Mabel my belle
Now we all know that the one who held the key to Keystone was Mack Sennett, but there was another set made specially, for one Mabel Normand. And Amabel Ethelreid Norman (yes I swear)! who would sadly not blow out the candles on her fortieth birthday, certainly made her proverbial mark in the few decades that she actually was on our earth. As comical as she was, her life was rife with travesty - Normand suffered many a health malady, namely tuberculosis, which would resurface a few times in her all too brief life.
Mabel, who hailed from Staten Island, New York came from extremely humble and quite
impoverished beginnings; the daughter of unemployed carpenter Claude Normand. Her first brush with
fortune would come, when she caught the eye of artist Charles Dana Gibson and posed
for the illustrator, becoming one of the famed Gibson Girls,( I happen to be a Gibson girl but a Fender one too) who were the absolute hallmark for 'hotness' circa the early twentieth century.
When she was just barely of age, and would have her first chance encounter with Mack Sennett, let's just say it was an encounter of another kind too. So impressed was Sennett, with her other abilities of unusual wit and charm, that he summoned this budding star to Keystone, and he intuited well, a grand move on Mr Sennett's part as Mabel was truly one of the most effortlessly funny women of the century, and indeed would earn her 'Queen of Comedy' dubbing.
And it would not take long for her to shine and illuminate as she would in her first substantial role
as Charlie's gal in the popular 1914's Tillie's Punctured Romance, a quiet comedy of errors and terrors that also starred another heavyweight; ( I mean her acting chops, not her physique, honestly) Marie Dressler.
This film would serve as catalyst for Normand's subsequent success, she would star in many noted silent shorts from Roscoe Arbuckle's convivial Fatty's Wine Party (1914) to Bright Lights in 1916, another Arbuckle adventure. Her next starring in a full-length feature film would come in the year 1918, for Goldwyn Pictures, with her memorable lead performance as Arabella Flynn in Dodging a Million.
Unfortunately, Miss Normand would see her career come to an end as a result of her poor health and two very infamous scandals, that although innocent would mar her otherwise impeccable reputation, when in 1922, Mabel was associated, (though not exactly a suspect )with the murder of William Desmond Taylor and a few years after, on New Year's Day 1924, following this major murder
scandal, Normand's best friend, fellow silent sister, Edna Purviance, (who happened to be Charlie Chaplin's lover in 1917) current oil magnate beau Courtland S Dines would be shot (but would survive) and the bullet wound came courtesy of Normand's chauffeur. Haunted by the guilty by association theme, her last screen days would come to an abrupt end in 1927. Mabel's other last day would come in 1930 due to complications of severe tuberculosis.
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