3 The Mobster of a Thousand Faces “Don't step on it! It may be Lon Chaney!” Popular 1920s phrase trayals of Quasimodo in The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1923), 2 N the title character in The Phantom of the Opera (1925), and many other grotesques, legendary screen star Lon Chaney played far more crooks, underworld types, and outright gangsters during his seven- teen-year reign as one of the silent era's most versatile, esteemed, and highest-paid film stars, Aw HE MAY BE MORE FAMOUS TODAY for his classic por- A GENius FoR MAKEUP Chaney was christened Leonidas Frank Chaney on April 1, 1883, in Col- orado Springs, Colorado. The second of four children (three boys, one of whom died in infancy, and one girl) born to Frank, a barber, and Emma Chaney, he went by the nickname “Lon” since childhood. Both of Lon Chaney’s parents were deaf—his father because of a child- hood illness, his mother from birth. Chaney's biographers and others who have written about the screen legend assert that the actor’s penchant for playing characters with disabilities or deformities—or who are marked as outsiders by society for other reasons, such as being a minor- 6The Mobster of a Thousand Faces 47 ity, or a gangster—likely stemmed from seeing his parents branded as “different,” even by polite society, and cruelly taunted as “dummies” by neighborhood children. I’m sure there is some truth to this, but I have a feeling it may be overstated. Chaney did not pursue a show business career playing such charac- ters. He was a song and dance man on the musical stage. Not until he went west to seek work in the movies did his persona as “the man of a thousand faces” come into being, and it seems to have been motivated as much by economic as by psychological interests. Quite simply, the actor may have realized that by being able to “look the part” in a wider range of roles, he'd get more work. So, he applied his genius for makeup effects, and his acrobatic skills, to achieving just that. Eventually his talent for disappearing physically into his “outsider” characters, and humanizing even the most bizarre and twisted among them, became a highly ex- ploitable—and profitable—gimmick. It led to Chaney's carving out a niche for himself in the industry (and film history) that is unique to this day. At the time of his death of throat cancer in 1930, Chaney ranked alongside Swedish import Greta Garbo as MGM's most popular star; had he lived, it is possible his star power would have endured, for unlike many actors of the silent screen, the stage-trained Chaney had no fear of the microphone. As an article in the June 22, 1930, edition of The New York Times reported, Chaney had welcomed the chance to expand upon his persona as the cinema's “Man of Mystery” in the new medium of the talkies. “{Chaney] realized the microphone would prevent him from indulging in the make-ups which had won him the sobriquet of the ‘man of a thousand faces,” the Times wrote on the eve of Chaney’s talkie debut in the under- world drama The Unholy Three, a remake of one of his biggest silent suc- cesses. “He had secured most of his facial distortions by holding foreign substances of divers [sic] shapes and sizes in his mouth. However, Chaney had made up his mind that if he couldn't indulge the genius for make-up which had earned him his unusual position in the cinema world, he would develop a new talent, that of voice disguises for talking pictures.” Commented Chaney in the same article: “Even as a prop boy, I used to watch [stage actors] Richard Mansfield and Robert Mantell and others. ‘Those old actors never showed the audience themselves, but really donned the personality of the character they were playing. From the be- ginning of my acting career, I always strove to bury my own personality48 BULLETS OvER HOLLYWooD in my part. That is my idea of acting, And there is no question that talking pictures are bringing back the old style of acting. I want to talk in at least two voices, or dialects, in each picture.” In The Unholy Three, he kept his word, using not just two more voices, but four—those of an old woman, a ventriloquist’s dummy, a talk- ing parrot, and a young woman in the courtroom gallery where the film's climax takes place—in addition to his own (one assumes) as the gang leader of the unsavory trio of jewel robbers that calls itself “the unholy three.” It is easy to imagine that if he had not died prematurely and had lived well into the sound era, he might have gone on to become the first great gangster movie star of the talkies. His rough-edged, blue-collar looks and bulldog demeanor as the silent film era’s first full-fledged gangster anti- hero would have made him a natural choice to play Rico Bandello (Edward G. Robinson) in Little Caesar (1930); the part of Tony Camonte (Paul Muni), the underworld antihero of Scarface (1932); or even some of Humphrey Bogart’s gangster roles, especially that of the doomed Roy Earle in High Sierra (1941). Perhaps only the gangsters played by the more youthful and pugnacious James Cagney" (who, like Chaney, began his career as a stage hoofer) may have eluded him—although Chaney does strike a very Cagney-like pose in Outside the Law (1921), one of his earliest gangster film successes. THE PENALTY The Samuel Goldwyn production oft@i@UBERANRGNI920) presented Lon Chaney in one of genre’s earliest, me st mobster roles, and he used the opportunity to create ar A violent, psychotic “lord and master of the underworld,” The Penalty’s protagonist, called Blizzard, is a Little Caesar and Phantom of the Opera rolled into one. An inexperienced doctor unnecessarily ampu- tated his legs when he was a boy, filling him with a desire for vengeance against the doctor specifically and society at large. Now grown, he has become a megalomaniac who, in a moment of frenzied grandiosity, calls himself “a modern Caesar.” But he is also an accomplished pianist, who soars into flights of romantic rapture on the ivories, as one of his molls,