IN SHORT/SMALL PRESSES: NONFICTION
By DAVID KAUFMAN
Published: November 25, 1990
A DARLING OF THE TWENTIES. By Madge Bellamy. (Vestal, Paper, $19.95.) Although her name is now generally unknown, Madge Bellamy was a star of the silent screen. While most of her 57 movies may have been mediocre, and many remain hard to locate or lost forever, a handful possess cult interest, such as "Lorna Doone" or "The Iron Horse," which was directed by John Ford. (At the height of her popularity, fans could purchase a "Lorna Doone" cape and a Madge Bellamy cap.) Though she tried to shed an ingenue image and to negotiate the transition into talking pictures, Bellamy never really accomplished either. In her lavishly illustrated memoir, "A Darling of the Twenties," completed before her death in January (when she was probably 90 years old), Bellamy wants desperately to understand and explain what she calls her "Cinderella story in reverse." But in trying to account for a crucial moment when she turned down the lead in "The Trial of Mary Dugan," Bellamy exclaims, "Why did I do this? A thousand sleepless nights haven't solved the puzzle for me." In one embarrassing passage after the other, Bellamy betrays the naivete that apparently retarded both her career and her personal development. She says more than once, "I wish that I had gone to a psychiatrist, but I never did." Bellamy lived out most of the second half of her pathetic life "in abject poverty" with her "stage and screen identity undisclosed," and she last captured headlines for a few days in 1943, when she took a gun to a longtime companion, the lumber magnate A. Stanwood Murphy, after he abruptly married another woman. As the film historian Kevin Brownlow writes in his introduction, this poignant autobiography is "the dramatic and touching case history" of one of Hollywood's "victims." Whatever else it has to tell us about the shabby methods of the silent film industry, it inadvertently demonstrates that the firmament is fickle and that some stars are a lot less immortal than they may at first appear.