Mulling Over Mabel

Thousands of writers, artists, creators and auteurs of one sort or another spend lifetimes trying to answer one stubborn inner question: “Why do I?”

The quest itself is rarely made public, for fear of appearing completely self-serving and therefor ego-driven and nothing more. You never give your patrons the notion that all of their adoration, admiration, praise – and in some cases money – has merely been to facilitate one’s narcissistic masturbation. Some artists realize the answer lies across too wide a gulf to navigate, and simply ride the wave to its measure.

One man realized much too late, exactly what – or rather who – was his muse. When he finally did, it was also realized that an entire industry and a generation who followed, had been empowered by that same muse.

The man was Mack Sennett. The elusive, eternally youthful butterfly that fate had allowed his meager net to snare, was the embodiment of muses, a girl whose nymph-like spirit was akin to those that had lured the mighty and infamous to their destinies: Mabel Normand.

Though forgotten by most of movie-going civilization today, Mabel was arguably the catalyst for the entire age of silent cinema comedy.

Mabel appeared in one film with cinema comedy’s first name-star, John Bunny, in the 1911 film Troublesome Secretaries. Just barely one reel, it was made near the twilight of Bunny’s career, and the beginning of Mabel’s. It’s an ultra-rare moment of collaboration and transition between the dawn generation of screen comedy and its still-silent golden age generation. The only person whose screen presence Mabel’s own does not upstage, is Bunny’s. But even in the final minutes, when Mabel and her onscreen paramour pull a fast one on Boss Bunny, she lingers ever so fleetingly in the background – near the very back of the set – and is magnetic.

One wonders if this is the film Mabel’s mother learned about and scolded her to return to the more reliably income-generating pursuit of modeling. Whichever the case, Mabel rebelled and generations of comedy fans must thank her young judgment for it.

She hooked her wagon to Sennett’s, and the couple embarked on what, in the beginning, must have been a journey marked by every emotion and obstacle to avail itself upon adventurous young lovers throughout history.

Mack’s vision was given spark by a petite, inexhaustible little bolt of lightning whose life’s very joy translated through the lens and read onscreen. Is it possible that Mabel was unaware of her own power? That what, to her, was merely ‘having fun’ acting on camera, was a jolt of addictive energy, not just to the man behind the camera, but ultimately to a throng of movie goers?

Did Mabel have any idea what she would become, to her fellow actors, and audiences years after her passing? Not just a movie star, but an aesthetic? A narcotic?

Did Mack Sennett himself ever ponder this, beyond the notion of love lost? Did he turn to God and give thanks for being the luckiest man in Hollywood? Both in terms of being the beneficiary of her destiny, and most probably her one genuine love?

Did Roscoe Arbuckle ever fully understand the origin of his star-power, having been effectively ‘branded’ by Mabel Normand’s natural, fun and innocently flirtatious attention and devotion in films like Wash Day, and Fatty & Mabel Adrift, and over a dozen more?

Did Charlie Chaplin ever knowingly thank her for triggering him into genius-mode, with her initial mentoring on the Keystone set, and then denial of his amorous advances outside of them?

Her 17-year career output was feverish but light – she made just over a hundred films, and many of them one- and even half-reelers. She made only a handful of ‘feature-length’ movies, and wasn’t even present for the talkies. She died the year sound-pictures arrived, in their Jazz Singer infancy. Most of her screen legacy is scratched, spliced and washed white by the passing of time – saved from the abyss only by the digital era.

Her public image was tarnished by her association with Roscoe Arbuckle and William Desmond Taylor – neither of whom could have second-guessed their own infamy. When Arbuckle’s films were banned in the wake of his scandal, the most memorable were those in which she had costarred. So Mabel was in affect banned along with him. Her initial implication in Taylor’s murder case cemented her fate as a ‘bad girl.’ Then her own ill-fortunes brought on by her personal downward spiral, combined with her fixed position in the public eye, only served to throw dirt on her career’s gravestone. Her ex-con chauffeur shot millionaire Courtland S. Dines in a party-fueled misunderstanding, with her own pistol, which she could not recognize later on the witness stand. She was duped by disingenuous stage producers regarding The Little Mouse, which she’d been assured was a new play worthy of her, and a new chapter to her career, but was in fact a tired little flop merely re-titled, and pushed on her for her name on the marquee. And let us not overlook the restless, relentless co-opting of her unhealthy lifestyle by her ‘friends.’ Even her marriage to Lew Cody was at first a drunken frolic. The constant merry-go-round of living to its lustiest resulted in pneumonia – which activated the lingering childhood tuberculosis in her system at last into a full-blown killer.

She was thirty years in her grave by the time the King of Comedy finally admitted in print that she had been the reason he’d done everything. Everything.

The pie fights – of which she’d made the first shot, the Kops, the chases and mad dashes, the pratfalls, the doubletakes... everything sprung from his need to earn what he’d been inexplicably gifted – The Girl – a woman self-pledged to him like none after, with every atom of Catholic daughter devotion, despite the ‘wild child’ atmosphere that enveloped the rest of her existence. He’d thrown it away, in an impulsive burst of foolish horniness, on the very eve of what would have otherwise been his heart’s triumph.

Placing his crown and legacy so completely at Mabel’s altar at the end, was his only option. Thirty years is a long time for credit due.