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

Madge Kennedy

MADGE KENNEDY It was hardly unusual to come across former silent stars in Los Angeles. It was more uncommon to find former stage performers retired in the city. It was virtually unique to encounter someone who had not only been a great silent star but an equally prominent performer on the Broadway stage. but Madge Kennedy was such an actress. Now living in a small apartment in a rundown. largely immigrant neighborhood of the city a few blocks north of the Ambassador Hotel. which was also showing its age and soon to close. was an actress who should have been a major celebrity but who was merely forgotten . relying upon a pension from the Actors fund to pay the bills. Madge Kennedy belonged to the era when gentlemen drank champagne from the shoes of Broadway leading ladies. Madge's longtime friend. Herb Sterne. always wanted to drink from the high-heeled shoes she had worn in her 1915 comedy Fair and Warmer. When she died. Madge left those shoes to Herb. and they now reside in my closet. They are incredibly tiny-can any woman have had feet so small?-and yet despite their provenance. Ifeel a little queasy about drinking from them. Through those shoes. one feels a psychic link to the Broadway stage of seventy or more years ago. Their owner was the star of the 1923 hit Poppy. in which she was supported (and not the other way around) by we. fields. In 1931. Madge Kennedy took over the role of Amanda Prynne from Gertrude Lawrence in Noel Coward's Private Lives. Earlier, in 1925. Coward had wanted her as his American leading lady in FaJJen Angels. In the teens, she was the leading purveyor of farce on the American stage. thanks in large part to Salibury fields and Margaret Mayo's Twin Beds, which ran for an incredible 411 performances in 1914 and 1915. The play contains all the elements associated with farce. including a drunken man undressing in a young lady's room that he has mistaken for his own and hiding in the closet when the jealous husband appears on the scene. The title is taken from the decision by the young married couple to adopt twin beds. the latest novelty. rather than sharing a double bed. The play demonstrated. as Everybody's Magazine commented at the time. "the American way of flirting with a risky situation and then dodging it." Although born in Chicago, on April 19. 1891. Madge and her family moved to California and then to New York, where the actress began her professional stage career in 1910: "I'm sure actors are born with an instinct. You can't teach it. You have it or you don't. It's like the color of your hair or your eyes. I have an instinct for timing, and Iwas usually let alone. The best thing that ever happened to me when I was young was a wonderful critic said of me-it was 194 Madge Kennedy Little Miss Brown, my first play in New York City-'Madge Kennedy would keep the show going, but before she can keep anything going she will have to get rid of that accent from the shores of Lake Michigan.' So I went to diction teachers." When Samuel Goldwyn (or Samuel Goldfish, as Madge would still insist on calling him) formed his own production company in 1917, she was the third star he signed, following Mabel Normand and Mae Marsh: "I was engaged for films as a funny girl, a combination between NormaTalmadge, who was the beautiful dramatic actress, and the comic ones like Marie Dressler." In his 1923 autobiography, Behind the Screen, Goldwyn wrote of her, "Madge Kennedy was always prompt on the set and was most conscientious in her efforts to do good work....No moods, no sharp edges obtruded themselves into any business relation with her." Between 1917 and 1920, Madge Kennedy starred in 21 five-reel features for Goldwyn, beginning with BabyMine, based on the 1910 theatrical comedy by Margaret Mayo. farce was Madge's forte at the studio, with her dark brown, gentle eyes and bronze hair as attractive on screen as they had appeared to theatre audiences. "In those days, there were five women stars: Mabel Normand, Mae Marsh, Geraldine farrar, Pauline frederick and me. We had our dressing rooms in a big hall that had just like board...