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

Constance Talmage

CONSTANCE TALMAGE Of the three Talmadge sisters. Norma was the great dramatic star and Constance (Brooklyn. New York. April 19. 1900-Los Angeles. November 23. 1973) the great light comedienne. The third sister. Natalie (1899-1969) was married to Buster Keaton at the height of his career and that was probably sufficient in and of itself. Constance Talmadge was barely sixteen years old and had been on screen in inconsequential films for only a couple of years when D.W. Griffith cast her as The Mountain Girl in the Babylonian story in Intolerance (1916). The visual humor and. above all. the pacing is remarkable. as she chews green onions to ward off suitors in the marriage auction. fends off the advances of her lover. Elmer Clifton as the Rhapsode. and moons over her hero. Belshazzar (Alfred Paget). Talmadge provides an everchanging variety of mood swings. from pout to serenic smile. One of the funniest and most outrageous moments in the film has Talmadge. who must have understood the phallic symbolism. milk a goat as her face records her desire for Belshazzar. Constance Talmadge never gave quiet as extraordinary a performance again. With maturity came sophistication. and this is suggested by the brief footage of her shot in 1919 when the Babylonian sequence was reissued under the title of The Fall ofBabylon. As The Mountain Girl who no longer dies but is united with the Rhapsode. she looks older. which of course she is. and somehow less energetic. In regard to Intolerance. what is even more remarkable is that one is inclined to forget that The Mountain Girl does not constitute the actress's only contribution to the film, She also appears in the french story. playing a serious role. Marguerite de Valois. and billed as Georgia Pearce. The modern viewer sees only her wedding procession. but there was apparently much more to the characterization. The only scenes in Intolerance where an audience does not see ConstanceTalmadge are those involving the chariot. where she is doubled by Annette Defoe. Aside from Intolerance, Talmadge also worked under Griffith's supervision in a handful of 1915 and 1916 fine Arts features. including The Missing Link (1915) and The Matrimaniac (1916). in which she is Douglas fairbanks's leading lady. When sister Norma married JosephSchenck. he was persuaded to take control of both his wife's and his sister-in-Iaw's careers. The first film Constance Talmadge made for her own company was The Lesson. released in May 1918. in which she plays a small-town girl who visits New York and eventually realizes that she was happier back home. The film was somewhat lackluster. and in order to improve the Talmadge films. Schenck hired Anita Loos and her husband. John Emerson. as writers. Emerson died in 1956. but 370 Constance Talmadge Loos lived on until 1981, and thus had the opportunity to present without argument her interpretation of the writing partnership. Just as Loos is singularly creative in the non-fiction she wrote on Hollywood history, she is probably equally dishonest in taking credit for the Loos-Emerson films away from her husband. She has taken credit for the writing of Intolerance, when it is obvious that her contribution was limited to the comic titles dealing with The Mountain Girl. John Emerson may have been an alcoholic, but he was a major writer long before Anita Loos teamed up with him, and there is no reason to doubt that Emerson did more than his share in writing the Constance Talmadge and other silent films. In the teens, Constance Talmadge and Dorothy Gish double-dated with Robert Harron and writer-director Victor Heerman. Talmadge at this time had much the same hoyden quality as Dorothy Gish. Of Talmadge, who was nicknamed "Dutch," Heerman told me, "Everybody loved her and everybody had a great time when they were with her." Eventually, Dorothy married actor James Rennie and Talmadge married a Greek importer named John Pialoglou. Both marriages ended in divorce. Talmadge married three more times; the final one in 1939 to stockbroker Walter Michael Giblin was a lasting one. Joseph Schenck continued to supervise Constance Talmadge's career into the 1920s, when there were fewer films but with higher production values than ever before. Both she and Billie Dove were showgirls in Polly ofthe Follies (1922). The following year, she played the title role in Duley, based on a dumb female character...