So, who was Colleen Moore? She was somewhere between pretty and plain, and had a haircut most people now think is reminiscent of another actress'. Most people haven't heard of Colleen nowadays, and even books which mention the impact of film stars on fashion or the history of youth culture forget her - and these books are usually written by supposed experts. Of course, no-one could forget Joan Crawford; she spent most of her life in the spotlight. Clara Bow and Louise Brooks both have the winning combination of beauty and scandal to keep their fame alive - you'll be enchanted by the photos and remember the tales, even if they aren't true. People who have no idea who Brooks was will recognise the "string of pearls" photo in an instant. Colleen's strngth was her personality. She looks best when she's moving, and you can't reproduce that sort of magic in a magazine or on a postcard, she has to be seen on film. She's been forgotten, yet without her the whole flapper phenomenon would certainly have had a different course.

The beginning
Born Kathleen Morrison in 1902, Colleen got her break in films because of a favour owed to her uncle by D.W. Griffith - her uncle had helped get Birth of a Nation and Intolerance past the censors in Michigan. She didn't have a huge impact in her ingenue roles, although she was Tom Mix's leading lady in The Wilderness Trail (1919) and The Cyclone (1920). She had quite a crush on Tom, and later one on King Vidor when he directed her in The Sky Pilot. They remained friends for the rest of their lives. In pictures taken before her flapper days, Colleen looks very, very young. In stills from later non-flapper films like Lilac Time and So Big she still has an incredibly girlish charm. It's those huge flapper eyes - Alice White, Louise Brooks, Clara Bow and Colleen all had fabulously expressive eyes, although Colleen was the only one to have one brown eye, one blue!

(Note 14/7/01: It has been suggested to me by William Drew, author of Speaking of Silents: First Ladies of the Screen, who knew Colleen, that her birthdate was actually in 1902, not 1900 as is normally stated. He kindly pointed out that it's the one Colleen herself always gave, and it's also the one on her social security number. Also, Colleen had been driving since she was 16, and it was in 1918 that she was earning enough to buy her own car. As I trust Mr. Drew far more than the IMDB, I've followed his suggestions!)

The sweet-faced girl with the long curly hair was pleasant enough, but no match for the likes of Lillian Gish or Mary Pickford (she supported Pickford in The Little American in 1917) . Colleen Moore was picked to be one of the original 13 Wampas Baby Stars in 1922. This was a big honour. The Wampus Baby Stars were the actresses predicted to go on to bigger things. She was also asked to become a member of "Our Club", Mary Pickford's club for actresses. Colleen was well-known, but she wasn't really a big name.

Flaming Youth: the big break
First National bought the film rights to Warner Fabian's novel Flaming Youth, all about a flapper named Patricia Fentriss, and Colleen wanted the starring role. She knew the part of Pat could make her famous. The studio was unwilling to give it to her. She asked her film producer husband John McCormick to get it for her as a wedding present (whether he could have managed this is debatable, although he repeatedly stuck up pictures of Colleen where studio bosses could see it). She also enlisted the help of her mother, who chopped off her hair, and a star was born.

Flaming Youth, released in 1923, made Colleen an icon of the age, and the phrase "flaming youth" has entered the language. On film she smoked, drank cocktails and danced, danced, danced. Bobbed hair became all the rage. Of course, flappers existed before her - the first film I've found having flapper in the title is actually a British comedy called The Flapper And The Fan (1914). F. Scott Fitzgerald was already writing about his beautiful don't-care girls. However, Colleen made it fashionable. Fitzgerald said "I was the spark that lit up Flaming Youth and Colleen Moore was the torch. What little things we are to have caused that trouble!" Suddenly a whole swathe of girls wanted those short skirts, that cute straight bob. Forget the Rachel (Friends) cut, the Purdey pudding-bowl and the Farrah Fawcett hairdo; the first media star to have a major impact on hairstyles was Colleen Moore and her Dutch boy bob. John Held Jr., one of the famous cartoonists and illustrators of the Jazz Age, wrote a strip called Bird-brained Flappers based on Colleen.

A more familiar Colleen!

Previous flappers
While Colleen was the first flapper actress to make it really big, it's important to see her in context. Viola Dana was mentioning wanting to play flappers in magazine interviews in the late teens. In 1920 Olive Thomas made a film called, simply, The Flapper, and it's been suggested that she would've been the natural choice for the role of Patricia Fentriss had she not died in mysterious circumstances in Paris (people are still debating why Olive should want to kill herself, and whether it was suicide or murder). Colleen really had to fight for the role; there wasn't another natural choice for the flapper after Olive. An actress other than Colleen might have been in Flaming Youth and become a huge star, or might have made it a flop. Either way, Hollywood and Britain had been making flapper films before this one, and probably would have continued to do so, even if it wasn't in the volume that got produced in the wake of Flaming Youth.

Olive was a long-haired curvy girl, and the fashion may have been for rounder body types had she been the one to light the torch of Flaming Youth. As for the haircut - dancer Irene Castle had made bobbed hair more widespread when she cut hers during an illness in the late teens, but had nowhere near the impact that Colleen had (possibly because a dancer could never reach the sort of audience a film actress could). What Colleen achieved was the total package. She could dance, drink cocktails and smoke. She had the short hair. She could act. And, as always in Colleen's life, she had a huge helping of luck, being in the right film at the right time.

The hard working Jazz-age hoyden
Colleen was not as overtly sexy as Clara Bow, Alice White or Louise Brooks, but one look at her and you know you'd have a great time with her. You feel you could swap books with her, go to the movies with her, visit the beach or go shopping and it'd be fun all the way. Of course, given her screen persona, you'd probably expect to get into a few scrapes. Before getting her break in films, she even used to collect cuttings about movie stars in scrap books - how much more normal can you get? Well, most of us don't leave a space for our own clippings when we're stars!

And her photographs really don't do her justice. The sometimes-ugly girl you see in the photos is an angel when she's in motion, with a gift for comedy never matched by any of the other flapper actresses. She was of the opinion that she was popular because she proved ugly girls could be flappers too, but she underestimated the sparkle she had. As F. Scott Fitzgerald points out in "Bernice Bobs Her Hair", if a girl's witty or can dance, she'll never be short of attention.

Wit and rhythm she had, and people wanted to see it. She made five films in 1924, three in 1925, four in 1926, three in 1927, three in 1928 and four in 1929. This might not look like a lot, especially when you realise she made six films a year in 1920, 1922 and 1923, but her later films were all starring roles, and she broke a vertebra in her neck in an accident on the set of The Desert Flower in 1925. She also had a nervous breakdown in the later 1920s as a result of McCormick's violent alcoholism and had to be hospitalised.

Her image changed slightly during the 20s. In her early films she had long curly hair, and in stills from Flaming Youth her bob is a wavy one. By 1924's The Perfect Flapper she had the sleeker, high 1920s bob hairdo. However, she wore a blonde wig for her role in Twinkletoes. The haircut she made popular never defined her. (I think she looked better with curly hair, just as Louise Brooks never seems quite right when you see her with curls.) Between filming, Colleen would spend time making sure all her costumes were exactly right. Also, as a big-name star, she would be called upon to give all sorts of interviews and help with film publicity. As this was in the days before air travel was commonplace, stars tended to travel from East coast to West and vice-versa by train, and this took a lot of time and effort.

Cinema and cement
Colleen was the eighth star to put her handprints in cement at the Chinese Theatre, preceeded only by Douglas Fairbanks and Mary Pickford, Norma Talmadge, Norma Shearer, Harold Lloyd, William S. Hart and Tom Mix (and Toby!). Stars like Charlie Chaplin and Joan Crawford would have to wait! She made her prints on the 17th of December 1927. She was voted the biggest box-office draw in the US in 1926 and 1927, which makes her current obscurity all the more sad. (Another flapper, Clara Bow, was top draw in 1928. It's interesting to note how many of the huge stars of the 1920s were female, whereas today many actresses just serve as eye-candy to prop up male leads.)

Colleen and Clara
Clara Bow was originally slated to act alongside Colleen in Painted People, and there are two different stories about why Bow dropped out after only three weeks of work. Colleen states in her autobiography that she liked Clara while they worked on Painted People, and the version of events she recounts is that Clara demanded Colleen's part, disliking her own role of haughty rich girl, but she wasn't the established star and Clara's own producer took her off the picture. The other is that both actresses were due to have close-ups, but Colleen used her clout to prevent Clara getting any, so Clara got her revenge by leaving the picture early for an operation, causing the production to be re-shot and run over time. Neither story puts either actress in a good light. The close-ups story is odd - if you've seen Bow, you know she looks great from any distance, and most silents feature close-ups of the faces of players in order to help with telling the story. Clara was also achieving fame of her own by this point (she was a Wampas Baby Star in 1924) so claims that she needed the close ups aren't really valid. Whatever the truth is, it's a real shame that they never made that picture together. With Clara's kittenish sexiness and Colleen's madcap perkiness, it could have been great. Both were so full of life on-screen, and I for one don't think either would have outshone the other.

Decline of a career
Colleen Moore was probably the happiest of the flapper actresses. Most of them found their careers waning with the Depression and the introduction of sound. The unthinking fun-fun fun of the 1920s wasn't fashionable during the depression. Clara Bow made a couple of films and retired (she had received monstrous treatment from the press and the Hollywood in crowd, and that treatment has unfairly blackened her reputation to this day). Constance Talmadge, F. Scott Fitzgerald's "Flapper de luxe" realised her Brooklyn accent wouldn¹t fit her upper-crust image and decided to retire ahead of the game, never bothering with talkies. Louise Brooks made two truly great films in Europe, had a few bit-parts in Hollywood talkies and turned down the feminine lead in The Public Enemy, a role taken by Jean Harlow, who played it like a block of wood. Brooks carried on making talkies, but never achieved anything near the heights she had once had. Only Joan Crawford made a truly successful switch, and the Joan of the 1920s was a very different creature to the one of the 1930s and 40s.

Like most of the others, Colleen Moore found her career declined with the talkies, but not due to any lack of skill. Although she was largely stereotyped as a flapper, films like So Big, Twinkletoes and Lilac Time had helped prove she could be successful in other parts. On the back of her off-Broadway stage work she was offered more film work. There just weren¹t roles available for her that she liked. She was particularly scathing about The Scarlet Letter (she hated the character of Hester). Her favourite film of all those she made was a talkie, though: The Power And The Glory. At the height of her fame, Colleen had pushed for more dramatic roles, but the films that display her best are her comedies. Imagine what she could have made of a classic 1930s screwball comedy - now that would be worth seeing!

Her final film, The Social Register, was directed by her old pal Marshall Neilan. The head of the studio tore up Colleen¹s contract at her request. In an interview many, many years later she stated that three years after leaving the screen she could walk down the street and no-one would recognise her, and she loved it. If only Clara Bow could have been granted the same peace.

The happiest ending
In addition to being probably the happiest of the famous flapper actresses, I'd say Colleen was probably the one who led the least "flapperish" lifestyle. Even though she came to be largely responsible for forming the look of the 1920s, she was much more conventional than, say, Brooks or Bow. Barring her husband, she had a massively supportive family, which neither of them did. Her route into films was via her influential relatives, so she didn't have to work her way up or worry about exploitation or the casting couch. Crawford, Brooks and Bow are remembered, rightly or wrongly, as man-eaters, scandalous and all the more interesting to debate for it. What Colleen Moore did have was determination and brains, and she made her own success. In that respect she does epitomise the young woman of the 1920s, with new spirit and the desire to have her own life and career.

After leaving films she lived a happy life, married again twice, had a family and invested wisely. She even wrote a couple of books on investing in the stock market for women. She wrote an autobiography, Silent Star and gave interviews as people rediscovered the magic of silent film. In the 1970s and 80s, as people began to want to know more about silents, she was active in talking to audiences about the heady days of the 1920s, bringing it to life for a new generation. When she died in 1988, Colleen Moore left three great legacies: her contribution to flapper history as we know it, her films and a magnificent dolls' house, now on display at the Museum of Science and Industry in Chicago. She began working on the dolls' house towards the end of her acting career, and in later years toured with it to raise money for children's charities.

I love the glitz and glamour of Hollywood's birth and golden age, but so many stars had unhappy times and many came to unhappy ends. Some started out being exploited, some died young, some killed themselves. Olive Thomas and Marilyn Monroe managed to do all three. But Colleen was different. She wanted to be a star, she worked hard, and she made it big. She also loved being a star, and continued to talk about her experiences in Hollywood until she died. Colleen Moore proves that dreams can come true.