The perils of actor Pearl White’s movies demanded real cliffhangers
A CENTURY ago film star Pearl White, who died 80 years ago, jumped off boats and dangled from skyscrapers.
Today in History
Don't miss out on the headlines from Today in History. Followed categories will be added to My News.
IN the Ritz bar, gushed Anita Loos’ blonde heroine Lorelei, a girl could see “all the important French people in Paris”, only to name several Americans, among them silent film star Pearl White.
White was a recent addition to the Paris social scene, retiring in 1923 after her stunt-double died on set, only to shoot her final movie in France in 1924.
After surviving thousands of stunts for her Perils Of Pauline and Exploits Of Elaine movie serials, White died in Paris 80 years ago, on August 4, 1938, at the age of 47.
Her death was attributed to a “liver ailment”, suspected as cirrhosis after years of alcoholism and rumoured drug use to ease a painful back injury. While some biographers suggest she lost much of her $2 million film savings on baccarat tables and her stable of 10 racehorses, when she died White had a townhouse in the elegant Passy commune of Paris and a 21.8ha estate just out the city, near Rambouillet. She also travelled and shared a house in Egypt with her consort, Greek millionaire businessman Theodore Cossika, and left an estate of £74,000, which would now be about £5 million.
But between 1914 and 1918, White’s exploits grossed $24,570,000 in ticket sales from four films, making her America’s most popular film star in 1916. In her autobiography, Just Me, in 1919, White described the beginning of her movie serial career, which left her hanging at the end of each episode, introducing the term “cliffhanger”.
“The idea of serial pictures had just been born over in Jersey, and Pathe (Freres, a French film company) offered me the chance to risk my life through a series of episodes called The Perils Of Pauline,” she wrote.
Her contract ruled out claims for compensation in case of accident or “loss of life”, and White argued she was too clumsy for the “hair-breadth” escapes, which in the first three episodes included a plane flight that ended with a crash. She would also drive a car through fire, sand and water, then go to sea in a yacht and jump off, although she could not swim. But risk her life she did, with publicity about White’s stunts quickly winning audiences in 1914 for the first
20-episode serial from the US branch of Pathe Freres.
Born on March 4, 1889, in rural Green Ridge, Missouri, to farmer Edgar White and his wife Inez, White made her acting debut at age six, earning $5 a week playing Little Eva when a production of Uncle Tom’s Cabin performed in her town.
She left high school early to join the Diemer Theatre Company in Springfield, later writing that she also performed trapeze work which taught her to “control my entire body fairly easy”. In 1910 she turned to films, joining the Powers Film Company in the Bronx, New York, playing in short slapstick comedies such as The Girl In The Next Room and Her Dressmaker’s Bill. Filming more than 100 comedies, serials and westerns over the next 13 years, White’s publicity included dangling from a skyscraper in Manhattan to paint her initials on a brick wall in 1916, with a 1921 article describing her as The Heroine Of A Thousand Dangerous Stunts.
Insisting she had “never” used a double for her stunts, White explained there was “a sort of fascination” and exhilaration in performing her own.
“I suppose it means more to me because I am afraid,” she said.
“You say to yourself ‘I thought I couldn’t go through with it, but I did.’ And that makes you feel good inside.”
Tapping on a wooden table as she spoke, White claimed never to have been hurt “doing the big things. I’ve done a million stunts. I’ve been hurt over and over. But it never happened when I was doing what looked really dangerous.” Her worst injuries came as “some slight mischance; not during a big moment of danger”. In one picture her hands were tied behind her, while she was left in the cellar of a building set on fire.
“The hero was to rescue me just in the nick of time,” she said. Actor Paul Panzer was carrying her upstairs, over his shoulder, when he lost his balance and fell backward down six stairs.
“I (was) struck on the top of my head, displacing several vertebra,” White said. “That was the worst hurt I have received. The pain was terrible. For two years I simply lived with osteopaths, and to this day I have some pretty bad times with my back. Yet you wouldn’t have called that a dangerous stunt, or any stunt at all.”
Worse came while filming Plunder, with Warren Krech as leading man. White’s character Pearl Travers was trying to unearth diamonds buried in the foundations of a New York skyscraper. On August 10, 1922, stunt double John Stevenson, 38, dressed as the heroine, leapt from a double decker bus onto the overhead girder of an elevated track.
A large crowd gathered at the 72nd St and Columbus Ave location, expecting White to perform the stunt. Stevenson’s hands slipped on dust and grime on the girder; he fell eight metres, cracking his head on the footpath, and died in hospital without regaining consciousness.
White made her final film, Terror, in Paris in 1925.