Today I read Dark Lady of the Silents, the autobiography of actress Miriam Cooper. She starred in two of D.W. Griffith’s biggest films, possibly two of the most important films in the evolution of cinema, but you don’t know her name. (I assume this because I care about this stuff, and I didn’t know her name). The trouble is that the films were Birth of a Nation and Intolerance.
Birth of a Nation, for all its cinematic breakthroughs — it played for nearly 3 hours when most films were far shorter, it had sophisticated editing and unusual closeups — ended with the Klan riding in to rescue a good white southern family from negros driven mad by post-civil war freedom. riiiiiiiight. It was wildly popular, playing for years and screening for the president at the White Housem, but its racism is just plain awful. When it was released in 1915, some audiences rioted in anger. Even the witty DJ Spooky remix ReBirth of a Nation is uncomfortably creepy.
Intolerance was meant, in part, to be a response to the northern audiences who “misunderstood” Birth of a Nation. It was a morality tale about, duh, tolerance. It was also monumentally expensive, massive in scope (four storylines set thousands of years apart) and narratively challenging (the four stories were parallel, but never intersected). It never caught on with audiences like Birth of a Nation did; instead, it put Griffith in serious financial trouble, and he couldn’t maintain his stable of filmmakers and performers.
Exactly what prevented Miriam Cooper from becoming as remembered/beloved as Lillian Gish, another early Griffith actress, is, in part, that she starred in films that didn’t have a shelf life. Intolerance was a joke, Birth of a Nation an embarrassment. But part of it is something else, and that something is hard to discern from her memoir. While she is candid — as early as 1920 she and her husband, director Raoul Walsh, like to have high colonics! — she doesn’t have much self-doubt. She says she wanted to be a wife and mother — but she seemed to choose these just as her career skidded into dust. She says she wanted to give her adopted sons a better life — but when, years after she divorced, one child chose to live with her ex-husband, she never spoke to the boy again (not ever, not for 40 years). She got jobs on her looks, which she admits, and she calls herself beautiful, but she never considers her own vanity. I loved the dish Miriam Cooper dished, but I am still mulling over her blind spots. She doesn’t think much about herself, not in this book at least, not beyond the (sometimes juicy) facts.
But with her will and what must have been, in the early days, a rambunctious spirit, she should be better remembered. Cheers to Miriam Cooper, who, between 1910 and 1924, appeared in more than 100 films.
