Transforming Faces for the Screen: Horror and Romance in the 1920s 3031400283, 9783031400285

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Transforming Faces for the Screen Horror and Romance in the 1920s

Karen Randell Alexis Weedon

Transforming Faces for the Screen

Karen Randell • Alexis Weedon

Transforming Faces for the Screen Horror and Romance in the 1920s

Karen Randell University of Bedfordshire Luton, UK

Alexis Weedon University of Bedfordshire Luton, UK

ISBN 978-3-031-40028-5    ISBN 978-3-031-40029-2 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-40029-2 © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors, and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG. The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland Paper in this product is recyclable.

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank the British Academy and the anonymous referees who had faith in our project and supported it. The resulting grant (SRG1920\101483 Horror and Romance in the technologizing of the body: Lon Chaney and Elinor Glyn ‘suffering for their art’ in five films of 1920s) enabled us to travel to the archives and spend time writing together, although COVID-19 postponed our collaboration and it was a while before the archives opened. During that time, we had tremendous correspondence with the archivists. Our grateful thanks to Stephen A. Logsdon, Sarah Bush and Philip Skroska at the Bernard Becker Medical Library in the School of Medicine at Washington University, St Louis, for enabling access to the Vilray Blair archive. Philip was particularly helpful in organising the materials in advice of Karen’s visit. Huge thanks to Trenton Streck-Havill, Assistant Archivist at the National Museum of Health and Medicine, at Silver Spring, MD. Trenton was thoughtful and diligent in their communication with Karen and enabled the images of the injured servicemen to be printed here. We were well looked after at the Margaret Herrick Library and our thanks to the librarians and archivists, particularly Genevieve Maxwell and Meg De Waal, for finding the scripts, correspondence and magazines we requested. Thanks too to the archivists and assistants at the Reading University Archive, Adam Lines, Joanna Hulin and Charlotte Dover, and to Sarah Pratt, Laura Russo and Jane Parr at the Boston University Archives for their help in tracing film scripts, treatments and Elinor Glyn’s manuscripts. The project would not have been possible without the generous help of staff at the Library of Congress and British Library. At Palgrave, v

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

our thanks go to Lina Aboujieb who grasped the promise of book proposal and Sasikala Thopu who piloted us through production. We have felt welcomed by the community of researchers on films of the First World War and the ground-breaking research in the medical and military histories which we have read and admired, and many are mentioned in the footnotes here. We would like to give special thanks to Lawrence Napper who has been an especial cheerleader. Karen would like to thank the many colleagues who have supported her throughout the Chaney years: to Linda Ruth Williams and Mike Hammond where it all started, I will be ever grateful. For the Southampton Solent halcyon days, the likes of which will never be seen again; Jacqueline Furby, Claire Hines, Darren Kerr, Mark Aldridge, Donna Peberdy, Deborah Jermyn, Sean Redmond, Cathy Fowler and to David Lusted, thank you for the front-of-house photographs. To Karen Ritzenhoff, for the many publishing opportunities, writing retreats, the wine and everything else; Clementine Tholas for the shared First World War mission; Stephen Ryan for always listening, taking me to Silver Spring and for the back catalogue of Chaney films. Thanks to Gaylyn Studlar for her generosity and enthusiasm for the project, for the photographs and for inspiring me in the first place all those years ago. And to Alexis, whose generosity of spirit and time, love of travel and fun and rigorous attention to the timetable has, against the odds, kept me sane. Alexis would like to thank Julia Knight without whom she would never have learned to appreciate film or had the opportunity to research new media over the decades working together as journal editors. To other friends and colleagues for their inspiring work on adaptations in publishing and on film, and Elinor Glyn: Simon Eliot, Mary Hammond, Laura Horak, Simon Frost, Juliette Gardiner, Christine Geraghty, Andrew Nash, Samantha Rayner, Amy Sergeant, and Lisa Smith-Stead. Thanks to Hilary Hallett who has made me appreciate the value of biography in the wider social history of the period with her work on Glyn. The Women’s Film and Television History Network (WFTHN) for their warm welcome and non-­ hierarchical organisational model which facilitates interdisciplinary work and in particular Elaine Burrows and Janet McCabe. To Christine Gledhill and Jane M. Gaines of the wonderful Women Film Pioneers Project. Also to Alex Weedon who has shared his keen enthusiasm for medical prosthetics and their future potential. And to my co-author, Karen, who, never forgetting the rigor required of the research, or compassion for the trauma of the men, has made it, in her inimitable way, all fun.

 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS 

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The Research Institute for Media Art and Performance (RIMAP) at the University of Bedfordshire has been the administrative and emotional home of the project and we have received much encouragement from colleagues at the RIMAP writing retreats who have shared in our progress. When we needed further days to get together, cross-check ideas and drafts, we have been kindly hosted by Mark Margaretten and Nicole Hines. Their large dining table, beautiful lunches and on-tap coffee as well as sparkling conversation and evening G&Ts (or is it sparking G&Ts and evening conversation) meant that we did, eventually make the deadline. Finally, and importantly, our significant others, who have listened, nodded, commented and encouraged, we thank John and Graham. This one is for the children, so the next generation never forget and always work for peace, Felix and Alex; Victoria, William, Alexandra, Luke and baby Grayson-Rain.

Funding

This book is the outcome of British Academy-funded project SRG1920\101483 Horror and Romance in the technologizing of the body: Lon Chaney and Elinor Glyn ‘suffering for their art’ in five films of 1920s.

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Contents

1 Introduction  1 Transforming Faces for the Screen in the 1920s   2 Who Were Elinor Glyn and Lon Chaney?   5 The Masculine War-Body, Feminine Beauty and Cultural Difference   8 1920s Cosmetic Surgery and Beauty Culture in Film and Photography  10 Beauty-and-the-Beast Myth and the Grotesque  13 2 Vilray  Blair, MD, Lon Chaney and The Phantom of the Opera 19 Facial Injury in Context  21 The Fascination of Facial Injury Surgery  25 Facial Injury and Film  28 The Production of The Phantom of the Opera and the Anticipation of the Grotesque  30 The Appearance of the Phantom  35 Conclusion  40 3 Beauty  Regimes, Facial Surgery and Elinor Glyn’s Such Men Are Dangerous 45 The Cosmetic Surgery and the Desire to Have ‘It’  46 The Moral Quandary of Surgical Transformation in 1920s Culture  52

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Contents

Elinor Glyn’s Eternal Youth and Embodied Knowledge  55 Glyn’s Creative Reimagining Surgical Transformations in Story and Movie  61 Such Men Are Dangerous (Hawks 1930) from the Elinor Glyn Story  63 Such Men Are Dangerous as a Film About Dysmorphia, Self-­transformation and Change of Identity  69 4 Masks,  Prosthetics and Performance 75 The Mask and the Work of Anna Coleman Ladd  76 The Mask of the Red Death  85 Chaney, Performance and Pain  87 Conclusion  95 5 Unveiling  Romance, Elinor Glyn’s Man and Maid 99 Elinor Glyn and Discourses of Female Beauty and Facial Disfigurement 100 Post-war Narratives of Facial Disfigurement in Visual Culture 101 The Face Radiates a Suggestion of Love: Elinor Glyn, Emilé Coué and Embodied Knowledge 104 Glyn’s War and the Origin of Her Novel Man and Maid (1922) 107 From Trauma to Romance in the Film Story of Man and Maid (Schertzinger 1925) 109 Glyn’s Embodied Knowledge and the First-Person Narrative in Man and Maid  115 6 In  Conclusion, Visual Culture in the Archive123 Value of the Archive 124 Bibliography131 Index135

About the Authors

Karen Randell  is Professor of Film and Culture and Research Fellow at the University of Bedfordshire. Her previous work includes The War Body on Screen, Reframing 9/11: Film, Popular Culture and the War on Terror and Screening the Dark Side of Love: From Euro-Horror to American Cinema. Alexis  Weedon  is Professor of Publishing Studies at the University of Bedfordshire. Her previous work includes The Origins of Transmedia Storytelling, Elinor Glyn as Novelist, Moviemaker, Glamour Icon and Businesswoman and Victorian Publishing: The Economics of Book Production for a Mass Market.

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List of Figures

Fig. 1.1 Fig. 2.1

Fig. 2.2 Fig. 2.3

Fig. 2.4 Fig. 2.5 Fig. 2.6 Fig. 3.1 Fig. 3.2

News and comment by W.H. Landvoigt in Evening star (Washington, D.C.), 22 Nov. 1925. Chronicling America: Historic American Newspapers. Lib. of Congress 5 The American Expeditionary Force (AEF) soldier with burns damage to the face. The nose has been burnt way along with half the right check; burn damage to the right side of the face and underneath both eye sockets. ‘Facial Maxillary Surgery, LeMaitre Collection, World War I.’ (Reeve 34799) OHA 80 Reeve Photograph Collection. Otis Historical Archives, National Museum of Health and Medicine 22 Lon Chaney with his theatrical make-up box. Public domain 33 Soldier with plastic nose graft held in place with metal clamps. Skin graft surgery to right cheek and nose still required. ‘Facial Maxillary Surgery, LeMaitre Collection, World War I,’ (Reeve 34800) OHA 80 Reeve Photograph Collection. Otis Historical Archives, National Museum of Health and Medicine 34 The Phantom is unmasked, cropped film frame. Author’s photograph36 ‘Feast your eyes, glut your soul on my accursed ugliness’ cropped film frame. Author’s photograph 37 The pathos of the monstrous Erik. Author’s photograph 39 The Birmingham Age-Herald. (Birmingham, Ala.) August 24, 1924, MAGAZINE SECTION, Image 46, Chronicling America. Lib. of Congress 49 Advertisement for a beauty mask, Photoplay magazine, April 1927, p. 130. Public domain 51

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Fig. 3.3 Fig. 3.4 Fig. 3.5 Fig. 3.6 Fig. 3.7 Fig. 3.8 Fig. 4.1 Fig. 4.2

Fig. 4.3 Fig. 4.4

Fig. 4.5 Fig. 4.6

Fig. 4.7

Glyn’s endorsement of Lux soap advertisement from The Washington Times, 3 June 1930. Chronicling America, Lib. of Congress53 Gargoyle by Dudley Pratt on University of Washington’s Smith Hall 1938. Hbobrien image cropped, greyscale, wikicommons CC-BY-SA 3.0 58 Photograph of Elinor Glyn aged 60 in 1924, © National Portrait Gallery, London 59 The Wrinkle Book plates I and V showing how the muscles droop with age and which exercises to use to tighten them. Author’s images 59 Figure from Dr Jacques Joseph’s Nasenplastik und sonstige Gesichtsplastik of a cheek plasty p. 623. Author’s image 60 Eight frames from the silent film Such Men Are Dangerous (Hawks 1930) by the author from the Filmmuseum restored print 67 The masked Erik in The Phantom of the Opera Cropped film frame. Author’s photograph 77 Mask with nose and glasses to enable fixing over ears. Image from Philadelphia News, 5 March 1919 (Image from Anon, ‘Artist Made Masks for Soldiers’, 1919. Philadelphia News 5 March. Scrapbook 1914–1923 Folder 7/7. Anna Coleman Ladd Collection, Archive of American Art, Washington DC.). Public domain 78 Christine sees the masked Phantom, cropped film frame. Author’s photograph 83 ‘Collection of plaster face casts of mutilated French soldiers, American Red Cross, Ms. Anna Coleman Ladd studio, First World War’ (Reeve 12596). OHA 80 Reeve Photograph Collection. Otis Historical Archives, National Museum of Health and Medicine 83 ‘Sculptress helping restore Shell-Torn soldiers faces. The final touches.’ Undated cutting in the Anna Coleman Ladd Collection, Archive of American Art, Washington DC 84 ‘Plaster casts in preparation of making masks for mutilated French soldiers, American Red Cross, Ms. Anna Coleman Ladd studio and First World War (Reeve 12594). Reeve Photograph Collection. Otis Historical Archives, National Museum of Health and Medicine 86 Chaney ‘wearing’ the Mask of the Red Death. Original Front-of-House Stills. Author’s photograph 87

  List of Figures 

Fig. 4.8

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Shell-shocked Veteran with Paralysis from War Neuroses at the Netley Hospital 1917. Cropped frame. Author’s image 88 Fig. 4.9 Chaney as The Frog in The Miracle Man. Film still. Author’s photograph89 Fig. 4.10 First World War Amputees. Imperial War Museum (Q 108161) ©Crown Copyright. ©IWM 90 Fig. 4.11 Chaney as Blizzard in The Penalty. Cropped frame. Author’s photograph91 Fig. 4.12 Chaney demonstrating his physical prowess and athleticism as Blizzard in The Penalty. Cropped frame. Author’s photograph 92 Fig. 5.1 Frontispiece showing Sir Nicholas’s wounded head and foot. Photoplay Edition of the novel Man and Maid. Author’s image 114 Fig. 5.2 Plate between pp. 68–9 showing Sir Nicholas’s head wound and Alathea’s glasses. Photoplay Edition of the novel Man and Maid. Author’s image 115 Fig. 5.3 Plate between pp. 194–5 showing the cocotte Suzette addressing Sir Nicholas’s butler, Burton. Photoplay Edition of the novel Man and Maid. Author’s image 116 Fig. 5.4 Plate between pp. 258–9 showing Alethea caught without her glasses by her rival Suzette. Photoplay Edition of the novel Man and Maid. Author’s image 117 Fig. 5.5 Suzette (Renée Adorée) and Sir Nicholas (Lew Cody) straining for love in the film Man and Maid (1925). Press photograph. Public domain 118 Fig. 5.6 Alathea (Harriet Hammond) and Sir Nicholas (Lew Cody) standing for a kiss, in the film Man and Maid (1925). Press photograph. Public domain 119

CHAPTER 1

Introduction

LUDWIG You have the reputation of being one of the greatest plastic surgeons in the world. What I am about to ask you to do will require all your skill. I want you to— Cut to close up of Ludwig as he continues— —straighten my body, change my features so that no living man—no woman—will recognise me. Can you do it? Script Such Men Are Dangerous

Abstract  The Introduction provides the context for the study of veteran facial disfigurement after the First World War and its impact on silent film culture. It introduces the case studies which explore the visibility of two individuals: Lon Chaney Snr, famous for this role in The Phantom of the Opera (1925), and Elinor Glyn, high priestess of romance and Hollywood scriptwriter, and how the fan magazines presented them to the movie-­ going public in the 1920s. Social and medical history is introduced as a useful intersectional method to understand the representations of injured war veterans and how disfigurement and reconstruction was depicted in popular visual culture. Mythmaking in popular discourses is also discussed in the context of narratives of beauty and ugliness and how these played out through generic conventions.

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 K. Randell, A. Weedon, Transforming Faces for the Screen, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-40029-2_1

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K. RANDELL AND A. WEEDON

Keywords  Facial disfigurement • Veteran • First World War • Silent film • Visual culture • Elinor Glyn • Lon Chaney Snr

Transforming Faces for the Screen in the 1920s This book is a study of the influence of facial disfigurement of veterans from the First World War on silent film culture. It will focus on the work of two individuals: Lon Chaney Snr, famous for this role in The Phantom of the Opera (Rupert Julian 1925), and Elinor Glyn, high priestess of romance and Hollywood scriptwriter. They were big names in the 1920s and guaranteed box office success. Scarcely an issue of Photoplay or Motion Picture magazines went by without a mention of one or other of them, and their films, made in rival Hollywood Studios, were advertised alongside each other in the same daily newspapers.1 Lon Chaney and Elinor Glyn still hold a cultural currency as the multiplicity of references to them in popular culture shows, from the lyrics of songs to characters in historical romances, musicals and in period dramas. The mask continues to be a metonymic for concealed trauma, particularly relating to the 1920s, in for example the American HBO TV drama Broadwalk Empire where the character Richard Harrow2 wears a tin mask hiding damage to the left side of his face, and in ITV’s crime drama Endeavour where it is a clue to a surgeon’s past help for veterans in the episode called ‘Game’.3 Elinor Glyn’s writing too has become the epitome of 1920s racy romance and is light-heartedly referenced in modern fiction set in that period from ITV’s Downton Abbey to the film adaptation of Agatha Christie’s Death On the Nile.4 Both works deal with the effect of the First World War on their male protagonists who return disabled or disfigured, and so references to Glyn sit alongside the narratives of physical and psychological trauma. Yet, although their careers flourished at the same time the link between Glyn and Chaney is not obvious. There is no evidence that these two met; Chaney was a very private person and avoided the Hollywood social scene that Glyn revelled in. The real connection, we argue, is that they shared an appropriation of medical techniques of the period to an unusual extent, and translated procedures and prostheses developed to heal and improve lives of wounded veterans in their storytelling for the screen. Each had unique and punishing physical regimes that they designed for themselves according to their beliefs and performance style and they brought their embodied knowledge to their screen characters.

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In this introduction, we look first at the visibility of Lon Chaney Snr and Elinor Glyn in the 1920s, and how the fan magazines presented them to the movie public. Then we will introduce the reader to relevant current work on the social and medical history of injured war veterans and how disfigurement and reconstruction was depicted in popular visual culture. This is followed by sections on mythmaking in popular discourses on beauty and ugliness in the 1920s and how these played out through generic conventions. This provides the necessary grounding for the case studies in the chapters. We discuss problematic cultural notions of the 1920s which seem outdated today; namely the connection between physiognomy and race, the Grotesque and attitudes to disability, for it is important to know the value-laden contemporary discourse in which Chaney and Glyn made their work to understand how they deviated from the normative in their creative production. Through horror and romance, we tap into the mediated emotions of post-war trauma. As Fay Bound Alberti’s says, emotions are ‘culturally embedded phenomena’, and our work has relevance as to the history of the emotions because we identify some of ‘the processes of production and contestation’.5 To make clear our contribution, in this book we have kept the voice of each author distinct to enable the reader to read in a multidisciplinary manner, and so to experience and appreciate the ways of seeing of each approach. Yet through co-authorship, we have sought to facilitate the breaking down of disciplinary boundaries and open up new insights in cultural history. In Chap. 2, Karen Randell argues that the image of Erik, painstakingly created by Lon Chaney in The Phantom of the Opera, provides a visual association with the war wounded of the First World War. The celebrated actor’s depiction of facial disfigurement engaged the audience’s visceral emotions in the genre of horror and affectively exposed fears of social dysfunction and trauma. Chaney’s performances represent anxieties that pertain to the First World War even though the explicit trauma of the war is absent from the films themselves. The pre-occupation with deformity and disfigurement within the narratives of Chaney’s horror and suspense films suggest that the horrific personal consequences of the war for many men were writ large on screen. Focusing on Chaney’s use of the Phantom’s mask in Chap. 4, Randell moves across film and cultural history, using archival sources to explore the work of the artist Anna Coleman Ladd in the portrayal of a concealed war trauma on screen. Randell also discusses Chaney’s performance style and the ways in which he adopted other

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images from the veterans, such as limb prostheses, and created a mythology of pain and suffering as part of his star persona. Chaney’s contemporary, Elinor Glyn, author and Hollywood filmmaker, was known for her beauty regimes and her definition of ‘It’ or sexual allure. Alexis Weedon argues that Glyn’s fascination with how to transform the body to redeem the romantic relationship moves beyond exercise and make-up to the intervention of surgery and bodily change. The two film adaptations of Elinor Glyn’s novels feature prosthetics and reconstructive surgery as an answer to the loss of love. In Chap. 3, Weedon shows that Glyn’s own experience of such procedures and therapeutic regimes to preserve her youthful beauty are central to her story of personal transformation in Such Men Are Dangerous (Kenneth Hawks 1930), where her main character changes his appearance to win the love of his wife. In Chap. 5, Weedon looks at the lost film of Man and Maid (Victor Schertzinger 1925) in an analysis of the surviving novel and photographs, scenario and script. Glyn addresses the issue of male impotence and despair within the constraints of the Romance genre, suggesting the consequences of war for many romantic relationships. Weedon argues that within her work, Glyn creates a space to address the effect of war trauma on physical desire. Glyn and Chaney were represented side by side in the movie magazines of the era, which is important for understanding the reception of the films that we discuss in the chapters. They sometimes appeared within the same issue, even page, reflecting the fact that their careers ran in parallel for a time as their movies were released to popular acclaim. Hannah Stein, a prolific interviewer of celebrities, ran articles on both Lon Chaney Snr and Elinor Glyn for her syndicated newspaper series. In ‘How I keep fit as told by Lon Chaney to Hannah Stein’ (1927) Chaney says he has found tranquillity of mind better for his well-being than the so-called health remedies. He is an advocate of fresh air and sleeps on the porch of his house summer and winter. Glyn interviewed in 1932 about ‘My food and My figure as told to Hannah Stein by Elinor Glyn’ also advocated what we might today call a ‘mindful approach’ to health, incorporating positive mantras into daily life.6 Such interviews were expected of Hollywood celebrities to link their names and personalities to the credit lines in newspapers when advertising films showing in Cinemas. This juxtaposition of features and ads put Glyn and Chaney on the same page, literally, as for example the 30 July 1930 issue of The Bystander which has an article about Lon Chaney’s dislike of making a talkie version of his silent masterpiece The Phantom (see Chap. 2) and alongside a photograph captioned ‘Eleanor marries an ugly man for his money’

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Fig. 1.1  News and comment by W.H. Landvoigt in Evening star (Washington, D.C.), 22 Nov. 1925. Chronicling America: Historic American Newspapers. Lib. of Congress

promoting Glyn’s film Such Men Are Dangerous.7 Bringing them closer still was rival studios gossip published as film news; for instance in 1925, gossip columnist W.H.  Landvoigt repeated a claim that Lon Chaney had been ‘Glynized’. His source in the MGM office said that players who aspired to share the fame of Mme Glyn’s pictures ‘must analyze, understand and memorize’ her world of romance (Fig. 1.1).8

Who Were Elinor Glyn and Lon Chaney? Glyn was one of the most successful romantic novelists-turned-­ screenwriters of her period. She was the originator of the ‘It’ craze—defining ‘It’ as sexual attraction and charisma—on screen and in print. An incredible 27 films were made from her work. Her signature became her seal of her authenticity and appeared on the film titles and above her magazine articles as she wrote on the topics of love, marriage, divorce and how to keep that ‘allure’. She spent nine years in Hollywood where she mixed

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a heady cocktail from the strong spirits of the two biggest selling genres— romance and self-help—and added just dash of the spiritual. Glyn’s home in Jersey was not a happy one. She and her sister grew up under a domineering, invalided stepfather, and were given little education. But she had access to role models in the beauties from the island such as the famous Lily Langtry whom she saw when she stayed with her French relatives (see also Chap. 3). Rebelling against the ‘dominant, selfish ways of my stepfather’ which ‘had completely broken the spirit of my poor mother’,9 she exerted her own will-power and formed what was to become a life-long belief that a man or woman could, by self-discipline, observation and practice of imitating role models plus strict adherence to exercises, alter both their exterior look and their interior sense of self. Today the closest thing might be engaging a personal trainer combined with adopting a spiritual or mental health regime. In her fiction, this leads to the desired outcome: winning the beloved, marrying the otherwise unattainable boss or climbing the ranks in business and society. Glyn’s line in articles about feeling sexually unattractive and what a person can do about it sold well in the international magazine market, and her attitudes permeate her romances which contain a narrative of self-determination and social advancement. The Career of Katherine Bush (1916) is her earliest British story in this vein, and many of her post-war stories in America develop this theme.10 Two of her films feature recovery and facial surgery; Man and Maid was adapted by Glyn and produced by MGM in 1925 and is set in Paris in the last few months of the First World War; Such Men Are Dangerous came five years later and was an adaptation by Ernest Vajda of a science fiction romance by Glyn written for a magazine. It was directed by Kenneth Hawkes for 20th Century Fox. Weedon points out that the working title of Such Men Are Dangerous was The Mask of Love, an apt reference to the concealment of passion as both trauma and love are revealed through the eyes are masked. Lon Chaney and Elinor Glyn both explore the hidden trauma behind the public face through the motif of the mask. In The Phantom, Randell observes that the masked man (Chaney) asks us to ‘look not upon my mask—rather remember my devotion…’ and argues that the mask makes the veteran both visible and invisible within society, alerting those curious to see the performance of normality whilst hiding the visible pain of war. Lon Chaney Snr was an extremely versatile actor with extraordinary characterisation famous for his silent film roles particularly: Quasimodo, the

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hunchbacked bell ringer of Notre Dame Cathedral, and Erik, the masked Phantom of the Paris Opera House. Highly talented, a voice artist, comedian and dancer first in theatre, Lon (Leonidas)11 Chaney himself made a case for drawing a connection between his early life and his sympathetic approach to the characters that he played. He was born on 1 April 1883 to profoundly Deaf, non-speaking parents, Frank and Emma, and was thus surrounded by difference from birth.12 The opening paragraph of ‘His Own Life Story’, which appeared in Picture Play Magazine in 1929 and is (supposedly) narrated by Chaney in 1925, tells of the significant early influence of disability on his life: My father and mother were both deaf-mutes…a great many people are inclined to pity deaf mutes, but I have found among them some of the happiest, most contented people in the world.13 They are very social. Because the outside world of amusement does not distract them, they seek and find happiness in their own homes…they do enjoy going to the theatre occasionally…café life means nothing to them, though they do enjoy dancing in their own homes, and frequently give parties there.14

Their disability does not render his parents’ victims, rather Chaney makes much of the positive lifestyle that is enabled by their difference. Later biographical material, however, insists on the connection between his ‘pitiable’ early life and the characters that he played. Universal’s publicity material for the release of the biopic Man of a Thousand Faces in 1957 states: He refused to utter a word in public until he was eight, out of sympathy with his parents who were ridiculed by the town’s youngsters.15 The young Lon tried to transfer their sorrow onto his shoulders and he carried a brooding sympathy for the afflicted with him for the rest of his life.16

It goes on to suggest that ‘this, perhaps, is the real reason why he so often played disfigured men. He tried to make the world sympathise with their plight, and he succeeded.’ Chaney’s publicity around his stardom always pivots on his ability to portray characters on the margins, those that are physically disabled by mobility and those whose facial disfigurement has made them outcasts. In his film career which spanned 13 years, he made approximately 157 films.17 The majority of which included a performance of disability or difference.

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Glyn and Chaney’s vastly different cultural backgrounds and upbringing in Europe and America would be brought side by side in Hollywood. Distressed by a war which crossed the continents, they separately internalised their own experience of the effect of war on the human body.

The Masculine War-Body, Feminine Beauty and Cultural Difference In the chapter analysis we utilise key historical research concerning the male body in the First World War and on post-war social attitudes to beauty and ugliness in Europe and America. Both Glyn and Chaney were in Hollywood making films just a few years after the end of the First World War, a war which had drawn millions of young men from America, France, Russia, Britain and their allies into conflict with German, Austria-Hungary, Bulgaria and the Ottoman Empire. In this conflict, men’s bodies faced trench weapons, artillery, poison gas, grenades and mortars on the ground, and machine guns and fire in the cockpits of airplanes. The physical injury to a generation of men scarred society. In the military hospitals, injured men were remade, but where they were remade psychologically and physically made a difference to their experiences after recovery within European and American post-war culture as discussed in Chap. 3. In 1920s, America consumerism grew and confidence in the future was alive and there was hope. Prevailing discourses around disfigurement celebrated the medical advances while shielding veterans from sight. In Britain and France where the trauma was more pervasive, the men had their own nomenclature, they were the ‘gargoyles’ of Britain or the ‘broken faces’ of France: heroes who were ill-equipped for the difficulties of reintegration into society. The old world was weighed down with the post-war struggle for recuperation. The trauma of the war’s effect on the male body and the fear of ‘othering’ or exclusion due to disability can be found in the mythmaking of post-war visual culture. Joanna Bourke, announcing her work on Dismembering the Male: Men’s Bodies, Britain and the Great War, observed ‘anatomy may not be destiny, but the belief that it is moulds most lives.’18 In Europe, this was confirmed by conscription, where men were physically assessed for military duty or, if unfit, for other occupations. The physically fit were destined to fight at the front and became potential war casualties. Until the medical advances of the First World War, casualties with significant facial wounds often died

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and so were not seen in society, while amputees survived. Bourke suggests that the living memory of veterans of the South African war (from 1899 to 1902) returning, and being seen on the streets of British cities unable to reintegrate into society meant that many soldiers were more frightened of being maimed than dying, so closely was being able-bodied tied into discourses of masculinity.19 The discourses around facial disfigurement differed between America and Europe. The French veteran’s gueules cassées, were lionised, and placed conspicuously in the front of the victory march on 14 July 1919, and in 1926 were politicised as part of a 12,000 strong anti-American demonstration protesting against the Mellon-Bérenger debt agreement.20 They were invited to witness the signing of the Treaty of Versailles which Glyn also attended. French-disabled veterans were reintegrated into society in a concerted programme of recovery whereby amputees were given prosthetics, tools and re-educated in a trade to be settled as close to their original home where they may still have family or friends. By contrast in America facial disfigurement was more hidden; Vilray Blair famously covering the walkways in his St Louis hospital so that his patients were shielded from public view.21 Newspapers reported on the miraculous results of surgery, but the photographs of the medical procedures and the physical recovery of soldiers were only accessible to military or medical personnel. In Britain too, there was ‘an unofficial censorship of facially disfigured veterans in the British press and propaganda.’22 In Britain, France and America, the ideal body image for men and women changed during the war when ‘an atmosphere of “Spartan idealism” prevailed and reducing one’s weight became part of civil defense.’23 This dissipated quickly after the war but the ideal of the slim female figure remained into the early 1920s now recognised as iconic flapper fashion. As discussed in Chaps. 3 and 5, dieting regimes and beauty routines were increasingly the topic of magazines such as the Photoplay, Motion Picture and Motion Picture Classic in America as advertising grew. Heather Addison’s quantitative study of such advertising concluded that from 1915 to 1925, the peak of the ‘reducing’ phase, the advertising of physical culture products increased significantly, and advertisers promoted ‘products more heavily in motion picture fan magazines than in popular women’s magazines.’24 It was for this market that Elinor Glyn wrote her articles about beauty, self-improvement and the celebrities she knew. Ideals of female beauty went along different lines. This is visible in the history of the beauty pageant which tells a story of international rivalry

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and cultural difference between European and American standards of attractiveness. Holly Grout points out the contests raised debates ‘regarding women’s visibility, their relation to the consumer market, and their place in the nation.’25 In America such contests had been part of the carnival or circus, and in France the tradition came from choosing a Queen at religious or national day festivals such as the ‘fête du couronnement de la Muse du peuple.’ These beauty queens were given the promise of becoming cinema idols. The prevalence of cinema-going across Europe meant that the silent films of Hollywood and American stars became known internationally. So, for instance, when the journalist and novelist Maurice de Waleffe launched his search for Miss France in 1920, and Agnès Souret won, her photograph was sold widely to newspapers and magazines. Film success followed and Souret appeared in Folies Bergère and two French films directed by Henry Houry, but her screen tests for Hollywood never lead to a role, and as other winners of Miss France found when invited to the American-run Miss Universe, there was a cultural bias. Miss America won the Miss Universe pageant in 1926, 1927, 1928 and 1930, and more American stars made it into French films than vice versa. By the 1920s, cinema had become the primary venue for popular entertainment, and the war and medical advances had radically changed the discourses around deformity and disability. Surgical interventions were developed through the 1920s to aid youthful beauty in Hollywood and for others who could afford it. In film there was a fascination with the narrative effect of make-up, facial surgery and beauty treatments. Both Glyn and Chaney’s screenwork was shaped by these new possibilities and in them the notion of a stable male body is bought into question.

1920s Cosmetic Surgery and Beauty Culture in Film and Photography Studying these early films highlights their relevance to our twenty-first century concerns regarding beauty and ageing, and the treatment of deformity and disability on screen as they speak to our social anxieties about identity and inclusion. The cultural acceptance of plastic surgery since these early days is reflected in the quantity of films which feature clinics and treatments. Today, body modification is both socially accepted and the subject of fantasy desire. Take for example three films from different directors and countries released in 2012: The French comedy La Clinique de L’amour

1 INTRODUCTION 

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(de Penguern and Tassov) [Sex, Lies and Surgery] sets the plot of a love triangle in a failing beauty clinic; the Japanese award winning GPF Bunny (Yutaka) features plastic surgeons and a cast with body modifications in a plot in which a girl dispassionately observes the effects of poisoning on the frame of her mother; and the Canadian American Mary (Soska) is a blackly humorous body-horror movie where the heroine desires and undergoes surgery to be like a Betty Boop doll. Even from this small sample, it is clear that we now accept the plasticity of the body, and our ability to alter it at will is embedded in contemporary media storytelling. According to Panayi et al.,26 over the first two decades of this millennium there has been on average at least one film a year on the theme of facial transplantation, and three more featuring plastic surgery for some other reason, the most common being aesthetic enhancement. Looking back at a hundred years of plastic surgery on the big screen, Panayi et al. assessed the extent of the coverage of the practice. Using the IMDB, BFI and AFI databases, they identified 223 films from 1919 to 2019 across 19 countries in different genres including crime, drama and comedy, counted the number of films representing surgeons or surgery and sorted them under themes. They found that around two-thirds provided an unrealistic view of surgery, either because they were inaccurate in their depiction of procedures or that the clinical outcome, recovery time or side-effects were unrealistic. They observed ‘In terms of positive films, there were two peaks, one in the first two decades (1919 to 1939) when most positive films were unrealistic, one in the last two decades (2000–2019) when most are realistic.’27 The early films from 1919 to 1925 addressed the issues we might expect in post-war culture: facial reconstruction, identity change and cosmetic benefits (beauty and anti-­ ageing). Later, films dealt with themes of deformity, race, gender transitioning and the dilemmas of the surgeon (including the morality of such surgery, the effect on body dysmorphic disorder and the potential of plastic surgery for future society). Some of the categorisation under themes for the early and often lost films are not as accurate as silent film historians might like: Elinor Glyn’s Such Men Are Dangerous is categorised under face transplantation and crime, while in fact it is a romance and in the film at least, is to do with race. Other films, like Chaney’s, may not feature the surgeon on screen, but in content are inspired by the plasticity of the body. It is a limitation they recognise, alongside the difficulties of attempting any survey which seeks to be representative of the industry’s global output. Writing up their

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findings for the readers of the European Journal of Plastic Surgery, they speculated on the connection between film representation and the social acceptance of surgery: The increased presentation of cosmetic surgery in the cinema may not be merely a reflection of changes in society, but rather cinema may be contributing to the increase through destigmatisation of plastic surgery. Likewise, besides shaping the perception of plastic surgery, cinema may also be able to modify and even establish beauty standards.28

It was not just film, photography was also an important tool as a record of medical achievement and in the commodification of beauty. Damaged veterans had no control over the circulation of the images of their faces while they were serving. Although these were not published in the press, they were available to medical professionals and students. Such photographs, as Jason Bate observes, made the men into ‘cases’. His description of medical photography echoes Grout’s of the fractured female body assessed part by part for its beauty in women’s magazines: Bate refers to the frontal, three-quarter and profile framing techniques used by the photographer for medical texts which ‘divides each patient’s reconstruction into smaller units and conceptual frames, much like a form of assessment that maps and summarises the surgical results at each step in the reconstruction.’29 Such photographic techniques objectified the body in order to judge its parts. It separated a person’s identity from the outward manifestation of the face, and ‘deified’ the surgeon. Both beauty and medical discourses regarded the body as plastic, which with skill and effort could be shaped into the desired image.30 This use of photography of the face to advertise a surgeon’s skill and reputation is mirrored in the images of the beauty contestants in magazines, thus photography was also a way of ‘establishing beauty standards’.31 This discourse in the magazine trade’s articles on beauty regimes, self-care practices and products located beauty work as a woman’s duty, a duty Elinor Glyn wrote about in her published letters to young women.32 Stereotypical images of criminal characters played a part in 1920s cinema. Frontal and profile photography had also been used for the classification of facial types in physiognomic discourse, such discourse proposed a biological basis for character which could be seen in a person’s shape of head and face. The belief had origins in Cesare Lombroso’s Criminal Man (1876) in which he related the shape of the head, jaw and brow with

1 INTRODUCTION 

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an innate disposition for criminal behaviour. R.L. Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr Jeckyll and Mr Hyde (1886) is perhaps the most famous and long running of many stories which played with this notion. Stevenson’s depiction of the spiritual anguish of a respected character incarcerated in a hideous simian body and acting out his suppressed desires has been adapted for the stage and screen ever since its publication. The facial transformation in John Barrymore’s 1920 version of the story have made him as famous as Lon Chaney’s miraculously walking cripple in The Miracle Man (1919) and it portrayed this notion of spiritual degeneracy. However, the disfigurement of ordinary soldiers in war complicated this form of genre storytelling; deformity could no longer simply be read as moral culpability. In the early 1920s, the Austrian-Jewish Joseph Roth related this discourse to his story of a starving amputee in ‘Menschenliche Fragmente’ [Human Fragments] (1919). In this tale, ‘The disfigured and shell-­ shocked war invalid makes a mockery of the formally established notion of the human as divine image, indeed of the notion of the human being as spiritual being whatsoever’ says Erica Weitzman.33 The existential questions raised by the war changed how the genres of crime and horror fiction drew on physiognomic discourse and the psychology of spiritual despair. Elinor Glyn for one sought to flip the narrative in her romance, fitting the disfigured veteran into genre conventions of the romantic hero and her own vision of romantic allure.

Beauty-and-the-Beast Myth and the Grotesque The return of the veteran was romanticised in popular narratives as is seen in the newspaper cartoons of the nurse falling in love with the wounded cited in Joanna Bourke’s work (the reality for the returning veteran was much harsher, as she and Joe Kember point out). This mythologising is seen on screen and in Glyn’s short stories and novels (discussed in Chap. 5). In Chaney’s films, the traumatic symptoms of the aftermath of the war become an ‘over-performance’, an excess, in the representation of disability and deformity on screen. Today, the Grotesque, deformity, beauty and ugliness and othering through anti-Semitism, racism, xenophobia are ethically laden terms and a clear and explicit critical distance is needed. In Chap. 2, Weedon discusses the magazine discourse on beauty and ‘ugliness’, an ethically loaded term which is in common use in this period, and notions of the Grotesque which became linked with the discourses on physiognomy and criminality.

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Aesthetic notions of the Grotesque have changed from a seventeenth-­ century Italian decorative art form to indicate anything bizarre or incongruous, becoming in the humanities a normative judgement of taste. In literature, the term refers to what gives pleasure to readers because of its value to disgust, as the reader embraces or pities a character while being revolted by them. Through the ‘pathetic fallacy,’ there is a parallel exterior manifestation of what in their inner world is repellent. In film the Grotesque, aesthetic is the opposite of beauty; so when beauty is equated with sexual attraction, the Grotesque is the reverse, the undesirable. This is linked to film genres as Randell shows; over-performance on the ‘hysterical screen’ is the expression of emotional turmoil converted it into bodily symptoms, and so in the narratives of horror and suspense, there is a pre-occupation with deformity. Such screen performances represent the legacy of anxiety even though the explicit trauma of the war is absent from the films themselves. As discussed in Chap. 2, they conceal not only the fears of the maimed man but also of those that have to look on him. Glyn and Chaney draw on the Grotesque to subvert genre conventions in horror and romance as we shall see in the following chapters. During the First World War, wounded soldiers returning from service were young men, and this changed social attitudes to disability placing greater emphasis on the retraining of wounded veterans to fit them to provide for their family. Physiognomic discourse was deeply embedded in the crime genre, yet in the movies of the 1920s, the discourse changed to reflect the fact that ugliness does always denote badness. In the surgical reconstruction of the face symmetry was favoured. In Glyn’s romance, the body is transformed through the intervention of the surgeon to redeem the romantic relationship. Yet romantic fiction often privileged Caucasian female beauty and plastic surgeons at the time altered racial characteristics to conform to a Western ideal of beauty undertaking rhinoplasties for ‘Jewish noses’ and double eyelid surgery to correct certain characteristically Asian features. Problematically too, Lon Chaney is tagged in newspapers as portraying a cripple. The term ‘cripple’ fell from use in the mid-1990s because its normativity was value-laden and insulting, but it was commonly used in the 1920s to refer to disabling damage (e.g., as physical impairment or debt) which deprived a person of the ability to function in society. The word was also applied to those who had a severe physical or emotional limitation. As we deal with such discourses, we have sought to remain critically aware of the work that has been done on disability, gender and race to be inclusive and de-stigmatise difference.

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To explore the relationship between 1920s film culture and the impressive medical advances in the face of war injury, each of the following chapters analyses films focusing specifically on the medical procedures and prosthetics that Lon Chaney or Elinor Glyn adopt and shows how they appear creatively in their performances and narratives. In the work of both Chaney and Glyn, we see outstanding examples of how body dysmorphia, change of identity and the potential for self-transformation is realised in post-war visual culture.

Notes 1. Advertisement, 1927, Evening Star Washington 21 May p.  32 for Lon Chaney’s Tell it to the Marines and Elinor Glyn’s ‘It’. 2. Boardwalk Empire fandom https://boardwalkempire.fandom.com/wiki/ Richard_Harrow (accessed 27 January 2023). 3. Lewis Russell (writer) Endeavour Series 4, Episode 1. ITV 8 January 2017. https://www.itv.com/watch/endeavour/2a1229/2a1229a0014 4. Glyn is a character in The Cat’s Meow (Bogdanovich 2001) which retells the real-life Hollywood case of Thomas Ince’s untimely death on William Randolph Hearst’s yacht. 5. Alberti, Fay Bound ed. 2006. Medicine, Emotion and Disease, 1700–1950. Palgrave Macmillan, p. xviii. See also, Penelope Gouk and Helen Mills. 2005. Representing emotions: New connections in the Histories and Art, Music and Medicine. Aldershot: Ashgate. 6. These articles were syndicated and appear in a number of newspapers often in different edited versions. The examples cited here are: Stein, Hannah. 1927. How I keep fit as told by Lon Chaney to Hannah Stein. The Sheffield Daily Independent, 11 October, 4 and Stein, Hannah. 1932. My food and My figure as told to Hannah Stein by Elinor Glyn. News Chronicle, 31 August, 11. 7. Chaney died in August 1930. The part-talkie of The Phantom was released in February 1930. See The Bystander 1930, 30 July p.  241  in British Newspaper Archive. https://www.britishnewspaperarchive.co.uk/viewer/ BL/0001851/19300730/024/0039 8. News and Comment by W.H.  Landvoigt in Evening star. (Washington, D.C.), 22 Nov. 1925. Chronicling America: Historic American Newspapers. Lib. of Congress. https://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/ sn83045462/1925-­11-­22/ed-­1/seq-­63/ 9. Glyn, Elinor (1936. p. 25). 10. In her films ‘It’ (1927) and Ritzy (1927), for example, her heroines seek to raise themselves in social class.

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11. There was often confusion in the fan press about Chaney’s first name. He is often referred to in later articles as Alonzo (which in fact is the character name in The Unknown). For instance, in Leonard Gordon, ‘A Barber’s son’ in The Film Weekly, 14 June 1930, p. 25. Private Collection (David Lusted). 12. Chaney’s maternal grandparents John and Mary Kennedy helped found the Colorado School for the Deaf in 1874 after establishing the Mute Asylum in Baldwin City, Kansas in 1864. Their daughter Emma married Frank Chaney in 1877. See Blake, Michael F. 1990, Lon Chaney: The Man Behind a Thousand Faces, Lanham MD: The Vestal Press, for a detailed biography. 13. Lon Chaney was born one of four children—all hearing. 14. Picture Play Magazine 1929, p. 97. Margaret Herrick Archive. 15. I have found no reference to this in any of the biographical material. 16. Universal Studios Press Book, Man of a Thousand Faces, 1957. BFI Archive. 17. The exact number is unknown. 18. Bourke, Joanna. 1996. Dismembering the male: Men’s bodies, Britain and the Great War. London: Reaktion Books. Bourke, Joanna. 1996. Masculinity, Men’s Bodies and the Great War, History Today (v. 46, nos. 1–6), 9. 19. Gagen, Wendy Jane. 2004. Disabling masculinity: ex-servicemen, disability and gender identity, 1914–1930. University of Essex. 20. Kember, Joe. 2017. Face Value: The Rhetoric of Facial Disfigurement in American Film and Popular Culture, 1917–1927. Journal of War & Culture Studies 10 (1):43–65. 21. Kember, Joe (2017). 22. Biernoff, Suzannah. 2008. Shame, Disgust and the Historiography of War, in Pajaczkowska, C., & Ward, I. Shame and sexuality: psychoanalysis and visual culture. Abingdon: Routledge. p 217. 23. Addison, Heather. 2002. Capitalizing their charms: Cinema stars and physical culture in the 1920s. Velvet Light Trap (50):15. 19. 24. Addison says ‘Around 1915, the number of physical culture advertisements in motion picture magazines began to increase significantly. In 1915, for example, Photoplay Magazine averaged 1 physical culture ad per monthly issue; in 1920, it carried over 3 physical culture ads per issue, or more than 35 per year; and in 1925, the peak of the reducing craze, Photoplay averaged 11 physical culture ads issue, or over 135 physical culture ads per year. Motion Picture Magazine and Motion Picture Classic echo this trend. The American Magazine, Good Housekeeping, and the Ladies’ Home Journal showed no such increase in physical culture advertising. […] clearly, advertisers promoted to their physical culture products more heavily in motion picture fan magazines than in popular women’s magazines.’ Addison, 2002: 28–9.

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25. Grout, Holly. 2013. Between Venus and Mercury: The 1920s Beauty Contest in France and America. French Politics, Culture & Society 31 (1):47–68. 48. 26. Internet Movie Database, British Film Institute and American Film Institute. Panayi, A.  C., Endo, Y., Huidobro, A.  F., Haug, V., Panayi, A.  M., & Orgill, D.  P. (2021, 2021/10/01). Lights, camera, scalpel: a lookback at 100 years of plastic surgery on the silver screen. European Journal of Plastic Surgery, 44(5), 551–561, 551. 27. Panayi et al. (2021, 555). 28. Panayi et al. (2021, 552). 29. Bate, Jason. (2016) At the Cusp of Medical Research: Facial Reconstructive Surgery and the Role of Photography in Exchanging Methods and Ideas (1914–1920). Visual Culture in Britain 17 (1):75–98. 16. 30. In 1982, Mike Featherstone observed that ‘the tendency within consumer culture is for ascribed bodily quantities to become regarded as plastic— with effort and “body work” individuals are persuaded that they can achieve a certain desired appearance’ (Featherstone, Mike. 1982). The body in consumer culture. Theory, Culture & Society 1 (2):18–33. 31. Some magazines ran their own beauty contests where entrants sent in a photograph of themselves. Grout 2013 cites Life magazine’s contest in America and L’Illustration’s in France commenting by ‘soliciting images of their profiles, their hands, their hair, and their silhouettes for public inspection in exchange for beauty products and other prizes, magazine contests helped link feminine corporal display to the commercial beauty market.’ 32. See, for example, Glyn, Elinor. 1914. Letters to Caroline, London: Duckworth & Co. 33. Weitzman, Erica 2014, Human Fragments: Plastic Surgery and Bare Life in Joseph Roth’s Feuilletons, Journal of Austrian Studies, 46 (4): 92.

CHAPTER 2

Vilray Blair, MD, Lon Chaney and The Phantom of the Opera

Feast your eyes, glut your soul on my accursed ugliness. Erik (The Phantom) Phantom of the Opera Acting is Masquerade Lon Chaney (1922) (Handy, Truman B. 1922, ‘Masquerade’, Motion Picture Magazine December, p. 43. Quoted in Studlar, 1996, ‘Sideshow Oedipus: Lon Chaney and Film’s Freak Possibilities’ in This Mad Masquerade: Stardom and Masculinity in the Jazz Age, New York: Columbia University Press, p. 9.)

Abstract  This chapter highlights the intersecting discourses surrounding the representation of disability on screen within the context of post-First World War culture in the 1920s. The visual iconography of Lon Chaney’s much publicised characterisations of disabled protagonists circulated in public discourse alongside the images and narratives concerning war veteran disability, medical practices to aid and repair wounded veterans and the surgeons and artists who worked on and with these men. Drawing on the archives of the American surgeon Vilray P.  Blair, MD, the chapter explores plastic surgery’s visual connection with The Phantom of the Opera. Keywords  Facial disfigurement • Disability • Veteran • First World War • Silent film • Military archives • Lon Chaney Snr • Vilray P. Blair, MD • The Phantom of the Opera © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 K. Randell, A. Weedon, Transforming Faces for the Screen, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-40029-2_2

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In an analysis of the on-screen performance of Hollywood film star Lon Chaney Snr in The Phantom of the Opera (Rupert Julian, 1925), this chapter highlights intersecting discourses within the context of post-First World War culture in the 1920s. The visual iconography of Chaney’s much publicised characterisations of disabled protagonists circulated in public discourse alongside the images and narratives concerning war veteran disability, medical practices to aid and repair wounded veterans and the surgeons and artists who worked on and with these men. Susan Crutchfield suggests in her work on film and disability studies that ‘we need more of such studies which strive to contextualise disability representations within the intersecting discourses that molded [sic] them and that they helped to shape.’1 This study interconnects early developments of plastic surgery (anoplasty), reconstructive surgery and the visual work of the most prominent war surgeons and argues that these can be seen echoed in the performances of Chaney whose repeated characterisations of damaged and disfigured characters visually resonates with that of the wounded veteran. The analysis of The Phantom of the Opera situates the film within its post-war cultural moment by engaging with archived medical records, newspaper articles, historical film magazines, images of facially injured veterans and a discussion of the innovations in medicine during and after the First World War, the analysis will present the performed damaged body displayed by Chaney as an interpolation in the narrative of the recovery image of the injured veteran. In her analysis of masculinity on screen in the Jazz Age, Gaylyn Studlar wrote of Hollywood actor Lon Chaney Snr that his ‘depiction of the monstrous body may be read as a symptomatic instance of the anxiety surrounding masculinity and the male body during this postwar period of American culture.’2 Studlar’s work pays attention to the performance of masculinity that Chaney offered in 1920s silent cinema which leant towards an enactment of spectacular disability offered by the live travelling freak show made most popular in the nineteenth century.3 His star persona, in that historical moment, Studlar argues used ‘deliberately exaggerated theatrically based effects that rendered him into figures who paralleled the different modes of freakshow presentation.’4 She also suggests that a ‘theory of historical trauma might relate Chaney’s grotesque construction of a deviant and deformed masculinity to the era’s post-war anxieties.’5 While her study does not focus on the post-war veteran male body and the cultural anxieties that surround him, she alerts the future scholar to this possibility, a challenge that is taken up here. By returning to the archive

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and drawing together multidisciplinary discourses of medicine, film stardom and performance, we might better understand the way in which the performances of disability and disfigurement exhibited by Lon Chaney resonated in the 1920s.6

Facial Injury in Context Fundamental improvements in surgery and after-care pioneered at the beginning of the twentieth century meant that more men were saved on or from the battlefield during the First World War. Improved cleaning of wounds (debridement, which includes removing damaged tissue from wound and saline irrigation), the development of sterilizing equipment for surgery and more effective local and general anaesthesia all enabled medical practitioners to save men who would have perished in earlier wars.7 The technologizing of medical practice enabled a technologizing of the body, where surgery and prosthesis enabled men to become mobile and seen again. Most First World War wounds from battle, it is estimated two-­ thirds, were from artillery shells. These explosions wreaked havoc on the human body, blowing off limbs, taking large portions of skin and bone from the torso or creating life-changing physical damage to men’s faces such as can be seen in Fig. 2.1. These explosions would cause acute burn damage which required great care to avoid infection and needed delicate skin grafting, particularly to facial injury, to enable any chance of reintegration into civilian life. David Houston Jones and Marjorie Gehrhardt state that for French combatants the ‘frequency of facial injuries was unexpectedly high … 11–14% of all injuries sustained … affected the head and face.’8 Similarly, Joanna Bourke estimates that at least 60,500 British servicemen received severe wounds to the face or eyes.9 In the American Expeditionary Force (AEF), the quantity of men with facial injury numbered 8000 cases, 3000 cases of whom did not survive the treatment.10 Although the numbers of AEF serving men was lower than those of the European forces, and the amount of time that the United States was active in the war was much less, 19 months rather than 4 years, the impact of over 4 million men going to war in Europe was felt throughout the States of America. On 11 April 1919, the US services newspaper The Stars and Stripes carried an advertisement which invited members of the AEF to join ‘a great national veteran’s fraternity’. The Comrades in the Service association would it states, ‘cement the ties of comradeship formed in service.’

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Fig. 2.1  The American Expeditionary Force (AEF) soldier with burns damage to the face. The nose has been burnt way along with half the right check; burn damage to the right side of the face and underneath both eye sockets. ‘Facial Maxillary Surgery, LeMaitre Collection, World War I.’ (Reeve 34799) OHA 80 Reeve Photograph Collection. Otis Historical Archives, National Museum of Health and Medicine

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There is an emphasis in the advertisement that this association would be good for the wider society. It would be more than a mere association of men who have gone through danger and hardship together in the past. It should be one of the vital factors in American Life for the present generation.11

Veterans, the advertisement suggests, are certain to become a cultural locus for the continuation of a stable American society. At the end of the war, there were still two million American servicemen in France.12 All told 112,432 American men lost their lives; 57,036 died as a direct result of war and 55,396 servicemen died because of influenza.13 Circulating discourses about the war and its veterans appeared in major newspapers across the United States as early as 1917. In July of that year, The Washington Post features an article under the heading ‘Help the Crippled in War’. The article discusses philanthropist J.  Milbank and his generosity in donating ‘$50,000 and a building in New York to create an Institute where crippled soldiers and sailors will be instructed in trades and occupations that will make them self-supporting.’ With the help of Milbank’s donation, the Red Cross were to model this facility after the ‘best institutions of the kind in England, France and Canada.’14 The American Red Cross played a major part in providing wide-ranging support to veterans and families during and after the war. It was fundamental in assisting the Army with voluntary personnel, equipment and securing further buildings for use by the medical and administration teams both in France and the United States. Its reach was broad and enabling. For instance, Bostonian sculptor Anna Coleman Ladd travelled to France with her husband, leading Paediatrician Maynard Ladd, when he became the Deputy Commissioner of the Children’s Bureau of the American Red Cross. As will be discussed in Chap. 4, Coleman Ladd had read about the artistry of British sculptor Francis Derwent Wood. He worked with New Zealand plastic surgeon Harold Gillies in London and used his inventive skill to construct masks for British veterans whose life-­ changing facial injuries could be hidden enabling them to reintegrate better into civilian society. Coleman Ladd corresponded with Wood who shared his techniques, and she used her connection with the Red Cross to set up the Studio for Portrait Masks in late 1917 to do similar work for French and American soldiers. Coleman Ladd worked alongside the Army Maxillofacial and Plastic Surgery department at the American Red Cross

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Hospital #1, in the Paris District, which was led by the Commander of the United States Army Corps of Head and Neck Surgeons in France, Vilray Papin Blair, MD. In his role he approved the orders for Coleman Ladd to visit France and work with the wounded men in November 1917.15 Leading civilian surgeons such as Blair, who had been working at the Washington Hospital, St. Louis, Missouri, were commissioned into the Army to ensure that the injured veteran would have the best care. Blair was already considered to be the best in the profession having led the training of surgeons and published work on the ground-breaking surgical techniques he and his teams developed to treat children, particularly those born with a cleft pallet, and to treat facial injuries suffered from industrial work and transport accidents. He was called to active duty on 15 June 1917, two months into the United States entry to the war, after being commissioned as a Captain of the Medical Reserve Corps in May of the same year. He went overseas to France in April 1918 as Senior Consultant in Maxillo-Facial [stet] Surgery for the AEF. Before arriving in France, he spent all of May 1917 visiting Queen’s Hospital in Sidcup, England, to consult with surgeon, Harold Gillies, and to observe his developing techniques.16 In October 1918, Blair was promoted to Lt. Colonel.17 On his return to the United States, Blair visited hospitals in Maryland, New Jersey and New  York ‘for the purpose of conferring with the Commanding Officers and Chiefs of Surgical Services, and advising in all matters pertaining to Plastic and Oral Surgery.’18 He remained as part of the surgical leadership for the treatment of veterans, whilst returning to his post at Washington Hospital, St. Louis, until his honourable discharge in June 1919. He then continued working with the soldiers in his civilian capacity receiving extra remuneration from the Army until October 1922. Many specialised military facial injury clinics were set up both in Europe and the United States during and after the war. In a letter to a librarian in 1938, who was researching the history of facial surgery undertaken during the war, Blair outlined the history of the care for facially injured soldiers, stating that in ‘order to assure the best possible treatment of…prospective cases’ in the United States, the Surgeon General authorized three short-term courses of practical study and demonstration to which would be assigned certain medical and dental officers who had been selected to care for these cases both in the field and in the base hospitals…associating the dental and medical officers to work in conjunction at as many stations as seemed practical.19

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In the 1920s, interest in veterans returning from the end of the war was high in the American press although there was what Joe Kember describes as a ‘visual quarantine for injured faces’, a ‘cultural aversion’ in the press who preferred optimistic narratives of the potential for returning those facially injured back into society ‘not unlike that of others in appearance.’20 Kember argues that, while ‘American plastic surgery developed far more rapidly than in Europe or the rest of the world during the 1920s the First World War patients of plastic surgeons such as Blair’s remained remarkably silent throughout the period.’21 However, although veteran oral accounts may be few and far between in the press during the mid-1920s, the work of pioneering plastic surgeon Blair and sculptor Coleman Ladd’s mask artistry raised the level of visual interest with numerous newspaper articles detailing the work that they did to retrieve the look and the dignity of these injured men.

The Fascination of Facial Injury Surgery On 11 May 1919, an article in the St. Louis Daily Globe-Democrat describes the work being done at the Washington Hospital in St. Louis: Soldier boys from Illinois and Missouri with jaws shot away, every tooth gone and noses and cheeks cruelly torn are being restored to normal in New U.S.  Hospital at St. Louis. New jaws, new teeth and new cheeks, just as good as the old ones, only a slight scar tells tale.22

If only that had been the truth of it. Of course, the reality was very different, and many men were restored to having only functional use of their nose and mouth and were considered majorly disfigured by those who saw them; ‘disfigured’ being the then usual cultural term used to describe the injured face. The article outlines some of the ‘wonderous’ procedures that were used to reconstruct facial injury with fascination and without any mention of the pain or the toll that multiple operations took on the physical body and the emotions of a recovering soldier. Instead, the tone of the article is upbeat and enthralled. In a section entitled ‘Use Human Toes to Make Noses on Wounded’, the article details the possibilities for skin and bone grafting to enable an ‘autogenous application’ so that the soldier will still be ‘100% himself’ after surgery:

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Bits of the rib, the tibia (shinbone) and the crest of the ilium (hip) are found excellent for grafting and cartilage is also used. Skin flaps can be brought over skilfully from the cheek or the neck to cover drawn places where flesh is lacking. There will always be a puckered scar…but by marvellous skills and sometimes eight or ten operations, the drawn appearance is relieved after bone and tissue have been added, and all of this wonderful transformation is done long after the original injury.

This article also details how a toe can be grafted to a hand and then used as a substitute for a nose ‘after a suitable time’. As Blair’s detailed surgical notebooks on injured soldiers shows this ‘suitable time’ might take more than a year and sometimes nearly two for all surgical work to be undertaken. One soldier Private Clifford D Blair #100405 [no relation], from Company. C, 168 Infantry, required nearly two years of surgeries before his reconstruction was complete. His surgeries are listed by a surgeon working on General Blair’s team, Colonel W. D. Crosby, and indicate the longevity of treatment and recovery: Secondary plastic on nose Sept 19 1919; Preparatory neck for plastic nose Nov 24 1919; Preparation of flap preparatory to nose plastic Dec 4 1919; Resection of 5th left costal cartilage [at the anterior end of the ribs], for transplant in plastic nose Mar 26 1920; Secondary nose plastic April 21 1920; Plastic to increase breathing space in vestibule of nose Mar 2 1921; Enlarged breathing space by removing anterior nasal spine of maxilla and part of septum Mar 16 1921.23

These notes clarify the pain and time that is required for the men to become as fully reconstructed at the St Louis Globe article of May 1919 discusses. The notion that ‘only a slight scar tells tale’, becomes exposed as propagandist spectacle within the detail of the procedures and lived experience of the injured men.24 The positive narrative in the press of the miracle of plastic surgery was partially balanced out by articles that described more of the process of the transformation. An article appeared on 1 September 1919 in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch Daily Magazine, by Marguerite Martyn which dedicates two of its five columns to detailed descriptions of the surgeries that some of the soldiers endured to enable them to make it back to civilian life. The article starts rather flippantly with dark humour perhaps typical of the recovering soldiers:

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Have you always been a little dissatisfied with the shape of your nose? Then go to war for Uncle Sam, get it shot off, let his surgeons supply you with a new nose and have it made to your liking.

The article goes on to explain that a public exhibition of ‘casts, photographs and drawings of facial cases in various stages of progress is now hung in the Red Cross recreation pavilion at Jefferson Barracks, St. Louis of surgeries carried out by Col. Vilray P.  Blair and his teams.’25 It then discusses the work of portrait artist Mary Ridgeway Gilmer who is able to capture the progress of the surgeries and enable the surgeons to view sketches, alongside photographs, to plan the further surgeries. As Jason Bates points out in his exploration of the international sharing of medical practice, ‘photographs were used by surgeons to record and describe the visual properties of facial reconstruction and healing…to catalogue and archive types of facial injury so that surgical outcomes could be assessed with precision.’26 Here with Gilmer the surgeons are able to ‘dictate a diagram of the next steps to be taken.’ The artist also makes a sketch of what the final face might look like to give the surgeons more direction for their work. This innovation which was similarly used by Derwent Wood in his work with Harold Gillies at Queen’s Hospital, Sidcup, is applauded as is the versatility of the artist.27 The article does not show any of the images from the exhibition ‘out of consideration for the feelings of individual men disfigured in fighting for us.’ Martyn suggests that there is a ‘morbid curiosity from which possible sensitiveness should be shielded.’ And although her article starts with a wry comment, Martyn points out very clearly before detailing the work that is carried out on the men that, it is not contended that in acquiring these new and perfected features you do not undergo pain, most of the cases require many, many operations. Most of us would prefer our own features, such as they are, to undergoing the pain these soldiers do.

There is an ambivalence to the discussion, one that acknowledges the miraculous new surgical techniques but that also outlines the physical and emotional cost of the procedures. Some graphic detail of the result of the surgery that the men endure follows which, although not illustrated pictorially, does very clearly lay out the visceral extent of the medical techniques used. Martyn meets a limping

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soldier who is part way though his surgery and is recently recovering from having a piece of bone extracted from his shin. She explains that, he has lost his entire nose and part of his lower jaw in battle…two pieces of cartilage from his rib lay buried in his forehead. When the skin has grown over them they are to be cut loose except for a hinge through which the blood will still circulate, pulled down and bent to form the beautiful straight nose that Miss Gilmer has modelled in wax and which now lies detachable upon the cast of his face bereft of nose.

There is a need to show the grit and determination of the soldier, he is described as having ‘half a twinkle in each eye’, the only part of his face not covered in bandages and is being subjected to banter about his chances of being married. He is not able to respond to the jocular camaraderie as his mouth has a ‘system of wiring’ which holds his ‘jaws apart until a piece of bone taken from his leg has become grafted there.’ The shock of this graphic description is undercut by the discussion of the positive ‘spirit exhibited by any number of chaps’ as they learn to basket-weave and make rugs as part of their rehabilitation. This article is typical, although more detailed than most, in its response to discussions of the war injured. There is a general fascination with the process that the men go through to enable them to be returned to civilian society, a positive view of the work that is undertaken by the surgeons and artists and a reluctance to discuss the traumatic impact of the surgeries beyond the acknowledgement of pain. The article closes by confidently suggesting that the camaraderie and occupational therapies will ‘efface’ the memory of the suffering, ‘along with the surgeon’s work to removing the physical scars.’ The scope of the article makes it clear that the social impact of the returning facially inured veteran and his recovery is an important element of the post-war moment even if it is as Kember suggests of many of the newspaper articles published, an overly optimistic narrative.

Facial Injury and Film After the First World War, images of the traumatised and wounded veteran were largely missing from the Hollywood movie screen. Kember has identified and discussed four films which did focus narratively on the facially injured war veteran, but generally injury and trauma were not considered to be something that audiences would pay money to see no matter how

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large a part of real-life society these veterans would become.28 In her chapters on Elinor Glyn, Weedon compares the use of the image of the facially injured veteran by considering the attitude of the author in her portrayal of war veterans. Glyn overturns the negative image of the facially injured veteran who instead provides a romantic catalyst for the actions of the narrative, aligning her veteran with the positive image of the war hero. In Chaney’s film, the excessive graphic display of the facial injury offers a displacement within the horror genre illustrative of the concerns, anxieties and curiosity of the disfigured veterans in the United States and across Europe. In The Phantom of the Opera, the effects and consequences of the war, that is, the mass mutilation of men’s bodies and the return of those men to society, are displaced within a narrative of displayed disfigurement through Chaney’s characterisation. This displacement allows the discourse of disability and disfigurement a ‘safe’ space away from the mainstream, a space in which the horrors of the original site of injury (the war) is removed. The freak show style ‘grotesque’ body of the film provides a concealment of the anxieties pertaining to the bodies of war-maimed men in the social sphere and contains the anxieties of those that look on. We are alerted to the traumatic symptoms of the aftermath of the war through an ‘over-performance’ within Chaney’s characterisation. His unique use of make-up, prosthetic devices, costume and performance coupled with the (well-publicised) physical pain and damage that he endured to create the Phantom presents a paradoxical situation in which the absence (of veteran injury) is marked by an over-presence, an excess. This spectacle of excess provides for the audience a moment of stasis from the narrative, a moment to contemplate the horrific. Tom Gunning’s work on early cinema suggests that the early film ‘attraction’ (the single action shot and the trick film) does not disappear with the development of narrative cinema, rather it goes underground ‘both into certain avant-garde practices and as a component of narrative films, more evident in some genres…than others.’29 For Gunning, the ‘cinema of attractions’ is a cinema that ‘displays its visibility, willing to rupture the self-enclosed fictional world for a chance to solicit the attention of the spectator.’30 Chaney’s appearance and performance in The Phantom of the Opera utilises this ‘cinema of attractions’, highlighting the spectacle of the facially disfigured man and creating a moment of visual shock when the mask is removed from the Phantom, Erik’s (Lon Chaney) face by Christine Daaé (Mary Philbin).

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The Production of The Phantom of the Opera and the Anticipation of the Grotesque The Phantom of the Opera is set in Paris at the Opera House where a ghostly apparition haunts the halls and stairways and has been seen sitting in a box during the performances. Carlotta (Mary Fabian), the principal soprano, is threatened by ‘the phantom’, as he has become known, and warned to give up her lead role as Marguerite in the company’s performance of Faust for the chorus girl, Christine. She refuses, and chaos reigns on the opening night as the Phantom releases the central chandelier and sends it crashing into the auditorium; the audience run screaming from the theatre. The masked phantom visits Christine and he takes her to his underground home where she removes his mask and faints at the sight of his disfigured face. Meanwhile her fiancé, Vicomte Raoul de Chagny (Norman Kerry) and the Secret Chief of Police Ledoux (Arthur Edmund Carewe) are in pursuit to find Christine. Eventually the Phantom is chased out onto the streets of Paris where he dies. Christine and Raoul are reunited and married. Lon Chaney does not appear in the film until one-third into the narrative. His presence as star is clearly demarcated in the opening credits, Chaney’s name appearing first ‘as The Phantom’, and the audience must wait in anticipation for his on-screen appearance. The Phantom is glimpsed, however, as a shadow crossing the balconies and corridors of the theatre and as a mysterious patron in the opera box at the side of the stage. In the first scene, the owners of the theatre rush to the opera box to discover this man’s identity only to find that he has disappeared. Like Chaney’s off-­ screen persona, the Phantom can never be found and no one knows where he is. Willis Goldbeck suggested in 1923 that ‘when the cameras weren’t grinding there was no Lon Chaney.’31 This inter-textual connection between Chaney the publicity shy star and Chaney as Erik the Phantom adds to the expectation and tension that is created by the withheld disclosure of the Phantom’s appearance, both as physical apparition and as monstrous disfigured creature. As Gaylyn Studlar states, this was a ‘studio exploitation’, an expectation within the construction of the character and the marketing of the image that the ‘viewers of Chaney’s films in the 1920s anticipated the actor’s specialisation in representing the physically grotesque much as they later anticipated the appearance of stars who sang or danced in talkies.’32 This exploitation mimics that of the freak show where

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the Barker describes in sensational detail for the patrons the characters that they will see only once they have paid their entrance fee. The pre-publicity of The Phantom of the Opera was similarly hyperbolic in its descriptions of the spectacle that the audience could expect even beyond Chaney’s characterisation. A special edition magazine entitled, The Magic Book. About a Great Motion Picture, included pen and ink drawings of the set and a red gelatine movable sheet that could be placed over the image with the instructions to ‘look again. Strange things will happen but they are nothing compared to what you will see in The Phantom of the Opera.’33 The piece goes on to describe the ‘5000 people in the cast’ the ‘16,000lb chandelier fall…the phantom’s secret chambers of mystery…the chase after the phantom…and a hundred more of the greatest thrills you ever had.’34 The article’s tone is reminiscent of the Freakshow Barker, and this continues throughout the period of production to increase excitement and anticipation for the reveal of both the staging and Chaney. A pre-production newspaper article in October 1924 detailed some of the spectacular preparations for the filming, stating that there would be 60-ballerinas employed and that ‘this will be the largest ballet ever used in a motion picture and that ballet is to appear in hundreds of feet of film’ to produce ‘something new in terpsichorean novelties.’35 Nowhere is there any mention of Chaney. As Thomas Lockwood states, ‘no still pictures were allowed of him before the fifth reel was shown.’36 The anticipation of the reveal continues in the newspaper through October, drawn out in pre-­ production releases to the press detailing the extravagance of the sets. In the Hollywood Daily Citizen in October 1924, three weeks after the discussion of the ballet, it is repeated that the ballet ‘is said to be the largest ever used in a motion picture,’ and this time with ‘100 dancers.’37 The number of dancers is repeated several times throughout the article, and it is explained that the slanting stage, which had been specially designed, is being attempted for the first time in this country. Camera experts are also reported to be fascinated by the set as the ‘elevated stage will register on the film as a distinct novelty’ and they hope to be given ‘new ideas in photography.’38 Thomas Lockwood has noted that the theatrical spectacle was assisted by ‘300 stagehands and 11 sculptors working on the set to create the elaborate theatre staging.’39 The sumptuousness of the set design and extravagant cast is privileged over any description of what Chaney will invent to play his grotesque creation. The anticipation continues. The Phantom’s physical appearance is described in detail during the second scene of the film using inter-titles, as the prop-maker Buquet

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(Bernard Siegel) explains to the young ballet dancers what he has seen in the past.40 This description foreshadows the appearance of Chaney and further adds to the anticipation for the audience. With exaggerated theatricality Buquet says, He is a grey shadow…his eyes are ghastly deep, like holes in a grinning skull. A few long, discoloured hairs draggle from his misshapen chin. His face is like leprous parchment, yellow skin strung tight over protruding bones…And his nose—there is no nose!

The prop-maker, like the Barker at the freak show, announces and anticipates the arrival of the Phantom by his animated macabre descriptions and melodramatic manner. The description could be that of any burn’s victim and in the post-war culture of 1925 and applicable to the faces of those soldiers with facial injury as seen in Fig. 2.1 and described in the newspaper reports.41 The life-size model head that rests in Buquet’s lap draws further attention to the artifice of created disfigurement. Chaney had such a model head and was ‘three months in preparation, experimenting with make-up’ for the role which took ‘three hours to apply’.42 The components of Chaney’s make-up case echo that of both the sculptor and the plastic surgeon; containing scalpels, fettling knives, modelling pens and brushes, putty, gutta percha, needles, clamps, wire and thread (Fig. 2.2). Chaney’s success in creating the haunting face that is exposed by Christine and that screams at the audience was achieved by painstakingly layering and moulding clay, mortician’s wax, gutta percha (as used by the dental surgeons), wires, putty, latex rubber, fish skin, pieces of animal bone and grease paint and liquid make-up to create skin and shadow, including dark brow lines, giving an overall look of the face of one that has been burnt. The high forehead, created by a rubber cap, and pieces of long hair flopped across the scalp suggest a burnt scalp where hair cannot now grow. His ears were glued to his head to give the appearance that they are burnt off. His apparent ‘suffering’ for this creation is curiously significant. To achieve the ‘nose-less’ look of Erik, Chaney created a misshapen putty nose attached to his own that needed a wire appliance to pull back his own nostrils which caused him to ‘bleed like hell.’43 Ironically, Chaney put himself through actual painful facial reconstruction to enable an authentic image of damage, even though the cause of the damage is never revealed. The visual propinquity to the facially injured and reconstructed

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Fig. 2.2  Lon Chaney with his theatrical make-up box. Public domain

soldier is compelling. Chaney’s facial construction echoes of both the pre-­ operative soldier whose faces were burnt, shell injured or chemically damaged by the weapons of war and the post-operative veteran whose healing skin grated faces have a taut, skeletal appearance and require wires to hold the nose in place until it is healed, and the graft takes (Fig. 2.3). The detailed case notebook kept by Blair listing the injuries and treatment of 92 patients at Washington Hospital, St Louis, admitted between April and May 1919 offers a snapshot of the types of facial damage that was common during the war.44 Using several of these cases as examples illustrates the way in which there is a clear intersection between the visualisation of the Phantom’s face, as designed and executed by Chaney and the damage and surgery of the facially disfigured veterans. In particular, the loss of a nose is extremely common, like the Phantom often ‘there was no nose’. There was a propensity of nose-less veterans, who required new and

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Fig. 2.3  Soldier with plastic nose graft held in place with metal clamps. Skin graft surgery to right cheek and nose still required. ‘Facial Maxillary Surgery, LeMaitre Collection, World War I,’ (Reeve 34800) OHA 80 Reeve Photograph Collection. Otis Historical Archives, National Museum of Health and Medicine

innovative surgeries to rectify, often requiring the graft of a bone to grow in the forehead for future use and the use of skin grafts producing, what the British soldiers being treated by Harold Gillies referred to as a ‘sausage’ to aid the reconstruction.45 Of the facially injured soldiers in Blair’s

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notebook, half needed reconstructive surgery to the nose. Private Lauride M. Lauridson noted by Blair as being from Viborg, South Detroit, and injured on 26 September 1918 required 60 days of treatment to repair the damage and one year of recovery and follow-up surgeries. Blair notes that the 25-year-old had been transferred from Fort Henry in April 2019 because ‘he has already received life-saving triage treatment but much of this needs to be removed before reconstruction can be undertaken.’ This was common. In the field the most important issue was bleeding. Men were stitched and repaired to enable the bleeding to stop, but the damage caused by this first response was often that infection had set into the wounds and meant that several new operations were needed before reconstruction could take place. When Private Lauridson was admitted, he had ‘the loss of the nose, lower half of the bridge, septum and columella. Soft tissue part cheek and part nose have been sutured across the lower part of the defect.’ In May 1919, he underwent his first major operation to ‘transplant piece of cartilage, from rib, under scalp to make future central cartilage in face close to each ala to make future wings of nose cartilage.’ Two subsequent operations were undertaken in July to complete the first ‘transplantation of cartilage in forehead.’46 The Appearance of the Phantom When the Phantom is finally revealed, the tension is created by the inquisitiveness of Christine, who stands in for the curiosity of the audience. Erik is at the theatre organ playing for Christine and enraptured by his own music. A point of view shot enables us to see the back of the Phantom swaying to the rhythm of his playing, as Christine does. The next shot cuts to an extreme close-up of his masked face, and his smile as he is cheered by the music as the camera pans out we see Christine’s fingers enter the frame above Erik’s shoulder and then move out again. There is a repeat of these three shots and then the hand moves into the frame closer this time. Again, the camera closes in on the face of Erik and then cuts to a medium shot of Christine and the Phantom in close proximity her hand nearly resting on his shoulder. A very quick edit takes us back to the close-up of the masked Erik and this time the hand enters the frame quickly and lifts the mask off Erik’s face just below the mouth. There is a swift extreme close­up as the Phantom opens his mouth and silently screams into the camera lens. His skeletal face is made all the more horrific by his clearly terrified

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Fig. 2.4  The Phantom is unmasked, cropped film frame. Author’s photograph

stare from the sunken eyes and the open mouth with the broken, missing and discoloured teeth (Fig. 2.4). Christine reveals the Phantom’s identity and the real face of Erik not to herself but to the audience. It is only after the audience have gasped (and there is evidence to suggest that they did) that Erik turns, and the next shot reveals the horrified face of Christine as she covers her eyes with her hands, an act of agency for those women in the audience who cannot bear to look any longer.47 The next shot is an advancing point of view shot towards Christine. Erik’s arms are held high as if to strike her and a fast cut to Christine shows her terrified stare (Fig. 2.5). The Phantom is revealed for the audience in a moment of shock and surprise that has followed a long period of anticipation. It does not advance the narrative for us to ‘see’ his disfigurement as this is never revealed to those that chase him and eventually hound him to his death in their rescue of Christine. This moment of spectacle is Christine’s, and she shares it with the audience. Variety stated that, ‘the kick of the picture is the

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Fig. 2.5  ‘Feast your eyes, glut your soul on my accursed ugliness’ cropped film frame. Author’s photograph

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unmasking’ and that it creates ‘a wallop that can’t miss its objective’.48 The make-up and horrific (and horrified) stare of the Phantom is a gratuitous device through which Chaney communicates with his audience. It is the performance of disfigurement that connotes his star status. The Phantom’s scream at his unmasking is not at Christine but at the audience. Chaney’s direct address ‘directly solicits the spectator attention’ and does, as Gunning suggests, incite ‘visual curiosity’ and supplies ‘pleasure through an exciting spectacle, a unique event.’49 However, Erik’s own horror at his unmaking and the horror that he sees displayed in the face of Christine allows for a feeling of sympathy towards what appears to be a facially injured man. Chaney’s performance as the disfigured ‘monster’ pivots on the notion of pathos rather than horror. Erik’s horror at his own appearance and at the response of others to it is greater than any fear that the viewer can have (Fig. 2.6). When Erik snarls at Christine to look at his damaged face; ‘Feast your eyes, glut your soul on my accursed ugliness’ he owns the power of the gaze, ensuring that he controls the narrative of the image, the ‘ugly’ damaged face is something that he claims for himself. These harsh words in the script are taken from the original novel by Gaston Leroux. In the novel Erik goes on to goad Christine with a threatening monstrousness for her insistence on seeing the face behind the mask, he says, ‘Well, are you satisfied? I’m a good-looking fella, eh?’ In the film, Erik falls back seemingly broken by the encounter. Rather than the aggression shown by Erik in the novel, Chaney plays out the shock at being revealed as traumatic and weakening. Chaney’s performance highlights the terror felt by Erik, the terror of being truly seen, the terror of the recognition of horror evident in his eyes; the terror of not being accepted and serves to highlight the horror of those that are facially disfigured. Will the shock of her returning gaze be too much to bear? Harold Gilles and Vilray Blair banned mirrors in their wards because they wanted to protect the men from seeing the full extent of their injuries, but Lindsey Fitzharris suggests that Gillies ‘inadvertently instilled in these men a belief that they had faces that weren’t worth looking at.’50 The confidence that they needed to recover from their injuries was undermined by their not being able to look and recuperate their image before they were seen by others. Here Chaney responds as one that cannot bear for his image to be seen, the taboo has been broken with his unmasking. In the 1925 shooting script Erik says as he dies, ‘All I wanted…was to have a wife…like everyone else.’ The pitiful cry of the facially disfigured man summarising the fear and concern of many post-­war injured.

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Fig. 2.6  The pathos of the monstrous Erik. Author’s photograph

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Conclusion The Phantom of the Opera re-locates and re-signifies the war experience of the facially injured soldier and becomes a site of fascination and spectacle for the audience. Variety’s review ends with a note of astonishment that ‘there are a majority of picturegoers who prefer this revolting sort of tale on the screen.’51 Its subsequent success proved that the audience did indeed enjoy watching the unmasking of the disfigured man.52 Chaney’s performance offers us a visual representation of mutilation and disfigurement, and becomes part of an already circulating discourse concerning the return of veterans whose physical and emotional scars become more apparent as the decade progresses.

Notes 1. Crutchfield, Susan ‘Film Studies and Disability Studies’, https://core. ac.uk/download/pdf/159560394.pdf, page 285. 2. Studlar, Gaylyn. 1996. ‘Sideshow Oedipus: Lon Chaney and Film’s Freak Possibilities’ in This Mad Masquerade: Stardom and Masculinity in the Jazz Age, New York: Columbia University Press, pp. 199–248. 3. For a fuller description and history of the Freak Show, see Bogdan, Robert, 1988. Presenting Human Oddities for Amusement and Profit, University of Chicago Press: Woolf, John, 2019. The Wonders: Lifting the Curtain on the Freak Show, Circus and Victorian Age, London: Pegasus. 4. Studlar (1996, p. 238). 5. Studlar (1996, p. 238). 6. See Randell, Karen ‘Masking the horror of trauma: the hysterical body of Lon Chaney’ in Screen 44 (2), pp. 216–221, 2003; ‘Mad love: The anxiety of difference in the film of Lon Chaney Snr’ in Karen A. Ritzenhoff and Karen Randell, 2012. Screening the Dark Side of Love: from Euro-horror to American Cinema, London: Palgrave. 7. For a fuller discussion of details of medical intervention, see www.worldwar1centennial.org/index (accessed 26/02/2023). 8. Houston Jones, David and Marjorie Gehrhardt, 2015. Paddy Hartley of Faces and Facades, London: Black Dog Publishing, p. 7. 9. Bourke, Joanna. 1996. Dismembering the Male: Men’s bodies, Britain and the Great War. London: Reaktion Books. p. 33. 10. Letter from Vilray Blair to the Librarian of the City Art Museum of St. Louis, Miss O. D. Stewart, 22 December, 1938. ‘The Surgeon General’s Office shows record of more than 8000 injuries of the face and jaws; of these 3000 died of their wounds’. Vilray P. Blair. Box 7:43. Archives and

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Rare Books reading room, Bernard Becker Medical Library, Washington University, St Louis, USA. 11. Stars and Stripes, USA, Friday 11 April, 1919, p.  3. The Newspaper Morgue. Center for American History, The University of Texas in Austin. 12. Stars and Stripes, 1919, p. 3. 13. http://spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/USAcasualties.htm. The cultural impact of these losses should not be underestimated when we consider that the loss during the American action in the Vietnam War (1964–1973) was 57,939 American serving personnel. 14. Washington Post, 9 July 1917. The Newspaper Morgue. Center for American History. The University of Texas at Austin. 15. ‘Woman Sculptor Will Mend Mutilated Faces’ in Star, 8 November 1917. Box 22, Military Memorabilia. File, FC025 22. Archives and Rare Books reading room, Bernard Becker Medical Library, Washington University, St Louis, USA. 16. For histories of the work of Harold Gillies, see Bamji, Andrew, 2022. Faces from the Front: Harold Gilles, The Queen’s Hospital, Sidcup and the Origins of Modern Plastic Surgery, Warwick, Helion and Company: Fitzharris, Lindsey, 2022, The Facemaker: One Surgeon’s Battle to Mend the Disfigured Soldiers of World War I, London, Allen Lane. 17. Military Curriculum Vitae dated 13 March 1919. Box 22, Military Memorabilia. File, FC025 22. Archives and Rare Books reading room, Bernard Becker Medical Library, Washington University, St Louis, USA. 18. ‘Travel Orders, War Department, The Adjutant General’s Office, Washington, 4 January 1919.’ Box 22, Military Memorabilia. File, FCO25 22. Archives and Rare Books reading room, Bernard Becker Medical Library, Washington University, St Louis, USA. 19. Letter from Vilray Blair to the Librarian of the City Art Museum of St Louis, Miss O. D. Stewart, 22 December, 1938. Vilray P. Blair. Box 7:43. Archives and Rare Books reading room, Bernard Becker Medical Library, Washington University, St Louis, USA. 20. ‘Advanced Surgery to be Feature of New St. Louis Hospital for Soldiers.’ 1919. St Louis Post-Dispatch. 2 April, pp. 3–4, quoted in Joe Kember, Face Value: The Rhetoric of Facial Disfigurement in American Film and Popular Culture, 1917–1927. Journal of War & Culture Studies 10 (1):43–65. 21. Joe Kember, 2017. Face Value: The Rhetoric of Facial Disfigurement in American Film and Popular Culture, 1917–1927. Journal of War & Culture Studies 10 (1):43–65. 22. ‘Re-Making Faces’, St. Louis Daily Globe-Democrat, May 11, 1919. Box 22, Scrapbook Contents. FCO25 22:4. Archives and Rare Books reading room, Bernard Becker Medical Library, Washington University, St Louis, USA.

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23. Operative Report, ‘Office of the Surgeon, Jefferson Barracks, Missouri, 18 April 1921’ from W. D. Crosby, Colonel Medical Corps Surgeon to Dr. V. P. Blair. In Vilray P. Blair, Box 23, 6811 Faculty Collection 25. Folder Patient Materials Restricted. Archives and Rare Books reading room, Bernard Becker Medical Library, Washington University, St Louis, USA. 24. Other nose surgeries were performed on Pvt Clifford Blair, Fontenelle, Iowa #100,703 Nose injury (has lost nose) Operation April 21, 1919, to add a plastic nose; Pvt Herbert A Eckland Injured September 14 1918 Fort Dodge, Iowa—no nose; Pvt Anthony Laurich #2,105,285 Cleveland, Ohio Injured July 18, 1918, plastic nose, lip and chin; Pvt Alexander C. Nisbet #2,786,453 Evanston, Wyoming Injured September 28, 1918, nose injury and replacement; 2nd Lt. James H McManus, Brooklyn, NYC Nose; Discharged to duty: Cpl. Percy E. Holverson Injured June 13, 1918, Neehah, Wisconsin. Tip of Nose replaced; Capt. Edgar G. Westlake, Clay City, Ky Plastic nose. Vilray P. Blair, Box 23, 6811 Faculty Collection 25. Folder Patient Materials Restricted 1912–1920 Exact typed notes in notebook. Archives and Rare Books reading room, Bernard Becker Medical Library, Washington University, St Louis, USA. 25. Martyn, Marguerite. ‘Woman Portrait Painter Giving Soldiers New Faces Here in St. Louis’ St. Louis Post-Dispatch Daily Magazine, 1 September, 1919. Box 22, Scrapbook Contents. FCO25 22:4. Archives and Rare Books reading room, Bernard Becker Medical Library, Washington University, St Louis, USA. 26. Jason Bate, At the Cusp of Medical Research: Facial Reconstructive Surgery and the Role of Photography in Exchanging Methods and Ideas (1914–1920) in Visual Culture in Britain, 2016 p. 76. 27. Martyn, Marguerite. Woman Portrait Painter Giving Soldiers New Faces Here in St. Louis, St. Louis Post-Dispatch Daily Magazine, 1 September, 1919. Box 22, Scrapbook Contents. FCO25 22:4. Archives and Rare Books reading room, Bernard Becker Medical Library, Washington University, St Louis, USA. 28. Gigilo (1926, William K.  Howard); Face Value (1927, Robert Florey); Back to Life (1925, Whitman Bennett); Skin Deep (1922, Lambert Hillyer). 29. Gunning, Tom, 1990. Cinema of Attractions: Early Cinema, its Spectators and the Avant Garde, in Thomas Elsaesser ed., Early Cinema: Space, Frame, Narrative, London: BFI, p. 57. 30. Gunning, in Elsaesser ed. 1990, p. 57. 31. Goldbeck, Willis. 1923. ‘The Star Sinister’, in Classic November, p. 63, 90. BFI Archive. 32. Studlar (1996. p. 238).

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33. The Magic Book. About a Great Motion Picture [not dated]. In Production Notes file, The Phantom of the Opera, Margaret Herrick Library, Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. 34. The Magic Book. About a Great Motion Picture, p 4. 35. ‘Ballet Dancers in Universal Film.’ Hollywood Daily Citizen, October 3, 1924. Production Notes file, Phantom of the Opera, Margaret Herrick Library, Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. 36. Lockwood, Thomas ‘In Search of the Phantom’ in Theatre Organ, Vol. 15. No 5 (1973) October, p. 19. 37. ‘Slanting Stage to be Utilised, Rupert Julian Will Attempt Innovation in the New Film Setting.’ Hollywood Daily Citizen, October 31, 1924. Production Notes file, Phantom of the Opera, Margaret Herrick Library, Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. 38. Hollywood Daily Citizen, 1924. 39. Lockwood, Thomas ‘In Search of the Phantom’ in Theatre Organ, Vol. 15. No 5 (1973) October, p. 19. 40. An ironic twist to use this character as the narrator because he specialises in artifice as Chaney does. 41. For a detailed histories of facial disfigurement see; Bamji, Andrew, 2017. Faces From the Front: Harold Gillies, The Queen’s Hospital, Sidcup and the Origins of Modern Plastic Surgery, Warwick, Helion and Company; Fitzharris, Lindsey, 2022. The Facemaker: One Surgeon’s Battle to Mend the Disfigured Soldiers of World War I, London, Allen Lane. 42. Lockwood, Thomas ‘In Search of the Phantom’ in Theatre Organ, Vol. 15. No 5 (1973) October, p. 19. 43. MacQueen, Scott. 1989. ‘The Phantom of the Opera—Part II’, American Cinematographer October, p. 35. 44. Vilray P. Blair, Box 23, 6811 Faculty Collection 25. Folder Patient Materials Restricted 1912–1920 Typed notes in notebook. Archives and Rare Books reading room, Bernard Becker Medical Library, Washington University, St Louis, USA. 45. Bamji, Andrew, 2022. Faces from the Front: Harold Gillies, the Queen’s Hospital, Sidcup and the origins of modern plastic surgery, Warwick, Helion & Company. 46. Vilray P. Blair, Box 23, 6811 Faculty Collection 25. Folder Patient Materials Restricted 1912–1920 Typed notes in notebook. Archives and Rare Books reading room, Bernard Becker Medical Library, Washington University, St Louis, USA. 47. Anon. 1925. ‘In the theatre last night, a woman behind us stifled a scream when this happened.’ The Phantom of the Opera, Review, New York Times, 7 September. BFI Archive.

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48. Anon. 1925 ‘The Phantom of the Opera,’ Review, Variety, 9 September. BFI Archive. 49. Gunning, in Elsaesser ed. 1990, p. 58 50. Fitzharris, Lindsey, 2022, The Mirrorless Ward in The Facemaker: One Surgeon’s Battle to Mend the Disfigured Soldiers of World War I, London, Allen Lane, pp. 105–121. 51. ‘The Phantom of the Opera’, Review, Variety, September 9, 1925. BFI Archive. 52. The Phantom of the Opera earned over $2,000,000 in revenue, one of the largest figures for any silent film. ­ (www.members.aol.com/ ChaneyFan/141.htm).

CHAPTER 3

Beauty Regimes, Facial Surgery and Elinor Glyn’s Such Men Are Dangerous

INT. BEDROOM Close shot of Ludwig in front of mirror—back to camera. The Image of the street girl is superimposed beside his reflected face … and he hears: STREET GIRL Not for all the money in the world would I marry a man with a face like that. FADE OUT ENTIRE SCENE. Script, Such Men Are Dangerous

Abstract  Elinor Glyn’s response to the life-saving work of plastic surgery during the First World War was to write stories about how injured men could win back romance in their lives. This chapter focuses on Glyn’s exploration of how a person can, through surgery, change their physical appearance and have ‘It’. Using archival materials and scripts, Weedon shows how Glyn taps into the growing number of essentially positive tales of plastic surgery on screen including her own Such Men Are Dangerous. Keywords  Facial disfigurement • Veteran • First World War • Silent film • Visual culture • Elinor Glyn • Plastic surgery • Romance • Archives • Such Men Are Dangerous

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 K. Randell, A. Weedon, Transforming Faces for the Screen, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-40029-2_3

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The Cosmetic Surgery and the Desire to Have ‘It’ In June 1932, Mr Maxwell KC asked the male jurors present to consider ‘Wherein lies a woman’s charm? Is it in her looks or does one find it in that elusive quality so aptly described by Elinor Glyn as ‘It’?’ They were deciding on the extent of damages to be awarded to Miss Atholene Strachan, a victim of a car accident who had been left scarred on her face and legs. The newspaper report was accompanied by a picture of her legs and observed that she had become a ‘wallflower at dances’.1 Maxwell sets ‘good looks’ against having ‘It’ in a deeply gendered definition of the effect of disfigurement on a woman’s future. This chapter examines how Elinor Glyn’s knowledge of the plasticity of the body, won through her unique and punishing beauty regime, was brought into her film stories. Elinor Glyn is cited as an authority on what makes women attractive in this court case. Icon of romance and pioneer2 of the silver screen, many of Elinor Glyn’s stories rework a beauty-and-the-beast fairy tale. Her definition of sexual attraction as ‘having “It”’ had entered popular discourse and enabled the discussion of sexology in the press. Maxwell’s comment comes two years after the release of the film of her magazine story ‘Such Men Are Dangerous’ in which Glyn explores how a person can, through surgery, change their physical appearance and have ‘It’. Deeply affected by the war’s ‘dismemberment of the male’, to use Joanna Bourke’s words, Glyn’s response to the effect of the war on the class of soigné English gentleman she so admired, was to write stories about how men could win back romance in their lives. In the war, plastic surgery had been life-saving for veterans, but this narrative swiftly died away in the 1920s.3 Moving with the societal changes of the time and to address the wider audience of the cinema, the class of British landed gentleman from which she drew her hero in Man and Maid (Schertzinger 1925) was replaced by international businessmen, seen in the films of ‘It’ (Badger 1927) and Such Men Are Dangerous (Hawks 1930). Even so her heroes remained rich and leaders in their own sphere. In 1929, Glyn reconnects with it through the needs of a male protagonist and taps into the growing number of essentially positive tales of plastic surgery on screen. She was challenging a popular discourse which said that cosmetic surgery was the province of hysterical women and charlatans when she wrote about plastic surgery’s transformative power for the self. In This Mortal Coil, Fay Bound Alberti refers to the ‘straightforward’ moral and ethical basis of First World War reconstructive surgery,

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compared to the contested value of cosmetic procedures.4 Cosmetic surgeons had had to defend their reputation against allegations of charlatanism and feeding vanity. In 1926, the French surgeon Dr Suzanne Nöel published La Chirurgie Esthétique: Son Rôle Social [Cosmetic Surgery: Its Social Role] in which she cited examples of her practice which had enabled people to get the jobs—and acceptance by society—that they needed. Surgery, Nöel argued, had a social as well as a medical function and helped people in genuine distress. She had learned techniques from observing surgeons treat veterans of the First World War. ‘Some of the most brilliant surgical work she had ever seen was done by the French’, had said an English observer in France in 1916, ‘Some of the finest work was that in relation to facial reconstruction’.5 Such war work was widely admired, and when a newspaper reported the Military Surgeon’s International Conference in 1918, they said excitedly that it showcased the latest developments in the medical, surgical and educational treatment of the disabled. The reporter particularly admired the exhibition of facial reconstruction which illustrated ‘how a man’s face, from battered mass, was made to present normal facial characteristics.’6 Although held in London, it attracted the best military surgeons in the world. Yet this confidence had largely been lost in the 1920s, and Nöel was responding to the concerns of her fellow surgeons and the wider audience of lay people about the value and risk of such surgery. She addressed their latent anxiety about the lack of medical rigour behind the treatments, seeking to allay fears of pain and disfigurement if things went wrong. There were some notorious and much publicised court cases as when in 1927 a London Hystogen Institute surgeon was sued by his receptionist who claimed damages for injury to her eyelids after an operation to make her a ‘walking advertisement’ for the centre.7 Not only had the operation left a scar but she had been sacked from her employment and her fiancé who was an assistant surgeon had broken his engagement. The defence argued that the scar was there beforehand; the case was dismissed and the story did not have a Glyn-esque romantic ending. In the double standard of beauty, ‘femininity, unlike masculinity, was not related to the ability to work but the ability to attract men sexually.’8 The argument that a ‘ruined’ body affected a woman’s ability to work was harder to sustain. Carloyn Comiskey researched a case in Paris in 1929 which was reported in both the French and British press. Suzanne Goeffre LeGuen had been the head of a large workroom in a fashion firm until she started her own Maison de Couture. Although moderately successful, she believed her heavy legs held

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her back in a business where good looks were essential. So she chose to have cosmetic surgery. Afterwards she found she had lost all feeling in her foot, and she got gangrene and had to have her leg amputated. She sued for half a million francs in damages. The judge awarded less than half (200,000 Francs). Comiskey observed that ‘Given the primitive prostheses of the 1920s, there was no way society could re-feminise Geoffre’s body,’9 adding ‘a woman with an amputated leg might have conjured images of wounded soldiers from the war.’ In the history of visual culture as Randell has shown in Chap. 2, military medical photographs taken during the war gave way to illustrated newspaper articles on the transformational procedures which could be had by anybody. The link was overt as in The Birmingham Age-Herald’s magazine headline ‘How the Plastic Surgeons, Profiting by Their War Experiences, Reshape Thick, Amazonian Limbs Into the Slender, Graceful Ones Essential to Present-Day Beauty’ in 1924 (Fig.  3.1). The use of Novocaine as a local anaesthetic and modern hospital conditions have, the journalist argued, rendered the operation ‘practically devoid of danger’.10 Sometimes these features were written about a particular surgeon: for example, in 1925, Dr Raymond Passot visited London to lecture at the Institute Français on his Chirurgie Esthétique pure11 and was later interviewed in The Sphere magazine, with before-and-after profile pictures of cases. ‘New faces for Old’ showed ear tucks, nose reduction, formation of a ‘Classical profile’ and taking a quarter of a century off the looks of a 70-year-old woman.12 The article emphasised the efficiency and painlessness of such operations in the hands of a skilled medic. As the cultural standards of beauty differed between America and France, so did the reasons patients wanted cosmetic surgery. ‘Many Europeans used cosmetic surgery to alter their racial appearances’ Comiskey says and some ‘new surgical procedures could aid individuals in passing as higher class.’13 In America, it was initially only movie stars who could afford to have these operations and had them clandestinely, but as clinics opened, cosmetic surgery became accessible for those who wanted to improve their fortunes in business and through their personal attraction. In 1930, O.O. McIntyre alleged that ‘Some 500 plastic surgeons and at least a dozen private home sanitariums’ in New  York attend to the growing demand and ‘4,000 faces have been reconstructed since the advent of movies and talkies.’14 Having lived in Los Angeles, Glyn was fully aware of the ‘beauty farms, rejuvenation palaces and plastic surgery emporiums that have sprung up around the movie center like mushrooms

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Fig. 3.1  The Birmingham Age-Herald. (Birmingham, Ala.) August 24, 1924, MAGAZINE SECTION, Image 46, Chronicling America. Lib. of Congress

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in a shady glen’ as Dorothy Manners wrote in her investigation for Motion Picture magazine in 1929. On visiting one of them, the journalist was greeted by ‘a gracious and well-preserved hostess who is referred to as Madame, high priestess of double chins, vibrator treatments, baths, massages, and violet-ray cures. Madame very graciously explains her miraculous treatment.’15 However, she observed that these establishments did not do the surgery themselves but referred their clients to a specialist clinic in which they trusted. This referral system was one way to build trust and surgeons developed professional reputations and personal celebrity. Alongside this was the rise of brands which came with the bourgeoning beauty industry and provided creams, soaps, elixirs and advice on how to preserve your youth to the magazine reader. In the mise-en-page of magazines such as Photoplay, and Cosmopolitan, illustrated advertisements for face masks echoed the images of masked veterans, and lay side by side with the stories of transformation (Fig. 3.2). Glyn endorsed Lux soap (Fig. 3.2) and appeared in magazine advertisements, but she was careful about how her persona was used, preferring to give advice or comment on how to have ‘It’ rather than on the qualities of the product.16 She wrote many advice columns as well as a book for women on how to make themselves attractive and keep their youthful looks. This involved workouts for the muscles and self-restraint at the table, but also mental and spiritual exercises for the mind. She avoided commenting on cosmetic surgery or recommending clinics. Yet her personal correspondence shows she did respond to the Hilde Heide Studio in San Francisco when they wrote a fan letter to her asking for an autographed photograph of her for their wall. So enamoured were they of her book Eternal Youth (1928) that they handed out copies to their clients who studied conversation, deportment, beauty and artistic make-up there. In her book, Madame Glyn plays up to her role and advises women ‘to keep the elasticity of youth by thinking young, revel in movement, in change and new things.’ And to ‘remember that love is first drawn by the eye even if he is held by the mind.’17 How celebrity and personal branding were performed was inextricably linked with national culture and was highly gendered. For Glyn, it was always coupled with having ‘It’.

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Fig. 3.2  Advertisement for a beauty mask, Photoplay magazine, April 1927, p. 130. Public domain

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The Moral Quandary of Surgical Transformation in 1920s Culture Joseph Roth’s more positive depiction of the plastic surgeon’s art was published in 1921. ‘Der Wiederaufbau des Menschen’ [The Reconstruction of Man] is darkly humorous about the possibilities of surgery to redeem character and moves from the reconstruction of the veteran’s damaged body to the unfortunate whose facial features put him or her at a disadvantage and needed ear tucks or ‘nose jobs’. Erica Weitzman says that Roth’s story is a plea to fund Dr Jacques Joseph’s clinic at Berlin’s Charité Hospital which he ran from 1916 to 1922. Joseph was a pioneering surgeon who published Nasenplastik und sonstige Gesichtsplastik, a textbook with medical images of rhinoplasty and breast surgery (1931) and drew his client base mainly from Berlin’s Jewish community.18 In Roth’s story, the wax replicas of patients’ original injuries are on display, and like the masks of veterans, these (literally) disembodied sculptures raise existential questions about the possibility of medical transformation. Weitzman observes that ‘these semi-healed invalids or clay Adams under the hand of the “Neuschöpfer” Dr. Joseph […are] on the very border between the thingy and the anthropological—between the no longer inanimate and the not yet living.’19 The trope of the disfigured war veteran as the living dead becomes in Roth a surreal limbo, and the clinic is a place where man, the recreator, takes on the god-like role of sculpting being out of nothing. The imperfect technology of the war, which had been used to persecute and dismember, was appropriated to reconstruct the survivors. By 1921, physical appearance had become malleable by the human hand, and its plasticity in Roth’s story is extended to the character. Similarly, when Glyn’s hero travels across Europe to Vienna for his facial surgery to a clinic which he had funded after the war, he is seeking physical transformation, but the process changes his inner being. In the popular discourse of beauty and ugliness, these were gargoyles, distorted or faceless sculptures hiding under the eaves of buildings. First World War soldiers often referred to themselves as broken gargoyles. Although the term was most common in Europe where Gothic Cathedrals boasted some virtuoso carvings, gargoyles existed on buildings in America too. One such is Dudley Pratt’s image of a grotesque on Smith Hall, University of Washington, competed in 1938, which shows a tin-hatted gas-masked soldier with a gun and hand grenade (it is not a co-incidence that Vilray Blair had founded the first Division of Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery at University’s School of

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Medicine in 1925). Significantly, Pratt’s gargoyle is not a broken face, it is a technologized face (Fig.  3.3). The eyes are two circles, and the mask hides the nose and mouth, while a tube like a prosthetic nose feeds into a

Fig. 3.3  Glyn’s endorsement of Lux soap advertisement from The Washington Times, 3 June 1930. Chronicling America, Lib. of Congress

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rectangular box, like a graft of skin growing out of the face to be cut and sewn later in surgery. The face is unreadable, and technology which protects also alienates. The indexical link between face and character has been severed and it depicts the latent fear of the technologizing of the body. On screen some films explicitly referenced plastic surgery in the exploration of the connection between the face and inner character. The film Skin Deep (Lambert Hillyer, 1922) shows that the connection between ugliness and criminal activity is a false one and is born of social prejudice. Joe Kember argues that the film depicts the power of plastic surgery to cure a man’s moral disposition in a reversal of Cesare Lombroso’s criminology (see also Chap. 5). The story has some similarities with Glyn’s later film, in plot where both heroes fall from a plane, and in the spiritual theme of redemption. In Skin Deep, the hero is a gangster whose face is marred by his crimes, but in the war he reforms. When he falls from a plane and is badly disfigured, Dr Langdon creates a new face for him and he enters into new and better life. This exploration received some critical acclaim and made it into Photoplay’s best six of the month.20 In many places in America, perhaps because of its social message, it was the choice of film screened on armistice day, and according to Kember, Vilray Blair’s colony of facial patients were invited to a special showing in St Louis. Tales of the power of the surgeon to restore men’s confidence were not all linked with the war. In the same year, John Fleming Wilson’s short story ‘The Man Who Married His Own Wife’ was turned into a film (Stuart Paton 1922). Wilson, a merchant seaman and journalist who wrote for Hearst’s International Magazines like Glyn, was tapping into the rising interest in plastic surgery and the discourse on romantic love. The story is about sea captain disfigured when saving an heiress at sea. Although they marry, he does not believe his wife loves him and so disappears to have facial surgery. He later learns that in fact she has always loved him. In this story, as in Defying Destiny (Louis Chaudet 1923) and Glyn’s film, the opportunity to come back unrecognised and exact revenge is a motivating factor. The male-orientated movie stories of the early 1920s were later challenged by tales about the transformational power of plastic surgery on women. ‘Il était une fois’ was a 1930s play by Francis de Croisset about a disfigured girl which was made into a French film in 1933, Swedish one in 1938 and an American one in 1941.21 It tells of a girl whose face is burnt as a child and who grows up to become a thief and blackmailer. A significant moment in the story is when, operated on by the plastic surgeon, the

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heroine is torn by the hope of the possibility of a new future and escape from the past. Capturing this moment on screen is great acting part for a woman, and it is unsurprising that it attracted the stars Gaby Morlay in 1933, Ingrid Bergman in 1938 and Joan Crawford in 1941. The existential crisis, the nature of attraction and of goodness as well as the temptation to exact revenge with new identity explored in this play and the films are themes which we shall see later in Such Men Are Dangerous. First we must look at how Elinor Glyn addressed the moral quandary of physical transformation and the possibilities of surgical intervention to hold back the signs of ageing.

Elinor Glyn’s Eternal Youth and Embodied Knowledge The curious Suzanne Nöel had knocked on Sarah Bernhardt’s door in 1912 to talk to the legendary actresses about the work she had had done in Chicago which removed the creases round the eyes. Her temerity paid off and what she learned of this early example of the procedure she put to good use in her own practice. It took courage to approach Bernhardt as she was not only a giant of the stage, she was a French national icon. Later, in First World War when she was in her seventies, she performed at Verdun and Argonne to soldiers before they went into battle. She had had her leg amputated in Paris in 1915 due to gangrene, yet continued to perform sitting or propped up on pillows to great acclaim. It was around this time that Elinor Glyn met her and had a frank conversation about the men they had known.22 The 20 years difference in age must have shown Glyn how she could preserve youthful beauty well into old age. It came at an important moment in Glyn’s life. Her humiliation at George Curzon’s announcement of his engagement in the newspaper and their complete estrangement after they had been lovers for years lead her to declare that she ‘died in 1917’. Curzon had chosen a younger wife who could still bear him a son, and Glyn was past child-bearing, but was to be fuelled by the sexual and physical energy which the hormonal changes of the menopause brings some women in the following decade. The trauma of the rejection of her love and the knowledge that she was not attractive enough to be wanted any more became a motivation. This event, and the circumstances of the war, determined her never to look or act old.

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From early womanhood, Glyn had a reputation as a red-haired beauty and was painted by Philip de László more than once. She worked to preserve that beauty and create the allure she called ‘It’. But how to keep that through her fifties was a more difficult task. She proved to be successful. As a journalist who interviewed her at the age of 63 commented: The sunlight is shining mercilessly on her face. Can you find a single line in it? No, you can’t. Her hair is under your scrutiny—is there anything wrong about its blazing colour? No, there isn’t. You see how directly she holds herself? How proud is the line her chin? How beautifully everything about her is cared for—her hands, her nails, her teeth, her eyes? She looks as though she had just emerged from a bath of milk. She’s not young woman.23

She commissioned many photographs for her professional image when she wrote for Hearts Illustrated magazines in her later life. These were printed in newspapers, above adverts and alongside her articles and showed an unageing face in full face or in a profile view with the sharp right angle of neck and chin. Private family portraits exist in her archive of her; the earlier ones taken of her dressed for a ball, the later ones with her mother, and show Glyn’s characteristic pose staring directly and unsmilingly at the camera, eyes outlined for emphasis. The photojournalistic images that exist confirm the preservation of her face and archival movie footage of Glyn with the de Lászlós reveals a ready engagement with the camera, a direct gaze into the lens while joking with her company (Fig. 3.5).24 How she achieved this effect was the subject of many of her interviews and articles, and what she said in public and what she did privately or ‘clandestinely’ like the stars differed; she never appears to have said in print that she had any surgery. To the journalists she advocated self-discipline:25 ‘Everywhere I see people who are eating too much, they are drinking too much, they are smoking too much. They allow themselves to stoop, to slouch, they let their fingers become stained and their bodies swollen.’26 They are, she said, killing themselves by what they put in their mouths. She recommended juice instead of cocktails, laying flat on your back for an hour to improve posture, sleeping in fresh air with your head to the north and wearing a mask of beauty clay. She urged women to study themselves, practice movements privately, but then let them become natural because to become self-conscious destroyed ‘It’. Glyn advocated dancing as an exercise and was herself a keen dancer, partnering younger men and teaching them the art of romance. As importantly as these physical acts, she

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advocated toning the mind to be as flexible as a young person’s and steering clear of temper and negativity with positive mantras. Her grandson and biographer Anthony Glyn said she ‘never disdained the use of artifice, employing everything from the secret treatment of El-Zair to the more commonplace face creams.’27 Her publication of The Wrinkle Book (1927), quite probably a collaboration with her niece, but with her endorsement in the form of a foreword, provided practical exercises of the facial muscles including that rightangled jaw line. Cecil Beaton who photographed her said after her death; ‘with her accustomed thoroughness, she taught herself all about the muscles of the face. She discovered that for every sagging muscle there was some basic exercise that could be done to tone it up.’28 Her book was illustrated with line drawings, reminiscent of medical diagrams for incisions and stretches of the skin for face lifts, but showing the muscular actions needed to hone the face (Figs. 3.6 and 3.7). She used iced water as a beauty aid, brushing her face to exfoliate (as supposedly did Joan Crawford in biopic Mommie Dearest 1981), and practised her exercises daily. Her red hair (and hair extensions) was plaited round her head in a timeless Hellenistic style (Fig. 3.4). Looking at Glyn’s face through the ‘cruel lens of the camera’, Cecil Beaton observed that her face was ‘moulded in a rigid cast; the eyes appeared unseeing, but without even a spider’s web line at their corners.’29 As Glyn’s reflect in the American edition of her book Eternal Youth ‘What a pair of magic words!—and what do they mean?’ and answered, keen sight and hearing, and ‘to revel in movement—in change, in new things. To have vitality which allows the muscles elasticity enough to dance—to have the quick mind which can flash in the uptake’.30 Seeking youth was not all about seeking beauty. In an era where the gap between generations caused by the war had led to social and familial breakdown, keeping young meant embracing change and new ways of being. The secrets of preserving youth and having ‘It’ was the knowledge she could offer when she travelled from Britain to Hollywood to work with actresses—stars the age of her daughters—in the early 1920s. In her nine years in Hollywood, she taught Gloria Swanson and Rudolf Valentino ‘the art of making love before a camera in a way that would carry conviction and thus produce emotion in everyone who saw the film.’31 Baron Adolf de Meyer, the great camera artist, ‘was the first to use “back-lighting” so that his female sitters were seen as the most ethereal,’ but it ‘was one of Mrs Glyn’s contributions to the screen that her heroines were lit so that

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Fig. 3.4  Gargoyle by Dudley Pratt on University of Washington’s Smith Hall 1938. Hbobrien image cropped, greyscale, wikicommons CC-BY-SA 3.0

Fig. 3.5  Photograph of Elinor Glyn aged 60 in 1924, © National Portrait Gallery, London

Fig. 3.6  The Wrinkle Book plates I and V showing how the muscles droop with age and which exercises to use to tighten them. Author’s images

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Fig. 3.7  Figure from Dr Jacques Joseph’s Nasenplastik und sonstige Gesichtsplastik of a cheek plasty p. 623. Author’s image

their coiffures appeared like spun sugar, and the champagne glass which they shared with their handsome lovers gave off—as did their profiles— sparks of starlight.’32 The more prosaic Samuel Goldwyn recorded contributions in her attention to the mise-en-scène and the accuracy of her sets. Those who knew her observed some of what she did not say in print. Gloria Swanson noted the effect of her false eyelashes and that her teeth were unnaturally regular. Glyn had had specialist dental treatment in France around the end of the war and later in Hollywood had other procedures. Revealing her own experience, she gave advice to a friend whose jaw was too receding for the cinema, about how to adjust his bite to bring it forward. She also worked from an early age on her voice, first reading her novels to her publisher Gerald Duckworth. Lisa Stead has argued that she ‘made use of radio, newsreel and live performance to perfect and refine her own skills in recitation and oration.’33 Later at a party in Hollywood in 1922, Goldwyn recalled the effect of her voice: ‘She has the trick, so I found, of convincing you that her voice is some far-away, mysterious visitant of which she herself supplies only a humble and temporary instrument of escape.’34 Glyn, Stead shows, used her authorial stardom to promote the British voice in her own talkies which were released in 1930 and 1931. The first was advertised at the same time as her American-made

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film Such Men Are Dangerous. In her own Knowing Men (Glyn 1930), she appeared erect and unblemished in a cameo role which emphasised her significance as author-director. As a woman in her fifties, Glyn took control of her ageing and consciously sculptured her appearance through the use of regular exercises and cosmetic interventions. Her artifice took time and she researched her beauty techniques. She studied her facial musculature and the fluidity of movement to create the effect of a youthful body. What she achieved was remarkable and admired by a wide audience of movie goers and magazine readers. Glyn encapsulated her embodied knowledge for her audience in her axiom, ‘having “It”’, which was a mix of the grace of youth and allure of heterosexual attraction. However, her understanding of body dysmorphia and the medical treatments which had become available went further and entered her storytelling.

Glyn’s Creative Reimagining Surgical Transformations in Story and Movie Her short story ‘Such Men Are Dangerous’ draws on some of her thoughts about the new medical procedures, including her experience of facial surgery which she had in Hollywood in 1926. Her grandson and biographer says the treatment was ‘so painful that her arms had to be strapped to her sides for 10 days.’35 She told others that she ‘had her jaw remade in Hollywood; not only the jaw but the teeth had been fixed in a forward position so that with age she would never have creases at the corners of her mouth.’36 This had been a major operation and was successful, but Charles Chaplin and other friends noticed that her skin was tight and so when laughing, or when she wished to close her mouth, she had to re-adjusting her lips over the teeth. Glyn only occasionally smiled in her photographs but rare images from later life where she is smiling show this effect. This experience was brought into Glyn’s magazine story (which can be read in the March 1929 issue of Cosmopolitan).37 Taking elements from the disappearance of the Belgian financier Captain Alfred Loewenstein, whose dramatic death had been the subject of much speculation in the papers in July 1928 and her own knowledge and experience of the potential of plastic surgery, Glyn fashioned a romance of changed identity. Tagged as ‘The story of a man who made over his body and of a woman who made over her soul’ in Cosmopolitan, it drew on the fictional scientific

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inventions of a concealable parachute and a mini submarine to enable the hero to escape his life and receive treatment clandestinely. At the same time, the widowed but wealthy American heroine contemplates her husband’s reference to ‘class’ in his final letter to her and decides ‘he meant my class of intellect—the people who, like me are half asleep.’ In Glyn-­ fashion she decides to improve herself and travels with an educated companion to the cities of Europe to learn about art and culture, deepening her knowledge of politics and economics, and releasing her emotional intelligence. So, when her unrecognisable husband returns and they dance ‘he realized the immense possibilities which were now emerging in Emma. No woman could understand the rhythm of the tango as she was showing him that she understood it, unless there was passion in her.’38 At the heart of the story though is the dialogue between the convalescent hero and his valet about the procedures he has had. Glyn portrays the confidential relationship between the classes of employer and private servant benevolently in this short story which travels from America (Saratoga Beech, Santa Barbara) to London, Vienna and finally the favourite romantic haunt of Americans in Paris, the Château de Madrid. Recovering in his Viennese apartment, our hero studies photographs of his 45-year-old former self, Ludwig Kranwertz, with his retroussé nose, wrinkled hands, stubby neck, stuck out ears and beetle-browed eyes. He gets up and looks at himself in the mirror to see a slim, athletic-looking figure an inch taller with square shoulders. The surgeon has ticked his ears, ‘cut the skin of my eyelids and drew it down instead of up; he cut and sewed up my mouth, changing the entire expression, and then he remade my nose—which was broken at college’39 he tells his agog valet. Now his face is oval with an unwrinkled olive complexion and a ‘finely cut, hawklike nose’, his eyebrows are straight, his eyes dark with a wistful expression and lips are young, unwrinkled and stern-looking. Best of all, he got rid of his scowl; the surgeon ‘raised the skin and drew the hair down in a different outline’ growing to a point on a Greek brow. The intimate conversation between two men sits in the relationship between the gentleman and his valet; the elderly English Johnson is the most trusted of all whom Ludwig knows, the only other person who is aware of his identity is the Austrian surgeon Herr Rosenberg. (In the film, Johnson is not his valet but this private secretary who runs his business concerns and there is no conversation about the operations, instead Johnson is brought to the clinic as a test to see if he recognises Ludwig.) Through her fiction Glyn can reveal the

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secrets of cosmetic surgery at a distance from herself and her own public persona. In terms of the reality of the surgery, as Panayi et al. ask,40 there are science fiction practices, including stretching the body to give Ludwig more height and straighten his posture. Yet details of the facial procedures are similar to those found in the textbooks of the period and the dangers are also shown, such as the operation on his hands which held the fear of the skin cracking and not healing. Glyn’s hero says obvious facial scars would be tattooed the colour of the rest of the skin and specifies that the skin behind his ears was cut and the ears drawn back and in. The operation on his shoulders was a major operation and then there was a strict diet and exercise regime, so Glyn is realistic in saying the metamorphosis took a year before he returned to society. When he did, it was under his new identity as the Hungarian Hurkly Ora, whose name, mystically is ‘made up of lucky numbers’, perhaps referring to the fact that all these operations went well for him.41 Glyn sold the story to 20th Century Fox for £6000 and in 1929 returned to England, unable to stay in America due to tax reasons. Her short story was republished in her collection Saint or Satyr in 1933. The Western Mail reviewer considered the story better than the film and the collection typical of Glyn at her best.42 However, it was film that made the headlines, perhaps because of its association with two tragedies.

Such Men Are Dangerous (Hawks 1930) from the Elinor Glyn Story The depiction of the transformation of Ludwig’s face through surgery is seen on screen in the film Such Men Are Dangerous. The film came out in both silent and talkie versions and is significant in that its depiction of personal transformation encompasses the medical moral and spiritual themes of the period. Glyn’s story ‘flips’ the negative discourses on race and love, but not the association of beauty with virtue. In this section, I will refer to the copy of the talkie on YouTube,43 the script from the Margaret Herrick Library and illustrate it with the restored version of the silent made at the Eye Filmmuseum in the Netherlands. Glyn’s inspiration for the short story had come from the newspaper report of the death of the financier, Albert Loewenstein, son-in-law of a Belgian banker and wealthy director of International Holdings who

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travelled internationally to New York, London and Barcelona setting up deals. Glyn may have met him socially or met his wife and her sister who travelled separately. She certainly would have read the newspaper stories when on 4 July 1928 as he was flying across the channel with a group of colleagues, he fell from the plane. ‘As an Evening Standard editorial writer wrote on the day after his death: “It was not merely that everything (or almost everything) he touched turned to gold–it turned to drama as well. Here at last was a financier such as a novelist might have conceived when in a carefree mood.”’44 He could simply have opened the wrong door at the back of the cabin, but reporter William Norris thought it was murder. Journalists noted that a pearl necklace insured for a quarter of a million dollars had gone missing a couple of years before which led to rumours he had faked a getaway after bad publicity and declining fortunes. These were scotched when his body was found and was identified by an engraved watch later. The connection with Loewenstein’s story was confirmed when his widow wanted to be involved with the scenario of film45 and it may not be a coincidence that a set of pearls is referred to in the opening wedding sequence of the film. They are Ludwig’s bridal gift for his wife (Catherine Dale Owen) but they are eagerly seized upon by her sister Muriel who is impressed by the businessman’s wealth (played in character by Hedda Hopper) and she appropriates them for her own wardrobe. The second tragedy which overshadowed the film happened during the filming. Kenneth Hawks the director was killed in a flying accident when the three planes flying over Santa Monica circled to get into position to film and two collided. Warner Baxter’s double, two actors and the cameramen crashed into the sea, two others bailed but their parachutes failed to open; in all ten people were killed. This made the news.46 The curse of the Loewensteins, to be attacked by things of the air, it was said, had extended to the film. In the film, race is more apparent and Ludwig has surgery to change his appearance from ‘extremely rich Jew of forbidding aspect’ (Warner Baxter heavily made up) to the identity of Pierre Vuillard with the actor’s own face. This is a reversal of Glyn’s magazine story where the very features he has altered make his Jewishness obvious; ‘the nose was unmistakable, and so was the drooping of large, magnetic, rather melancholy eyes.’47 Here, surgery transforms him into a Jewish man who has ‘It’ and women fall into his arms. ‘Elinor Glyn calls in plastic surgery to demonstrate that man’s ugliness is only pocket deep. Multimillionaire gargoyle is moulded into a Don Juan’ summarised one paper.48 In the talkie after his treatment

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Ludwig asks Paul to teach him all the words and forms of address that etiquette and romance demand. The publicity for the talkie version drew on Glyn’s famous dictum and announced, ‘Now you can hear ‘IT”. Allure is in the sound of the voice. The surgery is depicted in a sequence which addresses the fear of infection through a mise-en-scène of an aseptic clinical environment with white sheets, masked nurses and sterilising equipment. The camera follows the wheels of a trolley bed moving with brisk efficiency, and then pans up to show that it is carrying an unidentifiable body covered in a crisp white sheet. The camera briefly moves behind a column in a clandestine way. Then as the two nurses who are pulling the trolley pause to get it through the doorway, the camera sees through the open door to the doctors waiting in the operating theatre (35 m 45 s). The film cuts to a theatre nurse who receives instructions in German from the surgeon who is outside the frame to give the patient a narcotic and again cuts to a brief shot of her removing hot-sterilised instruments from the autoclave. In the next shot the camera is positioned at head of the bed as if behind the patient and at the waist height of the four masked medics gathered round the body, looking up at them (Fig 3.8.2). The viewer is positioned as an outsider watching the surgeon converse with a second doctor and subservient to the medical team. Omitting the surgery itself, the film then cuts to outside the operating theatre as the nurse wheels out the trolley bed, and in a reversal of the previous shots, pans down to the wheels and the feet of the nurse as the patient is taken away (36 m 55 s. Fig 3.8.3). Nowhere in this sequence is Ludwig’s face shown, and when we see him next, he is sitting, his head is fully swathed in bandages, and the camera is behind him. A nurse is reading to him from a magazine and he is evidently recuperating. In the surgery sequence which lasts no more than one minute and ten seconds, plastic surgery is shown to be safe, efficient, clean, controlled; there is no blood and no ugliness. Even so it is shown as intrusion on the body and an interruption of autonomous life as Ludwig learns to give up command. When the financier and the surgeon shook hands agreeing to go ahead with treatment, the trade was one man’s fortitude for another’s skill, strong reminders of the military origins of the practice. Ludwig’s surgery in the magazine article is part of the dialogue between two men, a recounting after the event to an awed audience which produces in the reader an excited appreciation of the future of medical science. Glyn unites the literary genres of romance and science fiction. However, the screen adaptation draws on the cinematic generic

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convention of the mirror (Fig 3.8.1, 3.8.5–6). Ludwig’s moment of self-­ revelation comes when he catches a glimpse of his reflection, and the looking glass reveals to him the reason for his wife’s behaviour (his ugliness). Then, later in the film, it is another mirror that reveals his new face to him. Similarly, it is women’s verbal and visual responses which shows him how he is perceived; by his wife who shrinks from his touch and by a woman in the crowd who says, ‘Not for all the money in the world would I marry a man with a face like that!’.49 This frame and comment is superimposed over Ludwig’s gaze at this own reflection. The connection with the war is made explicit when we learn Ludwig anonymously funded the pioneering plastic surgery and hospital for mutilated veterans in which he receives his treatment. In the silent version, when Ludwig offers the doctor ten thousand pounds for his medical transformation, Dr Goodman, played by Bela Lugosi, reacts to this cheque, eyes widening in surprise, and from his knowing expression, the viewer might expect him to be after the money. In the talkie Dr Goodman recognises Ludwig when he takes off his dark glasses before they shake hands on the treatment and sets aside the cheque saying he could do a great deal of good with that. Later, when the operations are over, he says to Ludwig: I was a surgeon in the world war, and afterwards I established a small hospital to aid the real unfortunates—those who were maimed, hopelessly scarred, and lived. But there was no money to carry on and I was helpless. Suddenly, from nowhere, money came in—millions—to permit this work to be done. Nobody knew who gave the money—and then one day I learned the name of my benefactor. It was Ludwig Kranz.50

Ludwig’s inner transformation begins as he refuses the money returned by Goodman. Warner Baxter’s make-up in the early sequences was said to be a work of art, and ‘one that might excite the envy of a Lon Chaney or a Paul Muni.’51 He plays a ‘living gargoyle’52 as the newspaper listings phrased it, and ‘is transformed into his own handsome self by means of plastic surgery.’ It is clear in the restored silent film image that he has a false nose, his ears stick out from an unflattering haircut and he has a low brow and goatee beard. He examines his wrinkled hands in concern and the viewer is left in no doubt he sees their ugliness. In contrast to the narrative of brisk efficiency in the short surgical sequence, the reveal builds up the emotional intensity through two minutes and three seconds of slow image

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Fig. 3.8  Eight frames from the silent film Such Men Are Dangerous (Hawks 1930) by the author from the Filmmuseum restored print

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building. It is carried out in Dr Goodman’s office (37 m 47 s Fig 3.8.4). Ludwig is sitting, facing away from the camera as the doctor unwinds his bandages. The two are alone. The viewer sees doctor examining Ludwig’s face closely and then a pleased expression spreads across his face, he says he looks a great deal younger, and in professional pride exclaims ‘Oh it is a good job.’ At his beckoning Ludwig gets up. It cuts to the back of Ludwig’s head and the camera closes in to point over his shoulder to look in the mirror to see what Ludwig sees; a full frame three-quarter-face portrait with his intense gaze, held for seven seconds (39  m 11–18  s. Fig 3.8.5). In a further seven seconds, the reflection blurs, as if he is going to faint, but then clears again (39 m 18–25 s). The emotion of the reveal is captured in the intensity of his gaze and the stillness of the moment. It cuts back to the doctor who asks him if he is satisfied and cuts back to a further glance in the mirror as Ludwig’s hand touches his chin in wonder and a slight smile lifts the corner of his mouth (Fig 3.8.6). There is a close shot of him as he turns and camera pans with him to doctor. He stammers thanks and the doctor says ‘You have a good smile, my friend. Smile often’ (39 m 50 s).53 The rest of the film follows a more conventional romantic narrative. The generous and soigné Pierre Vuillard (Ludwig) woos his unwitting wife through daily flowers, dinner engagements and rides about town. When eventually she recognises him, by his eyes, she is distraught as she loved this new Pierre who is ‘so thoughtful—so tender and so kind’ while Ludwig ‘bought me as you bought everything else you wanted. You thought I ran away from your ugly face—it was your ugly soul that terrified me! A soul that thought love was made up of jewels and checkbooks.’54 The discourses on beauty and ugliness are uncompromising. The new Pierre meets his wife again at Charity Bazaar at Chateau De Leuze, Paris. (His wife is called Emma in the magazine story but is renamed Eleanor in the film, undoubtedly in reference to the author. The link is made explicit when they attend a performance of Cinderella, and she comments that romance never grows old.) At the bazaar there is a merry-go-round and stalls, at one of which Eleanor is selling dolls. She is called over by a man who is selling a carved stone gargoyle who asks for Eleanor’s aid to help him sell it (Fig 3.8.7). Playfully, they agree she will auction a kiss of hers with the gargoyle to raise funds for the charity (Fig 3.8.8) Ludwig places the winning bid of 20,000 Francs. Chivalrously when Eleanor offers her kiss, Ludwig picks up a small boy and she kisses the child. The crowd is

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pleased. As he turns to leave the auctioneer reminds him of the gargoyle he has won. Ludwig offers it to Eleanor who replies, ‘Oh no thank you—I don’t like the ugly face!’. Saying it ‘distresses madame’, he asks for it to be sent to his apartment to be kept in memory of a most interesting event. So in the end he convinces her that his inner transformation is as true as his outer.

Such Men Are Dangerous as a Film about Dysmorphia, Self-transformation and Change of Identity The depiction of facial surgery as uncomplicated and sanitary fits with the genre of a science fiction romance. While it is unrepresentative of actual surgery, it does portray both the medical fact of the operation and the uncertainty of the result. When Ludwig goes to meet Dr Goodman (Bela Lugosi) at his Viennese clinic, he is told the surgery may take 4, 6 or 8 months, depending on his resolution and Goodman’s skill, a timescale which is supported by the textbooks of the period. Glyn’s story, and the film, present plastic surgery as a positive scientific advance which can enable people, albeit wealthy people, to transform their lives. The true stories of ordinary veterans tell a sadder tale. Some were unrecognisable to their families and some unsure that they would be welcomed at home. Joe Kember finds occasional notices in the press of ‘reported incidents in which the disfigured husband had simply disappeared, either in Europe or following a traumatic return home.’55 This social discourse became inscribed in the genres of gangster, crime or horror movies. But Glyn challenged this and framed the narrative of personal transformation within the romance genre, offering a resolution which gives the hero positive fulfilment. Depicting surgery in Europe, the film has a strong link to Dr Joseph’s procedures and the ‘before-and-after’ photographs which he and other surgeons used in their medical textbooks. Although privileging beauty as white European, Glyn contested racial characteristics in the ‘new-made’ face of her Hungarian Jewish hero. Her own professional portraits, taken as full face or profile photographs, reference the medical imagery and advertisements for surgical interventions and beauty procedures. So through her book Eternal Youth, her stories and her films Glyn opened up a way to talk about the social impact of body dysmorphia, the potential for self-transformation and change of identity.

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The disfigured man provided the narrative for Man and Maid and Such Men Are Dangerous, where Elinor Glyn addresses a nexus of romantic and social anxiety. Without disrupting traditional masculinity and its confident role as breadwinner and master, she gives agency to the impotent and undesirable through self-improvement and surgery. Her advocacy makes the use of medical treatments and the beauty parlour the only rational response for those who lack ‘It’. She connects the aspiration for youthful beauty (which goes across class) with mental exercise and dietary restraint, and with the surgical offer from American and European clinics. As Glyn exposed her audience to a new vocabulary to describe women’s sexual passion, so too she found a way to talk about the medical and other treatments available to address body dysmorphia.

Notes 1. Anon 1932, ‘Bruised Beauty Get Balm Of £50 Damages’ Truth (Sydney) 26 June, p.  10. Trove https://trove.nla.gov.au/newspaper/article/169142386? In the end the ‘bruised beauty’ got a £50 damages and not the £1000 sought. 2. See Jane M. Gaines, Radha Vatsal, and Monica Dall’Asta, eds. Women Film Pioneers Project. New  York, NY: Columbia University Libraries. The Women Film Pioneers project traced and reinstated many women who lead in the development of early cinema, including Elinor Glyn. https://wfpp. columbia.edu/ 3. Bourke, Joanna. 1996. Dismembering the male: Men’s bodies, Britain and the Great War. London: Reaktion Books. 4. Alberti, Fay Bound. 2016. This Mortal Coil: The Human Body in History and Culture. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 44–7. 5. Norman, Lady, 1916. Speech to Huddersfield Women’s Liberal Association. Huddersfield Daily Examiner. 14 December. p. 4. BNA. 6. Anon, 1918, Care of Ex-soldiers. Inter Allied Conference, Liverpool Daily Post. 21 May. p. 3. British Newspaper Archive. 7. Anon, 1927. Beauty Operation and a Scar, Dundee Evening Telegraph, 10 May. 3. Carl Henry Willi of the Hystogen Institute and Miss Christian Clara Vernon. 8. Comiskey, Carolyn. 2004. Cosmetic Surgery in Paris in 1926: The Case of the Amputated Leg. Journal of Women’s History 16:30–54. 39. 9. Comiskey (2004, p. 39). 10. How the Plastic Surgeons, Profiting by Their War Experiences, Reshape Thick, Amazonian Limbs Into the Slender, Graceful Ones Essential to Present-Day Beauty. The Birmingham age-herald. (Birmingham, Ala.), 24 Aug. 1924.

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Chronicling America: Historic American Newspapers. Lib. of Congress. https://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn85038485/1924-­08-­24/ ed-­1/seq-­46/ 11. Later published as Passot, Raymond. 1931. Chirurgie esthétique pure: (technique et résultats), G. Doin & cie. 12. Staveley-Wadham, Rose. 2021. History of Plastic Surgery. 21 January. Blog at https://blog.britishnewspaperarchive.co.uk/2021/01/21/ history-­of-­plastic-­surgery/ 13. Comiskey (2004, p. 39). 14. McIntyre, O.O. 1930. New  York Day by Day. New Britain Herald. [microfilm reel] (New Britain, Conn.), 15 Oct. 1930. Chronicling America: Historic American Newspapers. Lib. of Congress. https:// chr oniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn82014519/1930-­1 0-­1 5/ ed-­1/seq-­6/ 15. Manners, Dorothy, 1929. The Flesh and Blood Racket, Motion Picture Magazine April, 34. 1–2 cited in Comiskey, Carolyn. 2004. Cosmetic Surgery in Paris in 1926: The Case of the Amputated Leg. Journal of Women’s History 16, no. 3: 30–54. 16. Advertisement for Lux soap in The Washington Times. (Washington [D.C.]), 03 June 1930. Chronicling America: Historic American Newspapers. Lib. of Congress. https://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/ sn84026749/1930-­06-­03/ed-­1/seq-­4/ 17. Glyn, Elinor, 1928, Eternal Youth, New  York. The Macaulay Company, p. 11. 18. Weitzman, Erica 2014, Human Fragments: Plastic Surgery and Bare Life in Joseph Roth’s Feuilletons, Journal of Austrian Studies, 46: 4, p. 99. 19. Weitzman (2014. p. 92). 20. Anon, 1922, Photoplay’s Selection of the Six Best plays of the Month. Photoplay, December. 63–65. Internet Archive Photoplay Jul-Dec 1922. p. 693. archive.org Identifier ark:/13960/t7gq7w321 21. The directors were 1933 Léonce Perret, 1938 Gustaf Molander and in 1941 George Cukor. 22. Hallett, Hilary. 2022. Inventing the It Girl: How Elinor Glyn Created the Modern Romance and Conquered Early Hollywood. New York: WW Norton & Co. p. 101 23. Nichols, Beverley. 1927, ’Celebrities in Undress: LXXV-Elinor Glyn’, The Sketch, 31 August. p. 398. 24. See Bridgeman Images at https://www.bridgemanimages.com/ shows Philip and Lucy de László with Elinor Glyn PLC480123. 25. She attributed her values of self-discipline and outward control to her grandmother’s eighteenth-century French manners. This aligns with Bertrand Taithe’s focus on the francophone world as the origin of the

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move from pity and compassion to what he calls humanitarian protocols, from Catholicism and compassion and to painkillers which attenuate ecstatic agony without removing their aesthetic appeal. Bertrand Taithe ‘Cold calculation in the faces of Horrors? Pity compassion and the making of Humanitarian protocols’ in Fay Bound Alberti ed. 2006. Medicine, Emotion and Disease, 1700–1950. London: Palgrave Macmillan, p. 92. 26. Nichols, Beverley (1927. p. 396). 27. Glyn, Anthony. 1955. Elinor Glyn, A Biography. London: Hutchinson, p. 304. 28. Beaton, Cecil, 1974. The World of Elinor Glyn, The Times Saturday Review, 26 October, pp. 8–9. 29. Beaton, Cecil, 1974. Introduction. In Elinor Glyn, Three Weeks, Gerald Duckworth, pp. xvi–vvii. 30. Glyn, Elinor, 1928, Eternal Youth, New York. The Macaulay Company, p. 7. 31. Glyn, Elinor, 1936. Romantic Adventure: Autobiography. London: Ivor Nicholson & Watson. p. 300. 32. Beaton, 1974. Introduction. pp. xvi–xvii. 33. Stead, Lisa (2018) ‘Elinor Glyn’s British Talkies: Voice, Nationality and the Author On-Screen,’ Women: a cultural review, 29:2, 169–187. 34. Goldwyn, Samuel, 1923, Behind the Screen, New York, George H. Doran Company, p. 238. 35. Glyn, Anthony. 1955. Elinor Glyn. A Biography. London: Hutchinson. p. 304. 36. Beaton, 1974. Introduction. p. xix. 37. Glyn, Elinor. 1929. Such Men Are Dangerous, Hearst’s International– Cosmopolitan March 86(3) pages 38–129. Available from the Internet Archive at https://archive.org/details/sim_cosmopolitan_1929-­03_86_ 3/page/38/mode/2up 38. Glyn, Elinor (1929, p. 128). 39. Glyn, Elinor (1929, p. 40). 40. Internet Movie Database, British Film Institute and American Film Institute. Panayi, A.  C., Endo, Y., Huidobro, A.  F., Haug, V., Panayi, A.  M., & Orgill, D.  P. (2021, 2021/10/01). Lights, camera, scalpel: a lookback at 100 years of plastic surgery on the silver screen. European Journal of Plastic Surgery, 44(5), 551–561, 551 41. Glyn, Elinor (1929, p. 126). 42. Anon. 1933, Review of Saint or Satyr? Western Mail, 6 July. p. 6 43. Hawks, Kenneth. dir 1929 Such Men Are Dangerous, working title The Mask of Love. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pUT0BjJYkGw 44. Norris, William. 1987. The Man who Fell From the Sky, Viking, p. 147. 45. Anon, 1941, Latest of the Strange Winged Tragedies of the Loewensteins. Detroit Evening News. 8 June, p. 9.

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46. Anon, 1930, Daily News. London. 20 March. BNA. 47. Glyn, Elinor. 1929. Such Men Are Dangerous, Hearst’s International– Cosmopolitan March, 126. 48. Anon, 1930. Smith’s Weekly, Sydney, NSW 21 June. p. 7 Trove online 49. Fox film Corp., 1930, Such Men Are Dangerous, Based on the story by Elinor Glyn. Continuity taken from the screen by Peggy Lent and Helen Barnhart. Core Collection. Scripts, Margaret Herrick Library, Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. p. 10. 50. Fox film Corp., 1930, Such Men Are Dangerous, Based on the story by Elinor Glyn. Continuity taken from the screen by Peggy Lent and Helen Barnhart. Core Collection. Scripts, Margaret Herrick Library, Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. p. 35c. 51. Anon, 1930. SUCH MEN ARE DANGEROUS. Skegness News, 20 August. BNA. 52. Anon, 1930. LIVING GARGOYLE. News, Adelaide, SA, 27 June. BNA. 53. Anon, 1930. SUCH MEN ARE DANGEROUS. Skegness News, 20 August. BNA. 54. Fox film Corp., 1930, Such Men Are Dangerous, Based on the story by Elinor Glyn. Continuity taken from the screen by Peggy Lent and Helen Barnhart. Core Collection. Scripts, Margaret Herrick Library, Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. p. 75. 55. Kember, J. 2017. Face Value: The Rhetoric of Facial Disfigurement in American Film and Popular Culture, 1917–1927. Journal of War & Culture Studies 10 (1):43–65. p. 8.

CHAPTER 4

Masks, Prosthetics and Performance

Look not upon my mask—rather remember my devotion. Erik to Christine in The Phantom of the Opera

Abstract  Drawing on the war work of sculptor Anna Coleman Ladd, this chapter focuses on how medical advances and art coalesce in the visualisation of the mask. The success of new technology in plastic surgery, the creation of prosthesis and the artistry and performance of Lon Chaney are brought together in an analysis which acknowledges the context of his function as a cypher for both a facially injured veteran and an amputee after the First World War. Keywords  Facial disfigurement • Veteran • First World War • Silent film • Medical archives • Lon Chaney Snr • Anna Coleman Ladd • Mask • Plastic surgery • The Phantom of the Opera In this chapter, the ways in which medical advances and art coalesce are brought together in a discussion of the image of the veterans who wore masks to conceal the scars of facial reconstruction and the masked phantom, Erik. The analysis intersects the circulating public discourse and the visual iconography of Chaney’s much publicised characterisations of

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 K. Randell, A. Weedon, Transforming Faces for the Screen, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-40029-2_4

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disabled protagonists with the images and narratives of the surgeons and artists who worked on and with injured veterans. The chapter will also examine the performance style of Lon Chaney and the way in which his process and the characters that he performed resonated with the post-war cultural environment in which the body of the returned veteran impacted society. During his career in film spanning from 1913 to 1930, Chaney constantly re-invented the damaged male body ensuring that it was repeatedly visible on screen. Chaney’s films are trauma narratives in the sense that they engage with a prevailing anxiety within post-war society around war injury and trauma but are unable to ‘represent the unrepresentable’ in narrative terms.1 In this way, his characterisations often echo a referential anxiety that pertains to the First World War even though the war is absent from the texts themselves. Instead, the somatic outcome of war such as facial injury and double amputation is writ large within the plotline and the reference of the disabled veteran is a permanent trace within the performances of Chaney. Films such as The Penalty (Wallace Worsley 1920) and The Unknown (Tod Browning 1927) have plotlines that depend on the characters’ physical transgression to drive the narrative as The Phantom of the Opera does. Paul K. Longmore has stated that narratives of disability in literature and film have a long tradition of aligning physical difference with malevolence so that ‘deformity of body symbolizes deformity of soul. Physical handicaps are made the emblems of evil’.2 The stigma of disability is evoked through the behaviour of Blizzard (The Penalty), Alonzo (The Unknown) and Erik. However, Chaney’s physical engagement with the possibilities of the maimed body suggest a less victimised position than might be ordinarily depicted. Also, Chaney’s active portrayal of the damaged body throughout the 1920s negates a customary narrative of passivity and victimhood associated with disability and instead he goes to great lengths to demonstrate what can be done with a body that has a life-changing injury. The intersecting discourses across film, surgery and sculpture can offer broader readings of Chaney’s performance style and reveal how his body functions as cypher for the veteran.

The Mask and the Work of Anna Coleman Ladd In the image of the mask, the success of innovative technology in plastic surgery and artistic practice during the war and through the 1920s are brought together in an artifice that represents both pain and recuperation.

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As a symbol of modernity, the visibility of the mask in The Phantom of the Opera highlights both the innovation of the theatrical artistry of prosthetic artifice and the concealment of a facial trauma that is never narratively explained. So too for the mask-wearing veteran, the visibility of the mask hides the product of new techniques and technology that have been brought to bear on his face. In 1925, it seems pertinent that the character of the Erik the Phantom should wear a sculptured mask with a false nose, painted brows and eyelids. There is very little information regarding the making of this mask. Chaney had absolute control over his make-up, and he was often very secretive about his process, even from the director of the film. He did not create an ornate theatrical mask but one that echoed of those worn by men, recovering from reconstructive surgery undertaken during and after the First World War (Figs. 4.1 and 4.2). For Erik, the mask acts as a passive concealment of trauma, hiding what lies beneath and rendering the Phantom expressionless. It represents the

Fig. 4.1  The masked Erik in The Phantom of the Opera Cropped film frame. Author’s photograph

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Fig. 4.2  Mask with nose and glasses to enable fixing over ears. Image from Philadelphia News, 5 March 1919 (Image from Anon, ‘Artist Made Masks for Soldiers’, 1919. Philadelphia News 5 March. Scrapbook 1914–1923 Folder 7/7. Anna Coleman Ladd Collection, Archive of American Art, Washington DC.). Public domain

vulnerability of a character who is referred to as a ghost or a monster and who has hidden behind the scenes only to come out in the shadows. In the theatre ‘masks can be representational, emotive and indexical and disguise’.3 They have been used since Greek theatre and as David Roy points out there is a difference between the effect the mask has on the wearer and the effect the mask has on the spectator, ‘the mask works as a metaphor or signifier for the spectator to separate the individual performer, and distance of perception to allow an alienation effect.’4 In the theatre, this enables the spectator to ‘read’ the character as performance and not as an individual. In the world outside of the theatre, the distance provided by the mask alienates the wearer in other ways. The contractions are wide-­ ranging and poignant, the mask both protects the veteran wearer from the curious or horrified eyes of their family and the public but also dehumanises them, removing the individuality of the wearer. The mask immediately connotes performance, the artifice of donning a mask suggests to those viewing the wearer that they are not authentically in society but are

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performative. The veteran must present as a civilian back in the populace and conceal the sacrifice, the stigmata of war, to not only protect themselves from the shame of disfigurement but also to protect society from the visual horror of the consequences of war. The life is one of pretence as well as pain. The benefit of wearing the mask for the veteran therefore is complex. The trauma of war is simultaneously visible and invisible. The visible trauma of the scarred face is hidden by the mask which accentuates and makes the veteran ‘other’ within society. The felt experience of being at war, being wounded, being subjected to countless operations and procedures and the strain of reintegrating back into society are all tied up in the real and metaphorical representation of the mask. The mask in The Phantom of the Opera functions as a cypher for an unexplained trauma, and wearing the mask offers Chaney the opportunity to be creative in the way that he expresses the character of Erik. In silent film, the face is a marker of emotional communication, without words to express and explain the actor must use mime and gesture and use facial expression to convey the mood and sentiment of the scene. Without the use of the face, where the essence of humanity is played out, Chaney must use all his experience of acting with his whole body to portray Erik with pathos to enable the audience to understand his loneliness and sadness as a motivation for kidnapping Christine. Erik’s anguish at being in love with a woman who he fears will never love him back is not fully understood until the unmasking scene described in Chap. 2. When masked, Chaney plays Erik as a gentle defenceless man, his movements are balletic, poetic in action, flowing and soft. Chaney’s performance produces pathos as well as anticipation for the audience and the gentleness is required for the audience to care about his relationship with Christine, otherwise he truly is just a monster. An example of this can be seen when Christine first enters his secret realm and we are offered our first potential glimpse of the Phantom, a moment when the long wait for the reveal to the audience seems to be at an end. A white gloved hand enters the frame from the left very slowly and reaches for Christine’s shoulder. The camera is positioned in front of her, and she stands smiling, appearing entranced by the setting and expectedly waiting for her benefactor to appear. The hand disappears and reappears again tapping her gently on the shoulder. The audience are ready to see the Phantom. Christine is curious, and smiling she turns slowly to face him. The camera now moves to Erik’s point of view so that we witness her reaction before we see his face. She gasps, her hand rising up to her face

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and she shrinks back against the wall. Seeing her reaction, the audience can expect to see the promised theatricality of the Phantom’s face but instead they see the white masked man. Erik tells Christine, “Look not upon my mask—rather remember my devotion.” A point-of-view shot shows his fading masked image as Christine faints. The audience must wait for one more scene before they can witness the horror of his face beneath the mask. Erik’s words remind Christine of the attention that he has paid her by playing for her and his campaign of terrifying the producers into enabling her to become the prima donna at the Opera; it is also an invitation to the audience to understand the emotional pain. Erik’s words resonate with the sacrifice of the veterans whose noble ideals of war have ended with life-defining injuries and fear of rejection in society. Veterans with facial injury were given hope after surgery by the remarkable work of mask-makers like Francis Derwent Wood working in the Royal Army Medical Corps in England and American sculptor Anna Coleman Ladd working in France at the American Red Cross Studio.5 Suzannah Biernoff has stated that, ‘Britain did not represent the horrors of facial mutilation visually outside of the professional contexts of clinical medicine and this is characterized as a visual anxiety and aversion to such injuries’.6 However, the image of the disfigured veteran was more widely described and discussed if still unseen in the United States press.7 Articles about high-profile surgeons like Vilray Blair and the society sculptor Anna Coleman Ladd served to emphasise the plight of the veteran. As discussed in Chap. 2, the American public were fascinated by the spectacle of transformation that advances in plastic surgery were creating. The fascination for the mask-making of Anna Coleman Ladd did mean that images of masked veterans appeared in the national press as early as 1917. In a double-­spread article in The Morning Telegraph on 25 November 1917 entitled ‘Masking the Horrors of War’, Henry Tilford Parker details the work that will be undertaken by Coleman Ladd as she travels to set up the Red Cross Studio for Portrait Masks in France similar to that of Derwent Wood at the Masks for Facial Disfigurement Department at the 3rd London General Hospital.8 It speaks of the ‘promise of new faces’ for those that have had extensive surgery and her experience as a renowned sculptor. Numerous articles followed through 1918, 1919 and into the 1920s detailing the scope of the mask studio, as her work in France became more widely known. When Vilray Blair approved the orders for Anna Coleman Ladd to travel to France and work with the facially wounded men in November

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1917, it signalled an explicit objective to advance the innovative surgery work that Blair and his team of surgeons had developed. It showed an appreciation for the considerable amount of work that she had already achieved, and as there was already a proven record of sculptors working with the facially disfigured, it made sense to continue those innovations.9 As an already established society, sculptor Colman Ladd’s activities generated interest in the press. In August 1917, the Boston Sunday Globe featured a two-page spread of photographs showing her work, including The Triton Babies which had been shown at the Panama-Pacific Exposition in San Francisco in 1915, the marble bust of Mrs. A. Robeson Sargent, Mother and Child and a picture of the idyllic setting for her studio in Manchester Massachusetts. In the accompanying piece, A. J. Philpott outlines the work she has been doing for the past 10 years, including setting up the Guild of Boston Artists in 1914. The article clearly shows that Coleman Ladd is a woman ‘of the times’ meaning that she is, sensitive to the great artistic movement of the times—a movement that is seeking expression in all countries and which in itself seeks to express the yearnings and the hopes and something of the nervousness and unrest of the age.10 The piece explains that Coleman Ladd is a ‘cosmopolitan’ having lived ‘most of her early life abroad’ studying in Paris and Rome and that she can speak four languages. She was therefore perfectly positioned to add her skill to the maxillofacial surgeons in their quest to rebuild the faces of those that were injured in the war.11 In September 1917, C. Lewis Hind of the Imperial Association for Assisting Disabled Naval and Military Officers in Rockport Massachusetts wrote to Coleman Ladd to commend Derwent Wood’s work to her and stated that, I am confident that, should you go to Europe, your talents as a sculptor and modeller would be of immense help in this service to humanity. Men with faces half blown away have been remade by the sculptor’s art.12 Coleman Ladd was in correspondence with Wood, who shared information with her of his techniques. She had also already familiarised herself with the work being done in France, undertaken by Hippolyte Morestin at the Val-de-Grâce Military Hospital who she visited on her way to setting up her Studio in November 1917.

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The work of Coleman Ladd was to create a mask that optimised the character of the soldier that she was working with. To enable her to understand the essence of the man, photographs of his face before injury were used to enable her to create a mask as close to his personality as possible. Once his surgery was complete, a mould was made of his face. Figure 4.4 shows a collection of moulds made of the face after surgery at Coleman Ladd’s Studio with the positive re-modelled mould below on which the mask is based. In 1917, Ward Muir outlines how the moulds were made at the Masks for Facial Disfigurement Department, The face… it is first painted over with oil. The eyebrows are smeared with Vaseline. The moustache, in any, receives the same treatment. This is to prevent the plaster of Paris, which is about to be applied, from sticking to the hairs. Soon [the plaster of Paris] is of the proper consistency, and the patient, leaning back in his chair as though on the point of being shaved…closes his one remaining eye and has a snippet of tissue-paper placed on its oily lid to protect it…Quickly a film of plaster is brushed on the face…at length the exactly correct moment…has arrived and he detaches and lifts off from the patient’s face a faintly steaming shell of plaster, the inner surface of which is a negative replica of the gargoyle which is to be restored to naturalness.13

The patient is then free to leave the hospital until the mask is due to be fitted. The next process might take as much as two months as a plasticine squeeze, and another positive plaster is made and the features that are missing are painstakingly added and sculpted so that a mask can be made that includes the missing features. Muir describes the mask as a ‘thin metal contrivance—an electrotype plate 1/32” thick which bears a remote resemblance to an irregular bit cut out of one of those papier-mâché vizors worn by revellers at a fancy dress ball’.14 The theatricality of the process and final unpainted mask is highlighted by Muir who emphasises the performativity of wearing a mask (Fig. 4.3). The soldier has to perform as the individual, rather than just be the individual. The American Magazine of Art included an article in June 1919 that described how Coleman Ladd painted the masks with ‘a celluloid paint, in the exact imitation of flesh. The lips are always modelled slightly open so that the wearer can smoke and speak’.15 The article in Fig.  4.5 shows Anna Coleman Ladd posed with one of the French soldiers for whom she made a mask. The article reads:

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Fig. 4.3  Christine sees the masked Phantom, cropped film frame. Author’s photograph

Fig. 4.4  ‘Collection of plaster face casts of mutilated French soldiers, American Red Cross, Ms. Anna Coleman Ladd studio, First World War’ (Reeve 12596). OHA 80 Reeve Photograph Collection. Otis Historical Archives, National Museum of Health and Medicine

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Fig. 4.5  ‘Sculptress helping restore Shell-Torn soldiers faces. The final touches.’ Undated cutting in the Anna Coleman Ladd Collection, Archive of American Art, Washington DC

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Building up of war-shattered faces has become an important feature of the work of the surgeons of the Allied countries. Some of the soldiers come from the trenches with their faces shattered beyond repair, however and in such cases artists are employed in the work of restoration. These pictures show Mrs. Anna Coleman Ladd, the American sculptress, and two of the men for whom she has prepared masks made of copper and silver.16

This soldier, named Soldat 5, appeared in several articles, including an article in the French magazine Presse Médicale, No. 30, in May 1918. His image is repeated in ‘Les Masques Vivants’ in the Journal Paris 18 April 1918. In this article, a photograph of his damaged face is shown alongside a photograph of him wearing his mask and smoking a cigarette.17 The mould of his damaged face and the squeeze for his mask can be seen in in Fig. 4.6. The pose with the cigarette signifies the end of the process of surgical transformation. He was ready to go back to his normal habits leaving aside the question of whether he was socially rehabilitated or remained traumatised by the experience. Fitted with this mask, the veteran was able to perform as a civilian and conceal the visual horror of the consequences of war.

The Mask of the Red Death In the theatrical scene of the Masked Ball, the Phantom arrives wearing a different mask, that of the skeletal red death. This mask, taken from the novel by Edgar Allen Poe appears as an image of the living dead, a walking cadaver, whereas the white mask works as a symbol of a hidden and unidentified trauma. It is a terrifying image and one that is at odds with the vulnerability of Erik seen in earlier scenes. Chaney consulted the 1910 Gaston Leroux novel and took detailed notes of the description of the face of Erik which Leroux describes in a Gothic horror manner that you can’t see his nose ‘and THE ABSENCE of that nose is a horrible thing TO LOOK AT’.18 He also consulted the Bobbs-Merrill edition that included coloured painted illustrations by Andre Castaigne to ensure that the death mask was as authentic as possible to the original text.19 Those colour plates do not focus on the unmasked face but rather the face is obscured by the death mask or out of the image, enabling Chaney to have artistic licence with the look of the unmasked Erik. To practice his techniques for both faces, Chaney had a life-size wax head made.20 This mask of the Red Death is actually not a mask at all.

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Fig. 4.6  ‘Plaster casts in preparation of making masks for mutilated French soldiers, American Red Cross, Ms. Anna Coleman Ladd studio and First World War (Reeve 12594). Reeve Photograph Collection. Otis Historical Archives, National Museum of Health and Medicine

Chaney spent long hours perfecting this facial make-up made of wax, putty and grease paint which he applied to his own face for the scene. In the scene, Chaney appears to have fun with the idea of playing death, he moves gracefully and his menace is portrayed though the ghostlike quality of his actions. It is a moment of expressive theatricality away from the emotional angst of the love stricken and facially injured Erik. Yet it reminds us, as Leroux wrote, that Erik had grace of voice and a talent for music which he could not use, ‘and he had to hide his genius or use it to play tricks with (Fig. 4.7).’ 21

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Fig. 4.7  Chaney ‘wearing’ the Mask of the Red Death. Original Front-of-House Stills. Author’s photograph

Chaney, Performance and Pain Early in his career, Chaney plays a con-man contortionist called ‘The Frog’ in a film called Miracle Man (1919) who convincingly performs as a physically impaired man, crawling along the floor rather than being able to walk upright. Termed a cripple in 1919, this character is brought before The Patriarch (a faith healer) and miraculously draws himself to his feet to walk, thus encouraging others to come to the healer, via paying the group of conmen. Small excerpts of the film are available to view online, although the full film has been damaged and lost.22 In the extract, Chaney plays the ‘crippled man’ as one who drags his lower body along with his hands and arms. His lower legs are crossed over and his feet are pointed (as a dancers might be). His arms are twisted towards his chest and his wrists turn his hands inward, meaning that Chaney must move this character forward slowly by shuffling from his hips to his elbows to enable the movement

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along the path to the praying Patriarch (his eyes upturned as if to the heavens). Chaney’s movements echo those of the paralysed veteran as can be seen in the films of the treatment of veterans suffering from War Neurosis at Netley Hospital, Southampton held at the Imperial War Museum in London. One clip in the 1917 film shows a veteran suffering with hysterical pseudohypertrophic muscular paralysis as he falls to the floor and tries to right himself. As he does so his ankles are crossed, his feet point downwards and his arms are twisted across his chest and his hands turned inwards at the wrist (Figs. 4.8 and 4.9).23 There is a contemporaneous visual relationship between these two images, even though the medical film was not available for public consumption. Chaney’s performance for this characterisation is utterly convincing. The film made a star of Chaney for this physical performance. Chaney went to great lengths to portray his characters on screen. He would travel to downtown Los Angeles, in disguise, wearing a large coat and a cap over his eyes to observe ordinary people. Taking a notebook and

Fig. 4.8  Shell-shocked Veteran with Paralysis from War Neuroses at the Netley Hospital 1917. Cropped frame. Author’s image

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Fig. 4.9  Chaney as The Frog in The Miracle Man. Film still. Author’s photograph

making notes about the way that an old man might walk or a gesture of a salesman or the way that the everyday man moves his head when speaking, he wanted to ensure that his characters had both realism and emotion. That he could emote the correct sentiment or excitement or passion through the gestures and often balletic movements that his body made. Throughout his career he made his name from inhabiting these characters from the inside, showing their emotion through his expressions, through his choreographed movement and through innovative make-up. 24 He went to extreme lengths to play many of the characters, especially those that were physically or facially injured. His discomfort and actual bodily damage created a star/character fusion that enabled him to understand the limitations of physical restriction. For instance, the leather leg harness that Chaney wore during the making of The Penalty to portray the crippled character Blizzard damaged his lower back for the rest of his life. This was mainly due to his refusing to release the harness between takes

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against specific doctor’s orders. The ‘safe’ period being just two minutes, he increased the time to seven and then ten minutes.25 Full of bravado Chaney is reported to have joked that ‘there’s always carpet-laying’ to turn to should his back be permanently stooped.26 Performing as a double amputee in 1920 aligns Chaney to the thousands of American soldiers who returned home without a limb. The civil war had been a time of surgical and prosthetic development, and after the First World War, American prosthetic manufacturers worked with surgeons for the first time to create effective aids including being invited to England to showcase the innovations (Figs. 4.10 and 4.11).27 The plot of The Penalty has a direct engagement with injury, amputation and disability. The film enabled Chaney to deliver an active display of the damaged body rather than relying on a representation of the stereotypical passive lifestyle of an amputee. Here disability literally takes centre stage as Chaney, playing double amputee Blizzard, performs athletic stunts whilst having his own legs bent double and tied to a leather belt around

Fig. 4.10  First World War Amputees. Imperial War Museum (Q 108161) ©Crown Copyright. ©IWM

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Fig. 4.11  Chaney as Blizzard in The Penalty. Cropped frame. Author’s photograph

his waist. It is the disability of this character that provides the scenario for all that happens in the film; disability drives and motivates the action. The excesses of Chaney’s performance takes the scenario into the realm of the freak show as in scene after scene the abilities of the amputee are displayed. Chaney walks on his stumps that are encased in leather cups and straps and he uses a pair of cut of crutches for stability. The leather casing that enables Blizzard to walk is a double device here because it also serves as a base for Chaney to kneel on; his legs are bent up behind him and strapped to his waist by a leather harness. Wide-legged trousers and a voluminous jacket were tailored to hide the deceit. Chaney’s stature is continually raised by having those around him seated or by placing Chaney on surfaces that align him with the faces of those that he speaks to. An early scene in the sweat shop shows the working women siting around a long trestle table, each with a hat in front of them. Chaney as Blizzard climbs unaided onto the table via a chair, showing the agility of the actor. Blizzard’s menacing

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behaviour poses him as a threat to the women. Chaney’s steadfast agility is convincing, and he delivers a harrowing performance that leaves the women within the scene and the audience in no doubt of the physical strength of the amputee. His aggression as Blizzard fits with the notion of physical disability as a marker pathological behaviour. However, as the plot unravels, it is discovered that Blizzard’s evil ways are not because of his disability but because he has a pressure on his brain. Once this is relieved, in a convoluted operation scene, he becomes the pleasant and loving man that he might have always been, problematising the notion of the evil (disabled) other as a stable characteristic (Fig. 4.12). The focus of many features about Chaney are most often about the pain and suffering that he succumbed to in playing his roles. In an interview with Chaney in the New York Morning Telegraph, after the release of The Hunchback of Notre Dame, the main questions were about the physical effect that wearing the hump and the facial make-up had on the actor. Chaney is quoted as saying,

Fig. 4.12  Chaney demonstrating his physical prowess and athleticism as Blizzard in The Penalty. Cropped frame. Author’s photograph

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The burden of carrying that extra weight was almost unbearable. There were times when I felt that I simply could not go on … I had my right eye covered for so many weeks that I had spasms in it and have been forced to wear glasses.28

The reviewer comments that Chaney ‘tells these things quite casually as if losing the sight in one eye or suffering untold tortures was all a part of the day’s work’.29 It seems that for Chaney it was. Thus, his attention to detail in the creation of his disguises caused him actual long-term physical damage and pain. For him, this was part of the process of acting and not as the press would have it, ‘satisfying his penchant for portraying a twisted and crippled character’30. In 1927, Chaney disavowed an attraction for playing ‘grotesque’ characters. He insists, I play unusual characters not for the sake of applying grotesque make-up but always to advance the drama of a startling plot … grotesqueries [sic] as such do not attract me.31

The creation of spectacle, through make-up, prosthetics and bodily manipulation that Chaney adopts early in his career does ‘advance the drama of a startling plot’ in ‘startling’ ways and allows for the reading of these seemingly innocuous thrillers and horrors as trauma narratives. As Chaney said in an interview in 1924, Sometimes, one must exaggerate just a bit before the camera in order to get an action over. It takes much experimenting to find out just the proper shade of exaggeration which is necessary—in fact, the art of acting is a never-ending study. I practice and work with my make-up for hours at a time. A line here, a shadow there will produce entirely different effects when employed in different lights. Therefore, one must experiment endlessly and tirelessly in order to get satisfactory results.32

A much-publicised ‘obsession’, with not only playing grotesque and mutilated characters but in also bringing great pain and discomfort in the process, took up much of the trade press and fan magazine space around Chaney and helped to create a sensational star persona.33 From The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1923) onwards, there were no pre-publicity shots of Chaney in costume or make-up. The suspense created encouragement and excitement for the audiences who went to see ‘who’ Chaney was going to ‘be’ in this movie and ‘how’ he was going to achieve this.

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An article in Picture Play in 1925 described Chaney’s method of acting; thus, ‘acting to him means the creation of a man, whereas most of our favourite actors portray with their personalities as pigment. Chaney, like the artist of sculptor or painting, creates from an imaginative model which has nothing to do with himself.’34 The analogy with the artist is a pertinent one since the ‘new’ art of the period was that of the surrealist and Dada movement. Sidra Stich suggests that ‘the sudden presence, following the war, of a sizable population of the crippled and mutilated, with their missing, dislocated and disproportioned body parts’, enabled a representation of the body that ‘calls into attention the body as a disunified entity in which absence and deficiency prevail’.35 The excessive art form of Chaney’s performance calls into the attention the very presence of those veteran bodies that are injured and repaired. The fan magazines also helped to cultivate a mysterious and elusive persona through the creation of a myth that Lon Chaney could be anywhere amongst us at any time because ‘we never really know what he looks like’.36 Chaney and the press cultivated the notion of Chaney as an inaccessible persona; in 1925, he told a fan magazine, ‘There is no Lon Chaney, I am the character I am creating.’37 After interviewing Chaney in 1927, Ivan St. John’s declared: I couldn’t find any Lon Chaney. He just is whatever he’s playing at the time…Chaney doesn’t think of himself. He only thinks of the parts he plays. He has no interest in life than to transform himself beyond recognition.38

Chaney, St. John’s suggests, wants to remain an ‘enigma’. He did not make personal appearances and did not answer fan mail.39 He was also, allegedly, the first actor to affect dark glasses in public.40 This enigmatic star persona enabled the display of deformity and disfigurement to become a ‘must see’ spectacle in the way that the travelling Freak Show displayed its characters to a paying audience. Disability here becomes a site of entertainment rather than a site of anxiety. Chaney was only ever a disfigured or maimed character, not a ‘real’ man seen playing at home with his family or on the arm of his wife at society dinners as other celebrities are now being seen within the pages of the fan and society magazines.41 There was no public space in which he appeared as himself to de-mystify the fantasy.42 However, although Chaney did not appear at film and ‘high-society’ functions in person, unlike Elinor Glyn who revelled in the Hollywood social scene, his reputation was in evidence. At a dinner in 1927, the film director Mickey Neilan stopped the

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hostess from swatting a spider that had appeared on the table, with the shouted remark: ‘Don’t do that … it might be Lon Chaney!’ The remark apparently ‘brought the house down’.43 This line was already in existence in the trade and fan press, and according to Dorothy Spensley, Chaney himself kept a scrap book of cuttings of this ‘gag’, taking particular delight in the diversity of places that it had been found, including Java, Rumania and Germany.44 Chaney then can be seen as complicit in the construction of enigmatic star and mysterious man of disguise.

Conclusion Chaney’s performances are symptomatic of the time in which he is creating them and as an artist through his movement, through make-up and disguise and through excessive performance he created a new screen phenomenon, culturally aligned to the decade in which he was producing them. Modern technological advances in medicine facilitated the human body to be repaired, re-modelled and healed in revolutionary ways: skin grafting, sanitised amputation and a better understanding of anaesthetic meant that many men survived massive injury that would have killed them in earlier wars. As well as the technological advances in medicine, the advances in cinematic lighting, editing and make-up for the screen enabled Chaney to visually represent the body in ways that had never before existed. His performances associate the image of the injured man and the realities of the post-war cultural discourse of fascination and wonder at the surgeries and surgeons, artists and sculptors who worked alongside them.

Notes 1. Elsaesser, Thomas. 2001. ‘Postmodernism as Mourning Work’, Screen Volume 42, Issue 2, 1 July, p. 195. 2. Longmore, Paul K. 2001. ‘Screening Stereotypes: Images of Disabled People’ in Anthony Enns and Christopher R.  Smit eds., Screening Disability, Lanham MD: University Press of America, pp. 2–3. 3. Roy, David. 2016. ‘Masks as Method: Meyerhold to Mnouchkine’, Cogent Arts & Humanities Volume 3, Issue 1. 4. Roy (2016). 5. See Biernoff, Suzannah, ‘The Rhetoric of Disfigurement in First World War Britain’ in Social History of Medicine, Volume 24, Issue 3, December 2011, pp. 666–685. 6. Biernoff (2011).

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7. Many of the articles noted that images of the injured men and their surgical scars had not be reproduced out of respect for the injured veterans. 8. Parker, Henry Tilford, 1917. ‘Masking the Horrors of War’ 25 November. The Morning Telegraph. Scrapbook 1914–1923 Folder 5/7. Anna Coleman Ladd Collection, Archive of American Art, Washington DC. 9. Anon, 1917. ‘Woman Sculptor Will Mend Mutilated Faces’ in Star, 8 November. Box 22, Military Memorabilia. File, FC025 22. Archives and Rare Books reading room, Bernard Becker Medical Library, Washington University, St Louis, USA. 10. Philpott, A.J.  ‘North Shore Woman Forceful Sculptor’ in The Boston Sunday Globe, August 26 1917. Scrapbook 1914–1923 Folder 5/7. Anna Coleman Ladd Collection, Archive of American Art, Washington DC. 11. Interest in Anna Coleman Ladd’s work can also be seen in: ‘New Faces for Soldiers Made by Sculptor’ in Boston Globe 9 November 1917; ‘Built New Faces on Wounded Men’ in Bulletin 5 March 1919; ‘Makes Maimed Faces New’ in The Philadelphia Record, 6 March 1919; ‘Sculptors Make New Faces for War Heroes Disfigured Beyond Skill of Surgeons’ in New York Evening Telegraph 19 February 1919. ‘Modeller of Masks for Wounded, to Talk’ in The Philadelphia Inquirer 2 March 1919. Scrapbook 1914–1923 Folder 7/7. ‘Woman who remade Soldiers’ Injured Faces Reaches Boston Home’ in Sunday Post, 16 February 1919. Scrapbook 1914–1923 4/7. Anna Coleman Ladd Collection, Archive of American Art, Washington DC. 12. Hind, C.  Lewis, 1917. The Imperial Association for Assisting Disabled Naval and Military Officers in Rockport Massachusetts, 24 September. Scrapbook 1914–1923 Folder 5/7. Anna Coleman Ladd Collection, Archive of American Art, Washington DC. 13. Muir, Ward. Undated. ‘The Men with the New Faces’ in The Nineteenth Century, pp.  750–751. In Printed Material 1916–1918. Folder 10/11 1914–1925. Anna Coleman Ladd Collection, Archive of American Art, Washington DC. 14. Muir (n.d.) 15. Anon. 1919. ‘An American Sculptor’s Splendid War Work’ in The American Magazine of Art, June. Scrapbook 1914–1923. Folder 2/7. Anna Coleman Ladd Collection, Archive of American Art, Washington DC. 16. Undated cutting, ‘Sculptress Helping Restore Shell-Torn Soldiers Faces.’ Scrapbook 1914–1923 4/7. Anna Coleman Ladd Collection, Archive of American Art, Washington DC. 17. La Presse Médical No. 30 Juedi 20 Mai 1918, p. 345 and ‘Les Masques Vivants’ in Journal Paris 19 April 1918. Box 3. Anna Coleman Ladd Collection, Archive of American Art, Washington DC. 18. Original emphasis. Laroux, Gaston. 1994. (English translation 1911) The Phantom of the Opera, Project Gutenberg https://www.gutenberg.org/ cache/epub/175/pg175-­images.html (accessed 18 May 2023).

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19. Ross, N.  L. 1987. Lon Chaney: Master of Make-Believe, LA: Quality RJ, pp. 150–1. 20. This practice head and the make-up box can be seen at the Natural History Museum in Los Angeles. 21. Laroux (1994). Epilogue. 22. The Miracle Man (director George Loane Tucker, 1919) excerpts online at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6A9nedZoj3o 23. The Wellcome Collection website. The film is online see 18 min 20–30 secs in on, https://wellcomecollection.org/works/p5993re4 24. For Biographies of Lon Chaney and his characterisations, see Ackerman, Forrest J. 2003. Lon of 1000 Faces, Sense of Wonder Press, Rockville, MD; Blake, Michael F. 1998. The Films of Lon Chaney, Madison Books; Blake, Michael F. 1997. A Thousand Faces: Lon Chaney’s unique Artistry, Vestal Press; Ross, N. L. 1987. Lon Chaney: Master Craftsman of Make Believe, Quality RJ; Collier, Kevin Scott. 2017. Lon Chaney: In his Own Words, CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform; Anderson, R.  G. 1971. Faces, Forms, Films: The Artistry of Lon Chaney, Castle Publishing. 25. Donnell, Dorothy. 1930. ‘A Martyr to the Movies?’, Motion Picture December, pp.  34–35, cited in N.  L. Ross, 1987. Master Craftsman of Make-Believe L.A., CA: Quarterly RJ, p. 105. 26. Cruikshank, Herbert. 1929. ‘There’s always carpet laying’, Motion Picture Classic March, p. 43 &70. BFI Archive. 27. ‘Conference on Artificial Limbs for Disabled Servicemen,’ in British Medical Journal 31, July 1815, p. 190. 28. Parsons, Louella. 1923. ‘Lon Chaney’ in New York Morning Herald, 2 September. Margaret Herrick Library, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, Beverley Hills, Los Angeles, USA. 29. Parsons, Louella (1923). 30. New York Times, 1926. Review ‘The Blackbird,’ 1 February. BFI Archive. 31. Theatre Magazine, 1927. October, p. 58, cited in Studlar (1996), p. 207. 32. Anon. 1924. ‘The Man Who Sees’, The Morning Telegraph (NY) 27 January, [no page number] MHL. 33. See Maud Robinson Toombs, 1923. Lon Chaney: Collector of Faces…He mixes his grease paint with brains…, Photo-Play March, 1921, p.  20; Truman B. Hardy, 1921. Masquerade, Picture Play February, pp. 42–43 & 94; Mary Winship, 1921. Messrs. Chaney, Picture Play July, p. 25; Laura Louise Lowry, 1929. Without benefit of Ballyhoo, Hollywood April, p. 13; Ruth Biery, 1929. The Man behind the Mask, Screen Secrets June, pp. 72–3. BFI Archive. 34. Howe, Herbert. 1925. A Miracle Man of Make-Up. In Picture Play, 29 September. BFI Archive. 35. Stich, Sidra. 1990. Anxious Visions: Surrealist Art, New  York: Abbeville Press, p. 30.

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36. Ross, N. L. (1987. p. 131). 37. From 1925 ‘Lon Chaney: My Own Story,’ Movie Magazine, September. Margaret Herrick Library, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, Beverley Hills, Los Angeles, USA. 38. St. John, Ivan. 1927. Mr. Nobody: Lon Chaney has lost his own identity, in Photoplay Vol. 31 No. 3, February, p.  58 & 136. Margaret Herrick Library, LA. 39. St. John (1927. p. 137). 40. Skal (1993. p. 71). 41. Movie Stars such as Douglas Fairbanks, Gloria Swanson and John Barrymore had a high public profile, fan magazines often showed staged ‘at home’ photo shoots. 42. There was one exception in 1927 when Chaney appeared without grotesque make-up as a Marine Sergeant in Tell it to the Marines. Even here though this is a screen appearance rather than a live public showing of a star. 43. In Ross (1987. p. 131). 44. Spensley, Dorothy. 1929. ‘Laugh, Lon, Laugh’, Motion Picture, May, p. 67 &113 cited in Ross, 1987, p. 131.

CHAPTER 5

Unveiling Romance, Elinor Glyn’s Man and Maid

That’s the tragedy of life—when one suddenly observes things one has always known. Intertitle a coquettish Red Cross uniform—high heeled shoes—pearl necklace and most becomingly arranged cap Script of Man and Maid

Abstract  Drawing on archival material, this chapter looks at Glyn’s war veteran novel Man and Maid (1922) and its later lost film which depicted the wounded soldier recovering from injury and seeking domestic happiness. In the novel she portrays a hero who moves through the war-induced emotions of boredom, depression, cynicism, lust and bitterness. She weaves a story which portrays society in Paris in 1918 as  riddled with déclassé individuals as fortunes are lost and one coarsened by a predatory demi-monde. Yet she seeks to transfigure war-born greed and lasciviousness into the romantic genre, so it becomes selfless devotion and love. To do this, Glyn focuses on medical prosthetics which enabled men to be fit to work and the cultural discourses of facial beauty and ugliness. Keywords  Facial beauty and ugliness • Disfigurement • Veteran • First World War • Silent film • Elinor Glyn • Plastic surgery • Cosmetic surgery • Paris • Romance • Archives • Man and Maid © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 K. Randell, A. Weedon, Transforming Faces for the Screen, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-40029-2_5

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Elinor Glyn and Discourses of Female Beauty and Facial Disfigurement This chapter looks at Glyn’s war veteran story Man and Maid (1922) and its later filmic depiction of the wounded soldier recovering from injury and seeking (and finding) domestic happiness. In the novel she portrays a hero who moves through the war-induced emotions of boredom, depression, cynicism, lust and bitterness. She weaves a story which portrays society in Paris in 1918 as riddled with déclassé individuals as fortunes are lost and one coarsened by a predatory demi-monde. Yet she seeks to transfigure war-born greed and lasciviousness into the romantic genre so it becomes selfless devotion and love. To do this, she draws on the medical focus of veterans’ recovery in fitting prosthetics to enable men to be fit to work and the wider cultural discourses of facial beauty and ugliness. Over the decade following the war, Elinor Glyn pursued her distinctive philosophy of love through advice columns, novels and stories for the silver screen and became a celebrity. Glyn’s articles focused on self-­ improvement, strict discipline and dressing to attract the opposite sex. Many wanted to know how to have ‘It’. She addressed this through a beauty-and-the-beast’ theme which occurs in several of novels, the most unusual of which is Man and Maid written in 1919, and later made into film and its relationship to the discourses of plastic surgery, physical culture and self-transformation.1 This chapter will focus on the discourses of disability and beauty contextualising the story in visual culture up to the release of the film in 1925 and deals with Glyn’s own war experiences and the trauma of the war-damaged veteran. Glyn was one of a few female novelists pulled into the war effort to write reports for the news outlets on the front. In September 1914, the British modernist novelist May Sinclair went out with the ambulance corps to help the Belgian refugees, later writing up her experiences for publication in her Journal of Impressions (1915). Her time at the front was short. Longer lasting was Mary Roberts Rinehart the American mystery writer and a trained nurse, who was allied with the Belgian Red Cross in 1915 and visited the Belgian, French and British front lines for the Boston Globe, Saturday Evening Post and The Sphere. As familiar names, editors hoped they would attract a domestic readership newly interested in war news. Elinor Glyn came late to war reporting. She was invited in the summer of 1915 by a French charity to write articles for the American press, but it was not until July 1917 that she got to the front lines. Her sensational

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reports of the experience of being under fire, the horrors where Germans have passed, and outrages against womanhood were syndicated propaganda in Atlanta Constitution, Detroit Free Press, Idaho Daily Statesman, and San Francisco Chronicle throughout 1918.2 The romantic novelist Elinor Glyn was not perhaps a natural choice for a war reporter. She was a famous beauty, stunningly glamorous with her red hair and in her sister’s Lucile’s haute couture dresses. She had written on fashion and scandalously published Three Weeks (1907), a novel of passion and dynasty which had created a sensation when it was issued in Britain and America for its advocacy of extramarital conception. She had followed this with other fiction written in a new and popular eroticism about women’s romantic desire. Her success was also due to her Roman à clef novels with plots depicting the dual standards in high society. Her writing was fluent with an intensity of emotion but untutored in grammar and spelling. Elinor Glyn was known as Madame Glyn in the American press, and her adoption of the French salutation for her professional persona is a symbol of her cross-cultural origin. She stayed with her French cousins as a young woman in Normandy, near Bolbec, having her first romantic adventure there. She recalled in her memoir the differences between courting in France and in England; Frenchmen, she learned, flirted fascinatingly but were only serious when a girl had the right dowry which she did not. During the war she went to and fro between her flat in Versailles, the Ritz in Paris, visiting the front, and her English house. She loved France and was deeply imbued in French as well as English culture, and it was this dual cultural heritage which gave her a particular insight into different national attitudes to beauty and disfigurement.

Post-war Narratives of Facial Disfigurement in Visual Culture Post-war narratives of facial disfigurement could address the social problem or the personal trauma or seek to encompass both. Arguing from the perspective of trauma theory, E. Ann Kaplan points out that melodrama positions trauma as a ‘discrete past event, locatable, representable and curable’. Its popular appeal and repetition of ‘stories of high-born characters brought down by frailties’ she says, betrays ‘a traumatic cultural symptom’ ‘too painful to confront directly’.3 Personal and social traumas when

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represented in melodrama can enact the underlying relational ruptures within the spheres of the family or society but ultimately the form requires closure.4 Such narratives concern themselves with the doubts of the disfigured about their reception on their return home and the uncertainties of being loved. In two early films, the heroes lack confidence in their looks and so undertake plastic surgery: The Man Who Married His Own Wife (Mayo 1922) is a tale about a husband who carries out surgery because he—mistakenly it turns out—believes his disfigurement is a barrier to his wife’s love. In Minnie (Neilan and Urson 1922), a reporter has surgery to woo and win the hand of the homely woman he is investigating who has invented an admirer. The films raise the problem of body image and self-­ esteem in the context of romance. For Kember, the ‘more conventional variants of the social problem film tended to emphasise the consequences of wartime facial trauma upon personal identity, family and sexual relationships […] the restoration of perfect facial symmetry in these films—which so many real veterans did not experience—ultimately occasions the restoration of the domestic order too’.5 Two journalists’ novels of war trauma were made into Hollywood films: the British war correspondent Andrew Soutar’s Back from the Dead (1920) and American Jewish writer Edna Ferber’s short story ‘Gigolo’ (1922). Joe Kember deftly interpolates the historical context of the American war veteran’s return to civilian life into his film analysis. He points out that the novelty appeal of plastic surgery was important in these films’ success, and the special effects of transformation were achieved through the ‘grease paint surgery’ of a handsome star. He aligns the social records of the veterans’ problematic return in the newspapers with the screen depictions addressing the social problems. I would like to add the writers’ experience of what they describe and how that comes through in the adaptations: Soutar, for example, served with the RAF and covered the Allied Expedition against the Bolsheviks in 1919, publishing a record of his time.6 As a journalist, he caught the tone of the press and the title of his 1920 novel is from the oft-quoted headline of that year when missing service men returned unexpectedly ‘back from the dead’. By the time the film was released in 1925, the discourse had changed. The film with its changed title Back to Life had become the ‘extraordinary story of a man who is reported dead but returns to life to see from beneath the mask of changed features his possession [his wife] in the hands of another man’.7 There are similarities with Elinor Glyn’s two works, not only in the transformation

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of a personal story written with the rawness felt immediately after the war, but also in plot. The hero is presumed dead after falling from an aircraft across the English Channel as in Glyn’s Such Men Are Dangerous. Like Soutar, Glyn asks if a new identity is moral question and reflects on the hero’s change in character as well as facial features. Both Glyn and Edna Ferber capture the decadence of Paris and put it into their tales. Edna Ferber’s short story ‘Gigolo’ was made into a film in 1926 directed by William K. Howard and starred Rod La Rocque as the wealthy American heir, Giddy, who is shot down from the French air force and has facial surgery. The depiction of Paris was, according to the film’s publicity machine, personally investigated by Ferber. Her lively journalistic eye captured the horror: ‘All Europe was dancing. It seemed a death dance, grotesque, convulsive, hideous. Paris, Nice, Berlin, Budapest, Rome, Vienna, London writhed and twisted and turned and jiggled.’8 As they danced they tried to forget. Glyn’s Man and Maid was written some years earlier and set just as the war was ending. Both writers depict avaricious, vitiated, solipsistic women who were drawn to Paris. In Ferber’s story, the hero Giddy was left financially broken and washed up: ‘Driftwood, like thousands of others, tossed up on the shore after the storm; lying there bleached and useless and battered.’9 He becomes a dancer in Paris, partnering wealthy guests for a fee. Ferber’s describes the gigolos, the war veterans, and their damaged faces: they were young, though their faces were strangely lacking in the look of youth. All of them had been in the war. Most of them had been injured. There was Aubin, the Frenchman. The right side of Aubin’s face was rather startlingly handsome in its Greek perfection. It was like a profile chiselled. The left side was another face—the same, and yet not the same. It was as though you saw the left side out of drawing, or blurred, or out of focus. It puzzled you—shocked you. The left side of Aubin’s face had been done over by an army surgeon who, though deft and scientific, had not had a hand expert as that of the Original Sculptor. Then there was Mazzetti, the Roman. He parted his hair on the wrong side, and under the black wing of it was a deep groove into which you could lay a forefinger. A piece of shell had plowed it neatly.10

Mary, Giddy’s childhood sweetheart, sees through the strained gaiety of Europe in 1922. She observes ‘Europe wasn’t so gay as it seemed to the blind; and she didn’t write home to the effect that you’d never know there’d been war’.11 She saw Europe was sick, but felt America was alive

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and growing. It is the message of the film: Mary sees through the disguise of Giddy’s new face and brings him back home to work to restore his position in American society. The film presented images of tuxedoed man partnering fashionable slender women in gorgeous but effete Paris and contrasts it with the hard labour of Giddy, virtuously rebuilding his fortune in the furnaces of Winnebago. Kember observes that the film ‘carried interesting implications for men who had been remade, physically and psychologically in France’.12 Giddy’s facial surgery, however, is a reconstruction of the nose and Rod La Rocque like Lew Cody in Glyn’s Man and Maid loses little of his attraction on screen. Cody was known for playing villains, and his role in Glyn’s movie was his first romantic lead. In her work on Silent-Era Hollywood, Heather Addison interrogated the dual standards of beauty encoded in contracts and legal cases. She points out that the actor Louis Wolheim’s face was viewed as a property by the studio owner who brought an injunction when the star sought an operation to repair his nose in 1927. Typecast as a villain or a comic, the actor wanted to exercise his talent and play romantic leads, but was prevented.13 Male romantic leads she observes had to have handsome faces, while female leads had to keep under a specified weight.

The Face Radiates a Suggestion of Love: Elinor Glyn, Emile Coué and Embodied Knowledge Elinor Glyn had a racy public reputation as a red-haired passionate beauty and a belief in a form of masculinity that held command. In her time, she was an author of romance, adept in her depiction of women’s desire, and, as she claimed in her memoir A Romantic Adventure, was ‘always instinctively a high-priestess of the God of Love’,14 rejecting suitors whose only attraction for her was the lifestyle they offered. After a season or two in London, she stayed with her cousins in Normandy, La Valasse, near Bolbec. There she broke the hearts of many gallant Frenchmen but they did not offer marriage as she did not have a substantial dowry. In England, her admirers ‘possessed a more fundamental spirit of chivalry and romance’ when, elderly or unattractive, they offered their hands to her.15 So from her youth she was very aware of the difference between French and Anglo-­ Saxon cultural attitudes to physical attraction.

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That she was comfortable with her racy public reputation undoubtedly stemmed from her admiration for two female figures who she met as a teenager. These magnetic women who drew the eyes—and ears—of society became icons for her. Lily Langtry who came to her home in Jersey when she was a child and Sarah Bernhardt whom she saw in Paris in Victorien Sardou’s ‘Théodora’ saying ‘I was tremendously stirred by what I saw and heard, and became quite intoxicated with her voice, her marvellous art, and with the realization of a new and undreamt of kind of love—a rather wicked, tigerish, variety’.16 She recalled in her memoir that it was said that ‘La Petite Elinor’ had ‘something of Sarah Bernhardt about the eyes’.17 Glyn met her again in the First World War, when Bernhardt was in her seventies. The great actress had had her right leg amputated because her knee was causing her too much pain, yet she continued to perform and drew crowds for every performance (see also Chap. 3). Glyn’s determination to be like her idols, and an unhappy home life, lead her to exert strong self-discipline. As her tyrannous stepfather became a demanding invalid, Glyn ‘was able to change from a timid, nervous child into rather a brave one’, so ‘strong is the power of childish vanity to dominate the will’. She recalled that ‘it was not until I was shut up in a dug-out near the Front during the War that I again experienced the sense of sickening fear and horror that I remember enduring as a child’.18 Other experiences too shaped her writing of the war veteran. At the age of 35 shortly after the birth of her second daughter, Glyn contracted rheumatic fever. The acute arthritic pain in her back and legs left her bedridden for some months and there was a fear that she would not walk again.19 She used crutches to totter to her garden pavilion in her convalescence and began writing as a way to occupy her mind. She also had intimate experience of damaged men’s bodies before the war: her husband, Clayton’s, head had been badly burnt in a gas explosion and his dark hair had grown back as white as, she said, an eighteenth-­ century wig. She also witnessed the daily needs of a man in chronic pain when she lived with George Curzon, her lover on and off for seven years. Curzon had congenital deformity of the back and wore a corrective girdle which gave him a rigid stance. Not an easy man, his illness left him tired which led to a shortness of temper, and many took his inflexible back for arrogance, yet Glyn admired his self-discipline and work ethic.20 Such experiences led Glyn to develop her own guide to mental health which she advocated in her books and articles.

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Glyn’s writings and self-reflections have some similarities with Couéism, particularly through her belief that the reiteration of positive thoughts has a direct connection to physical health. The French pharmacist Emile Coué (1857–1926) founded a system of psychotherapy based on optimistic autosuggestion which he used to complement medical treatments effectively harnessing the placebo effect. Put succinctly, he advocated changing the unconscious through twice daily intentional imagining and focusing of the mind on the desired outcome. His work was adopted by the American cosmetic surgeon Maxwell Maltz (1899–1975) who proposed a system of ideas to create a healthy self-image, arguing that this was fundamental to successful change in a person. Maltz wrote many self-help books and a play ‘Unseen Scar’ (1946) about a burn victim with ‘that other unseen scar she wears on her heart’.21 Although published later than Glyn’s films, the play follows the themes of mental and physical recovery through Couéistic psychotherapy and plastic surgery. In the play, the scarred scientist Lee—the veteran is female—blots out her image in the mirror with the clay used for moulding face masks, a sign she contemplates suicide.22 Norman, the surgeon, refuses to operate, but agrees she can work for him in his lab, which gives her confidence and restores her self-belief. He eventually agrees to try out a new procedure and then succumbs to her regained sexual allure. Maltz combined Coué’s ideas on harnessing the power of internal self-image with that of cosmetic surgery to reconstruct the external beauty of the face. For Coué willpower could contradict autosuggestion and create a conflict which blocked the desired behavioural change. For Glyn, however, willpower and self-discipline were very important, and positive autosuggestion had to be aligned with them.23 She tells her magazine readers that she reflects on her behaviours once a week to ensure she has a clear self-­ image, going over her successes and failures; ‘It is an absolutely merciless examination’, for there is ‘one person only before whom I can truly be ashamed. And that person is Elinor Glyn.’24 In another interview she revealed her working day, explaining that she devoted the early hours of her morning to her beauty and health regime doing mental and physical exercises for the muscles of the face to keep them toned and young, some of which she may have shared with her niece Esmé Lady Halsbury and published in The Wrinkle Book [Eternal Youth in America].25 More theosophic in her outlook, Glyn referred to the ‘boomerang effect’, urging her readers only to send out the positive emotions that they wanted to receive in return. Her interviewer Hannah Stein observed that her method was

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singular, even psychic, in that ‘wherever she goes she creates her own physical atmosphere.’26 Two personal tragedies in the war tested her method and her self-­ discipline. In 1915 her husband Clayton became ill, and Glyn, who was in France awaiting passes so she could report from the front, returned home. His gambling and alcoholism had caught up with him and he died on 10 November. Elinor was now free to marry Curzon, but she had a second shock just a year later on 10 December 1916. Redecorating his unfurnished Elizabethan House at Montacute, Glyn read in the newspaper of Curzon’s engagement to an American, Grace Duggan. Her affair with Curzon was well known in society and it was a public humiliation. Glyn left Montacute, burnt his letters and returned to France. The combination of her personal tragedies and the war led her to declare that ‘in 1917 I died’. ‘I sat before my glass and I saw an old woman’, physically broken and spiritually dead. ‘It was as though a challenge was flung at me from its depths.’27

Glyn’s War and the Origin of Her Novel Man and Maid (1922) The spiritual death that she felt in the turn her personal life had taken she also saw in France. She kept a locked journal of her time in Paris during the war, ‘filled with gloom’. Quoting from it in A Romantic Adventure, she recalls her depression at the decadent remains of the ‘gallant French nation’. She writes that the Parisians ‘seem to be wilted flowers revived by some chemical for a short time, but their roots no longer exist’. She witnesses boredom, risk-taking, rampant vice and avarice, exhaustion and also dedication and sacrifice. In her diary she wrote that the Parisians were: Ungrateful, emotional, dramatic, crafty and self-seeking; polite only for appearance’ sake, uncouth underneath; witty, gay, brave and untrue; yet so fascinating and so brilliant that they will always be loved, not for their own qualities but in spite of them.28

She noted that French women of family did not become nurses as British women did in the war. Such characterisations went into her novel Man and Maid which was written from the point of view of an invalided veteran living in a Paris apartment as the war comes to an end. Glyn’s story focuses on romance, rather than horror, and deals with the psychological

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trauma of not having, or losing, the ability to attract the opposite sex. Although many of the characters who have ‘It’ in her later fiction are men, this is the only book she wrote from a male perspective and in the first person. It shows Glyn’s thoughts about beauty and ugliness and their internal link with desire and allure. To do this, she fictionalises a documentary form, the diary, and her novel mimics the recovery diary, a therapeutic aid recommended by surgeons for amputees. In these and in the letters, scrapbooks and journals of the patients, nursing and medical staff which Joanna Bourke has examined, veterans were able to express the negative feelings they could not utter.29 ‘Bitterness was one response to wartime experiences: and it was a response that few could afford to maintain for long periods’ Bourke observed.30 Man and Maid is the diary of Nicholas Thormonde, initially acrid in tone as he recovers from the loss of an eye and the amputation of his lower leg, and awaits a course of special treatment for his shoulder and fitting of his prosthetic limb in Paris. Glyn had witnessed the English wounded in France, taking flowers and cigarettes to the Trianon Palace Hôtel at Versailles.31 The Duchesse de Rohan had turned her hotel into a British hospital and worked there, much to the writer’s admiration. Glyn was ‘was terribly shocked both by the awful wounds and by the number of deaths which seemed to occur’.32 She also visited hospitals in Britain as her daughters were in the Voluntary Aid Detachment nursing and she helped out herself in a canteen for a while after her husband’s death. In 1917, she met Frenchman in Foreign Office who had lost his leg. To him the war meant nothing but ‘shocking weariness’. He ‘never opened his mouth except to squeak cynical and mordant monosyllables, and […] seemed to have no interests other than worn-out sex desires of a vicious type’ she recalled unsympathetically.33 Yet in the hospitals she found unexpected joy and was surprised that despite all ‘the men were so cheerful and gay, it was wonderful.’ Such experiences went into her novel. Despite bitterness, Joanne Bourke observed, patients ‘were more likely to view their surprising survival as a lucky and joyous opportunity to create a sphere of comfortable domesticity than as a chance to reflect on their social alienation and despair’.34 Glyn drew on this aspect when she later adapted her story into a melodrama for the screen. Her main war effort was to be a writer, and in 1915, she took an offer from a French organisation to write for American magazines about the devastated areas. Glyn’s role was different from the other British women writers who reported on the war as she was writing with the aim of encouraging and keeping American involvement. She visited the front and the

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American base camps writing about German atrocities and painted a picture of ‘Hun horror’ in her articles which were syndicated across America.35 Clearly propaganda, they contrast with the eyewitness account she wrote in 1917 ‘on the night she returned from a tour behind the British front lines’. Destruction (1918) shows an author unable to make sense of a landscape churned up into a battlefield or to describe the pitiless randomness of death. Her articles, on the other hand, offer a personal narrative of her travels which demonise the enemy, who burn and rape, and destroy the fertility of the land.36 For Glyn the loss and disfigurement of a generation of Englishmen was horrific. Hilary Hallett, in her biography of Glyn, says that this was the time when the author’s political ideas changed, and she became a suffragist and a democrat. Her freedom from the influence of Curzon was an undoubted factor, as that servant of the imperialistic state was anti-women’s suffrage. But it was the mental and physical turmoil of the war that she was to show in the novel she originally titled Renaissance.

From Trauma to Romance in the Film Story of Man and Maid (Schertzinger 1925) Glyn’s story exists today in the form of her novel, her partial film treatment in manuscript, the plates in the Photoplay Edition of the novel and the film script.37 No print of the film remains. In addition, we have the evidence of contemporary reaction to the story in the reviews of the book and the film, and some correspondence around the production of both. The changing titles of the manuscript on its way to publication tell its own story: an early draft of the book was entitled The Journal of Nicholas Thormonde, a reference to the recovery diary form, later Glyn called it Renaissance foregrounding Thormonde’s romantic rebirth. But the publisher had misgivings about using such an oblique title in the marketplace and chose the simpler Man and Maid to indicate its genre. Glyn depicts the feverish decadence of Paris in the final few months of the war through the journaling of the wounded Nicholas Thormonde. He believes he will never be the object of love for any woman, all he can expect is compassion and pity because he is an amputee and half his face is ruined. He is confined to a chair and has a crooked shoulder which prevents him from sustained writing. This fractious but rich convalescent is encouraged to exercise his mind by writing a history book. He hires a bristly secretary, who disguises her social class out of pride, shamed by her need to work

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because her father has gambled away their fortune. The story tells how these two spikey characters gradually fall in love. Thormonde’s inner dialogue offers a bitter commentary on those who come to visit and who represent his former life; a cocotte and a group of Parisian socialites brought to entertain him by his military friends. Only the old Duchess offers a corrective to this brittle demi-monde, urging him to think of the world beyond his mordant self-reflections. She is Glyn’s portrait of the hard-working Duchess de Rohan. Published in 1922, the book was too close to the bone for some critics. Keble Howard, the Literary Lounger of The Sketch, was ‘not “intrigued” by a riot of ultra-bitter ideas jammed together in the shape of a story’. ‘All the 1914–1918 nerves should be covered over and left to lie in the dark for awhile’, Keble expostulates, and explains that ‘there is a sort of tacit conspiracy among males of these islands to leave the sore place alone and give it a chance to get well’. Instead of giving us this novel which tastes of ‘powders in jam’, he asks talented women to join in that conspiracy, and then ‘the business of convalescence would, I am sure, be hastened’.38 Richard King in The Tatler says he finds it difficult to ‘realize that it is supposed to be a man writing at all’, as ‘men really do not do such things—at least, in that kind of way’. Not Englishmen anyway, the novel was written ‘in the French style’ ‘so perfectly […] that the whole thing might be a translation from the French’.39 King attacks Glyn’s romantic psychology as unconvincing, objecting to the cool-headed game playing and reversals from abject devotion to the masterfulness of men and to the portrayal of woman as tyrant and then the willing slave.40 With a reference to the release of Glyn’s film The Great Moment (Wood 1921), he observes: One feels at times that one is gazing through the eyes of the under-­ housemaid, whose imagination has been excited by novelettes and six-reel super films depicting the “Great World.”41

Somewhat grudgingly one feels, he adds ‘Still, Mrs. Glyn knows her public, and knows what this public wants to find and how they want to find it. She gives it to them accordingly’. Such a reaction from the critics influenced Glyn’s adaptation, which focuses on the love story, the luxurious apartment and the mystery of the stenographer’s family origins. In the six years between beginning writing the novel and the film’s release, society’s attitude to war stories changed considerably. The initial post-war silence broke around 1921 with a flourish of reminiscences,

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diaries and fictional storytelling. By the time the novel was turned into a film, in 1925, Glyn had had financial successes with her films Three Weeks (Crosland 1924) and His Hour (Vidor 1924). Both were romances of aristocracy in timeless settings in lavish exotic locations with the spectacles of drunken orgies, armed uprisings, gypsy bands and tame tigers. Man and Maid was set in Paris 1918 and had no such romantic scaffolding. She had written it in her redecorated flat 23 Rue du Peintre Lebrun, Versailles, where she moved in spring 1919 and it is no surprise that the book her hero writes was on the furniture of William and Mary. Yet the Kinematograph said the ‘big box office asset of this production’ was Elinor Glyn’s involvement. In fact, she did not direct the film, Victor Schertzinger did, but she did write the script and held sway over the production, playing close attention to the mise-en-scène, injecting glamour. A publicity shot for the film from 1920 has Glyn peeping round one of the four posts of a crowned half-tester bed with embroidered hangings and headboard featuring a blossoming tree above its single satin pillow. Its meaning is unmistakable, yet the promise of this field of passion could not be fulfilled on screen. All the romantic encounters are carried out in the Great or Small Salon of a luxurious Paris apartment according to the script and on chaise longue in the publicity photographs. The only bed in the film is that of the ailing Lady Hilda, mother of Alathea the heroine in their poor lodgings. Unlike the modernity of Edna Ferber’s Gigolo, Glyn’s film stuck to an older style of romantic drama. This featured her English heroes of the pre-­ War men-of-the-world type who were ‘expected to accept a commission and if necessary die with gallantry’ in time of war.42 She imagined how this generation of men, damaged by war would face the psychological trauma of losing the ability to attract the opposite sex. Glyn had to reconcile the disfigurement of this generation with what Joe Kember observed as ‘wives’ and families’ patriotic responsibilities’ to help in the ‘moral recuperation of loved ones… but also in responding appropriately, without obvious revulsion’ and recommence ‘social and sexual relationships’.43 Joanna Bourke commented on the soldier’s conjured images of their home in the letters and diaries at the Imperial War Museum and their visualisation of being reunited with family and friends. This desirous ‘sphere of comfortable domesticity’, as Bourke put it, is represented in scenes where Alathea takes care of the postlady’s baby and helps her younger brother and sister. However, according to one reviewer, the effect of Thormonde’s wistful yearning when he spies this vision of the Madonna and child comes across in a rather strained expression.

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Glyn played on the discourses of social transformation, finding her supporting cast outside Hollywood’s bounds. The newspapers caught on to this publicity claiming she was in a ‘unique position in that she is transcribing her own stories to the screen and is able to cast the parts identically with the way she has written them’. But there were hints of criticism. ‘Harriet Hammond plays the feminine lead, a girl who has not appeared in a picture in the past two years…. Dagmar Desmond, who plays the widow, Odette, was a society woman who had never even been in a studio before. Leonie Lester was assistant to her aunt, a cashier at a hotel, when Madame Glyn found her and gave her the part of Alice, the divorcee.’44 Glyn deployed the troops in the culture wars of beauty, and, as in the pageant, the eye of Madame Glyn could catapult beauty onto the screen. Her romantic advice to avoid ‘revulsh’ at all costs in a relationship as it erodes love, found its place in this film, not in the hero’s deformity, but in Suzette’s mole with three stiff black hairs protruding. The direction to ‘iris in’ and out on the mole following Thormonde’s gaze is combined with the intertitle: ‘That’s the tragedy of life,—when one suddenly observes things always known.’45 As in the discourse of physiognomy, Suzette’s physical shortcomings are accompanied by moral ones; we see her give her dog sugar cubes in a time of rationing, while the virtuous Alathea offers her ration card for her bread and butter, and she accepts a cheque for 50,000 Francs from Thormonde for ‘her charities’, in a euphemistic dismissal of her as his cocotte (Fig. 5.5). True to the genre, Glyn lightened the tone. There is humour in the film as the demi-monde characters are paid back for their teasing of Alathea. ‘A rich bachelor is always an interesting “wounded”…’ states the intertitle and Thormonde is momentarily entertained by the Fluffies who visit together: Coralie in a coquettish Red Cross uniform who wants chocolate cakes despite rationing, Odette the widow, coming straight from half-an-­ hour of work at the hospital who grabs the plate, and Alice, the divorcee, who cosies up to him. But he intervenes when they ask Alathea to type up their bridge list, assigning the task to Odette who has pretended she can type, but can’t, and in a comic moment tries to do so. Turning her criticism of the Parisian demi-monde into comic episodes at Alathea’s expense, Glyn’s script fails to portray the mystery of the heroine’s character. A feature she clearly sought in her initial treatment. In Elinor Glyn’s archive at the University of Reading, there is a notebook in which she drafted a partial treatment of her story. It shows a shift of focus from Nicholas’s embittered ennui in the book to his interest in

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the ‘young girl of provocative mystery’46 who has piqued his curiosity in the film. Glyn’s aim is to tantalise the viewers as she writes of Harriet Hammond’s first appearance: ‘This is only a long shot so that Alathea’s outline alone is grasped by the audience. They never see her actual face’. Later as she puts on her disguise Glyn says: The shot is so arranged that her face even in longshot only shows in profile. When all is ready she takes out a pair of horn rimmed spectacles with slightly darkened lenses yellowish and put them on and then turns and looks in the glass—and as she does so her mother comes into the room […] makes a slight gesture showing she is almost horrified at the change in her lovely daughter.47

The glasses are significant for Glyn as these hide her heroine’s allure (Figs. 5.2 and 5.4). Glyn herself emphasised her own Bernhardt-like eyes, characteristically leaning in and staring straight at the camera in her publicity photographs, and Gloria Swanson noted she wore artificial eyelashes when she met her in the 1920s. In Glyn’s novels love is found in the eyes, and those who have ‘It’ convey it in their glance. There is great deal of play in the film about Thormonde pretending to be asleep in the Bois in his wheelchair, catching glimpses of Alathea with her glasses off and seeing her tender look. In fact, the movie downplays Thormonde’s deformities (Fig. 5.2). In the book, he has lost an eye, in the script, his head is bandaged, but later he only has ‘a small patch over his eye where his wound was’. The doctors appear very briefly towards the end of the film having fitted his prosthetic, simply to indicate his recovery.48 His butler, Burton (Fig. 5.3), is the moral compass in the film, befriending Alathea, ensuring Thormonde’s guests entertain but also go when his master is tired, and his expressive facial reactions to the guests provide much of the comedy. He discretely provides advice and comforts, tolerating the convalescent’s fractious temper. Through most of the film Thormonde is angry with his physical weakness but not ugly. In Glyn’s script he is seated in ‘a chair foot up in a becoming smoking suit of velvet’, (Fig. 5.1) and he sleeps ‘looking very handsome’.49 He is able to stand with a stick as the armistice celebrations are heard (Fig. 5.6). Yet the film is bookended with two scenes of the wounded man helpless in Alathea’s arms. The rather effective opening shows two London offices side by side in a terrace divided by a wall each pursuing their own work

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Fig. 5.1  Frontispiece showing Sir Nicholas’s wounded head and foot. Photoplay Edition of the novel Man and Maid. Author’s image

unaware of each other. On one side is the busy American Red Cross where Alathea works, on the other is the English office where Thormonde has been assigned to recover from his field wound. We learn about the different work they carry out though the everyday chatter and get insights into the two main characters  from their colleagues—Alathea is efficient and well regarded and Thormonde’s wound minor, but it earned him the VC. Then comes the explosion of a Big Bertha bomb which blasts a hole between the two worlds, causing disruption to the Red Cross, but completely destroying the English office. Most evacuate, but Alathea goes through the wall to find that ‘Sir Nicholas is lying unconscious on the floor—a great mass of plaster and debris has fallen on his poor bandaged foot—and a small splinter has struck his temple above his eye’.50 Alathea frees his foot and rests his head on her lap gazing down at him until help comes. ‘So love was born of a wound…’ reads the intertitle. At the end of the film Alathea, sitting on the sofa, ‘touches his hair lovingly’ as she holds

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Fig. 5.2  Plate between pp.  68–9 showing Sir Nicholas’s head wound and Alathea’s glasses. Photoplay Edition of the novel Man and Maid. Author’s image

his head on her breast while he sleeps mirroring the earlier scene after explosion. It is she who bends down and kisses his lips, ‘a long and beautiful kiss’, and the shot cuts to the jubilant crowd in the street outside.51

Glyn’s Embodied Knowledge and the First-Person Narrative in Man and Maid Lady Hilda in the film of Man and Maid is a portrait of a woman carried away by her love of a gambler to divorce her first husband. There are parallels with Glyn and her sister Lucille’s marriages. Glyn remained married to her gambling husband, but the cost of divorce affected her sister. True to Glyn’s romantic philosophy, Lady Hilda says ‘Had I to suffer everything all over again—I would forgive him—for love’. And her advice to Alathea when Thormonde conceals his material help for the family is that ‘A wise woman accepts the present and forgets the past…’. This portrait may not

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Fig. 5.3  Plate between pp. 194–5 showing the cocotte Suzette addressing Sir Nicholas’s butler, Burton. Photoplay Edition of the novel Man and Maid. Author’s image

have pleased the male critics, but it must have found echoes in her female audience. Her plot of comic but petty jealousy, fortune hunting, ‘revulsh’ and the glitter of money—Thormonde will give four times the 50,000 Franc debt of her father to marry Alathea—captured her market. Man and Maid made a profit, not as great as her previous two films, but enough for the studios to continue to invest in Glyn’s stories. Glyn expressed optimism about the men, and women, remade physically and psychologically in France. How much this was a part of her Couéism and how much it was a belief in the enduring values of the culture is unclear, but she did adopt of the style of Madame Glyn in Hollywood in the 1920s. Flipping his typecasting, she chose Lew Cody to play the romantic hero, and the reviewers made much out of this of move from playing villains. It met with some success, as five months later he was to

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Fig. 5.4  Plate between pp. 258–9 showing Alethea caught without her glasses by her rival Suzette. Photoplay Edition of the novel Man and Maid. Author’s image

star again as the romantic lead in A Slave of Fashion (Henley 1925). It was not an uncommon route for actors, but in the context of post-war facial disfigurement, the move from villain to hero in the discourse of physiognomy meant exchanging the face of the villain to that of a hero, and that could be a difficult act if surgery was needed. Dagmar Desmond and Leonie Lester are credited with no further film roles, and Glyn’s ability to project unknown beauties to stardom needed some help from their acting talent. In 1922, she published The Elinor Glyn System of Writing explaining (with the likely help of a ghost writer) the motivation for writing for the screen: ‘the movie screen is The World’s Looking Glass, wherein it sees reflected all its own emotions.’52 The impact of the war on the English masculinity which she had idolised in her erotic bestseller Three Weeks and its return from the front disfigured and demoralised was a problem for the romantic author. How can

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Fig. 5.5  Suzette (Renée Adorée) and Sir Nicholas (Lew Cody) straining for love in the film Man and Maid (1925). Press photograph. Public domain

love triumph over physical deformity? Her definition of ‘It’ was not wholly dependent on physical perfection and it did encompass a person’s confidence and carriage, their way of moving and their conversation, but all of these were affected by trauma. Glyn believed that a person could better themselves through exercises and training, a self-discipline she exercised in her own life, and much of her own experience of the war went into her novel. She was not averse to shifting socially gendered experience between the actors of her heterosexual romances; both men and women could have ‘It’ and suffer the loss of sexual attraction. Writing from the first person enabled her to bring in the rawness of her own experience recorded in her own locked journal; it also linked the novel to the genre of the war diary emerging from bookstores post-war Britain, and the private recovery diary written by soldiers in hospitals as an aid to convalescence. She confronted

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Fig. 5.6  Alathea (Harriet Hammond) and Sir Nicholas (Lew Cody) standing for a kiss, in the film Man and Maid (1925). Press photograph. Public domain

the camera straight on to capture her own unsmiling but intense face focusing on the eyes, or in a profile view emphasising a right-angled line of the neck jaw. Glyn did see the body as plastic and she spent a lot of time and effort on these features and took advantage of the expertise surgeons gained during the war.

Notes 1. Glyn, Elinor. 1922. Man and Maid. London: Duckworth & Co. 2. Hallett, Hilary. 2022. Inventing the It Girl: How Elinor Glyn Created the Modern Romance and Conquered Early Hollywood. New  York: WW Norton & Co. 3. Kaplan, E.  Ann. 2001. Melodrama, Cinema and Trauma, Screen 42.2 Summer 201–205, 204. 4. Kaplan (2001, p. 204).

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5. Kember, Joe. 2017. Face Value: The Rhetoric of Facial Disfigurement in American Film and Popular Culture, 1917–1927. Journal of War & Culture Studies 10 (1):43–65. 6. Soutar was a keen criminologist and prolific novelist and playwright and his stories were made into films by British film companies. In 1920, he won £500 offered by Walker West of Broadwest films for a story and voiced his support of British film-making in the press. 7. Anon. 1926, Picture House. Portsmouth Evening News 26 January. p. 4. 8. Ferber, Edna. 1922. Gigolo. New York: Grosset & Dunlap. Original edition, Doubleday, Page & Company. p. 86. 9. Ferber (1922, p. 84). 10. Ferber (1922, p. 99). 11. Ferber (1922, p. 92). 12. Kember, J. (2017, p. 80). 13. Addison, Heather. 2019. Actor Denied Straight Nose: Louis Wolheim and the Gendered Practice of Plastic Surgery in Silent-Era Hollywood. JCMS: Journal of Cinema and Media Studies 58 (4):1–20. 14. Glyn, Elinor. 1936. Romantic Adventure: Autobiography. London: Ivor Nicholson & Watson. p. 46 15. Glyn (1936, p. 47). 16. Glyn (1936, p. 40). 17. Glyn (1936, p. 47). Like Bernhardt, Glyn was a self-publicist and was photographed throughout her career. She collected many in a blue exercise book with her own captions alongside the serialisation of her novel Love’s Blindness (RUL). 18. Glyn (1936, p. 15). 19. Hallett (2022, p. 24). 20. Glyn, Anthony. 1955. Elinor Glyn A Biography. London: Hutchinson. 21. Maltz, Maxwell, 1946. Unseen scar. Typescript, Billy Rose Theatre Division, The New York Public Library. New York Public Library Digital Collections. Accessed November 29, 2022. pp. 1-1-19 https://digitalcollections.nypl.org/items/3b0daa30-­3798-­0132-­fa6f-­58d385a7bbd0/ 22. Maltz (1946. pp. 1-2-43, 1-2-44) 23. Glyn’s spiritual path wound through western spiritualism to eastern notions of reincarnation and theosophy, hence her reference to the boomerang effect. 24. Nichols, Beverley. 1927, Celebrities in Undress: LXXV-Elinor Glyn. The Sketch. 31 August. p. 398. 25. There is an agreement for Wrinkles Postponed by Esme Lady Halsbury, with a forward by Elinor Glyn in Reading University Archives, MS 4059 archive box 44.

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26. Stein (1932. p. 10) 27. Nichols, Beverley. 1927, Celebrities in Undress: LXXV-Elinor Glyn. The Sketch. 31 August. p. 398. 28. Glyn (1936. p. 233). 29. Bourke, Joanna. 2000. Effeminacy, Ethnicity and the End of Trauma: The Sufferings of ‘Shell-Shocked’ Men in Great Britain and Ireland, 1914–39. Journal of Contemporary History 35, no. 1: 57–69. http://www.jstor.org/ stable/261181 30. Bourke, Joanna. 1996. Dismembering the male: Men’s bodies, Britain and the Great War. London: Reaktion Books, pp. 19–20. 31. See A.L.  Walker’s account of the Trianon Palace, Versailles in 1914 ‘Experiences at a base hospital in France 1914–1915’ http://www.scarletfinders.co.uk/156.html. Glyn lived eight minutes’ walk away from the hotel at 23 Rue du Peintre Lebrun. 32. Glyn (1936. p. 226). 33. Glyn (1936, p. 254). 34. Bourke, Joanna. 1996. Masculinity, Men’s Bodies and the Great War. Cross Current, History Today 46, nos. 1–6. 11. 35. The publisher Tauchnitz wrote to Glyn: Ask if they could leave out derogatory references to German nation in their European edition of Man and Maid. Barnett, Vincent L. and Alexis Weedon, Elinor Glyn as Novelist, Movie Maker, Glamour Icon and Businesswoman, Farnham: Ashgate, 2014. 36. Hallett (2022. p. 221) 37. The A.L. Burt and Company edition of the novel is available on Project Gutenberg and can be read online (EBook #20512). It includes plates of scenes from Elinor Glyn’s production Man and Maid for Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. 38. Howard, Keble. 1922. Literary Lounger, The Sketch, 17 May, 264, British Newspaper Archive. 39. Howard (1922, p. 264). 40. There were those who were more positive: The Northern Whig said it would no doubt please Mrs Glyn’s large public. The Times said she had made a great advance in her art by eschewing overblown passion, and her grandson Anthony Glyn said it was one of her better novels in his biography. (A Love Secret. The Times 12 April 1922, issue 43004, The Times Digital Archive, Gale Primary Sources, p. 17. Anon. 1922. Short Notices, The Northern Whig, 12 June 1922, 7. British Newspaper Archive.) 41. King, Richard. 1922. With Silent Friends. The Tatler, 17 May, p.  234, British Newspaper Archive. 42. Glyn, Elinor. 1936. Romantic Adventure. 63. 43. Kember (2017, p. 8).

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44. Anon, 1925, Elinor Glyn has unusual cast for ‘Man and Maid’. The Alaska Daily Empire 30 October. 45. Turner/MGM scripts, Margaret Herrick Library, Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, ‘Man and Maid’ script, Scene 41 and 46. Elinor Glyn’s script at the Margaret Herrick library is divided into fifteen sequences and 247 scenes. 46. Anon, 1925, Hot Weather Films Are the Right Brand next Week. The Indianapolis Times. 11 July, Home Edition, Page 6, Image 6, Chronicling America https://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/ 47. Glyn, Elinor manuscript fragment, Reading University Archives, MS 4059 Box 32 mss ‘Renaissance’. 48. Turner/MGM scripts, Margaret Herrick Library, Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, ‘Man and Maid’ script, Scene 234. 49. Turner/MGM scripts, Margaret Herrick Library, Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, ‘Man and Maid’ script, Scene 241 and 73. 50. Turner/MGM scripts, Margaret Herrick Library, Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, ‘Man and Maid’ script. Scene 12 Interior of English Branch office after explosion M-305. 51. Turner/MGM scripts, Margaret Herrick Library, Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, ‘Man and Maid’ script. Scene 245–6. Glyn’s script offers two alternative endings. This one which is rich in sentiment, or she adds in a note: ‘if it would be more interesting we could cut back to Salon—to the two, perfectly happy—and then to Burton outside the door, just bringing in the tea—he opens the door softly—sees them—then closes the door—and then Fade out on his exquisite expression and title:—“As I say—always make a fuss of ‘em!” This would be whimsical—but I am sure—it might destroy the sentiment.’ 52. Glyn, Elinor. 1922. The Elinor Glyn System of Writing. Auburn, N.Y.: Author’s Press. p. 27.

CHAPTER 6

In Conclusion, Visual Culture in the Archive

Abstract  This work studying the cultural history of the post-war period can illuminate sections of history from the military and medical, and significantly change normative discourses on beauty and disability, the (in)-stability of personal identity and the plasticity of the body. Using the archive has enabled a fuller discussion of the intersection of art and medicine than would have been possible using secondary sources. During this research, the authors have come across medical images which are either not publicly available or that the public has been shielded from; it is the authors’ contention that we have a responsibility to interrogate the silence which can surround such images. The hope is that the focused study of selected films of Chaney and Glyn inspires others to work at the intersections of their disciplinary discourses. Keywords  Military and medical archives • Scripts • Beauty and disability • Plastic surgery • Facial disfigurement • Veteran • First World War • Silent film • Visual culture • Elinor Glyn • Lon Chaney Snr Whereas Glyn explicitly used the notion of the disfigured veteran and the use of plastic surgery in her narratives, Chaney’s performance of disability provided a visual reference that was not explicitly linked to the War and those that fought in it. Both artists worked within the zeitgeist of post-war

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 K. Randell, A. Weedon, Transforming Faces for the Screen, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-40029-2_6

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cultural rhetoric and gave visibility to an issue that was hidden behind the covered windows and corridors of hospitals across Europe and America. Silent film had international appeal with intertitles translated for screening in different countries enabling wide distribution. So Glyn and Chaney’s Hollywood films were shown across Europe and America and drew audiences with different experiences of the war, yet these ‘communities and experiences … not to mention many of the major issues [which filled] newspapers and public debates, all reflect connections that span across national borders’ as the Netherlands-based researcher of transnational media, Alec Badenoch, points out.1 Some of these connections are drawn out here. Consulting newspapers and magazines of the era enabled an understanding of the prevailing discourse of the aftermath of the war in context. Understanding the ways in which war injury was reported alongside notions of beauty and self-improvement provides a context which has illuminated the representations seen in the films and novels under analysis. We have been able to revisit the archive to take a new look at the context in which our stories were created. Our research has taken us to digital and physical archives, the two having vastly different qualities, and our narrative could not be told without either of them. The themes we have sought to trace cross national and cultural boundaries, and we have delved into archives which were collected for specific medical or military purposes. Some were in America, some in Europe. Some were available and searchable as digital archives online, while others needed carefully wrought permissions to gain access. Our experience of archival work is different too and we have kept the voice of each author distinct to enable the reader to understand a multidisciplinary approach, and to see how archival evidence is used by each discipline. Even so we have sought through our co-authorship to mitigate the breaking down of boundaries between disciplinary ways of seeing and create broader insights.

Value of the Archive Dagmar Brunow has argued that for scholars of film ‘Studying the preserved script versions can reveal the changes and adjustments that have been made during the adaptation process’.2 The difficulty in the 1920s is in the diversity of their designations and their meaning: scenario,

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continuity, dialogue, lighting and camera scripts have different roles. Some are numbered or dated, and authorship is assigned or stamped and initialled by those through whose hands they passed. How useful are such scripts? In the Margaret Herrick the scripts were not highly annotated, indeed they were quite clean with some minor amendments. These seem to be the scripts that were used, or circulated for assessment. Brunow contends that ‘Archival studies can not only excavate different versions of a screenplay, but also different screenplay variants.’ Such word use emphasises the extent of textual revision. However, the literary term ‘variants’ over-­ emphasises the written contribution in the creative process and under-­emphasises other creative inputs such as Chaney’s ability to use make-up and create character effects in response to the camera lens or Glyn’s ability to set up the mise-en-scène. Claus Tieber has shown how important the film conference was in Hollywood Studios in ‘tearing up’ and re-creating the script, yet often little evidence remains of what was said (Tieber worked on rare notes of these meetings).3 The script of Man and Maid in the Margaret Herrick Library is from the MGM script department with Glyn named as the author. It is dated 25 November 1924, and changes were made—and approved—by 18 December (quite a short turnaround for amendment). But it is a world away from the early treatment Glyn sketched in her exercise book and no manuscript exists to bridge that gap. Yet Brunow’s broader point that the script is as worthy of study as the preparatory work of all other art forms is well-made, for without the script in the Margaret Herrick archive we would not know what the lost film was like, nor the extent of Glyn’s personal involvement. So, we have to unpeel the narrative in layers like an onion: from the book, the photographs in the Photoplay Edition (which are of course posed and not from the film), the script and from the reviews and a fragment of the manuscript treatment in Glyn’s personal archive at Reading, UK.  It is such archival work across three different countries that enabled a fuller analysis of her work. Anne Bachmann, writing about the press cuttings books in the Swedish Film Institute, has suggested that we need to look at these as a collection to garner their significance.4 Some press cuttings in boxes in Glyn’s Reading archive are dated and labelled by a cuttings service, others are cut out by herself and stuck into an exercise book as typeset galleys of the story and with little heed to provenance. In other archives, scrapbooks of cuttings are a witness to the production teams processing of reviews or an

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author’s record of the reception of their adaptation. So cuttings pasted into scrapbooks collected without identifying dates, maybe created for a specific reason, one in which the provenance of the cutting was not important.5 In every case, the selection and collection of material tells its own tale. Access to archives is privileged, appointments are usually necessary and not all archives or archival material have the same status. Karen Randell needed to access a military archive in the United States which gave rise to security issues not to do with the content of the material she wanted to see, but to do with the ownership of the material. It meant that the archival work was done at a distance and the archivist spent time working with her remotely and making images and films available securely. The Vilray Blair collection at the Bernard Becker Medical Library, Washington University in St Louis, is not digitised and required planned visits and pre-­ ordered material. The resources in the archive were gathered for medical use with images of ordinary soldiers used as evidential documents for the development and refinement of medical procedures. Using this archive within a film studies context required a mindful approach to the material to ensure that it was respectful and relevant to the context of 1920s visual culture. The archivists worked with Karen Randell to select the most appropriate documents and organise them for expedient work, the work of the archivist cannot be underestimated. And archives are funded in different ways which affects access as well as the amount of time the archivist or librarian can devote to helping the researcher. Alexis Weedon went to Penguin Random House, the commercial publishing company archive where access is controlled because its primary purpose is to care for the company’s business needs and protect copyright and the authors’ privacy but who also help academic researchers. Business archives often include financial and production records, which may be confidential or under copyright and it can be difficult to compare across these areas and across archives. Also, the different purposes behind the retention of materials affects access as external facing catalogues and databases may be supplemented by internal databases which are used to call the manuscript. Even the manner of issuing documents affects the research as when items are issued and returned separately, side by side comparison can be difficult. Yet the value of visiting the archive is undeniable: without it our narratives stagnate.

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The novel, Man and Maid, is available online, so too are the newspapers which have reviews in America, Britain and Australia as well as in many other countries which makes access available from the desktop and aids the researcher with the comparison of sources. It is also a great boon for research with a transnational dimension. These new forms open up different ways to research which were previously impossible. Yet it has to be remembered that what is put on digital display is chosen, and the curatorial decision may remove what is interesting to the researcher, as manuscript emendations, touch points, lip prints, wear and tear are often curated out when the cleanest copy is digitised. So digitisation preserves only some aspects of the material form. Some aspects can be simulated. Hi-Res images of full-page scans retain the page layout and imitate the experience of flicking through. Digital browsing through the bound magazines reveals the juxtaposition of articles and advertisements and allows for serendipity. It gives a simulated experience of reading in the era of production. For example, one article on Elinor Glyn and another in the same magazine on Lon Chaney would not have been found without the reading of the whole physical film magazine. Digital collating of material on each artist may have separated that connection out, never to be realised. We can see how the discourses are close and run in parallel, although they may not intersect. Reading stories in periodicals we can experience the anticipation of the cliff hangers of serialisation. And we can also see what is advertised adjacent to the stories and the visual connection between them providing a rich source of evidence for our understanding of the place of the film within a wider social and cultural context. Outside the institutional archive is the market for archival goods; for example, on eBay there are letters, cigarette cards, autographed books, postcards and memorabilia of both Glyn and Chaney. Such collectables are a useful indication of their popularity and, as in the case of the photographs of Glyn, are evidence of how she publicised her own ‘Eternal Youth’ in commissioned portraits. They attest to the perennial attraction of Chaney’s horror characters. You can still collect Legends of Horror stamps or make a coffin-clock with Chaney Snr on the face or buy a 1/6 figure of him as The Hunchback of Notre Dame, or The Phantom of the Opera wearing the mask of the Red Death. They are a testament to the longevity of Chaney’s reputation as a creator of horror characters, yet the

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connection with the disfigured veterans of the First World War is now lost from his legacy as the detachable mask for the Erik figurine is a skull-like scary face, not the aesthetic shield of Ladd’s work. The market tells us what remains in the popular imagination and has commercial value; it does not give us material for new readings of film history and its cultural significance. Glyn and Chaney raise questions about physical and psychological trauma which have relevance to later film history up to today. This archival research develops the relationship between film and medicine and the ability of the creative artist to destigmatise the horror of war. In the course of this research we have come across images which are either not publicly available or the public has been shielded from.6 Researchers alongside artists have a responsibility to interrogate the silence which can surround medical images.7 Our work studying the cultural history of the period, specifically in film and literature, illuminates the intersecting discourses of military and medical history and aids the revaluation of normative discourses on beauty and disability, the (in)stability of personal identity and the plasticity of the body. We hope our focused study of selected films of Chaney and Glyn inspires others to work at the intersections of these discourses.

Notes 1. Föllmer, Golo and Badenoch, Alexander. Introduction to Transnationalizing Radio Research: New Approaches to an Old Medium. Bielefeld: transcript Verlag, 2018. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783839439135. 2. Brunow, Dagmar. 2022. Towards an archival study of screenplay versions: the role of screenwriting research for adaptation studies. Interfaces 47: On-line. https://doi.org/10.4000/interfaces.4494 3. Tieber, Claus. 2014. A Story is not a Story but a Conference’: Story Conferences and the Classical Studio System. Journal of Screenwriting 5 (2):225–237. 4. Bachmann, Anne. 2017. ‘The press cutting, film studies and the digital age’. Journal of Scandinavian Cinema, 7(2) 149–154. https://doi.org/10.1386/ jsca.7.2.149_1 5. In the case of the Cinderella Collection in the University of Bedfordshire, it was to see how widely the transformation tale was used. See Nicola Darwood and Alexis Weedon (eds). 2020. Retelling Cinderella: Cultural and Creative Transformations. Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Press.

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6. This clash of visual cultures continued into the Second World War, as Eric Amber recalls the physical distress in the cutting room when his army film unit edited a documentary about maxillofacial injuries of soldiers for use by military surgeons. Eric Ambler, 1986. Here Lies Eric Ambler, an autobiography. Glasgow: Fontana, 1986. 7. Black feminist artist Wangechi Mutu’s work Histology of the Different Classes of Uterine Tumors (2004–2005) uses found materials as a basis for collage. The found materials are published medical illustrations, and on top of these Mutu creates a collage of the faces of women distorted by the shape tumour illustrated. Her work draws attention to the issues of women’s health and the prejudices and social censorship which surrounds disturbing conditions.

Bibliography

Addison, Heather. 2002a. Capitalising Their Charms: Cinema Stars and Physical Culture in the 1920s. The Velvet Light Trap 50 (Fall): 15–35. ———. 2002b. Capitalizing Their Charms: Cinema Stars and Physical Culture in the 1920s. Velvet Light Trap 50 (15): 19. ———. 2019. Actor Denied Straight Nose: Louis Wolheim and the Gendered Practice of Plastic Surgery in Silent-Era Hollywood. JCMS: Journal of Cinema and Media Studies 58 (4): 1–20. Alberti, Fay Bound, ed. 2006. Medicine, Emotion and Disease, 1700–1950. London: Palgrave Macmillan. ———, ed. 2016. This Mortal Coil: The Human Body in History and Culture. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Ambler, Eric. 1986. Here Lies Eric Ambler, An Autobiography, 1986. Glasgow: Fontana. Bachmann, Anne. 2017. The Press Cutting, Film Studies and the Digital Age. Journal of Scandinavian Cinema 7 (2): 149–154. Bamji, Andrew. 2022. Faces from the Front: Harold Gilles, The Queen’s Hospital, Sidcup and the Origins of Modern Plastic Surgery. Warwick: Helion and Company. Bate, Jason. 2016. At the Cusp of Medical Research: Facial Reconstructive Surgery and the Role of Photography in Exchanging Methods and Ideas (1914–1920). Visual Culture in Britain 17 (1): 75–98. Beaton, Cecil. 1974. Introduction. In Three Weeks, ed. Elinor Glyn. Gerald Duckworth. Biernoff, Suzannah. 2008. Shame, Disgust and the Historiography of War. In Shame and Sexuality: Psychoanalysis and Visual Culture, ed. C. Pajaczkowska and I. Ward. Routledge. © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 K. Randell, A. Weedon, Transforming Faces for the Screen, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-40029-2

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Biernoff, Suzannah. December 2011. The Rhetoric of Disfigurement in First World War Britain. Social History of Medicine 24 (3): 666–685. Blake, Michael F. 1990. Lon Chaney: The Man Behind A Thousand Faces. Lanham MD: The Vestal Press. Bogdan, Robert. 1988. Presenting Human Oddities for Amusement and Profit. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Bourke, Joanna. 1996a. Dismembering the Male: Men’s Bodies, Britain and the Great War. London: Reaktion Books. ———. 1996b. Masculinity, Men’s Bodies and the Great War. Cross Current, History Today 46 (2): 8–11. ———. 2000. Effeminacy, Ethnicity and the End of Trauma: The Sufferings of ‘Shell-Shocked’ Men in Great Britain and Ireland, 1914–39. Journal of Contemporary History 35 (1): 57–69. Brunow, Dagmar. 2022. Towards an Archival Study of Screenplay Versions: The Role of Screenwriting Research for Adaptation Studies. Interfaces 47: On-line: 1–21. Darwood, Nicola, and Alexis Weedon, eds. 2020. Retelling Cinderella: Cultural and Creative Transformations. Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Press. Elsaesser, Thomas. July1, 2001. Postmodernism as Mourning Work. Screen 42 (2): 201. Featherstone, Mike. 1982. The Body in Consumer Culture. Theory, Culture & Society 1 (2): 18–33. Ferber, Edna. 1922. Gigolo. New York: Grosset & Dunlap. Fitzharris, Lindsey. 2022. The Facemaker: One Surgeon’s Battle to Mend the Disfigured Soldiers of World War I. London: Allen Lane. Föllmer, Golo, and Alexander Badenoch. 2018. Introduction to Transnationalizing Radio Research: New Approaches to an Old Medium. Bielefeld: transcript Verlag. Gagen, Wendy Jane. 2004. Disabling Masculinity: Ex-servicemen, Disability and Gender Identity, 1914–1930. University of Essex. Glyn, Elinor. 1914. Letters to Caroline. London: Duckworth & Co. ———. 1922. The Elinor Glyn System of Writing. Auburn, N.Y.: Author’s Press. ———. 1928. Eternal Youth. New York: The Macaulay Company. ———. March 1929. Such Men are Dangerous. Hearst’s International– Cosmopolitan 86 (3): 38–129. ———. 1936. Romantic Adventure: Autobiography. London: Ivor Nicholson & Watson. Goldwyn, Samuel. 1923. Behind the Screen. New York: George H. Doran Company. Grout, Holly. 2013. Between Venus and Mercury: The 1920s Beauty Contest in France and America. French Politics, Culture & Society 31 (1): 47–68. Hallett, Hilary. 2022. Inventing the It Girl: How Elinor Glyn Created the Modern Romance and Conquered Early Hollywood. New York: WW Norton & Co.

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Houston Jones, David, and Marjorie Gehrhardt. 2015. Paddy Hartley of Faces and Facades. London: Black Dog Publishing. Kaplan, E.  Ann. 2001. Melodrama, Cinema and Trauma. Screen 42 (2, Summer): 201–205. Kember, Joe. 2017. Face Value: The Rhetoric of Facial Disfigurement in American Film and Popular Culture, 1917–1927. Journal of War & Culture Studies 10 (1): 43–65. Longmore, Paul K. 2001. Screening Stereotypes: Images of Disabled People. In Screening Disability, ed. Anthony Enns and Christopher R. Smit. Lanham MD: University Press of America. Norris, William. 1987. The Man who Fell From the Sky. Viking. Panayi, A.C., Y. Endo, A.F. Huidobro, V. Haug, A.M. Panayi, and D.P. Orgill. October 01, 2021. Lights, Camera, Scalpel: A Lookback at 100 Years of Plastic Surgery on the Silver Screen. European Journal of Plastic Surgery 44 (5): 551–561. Riley, Philip J. 1999. The Making of the Phantom of the Opera (Including the Original 1925 shooting Script), Classic Silents Series. Vol. 1. Chesterfield, NJ: Magic Image Filmbooks. Roy, David. 2016. Masks as Method: Meyerhold to Mnouchkine. Cogent Arts & Humanities 3 (1): 1236436. Stead, Lisa. 2023. Elinor Glyn’s British Talkies: Voice, Nationality and the Author On-Screen, in Karen Randell and Alexis Weedon, Elinor Glyn and Her Legacy, Abingdon: Routledge. Stich, Sidra. 1990. Anxious Visions: Surrealist Art. New York: Abbeville Press. Studlar, Gaylyn. 1996. Sideshow Oedipus: Lon Chaney and Film’s Freak Possibilities. In This Mad Masquerade: Stardom and Masculinity in the Jazz Age, 199–248. New York: Columbia University Press. Tieber, Claus. 2014. A Story is not a Story but a Conference’: Story Conferences and the Classical Studio System. Journal of Screenwriting 5 (2): 225–237. Weitzman, Erica. 2014. Human Fragments: Plastic Surgery and Bare Life in Joseph Roth’s Feuilletons. Journal of Austrian Studies 46 (4): 92.99. Woolf, John. 2019. The Wonders: Lifting the Curtain on the Freak Show, Circus and Victorian Age. London: Pegasus.

Index1

A Able-bodied, 9 Advertising, 4, 9, 16n24 Aircraft, 103 American Expeditionary Force (AEF), 21, 22 American Mary (2012) film, 11 Amputation, amputee, 9, 13, 76, 90–92, 95, 108, 109 Anaesthetic, anaesthesia, 21, 48, 65, 95 Ankles, legs, 46, 47, 87, 88, 90, 91, 105 Archive, 20, 27, 56, 112, 123–128 Argonne, 55 Autosuggestion, 106 B Back from the Dead (1920) book, 102 Back to Life (1925) film, 42n28, 102 Barrymore, John, 13, 98n41

Baxter, Warner, 64, 66 Beaton, Cecil, 57 Beauty-and-the-Beast, 13–15, 100 Beauty, beauty products, 3, 4, 6, 8–14, 17n31, 46–70, 100–101, 104, 106, 108, 112, 117, 124, 128 Beauty queen, 10 Bergman, Ingrid, 55 Bernhardt, Sarah, 55, 105, 113, 120n17 Betty Boop, 11 Blair, Vilray Papin, 9, 20–40, 40n10, 41n19, 42n23, 42n24, 43n44, 43n46, 52, 54, 80, 81, 126 Bobbs-Merrill edition of Leroux’s novel The Phantom of the Opera, 85 Body image, 9, 102 Broken faces, see Gueules cassées Bystander, The magazine, 4

 Note: Page numbers followed by ‘n’ refer to notes.

1

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INDEX

C Career of Katherine Bush, The (1916) novel, 6 Castaigne, Andre, 85 Celebrity, 4, 9, 50, 71n23, 94, 100 Chaplin, Charles, 61 Cheek plasty, 60 Chirurgie Esthétique pure (technique et résultats) book, 48 Chirurgie Esthétique: Son Role Social, La book, 47 Cinderella, 68, 128n5 Cinique de L’amour, La (2012) film, 10 Clinic, 10, 11, 24, 48, 50, 52, 62, 69, 70 Cody, Lew, 104, 116, 118, 119 Consumerism, 8 Cosmetic surgery, 10–13, 46–53, 63, 106 See also Plastic surgery Cosmopolitan magazine, 50, 61, 81 Coué, Emilé and Couéism, 104–107, 116 Crawford, Joan, 55, 57 Crime, 2, 11, 13, 14, 54, 69 Criminality, 13 Criminal Man (1876) book, 12 Cripple, 13, 14, 87 Croisset, Francis de, 54 Curzon, George, 55, 105, 107, 109 D Deaf, 7, 16n12 Debridement, 21 Defying Destiny (1923) film, 54 ‘Der Wiederaufbau des Menschen’ story, 52 Destigmatisation, 12 Destruction (1918) by Elinor Glyn, 109

Disability, 3, 7, 8, 10, 13, 14, 16n19, 20, 21, 29, 76, 90–92, 94, 100, 123, 128 Double-eyelid surgery, 14 Dymorphic, body dysmorphia, 15, 61, 69, 70 E The Elinor Glyn System of Writing (1922) book, 117 Embodied knowledge, 2, 55–61, 104–107, 115–119 Esmé Lady Halsbury, 106, 120n25 Eternal Youth (1928) book aka The Wrinkle Book (1927), 50, 55–61, 69, 106, 127 Ethically-loaded terms, 13 Evening Star, newspaper, 5 F Fabian, Mary, 30 Facial disfigurement, 2, 3, 7, 9, 100–101, 117 Facial surgery, 6, 10, 24, 46–70, 103, 104 Fairy tale, 46 Fan magazines, 3, 9, 16n24, 93, 94, 98n41 Fashion, 9, 47, 62, 101 Ferber, Edna, 102, 103, 111 Flapper, 9 Freakshow, 20 G Gargoyle, 8, 52, 53, 58, 64, 66, 68, 69, 82 Gender, 11, 14, 16n19 Genre, 3, 4, 6, 11, 13, 14, 29, 65, 69, 100, 109, 112, 118

 INDEX 

Gigolo (1926) film and short story (1922), 102, 103, 111 Gillies, Harold, 23, 24, 27, 34, 38 Gilmer, Mary Ridgeway, 27, 28 Glyn, Anthony, 57, 121n40 Glyn, Clayton, 105, 107 Goldwyn, Samuel, 60 GPF Bunny (2012) film, 11 Graft, 33, 34, 54 Great Moment, The (Wood 1921) film, 110 Grotesque, 3, 13–15, 20, 29–35, 52, 93, 98n42, 103 Gueules cassées, 8, 9, 53 H Health regime, 6, 106 Hearst Magazines International, 54 Hilde Heide Studio, 50 His Hour (Vidor 1924) film, 111 Hollywood, 2, 4, 5, 8, 10, 15n4, 20, 28, 57, 60, 61, 94, 102, 112, 116, 124, 125 Hopper, Hedda, 64 Horror, 3, 13, 14, 29, 38, 69, 72n25, 79, 80, 85, 93, 101, 103, 105, 107, 127, 128 Houry, Henry, 10 Howard, William K., 42n28, 103 Hunchback of Notre Dame, The (1923) film, 92, 93, 127 Hysterical screen, 14 Hystogen Institute, 47 I Infection, 21, 35, 65 Influenza, 23 IRS, 63 ‘It’ (1927) film, 15n10, 46–53, 56, 57, 61, 108, 113, 118

137

J Jaw, 12, 25, 28, 40n10, 57, 60, 61, 119 Jersey, 6, 24, 105 Jew, Jewish, 14, 52, 64, 68, 69, 102 Joseph, Jacques, 52, 60, 69 Journal of Impressions (1915) book, 100 K Kerry, Norman, 30 Knowing Men (1930) film, 61 L Ladd, Anna Coleman, 3, 23–25, 76–86, 96n11, 128 Ladd, Maynard, 23 Landvoigt, W.H., 5 Langtry, Lily, 6, 105 László, Philip de, 56 Lauridson, Private Lauride M., 35 LeGuen, Suzanne Goeffre, 47 Leroux, Gaston, 38, 85, 86 Life magazine, 17n31 L’Illustration magazine, 17n31 Loewenstein, Alfred, 61 Lombroso, Cesare, 12, 54 Lucile, 101 Lugosi, Bela, 66, 69 Lux soap, 50, 53, 71n16 M Maimed, 9, 14, 66, 76, 94 Maltz, Maxwell, 106 Man and Maid (1922) book, 100–119, 127 Man and Maid (1925) film, 4, 6, 46, 70, 125 Manners, Dorothy, 50

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INDEX

The Man Who Married His Own Wife (1922) film, 54 Martyn, Marguerite, 26, 27, 42n25, 42n27 Masculinity, 9, 16n19, 20, 47, 70, 104, 117 Mask, masking, unmasking, 2, 3, 6, 23, 25, 29, 30, 35, 38, 40, 50–53, 56, 75–95, 102, 106, 128 Mask of Love, The working title for Such Men Are Dangerous (1930) film, 6 Maxillofacial surgery, 23 McIntyre, O.O., 48 Mellon-Bérenger debt agreement, 9 ‘Menschenliche Fragmente’ (Human Fragments) (1919) story, 13 Meyer, Adolf de, 57 Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (MGM), 5, 6, 121n37, 122n45, 122n48, 122n49, 122n50, 122n51, 125 Military hospital, 8, 81 Minnie (1922) film, 102 Miracle Man, The (1919) film, 13, 87, 89 Morlay, Gaby, 55 Motion Picture Classic, 9, 16n24 Motion Picture magazine, 2, 16n24, 50 Movie stars, see Stars Multidisciplinary, 3, 21, 124 Muni, Paul, 66 Myth, 13–15, 94 N Narcotic, see Anaesthetic, anaesthesia Nasenplastik und sonstige Gesichtsplastik (1931) book, 52, 60 Nöel, Suzanne, 47, 55 Norris, William, 64 Novocaine, 48 Nurse, 13, 65, 100, 107

O Owen, Catherine Dale, 64 P Pageant, 9, 10, 112 Paris, 6, 24, 30, 47, 55, 62, 68, 70n8, 71n15, 81, 82, 100, 101, 103–105, 107–109, 111 Passot, Raymond, 48 Pathetic fallacy, 14 Penalty, The (1920) film, 76, 89–92 Phantom of the Opera, The (1925) film, 2, 3, 20–40, 76, 77, 79, 127 Philbin, Mary, 29 Photography, 10–13, 17n29, 31, 42n26 Photoplay Edition, 109, 115, 116, 117, 125 Photoplay magazine, 16n24, 51 Physical culture, 9, 16n23, 16n24, 100 Physical desire, 4 Physical regime, 2 Physiognomy, physionomic, 3, 12–14, 112, 117 Plastic surgery, 10–12, 20, 25, 26, 46, 48, 54, 61, 64–66, 69, 76, 80, 100, 102, 106, 123 Portraits, 27, 56, 68, 69, 110, 115, 127 Prosthetics, prostheses, 2, 4, 9, 15, 29, 48, 53, 75–95, 100, 108, 113 Q Quasimodo, 6 R Race, 3, 11, 14, 63, 64 Recovery diary, 108, 109, 118

 INDEX 

139

Red Cross, British, American, 23, 27, 80, 83, 86, 112, 114 Reducing, slimming, 9, 16n24 Reintegrate, reintegration, 8, 9, 21, 23 Rhinoplasty, 14, 52 Rocque, Rod La, 103, 104 Romance, 2–6, 11, 13, 14, 46, 56, 61, 65, 68, 69, 100–119 Roth, Joseph, 17n33, 52

T Theosophic, 106 Three Weeks (Crosland 1924) film, 111, 117 Transplantation, 11, 35 Trauma, 2–4, 6, 8, 14, 20, 28, 55, 76, 77, 79, 85, 93, 100–102, 108–119, 128 Trianon Palace Hôtel Hospital, Versailles, 108

S St Louis hospital, 9, 41n20 Saint or Satyr (1933) book, 63 Sardou, Victorien, 105 Scenario, 4, 64, 91, 124 Script, 4, 38, 63, 109, 111–113, 122n45, 124, 125 Self-improvement, 9, 70, 100, 124 Sinclair, May, 100 Skin Deep (1922), film, 42n28, 54 Skin grafting, 21, 95 Souret, Agnès, 10 Soutar, Andrew, 102, 103, 120n6 South African war, 9 Sphere, The magazine, 48, 100 Stars, 4, 10, 16n23, 20, 30, 38, 48, 55–57, 88, 89, 93–95, 98n41, 98n42, 102, 104, 117 Stein, Hannah, 4, 15n6, 106 Stevenson, R.L., 13 Strachan, Atholene, 46 Strange Case of Dr Jeckyll and Mr Hyde, The (1886) book, 13 Studio for Portrait Masks, 23 Such Men Are Dangerous (1930) film, 4–6, 11, 46–70, 103 Swanson, Gloria, 57, 60, 98n41, 113

U Ugly, ugliness, 3, 4, 8, 13, 14, 37, 38, 52, 54, 64–66, 68, 69, 100, 108, 113 Universal Studios, 16n16 V Vajda, Ernest, 6 Valentino, Rudolf, 57 Variety, 36, 40 Verdun, 55 Versailles, Treaty of, 9 Vienna, 52, 62, 103 W Waleffe, Maurice de, 10 Washington, University of School of Medicine, 53 Wilson, John Fleming, 54 Wolheim, Louis, 104, 120n13 Women’s magazines, 9, 12, 16n24 Wood, Francis Derwent, 23, 27, 80, 81, 110 Wrinkle Book, The. (Eternal Youth in USA) book, 106