Mack Sennett: Maker of Comedies The King of Moron Culture

JIM TULLY

MANY film critics have coupled the names of our leading cinema clowns with thoscof Molierc and Aristophanes.

One of the clowns recently asked me in a moment when he was seemingly puzzled— "Who's Aristophanes? "

Even Mr. Gilbert Seldes called Mr. Mack Sennett "the Keystone the builders rejected." lie also made the unwise statement that Mr. Sennett needed encouragement. Court jesters were born through the tyranny of kings. Too much encouragement made them lazy, wealthy and indifferent. 'They began talking of philosophy and art. The kings were forced to behead them. When clowns become serious wise men weep.

Mr. Sennett needs about as much encouragement as Charles M. Schwab. As a matter of fact, Sennett like Chaplin, has lost the spontaneity of his early years. This has been due to intellectual encouragement for which he was ill prepared.

Mack Sennett comes of Irish stock. Elis real name is Michael Sinnot. He was born in the Province of Quebec about forty seven years ago. He is a big man. His face is red, puffy and sagged. He has shrewd glints in his eyes. They are those of an Irish general who has won a great victory in Jerusalem.

He is often called an "Irish-Jew". His mind untutored and powerful, drives a hard bargain. In all the vicissitudes of finance no man has ever beaten him. The glints in his eyes seem to accentuate his vision. He can sec a penny just about as far as a film critic can see Ben Turpin.

He is worth about fifteen million dollars.

HIS EARLY HISTORY

SENNKTT has, like most illiterate men, a greater sense of the ridiculous than of humour.

His father was a blacksmith. The son, Michael, developed his immense shoulders by swinging a sledge in his parent's second-rate blacksmith shop.

The father, like his famous son, lived much in the physical. He would spend a half holiday now and then by having his three sons fight for his amusement. He was long the master of them—one at a time. But once the sons fought three against one. The massive blacksmith found himself as helpless as an English soldier at the battle of Fontency. Indeed there is no softness in the man that is Sennett.

Several men who have been close to him for years consider him scrupulously honest. I asked one of them why the courts had made Sennett settle with Ted Paramorc for using the story of Yukon Jake which originally appeared four or five years ago in Vanity Fair. E he answer was— That was a misunderstanding."

Sennett sang as a lad in the choir of the local Catholic church. He soon wandered out of the choir and the little Canadian blacksmith shop to a destiny which it is doubtful if he had the imagination to conceive. The blacksmith's helper learned what destitution was in early wandering years before he joined the chorus of Floradora. It hardened the granite in his nature and made him an adept at all the shifts of fortune. It twisted his amazing Irish personality into the strangest of all anomalies among mankind . . . an Irishman turned cold.

In only one layer of his nature is there a streak of softness. He is Irish and a bachelor— a combination that would have made even Schopenhauer a sentimentalist about pretty women.

He has a sagging manner. He is careless, even slovenly in appearance. He is a man of Rabelaisian laughter and vitality. Life, to him, is an eternal collision of comical forces. Nothing is mysterious to this ribald master of the obvious. He would be capable of turning death into an Irish wake and of pouring liquor down the throat of the corpse.

BUSINESS ACUMEN

LET no man mistake this Sennett. He carries terrifying wisdom in his head. If you fire what are considered philosophical truths at him, he stands, unkempt, heavy-jowled, iron-grey hair straggling, his eyes looking out of the window and focused on some buffoon in one of his twenty-two comedy companies. He understands.

Many people ridicule the idea that Sennett helped Chaplin on to fame and fortune. I do not. Ele is a far, far greater man. Sennett is elemental—of the earth. He swaggers with impudence and thumbs his nose at the stars. Born among lumber-jacks, he would have been the John Bunyan of the tribe.

It was the blacksmith's helper, with no touch of beauty in his soul who yet conceived the idea of developing bathing beauties for the screen. A connoisseur in beautiful women, and a sensualist, he can see a form like Gloria Swanson's as a commercial asset. It was Mack Sennett who first engaged Gloria Swanson, Marie Prevost, Mae Busch, Mabel Normand, Phyllis Haver, Alice Lake, Mary Thurman and diverse other beautiful girls.

THE BACHELOR

WITH beauty all around him, and a sentimentalist, he has never married. Philosophers have married beauties and have watched them grow fat. Perhaps the cynical sentimentalist feels that there is always another beauty just around the turn of the road. That is an excellent philosophy.

He is building now, a million dollar mansion on a mile long mountain top. For many leagues it will be seen—a colossal and imposing monument in which will dwell the king of moron culture.

In the mansion with him will be his Irish mother. Out of consideration for her it is said he is having a private entrance built especially for her personal use.

For years Sennett's mother remained in her little Canadian home and gauged her son's progress with an unfailing barometer of her own invention.

During his early picture career Sennett had a large diamond ring. It was often in pawn. Mrs. Sinnot would watch closely for the ring in every comedy in which her son appeared. If she saw the ring on his finger she knew that all was well with Michael. If the ring were missing she left the picture theatre with forebodings that lead not to a mansion on a mountain-top.

THE CYNIC

WE find something of the cynic in Sennett as far as his career can be traced. With Griffith in the early Biograph days, when he was an extra player, he considered Mary Pickford "affected". He said that Florence Lawrence, an early star, "talks baby talk". An actor, now forgotten, who in his little day paraded like a gobbler, was called by Sennett, "inflated". The blacksmith's helper was using his eyes and cars.

Evidently the years taught him that baby talk has its place. For he later provided marvelous futures for beauties who have never talked anything else.

Sennett, dissatisfied and unhappy as an extra player under Griffith, once talked to him about his future. That gentleman told him that there was a chance for a director in pictures but none for the actor.

He soon left Griffith and started in business for himself.

He had no studio. He carried his meagre equipment on the street car with him. A few theatrical vagabonds remained with him. He had not the money with which to have his film developed after it was made. So he made two more pictures with the hope that by some stroke of fortune he could have all three developed at once.

When at last he raised money to have the films developed he found that the figures on the screen only moved every now and then. He was forced to junk them all.

THE FIRST COMEDIES

AFTER this experience he pawned everything available and came to California. He rented a vacant lot in the suburbs of Los Angeles and built a shack upon it. His great vitality helped him. Every morning he went to his studio before dawn. He arranged his interior scenes, and acted in and directed his own pictures. He would remain late into the night and cut the film which he had made the previous day.

After much travail he sent his first comedy to men in the east he had induced to release it.

A wire came .... "Terrible".

More travail and another comedy.

The second wire .... "Worse".

Then in desperation the weird young Irishman stumbled across a golden meadow of fortune.

There was a Grand Army parade in Los Angeles. He took pictures of it and inserted as many comedy scenes as possible. He sent the makeshift comedy east. The third wire came .... "Great".

Thus were born the Keystone comedies and a new and totally different millionaire.

Mack Sennett swaggers with the memory of the people whose reputations he has made. "One time," he said, "a little girl came to me for a job. She was kinda cute and had pretty dark hair. I gave her the once over and asked—'Where you from?'

"'Chicago' she comes back at me.

"Then I says—'It seems to me you oughta go quite a ways in pictures. I think I'll give you a chance . . . you got the face an' the form . . . an' everything. Come around here tomorrow at eight o'clock and I'll put you on in something.'

"I saw a great big guy standin' over near a telephone pole as I talked to her. She walked right over to him and then the two left together.

"Well I come to the studio the next mornin' and look around for the young dame an' she don't show up, and I thinks to myself .... that's a devil of a note .... and I inquire around to see if anybody's seen her because I knew she'd get on in pictures . ... I can always tell ... .

GLORIA SWANSON

"WELL she don't show up till eleven o'clock, and then she comes smilin' up to me and I says . . . 'Where you been?'

"And she answers smilin'—'Well you sec Mister Sennett—after you gave me the job last night I went an' got married. . . . That's mv husband. . . .'

"I looked and saw the big guy she was with last night. He was smilin' like a truck-driver.

The little girl turned out to lie Gloria Swanson and the big guy was Wally Beery!"

"You can certainly pick 'em, Mr. Sennett," I said.

"Yes sir . . ." he laughed merrily . . . "But you notice the big guy married her right after I give her the job."

Later on, C. B. De Mille saw Gloria doing a bit in a scene and was so impressed with her possibilities as a dramatic actress that he offered her a contract to play in pictures under his direction.

Incidentally I once asked De Mille how he accounted for his own prescience in choosing so many screen women who later became famous—such as Gloria. "I have one method" De Mille said, "I sec what the girl can do on the screen first."

THERE are those who say that Mack Sennett once loved Mabel Normand. T here are others who say, that being a sentimentalist, he always will love her.

Mabel, who carries Freud and the Police Gazette about with her, has the brains and the laughter to understand a man of Sennett's disposition.

She calls him Moike.

Mabel, in speaking of another director, whom Hollywood considers intelligent, once said to me .... "If he's intelligent I was at the Lord's Supper."

Strange and wayward, cynical with the laughter of life and the pity, missing nothing on the journey and forgiving all, happy indeed will ever be the nation that can produce two such people as Mabel Normand and Mack Sennett.

May their gorgeous spirits never be submerged by the waves of fanaticism that ever and anon sweep over this world of ours.

For they and their like are the troubadours whose life work it is to keep it; heart from breaking.