Flapper by Joshua Zeitz Page A

Port Huron, Michigan, but she spent the better part of her youth in Atlanta, Georgia, and Tampa, Florida, where her father chased a variety of career opportunities and where she acquired a distinctive southern-midwestern accent.
    Later in life, Kathleen would trace the spark of her lifelong love affair with the acting profession to a magic Saturday afternoon when she was five. That year, her mother took Kathleen to see a stage production of Peter Pan. When the title character ran down the center aisle in a blaze of footlights and invited “all children who believe in fairies to raise their hands” to save Tinker Bell, Kathleen did the audience one better. She leapt onto her seat, flailed her arms in the air, and cried, “I believe in fairies, I really do!”
    “The audience burst into laughter,” she remembered, “turning to look at me. I stared back at them, their laughter hitting me with a force I had never felt before. And when I realized that it was I—I—who was making them laugh, a curious feeling of power came over me—as if for those few brief moments I held that audience in my hand. That Saturday afternoon I knew—not hoped, knew—I would become an actress.”
    Like millions of other girls who came of age in the years just before and after World War I, Kathleen soon transferred her love of the stage to a near obsession with America’s infant film industry.
    As a junior high student in Tampa, each Friday afternoon she madea frantic dash for the Bijou Theater, where, amid the dazzling crystal chandeliers and beautifully upholstered, plush red seats, she and her friends swooned at the sight of Francis Ford and were awed by the polish and poise of Grace Cunard in Lucille Love. On Saturdays they flocked to the Strand Theater—equally grand, equally majestic—where they studied Mary Pickford’s every move and gesture and mapped every line and curve on Marguerite Clark’s petite, four-foot-ten-inch, ninety-pound frame.
    The girls wrote fan letters to their favorite stars, clipped pictures and movie advertisements from magazines, and kept intricately detailed scrapbooks, with separate pages for each Hollywood luminary.
    When she read in Photoplay magazine that Norma Talmadge, a leading lady of wide renown, believed all great actresses should be able to cry a river of tears on demand, Kathleen practiced for weeks until she was able to sob convincingly at a moment’s notice. She cried on the way to school. She cried on the way back from school.
    One day, when she was passing the time on a streetcar by practicing her mournful art, an old woman seated next to her asked, “What’s the matter, little girl?”
    “Oh, nothing, ma’am,” Kathleen answered with a broad smile. Tears still streaming down her face, she explained, “I’m just practicing to be a movie actress.”
    It wasn’t an uncommon story. Not by the dawn of World War I, anyway. Nevertheless, years later Kathleen would remember her Hollywood fixation as just a little exceptional. “The only difference between my movie scrapbook and those of my friends,” she asserted, “was that I left a blank page in mine for my own picture after I became a movie star. Because I didn’t just hope to go to Hollywood. I intended to.”
    Of course, Kathleen Morrison had something that a lot of other girls didn’t: connections.
    Walter Howey was the archetype of the hard-boiled newspaperman. He might have come straight from Central Casting, so convincingly did he play the part. A true son of the American heartland—born and bred in Fort Dodge, Iowa—as a young man,Howey came to Chicago an ordinary hayseed without a clue about the big city and its alien ways. He spent the first two decades of the new century figuring it all out—scratching and clawing his way up the ranks of that city’s famously competitive, no-holds-barred world of print journalism.
    Howey was clearly in a line of work that suited him well. He had an uncanny knack for showing up