A Glance at Blanche Mehaffey

Blanche Mehaffey (1908-1968) lived in a time of Blanches: Blanche Sweet, Blanche Ring, Blanche Merrill,Blanche Payson, Blanche Bates, Blanche Walsh, and her own mother, the Cincinnati soprano Blanche Bernt Mehaffey (1875-1941). Luckily she didn’t blanche at the prospect of hard work or she’d never have gotten anywhere in show business!

Fortunately, Mehaffey possessed inborn assets. Endowed with huge, haunting blue eyes, and gifted at dance, she got her start in the chorus of the Ziegfeld Follies of 1922 at the worryingly young age of 14. The high profile engagement got her noticed, and by the next year she was co-starring in comedy films for Hal Roach. Her first one, Fully Insured (1923) with Snub Pollard and James Finlayson, was released just about a century ago. She remained with Roach for the next couple of years appearing in comedies with Charley Chase, Glenn Tryon, and others. In 1924 she was elevated to the WAMPAS Baby Stars.

By the mid ’20s Mehaffey was cast pretty consistently in features. These included A Woman of the World (1926) with Pola Negri, Take it From Me (1926) with Reginald Denny,The Tired Business Man (1927) with Raymond Hitchcock,Finnegan’s Ball (1927) with Mack Swain, Marlie the Killer (1928) with Francis X. Bushman, and several Hoot Gibson westerns.

In 1928, Mehaffey married a businessman, but the union only lasted a couple of months. She spent some time taking diction and speech classes, and then returned to Filmland to work in talkies. Most her sound pictures were westerns, B movies and serials, starring Rex Lease, Bob Steele, and others, many of them produced by her second husband Ralph M. Like. She also had a supporting role in Mack Sennett’s 1932 feature Hypnotized. In some of her films she was billed as “Janet Morgan”.

Mehaffey’s last movie (out of 60 total) was the independently made 1938 melodrama The Wages of Sin. She was not yet 60 when she died 30 years later. Some sources say she died of natural causes; others claim it was a drug overdose.

For more on show business history please see No Applause, Just Throw Money: The Book That Made Vaudeville Famous,and for more on silent comedy read  Chain of Fools: Silent Comedy and Its Legacies from Nickelodeons to Youtube.