The New York Times and Alfred Cheney Johnston
Many years ago, I worked in NYC for a respected think-tank. During my time there, I learned that standard practice at The New York Times was to sell editorial space. Institutions that enjoyed a relationship with the paper could— every so often— buy space for one of their experts to plug themselves and their latest projects. My understanding is that this is how things have always been done. So imagine my surprise to find that Edith May appeared on the cover of the NYT’s Mid-Week Pictorial magazine issued November 4th, 1920— about one week after I estimate that she left NYC.
There is no text about Edith May inside the Nov. 4th Mid-Week Pictorial, she’s just a cover image: a seventeen year-old wrapped in a bed sheet, flashing teeth and staring into the eyes of the viewer. Her photo was taken by Alfred Cheney Johnston. (Edith May would have actually been sixteen in that photo if she was in fact born “Emma Mariha”.)
Edith May’s Johnston photo shoot appears to have been among the last things she did in NYC prior to leaving suddenly, at least a week before her contract with Ziegfeld was over. Her hurried departure contrasts starkly with her life ambitions as stated four weeks prior:
“You see, I've just GOT to make good,” she says to me. “I can't disappoint these people. Besides there's something I want terribly much *** Guess! *** You can't. Well, it's a couple of acres of land I want to buy for-- for them.” Edith May jerked her head in her parents' direction.
[Edith May to Zoe Beckley, Wisconsin State Journal, September 24th 1920.]
And two days later Edith May elaborated …
“Nobody knows how I've longed for some miracle like this to happen. Of course, like all other girls, I love the movies. We have a movie here in Monroe, you know.”
“But when I go to it, I am not just enjoying the story that is flashed on the sheet. I am thinking how people get their start in acting-- wondering if I could-- wishing with all my soul I knew where and how to begin-- dreaming day and night of the things I'd do for my folks if I could once get in-- and succeed!”
[Edith May to Zoe Beckley, Wisconsin State Journal, September 26th 1920.]
When questioned by local press why she left NYC, Edith May gave a variety of answers: homesickness; the cold costumes; not being cut out for a life on the stage; and preferring a rural, married existence. The about-face is so startling that I believe something traumatic must have happened to the teen during her Ziegfeld experience. I explore that in my post on Alfred Cheney Johnston’s Nude Photograph Collection.
I’d like to stress how significant Edith May’s NYT/Mid-Week Pictorial cover is, because somebody in NYC was splashing a lot of money around to promote Edith. Typically already-famous people were featured on the cover of M-WP, people like Billie Burke (Flo Ziegfeld’s wife), Babe Ruth or the Pope. As I looked into Mid-Week Pictorial cover art further, I saw that even more money had been spent promoting Alfred Cheney Johnston than Edith May.
During the final half of 1920 Johnston supplied at least five Mid-Week Pictorial cover photos, most of which were in the final three months of the year (when the National Salesgirls Beauty Contest was in promotion). All of Johnston’s subjects were women associated with companies that had lost out from California’s eclipse of New York’s entertainment scene. It was almost as if Johnston’s rally on the cover of Mid-Week Pictorial was a last-ditch effort to revive NY entertainment interests.
By 1920 both NYC and Chicago film interests had had a very rough couple of years, and not just for financial reasons. There were mysterious setbacks, for instance the post-war dissolution of Mutual Film (Chicago) and its subsidiary Thanhouser film (New Rochelle, NY) — even the best scholarship on Mutual glosses over the firm’s end. Thanhouser appears to have been wound up for no reason. However, the origin of the companies may provide an explanation for their troubles.
Prior to Mutual buying Thanhouser (and its submarine film unit) in 1914, Edwin Thanhouser built his company using money he’d made as the Milwaukee representative of the Shubert theater dynasty, which was based out of NYC. The Shuberts are described as “Ziegfeld competitors” and the dynasty flourished alongside human trafficking:
Culminating in 1910— the year after Thanhouser started his film company— the Shubert brothers broke the monopoly on the theater-management industry enjoyed by the Theatrical Syndicate, which was controlled by Ziegfeld investors Abe Erlanger and Marc Klaw. The Shuberts did this through a strategy of ‘collecting actors’— controlling theatrical talent— which starved the Syndicate of performers. (Perhaps Flo Ziegfeld took notes?) The Shuberts then set up their own monopoly The Shubert Organization, which was based in New York City (Broadway), but the family owned theaters across the country. Austro-Hungarian police identified traveling international musical acts as one of the main vectors through which human trafficking for the White Slave Trade (organized international prostitution) was effected— such trafficking would have to have piggy-backed off of these theater monopolies.
The Shuberts weren’t the only fountain from which Mutual drew life: key Mutual talent D. W. Griffith owed his start to David Belasco, as well as nearly-Mutual talent Mary Pickford. Belasco was a leading NYC theater magnate:
David Belasco, whose family were London transplants, was responsible for launching the careers of two key people associated with Freuler’s Mutual Film endeavor: D. W. Griffith and the young Canadian Mary Pickford. He also championed Cecil B. DeMille, whose career flourished alongside British government intervention in the US film industry.
So while the Chicago/Milwaukee axis was important to the development of the film industry, its roots were firmly in the world of New York Theater and the families who controlled it. Mutual’s, Thanhouser’s and ultimately Mutual-subsidiary Arrow Film’s murky backgrounds make the dissolution of the first two after WWI particularly strange. Historian of criminology Paul Knepper in his book The Invention of International Crime, notes that passport controls introduced during that war were the first real stumbling block faced by the international prostitution syndicate. Last February I wrote this about Mutual and Thanhouser:
John Freuler worked out of Chicago and his movie ventures hired talent from the old Essanay Company, which had offices in London, Berlin and Barcelona besides its flagship undertakings in Chicago. This global distribution network based in Chicago was part of the value that Freuler brought to the Shallenberger operation through Mutual Film.
Mutual Film worked closely with Teddy Roosevelt and British intelligence interests which were keen to bend US public opinion in favor of joining WWI. To this end, a great many “preparedness” war-films were produced and shown. According to a 1956 edition of the Monroe Evening Times, J.P. Gruwell and Leon Goetz opened the new “Monroe” theater in 1916 with an airing of the most notorious of these war-films, “Battle Cry of Peace”, for which Teddy Roosevelt had organized the use of US servicemen as extras.
In the early days of this propaganda outreach (1915), the investors in Mutual set up a different company, Arrow Film, which ostensibly existed for the same purpose [film production] but with the added bonus of supplying Pathe Films too, a French firm which was the preeminent film production company prior to WWI. Over the course of WWI, the Shallenbergers ran three companies which appeared to compete with each other: Mutual, Thanhouser and Arrow.
At the end of WWI in 1918, both Mutual and Thanhouser closed down. This left the industry scratching their heads, because these firms had both talent, equipment and plenty of money in the bank. Arrow was there, however, to pick up where its sister firms had suddenly left off.
The troubles didn’t stop in 1920. Arrow Film Corp. was dead by 1926; Ziegfeld’s enterprise died in 1932; and by the 1930s California film companies controlled production, distribution and exhibition of films, thereby eclipsing the East Coast entertainment industry. Therefore, 1920 was a time of intense uncertainty for the Shallenbergers, the Shuberts, David Belasco, the Ziegfeld family as well as Ziegfeld investors like William A. Brady (prize fight promoter, theatrical hustler and President Wilson’s anti-pornography film czar), “European” burlesque promoter Joseph Weber, Marc Klaw and Abraham Lincoln Erlanger, Charles Dillingham, William Randolph Hearst and Arthur Brisbane, and finally New York gangster Arthur Flegenheimer (a.k.a. “Dutch Schultz”). That these interests would collaborate above and beyond The National Salesgirls Beauty Contest shouldn’t be too surprising.
So what did Alfred Cheney Johnston turn out for the consumers of movies and readers of Mid-Week Pictorial at the end of 1920? Edith May’s fleeting fame was linked to Raoul Walsh’s abortive attempt to start “Mayflower Film Corp”— Walsh was formerly employed by Mutual Film (he played Pancho Villa, the lionized Imperial German agent) and was searching for a way to reinvent himself after WWI. The other Johnston subjects were just as interesting:
NYT’s Mid-Week Pictorial, August 19th, 1920. Photograph of Billie Burke by Alfred Cheney Johnston. Note how Ziegfeld’s wife is wearing clothes.
NYT’s Mid-Week Pictorial, September 16th, 1920. Photograph by Alfred Cheney Johnston. The bed-sheet-draped “Harvest Maid” is Ziegfeld Girl Kathlene Martyn, more on her in a minute.
That Ziegfeld would wish to promote his wife Billie Burke is, I think, obvious and in line with his history and character. Now that he was a respectable businessman, however, Billie Burke’s clothes stayed on. No such scruples for the lesser assets, like Edith May. The other nearly-naked “Harvest Girl” is British actress Kathlene Martyn, according to Dr. David S. Shields from the University of South Carolina:
A British beauty who became the mascot of the Royal Flying Corps during World War I, Kathlene Martyn emigrated to the United States in 1919. Martyn was generally acknowledged by theater critics and artists to be one of the most beautiful women gracing the stage in 1920s New York. The etcher Paul Helieau was so struck by her beauty in the 1920 Midnight Frolic that he published an image which created a national sensation. Advertising agencies hired her as a model. Her picture appeared in the newspapers and magazines regularly from 1920 to 1926.
It was Martyn's reputation as an amiable and fashionable performer with a solid ability as a partner dancer that won her a place touring vaudeville on the Orpheum circuit when not gracing the Broadway Revues. And she always had a role in any revue or musical that didn't require virtuosic singing, good timing in the delivery of dialogue, or complicated solo choreography. She graced some notable productions: "Sally," "Lady be Good," and Ziegfeld's "Palm Beach Days."
Her beauty won her parts in motion pictures as well. Beginning with 1924's "The Sixth Commandment," she appeared in four feature films, always in a supporting role, and always as a beauty who comes to a bad end. Little wonder Martyn tired of film work in 1926 after two years in the business.
The “image” by Paul Helieau which Shields mentions is the one below (as far as I can tell) but I have found no information on why it was considered a “national sensation”. The “Midnight Frolic” was one of Ziegfeld’s girlie shows— Edith May performed in this one too. 1920 was the last year Lady Duff Gordon designed costumes for the Follies, and we can see the then slightly-dated ostrich feathers exploding out the back of Martyn’s hat in Helieau’s sketch.
Kathlene Martyn by Paul Helieau, appeared in the October 1921 edition of Shadowland, a color magazine showcasing “the Arts”— but mostly theater people. You can read a digitized copy of this edition at archive.org.
The magazine in which Helieau’s sketch appeared was Shadowland. Shadowland was run and owned by Eugene Valentine Brewster, a wealthy lawyer/artist/publisher/editor from Brooklyn, N.Y. Brewster owned two other movie-industry publications also: Motion Picture Magazine and Motion Picture Classic.
While Brewster’s publications carried weight in the early film industry, it was his political connections that were the most remarkable. Eugene Brewster first gained fame as a "boy orator" for Grover Cleveland's 1892 presidential campaign; he then became Chairman of the Democratic Ways and Means Committee. Brewster stumped in support of William Jennings Bryan, while Brewster’s first wife founded the ‘Women's Bryan League’. In 1900 Brewster’s politics took a hard left and he ran as the Social Democratic candidate for New York Attorney General.
When Brewster ran for AG in 1900, the Social Democratic party was chaired by Eugene V. Debs and one year later the organization changed its name to “Socialist Party of America”. By the time Edith May had her photo shoot with Johnston, Brewster was part of the socialist movement that had been effectively steered by NYC big-wig Jacob Schiff.
(As an aside, Eugene Brewster was one of the men actress Corliss Palmer married, his publishing connections enabled her journalism career. We met Palmer before through Leon Goetz’s pornography partner, Sint Millard. Palmer acted in one of Millard’s pornographic films, Scarlet Youth (1929), advertised as "THE MOST VIVID SEX PICTURE EVER FILMED!" Palmer acted in this picture while she was still married to Brewster, the couple had first met in 1920 when Palmer won a beauty contest that Brewster ran through Motion Picture Magazine which was almost identical to the National Salesgirls’ Beauty Contest. (The Shallenberger’s Photoplay Magazine set off the popularity of this advertising gimmick in 1915.) Brewster must have trusted Sint Millard quite a bit— or he was involved in Millard’s pornography/pimping racket. Brewster and Palmer were divorced two years after Scarlet Youth was released.)
NYT’s Mid-Week Pictorial, October 14th, 1920. Photograph of Ina Claire by Alfred Cheney Johnston. The description below reads: “Ina Claire Whose delightful acting and attractive personality have accounted in large measure for the success of “The Gold Diggers,” in which she plays the leading feminine role.”
Ina Claire's Vaudeville career began in a tragic way similar to Evelyn Nesbit’s: born in D.C., her father died when she was young and her mother took the family to live in a boarding house because of difficult financial circumstances. In eighth grade Claire's mother removed her from school and at 14 years old-- the age prostitutes typically started in the trade-- Ina was acting on stage in Washington. At 15 years old she began a stage career in NYC. Broadway magnate David Belasco cast Claire in a leading role in his 1919 production of “The Gold Diggers”, a play about a chorus girl who marries into money. This is the role she's advertised in on the cover of Mid-Week Review.
Having worked steadily through the 1920s, Claire's film career petered out after she played a salacious role in the 1932 film The Greeks Had a Word for Them. This was another flick about showgirls angling for wealthy husbands. As a nearly 40 year old actress, there was probably an element of desperation in her decision to take the part; outcry from the public hastened the end of her career, though she had a few bit parts during the following decade.
The salacious nature of Claire’s performance in “The Greeks Had a Word for Them” hastened the end of her career. This is an example of “pre-code” Hollywood advertising, and offers some explanation of why censorship had so much public support.
NYT’s Mid-Week Pictorial, September 23rd, 1920. Photograph by Alfred Cheney Johnston. In early 1920 Corinne Griffith was a Vitagraph star, but would soon make the transition to First National Pictures ‘ just like Mary Pickford and Charlie Chaplin… Much like the abortive Mayflower Film Corp, First National grew out of the ashes of John Freuler’s Mutual Film Co.
The final subject of Johnston’s Mid-Week Pictorial covers, Corinne Griffith, was a Vitagraph Studios star. Vitagraph was a Brooklyn-based film company set up by British immigrant James Stuart Blackton and was part of the “Edison Trust”, which had been hobbled in 1914. Blackton’s famous film “Battle Cry of Peace” (1915) was a pro-WWI film which received personal support from Teddy Roosevelt during production. The film was widely decried as militaristic propaganda, but by 1917 even Brooklyn’s socialists had got on Blackton’s side. “Battle Cry of Peace” was the first film Leon Goetz and the Gruwells played in their “new” Monroe Theater in 1916— its not clear to me if the premiere celebrated the opening of a new building or if the old building had simply been renovated. Whatever the circumstances, this was a curious choice of premiere in a largely German-speaking community.
By 1920, however, Vitagraph was on the rocks. Like the top-shelf talent (Mary Pickford and Charlie Chaplin) associated with Freuler’s Mutual Film, Corinne Griffith would soon switch to First National Pictures, the leading exhibitor/producer founded by West Virginian John Dixon Williams and Texan Thomas Lincoln Tally. Richard Koszarski explains the precariousness of Griffith’s position when she posed for Alfred Cheney Johnston in Hollywood on the Hudson:
Griffith had been with Vitagraph since 1918, and in New York's postwar production boom she suddenly emerged as the busiest star in the city: eight of her films were released in 1919, six in 1920, and four each in 1921 and 1922. Like Clara Bow, she had entered films as a beauty contest winner and was valued more for her good looks than her acting ability...
It's difficult to judge the quality of Vitagraph's product in this period (1917-1925 after J. Stuart Blackton left) because of the scarcity of surviving prints... But whatever the quality of its films, Vitagraph's inability to tie down the exhibition end of the business eventually doomed the whole operation. Corinne Griffith's company was the last unit at the Brooklyn studio in 1922, and by 1923 production on both coasts had slowed to a trickle.. on April 22nd [1925] this last surviving member of the Motion Picture Patents Company was swallowed up by the Warner brothers.
Corinne Griffith’s career trajectory after the Johnston shoot is exemplified by her role in a film version of one of Elinor Glyn’s (Lady Duff Gordon’s sister’s) romance novels titled “Six Days”. Griffith worked at an impressive pace until the advent of sound film, after which she turned to real estate investment around Los Angeles. Such a happy ending was far from guaranteed in 1920, however.
Alfred Cheney Johnston’s remarkable exposure through the New York Times’ Mid-Week Pictorial at the end of 1920 suggests that Edith May was part of a larger strategy to shore up NYC’s sagging film and theater business. Despite New York Times promotion, despite the Shallenberger/Photoplay “National Salesgirls Beauty Contest”, Mutual Film veteran Raoul Walsh’s Mayflower Photoplay Co. never made it off the ground; Flo Ziegfeld’s brother’s “Ziegfeld Film Corporation” was a flop too. New York would be relegated to a secondary arena for the movie biz, with only the remnants of the theater (as in stage plays) to sustain it.
In 1920 William Wesley Young would have met many worried entertainment executives as he milled around the halls of The Friars’ Club, which was his working address at the time. We know from his professional life with the Humanitarian Cult that after WWI moneyed interests sought new ways to manipulate socialism and the pacifist movement. Perhaps a confluence of interests beyond the entertainment world motivated The National Salesgirls’ Beauty Contest. A finance/entertainment confluence would explain Young’s politically-themed overtures to the Monroe teen during her stay in New York, if “Mr. Young” was William Wesley.
