Ithaca Journal Featured Story: Olive Thomas

[Terry Harbin]

Remembering Olive Thomas

Silent film star's Ithaca beginnings
captured in "PlayBall'

By BARBARA J. WOLTAG
Journal Staff

Although her life was brief, silent film actress Olive Thomas made her mark in the world of motion pictures. Before her climb to stardom from a small industrial town in Western Pennsylvania, she made a stop in a place called Ithaca, a town at the forefront of an industry now known as Hollywood.

At 7:30 p.m. Wednesday in the Borg Warner Room at the Tompkins County Library, the International Women's Friendship Group hosts a screening of "PlayBall," an episode from the "Beatrice Fairfax" series that was filmed in Ithaca and includes Thomas, and another "Fairfax" episode. "A Name For The Baby.".

The "Beatrice Fairfax" series tells the story of a fictional New York newspaper columnist who gets into trouble while trying to solve her readers' problems. In "PlayBall" Thomas plays the fiancee to actor Nigel Barrie's Bert Kerrigan, a baseball player who is kidnapped, along with Thomas, to prevent his participation at a baseball game.

The film includes actual footage of the New York Giants and the New York Yankees at a polo field in New York City. Because of the rarity of the footage of these New York teams, this episode was donated to the National Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, NY.

The beginnings of a star

Thomas was born Oliva Duffy on October 20, 1894 in Charleroi, Pa., outside of Pittsburgh. At 15, she headed for New York City, where she worked at a department store prior to posing for artists including Harrison Fisher and Howard Chandler Christy. It was as a model that she won a role as a Ziegfeld Follies girl.

In the magazine Photoplay, Terry Ramsaye wrote, "She (Thomas) was a sudden sensation, the toast of Broadway. Strong men grew dizzy under her eyes. She was overwhelmed with admiration and gifts of treasure, diamond necklaces, pendants, rings, parties, orchids, everything that the dreaming little shop girl might fancy on the screen of her imagination."

Her first film role was in "PlayBall" in 1916, which was produced and directed by the Wharton Brothers here in Ithaca and in New York City for the International Film Company, owned by media mogul William Randolph Hearst.

It is in 1916 that she meets Jack Pickford, brother of silent film star Mary Pickford. In an interview in Motion Picture magazine Thomas says: "Jack is a beautiful dancer. He danced his way into my heart."

"We knew each other for eight months before our marriage, and most of that time we gave to dancing. We got along so well on the dance floor that we just naturally decided that we would be able to get along together for the remainder of our lives."

Although she will marry Pickford during 1916, she will keep the news from the public for an entire year. The magazine Photoplay reports: "News of the marriage was kept from the public because, as the beauteous Olive says, 'I didn't want people to say that I'm succeeding because of the Pickford name.'"

Thomas and Pickford spend their time between Los Angeles and New York City while she continues to build her film resume. In 1918 Pickford, a Canadian, is drafted into the war under the Allied Draft Agreement. Thomas continues to work and is interested in more substantial roles to play on film.

The October 1918 edition of Photoplay reports: "She's too matter-of-fact even to try to impress you. She told me she hoped to have some real parts to play; something more than simp ingenues.

"I might just as well go back on the stage, if they won't give me bigger things to do in the movies. It's all work-work-work out in California; and one likes to feel one's done something to show for it.'"

During her film career, she will work for Selznick Pictures, Triangle Studios and will be known as the first"flapper" girl on the screen.

In 1920, Thomas and Pickford take a "second honeymoon" and set sail for Paris on August 12. It was in Paris that she met her tragic end. Her death is considered the first real scandal of the film industry.

On September 5, after an evening with friends, Thomas and Pickford return to their hotel where Thomas drinks mercurial bio-chloride. The next morning she is taken to an American hospital where she dies on September 10.

Her death is ruled accidental. Pickford claimed that Thomas was not suicidal, she drank the poison by mistake.

On September 24, Thomas' funeral is held at St. Thomas Episcopal Church on Fifth Avenue in New York City. Her pallbearers were Owen Moore, Gerte Buck, Thomas Meighan, Harrison Fisher, Myron Selznick, Harry Carrington, William Kelton and Allen Crossland.

The New York Times reported of the funeral: "Amid scenes of great sorrow and such a crush of mourners that women fainted and men's hats were smashed, funeral services were held yesterday for Olive Thomas, wife of Jack Pickford, who died in Paris of mercury poisoning.

The world of stage and the screen in which she had been a much loved figure sent hundreds of representatives, many of them bearers of well-known names.

There was a crush at Fifth Avenue and Fifty-Third Street by 10 o'clock in the morning, the hour set for the services and the interior of the church already was so jammed that it was found necessary to increase the number of policemen on duty from ten to twenty-five, while mounted men were called to force lanes through the throng that mourners might enter."

Ithaca's past restored

For more than a decade, Ithaca film historian Terry Harbin has been chronicling Ithaca's brief, seven-year starring role in the burgeoning film industry, collecting memorabilia, photographs and actual prints of the films, as well as converting them to video with the help of the Library of Congress.

This latest project -- "PlayBall" -- required piecing together the footage from tape, recording it to digital and having a score added to the film.

Harbin unearthed historic photos of Thomas in "Play Ball," after meeting Trumansburg resident Ralph Bacon, whose father Levi took pictures during the 1910's while working as a cameraman for the Wharton Brothers studios.

The photos stayed in a box for 80 years in Bacon's family attic and included everything from behind-the-scenes life at the Wharton studios to actual scenes from Wharton films. Among his finds was an autographed photo of Thomas applying powder to her face and signed: "I should worry. Lovingly 'Olie' Thomas."

Harbin says this is an original autograph signed by Thomas herself because she refers to herself as "Olie" where other publicity signatures have her name signed as "Ollie."

Theodore and Leopold Wharton made dozens of silent films and popular serials, like "Beatrice Fairfax," "Patria" and "The Romance of Elaine" in Ithaca between 1913 and 1920.

Many sets were built right next to the Whartons' studios in Renwick (now Stewart) Park, and Cayuga Lake and the nearby gorges were used for many sequences.