made the censors blink.”
“This girl plays a flapper the way Scott Fitzgerald writes one,” another critic wrote of Colleen Moore, the film’s lead player. 2 “She is an informer and a betrayer. And I think she is one of the most fascinating little devils on this or adjacent continents.” To yet another observer, Moore embodied “the young flapper to the tip of her bobbed head.… Perhaps college professors will call it trashy. But the people who should be pleased, those who pack the movie houses every night. Those are going to crazy about it.”
As far as story lines go, Flaming Youth left a lot to be desired. Colleen played the role of Pat Fentriss, the teenage daughter of well-to-do urban sophisticates. Pat’s mother and father host wild parties in the family mansion, complete with jazz music, bootleg liquor, and skinny-dipping romps in the swimming pool. They don’t set the best possible example for their daughter, and it shows.
Young Pat, still hemmed in by adolescence, is eager to emulate her parents’ fast life. So she skips town with a seductive violinist a few years her senior and sets sail for Europe on a yacht. Trouble quickly ensues when the violinist tries to seduce Pat. Realizing that she is in way over her head, and desperate to escape her sexually aggressive escort, Pat jumps overboard into the deep blue sea, only to be rescued by a sailor who proves far better mannered and better intentioned than the rakish musician.
Lessons learned, Pat is bound back safely for shore and then back to her mother and father. She doesn’t want to grow up too fast, after all.
The film told a new kind of story and provided a new kind of role for Colleen Moore.
Anyone who grew up with Moore, back when she was still Kathleen Morrison, must have known she was fated for the stage. When she was a girl of about nine or ten, someone in the neighborhood ordered a large upright piano for his family and disposed of the enormous wooden packaging crate outside his house. Before the garbage men could come to haul the box away, Kathleen—a short, precocious redhead with intense eyes—convinced her neighbor’s yard man to drag the crate, which resembled a small stage, over to her backyard. “The American Stock Company was now in business,” she remembered years later with a smile.
Kathleen wrote a series of short dramatic productions and recruited some of her friends to perform the supporting roles. The American Stock Company charged a penny per head for admission—a stiff price for ten-year-olds. “Business, unfortunately, was bad,” she recalled. “We played to very small audiences, sometimes as small as one or two. But my vanity wasn’t the only thing that suffered. I’ve always liked a paying business, and we sometimes couldn’t even get the ones who did come to pay the penny we asked.”
Sensing that her fledgling production company was about to hit the skids, Kathleen revamped her act. Hoping to capitalize on the success of Barnum & Bailey’s Circus, which had recently played to sold-out audiences in town, she plastered the neighborhood with boldfaced signs —CIRCUS IN MORRISON’S BACK YARD—SATURDAY—NO BOYS ALLOWED. It was a winning gambit. That weekend, her family’s well-manicured lawn took a royal drubbing from dozens of girls and boys who were eager to watch Kathleen and her troupe perform a dazzling display of acrobatics.
“I was so carried away,” she later wrote, “ … that when I performed an acrobatic stunt with Cleve”—her younger brother—“hanging by my knees from a gym bar and holding him dangling, a leather book strap around his middle and the end of it clenched in my teeth, I twirled him around so fast I broke the edge off my new front tooth.” 3
No matter. The show was a great success, and the end-of-the-day take—43 cents—was a vindication of Kathleen’s dramatic aspirations.
Kathleen Morrison was born in 1900 to a middle-class, “lace Irish” Catholic family in
“This girl plays a flapper the way Scott Fitzgerald writes one,” another critic wrote of Colleen Moore, the film’s lead player. 2 “She is an informer and a betrayer. And I think she is one of the most fascinating little devils on this or adjacent continents.” To yet another observer, Moore embodied “the young flapper to the tip of her bobbed head.… Perhaps college professors will call it trashy. But the people who should be pleased, those who pack the movie houses every night. Those are going to crazy about it.”
As far as story lines go, Flaming Youth left a lot to be desired. Colleen played the role of Pat Fentriss, the teenage daughter of well-to-do urban sophisticates. Pat’s mother and father host wild parties in the family mansion, complete with jazz music, bootleg liquor, and skinny-dipping romps in the swimming pool. They don’t set the best possible example for their daughter, and it shows.
Young Pat, still hemmed in by adolescence, is eager to emulate her parents’ fast life. So she skips town with a seductive violinist a few years her senior and sets sail for Europe on a yacht. Trouble quickly ensues when the violinist tries to seduce Pat. Realizing that she is in way over her head, and desperate to escape her sexually aggressive escort, Pat jumps overboard into the deep blue sea, only to be rescued by a sailor who proves far better mannered and better intentioned than the rakish musician.
Lessons learned, Pat is bound back safely for shore and then back to her mother and father. She doesn’t want to grow up too fast, after all.
The film told a new kind of story and provided a new kind of role for Colleen Moore.
Anyone who grew up with Moore, back when she was still Kathleen Morrison, must have known she was fated for the stage. When she was a girl of about nine or ten, someone in the neighborhood ordered a large upright piano for his family and disposed of the enormous wooden packaging crate outside his house. Before the garbage men could come to haul the box away, Kathleen—a short, precocious redhead with intense eyes—convinced her neighbor’s yard man to drag the crate, which resembled a small stage, over to her backyard. “The American Stock Company was now in business,” she remembered years later with a smile.
Kathleen wrote a series of short dramatic productions and recruited some of her friends to perform the supporting roles. The American Stock Company charged a penny per head for admission—a stiff price for ten-year-olds. “Business, unfortunately, was bad,” she recalled. “We played to very small audiences, sometimes as small as one or two. But my vanity wasn’t the only thing that suffered. I’ve always liked a paying business, and we sometimes couldn’t even get the ones who did come to pay the penny we asked.”
Sensing that her fledgling production company was about to hit the skids, Kathleen revamped her act. Hoping to capitalize on the success of Barnum & Bailey’s Circus, which had recently played to sold-out audiences in town, she plastered the neighborhood with boldfaced signs —CIRCUS IN MORRISON’S BACK YARD—SATURDAY—NO BOYS ALLOWED. It was a winning gambit. That weekend, her family’s well-manicured lawn took a royal drubbing from dozens of girls and boys who were eager to watch Kathleen and her troupe perform a dazzling display of acrobatics.
“I was so carried away,” she later wrote, “ … that when I performed an acrobatic stunt with Cleve”—her younger brother—“hanging by my knees from a gym bar and holding him dangling, a leather book strap around his middle and the end of it clenched in my teeth, I twirled him around so fast I broke the edge off my new front tooth.” 3
No matter. The show was a great success, and the end-of-the-day take—43 cents—was a vindication of Kathleen’s dramatic aspirations.
Kathleen Morrison was born in 1900 to a middle-class, “lace Irish” Catholic family in
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