Silent Players: A Biographical and Autobiographical Study of 100 Silent Film Actors and Actresses

Bese Daniels and Ben Lyon

The wedding of Bebe and Ben. BESE DANIELS AND BEN LYON Both were American silent stars, but Bebe Daniels and Ben Lyon also hold a unique place in the history of British entertainment. They were the only major U.S. stars to sit out World War Two and the blitz in London and the only American performers to have starred in long-running BBC radio shows. from 1940 to 1942, Bebe and Ben were heard on Hi Gang!, which was also revived as a postwar series in 1949. They devised and wrote the comedy-variety series and also starred in a 1942 film version. Bebe Daniels also provided the script for the situation comedy Life with the Lyons, heard on the BBC from 1950 to 1961, and in which Bebe and Ben were joined by daughter Barbara and adopted son Richard. Life with the Lyons also made the transition to television and was the basis for two feature films, Life with the Lyons (1954) and The Lyons in Paris (1956). The Spanish ancestry is evident in Bebe Daniels's physical appearance, her exotic look, and her first name, Spanish for baby. The wicked grin, however , is quite unique. In comparison, Ben Lyon, a Southerner of Irish ancestry , is very much American. Indeed, there was a while in the mid-1920s when he was promoted as the all-American equivalent of the Latin lover. Bebe Daniels was born in Dallas, Texas, on January 14. 1901. and was a child actress on stage before making her film debut in two 1910 Selig Polyscope shorts, The Wonderful \;\t1zard of Oz and The Common Enemy. In 1915, she joined the Rolin Company, appearing in the "Lonesome Luke" comedy shorts opposite Harold Lloyd. She was the comedian's first acknowledged leading lady, and he could not have been more fulsome in his praise of Bebe Daniels when we talked in London in 1970: "She's a wonderful individual. and I can understand why she's tremendously revered here. She has so many friends in the United States. Bebe makes friends very easily. She's very warm-hearted and she has a habit of giving. I've always loved Bebe, and, of course, she worked with me in so many pictures . I felt terrible when 1 lost her. But I was the featured individual in our pictures, so Bebe had to be content with the next important role. In the C.B. DeMille films, it gave her a chance to do a little bit of dramatic art." Despite her later talent as a screenwriter, Bebe did not contribute creatively to the Harold Lloyd shorts: "I don't say that Bebe wouldn't occasionally think ofsomethingfunny. But she wasn't a part of that end of it. 1think she had all she could to get her costumes, do what she had to do, and carryon with her personal life." One evening, Bebe was having dinner with Lloyd and Hal Roach when Cecil B. DeMille came over and asked if she would like to work for him. "I said, 90 Bebe Daniels and Ben Lyon 'I'll wait till my contract expires,' which I did," recalled Bebe. "Then I called up and asked if he was still interested, and he said, 'Very much so: So Iborrowed my mother's suit and my grandmother had brought a lot of egrets back from South Africa. and I had this hat with all these egrets on it. I went to his office and he said, 'Well, I'm signing you up, but please throw that hat away.'" DeMille first featured Daniels in the small role of the favorite of the Babylonian king (Thomas Meighan) in the flashback sequence in Male and Female (1919). She was signed to a Paramount contract, became a leading lady to Wallace Reid in The Dancin' Fool (1920) and Sick Abed (1921), and was starred by DeMille with Gloria Swanson in Why Change Your \;\tlfe? (1920) and The Affairs of Anatol (1921). In all, Bebe Daniels appeared in more than fifty Paramount releases of the 1920s. Bebe remembered Wallace Reid and Rudolph Valentino as "two of the nicest men I've ever known. I have never met a more modest man in my life than Rudy was. I remember we used to go horseback riding together, and I'd say, 'Come on Rudy, let's take this fence: And he'd say, 'No, Bebe, they...