Stanley

Stan Laurel was born Arthur Stanley Jefferson in Ulverston, England on this day in 1890.

The "thin" half of the comedy team of Laurel and Hardy, Stan Jefferson was born into a family of British stage performers, and sought a stage career from an early age. Stan earned his first stage appearance on his own comic merits at 16; and when his father witnessed his son's talents, he arranged for young Stan to join a traveling pantomime company. By 1910, he was working with Fred Karno's Troupe, one of the best companies in England, clowning alongside (and sometimes as understudy to) Charlie Chaplin. When Chaplin left the Troupe during a tour of the U.S. to join Mack Sennett's Keystone movie studio in 1912, Stan decided to stay on in the U.S. to try American vaudeville, shortly thereafter adopting the name "Laurel" to avoid the bad luck of using the 13-lettered "Jefferson."

In 1917, Laurel began starring in short comedy films, often writing and assisting with direction; but in about 9 years he failed to make much of a mark, jumping from studio to studio. He joined the Hal Roach studio in 1926 as a gag writer, but was eventually persuaded to team with Roach contract player Oliver "Babe" Hardy in a series of short silent comedies, many directed by Leo McCarey. Together, Laurel and Hardy made more than 100 films (27 of them full-length features), bridging the gap between silent and talking pictures and becoming the most enduring comedy team in screen history.

Always a craftsman, Laurel took a special interest in writing the scenarios and was known to spend hours in the cutting room, painstakingly pacing the team's sequences. By contrast, Babe Hardy loved to play and eat and drink (and he was probably a gambling addict). In a role reversal of sorts, on-screen Hardy was the putative leader of the two derby'd man-children known as Mr. Laurel and Mr. Hardy. Sputtering with frustration, the on-screen Laurel could barely transfer a clue from one hand to the other, and would inevitably dig them into a precarious mess, registering his fear through blinking sobs and head-scratching. The really distinctive aspect of the team, however, was their giant hearts. There was little meanness in them on screen, either to each other or to any bystander. When things went wrong, they frequently knew it was their own fault, and when things went well, they received it as good fortune, linked arms, and frequently broke out into song. Contrasts aside, Laurel and Hardy were great friends off-screen, frequently vacationing together.

Laurel's only professional separation from Hardy from 1924 until Hardy's death in 1957 was during Laurel's contract dispute with Roach, during which Hardy starred with veteran comic Harry Langdon in Zenobia (1939). In tribute to his friend, Laurel retired from performing upon Hardy's death, but continued to ply the art of comedy as a writer. He died on February 23, 1965 in Santa Monica, California.

Plain Bill

William Sulzer, the Democratic governor of New York from January to October of 1913, was born on this day in 1863 in Elizabeth, New Jersey.

Known as "Plain Bill," Sulzer served as a member of Congress from 1895 to 1912, and was elected governor of New York in 1912 with the support of the New York City Tammany Hall political machine. Soon after he took office, however, he fell out of favor with Tammany boss Charles F. Murphy when he failed to appoint certain handpicked Tammany allies to key positions and advocated the use of primary elections rather than nominating conventions for the selection of candidates for office, thus taking the party banner out of the hands of the backroom pols; by the year's end, Sulzer was impeached for allegedly diverting campaign funds for personal use.

At the time, anti-Tammany forces cried foul, and almost immediately afterward, Sulzer was elected to a seat in the New York State Assembly. He ran for governor in 1914 as a candidate of the American Party, but did not receive the vindication he had hoped for, running third behind the Republican victor, Charles S. Whitman; Sulzer's Tammany-backed successor, Martin H. Glynn came in second in his losing bid for re-election. In 1916, Sulzer turned down the presidential nomination of the American Party, and practiced law in New York City for much of the rest of his life. He died there on November 6, 1941.

Sulzer also starred in a film about his impeachment (The Governor's Boss, 1915) in which, on celluloid if not in real life, he successfully fights Tammany Hall and keeps his office. Despite all the populist sentiment in his favor, Sulzer's name has never been officially rehabilitated, and he remains the one New York governor whose portrait does not hang in the Hall of Governors in the State Capitol in Albany.

Barney Oldfield

Auto racer Barney Oldfield was born Berna Eli Oldfield on this day in 1878 in Wauseon, Ohio.

Oldfield served as Henry Ford’s proxy on the racing circuit, driving Ford’s 999 sports car in 1902 in races around the country (beating, among others, Ford's rival Alexander Winton). Winton hired him away from Ford and sent him on tour in his Winton Bullet, in which Oldfield became the first driver to achieve the speed of a mile-per-minute (at Indianapolis on June 15, 1903). In 1910 he set another record, hitting 131.724 mph in a 200-horsepower Blintzen Benz, in a match race against African-American heavyweight boxing champ Jack Johnson, who had boasted he could beat any professional driver. For racing an African-American, the American Automobile Association suspended Oldfield and banned him from AAA-sanctioned meets.

He was a bit past his prime, although still probably the most famous racer in the U.S., when he starred in a Mack Sennett adventure-comedy short, Barney Oldfield's Race for Life (1913), in which he raced a train to get to Mabel Normand and untie her from the tracks.

Oldfield died on October 4, 1946 in Beverly Hills, California. He never finished higher than fifth in the Indianapolis 500.

Murnau

"Reality in his films was surrounded by a halo of dreams and presentiments, and a tangible person might suddenly impress the audience as a mere apparition." -- S. Kracauer.

Film director F.W. Murnau -- whose work was marked by an art historian's sense of composition and the use of imagery, and the poignant, almost ghostly characterizations he inspired from his actors -- was born on this day in 1888 in Bielefeld, Westphalia.

Murnau graduated from Heidelberg University where he studied art history and literature and started acting in Max Reinhardt's Deutsches Theater, when he was drafted into the German infantry in the First World War. Before long he was transferred to the air force as a pilot, and survived seven crashes before being captured in Switzerland. During his internment there as a P.O.W., Murnau was permitted to direct theatrical productions and compile propaganda films for the German embassy in Bern.

After the war, Murnau began to direct films, first through a production company he founded with actor Conrad Veidt, and later through other German producers. Among his great German works were the chilling Nosferatu (1922), a breakthrough film in Germany for its use of real locales, based broadly on Bram Stoker's Dracula (in fact, Murnau was sued for infringement); The Last Laugh (1924), about a hotel doorman (Emil Jannings) who loses his job, his uniform and his station in life; and Faust (1926), based on the Goethe epic.

Murnau moved to the U.S. and made his finest film, Sunrise (1927) based on Hermann Sudermann's A Trip to Tilsit. At the time of its release, Robert Sherwood called it "the most important picture in the history of movies" and even 31 years later it was voted the greatest film of all time in a Cahiers du Cinema poll.

After an ill-fated South seas collaboration with documentary filmmaker Robert Flaherty (Tabu, 1931), Murnau was killed on March 11, 1931 when his Rolls Royce went off the road while he was driving up the coast from Los Angeles with friends.

The Fetish of Tragedy

Film director Fritz Lang was born on this day in 1890 in Vienna.

Following the wishes of his architect father, Lang studied architecture for a time before joining the Vienna Academy of Graphic Arts to pursue a course in painting. Facing his father's disapproval, Lang moved to Brussels around 1909 and made his living selling sketches. In 1910, he took to the sea, visiting North Africa, Asia Minor, China, Japan and Bali before settling in Paris, renting a studio at Montmartre and studying at the Academie Julien.

During World War I, Lang found himself in the Austrian Army; blinded in one eye after being wounded, Lang spent his time in military hospitals writing film scripts. He wrote several scripts for Erich Pommer's Decla film company in Berlin before directing his first film, The Half-Caste (1919), followed by the first episode of a popular adventure serial, The Spiders (1919). He was slated to direct Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1919) based upon a scenario to which he contributed, but instead he was assigned to direct another episode of The Spiders serial; Caligari became a classic in the hands of Robert Wiene.

Annoyed at losing Caligari, Lang left Decla for a time, but returned to direct his first international success, Destiny (1921), the visual style of which caused comparisons to Durer and Grunewald in the French journals. From a thematic perspective, Destiny also typified Lang's preoccupation with despair and the inevitability of fate, or as Lang himself described it, his "fetish of tragedy." In 1922, he completed Dr. Mabuse the Gambler, the first of a series of films featuring the fiendish criminal mastermind, which he followed with two films based on the German legend Die Nieblungen (Siegfried and Kriemhild's Revenge, 1924). In 1926, Lang completed the greatest of his silent films, Metropolis (with Brigitte Helm), a social melodrama set in the year 2000 against "an exaggerated dream of the New York skyline, multiplied a thousandfold and divested of all reality." (L. Eisner)

Although Metropolis was not a box office success, Lang's preeminence among German directors was assured as he began work on his first sound film, M (1930; with Peter Lorre), a film about how the criminal underground organizes to capture a child murderer whose activities are bad for business. In 1934, Lang arrived in the U.S., where he made a pair of dark, moralistic character studies, Fury (1936; starring Spencer Tracy and Sylvia Sidney) and You Only Live Once (1937; with Sidney and Henry Fonda).

Lang's early efforts in Hollywood did not endear him to the studios, which favored light material with happy endings, nor did his insistence on detail. Nevertheless, Lang survived, making such eerie minor classics as the stark western, The Return of Frank James (1940; with Fonda); a Graham Greene mystery, Ministry of Fear (1944; with Ray Milland); the twin nightmares Woman in the Window (1944; written by Nunnally Johnson) and Scarlet Street (1945) (both with Edward G. Robinson, Joan Bennett and Dan Duryea); and The Big Heat (1953; with Glenn Ford and Lee Marvin). His career went into sharp decline after 1956, although his films continued to be appreciated by younger film directors; in homage to Lang, Jean-Luc Godard cast Lang as himself in Contempt (1963). Lang died on August 2, 1976 in Beverly Hills.

*Achoo!*

Frederick P. Ott -- itinerant mechanic and film star -- died on this day in 1936 in West Orange, New Jersey at the age of 66.

Fred's brother John got Fred a job as a mechanic in the famous research and development workshop of Thomas Edison, the "Wizard of Menlo Park." Together the Ott brothers worked on Edison's kinetograph and kinetoscope motion picture projects.

The contemporaries report, however, that Fred Ott had a penchant for "monkey-shines." So when it came time for W.K.L. Dickson, Edison's kinetograph supervisor, to try out the new invention, he aimed his camera at Fred Ott who, among other talents, had "a sneeze louder than any other white man born east of the Rockies." Although this was to be a silent experiment, Dickson decided upon Ott's sneeze as a proper subject for an experimental motion picture, but try as he might, Ott couldn't sneeze until the second day of production. The result was the very first copyrighted motion picture, Fred Ott's Sneeze (1893), shot in close-up at Edison's "Black Maria" studio, and it made the clowning, mustachioed mechanic the world's first film star -- after a fashion.

Keaton

"Chaplin appropriated film to his own image. Lloyd manipulated it with an architect's knowledgability. Keaton preferred to function as its conscience. While others were using film to point at themselves or their deviltries, Keaton pointed in the opposite direction: at the thing itself. He insisted that film was film. He insisted that silent film was silent." -- Walter Kerr.

Born on this day in 1895 in Piqua, Kansas, the son of traveling medicine show performers, Keaton was performing comedy almost as soon as he could walk. His nickname is said to have come from Harry Houdini, who saw Keaton take a spill down some stairs at the age of 6 months and laugh delightedly upon reaching the bottom (as in, "that was quite a buster your boy just took").

Keaton's ability to take a pratfall became the basis of his early comedy, as his father Joe Keaton threw his hapless son around the medicine show stage like a rag doll while Keaton maintained what would become his famous deadpanned face. Soon he became the star attraction of his parents' act, and he enabled the family to break from the small-time to the better houses of the vaudeville circuit. When Buster reached majority, the family act broke up (at that time his father seemed incapable of having anything but a violent relationship with his son, either on or off the stage), and Buster began to headline on his own.

Very soon thereafter, however, Keaton met movie comedian Fatty Arbuckle, then one of the most popular silent screen stars, and began to support him in various two-reel comedies, beginning with The Butcher Boy (1917). While most silent comedy was distinguished by its frenetic pace and overemphatic gesture, Keaton's quiet, unhurried style immediately asserted itself on the screen. Even with his stoic expression, he managed to convey much more about what he was thinking than the grimacing, mugging comedians who populated the silents at the time. He also showed himself to be a wildly resourceful, logical character, someone who could take adversity and bend it to his will.

Near the end of 1917, Arbuckle moved his film company to California, and Keaton went with him, interrupting his film education with a brief stint in World War I. In 1920, Keaton was offered his own picture deal at Metro just as Arbuckle was jumping to Paramount. From 1920 to 1923, Keaton directed and starred in 19 short comedies, including the classics One Week (1920) and Cops (1922). In 1921, he married Natalie Talmadge, the least famous of the Hollywood Talmadge sisters, and moved into a grand Hollywood mansion. Natalie starred with Keaton in his first feature masterpiece, Our Hospitality (1923) in which he combined his penchant for athletic gags (such as swinging across a waterfall to rescue Natalie just as her canoe goes over the edge) with a compelling period atmosphere and a subconscious critique of his real-life relationship with his Hollywood in-laws, as his character in the film becomes the target of the family of his beloved. (Keaton ended up being chewed up and spit out by the Talmadges in due course, his marriage to Natalie breaking up in 1932.)

In Sherlock, Jr. (1924), Keaton plays a movie projectionist who dreams himself into the movie screen (a theme reworked by Woody Allen in Purple Rose of Cairo, 1984), and added to his smart, physical gags a series of special effect gags -- seamless background changes without apparent cuts -- which dazzled Hollywood tekkies; critics claim that the science of special effects didn't catch up to what Keaton achieved with inferior technology until the 1980s. His next film, The Navigator (1924), is thought to be second only to The General (1926) in exposing Keaton's greatness.

In The General, often considered one of the greatest American films ever made, Keaton plays a Southern engine driver who gets rejected by the Confederate Army and by his girl (Marion Mack). When his girl and his train are kidnapped by the Union, he pursues them, rescues them and is commissioned as a Confederate officer. Like Our Hospitality, Keaton endows the film with a beautiful period sense (many critics compare his pictorial sensibilities to those of Civil War photographer Mathew Brady), but it is Keaton's delicate engineering sense and integration of plot structure and gags which leaves audiences in awe: every gag propels the plot with linear economy.

Keaton continued to make great silent comedies as the talkies arrived (Steamboat Bill, Jr., 1928; The Cameraman, 1928; and Spite Marriage, 1929), but his comedy did not translate well to the early sound period, despite 8 sound features made for MGM made between 1929 and 1933. He rapidly went from Hollywood stardom to a couple of decades of alcoholism and poverty row short films. He appeared in cameo roles in Billy Wilder's Sunset Boulevard (1950, playing bridge with Erich von Stroheim) and in Charlie Chaplin's Limelight (1952, in which utters the famous line, "If anyone else says it's like the old times, I'll jump out the window."), and sold his biography to MGM for a regrettable biopic starring an inadequate Donald O'Connor, The Buster Keaton Story (1957).

Although during the 1920s, Keaton's comedy was considered second-best to Chaplin's, as Keaton approached the end of his life he not enjoyed a resurgence of popularity, and since then a number of critics have labored to show that Keaton was the superior director and the more inventive comedian. He died on February 1, 1966.

It

"We had individuality. We did as we pleased. We stayed up late. We dressed the way we wanted. I'd whiz down Sunset Boulevard in my open Kissel . . . with several red chow dogs to match my hair. Today they're sensible and end up with better health. But we had more fun." -- Clara Bow, 1951.

Silent film star Clara Bow, known as the "'It girl," was born on this day in 1905 in Brooklyn, New York.

Clara was rescued from her impoverished home (her father was a Coney Island waiter) when she won a movie fan magazine beauty contest at 16. After a succession of bit parts, she hit the big time in 1925 when producer B.P. Schulberg turned the Paramount Studios publicity machine on, reinventing Bow as an energetic, carefree flapper, a party-girl who leaped out of the pages of F. Scott Fitzgerald, with her bobbed red hair, cute bee-stung lips and bright brown eyes. In 1927, she starred in Elinor Glyn's It, and Glyn endorsed the casting choice, pronouncing Bow the greatest living example of "it" -- a quality which subsumed sex appeal and an unconscious, animal-like vitality. In fact, Glyn said four people in Hollywood had "it": Bow; actor Tony Moreno; Rex, the wild stallion (a Hal Roach animal star); and the Ambassador Hotel doorman. Her portrayal of the flirtatious ambulance driver in William Wellman's Wings (1927) was another notable success.

Before the end of the silent period, however, Bow's popularity began to decline, with rumors of her gargantuan sexual appetite (exaggerated, especially the untrue story that she once serviced the entire USC football team) stimulating an ounce of Midwestern moral outrage of the type felt in the wake of the Fatty Arbuckle and Wallace Reid scandals. In the late 1920s, she suffered from mental and physical exhaustion, but tried her hand at a few talking pictures nonetheless. True, her Brooklyn accent did not rest easily on the ears, but it was no worse than the accent of early talking star May McAvoy; the truth was that the time of the flapper had passed, and America was uncomfortable with the loose-living alcoholic daughters it had suffered during the Jazz Age.

Miss Bow was a hangover memory when she eloped with cowboy actor (and later lieutenant governor of Nevada) Rex Bell in 1931. While Bell led his public life, Bow spent a great deal of time in sanitariums. She died in 1965.

Messmer Gets His Due

Otto Messmer was born on this day in 1892 in West Hoboken, New Jersey.

A correspondence school art student, Messmer began his career illustrating fashion catalogues but, inspired by the vaudeville act and early animated cartoons of Winsor McCay, he started to try to break in to newspaper comic strips by contributing to Fun and the Sunday New York World. In 1915, he was hired by Raoul Barre Animated Cartoons, but didn't have much of a chance to prove his mettle before he shipped off to World War I as a telegraph operator in the Army Signal Corps.

After the War, he joined former Barre animator Pat Sullivan (fresh from Sullivan's stint in prison for statutory rape) in Sullivan's new independent shop to produce short travelogue parodies for Triangle Films. Asked to create a filler-series for Paramount in 1919, Messmer came up with an adventurous, wide-awake, lucky little cat-hero, painted black at Sullivan's request to save time -- and "Felix the Cat" was born. Sullivan, however, claimed credit for the cartoon's birth, and kept Messmer's name off the screen for over 175 silent shorts while "Felix" became a national phenomenon and Sullivan raked in the money on Felix merchandise.

When Sullivan's irresponsible lifestyle caught up with him and he died in 1933, Messmer found himself without a studio and with no rights to Felix. He happily and humbly continued to draw Felix, however, as a comic strip for Felix's owners (King Features), turned down the chance to direct more Felix cartoons in the 1930s (he thought of Felix as a silent cat, and was unwilling to take on the burden of giving him a voice and drowning him in Technicolor), and bounced around in various studios.

In 1937 he began an association with Leigh-EPOK, and while continuing to draw comic strips he became Leigh-EPOK's premiere designer of huge animated electronic signs for Times Square in New York for almost 40 years.

In the 1960s, as Joe Oriolo began to revive Felix for TV, Messmer finally got the recognition he deserved among the film animation community. Animation historian John Canemaker makes the case that Messmer was the unsung "inventor of character animation."

Messmer died on October 26, 1983 in Teaneck, New Jersey.

Dolores Del Rio

Film actress Dolores Del Rio was born Lolita Dolores Asunsolo de Martinez on this day in 1905 in Durango, Mexico.

Often referred to as one of the most beautiful women in the history of film, Dolores, the convent-educated cousin of Ramon Novarro, married lawyer Jaime Del Rio at age 16. When she was 20, she was spotted by a Hollywood director at a Mexico City tea party and invited to appear in her first film, Joanna (1925). She followed her debut with plum roles in silent films such as What Price Glory? (1926, from the Maxwell Anderson play), Resurrection (1927, based on the Tolstoy novel) and Evangeline (1929).

Although she was not often cast as a vamp, which was Hollywood's usual approach to dark, exotic beauty, she tended to play "an assortment of puzzled Indian and Polynesian maidens" (per Richard Schickel) in such films as Ramona (1928; based on the Helen Hunt Jackson story) and Bird of Paradise (1932; directed by King Vidor) in which she appears topless (wearing a strategically placed lei) for most of the film.

While the studios were dropping many of the foreign beauties who graced the silent screen when the talkies arrived, Del Rio survived in Hollywood on her education, her grace and taste -- even if Hollywood didn't often know what to do with her singular persona. Divorced from Jaime before 1930, Del Rio married twice and came close to marrying Orson Welles around the time she starred with him in Journey into Fear (1942).

Disappointed over the end of her relationship with Welles and exasperated with Hollywood for underestimating her dramatic talent, she returned to Mexico in 1943, negotiating lucrative contracts and starring in some of the finest pieces in the golden age of Mexican cinema, including the classic Maria Candelaria (1943). She returned to American films intermittently, appearing in John Ford's The Fugitive (1947, with Henry Fonda) and Cheyenne Autumn (1964). She appeared with Elvis Presley in Flaming Star (1960), summing up her decision to join the project with a sentiment which no doubt prodded her throughout her career: "I took the part because it permitted me to play an intelligent, sensitive woman of character."

She died on April 11, 1983 in Newport Beach, California.

Falconetti

Stage actress Renee Maria Falconeti was born on this day in 1892 in Sermano, Corsica. Falconetti started as a music hall singer at Le Boeuf Sur le Toit in Paris in 1914. She established herself as a dramatic actress in Racine's Phaedre at L'Avenue, and later appeared in numerous stage productions there and at the Comedie Francaise, including La Vie d'une Feeme and Le Carnaval des Enfants.

At the height of her fame she agreed to appear (with shorn coif and no makeup) in Carl Dreyer's silent film La Passion de Jeanne d'Arc (1927), and despite the fact that she suffered at Dreyer's belligerent style of direction, the film is an acknowledged masterwork of cinema, and the only surviving showcase of Falconetti's power as an actress. Throughout much of the film, Falconetti is shot in close-up with the revealing effects of high-contrast lighting, presenting in silence one of the most intense representations of mental and physical anguish in the history of film -- as well as capturing the status of icon. As Jean Renoir noted, "That shaven head was and remains the abstraction of the whole epic of Joan of Arc."

It was Falconetti's first and last film. Afterwards, she returned to the stage and bought L'Avenue theater, but the theater flopped, leaving her financially ruined. When France was invaded by the Nazis, Falconetti fled to Switzerland, then Brazil, then Argentina, where she made a meager living in small acting and singing jobs. After World War II, she hoped to return to the Paris stage, but fearing she was overweight, she went on a crash diet and died within several days, on December 12, 1946 in Buenos Aires.

Uncle Bob

Film director Robert McGowan, the trusty helmsman of the earliest and the best of the "Our Gang" comedies, was born on this day in 1882 in Denver, Colorado.

A Colorado fireman who suffered a career-ending injury, McGowan was a naturally gifted storyteller, arriving in Hollywood in 1913 hoping to break into movie production. He eventually caught on as a gag writer for silent comedies at Hal Roach Studios. When Hal Roach came up with the idea for a series of kid comedies in 1922, he turned the reins over to McGowan. Like a benevolent, respected old uncle, McGowan charmed wonderfully natural comic performances out of such children as Mickey Daniels, Mary Kornman and Farina Hoskins for the gleeful "Our Gang" short comedies during the silent period, always attempting to make sure that the children enjoyed what they were doing, filming them outdoors in an atmosphere of play.

By the time sound film came into vogue, McGowan had already made 68 silent "Our Gang" comedies and had nearly retired; but sound and new cast members (eventually including Jackie Cooper, Stymie Beard and Spanky McFarland) gave McGowan new energy, leading him to make some of the most entertaining entries in the "Our Gang" catalog from the advent of sound until he finally did retire in 1933. (His nephew, Anthony Mack, continued making the films from time to time along with other directors until the end of the series, sometimes under the name of "Robert A. McGowan" -- which is a shame because Mack wasn't nearly as talented as his uncle.)

What is also remarkable about his early sound films is their urban realism: in Pups is Pups (1930) for example, most of the action takes place within the confines of a smoky factory ghetto, shown in long shot at the beginning of the movie, his street urchins all coming from disadvantaged homes, with black children always mixing on friendly terms with white children -- because poverty, of course, loves company. His deft use of cross-cutting, outdoor locations, and a combination of slapstick with poignant scenes took away some of the stiffness which marked much of early sound film production.

Later he wrote gags at Paramount and directed a few comedies elsewhere, occasionally enjoying a round of golf with such friends as W.C. Fields or Oliver Hardy. He died on January 27, 1955 in Santa Monica, California.

The Diving Venus

"There is nothing more democratic than swimming. Swimming, like running, is a sport that requires in its most basic mode no equipment other than one’s body." – Annette Kellerman.

Swimmer and silent film actress Annette Kellerman, known as the "Diving Venus," was born on this day in 1888 in Sydney, Australia. She apparently occupies a number of obscure but important niches in pop culture history: by legend, she was the first woman to attempt to swim the English channel; the first to perform underwater ballet, the forerunner to today's synchronized swimming; the first to brave North American shores in a one-piece swimsuit; and, as a pioneering athlete turned film star, the first celebrity to appear nude on screen.

Born with weak legs and requiring braces to walk, Kellerman began swimming at an early age as therapy. She moved with her family to England when she was 14, where her down-and-out father Frederick Kellerman promoted her swimming prowess shamelessly. After a series of local exhibitions, Mr. Kellerman announced to the press that his little Annette would swim 26 miles down the Thames from Putney to Blackwall, training on a diet of bread and milk. The teenaged Annette succeeded mightily, and thereafter earned a small fortune by performing other swimming feats, but failed twice to become the first woman to swim across the English Channel (a feat finally accomplished by Gertrude Ederle in 1926).

In 1907 she moved to the U.S., performing water ballet to packed houses at the New York Hippodrome and doing high diving stunts at Chicago's White City amusement park in the dead of winter. While visiting Boston's Revere Beach in 1907, Annette appeared before the assembled press in a tight-fitting boy's one-piece racing swimsuit -- demure by today's standards, amply covering both bottom and top, but scandalous by the standards of the day, which required a woman to wear skirts, bloomers and stockings when cavorting in the surf. The police arrested her on the spot (some would cynically say it was just another publicity stunt) and hauled her away.

Kellerman, however, was not so easily turned away: when she discovered that it was not the tightness that violated the law but the amount of flesh shown in the outdoors, Kellerman returned to Revere Beach wearing a modified version of her original one-piece, showing off her curvaceous figure (she was actually 5'-4" weighing 140 lbs; perhaps more chutzpah than cheesecake, although a gawking Harvard professor stammered that Kellerman was "the most beautifully formed woman of modern times") in her tight, scoop-necked, sleeveless black leotard and tights while still not showing more skin than the law allowed. The woman’s one-piece bathing suit was born -- or at least a standard which allowed a woman to wear tight-fitting garb. For Kellerman, it was a matter of sport, not fashion: "I can’t swim," she declared, "wearing more stuff than you can hang on a clothesline."

Her overnight celebrity caused Hollywood to take note, and Kellerman's swimsuit was shown off in a couple of quick newsreels in 1909. Kellerman made her bona fide film debut later that year, and starred in 8 features, including Neptune's Daughter (1914, directed by Herbert Brenon). Her most notorious appearance, however, was in Brenon's Daughter of the Gods (1916; produced by William Fox), by reputation a bit of overripe nonsense as cinema (it is now lost), but enormously popular on the strength of Kellerman's "startling nude scenes," including a bit of nude swimming (confirmed in surviving production stills) -- 78 years before another uninhibited Australian, Elle Macpherson, would cause barely a ripple by appearing nude for long glorious stretches of the film Sirens (1994). At any rate, Daughter of the Gods made a fortune for Fox and Brenon.

In 1918, Kellerman wrote a book, Physical Beauty and How to Keep It, in which she offered diet tips. Her film career ended in the 1920s, but Kellerman's tale was revived when Esther Williams portrayed her in Million Dollar Mermaid (1952). Kellerman died on November 5, 1975 in Southport, Australia.

Harry Langdon

"The oddest thing about this whole funny business is that the public really wants to laugh, but it's the hardest thing in the world to make them do it." -- Harry Langdon.

The unlikeliest of silent comedians, the oldest of the four worthies (Chaplin, Keaton and Lloyd being the others), the last to reach the movie screen, and, according to Mack Sennett, the greatest of them all. Born on this day in 1884 in Council Bluff, Iowa to Salvation Army parents, he left home at 13 to join a medicine show. By 1906, while working the vaudeville circuit he had created the rough edges of the character which would see him through his brief but brilliant turn as a silent movie comedian: sleepy, child-like mannerisms, baggy trousers, a round hat with a punched-in crown, and a white pancake face with eyes, eyebrows and lips darkly outlined, reducing his facial features to a few cartoon-like smudges.

As vaudeville began to vanish, Langdon was plucked out of the circuit and signed by Sennett to a star contract. Initially, Sennett didn't know what to do with Langdon: most Sennett comedians ran very fast and had a certain natural malevolence -- they'd think nothing of tripping the cop, or throwing a brick at him. The principle behind Langdon's blinking "baby-man" character was entirely the opposite: he functioned more as a comic pause in the action, the ridiculous calm at the eye of the tornado of slapstick around him. And throwing a brick was out of the question: Langdon was the child of fate, and if fate would somehow see fit to drop a brick on the cop's head, then Langdon would make it home safely.

Sennett entrusted Langdon's offbeat brand of pantomime to a young writer, Frank Capra, who helped Langdon figure out how to make his character work on celluloid in Langdon's three best feature films: The Strong Man (1926), Tramp, Tramp, Tramp (1926, with Joan Crawford) and Long Pants (1927).

Langdon's fame quickly faded as the silent era drew to a close, although he continued to work as a character actor and gag writer for Laurel and Hardy, once even subbing for Laurel opposite Hardy in Zenobia (1939) when Laurel left the studio during a contract dispute. He died on December 22, 1944 of a cerebral hemorrhage while on a movie set.

Dizzy Dame

Silent film actress Mae Murray was born Marie Koenig on this day in 1889 in Portsmouth, Virginia.

Murray began her career as a dancer with Vernon Castle on Broadway in 1906, appeared in the "Ziegfeld Follies" and made her screen debut opposite Wallace Reid in To Have and to Hold (1916). Not a great actress, she nonetheless became an important, highly-paid film star: blonde, with bee-stung lips, a vibrant personality and a dancer's posture, her best films were made by her second husband, Robert Z. Leonard (such as The Gilded Lily, 1921; Fascination, 1922 and Circe the Enchantress, 1924) apart from her finest appearance ever, in von Stroheim's The Merry Widow (1925).

She was also one of the great eccentrics of Hollywood -- often described as "dizzy" or "ethereal," she seemed to live in her own fantasy-world which ignored practicalities. She once bought jewelry at Tiffany's and paid for it with little bags of gold dust; while working on The Merry Widow, when co-star John Gilbert stalked off the set following an argument with von Stroheim, Murray chased Gilbert into the parking lot wearing nothing but her shoes; and once, after being informed that Paramount's East Coast office had cut out all the "fairy tale" scenes of one of her films, Murray boarded a train for New York (without even packing first) and spent weeks crawling about a film warehouse, rescuing the excised footage from the cutting room floor and pasting it back in her movie.

She left her successful relationship with MGM Studios at the insistence of her fourth husband, Prince David Mdivani -- who wasn't so much a prince as the son of a former Russian imperial governor in Batum (in Georgian Russia), the brother of Prince Alexis Mdivani (the some-time husband of heiress Barbara Hutton) and Prince Serge Mdivani (the some-time husband of actress Pola Negri), and boyhood chum of writer Lev Nussimbaum (also known as Kurban Said or Essad Bey). The move away from MGM effectively ended Mae's her career. After her divorce from Mdivani in 1934 and losing a bitter custody battle over their son Koran David, she faded into poverty and obscurity, eventually dying as a ward of the Motion Picture Country Home in Woodland Hills on March 23, 1965. She published an autobiography, appropriately entitled The Self-Enchanted, in 1959.

Harold Lloyd - Silent Comedy's Adventure Capitalist

Harold Lloyd's silent comedies -- once among the most popular of the era -- were rarely seen for a number of years due to squabbles over ownership, but one image of Lloyd has remained indelible in pop consciousness: the picture of a man in a dark business suit and round horn-rimmed glasses, hanging for dear life from the hour-hand of a clock high atop a tall building in some downtown American metropolis.

Thrilling and funny within its context (the 1923 feature Safety Last), it is also portentous, and a little bit haunting -- and not just incidentally. More than any other major comedian of the era, Lloyd sought identification as a budding American capitalist, usually a smart, hard-working yet kind-hearted junior clerk who has his sights set on the top of the corporate ladder. For the capitalist, the image is a chilling metaphor: money is time, time is money, timing is everything, and even those who have climbed to the top (in this case, literally) are only holding on for dear life by the most slender of handles. The identification behind Lloyd's on-screen character (so close in so many ways to his own personality), for all its jaunty optimism as well as for its underlying recognition of how fragile the world of the capitalist can be, was perhaps the secret of Lloyd's popularity.

Young Harold, who was born on this day in 1893 in Burchard, Nebraska, grew up as a resourceful lad in a habitually relocating Midwestern family -- delivering telegraph messages or newspapers, soda-jerking, selling popcorn, anything to supplement the meager family income. In 1907, the family settled in San Diego, just as the film industry was beginning to move into California. Lloyd caught the show business bug working as an usher in theaters and in small parts in the local rep companies before landing his first screen bit, as a Yaqui Indian in an Edison film in 1912.

In Los Angeles, he eventually caught on as a regular extra at Universal, where he met another young extra named Hal Roach. In 1914, Roach inherited some money and decided to start his own film studio, inviting Lloyd along to play a comic character in a handful of short films which were ultimately never released. One of Roach's shorts did manage to catch the attention of Pathe for distribution, and after a brief falling out between Roach and Lloyd over wages, Lloyd signed on to create a Chaplin knock-off character, "Lonesome Luke," a tramp in tight clothes as opposed to Chaplin's baggy ones. While neither Roach nor Lloyd really cared much for the character, it was very popular, and together with Bebe Daniels and Snub Pollard, Lloyd made over 100 "Lonesome Luke" shorts during 1916-7.

Half-way through "Luke's" run, however, Lloyd and Roach convinced Pathe to accept a new character Lloyd was working on, an average-looking all-American young man in regular clothes and horn-rimmed glasses; and by 1918, Lloyd's "glasses" character became one of Hollywood's most popular comic characters. Not only was he a bright, diligent gent, but he would often find himself in some spectacularly precarious physical predicaments -- tottering around the high girders of a skyscraper under construction, edging along lofty ledges or hanging from the connection rod of an out-of-control streetcar -- earning him the nickname "king of daredevil comedy." He performed these stunts despite the loss of his right thumb and forefinger when a prop bomb went off in his hand during the filming of Haunted Spooks (1920); if you look closely, he always wore thick gloves in his movies which concealed prosthetics, and his right hand was almost always in his pocket for posed photographs.

During the 1920s, Lloyd jumped from shorts to feature films, including: Dr. Jack (1922) and Safety Last (both of which featured his soon-to-be-wife, Mildred Davis); Why Worry? (1923, in which our Harold becomes involved in a revolution in a small Latin American country, yet another mythically pregnant setting for Lloyd as adventure capitalist); Girl Shy (1924); Hot Water (1924); The Kid Brother (1927); and Speedy (1928).

Having left Roach in 1923, he produced his own films, and charted his own destiny into a few sound comedies, but age was catching up with his young-man-in-a-hurry image and his voice did not seem to match well, either. Lloyd shrewdly took his profits and closed the doors on his storefront after only a few talkies, retiring to his 44-room Italian Renaissance-style villa in Beverly Hills.

Preston Sturges coaxed him out of retirement in 1947 for a Howard Hughes production, Mad Wednesday, which begins with a cynical joke on Harold's old image: we see the young capitalist busy at his desk, followed by a calendar montage which brings Harold from 1925 to 1945, still sitting at the same desk, without discernible change in station. The film was a flop -- perhaps because audiences would rather have imagined young Harold the capitalist as the eventual retiree in a 44-room villa than as a drudge at a desk -- and Lloyd went back into retirement, emerging occasionally to revive his films, as he did at Cannes in 1962 to a standing ovation. Lloyd passed away in Beverly Hills on March 8, 1971.

The Tramp

"The Tramp is as centrally representative of humanity, as many-sided and mysterious, as [Shakespeare's] Hamlet, and it seems unlikely that any dancer or actor can ever have excelled him in eloquence, variety or poignancy of motion." -- James Agee.

The man who once had the most recognizable face on Earth and gave joy to millions of moviegoers began life much like a waif in a Dickens novel: born on this day in 1889 in London to a pair of unstable music hall performers, Charlie Chaplin spent most of his childhood in public charity houses and on the streets. Brought to London by stage actor William Gillette with his tour of Sherlock Holmes in 1905, Chaplin eventually joined Fred Karno's vaudeville troupe and soon became its star attraction, known around England and America for his "comic drunk" sketches. On his second tour of America, Mack Sennett offered Chaplin a film contract, and Chaplin accepted.

Initially puzzled by film continuity, for one film he continued in the Sennett tradition of knockabout comedy with very little pause for character development. Beginning with his second film, Kid Auto Races at Venice (1914), however, Chaplin wore a small moustache, bowler hat, baggy pants borrowed from Fatty Arbuckle and floppy shoes, twirled his walking stick and began to create a new comic character, the "Tramp."

In shorts made for Keystone (some co-starring Mabel Normand) and later Essanay, Chaplin framed his scenes to enhance the audience's connection with his "Tramp" and slowed the action slightly to permit flashes of social and psychological observation amidst the chases and cartoon brutality. The Tramp also had the ability, it seemed, to animate the inanimate, waging a protracted and very personal battle against a saloon door or carrying a running conversation with a statue of a female nude. With his graceful manner belying his tattered clothes, and his compassion for the meek, he was an outsider in the world of silent comedy -- but Chaplin also set up his character as a social outsider within the stories in his films. In shorts such as The Tramp (1915), he typically enters bourgeois society by providing assistance to a soul in distress (often Edna Purviance), beats off the villains, dreams for a moment of settling down with Edna, but is always reminded of his poverty and, blithely, moves on to his next adventure.

Chaplin's popularity, matched for a time only by that of Mary Pickford, reached heights not previously known in the history of cinema: audiences around around the world awaited his next film with anticipation, and nickelodeons had only to put up his picture with a sign saying "I'm here today!" to attract long lines.

He moved from Essanay to Mutual, bringing along his own little company of players and technicians (Purviance, the leviathan Eric Campbell, cameraman Rollie Totheroh), and made a dozen brilliant two-reel comedies (including The Immigrant, The Rink and Easy Street) which are warm and hilariously funny pieces of cinema.

In 1918, he signed a $1 million contract with First National, during which he gradually transitioned from short films to features, culminating in his most ambitious film to date, The Kid (1921, with little Jackie Coogan), combining Victorian melodrama with beautifully choreographed sight gags.

Chaplin joined other members of "Hollywood royalty," Pickford, Douglas Fairbanks and D.W. Griffith, in establishing United Artists (UA) in 1919, and preserved for himself complete control over his work for the rest of his life. (He even went so far as to compose his own film music -- including two hit songs, "Smile" for Modern Times, and "Eternally" for Limelight.) For UA he made his last 4 silent films -- The Gold Rush (1925), The Circus (1927), City Lights (1931) and Modern Times (1935, with some sound sequences, made 7 years after talking pictures had arrived) -- each of them classics containing elements of his earliest work (the Tramp's pluck and essential alienation), developed on a grander scale, resulting in some of the most memorable moments in cinema: the Tramp eating his own shoe in The Gold Rush, the famous ending shot of Chaplin in City Lights during which the flower girl who has regained her sight suddenly recognizes him, and the ending scene of Modern Times, in which the Tramp finally goes off into the sunset with the girl (his third wife Paulette Goddard).

Agonizing over how to permit his Tramp to join the world of talking cinema, Chaplin seized upon the Tramp's superficial resemblance to Nazi dictator Adolf Hitler, and made The Great Dictator (1940), playing upon the prevailing American opinion of Hitler, prior to his exposure as a genocidist, as an anti-Semitic clown.

During the 1940s, Chaplin became the target of J. Edgar Hoover and other anti-Communists who were suspicious of his leftist leanings and his apparent support of the Russian second front during World War II. A sexual adventurer, Chaplin was an easy target, and the FBI helped to trump up a paternity case against him through the cooperation of a former lover of his, an unstable aspiring actress named Joan Barry, in 1943. Genetic evidence, excluded from the trial, proved that Chaplin was not the father of her child, but a jury tagged him for support. Meanwhile, at age 54 Chaplin married Oona O'Neill, the 18 year-old daughter of playwright Eugene O'Neill. After being refused admission to the U.S. on the grounds of his "unsavory reputation" following a European trip in 1952 (again the work of Hoover, whose file on Chaplin was 1,900 pages long), Chaplin and Oona settled in Switzerland.

He continued to make films sporadically until 1967 (working with such talents as Claire Bloom, Marlon Brando and Sophia Loren). In 1972, he made a triumphal return to the U.S. to receive a special Oscar (despite Hoover's lobbying against giving him an entry visa), and in 1975 he was knighted by Queen Elizabeth II. He passed away on Christmas Day, 1977 in Vevey, Switzerland.

Richard Attenborough made a not half-bad biopic of Chaplin's life, Chaplin, starring Robert Downey, Jr., in 1992.

America's Sweetheart, Vintage 1918

Guess who: a little girl from the Great Lakes region loses a parent early; dreams about and immerses herself in a show business career in her youth; goes to New York and seizes upon a fledgling medium, calculatingly making it her own, carefully controlling her public persona and using her uncanny business sense to become the dominant woman, if not the dominant person, in her industry, known to hundreds of millions of fans the world over.

And the answer is . . . Madonna? In this case, no; Madonna was a wannabe -- Mary Pickford was the original. As the rock-solid Pickford herself said: "My career was planned. There was never anything accidental about it. It was planned, it was painful, it was purposeful."

Silent film star Mary Pickford was born Gladys Smith on this date in 1892 (not 1893) in Toronto. Her laborer-father died in a work-related accident when Gladys was 6, and like the plucky heroines she would later essay on screen, she immediately went to work herself, using her charm and wits to support the family (her penniless mother, sister Lottie and brother Jack) by acting on stage in Toronto. By the time she was 9, "Baby Gladys" was touring North America in The Little Red Schoolhouse.

At 14, the regionally-celebrated Gladys Smith barged her way into David Belasco's office and demanded a role in his upcoming Broadway show -- desiring better pay and a home base for her family. Out of sheer persistence she won him over, on the condition that she change her name to "Mary Pickford." She was a success on Broadway, but stage acting was only a three-season job (theaters, without air-conditioning, were too oppressive in the summer), so in 1909 she took a streetcar to the Biograph Studios, where she met and conquered D.W. Griffith, convincing him to hire her at twice the rates he paid his other players since she was a "Belasco actress."

She was soon the queen of Biograph's stock company, gaining notice across the country as "the little girl with the golden curls." The following year, she leveraged her growing fame to sign with Laemmle at IMP for $175 a week; she traded up again in 1911, signing a contract with Majestic Pictures for $275 a week; and finally she returned to work with Griffith. Although the outlines of Pickford's indelible image -- as a radiant and ringleted adolescent, who faces adversity without self-pity, but rather with winning doses of moral courage, moxie, perseverance and tomboyish cheekiness -- were beginning to take shape, she also experimented with a number of other types of roles, playing everything from elegant middle-aged ladies to a prostitute (Friends, 1912) to a murderous proto-Barbara Stanwyck seductress (Female of the Species, 1912).

When she switched to Famous Players in 1913 (for $500 a week, eventually renegotiating for a $10,000 a week contract with a $300,000 bonus), she played to her strengths in character films, showcasing a naturalistic, highly accessible acting style which focused on behavior rather than performance in films such as Mistress Nell (1915), Rags (1915), Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm (1916) and Stella Maris (1918), and earning the title of "America's Sweetheart."

In 1918, she left Famous Players for an arrangement with First National that offered her complete control over her work (and $350,000 per picture), and in 1920 married film star Douglas Fairbanks (her second husband). Together, at their legendary Beverly Hills estate "Pickfair," Pickford and Fairbanks reigned as Hollywood's definitive power couple, the pinnacle of Hollywood royalty who hobnobbed with the 1920s international society blue-book. They traveled around the world and were mobbed everywhere they visited; the frenzy of admiration that greeted Mary in the far corners of the globe became the central joke of a Russian movie, A Kiss From Mary Pickford (1927), which was literally built around "stolen" footage of an impromptu bit of clowning between Mary and a Russian comedian during her visit to Russia.

She famously joined forces with Fairbanks, Chaplin, Griffith and (briefly) William S. Hart to form an independent studio, United Artists, and quickly revealed herself to be the best business mind of the bunch, the lioness of the board room, even as she was voted Hollywood's top star by readers of Photoplay for 15 of 21 years. Although she continued to enjoy success after success playing young girls (Suds, 1920; Tess of the Storm Country, 1922; Sparrows, 1926), she grew increasingly frustrated with her limiting public persona, and in 1929 she rebelled by cutting off her golden locks and starring in her first talking picture as a carefree flapper (Coquette, best actress Oscar). Unable to return to the old roles, she and Fairbanks tried their hand, disastrously, at Shakespeare in The Taming of the Shrew (1929), and after two more films, Pickford retired from the cinema and the limelight at age 41.

Her marriage to Fairbanks disintegrated just as she was making her last film, and although she admitted loving him until the end, she married a minor male lead, Buddy Rogers, and stuck with him for over 40 years until her death.

"I left the screen," she said, "because I didn't want what happened to Chaplin to happen to me. When he discarded the little tramp, the little tramp turned around and killed him. The little girl made me. I wasn't waiting for the little girl to kill me." She monitored the film industry closely, though, and as tastes changed she began to believe that her work had become permanently irrelevant; she bought out the rights to most of early films with the intention of having all of them destroyed upon her death. Before the end, however, she changed her mind and donated many of them to the American Film Institute. In 1975, she made a final public appearance to accept a lifetime achievement Oscar, a little mystified by why anyone would care. She died on May 29, 1979 in Santa Monica, California. Her best work, if one has the patience to look beyond the sentimental tastes of her times, still captivates us for its suppleness and irrepressible charisma.

Silver Shirts

The period between the fall of the Russian czar and the U.S. entry into World War II certainly produced its share of strange rangers operating in the wide open plains of the American political landscape. Surely one of the more colorful and bigoted of such creatures was William Dudley Pelley -- American fascist, evangelist and screenwriter, and the founder of the "Silver Shirts," sub-dubbed by Pelley himself as the "Protestant militia of America." Pelley, who was born on this day in 1890 in Lynn, Massachusetts, established the "Silver Shirts" on the day after Hitler took power in Germany in 1933.

The son of a Methodist minister, Pelley was a foreign correspondent in Russia during the Bolshevik revolution. By the time he returned to the U.S., his reports were filled with anti-Semitic ramblings; but he temporarily left his politics behind, moving to Hollywood from 1921 to 1929, becoming a reasonably successful novelist and screenwriter -- his stories and scenarios that reached the screen included What Women Love (1920, with Annette Kellerman), The Light in the Dark (filmed by Clarence Brown, 1922), The Fog (1923), Her Fatal Millions (with Viola Dana, 1923), The Shock (with his good friend Lon Chaney, 1923, from his story "Pit of the Golden Dragon"), and Drag (filmed by Frank Lloyd, 1929).

On May 28, 1928, however, he had a spiritual epiphany, which he wrote about in My Seven Minutes in Eternity (1929), detailing coincidences and visions he had that convinced him that angels of God had willed him to do something to stop the spread of ruthless Jewish domination that he believed he had seen in Russia. With Hitler as his example, Pelley founded the "Silver Shirts," publishing a tabloid called Liberation in which he regularly cast American politics in apocalyptic terms (Franklin Roosevelt's presence in the White House was a sign that the "conflict between Light and Dark forces on the earth" was drawing nearer, for example), and amassing a small but loyal band of supporters who donned Nazified uniforms and marched through small towns in America.

In 1936, rather than support the anti-interventionist Union Party ticket led by William Lemke and supported by Father Coughlin, Pelley ran for president as the candidate of his self-formed Christian Party on a platform of prohibiting Jewish property ownership and suffrage. The lukewarm effort eventually landed Pelley in a distant 8th place in the November election, with roughly 1,598 votes.

By 1940 Pelley was under investigation for espionage by the U.S. Justice Department. After he began publishing a pro-Nazi, anti-interventionist magazine, Roll Call, just before the U.S. entry into World War II, Pelley was indicted under the Sedition Act, and despite character testimony from Charles Lindbergh, Pelley was convicted and sentenced to 15 years in a maximum security prison. He was released on parole in 1952, and settled in Nobelsville, Indiana, where he continued to blame Roosevelt as the cause of America's growing social upheaval and saw fascism as America's only chance for redemption. He died there on July 1, 1965.

She Traded Her Sarong for an Apron

Somewhere out there, there lives a housewife, known to her friends and family for her radiant charm, who is celebrating her 94th birthday today.* I hope she forgives me for bringing to light a little tale that received some tabloid attention about 75 years ago. It has a happy ending.

Dorothy Janis was a minor silent film starlet, born Dorothy Penelope Jones on this day in 1912 in Dallas, Texas. There's an emphasis on "minor" here: Dorothy Jones was a mere 15 years old when she tagged along with her cousin, a Hollywood extra, onto the Fox Studio lot, but the 5'-0", 94-lb. high school student was immediately noticed by a casting director for her dark, exotic good looks and was cast as an Arabian girl in Fleetwing (1927).

Within a year, although she was just 16, Dorothy Janis (as she came to be known) was signed by Metro to a 5-year contract. Metro said publicly that Janis was 18 and half-Cherokee; neither fact was true, and Metro seemed to know better enough about her status as a minor to have her contract supervised by a court. After a pair of silent 'horse operas' (Kit Carson, 1928; and The Overland Telegraph, 1929, with Tim McCoy), Janis won the romantic lead opposite hunky Ramon Novarro in a part-talkie, The Pagan (1929, directed by W.S. Van Dyke), notable for the fact that Janis (without a chaperone at 16), Novarro and the entire cast and crew went to Tahiti to make the film, back in the days when location shooting was extremely rare. The film is kind of a cult-hit among aficionados today, in part for Novarro's popular recording of "The Pagan Love Song," featured in the movie.

Dorothy made one talkie (Lummox, 1930, directed by Herbert Brenon) before joining director Harry Gerson and another crew for a tour of the Malay Peninsula to make a film to be entitled The White Captive. When the company returned to Hollywood at the end of 1930, however, the studio found that Gerson's footage was virtually unusable; worse yet, poor Janis found herself at the epicenter of a tabloid scandal.

Sidney Lund, a newlywed sound technician who traveled with the White Captive company, apparently formed a crush on Janis during the 6-month trip, inspiring Mrs. Lund, a former vaudeville dancer, to file for divorce and to sue Janis for $25,000 for "alienation of affection." Mrs. Lund's claim was all the rage in Hollywood at the time: earlier that year, Clara Bow settled a "love theft" suit by the wife of a Texas physician, and Josef von Sternberg's wife had unsuccessfully sued Marlene Dietrich. Nevertheless, it was typically a difficult claim to prove (you had to first establish that there was love in the marriage, then that said love was destroyed by the defendant, and finally that the defendant destroyed said love maliciously), and probably even more so where the virginal Janis was concerned.

Mrs. Lund eventually got her divorce but dropped her suit against Janis; White Captive was never released; and the 19-year old Janis -- movie star, world traveler and enfant celebre -- perhaps understandably left behind her singular Hollywood career to visit an aunt in Chicago, where she met and married dance bandleader Wayne King.

Meanwhile, California abolished "alienation of affection" lawsuits in 1939. By 2001, all but 9 states had abolished the cause of action, citing the sense in which such lawsuits irresponsibly assume that some people (in our case, Mr. Lund) have no control over their own emotions as being a bad basis for damages. On the other hand, in states such as Hawaii, North Carolina and Utah where the claim is still recognized, family advocates argue that it provides an effective disincentive to monkey business. In 1997, a woman in North Carolina won $1 million worth of disincentive from her ex-husband's monkey business partner.

Dorothy and her husband apparently needed no such disincentives; they were together for over 50 years, until King's death in 1985. Few knew or could even have imagined that the happy housewife and mother of two once wore a sarong in the Tahitian jungles listening to Ramon Novarro croon the "Pagan Love Song."

* Some sources suggest that this is actually Dorothy's 96th birthday. Either way, she sure has lived a remarkable life -- I'll let you do the math adjustments if you'd prefer to find her to be two years older.