Norma Talmadge

See for Yourself

Though she was a major star in silent movies in the late 1910s and all through the 1920s, the name and image of Norma Talmadge faded into obscurity after just two attempts at talking pictures, the second of which, Du Barry, Woman of Passion (1930), went down in legend as a costume item where her supposedly thick Brooklyn accent did her in. This impression was more or less solidified by the portrayal of Lina Lamont (Jean Hagen) in Singin’ in the Rain (1952) as a silent favorite whose grating voice is exposed in a sound costume film.

I first read about Talmadge in Ethan Mordden’s book Movie Star (1983), in which he devotes a brutal two-or-so pages to her stardom and writes that Talmadge “had the personality of melting sherbet and the style of a pizza waitress.” It is unclear just how much of her work Mordden had seen, or even if he had seen any of it; presumably he saw some clips, at least, to come to such a judgment. In the early days of the internet, Greta de Groat put together a beautifully detailed website devoted to Talmadge, and it is still there, hanging on by a thread; when I first read through the site and looked at all the photos, it was still all but impossible to see a Norma Talmadge movie.

The first Talmadge picture I managed to see was Frank Borzage’s Secrets (1924) around 2006, with no musical score and unrestored image, and it came from an incomplete print with scenes missing; the first half of it plays somewhat like unedited dailies, so that I was led to wonder just where this material came from. I noted that Talmadge had a liking for absorbing herself in a deep emotional state in extreme close-up and staring off into the distance, so that Mordden’s “melting sherbet” comment seemed apt, and I remained interested in her, but I didn’t seek out her other movies as they started to circulate.

Recently I took a look at some of Talmadge’s surviving first short silent films, for she began as a teenager in 1910, working her way up in bit roles and eventually taking leads, and what struck me in these early roles was her enormous vitality, the way she seizes the space and roars with laughter and gives the impression of boundless good nature and fun, which was hardly in line with her later image.

Playing lead parts in extant films like A Social Secretary (1916), which has an amusing and feminist script by Anita Loos, and The Devil’s Needle (1916), where she gets artist Tully Marshall hooked on drugs, Talmadge has a headlong American girl confidence and sense of play that was very much present in her sister Constance, who emerged in this period as the Mountain Girl in D.W. Griffith’s Intolerance (1916).

Constance Talmadge is delightful on screen in the series of comedies she did after that, a Carole Lombard of the 1920s, and so it seems to me that Norma was more or less forced to take on more dramatic roles as contrast to her sister, who did pretty much nothing but light fare. The Talmadge sisters were ruled by their mother Peg, the ultimate managing stage mother; she was known as “Ma Talmadge” in film circles, and Ma Talmadge was liked by Anita Loos for her tough, wisecracking nature.

Talmadge’s career ascended to a new level when she met and married Joseph M. Schenck, a hard-nosed producer who made sure his younger wife was showcased to best advantage in a variety of parts beginning with Allan Dwan’s Panthea (1917), which is lost. Talmadge made five-to-six films per year after that and often played dual roles; her image became one of versatility, an actress-star who could play different sorts of parts even within the same film.

In Yes or No (1920), which co-stars her sister Natalie (the one Talmadge daughter who did not take to film work), Talmadge is lovingly presented in close-ups where the background is faded out so that we can concentrate on every gradation of her emotional life. Her style is distinctive; she saturates herself in whatever the emotion is she has been asked to portray, usually misty self-pity with brimming tears, and she goes further and further with this in close-up. Whether this is good acting or not is debatable, but the camera will stay on her “melting sherbet” until it melts into nearly nothing.

Her biggest hit was Smilin’ Through (1922), an adaptation of a sentimental stage vehicle that was co-written by its original star Jane Cowl in which Talmadge again played a dual role, a young girl about to be married and her aunt Moonyean Clare, who was killed on her wedding day by a jealous suitor. She stared off into her “I’m soulful” distance for this and for Secrets and another Borzage movie, The Lady (1925), that is also missing considerable footage.

The best work I have seen from Talmadge is in the heavy drama Within the Law (1923), where she plays a shopgirl falsely accused of theft. In the first half hour of that movie, Talmadge’s style is stripped down, intensely focused, and restrained; she expresses the panic and anguish of her character with such subtlety and believability that the effect is very upsetting. Talmadge painstakingly gives us the sense that this girl is caught in a trap and can’t get out of it, and she gradually lets us see the anger and bitterness that emerges in this wronged girl during her prison sentence. If a case is to be made for Talmadge’s talent, this is the movie that shows what she is capable of at her best.

Talmadge’s reputation was high at this point, so much so that Adela Rogers St. Johns wrote an article deeming her “our one and only great actress” where she actually compared Talmadge to Eleonora Duse. The most notable thing about this article is St. Johns’s very specific and damning negative viewpoint on the work of Lillian Gish, but this was written before Gish had appeared in La Boheme (1926), which came out the same month as this article, and The Scarlet Letter (1926) and The Wind (1928). In recent years, Jeanine Basinger has written that not knowing the work of Norma Talmadge in the 1920s is akin to not knowing the work of Bette Davis in the 1930s and ‘40s, but these hyperbolic comparisons from St. Johns and Basinger don’t do Talmadge any favors.

Kiki (1926) was a welcome change of pace for Talmadge that allowed her to play outright slapstick comedy again; she is a little studied with it by this point, but very funny and expert taking her various pratfalls. Talmadge began an affair with the sexy Gilbert Roland while making Camille with him that same year, but this film only survives in part and does not circulate in any version at the moment.

Whatever his personal feelings might have been, Schenck was business-minded enough to pair Talmadge with Roland several times because he knew they had chemistry on screen, and Roland was her leading man for her first talkie, New York Nights (1929), where she played a chorus girl. Talmadge does have a noticeable Brooklyn accent in this sound debut, especially on words like “off,” but this is no problem for this particular movie.

Unlike some other silent stars, Talmadge does not have trouble piecing together behavior for talking pictures and behaving in a more naturalistic way with emotional transitions. In the notorious Du Barry, what is most impressive is that Talmadge, contrary to the legend, manages to smooth away pretty much all traces of her Brooklyn accent, but her reviews were negative, and so her hard-headed sister Constance wrote her a telegram saying, “Quit pressing your luck, baby. The critics can’t knock those trust funds Mama set up for us.”

Talmadge retired, and when she was approached by fans in the 1930s she supposedly said, “Go away, dears…I don’t need you anymore and you don’t need me.” That oft-repeated quote from her often leaves off the “and you don’t need me” part, which feels crucial. Did she mean that there were other stars now that they could idolize, like Garbo and Crawford and Davis? Or did she mean that they didn’t need movie stars at all? It’s hard to say.

Talmadge was financially secure, and she married the comic toastmaster George Jessel before making a final marriage to a doctor in 1946. At this point, according to Loos, Talmadge was suffering from arthritis and addicted to painkillers, and she died at age 63 in 1957.

For decades Talmadge was basically just a name in film history books, but through the dedication of silent film lovers like Greta de Groat, it is now possible to see a lot of her work and judge it for yourself. In that spirit, I have included two Talmadge films below: her best available silent film performance in Within the Law and her first talkie New York Nights. The tonic thing about this moment in film history is that so much that was once out of reach can now be seen and disseminated with ease.