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266 TRAGEDY OF MABEL NORMAND
bed. A fatalist, she also always slept with a dream interpretation book under her pillow as well, or so her secretary said. Hollywood accepted it all as a matter of course. As long as her films made money she could have an armed guard and an astrologer if she wished.
From Sweden the film colony brought Garbo, though, in this case, it really was after her director, Mauritz Stiller, but he never really fitted into the Hollywood pattern. The studios certainly made a good investment in Greta Garbo, though they overplayed their hands in the end by making her so aloof and remote that audiences began to lose interest.
But no one can accuse Hollywood of not being diverse in its acting material.
At the other end of the scale from Negri and Garbo it had two gamins extraordinary in Mabel Normand and Clara Bow.
Mabel Normand came from sedate Boston, but there was nothing sedate in her career. She called herself Mabel Fortescue at first and made a series of Betty comedies at the Vitagraph studio in Brooklyn, then she graduated at Biograph and Keystone before becoming Chaplin's leading woman. Sensation seemed to follow her wherever she went ; she was a close friend of W. D. Taylor, the English film director who was murdered in Hollywood in 1922. She was one of his last visitors ; he was found shot an hour later. Two years later, while she and Edna Purviance, another Chaplin leading woman, were dining at the flat of Courtland Dines, a wealthy stockbroker, he was shot dead by her chauffeur.
She is reputed to have spent twenty thousand dollars a year on clothes, but she certainly played fair}7 godmother to several unsuccessful actresses. Full of a tremendous zest for life and an inveterate practical joker in the studios, her life was burned out by tuberculosis by the time she was thirty-four.
Wide-eyed Clara Bow, on the other hand, was a real product of Brooklyn. The stage hands used to call her " The Brooklyn Tomato", and she brought a wide-eyed, whirlwind spirit of impudence to the screen that has never been equalled since.
Hollywood, then as now, drawing on the stage for the greater part of its talent, was always ready to take a chance on any personality which was " different". It made an indifferent actor but a tremendous sensation out of the contortionist stage hand, Lon Chaney.
All through his life, Chaney kept his stage hands' trade union ticket just in case his career came unstuck. A past master at throwing