She was known as the Biograph Girl, Vitagraph Betty, Madcap Mabel, The Queen of Keystone and The Little Clown. She starred in 167 film shorts and 23 full-length features. She was involved in three major Hollywood scandals. She was an alcoholic, and apocryphal stories of her cocaine usage abound in Hollywood lore. And she died of tuberculosis at age 37. 

But in Mabel Normand’s short life, there were a lot of career firsts. She was the first actress to direct herself in movies. She was the first woman to have her name in film titles, such as 1912’s Mabel’s Lovers. She was the first woman to have her own studio, the Mabel Normand Feature Film Company. She was the first to get a pie thrown in her face, a gag in the 1913 film A Noise from the Deep with frequent co-star Roscoe ‘Fatty’ Arbuckle. She pioneered the use of the “aside,” where she broke the fourth wall and talked directly to the audience, a move that became her signature.

She was iconoclastic, profane, fearless and funny. Producer Hal Roach called her “the dirtiest talking girl you ever heard.” Famous Studios head Adolph Zucker called her “a fine athlete [who] could swim, dive, run, jump, box, and – the really important thing –take a fall wonderfully.” Charlie Chaplin, who owed her his career, wrote in his autobiography, “She was light-hearted and gay, a good fellow, kind and generous and everyone adored her. Stories went round about Mabel’s generosity to the wardrobe woman’s child, of the jokes she played on the cameraman.”

Amabel Ethelreid Normand was born in 1892 in Staten Island, New York where she became a “Gibson Girl” at the age of 14, posing for the pen-and-ink artist Charles Dana Gibson whose drawings epitomized American beauty at the time, and her image appeared in magazines and newspapers nationwide. She moved on to work at the Kalem studios as an extra, and at the Biograph studios where she worked with director D.W. Griffith. It was also at Biograph that she met Mack Sennett, with whom she would have a lifelong personal and professional relationship.

Sennett took Normand with him when he set up his Keystone Studios in 1912. She was his muse and partner in making the comedy films that it would become known for, often writing the scripts and directing the ones she starred in. The Keystone Kops debuted in her 1913 short, The Bangville Police. And she urged Sennett to offer a contract to the 24-year-old Chaplin and continued to mentor him in his career at Keystone, writing, directing and acting in many of his shorts. They made 11 films together. The Little Tramp made his first appearance in Mabel’s Strange Predicament. Tillie’s Punctured Romance of 1914 would make them both stars.

Normand had become the best-known comedienne of the screen by then, at a time when women were not known for doing comedy. Her lack of theatrical training allowed her to avoid the overly mannered acting and histrionic style adopted by those who broke into films via the stage. She had a lively presence on film, her “Cinderella” characters filled with a can-do spirit which frequently saved the male leads from catastrophe, a storyline never seen in films before. The tone was always light-hearted and slapstick, the action filled with pratfalls and chases, her tomboyish and sparkling persona winning her legions of fans.

After Chaplin left Keystone, she continued her collaboration with Arbuckle. But according to themabelnormand.com, things began to go south for her with Sennett, who continued to pay her $500 a week, much less than other stars were getting. They had an on-and-off romantic relationship for years; it ended when a girlfriend of his threw a vase at Normand and injured her sufficiently for her to need extended hospitalization. It was at this time that she was rumored to have started a cocaine addiction. Cocaine was legal at the time.

Normand also liked her gin, and probably got it from a bootlegger when the Prohibition era started in 1920. She carried a flask of it to slip into her other drinks. She once told a reporter, quite possibly when she was intoxicated, “Say anything you like, but don’t say I love to work. That sounds like Mary Pickford, the prissy bitch. Just say I like to pinch babies and twist their legs. And get drunk.”

Normand left Keystone in 1916 and formed her own company, with a studio that still stands today on Fountain Avenue in Silver Lake. Only one feature film came out of it, 1918’s Mickey, but it was a big hit. In his biography “King of Comedy,” Sennett writes: “It was a simple story, no more than the adventures of a pretty daughter of a Western prospector who comes to New York as a Cinderella, inherits great wealth, and is pursued by the rascally villain … by far the best thing ever done with Mabel Normand. It gave scope to her whimsical talents for the first time … the comedy scenes are hilarious; the chases are breath-taking. And Mabel Normand is prettier than a speckled pup.”

Mickey took a long time to release, and Normand had been signed by Goldwyn Studios by then, where she was making $1,000 a week. A lot of her films are lost from that studio, but a few survive, like What Happened to Rosa? and Head Over Heels.

Sennett and Normand teamed up again in 1920 for Molly O’. However, in 1921, when the film was to be released, Arbuckle was accused of the rape and death of actress Virgina Rappe, and it made for sensational headlines. After three trials, he was exonerated, but his career was over. All his films (including those with Normand as his co-star) were pulled from distribution. Even though he was not in the cast of Molly O’, Normand’s reputation was affected by her association with him, and the film did not do well. Adding to her woes, in 1922 her friend, director William Desmond Taylor was murdered, another event that gripped Hollywood, and Normand herself was implicated, having been the last one to see him alive. She was made to testify, and then eventually ruled out as a suspect. But again, the scandal clung to her and her name was further sullied in the papers that accused her of being a “dope fiend.” One writer, Robert Giroux, in “A Deed of Death: The Story Behind the Unsolved Murder of Hollywood Director William Desmond Taylor,” claims that Taylor was helping Normand with her cocaine habit and had reached out to prosecutors to offer help in filing charges against her suppliers. Giroux believes those suppliers hired a hitman to kill Taylor. But the crime remained officially unsolved.

One more scandal was to touch her when, in 1924, her chauffeur shot a millionaire oil broker, Courtland S. Dines, with Normand’s own pistol. Normand’s films were pulled from theaters and banned in the state of Ohio.

An attempt was made to resurrect her career when she and Sennett made The Extra Girl in 1923, another Cinderella role. But by this time Normand was box office poison, and she stepped back from her film career to go on stage, a move that did not last long. In 1926, she signed with Hal Roach and did a few shorts. Then she married an old friend, actor Lew Cody, on a dare in 1926. It was a marriage apparently never consummated, and the two never lived together.

Normand suffered from tuberculosis since her childhood, but from 1927, she became seriously ailing, enough to be moved into a sanatorium, where she died in 1930. Her pallbearers were Chaplin, Griffiths, Louis B. Mayer, Samuel Goldwyn and Douglas Fairbanks.

Writer Adela Rogers St. Johns, in Photoplay of June 1929, wrote, “Mabel Normand was the greatest comedienne the screen ever knew. I would not dare to make that statement upon my own opinion alone. I heard it said first by Charlie Chaplin. No one, I think, would dispute his authority. I have heard it said often since by those who should know … Today she should occupy the place among the women of the screen that Chaplin holds among the men.”