Wallace Reid
Wallace Reid - one of Hollywood's earliest screen idols
"The terrible shock of his death shattered the public's image of him, and almost shattered Hollywood."
Cecil B. DeMille
Birth name:
William Wallace Reid
Born:
15th April 1892, St. Louis, Missouri, USA
Died:
18th January 1923, Los Angeles, California, USA
Years active:
1910 - 1923
Biography
One of early American cinema’s first screen idols, Wallace Reid embodied the image of the All-American male. Handsome, vigorous, and athletic, he captured the hearts of an army of female moviegoers and seemed destined for a long career. However, within eight short years of rising to prominence, morphine addiction would destroy the man America embraced as the epitome of clean-cut, easy-going masculinity.
Early life and family background
William Wallace Reid was born on 15th April 1892, in St. Louis, Missouri. His father, Hal Reid, was a former journalist turned successful playwright. His mother, Bertha, a former socialite and actress, often appeared in the plays written by her husband. Hal Reid’s success as a playwright meant his son enjoyed a privileged upbringing. It also provided him with his first acting role when he appeared on stage at the age of four, playing a little girl in his father’s melodrama Slaves of Gold.
The family settled in New York, but Reid’s parents divorced in 1901, shortly before enrolling him at the Freehold Military School in New Jersey. He then attended Perkiomen Seminary in Pennsylvania, where he developed a strong interest in automobiles. In fact, he was so preoccupied with them that his grades suffered. Despite this, he passed the exams for entry to Princeton.
Entry into movies
During a vacation from school, his parents won Reid a part in a new play called Unto the Fourth Generation. Much to their consternation, his performance created quite a stir; fearful he would be lured into a life on stage, they shipped him out west to spend time with ‘Buffalo Bill’ Cody, who was a friend of Hal Reid’s.
Cody’s sister put Reid to work as a clerk in her brother’s hotel. But with his imagination fired by the older residents’ tales of the Wild West, he soon struck out for Wyoming in search of adventure. After six months working as a ranch hand, he became a surveyor on the Shoshone Dam project.
Reid remained in New York after his parents tricked him into returning by falsely claiming that Bertha was close to death. He became a reporter, first for the Newark Daily Star and then for Motor Magazine. He gave up his career in journalism when his father asked him to replace the lead actor in a road tour of an abridged version of his play, The Girl and the Ranger.
When its tour ended, Hal Reid found work as a writer in Selig Polyscope’s scenario department. His son also found employment with the studio as an assistant cameraman. Soon, he was writing and directing, as well as playing minor roles when needed. Father and son returned to New York when Bertha was seriously injured in a traffic accident. There, writer-director Milton Nobles cast him in his short film, The Phoenix (1910).
He made a strong enough impression to be offered further acting work, although he really preferred to work behind the camera. At Vitagraph, he appeared opposite the rotund stage comedian John Bunny, before appearing in a popular series of films called Leather Stocking Tales. When he wasn’t appearing in front of the camera, he sometimes earned a little extra cash by playing the violin as a mood musician - someone who plays music to provide a conducive atmosphere for actors.
Reid’s increasing popularity made it difficult for him to return to working behind the camera. Otis Turner, who had directed Reid in a few films for Reliance and was now working for Universal, persuaded the young actor to go with him to Hollywood. There he worked as Turner’s general assistant at Universal, where he wrote, directed, operated the camera, and sometimes acted. Still intent on a career behind the camera, he joined the American Film Company, where he worked under actor-turned-director Allan Dwan. The following year, 1913, he and Dwan, together with Dwan’s leading lady, Pauline Bush, signed with Universal.
Reid enjoyed success at Universal as a writer, director, and actor, and recalled those days as the happiest of his career. Like many in his profession, Reid considered D. W. Griffith to be cinema’s genius and was keen to work under him. However, when Griffith finally showed an interest in Reid, it was only as an actor. The lure of working with the revered director in any capacity was too great to resist, however, and Reid left Universal for Mutual in May 1914.
Reid appeared in several films for Griffith, and when Henry B. Walthall fell ill, looked as though he might win the lead role in the director’s epic Civil War saga The Birth of a Nation. When Walthall recovered, Griffith awarded Reid the much smaller role of a blacksmith who single-handedly battles a gang of Negroes.
Reid’s performance in the movie caught the attention of Jesse Lasky and Cecil B. DeMille, who signed him as an actor to the Jesse Lasky Feature Play Company, which eventually became Paramount Pictures. It was there, where he was heavily promoted as an icon of American manhood, that Reid became a major star of the screen. He starred opposite opera singer Geraldine Farrar, Lasky’s major female star, in five movies. Other prominent co-stars from this period included Cleo Ridgeley and Mae Murray. His most frequent co-star, however, was the diminutive Ann Little, with whom he made eleven pictures between 1917 and 1920.
Wallace Reid and Cleo Ridgely in Cecil B. DeMille's The Golden Chance (1916)
Morphine addiction and decline
In early 1919, Paramount cast Reid opposite Grace Darmond in a logging picture to be called The Valley of the Giants (1919). On 2nd March 1919, travelling to the Korbel Mountains in Oregon for location shooting, Reid and other members of the cast and crew were involved in a horrific accident. Their train left the tracks while travelling across the Noisy Creek Bridge and plunged down a fifteen-foot embankment. Almost everyone who was part of the company suffered injuries. Despite suffering a serious scalp wound and damage to his sciatic nerve, Reid tended to other members’ wounds, including setting a prop boy’s four broken fingers. Help took twelve hours to reach the remote region, but everyone survived. However, the accident left Reid prone to agonising headaches and crippling back pain for the rest of his life.
Incredibly, shooting of the film resumed the very next day. Paramount sent the studio doctor to the shoot with a plentiful supply of morphine to help the film’s leading man shoot his scenes. In 1919, the addictiveness of the drug was not understood, and Reid received doses several times a day. By the time the shoot was complete, he was addicted.
Despite his addiction, Reid continued to make films at a breakneck pace: six features in 1920; seven in 1921. Although he initially appeared outwardly fit and healthy, Reid suffered changes in his character: he became nervous and irritable, lost his appetite, and suffered from insomnia.
Reid’s popularity remained unaffected, and after the release of The Roaring Road (1919), Double Speed (1920) consolidated the huge success of a sequence of movies he made centred around high-speed motor vehicles. Reid’s troubled state of mind continued, however, and the death of his father in May 1920 affected him deeply. Rumours that Reid was a dope addict began to circulate following two separate incidents in which men carrying drugs were arrested on movie sets. When Lasky ordered that a doctor stay by Reid’s side for two weeks to determine whether the young actor was indeed an addict, Reid went cold turkey to receive a clean bill of health. The moment it was issued, he began using once again.
Late in his life, Reid began a desperate fight to rid himself of his addiction. As there were no such things as recovery programs in the 1920s and he wished to keep his addiction out of the public spotlight, he simply abstained completely. His efforts weren’t aided by a temporary bout of blindness caused by working under the studio’s intense Kleig lights. In late 1922, he voluntarily admitted himself to the Banksia Place Sanatorium. While undergoing treatment, his weight plummeted from 200lb to 135lb and he contracted influenza. When doctors told him his only chance of survival was to return to the drug, taking strictly controlled doses, he refused.
Shortly after one o’clock in the afternoon on 18th January 1923, Wallace Reid lost his fight and died in his wife Dorothy’s arms. He was just thirty years old.
Legacy
Following his cremation, Reid’s ashes were placed in an urn at Forest Lawn Memorial Park in Glendale. Paramount, the studio that had enslaved Reid to morphine, paid him less than comparable stars of the era, and subjected him to a punishing schedule while in the grip of addiction, announced it would erect a memorial in his honour. The memorial was never built.
Coming in the wake of the Roscoe ‘Fatty’ Arbuckle scandal and the unsolved murder of the director William Desmond Taylor, press coverage about Reid’s death from morphine addiction inflamed public outrage over drug abuse in Hollywood. His wife, the actress Dorothy Davenport, quickly produced and starred in Human Wreckage (1923), a semi-exploitation picture that used Reid’s death as a framing device to warn against the ravages wrought by drug addiction. She also toured with the film to speak publicly about the dangers. Profits from the film went to fund the Wallace Reid Foundation Sanatorium in the Santa Monica Mountains.
Sources: Wally: The True Wallace Reid Story, David W. Menefee; Wallace Reid: His Life Story, Bertha Westbrook Reid.
Wallace Reid Filmography
The Phoenix (1910) [a], The Courting of the Merry Widow (1910), The Leading Lady (1911) [a], The Mother of the Ranch (1911) [a], The Reporter (1911) [a], War (1911) [a], A Daughter of the Redskins (1912) [a], A Man's Duty (1912) [a], A Red Cross Martyr, or, On the Firing Lines of Tripoli (1912) [a], All For a Girl (1912) [a,w], An Indian Outcast (1912) [a], At Cripple Creek (1912) [a], At Scrogginses' Corner (1912) [a], Before the White Man Came (1912) [a], Brothers (1912) [a], Chumps (1912) [a], Curfew Shall Not Ring Tonight (1912) [a], Diamond Cut Diamond (1912) [a], Early Days in the West (1912) [a], Every Inch a Man (1912) [a], Fortunes of a Composer (1912) [a], His Mother's Son (1912) [a], His Only Son (1912) [a], Hunted Down (1912) [a], Indian Romeo and Juliet (1912) [a], Jean Intervenes (1912) [a], Kaintuck (1912) [a], Making Good (1912) [a], Playmates (1912) [a], The Cowboy Guardians (1912) [a], The Gamblers (1912) [a], The Hidden Treasure (1912) [a,d], The Hieroglyphic (1912) [a], The Illumination (1912) [a], The Indian Raiders (1912) [a], The Path of True Love (1912) [a], The Secret Service Man (1912) [a], The Sepoy Rebellion (1912) [a], The Seventh Son (1912) [a], The Telephone Girl (1912) [a], The Tribal Law (1912) [a,d], The Victoria Cross (1912) [a], Virginius (1912) [a], A Cracksman Santa Claus (1913) [a], A Foreign Spy (1913) [a,d], A Hopi Legend (1913) [a,d], A Modern Snare (1913) [a,d], An Even Exchange (1913) [a], Brother Love (1913) [d], Calamity Anne Takes a Trip (1913) [a], Cross Purposes (1913) [a,d], Dead Man's Shoes (1913) [d], Hearts and Horses (1913) [a,d], Her Innocent Marriage (1913) [a,d], In Love and War (1913) [a], Love and the Law (1913) [a,d], Man's Duty (1913) [a], Mental Suicide (1913) [a], Near to Earth (1913) [a], On the Border (1913) [a,d], Pirate Gold (1913) [a], Pride of Lonesome (1913) [a,d], Retribution (1913) [a,d], Song Bird of the North (1913) [a], Suspended Sentence (1913) [d], The Animal (1913) [a], The Brothers (1913) [a,d], The Crackman's Reformation (1913) [a], The Deerslayer (1913) [a], The Eye of a God (1913) [a], The Fires of Fate (1913) [a,d], The Fugitive (1913) [d], The Gratitude of Wanda (1913) [a,d], The Guerilla Menace (1913) [a], The Harvest of Flame (1913) [a,d], The Heart of a Cracksman (1913) [a,d], The Homestead Race (1913) [d], The Kiss (1913) [a,d], The Latent Spark (1913) [d], The Lightning Bolt (1913) [a,d], The Mute Witness (1913) [d], The Mystery of Yellow Aster Mine (1913) [a], The Orphan's Mine (1913) [d], The Picket Guard (1913) [a], The Picture of Dorian Gray (1913) [a], The Powder Flash of Death (1913) [a], The Renegade's Heart (1913) [d], The Rose of Old Mexico (1913) [a,d], The Spark of Manhood (1913) [a,d], The Spirit of the Flag (1913) [a], The Tattooed Arm (1913) [a,d], The Wall of Money (1913) [a], The Ways of Fate (1913) [a,d], Their Masterpiece (1913) [a], Via Cabaret (1913) [a,d], When Jim Returned (1913) [a,d], When Luck Changes (1913) [a,d], When the Light Fades (1913) [d], Where Destiny Guides (1913) [d], Women and War (1913) [a], Youth and Jealousy (1913) [a,d], 'Cross the Mexican Line (1914) [a,d], A Flash in the Dark (1914) [a,d], A Gypsy Romance (1914) [a,d], A Mother's Influence (1914) [a], A Wife on a Wager (1914) [a,d], Another Chance (1914) [a], Arms and the Gringo (1914) [a], At Dawn (1914) [a], Baby's Ride (1914) [a], Breed o' the Mountains (1914) [a,d], Cupid Incognito (1914) [a,d], Down by the Sounding Sea (1914) [a], Down the Hill to Creditville (1914) [a], Fires of Conscience (1914) [a,d], For Her Father's Sins (1914) [a], For Those Unborn (1914) [a], Her Awakening (1914) [a], Her Doggy (1914) [a], Love's Western Flight (1914) [a,d], Moonshine Molly (1914) [a], Over the Ledge (1914) [a], Passing of the Beast (1914) [a,d], Regeneration (1914) [a,d], Sheriff for an Hour (1914) [a], Sierra Jim's Reformation (1914) [a], The Avenging Conscience (1914) [a], The City Beautiful (1914) [a], The Countess Betty's Mine (1914) [a,d], The Daughter of a Crook (1914) [a], The Den of Thieves (1914) [a,d], The Exposure (1914) [a], The Fruit of Evil (1914) [a,d], The Greater Devotion (1914) [a,d], The Heart of the Hills (1914) [a,d], The High Grader (1914) [a], The Intruder (1914) [a,d], The Joke on Yellentown (1914) [a], The Little Country Mouse (1914) [a], The Man Within (1914) [a,d], The Mountaineer (1914) [a,d], The Niggard (1914) [a], The Odalisque (1914) [a], The Quack (1914) [a,d], The Second Mrs. Roebuck (1914) [a], The Siren (1914) [a,d], The Skeleton (1914) [a,d], The Spider and Her Web (1914) [a], The Test (1914) [a,d], The Voice of the Viola (1914) [a,d], The Way of a Woman (1914) [a,d], The Wheel of Life (1914) [a,d], Who So Diggeth a Pit (1914) [a,d], Women and Roses (1914) [a,d], A Yankee from the West (1915) [a], Carmen (1915) [a], Enoch Arden (1915) [a], Old Heidelberg (1915) [a], Station Content (1915) [a], The Birth of a Nation (1915) [a], The Chorus Lady (1915) [a], The Craven (1915) [a], The Lost House (1915) [a], The Three Brothers (1915) [a], Intolerance (1916) [a], Maria Rosa (1916) [a], Starlight’s Message (1916) [a], The Golden Chance (1916) [a] The House with the Golden Windows (1916) [a], The Love Mask (1916) [a], The Selfish Woman (1916) [a], The Wall of Flame (1916) [a], The Wrong Heart (1916) [a,d], The Yellow Pawn (1916) [a], To Have and to Hold (1916) [a], A Warrior's Bride (1917) [a,d], Big Timber (1917) [a], Buried Alive (1917) [a,d], Joan the Woman (1917) [a], Nan of Music Mountain (1917) [a], The Devil-Stone (1917) [a], The Golden Fetter (1917) [a], The Hostage (1917) [a], The Man Who Saved the Day (1917) [a,d], The Penalty of Silence (1917) [a,d], The Prison Without Walls (1917) [a], The Squaw Man's Son (1917) [a], The Tell-Tale Arm (1917) [a], The Woman God Forgot (1917) [a], The World Apart (1917) [a], Believe Me, Xantippe (1918) [a], His Extra Bit (1918) [a], Less Than Kin (1918) [a], Rimrock Jones (1918) [a], The Firefly of France (1918) [a], The House of Silence (1918) [a], The Man from Funeral Range (1918) [a], The Source (1918) [a], The Thing We Love (1918) [a], Too Many Millions (1918) [a], United States Fourth Liberty Loan Drive (1918), Alias Mike Moran (1919) [a], Hawthorne of the U.S.A. (1919) [a], The Dub (1919) [a], The Lottery Man (1919) [a], The Love Burglar (1919) [a], The Roaring Road (1919) [a], The Valley of the Giants (1919) [a], You're Fired (1919) [a], Always Audacious (1920) [a], Double Speed (1920) [a], Excuse My Dust (1920) [a], Sick Abed (1920) [a], The Dancin' Fool (1920) [a], What's Your Hurry? (1920) [a], Don't Tell Everything (1921) [a], Forever (1921) [a], The Affairs of Anatol (1921) [a], The Charm School (1921) [a], The Hell Diggers (1921) [a], The Love Special (1921) [a], Too Much Speed (1921) [a], A Trip to Paramountown (1922) [a], Across the Continent (1922) [a], Clarence (1922) [a], Nice People (1922) [a], Night Life in Hollywood (1922) [a], Rent Free (1922) [a], The Dictator (1922) [a], The Ghost Breaker (1922) [a], The World's Champion (1922) [a], Thirty Days (1922) [a], Hollywood (1923) [a].