The secrets are no longer kept silent

During the silent era, William S. Hart was the epitome of the honest, loyal cowboy in such film classics as “Tumbleweeds.” But in the new book “Silent Players” (University Press of Kentucky), film historian Anthony Slide says it was all an act.

“I don’t think he was a very nice person,” Slide says. “He was obsessed with his leading ladies, and he wanted to marry them. Actress Jane Novak mentions the way that Hart and his fellow cowboys tied her hands behind her back and put emptied alcohol bottles around her and photographed her in this very compromising pose that isn’t anything you’d expect anybody to do.

“Today you would never get away with anything like that. You assume that all the bad manners and sexual harassment came later, but it didn’t. Obviously, he treated women very badly.”

In “Silent Players,” Slide profiles 100 silent-film stars -- 57 of whom he knew personally -- including such well-known names as Mary Astor, Lillian Gish and Harold Lloyd and such now-forgotten performers as Babe London and Ethel Grandin.

A lot of these silent performers seemed to suffer from the Norma Desmond syndrome -- they were difficult during their career heyday and even in the twilight of their years. “Once they became stars, they were told to behave like a star,” Slide says. “I remember one of the actresses went to a coffee shop and her producer saw her there and said, ‘You don’t drink in a coffee shop. You are a star. You must never mingle with your admirers. You must always keep your distance. You must be up there on a pedestal.’ ”

The actors, he says, also tended to believe their own publicity, especially when they got older. Even someone like Gish, who acted into the 1980s, would often repeat stories that the studios’ publicity department had written about her as if they were the truth. And in the case of Blanche Sweet, Slide says, “When academics would come to interview her in her old age and she didn’t know the answers to the questions, she would go and research them at the Museum of Modern Art.”

These silent-film stars often began their careers on the stage as child performers. “A lot of them were self-educated,” Slide says. “A lot of actors and actresses back then wanted an education, but because they started their careers as child actors they didn’t have the opportunity to go to a real school. But they were sort of desperate to learn, so they read books. They might not know very much about American history, but they knew geography real well because they went from town to town.”

Actresses as moguls

Unlike today, most of the major stars of the silent era were female and several had their own production companies. “Once women became more prominent, then they founded their own production companies, which were often, of course, financed by a man,” Slide says.

“For example, Gloria Swanson’s production company was financed by Joseph Kennedy. But at the same time I think they realized that to best promote themselves and to make the most financially from their careers, it was necessary to have their own production company.”

These actresses also turned to directing, like Margery Wilson, who directed a two-reel comedy, “Two of a Kind,” in 1920 and then produced, directed, acted, wrote and sold two feature films, “Institution” and “The Offenders,” in the early ‘20s.

Several performers who didn’t make the transition from silent films to talkies ended in relative poverty. When Slide met Madge Kennedy, who had been a headliner in the late teens and early ‘20s, she was living in a “little tiny apartment near the Ambassador Hotel in a really run-down neighborhood. But she still kept up appearances. She loved to serve pink champagne.”

One of his favorites was actress Alice Terry, who was married to director Rex Ingram and had come to fame in the early ‘20s playing opposite Rudolph Valentino in “The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse” and “The Conquering Power.”

“She always had a weight problem,” Slide says. “She would tell the story that Louis B. Mayer said to her when her contract came up for renewal at MGM, ‘You have to give up candies or give up film.’ Alice said it was an easy choice: ‘I’ll give up film.’ And she did.”