Pioneer silent film director, film producer, actress, writer, wife, mother, activist, educator, foremother to all women film directors, everywhere...
Born in Boston, Massachusetts, in 1895, Dorothy made her screen debut in 1910 at age fifteen when she appeared in silent film for Biograph Studios under the direction of D.W. Griffith.
Dorothy Davenport's family was well known in the theater. Her audacious aunt, Fanny Davenport, was considered one of the great theater actresses of the time. Her father, Harry Davenport, was a Broadway star and her mother Alice was a motion picture actress. With her background on the stage, she was in her early teens when she started playing bit parts in the thrilling new film industry. The Davenports were highly educated, Christian Scientists, and raised their daughter to be fiercely independent and socially compassionate. Young Dorothy proclaimed she would forever remain single and had no girlish fantasies about weddings and being a bride because marriage seemed such a much better deal for dudes.
By the time she was 17, she was a star at Universal. Davenport was a fabulous horsewoman and did a lot of her own stunts. It was on the Universal western, "His Only Son" in 1912 that she met a handsome young actor (and assistant director, scenario writer) Wallace Reid. Reid was already destined to stardom: he was accessible, charming, and was a mad racer behind the wheel doing his own amazing stunts in the early days of the car chase. The two young stars fell madly in love -- AFTER Reid proved he could ride a horse, read books, take up a musical instrument, and treat Dot as an equal! She reisisted marriage for almost a year, but Wally was determined and first won over her mother Alice, and at last Dorothy said yes. They married on October 13, 1913. They took one day off work for a honeymoon and were back on the set by the 15th!
The Reids shared their passion for the new medium of cinema (Wally had also come from an movie family, his father was a screenwriter and his mother an actress) and they worked together often and seperately during their marriage. Dorothy took time off to give birth to their son Wallace Reid Jr. who they called "Billy" while Wally became one of the top box office international movie stars. In addition to son Billy, the couple adopted a 3 year old baby girl named Betty. There was some lore at the time in the gossip magazines that suggests Betty was actually Wallace Reid's love child whom Dorothy welcomed and raised as their own. If so, it makes her all the more the heroine to me.
While filming on location in Oregon in 1919 on "The Valley Of The Giants" , Wally Reid sustained severe injuries when a train caboose jumped tracks. Wally saved the lives of himself and his co-star, but not without a dear price: the pain from head injuries he endured was so great that he was prescribed morphine and within weeks became addicted. A maddening cycle began, where he would kick the narcotic addiction and turn to alcohol, then back to morphine again. Dorothy watched helplessly as Wally conned doctors into giving him 'just enough' morphine to get through. He had every classic piece of behavior of the addict.
It was said that Reid's drug problem became the catalyst for the creation of the Hays Office which monitored the 'morals' of Hollywood stars, on screen and off. Dorothy, desperate to understand her husband's addiction began to study and pen articles on the need for society to treat addiction as a disease, not a moral issue. Incredibly, this was years before the creation of Alcoholics Anonymous which starts from the same premise.
The crisis of drug addiction and alcoholism took a rapid toll on Reid's healh. Ironically he had kicked morphine and was clean and sober in a sanitarium when he died of influenza. The abuse his body had endured made him far too weak to fight off the infection. It was 1923. Dorothy was by her husband's side when he passed away, he woke up long enough to say, "Hello Dot", as he greeted her each morning during their life together. When Dorothy left the sanitarium and faced the reporters, she brazenly took the microphone and addressed the radio listeners, proudly, and dramatically, "This is Mrs. Wallace Reid." This no doubt inspired the scene in "A Star Is Born" where Janet Gaynor addresses fans after her alcoholic husband's death "This is Mrs. Norman Main."..
Dorothy referred to herself as Mrs. Wallace Reid for the rest of her life. And it is important for feminist film buffs to note this: it was not that she felt she was Reid's property -- she was making a very powerful statement that she was not ashamed of her husband's death from addiction, any more than she would have been had he died of cancer, or any other incurable disease. Wally continued acting up until his death, and never felt himself a victim. He even managed to fulfill a dream by competing in a car race in Indianapolis and some felt had he been in better health he would have won. His ashes were placed in an urn he designed himself!
After Reid's death, Dorothy established the Walter Reid Foundation in the Santa Monica mountains, the first of its kind, to help alocholics and addicts. She took writer Adela Rodgers St. Johns to Washington DC to attend a conference on narcotics addiction and became determined to put the message up on the screen.
Dorothy had been mentored by director/producer Lois Weber, the queen of message films. Dorothy teamed up with producer Thomas Ince to make her directorial debut "Human Wreckage" (1923) with Bessie Love, James Kirkwood, Sr., and Lucille Ricksen, a film that dealt with the dangers of narcotics addiction. The power of the film left audiences and her peers wrecked. Sadly, at this time, the status of this film is "presumed lost". The stills which remain are shockingly audacious and raw for the time period.
With the success of this first effort, Dorothy took on the desperate life of a prostitute in the Storyville district of New Orleans with her film, "The Red Kimono" (1925). Dorothy hired her female friends writer Adela Rogers St. Johns and director Dorothy Arzner (who at the time was a film editor and writer) to pen the screenplay.
"The Red Kimono"'s release was clouded by some very unwanted press: the film was promoted 'based on a true story' which would have been fine, had they not named the character the same as the real life former prostitute Gabrielle Darley, who at the time of the film's release, was married into high society in St. Louis, and none of her well heeled friends had a clue as to Miss Darley's sordid past. Darley sued the production for $50,000 and won. It is often suggested this case is how Errors & Omissions Insurance in the movies came about.
She would next direct "Linda" (1929), a stunningly lovely film with Helen Foster, Warner Baxter, and Noah Berry. I wish I had some stills from this one -- if anyone has any images from this film, I would be so indebted. It is one of the most beautifully directed films of the silent era. Foster is cast as a young poor girl child from a backwoods alcoholic home. She longs to be educated and has taught herself to read. But her bigger dreams for herself are shattered when her drunken father marries her off to a much older uneducated man (Noah Beery). If you think you know how this story ends, believe me, you don't. Ernest Laszlo's black & white photography is just gorgeous. Laszlo was a mere youngin' at the time but Dorothy spotted his genius and gave him his first big break.
Watching "Linda" next to a film by King Vidor or any of the great directors of the time -- there is no comparison. While others were churning out banal stories or aiming for gravitas, Dorothy was crafting a masterpiece; treating tough subjects with open warmth, humanism and a very modern approach.
Next Dorothy directed a crime genre film "Sucker Money" (1933), followed by an early teenage girl juvi flick called "Road to Ruin" (1934), and "The Woman Condemned" (1934). When talkies arrived and the studio moguls took over, fewer women were hired to direct movies, and Dorothy turned to producing. When less women survived as producers in the male-dominated studio system Dorothy made her living as a writer and dialogue coach in the 40s and 50s. One of her last credits was as dialogue director for "The First Traveling Saleslady" (1956) with Ginger Rogers. There is no doubt more to learn of Dorothy's accomplishments and contributions. The major role women filmmakers played in early cinema is only now being unearthed. It is incredible to think that Dorothy was producing and directing her first film before she even had the right to vote.
Wally and Dot's son Billy went on to earn a living as an actor up into the 1940s, but I'm unclear what he was doing between his last film and his death in the early 1990s. Little is known about what became of Betty but I do know that Dorothy raised both children as a single mom in Los Angeles. She never remarried and even in her last years referred to herself as only 'semi' retired. Perhaps she envisioned a near future when women would return to roles behind the camera once again...
Dorothy Davenport died at the Motion Picture & Television Country House and Hospital in 1977 in Woodland Hills, California. She is interred with her husband in the Forest Lawn Memorial Park, Glendale, CA. My greatest frustration is that when I was first studying film, this amazing woman, this brilliant filmmaker and pioneer was just miles away, but I had no idea she had ever existed. There is so much I would have loved to ask her.
Mrs. Wallace Reid: an inspiration!
~~ Allison Anders
