Gladys Walton: The Glad Girl

I became aware of silent screen actress Glady Walton (1903-1993) by way of my recent post on Hazel Howell. They had appeared in the 1921 feature Desperate Youth together.

I was naturally most interested by the widely reported fact that Walton had started out in silent comedies. The word is that she got her start in Fox Sunshine Comedies in 1919, although a list of which ones she was in has not yet made it to the internet. And her first feature was the screen version of the Gershwin musical La La Lucille (1920) with the team of Eddie Lyons and Lee Moran. I was also attracted by the fact that several of Walton’ movies had show biz settings: Pink Tights (1920) and Sawdust (1923) are both circus stories; The Trouper (1922) is about a traveling stock company. She only starred in about 3 dozen films over a five year period, most of them were for Universal. She is compared in advertising materials to Mary Pickford, though the title of most of the pictures paint her as more of a flapper type: All Dolled Up, Short Skirts, High Heels (all 1921); The Girl Who Ran Wild (1922); The Untamable (1923). Her directors included important figures of the era like King Baggot and Herbert Blaché.

After A Little Girl in a Big City (1925) she retired to focus on marriage and raising her six children. (One of the six, John Herbel, has this website where he claims she had a 10 year affair with Al Capone). Only five of her films are known to survive.

Intriguingly, her credits also list L. Frank Baum’s The Fairylogue and Radio-Plays (1908) though I’m skeptical. She was from Boston and educated in Oregon, and that project was produced out of Chicago. Also, she was five at the time — not a dealbreaker, but I’ve not heard of any other childhood credits. She is apparently an entirely different Gladys Walton than the one who appeared in Broadway musicals and revues throughout the same period.

For more on silent movies please read  Chain of Fools: Silent Comedy and Its Legacies from Nickelodeons to Youtube.