"Dark Lady of the Silents: My Life in Early Hollywood" by Miriam Cooper (1973)
Miriam Cooper's autobiography is a breezy read told in a very conversational style. Cooper entered the acting profession in 1911 strictly for financial reasons. Her father abandoned her mother and three siblings while the children were very young. As a teenager, Miriam started earning $35 a week as an actress and supported her entire family. A member of D.W. Griffith's troupe, she played important roles in two of America's most influential silents: "The Birth of a Nation" (1915) and "Intolerance" (1916).
She married actor/director Raoul Walsh and here is where she displays some less admirable qualities. Walsh was a womanizer and Miriam was the jealous type. She relates the tale of inviting one of her romantic rivals to her home. Miriam mixes the woman a cocktail and throws in some cleaning fluid. Hmmmm. The unstable couple adopted two boys although the idea was Miriam's and Raoul was not an engaged parent. Miriam essentially abandons the boys when they reach the age of sixteen. She writes she had no further contact with them and has no idea whether they are dead or alive. In a rare moment of introspection, she writes of her son Jack "I had thought I was giving him something good when I took him out of the orphanage, but as a motion picture star I hadn't been able to give him what he needed most: a stable home life with a mother and father around all the time. Now that I was divorced, Theresa (her cook) and I tried to do the job, but the damage had already been done."
Cooper's accounts of family life are confirmation that the nuclear family was often not the norm in America, even in the early part of the 20th Century. Along with the sociological aspects, the book is worth reading for Cooper's anecdotes regarding Hollywood's A-listers, including Charlie Chaplin, Pola Negri, Lillian Gish, Theda Bara, and Douglas Fairbanks.
