According to an article entitled “How She started Screen Career,” printed May 17th, 1929, Colleen said that her film career started in Chicago at the Essanay Studios, a claim she did not repeat in "Silent Star." The records from that time are gone, so it will never be possible to prove or disprove this claim from late in her career, but it was it not an unrealistic claim given the proximity of the studio to the home of her aunt and uncle and the drive to find a way to the silver screen. In the article Colleen claimed she was in at least one mob scene shot in Chicago. Her parents did not approve, so; “Without a word to our families we (herself and Helen Ferguson, who was to go on to make documented films with Essanay) dressed in our best clothes and visited the studio the following Saturday morning. At first we were refused admission, but our downcast looks finally made an old doorman relent.” An assistant director gave them the once over and told them to come back the following Thursday morning. A school day, they ditched and went over to the studio, but the casting director said no extras were needed. They went back 2 and 3 times a week until they were used for a mob scene.
In a 1970 interview given to Kevin Brownlow by Helen Ferguson, she gives her own version of this story, though she could have either been describing her first of several appearances at the studio, or simply her screen test before her departure for Hollywood: “Babille (casting director for Essanay?) brought a girl to me with long red curls, her name was Kathleen Morrison and she was 14 years old, he told me. Since I was the youngest at the studio and she would be the next youngest, I should take very good care of her….
“That gal and I became real friends. One day someone said they were going to shoot a film of Kathleen Morrison to send to DW Griffith. By now they had converted some of the offices upstairs so we no longer had to stand to do our makeup. They allowed up to go into rooms with windows, and they gave us a place for makeup an Kathleen sat next to me, clutching my hand…. Harry Beaumont shot it. Well, there was a buzz around the studio, as there always was when something had happened. I hoped it meant Kathleen had done well. When I saw her, her eyes were all red. She had been crying. She had been told to act jealous so she cried. I asked her ‘How did you cry?’
“She was crazy about Charlie Chaplin and Lillian Gish. So she said ‘You know how I love Charlie Chaplin and you know how I hate spotted neckties? Well I thought of Charlie Chaplin wearing spotted neckties and I cried!’”
| Photograph: Chicago History Museum, "On the set of a Broncho Billy Western." |
(Note: while stopping in Chicago in 1925 on a transcontinental railroad trip that would take her to New York and from there on to Europe by ship, Colleen mentioned in an interview again that she had started in films in Chicago, in the mob scenes where she appeared so briefly you'd miss her if you blinked. In her interview she put the number of films in Chicago at eight, and also says her mother was at every opening night (not quite contradicting the claim her parents did not approve; they might still disapprove but be curious enough to want to see their daughter up on the silver screen.)
(It is also said that she had an uncredited appearance as "the maid" in the 1916 "The Prince of Graustark," which was filmed in Chicago. I've heard the actress, whoever she is, is "the spitting image" of a young Colleen Moore, though I have neither seen the film or stills from the film, so I cannot comment on this).
Whether true or not, Helen’s description sounds very much like a scene that definitely happened. As she described it in “Silent Star,” her Aunt Lib prevailed upon her Uncle Walt to call in a favor he was owed by D.W. Griffith. It was Walt managed to get the movie “Birth of a Nation” to play in Chicago uncensored, and so he called the director and told him he had a niece wanted a break in show business. And as all versions of the story go, Griffith replied “Not a niece!”
In November, 1916, after getting a telephone call in Tampa from Uncle Walt in Chicago, Kathleen’s parents debated whether to let their daughter travel to California to pursue her dream of a life on the silver screen. She was not yet graduated from school, though she was close, and there was no way the family could relocate to California, and letting her travel alone was out of the question. At last it was decided that Kathleen would be allowed to make the trip: first to Chicago for photographic tests, and if they proved satisfactory, from there on to California. Her grandmother would accompany her.
Her mismatched eyes proved to photograph close enough in color not to be a problem. Before she and her grandmother boarded the train for California, her uncle told her that it had been decided that se would have a professional name. “Kathleen Morrison” was too long to appear on a marquee; the optimum number of letters that should appear in lights was twelve, and so the name was whittled down to “Colleen Moore.” Close enough to her real name to be comfortable. And a reminder of her half-Irish background. It was about time the country had an Irish movie star, Walt would tell her. And so in November, 1916, Kathleen Morrison boarded an AT&SF train headed west, towards Los Angeles.