Audrey Munson: The First Supermodel
America’s first supermodel wasn’t Janice Dickinson. It was Audrey Munson, the most copied model in New York, whose life story ran under her byline in a twenty-part 1921 newspaper serial.
Mae Murray’s First Film: To Have and to Hold, 1916
In December 1915 Mae Murray left the Ziegfeld Follies for the Lasky studio. Trade papers, newspaper reviews, and her 1942 memoir tell the story of her lost first film, To Have and to Hold (1916), opposite Wallace Reid.
15 Silent Film Actresses Who Died Young: Drugs, Alcohol, and the Cost of Stardom
The silent film actresses who died young include Alma Rubens, Helene Costello, Helen Lee Worthing and Germany’s Maria Orska, all of whom struggled with addiction. Alcohol contributed directly to Marie Prevost’s death, while barbiturate sleeping pills killed others, among them Ruan Lingyu and Lupe Vélez. Why Did So Many Silent Film Actresses Die Young? The…
Why Did Mary Miles Minter Talk About William Desmond Taylor?
Mary Miles Minter, Her Mother, and the Taylor Murder: What the 1923 Interviews Show Minter spoke to the press in August 1923 because she was preparing to sue her mother over her film earnings. By August 10 she had announced a claim against Charlotte Shelby for an accounting of more than $1,000,000; on the 14th…
L’Ange des projections lumineuses: Lantern Slides and the Coming of Cinema in Rural France
L’Ange des projections lumineuses (The Angel of Luminous Projections) was an illustrated French monthly publication devoted to teaching the Catholic faith with magic-lantern slides. These slides were made of glass and were projected using devices with lenses and an intense light source—an oil or alcohol lamp, acetylene, limelight or an electric arc. The value of…
The First Flapper Was a Schoolgirl—Until Hollywood Grew Her Up
A flapper was a young woman of the 1920s who cut her hair short, raised her hemline, and refused the manners her mother was raised on. That definition holds for the later 1920s. It is not what the word meant when Americans first took it up: in 1916 a flapper was a schoolgirl, roughly twelve…
