On Glen Cavender and How They Laid Him Out in Lavender

Miracle of miracles, a silent comedy star I haven’t yet written about. I don’t know how Glen Cavender (1883-1962) slipped through the cracks (maybe I thought Glenn Tryon was Glenn enough) but it’s okay with me because it means that he lands here just in time to help me plug the 10th anniversary audio book version of Chain of Fools and the revised version of the book itself. (The former is coming out for the holiday season, and the latter in early 2024).

Cavender appeared in nearly 350 films during his long career as a supporting player. Originally from Tucson, he claimed to have performed with Buffalo Bill’s Wild West, but is more reliably known to have performed on the Pantages vaudeville circuit prior to signing up with Keystone in 1914. There he supported Charlie Chaplin, Fatty Arbuckle, Mabel Normand, Ford Sterling, Louis Fazenda,Ben Turpin, et al in too many classic shorts to name, as well as features like Tillie’s Punctured Romance starring Marie Dressler and A Submarine Pirate starring Syd Chaplin.

From here he went to Fox around 1918 and also supported Arbuckle in some of his Comique shorts. He worked steadily throughout the ’20s, appearing in such things as The Pest (1922) and Pie-Eyed (1925) with Stan Laurel, No Wedding Bells (1923) with Larry Semon, Keep Smiling (1925) with Monty Banks, The Fighting Dude (1925) with Lupino Lane, and Buster Keaton’s The General(1927), probably his high water mark. He continue to be in scores more shorts through the end of the silent era and into the early days of talkies.

Cavender had a decent role in the 1931 Bob Steele western The Nevada Buckaroo, but after that most of his work in features was in extra roles and walk-ons. He stayed at it for almost two more decades though, rounding out his career as an extra in a crowd scene in The Fountainhead (1949).

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