally wanted to be a painter but subsequently drifted into film work.  In any case, it seems that, whatever stage experience she had had prior to films was very limited and I'd say almost certainly did not include a stint on Broadway.  I have not been able to locate her in the 1910 census so I'm not at all certain where she was living at that time.  However, I believe I have found her father and her brother in the 1910 census who were living together at that time.  Louis Holmes was still employed as a railroad clerk while son Frank was working as a postal clerk.  Where the rest of the family was then living I have no idea.  Since I cannot find an appropriate match for Frank in the 1920 and 1930 censuses, it would thus seem likely that he did indeed die at the time the accounts state and that he presumably did go out to California in search of his health, accompanied by the older of his two sisters.  It may be, of course, that there was no prior acquaintance between Mabel and Helen and that their friendship dates only from the time Helen began her screen career at the new Keystone studio in Edendale.  I certainly don't recall that Mabel had spent any time in Chicago in the early 1910s as the Arcata article says.  But even though the details were thus probably garbled as often happens, still, as I said, I see no reason to doubt that Mabel and Helen had been friends and such is the supreme importance of both that I felt it should be at least noted, instead of being completely overlooked, as it was in Betty Fussell's book, for example.

  Warmest regards,

  William M. Drew