Terry Chester Shulman - Films First Family: The Untold Story of the Costellos

Films First Family

Films First Family

The Untold Story of the Costellos

Terry Chester Shulman

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Copyright 2019 by The University Press of Kentucky

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Shulman, Terry Chester, 1955 author.

Title: Films first family : the untold story of the Costellos / Terry Chester Shulman.

Description: Lexington, Kentucky : University Press of Kentucky, [2019] | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2019025472 | ISBN 9780813178097 (hardcover) | ISBN 9780813178110 (pdf) | ISBN 9780813178103 (epub)

Subjects: LCSH: Costello family. | Costello, Maurice, 18871950. | ActorsUnited StatesBiography. | Motion picture industryUnited StatesHistory20th century.

Classification: LCC PN2285 .S516 2019 | DDC 791.4302/8092273 [B]dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019025472

This book is printed on acid-free paper meeting
the requirements of the American National Standard
for Permanence in Paper for Printed Library Materials.

Manufactured in the United States of America

For Hillary

To Deirdre, Dede, and Dore

Its better to be a has-been than a never-was.

Maurice Costello

Contents

Mise-en-Scne

It was an unlikely face for a screen idol, as would have been obvious in the early years of filmmaking if anyone, just yet, had the faintest idea what a screen idol should look like. The nose was prominent and beak-shaped. The hair was gray in patches, and had receded boldly to expose a wide, balding foreheadlike that of a favorite uncle, perhaps, or the family doctor, or a politician. Not a movie star, certainly, at least not as the term would one day be understood.

But to the growing throngs of female movie patrons in the summer of 1910, when he smiled there was no face in America as easy to look at. Because film actors were not credited as yet, his admirers had to address their fan lettersfilmdoms firstto the man with the dimples, or to the dimpled darling, until he was known simply as Dimples. The seeds of screen idolatry had been sown; the first great movie star was born.

He had almost arrived too late. The facial accoutrements that became his stock-in-trade were being rapidly consumed by a pair of deeply etched wrinkles, one on each cheek. Maurice Costello was thirty years old when he started making movies, but onscreen he looks fifty. A decade of hard living as a traveling performer had worn on him physicallythe one-a-days, playing a different theater each night; squalid boarding houses where, depending on the season, the show trade baked or froze on lumpy, vermin-infested mattresses. And when it became too much, the bottle brought easy oblivion to an actor returning to grimy quarters after the evenings performance.

Traveling the countrys variety circuits at the turn of the century took a personal toll on him as well. According to Maurices granddaughter, he could be a mean drunk in those days. As a child, Deirdre Le Blanc knew him as a kindly old man living in penniless retirement at the Motion The diversion succeededMaurices attention was drawn elsewhere and the crisis passed.

As he tired of life on the road, Maurice began looking for more sedentary ways to make a living as a performer. By the middle of the aught years, he could not have failed to notice the nascent film industry making its presence known wherever he went.

Manhattans theater district, now under the control of a confederation of trusts aptly named the Syndicate, had moved uptown to the vicinity of Broadway and Forty-Second Street. An evening at the theater was fleetingbut now any living moment could be pulled from the ether and sequestered on a piece of film, for reanimation at a later date. To live again, as it were, for audiences yet unborn. It was a brush with immortality human beings would have never imagined possible.

By mid-1908, most of the polite variety theaters in New York had incorporated movies into the twelve-hour marathons they called continuous Meanwhile, the trusts tightened their grip on the theater business, blacklisting actors and independent theater operators who refused to give up their autonomy. Powerbrokers Charles Frohman of the Syndicate and Edward F. Albee of the Vaudeville Managers Association ruled in their separate fiefdoms. Palatial new playhouses, built to attract affluent audiences to the theater and less affluent audiences to the vaudeville stage, generated record profits for the trusts.

While opportunity knocked, Maurice moved his family from Pittsburgh into the epicenter of Americas frantic new age of cultural innovation. From its headquarters in the Bronx, Edison Studios fought hard to maintain its grip on the burgeoning film industry.

Eventually the studios increased their output of moving pictures, but filmmakers still had to share their audience with omnipresent vaudeville. When I started there were more than 5,000 vaudeville theaters in the country, George Burns recalled. Anything could be the basis of an act. Mind reading, mental telepathy, and hypnotism were popular. Posing acts pretended to be statuesmaybe they did nothing, but they did it beautifully. One performer ate paper, wood, flowers, light bulbs and matches while another man bit railroad spikes in half. There was even The Wrestling Cheese, a slab of cheese that could not be lifted from the stage, and a Chinese act that put chopsticks through their noses.

Before the advent of the first movie theaters, called nickelodeons, New York film producers had to compete with vaudeville for lucrative

Somehow the rank-and-file stage actor had to make a living in this oppressive climate. Fortunately, stage work was still plentiful in the age of the theater stock companythe term referring to a troupe of actors bound to a single proprietor, or theater, or both. By the end of the decade their numbers had fallen substantially, but, added to hundreds of smaller acts, musical troupes, opera companies, minstrel shows, and traveling circuses, they paint a picture of a turn-of-the-century America inundated with live entertainment.