Erik Visits an American Grave, Part 1,700

This is the grave of Marguerite Clark.

Born in 1883 in Cincinnati, Helen Marguerite Clark grew up in an upwardly mobile family in Porkopolis. Her father ran a fancy haberdashery (it’s sad we don’t use that word in general conversation anymore, it’s a solid one). But he died in 1896 and her mother had evidently already died, so she was an orphan. But her older sister took her in and made sure she got her education. In 1899, though only 16, Clark decided to go into the theater, which she loved. It took her almost no time to reach Broadway. Like one year. In 1900, she performed in a number of plays, smaller roles sure, but still, she was an actor on the rise.

This continued until 1903, when Clark got her first big break. She was cast alongside DeWolf Hopper in Mr. Pickwick (I am not sure if this is an adaptation of Dickens’s The Pickwick Papers, but I guess it doesn’t matter). They went over like gangbusters together. A big part of the reason was their respectable sizes. Clark was tiny, even for a woman of the time. She was 4’10”. He was 6’6″ and also a respected comedian for whom size was a big part of the bit. Put these two together and evidently you had comedy gold. They started working together pretty frequently.

By 1909, Clark had reached stardom, at least for the theater world of that time. She took that next big step by starring in the musical comedy The Beauty Spot. This was one of these comedies about the love lives of rich Europeans at a spa where there are lots of disguises and shenanigans. It was a big hit and Clark had the lead. Then she got to know a director named Cecil B. DeMille, before he went into the movies. She did a play with him called The Wishing Ring that he then turned into a movie. In fact, a lot of her roles ended up being reprised in the films. But she didn’t enter the films until 1914.

Now, at 31 years old, when Adolph Zukor signed Clark to a film contract, she was kinda old for the time. But she was so tiny and could still pull off the Mary Pickford little girl role that was popular at the time. She had avoided films before this for obvious reasons–it was a new technology, you couldn’t actually speak, and the idea of the feature film didn’t exist yet. But by the mid-10s and especially after D.W. Griffith made The Birth of a Nation, the technology had expanded and the popularity of the genre was strong enough that Broadway stars began paying attention, including Clark.

Unfortunately, almost all of Clark’s films are lost. She did most of her work for production companies who were slow on the uptake about the importance of what they are doing. For example, one of the reasons that we focus so much on Griffith today is that from the very beginning, he submitted his films to the Library of Congress for preservation, so they almost all survive. Few people in silent film took themselves serious enough to do this. An exception is her 1916 film Snow White, retelling that famous story. This was one of the many film adaptations of her Broadway work she did for the movies. It was lost until 1992, but then was found in complete form in an Amsterdam vault. She also played both Little Eva and Topsy in 1918’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin, meaning of course the blackface that was almost everywhere in early American film.

In 1921, Clark started her own production company and did something very rare for the time, effectively thought not officially directing herself in Scrambled Wives. Women simply did not get the chance to direct films for the first half-century of the genre, outside of extremely rare cases such as Alice Guy Blanche. So the actual director was Edward Griffith, but she basically called most of the shots. This was her last film. Less usefully, there was a big rivalry between Clark and Pickford, largely started by the families of the two stars hating each other personally. Of course the media loves a good cat fight and played this up way beyond what was reasonable. In fact, the two actors had very few personal interactions and mostly just ignored each other. In 1918, Motion Picture Magazine even ran a poll about which star fans liked best. Pickford won by a 53-47 margin.

Also, Clark always preferred the theater. She didn’t have a lot of illusions why she worked–for money. She once stated. “I am working simply and solely to earn my bread and butter, and my ambition is to find a good play… I shall remain in the pictures until I find one. You see how matter of fact I am. I confess that I really much prefer the stage to the pictures … After all, one loves to be able to talk.”

Clark had gotten rich. In 1918, she married a businessman and millionaire plantation owner named Harry Palmerston Williams, who is also buried here. He deserves a word too. He was born in 1889 in Patterson, Louisiana into a rich family and he went into his father’s lumber business after graduating from the University of the South. He was married but divorced before he met Clark. After they married, he got really into airplanes starting in the mid 20s providing air service in Louisiana. He then got into airplane racing, starting a company with noted racing pilot Jimmy Wedell. He died in 1936 in a plane wreck himself, although this was not a racing thing. It was a takeoff problem.

Clark had retired in 1921 basically because she didn’t need to work anymore. She had intended on her production company being a real deal, but then she was like, why would I bother when I can live a great life without doing anything at all? Fair enough! When her husband died, she sold his plane interests to Eastern Airlines and became even wealthier. She moved to New York after his death. But she didn’t live long. In 1940, she came down with pneumonia and that did her in. She was 57 years old.

Let’s watch some of what remains of Clark’s work:

Marguerite Clark is buried in Metairie Cemetery, New Orleans, Louisiana.

Hey, it’s grave post #1700, something of a milestone! If you would like this series to visit other stars of the silent era, you can donate to cover the required expenses here. Oliver Hardy is in North Hollywood, California (that one would be fun) and Stan Laurel is in a different Hollywood cemetery. Previous posts in this series are archived here and here.