These days, only hardcore cinephiles would probably recognize the name of Nell Shipman. But for a few short years in the early 1920s, the Canadian-born actress was one of the few female pioneers, along with Grace Cunard, Ida May Park and Lois Weber, able to work in Hollywood as screenwriter, director and producer. So it is quite fascinating to get to know her better by reading “The Silent Screen & My Talking Heart,” the autobiography she completed in February 1969, one year before her death at age 78, and which was published eighteen years later.

In this dense volume, she candidly chronicles her childhood growing up in Victoria, British Columbia, where she was born Helen Barham in 1892, before her family moved to Seattle when she was twelve.

After an epiphany, she decided to be an actress, and in 1905 she joined a traveling theatrical company. Soon, she was touring all over the country, playing a part as an ingenue in the comedy play At Yale.

Life on the road meant a lot of nights spent in cheap lodgings, often dirty flophouses, surviving on meager pay and frugal meals. She never minded. Until one terrifying night which she described in almost hallucinatory terms.

Reading between the lines, it is apparent that she was probably raped. Someone had followed her to the hotel, threatened her with a knife and abused her. She wrote, “It was not clear to me until years later, but its terror persisted. I had begun a long traumatic trail which ultimately led me to a mental, physical and spiritual distrust of human beings balanced by a love of animals which was to dominate my life. Animals did not speak and therefore did not lie. They make no false promises, betrayed no trusts. I like animals better than people and meant it for many years after, even when I was grown and had learned to give a meed of affection to the males I mated in exchange for what they declared was love.”

 

In 1910, at 18, she met and married the first man who had wooed her. Ernest Shipman was a New York theater company manager and twenty years her senior. “A vanished breed,” she explains with detachment. “One of the great cocksmen of his time, not immoral but amoral, not lascivious but lusty. If they named him dishonest, he was always within the law’s fences contractually.”  The lovemaking prowess of her Casanova husband on the first night of their marital life left her unimpressed: she summed it up as a “painful gymnastic.” 

The couple moved to Hollywood in 1912, determined to find opportunities in the new Mecca of moviemaking. With his flair for promotion, Shipman quickly landed work in publicity for several studios, while Nell began to write scripts. Having noticed that screenwriters’ names were not indicated on the film credits, she pleaded for a change to that system in an article published in West Coast Magazine.

One year later, she made her first short film as an actress, The Ball of Yarn, which she had also written. “It was so bad, that finding distribution was almost impossible, but I was beginning to sell scenarios,” she recalls, helped by “Shipman’s wire-pulling and promotional perspicacity.” It paid off. So, she kept writing scripts, usually adventure movies, “outdoor yarns about noble and beautiful leading men.”

In 1916, her sophomore picture, God’s Country and the Woman, made at the Vitagraph studios and partially filmed on location in Big Bear, was a success and earned her the sobriquet “The girl from God’s Country.”  “I might not have foreseen how weary this girl would become in time,” she writes wistfully, “nor how difficult the country in which she was to toil.” In the film, she played the type of combative, strong and resourceful woman that was to become her trademark on screen. She often did her own stunts, projecting in her roles a winsome personality and contagious peppiness.

Through a colorful narrative, she offers several vivid anecdotes about those salad days of Hollywood in the early silent era, before, as she remarks, “sound shattered silence forever.”  Notably, she tells of the working conditions at Vitagraph, first at its Santa Monica location, where “the studio was an open-air platform with overhead diffusing cloth, a few dressing rooms and a cubbyhole office.” It was then moved to a big lot at the corner of Prospect and Talmadge, in Los Feliz, with “its first dark stage lighted with Cooper-Hewitt and Kliegs lights. The latter were murder. The carbons spluttered as they burned and cast-off dust, an occupational hazard for the eyes for which the only remedy was a compress of cold tea.”

In 1917, at the end of filming Black Wolf, her seventh picture, she remembers observing on the nearby set Cecil B. deMille direct a scene from The Woman God Forgot, his first all-out historical spectacular. “A stickler for realism, he had ordered real brandy to top real wine. No real tea. The orgy was for real and the scene so out of hand, no actors, from stars to extras, could function. They say it took three days to sober them up. The sight was prodigious, if messy. I stood watching Mr. deMille shouting orders on his megaphone, trying to cover the bare breasts of prone and sprawling undressed extras…”

 

That year, the producer Sam Goldfish, who had not yet changed his last name to Goldwyn, offered her a seven-year contract. “It was less than Vitagraph was paying but promised eventual stardom. Cheekily, I turned it down. Probably as silly a move a neophyte ever made. But I did not like the way they dressed their contract players. And this was the period of curly blondes with Cupid’s bow mouths…”

Regrets? Possibly. Maybe she could have been groomed to become one of the reigning queens of the silent films, like her contemporaries at the time, Gloria Swanson, Viola Dana, Blanche Sweet, Lillian Gish, Alla Nazimova, Zasu Pitts, Florence Turner and others of more ephemeral fame.

“Motion Pictures Star!” she muses. “What is a star but a far-away glimmer, an impossible goal, a thing at the end of a telescope, a faulty human drawn into close focus by continued repetition of an image, a substance to fall blazing or fade unseen? The Star dies but the Picture lives on, at least in memory.”

But she had a plan nevertheless and wrote herself a part in what would end up being her most famous picture, Back to God’s Country, released in 1919.  The advertised storyline for the movie, adapted from a James Oliver Curwood story, could not be more dramatically explicit. “Do you want a different kind of film? Never was there one like this. The extraordinary story of Dolores, the swimming girl of the Canadian wilds, and Wapi the Killer, who fights a whole dog team to save her life and a great bear which protects her from a man more brutal than the beasts, when she comes dripping from a roaring mountain spring.” Strong words!

 

What the ad fails to mention is that Dolores (Nell) is seen in a brief sequence actually splashing naked by the cascading waterfall. There is no body double here. Reminiscing about it decades later, she can’t help expressing a sense of pride for having put on screen such a daring moment. “I know that a beautiful foreign import was photographed in the nude in the feature Ecstasy,” she states, “but I really was ‘first.’” She was alluding of course to Hedi Lamarr, who shot to fame in the aforementioned 1933 film. She is most proud too of being surrounded by a “cast” of dozens of critters in various parts, playing comic relief, heroes and villains! The film included a total of twenty-eight animal characters.

Following a disagreement about the final cut of the film, Vitagraph and Nell Shipman parted ways. Divorced from her husband, she soon formed her own company, which allowed her the freedom to write, direct and act in her own projects, starting in 1920 with a short film titled A Bear, A Boy and A Dog, followed by Something New, which she co-directed with her romantic partner Bert Van Tuyle.

The biggest change came two years later. She decided to move north to Idaho, close to the Canadian border. She settled in Priest Lake and built her own facilities called Lionhead Lodge in the middle of what she describes as “the Never-Never Land of the Wilderness.” It was the ideal place for her to achieve her artistic ideals while remaining true to her independent spirit, making the outdoor and nature-oriented films she so favored – those like The Girl from God’s Country, The Grub Stake, Trail of the North Wind, The Light on Lookout Mountain…usually reprising the same formula. 

She had brought her menagerie to the compound, providing a safe and cruelty-free environment for the Malamutes, several great Danes, two tamed, bears, cougar, bobcat, eagle, raccoon, deer and elk, fox, porcupine, marmots, chipmunks, squirrels, skunks and a wolf…There were one hundred in all, by her own account, “unattended by keepers, guns, whips or cages.” In her Vitagraph days, she had been horrified by the mistreatment of animals used in films, by how horses were tripped by wire for stunts, and felines shocked by electricity to make them hop and snarl, often causing their deaths.

By 1924, funds had become scarcer as her distributor went bankrupt, and she strove to keep afloat. “By now,” she writes, “the star image had faded, and I was a woman who ran a camp and sometimes made moving pictures.”

Money finally ran out and she describes “a life of work and worry, empty bank accounts, debt and suffering,” in which “the struggle was for food, not film.”  

Her utopian endeavor could not survive, crippled by the harsh reality of a movie business in which independent producers were encountering increasing difficulties in marketing and selling their films to major distributors. And her collaborative approach to filmmaking, and her preferred use of exterior locations, were at odds with the Hollywood studios’ emerging hierarchical and centralized film industry.

Heartbroken, she had to leave Priest Lake, never to return. Equally distressing was the fate of her cherished animals. She could not afford to keep them. The San Diego Zoo came to the rescue and took some in.

In a moving letter to her 13-year-old son Barry from April 1925, she mentions her hope of rebounding after another movie project fell through (one of so many punctured dreams) – The Purple Trail, in which she was to reprise her character of the “girl from God’s Country.” She explained her intention to adapt the screenplay into a children’s story, admitting matter-of-factly, “Words are easier to make than moving pictures.” 

All the while, she tried unsuccessfully to rekindle her acting career. “I have had such a hard and disappointing time,” she writes in 1929, “I seem to be remembered, professionally I mean, as well as any star might wish, but the fact of my four years absence does count, there is no denying, and the handicap I am under for the lack of funds is appalling. I may not even get photographs – necessary trifles when one sells one’s face! – nor good enough clothes in which to be appraised, nor publicity so that people may know about me or where I’ve been.”

Never losing her resilience, she spent the rest of her life concentrating on her writing, and managed to get several books and articles published, still chasing after the elusive hope of a possible comeback that never came, while going on living a peripatetic existence, bouncing from Spain with her second husband, the portrait painter Charles Austin Ayers, (they were married in 1925 and divorced ten years later) to New Hampshire, to Sarasota for a brief stint with the Ringling Brothers Circus, to New York, Connecticut and several other places…

By 1967, the home which would be her last home was now a cottage in Cabazon in California, which she shared with an old dog, a dozen cats, and two typewriters. This is where she wrote “The Silent Screen & My Talking Heart.” In its foreword, she describes what she characterizes as her enslavement by and passion for animals. “Perhaps today, back-tracking, treading the trail of stream of consciousness, I would refrain from so much loving, so much gathering, so much suffering with and for many fellow creatures…” She confesses to finding solace in watching television shows like Daktari, Gentle Ben, Lassie, because “they continue the lessons exemplified in the wonderful Born Free picture and always present the magic of Disney.”

In one of the last exchanges with Bert Van Tuyle, she reflected that “memories are our greatest treasure, cannot be taken by rust, by the dream-killers, or the ‘so whats?’ Our only sure possessions…”

Sadly, in the end, that was all Nell Shipman had left.