Background
Mabel Normand was born on 9 November 1894 in Boston, Massachusetts, United States.
Mabel Normand was born on 9 November 1894 in Boston, Massachusetts, United States.
She was a model before joining Griffith at Biograph in 1911. Still only sixteen, she acted several times for him, most notably in The Squaw’s Love (11), in which she did a back flip into a river first take. But it was Mack Sennett who used her most at Biograph, as the female attraction in comedy shorts. When Sennett left Biograph to form Keystone in 1912, Mabel went with him to even greater prominence. She remained with Sennett until 1917; she depended on his advice, and she was his girl. As well as appearing in over a hundred shorts directed by him, she had gone as far as directing herself by 1914, when still only twenty: Mabel’s Stormy Love Affair; Mabel’s Bare Escape; Mabel's Nerve; Mabel’s New Job; Mabel's Latest Prank; Mabel's Blunder; and Mabel at the Wheel. It was on this last that she and Chaplin fell out, in a way that suggests a lot about work at Keystone, as well as their different attitudes to film. This account of it, by Chaplin, also suggests that he knew his Lumière:
Now I was anxious to write and direct my own comedies, so I talked to Sennett about it. But he would not hear of it; instead he assigned me to Mabel Normand who had just started directing her own pictures. This nettled me, for, charming as Mabel was, I doubted her competence as a director; so the first day there came the inevitable blow-up. We were on location in the suburbs of Los Angeles and in one scene Mabel wanted me to stand with a hose and water down the road so that the Villain’s car would skid over it. I suggested standing on the hose so that the water can’t come out, and when I look down the nozzle I unconsciously step off the hose and the water squirts in my face. But she shut me up quickly: “We have no time! We have no time! Do what you’re told.”
That was enough, I could not take it—and from such a pretty girl. “I’m sorry, Miss Normand, I will not do what I’m told. I don’t think you are competent to tell me about what to do.
Mabel seems to have held no grudge. Before Chaplin moxed on, they worked together several times—Mabel’s Strange Predicament (14, Sennett and Henry Lehrmann); Mabel’s Busy Day (14); Mabel’s Married Life (14); The Fatal Mallet (14); Caught in a Cabaret (14); Her Friend the Bandit (14); Gentlemen of Neive (14); His Trysting Place (14); Getting Acquainted (14); and Tillies Punctured Romance (14, Sennett). Her new partner was Fatty Arbuckle and she worked with him for most of 1915: Mabel and Fatty's Wash Day; Fatty and Mabel's Simple Life: Fatty and Mabel at the San Diego Exposition; Mabel, Fatty and the Law—foreboding title; Mabel and Fatty's Married Life; That Little Band of Gold; Fatty's Tintype Tangle—all directed by Arbuckle; and Mabel’s Wilful Way and Mabel Lost and Won. both directed by Mabel herself .
She stayed with Sennett two more years, but was anxious for a feature debut and got it, in 1918 at Paramount, in Mickey (Richard Jones). She then worked for Goldwyn for the next few years: Sis Hopkins (19, Clarence Badger); The Pest (19, Clnisty Cabanne); When Doctors Disagree (19, Victor Schertzinger); Pinto (19, Schertzinger); Jiny (19, Schertzinger); The Slim Princess (20, Schertzinger); What Happened to Rosa? (21, Schertzinger).
Disaster struck in 1922. Already on drugs, Mabel was implicated in the murder of director William Desmond Taylor and badly damaged by the scandal. Sennett took her back and tried to retrieve her fortunes with Suzanna (23, Jones) and The Extra Girl (23, Jones). But to no avail. Her last pictures were a few shorts for Hal Roach in 1926: Raggedy Rose, One Hour Married, and The Nickel Hopper.
Mabel was the sweet young thing at the Keystone studio, the pretty, dark girl with lively eves who loved (fixing into pools and who thrilled the hearts of Chaplin and Fattx Arbuckle in the early years of the First World War. A contemporary of Mary Pickford and the Gish sisters, she was one of the first proofs that a good-looking girl with charm and a sense of fun could succeed in the movies without any special pretense to acting. The Keystone setup helped to make her seem the more charming—as Chaplin put it, beauty among the beasts.