By Ross Eric Gibson

ZaSu Pitts had given what she thought was an embarrassing audition in 1917, to play Mary Pickford’s impoverished best friend in “A Little Princess.” ZaSu asked her idol “How do you want me to play the character?”

Mary Pickford said, “Just be yourself.”

Not quite sure Pickford knew her that well, ZaSu questioned “Are you SURE?” To which Pickford grinned and nodded. For ZaSu, who had tried most of her life not to be her shy insecure self, it was rather liberating, that this awkward, gawky persona was exactly what Hollywood wanted!

Each time Santa Cruz entrepreneur Fred Swanton went to Hollywood on business, he visited former Santa Cruzan ZaSu Pitts to see how her career was progressing. ZaSu wanted to know about “Fer-Dal Studios” in De Laveaga Park, which in 1916 had made short comedies, hoping they could be mixed into any film program as a short subject. But even with Edward Ferguson’s connections with Universal, none of the short subjects met Hollywood standards. Swanton realized the promotional value of Santa Cruz scenery was not in quickies, but in feature films. He toured Hollywood again in 1917, courting leading film-makers to run a studio in beautiful Santa Cruz County. He befriended Thomas Ince, Cecil B. DeMille, Marshall Neilan, D.W. Griffith, Allan Dwan, and others. All said they would be glad to film their features in Santa Cruz, but not run a studio so remote from Hollywood’s film-making network.

Discoveries

ZaSu was constantly star-struck at the people she got to work with. During the making of the 1918 film “A Society Sensation,” ZaSu blushingly confessed when asked to dance, that she didn’t know the simplest step. A voice behind her said, “I’ll teach you, ZaSu.” She turned to see the film’s love interest, a struggling Italian actor, known at the time as Rudolpho de Valentino, a professional dance instructor. He taught her to dance, and she saw his hidden potential that others didn’t. Valentino’s big break finally came in 1921, when in one year he did the “Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse,” “Camille,” and “The Sheik” becoming a matinee idol.

King Vidor at Brentwood Studios started out doing short films, but instead of fluff, he explored important social issues, feeling the film medium had an obligation to inform. His first feature in 1919 was based on a Christian Science tract. His next film was a 1919 comedy called “Better Times,” about a struggling hotel, that began treating poor eating habits with a Christian Science diet. Vidor hired ZaSu Pitts to star as the hotel owner who falls in love with a sick man. Vidor told ZaSu “I’m actually the one who discovered you.”

“But I’ve already done several dozen films,” ZaSu said.

Vidor replied, “No, it was on a rainy day in 1915, I saw you get on a crowded trolley on Hollywood Boulevard. You managed to constantly prod and gore people next to you with your umbrella and elbows, prompting a litany of apologies. Then your stop came, and you raced to get off, knocking heads, hats, and newspapers as you went. People lined the windows to watch you depart, and had I not been just a struggling screenwriter at the time, I would have hired you on the spot!” Vidor next cast Pitts in three dramas: “The Other Half” and “Poor Relations” in 1919, and later “Three Wise Fools” in 1923.

In a 1920 visit, Fred Swanton found ZaSu deluged with offers from big studios, and she asked to hire him as her manager. Swanton wasn’t sure he had the time, but with his studio connections, he raised funds to produce a movie as “Fred Swanton Productions,” and joined the new Truart Film Corporation which did production and distribution, making Swanton’s script their first movie. It would be a star vehicle showcasing ZaSu Pitts’ talents, called “Patsy” (not to be confused with “The Patsy” from 1928). ZaSu played the title character, an unremarkable sister of the beautiful Grace. Patsy secretly loved her sister’s boyfriend (played by Tom Gallery), then when Grace ran off with a millionaire playboy, Patsy consoled the boyfriend, saying she herself loves someone who doesn’t know she exists. The boyfriend teaches her how to win “that guy” (which he doesn’t realize is himself), but in the process he falls in love with Patsy. As it turned out, this wasn’t acting, for ZaSu Pitts married Tom Gallery in 1920.

Swanton eventually negotiated with Selznick studios to grant a three-year contract for ZaSu, paying $1,000-a-week the first year, $2,250 the second year, $3,500 the third; plus a 15-20-then-25% cut of each film’s gross.

Too beautiful

ZaSu and her husband Tom celebrated the birth of their daughter named “ZaSu Ann Gallery” in 1922. Her nanny brought the child to visit ZaSu at work, first on the set of “Poor Men’s Wives” in 1923, then again the same year in “Soul’s for Sale,” two movies where she acted with Barbara La Marr. La Marr was being treated on the set with cocaine for a sprained ankle, and kept her weight down through narcotics, which reduced her sleep time to two hours a night. La Marr had been a screenwriter of whom Mary Pickford remarked, “You’re too beautiful to remain behind the camera.” So La Marr became a movie femme fatale, developing an equally tumultuous reputation off screen. Called “The Girl Who Is Too Beautiful,” for decades she was the ultimate measure of beauty.

ZaSu befriended La Marr, because she didn’t like to see someone picked on with unflattering gossip in the national press. Barbara admired ZaSu’s baby, and said she had something hidden in her picnic basket. ZaSu apprehensively looked inside, and her heart melted when she saw a beautiful baby boy named Sonny. ZaSu didn’t have to ask, knowing this was Barbara’s child out of wedlock. Barbara confessed that her marriages were all disasters, first in 1914 to a man who died three weeks later of pneumonia, then the same year, she married a man who was quickly arrested for bigamy, and died in prison from a head wound. Her 1916 marriage led to her husband’s arrest as a forger. She married a dancer in 1918 but separated in 1921 due to his gambling and alcoholism. After that, she had this baby out of wedlock in 1922, concealing his relationship.

La Marr wondered how ZaSu was handling fame. ZaSu thought La Marr was joking, since she mostly played minor, humble characters, nothing to make her a movie queen like La Marr. Yet the public saw in ZaSu something approachable, a person who reminded folks of a sister, a neighbor or a best friend, with distinctive looks and mannerisms popularly imitated. ZaSu was allowed to do cameos in four 1923 films, because she was recognizable. ZeSu had brief cameos in “Souls For Sale,” “Mary of the Movies,” “Hollywood,” and the newsreel “Screen Snapshots No. 1.” In those films, she was in the company of star cameos by Erich von Stroheim, Charlie Chaplin, Chester Conklin, Barbara La Marr, Bessie Love, Mary Pickford, Roscoe “Fatty” Arbuckle, Bebe Daniels, Mary Astor, Noah Beery, Cecil B. DeMille, Douglas Fairbanks, Sid Grauman, Will Rogers and Wallace Reid. Meanwhile, La Marr’s idea to avoid a scandal, was to put her baby in a Texas orphanage, then in February 1923, she pretended to openly select and adopt him. La Marr married a last time, but the man left shortly after.

The dark side

Early films used saturation lighting along with baby spots to remove shadows for the clarity of the image. Yet there are a few examples of early Film Noir lighting to emphasize shadows and dark settings. “The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari” in 1920 is among the first. Then in 1924, Erich von Stroheim’s epic masterpiece “Greed” was a revelation in noir lighting. The film was based on the Frank Norris novel “McTeague: A Story of San Francisco.” This brutal psychodrama was not exactly the type of dramas ZaSu was doing, but Stroheim wanted her, for her subtlety and nuance, able to slowly lose her sanity while maintaining sympathy for her character.

The copy of the film at the New York debut was hand colored, giving a yellow tint to everything gold in the film, in stark contrast to the drab black-and-white world they lived in. The story of “Greed” opened in the underworld of a gold mine’s darkness, where only a golden shaft of sunlight penetrated. Throughout the film a cage motif is repeated, symbolizing the constraints of poverty and working women, and the entrapping power of greed. Powerless confinement was seen, from a bird in a gilded cage, to a wife in a “gilded” brass bed. Then ZaSu’s character wins $5,000 in the lottery, yet slowly descends into madness, hoarding her gold while living in squalor. In the end, her husband murders her for the gold, then flees to Death Valley. The entire desert sequence is tinted yellow, and here at last the husband possesses this weighty treasure in the blistering sunshine, where his riches are completely worthless to him. The director’s cut was nine hours, but new studio head L.B. Mayer hated the film, and had it trimmed to two and a half hours. None-the-less it is an important movie milestone, and Stroheim called ZaSu Pitts “the screen’s greatest tragedienne.”

ZaSu loved to babysit Sonny and Ann, who played together as if brother and sister, just as La Marr had become close to ZaSu. ZaSu returned to Santa Cruz in 1925, to see friends, and film “Thunder Mountain” in Paradise Park north of town. The same year, La Marr felt “The Girl from Montmartre” would be one of her best films. She played a high-born woman who ended up as a dance hall performer, only to gain the love of an English gentleman, who fights off kidnappers to marry her. Yet even acting such a happy ending was stopped in its tracks, when La Marr collapsed on the set. ZaSu rushed to La Marr’s bedside, only to learn the 29-year-old La Marr was dying. It wasn’t made clear if it was drugs, TB, or extreme dieting. La Marr regretted most the time she missed with Sonny, and now her dying wish was that ZaSu would promise to adopt La Marr’s son. ZaSu didn’t have to think twice, feeling close as family. La Marr died Jan. 30, 1926, and ZaSu gave him the name Don Sonny Gallery.

La Marr’s last movie was completed with stand-ins, and released the day after her death. Her funeral attracting 3,000 to see “The Girl Who Is Too Beautiful to Live” lie in state. Seven months later Valentino died at age 31, two sex symbols of their age. ZaSu made sure Don (as he called himself) knew his mother for her talent, beauty, and love of her son. Don also received visits and gifts from screenwriter Paul Bern, whom Don came to believe was his father. Bern married Jean Harlow in 1932, then he was dead two months later of an apparent suicide. It was in a world of such turmoil that ZaSu was a stabilizing influence in many lives, thanks to the advice to “Just be yourself.” This was reassuring, although her answer still nagged her, “Are you SURE?”