Could everyone write one simple essay about something that once happened in Saltaire…that they saw or were a part of…and put it on one big website? Somebody should collect a lot of stories before we all forget. Otherwise it is like a line in “On The Beach” : The history of the war that now would never be written.” -(JO'H)

Sunday, March 3, 2013

Requiem for a Movie Star


Which ONE-TIME  Saltaire resident played a starring 
role is this movie??

 http://m.youtube.com/watch?v=ZWkVjKM5uZI&feature=fvwrel

Answer courtesy of HUGH O'BRIEN





ENID MARKEY: Born Feb. 22, 1894, Dillon, CO; died Nov. 15, 1981, Bay Shore, NY.  She entered films in 1911 and made 37 short films through 1918.  She made her first feature in 1914 and soon shifted almost exclusively to full-length movies.  Her films (I have no idea about most of these, but I’ll give you some interesting-sounding titles or character names) include: 

Tillie’s Punctured Romance (1914, her first film, which is actually quite famous); Aloha Oe (1915, playing Kalaniweo); The Iron Strain (1915, playing Octavia Van Ness); Civilization (1916, also famous); The Captive God(1916, which sounds like another Hawaiian epic since she played a character called Lolomi); The Yankee Way (1917);The Zeppelin’s Last Raid (1917, which definitely sounds the neatest); Cheating the Public (1918, probably a documentary on the Saltaire Development Company); Tarzan of the Apes and The Romance of Tarzan (both 1918, both as the screen’s first Jane, opposite Elmo Lincoln as Tarzan); and her last silent, Sink or Swim (1920, another expose of the Saltaire Development Company), after which she quit movies and went to the stage.  (She was quoted as saying she wanted to stop making faces and start acting.)

She didn’t return to films until 1945, when she appeared in a movie called Snafu.  She made only three more movies, most notably the classic The Naked City (1948), as well as Take One False Step (1949) and her final film, and last acting appearance of all, The Boston Strangler (1968), in which she played the real Albert de Salvo.  Altogether, she made 31 films, 27 of them silents.  However, she did a lot of TV in the 50s and into the 60s.  

Marjorie Shell knew her somehow and discovered her in a terrible state in some awful nursing home in the mid-70s.  She and her husband took her into their home and took care of her for several years.  During the summer Enid would sit out on the bench at Broadway beach holding the same magazine.  Michael Bernstein and some others used to ask her questions about her career and the people she’d worked with, but her only response was to say, “Oh, he/she was nice”, and to ask everyone what time it was.  A bit sad, but at least she was being well cared for.  When the Shells sold their house in 1981 they put Enid in a good retirement home in Bay Shore, where she died a few months later at 87.  A small Saltaire tale.  There are eight thousand stories in The Naked Village...this has been one of them.
      -Hugh O'Brien

Dick Starkey recalls:
A Markey memory:  She used to sit on the bench overlooking the beach at Broadway and greet as 
well as chat with passers-by.  John Ludlow, who would sit for awhile, was her favorite conversation partner.
One day, as he got up to leave, she asked him to stay longer.  As John tried to break away, Enid called 
out "Be a sport."  Sounded like a line she had used in her life many times. It worked, for at least a few
seconds, with John. 
--Dick Starkey 



1 comment:

cosmo said...

Frank Mina played Chetah.