Annie Laurie

San Francisco Examiner/February 11, 1909

Miss Bebe Daniels, the largest salaried child actress in America, is in our midst.

She is making a big hit in the Prince Chap this week. She gets more curtain calls than the leading man; and as to the leading woman, no one seems to know she’s alive, when little Bebe Daniels appears on the scene.

She is 8 years old, is Miss Daniels, and just a bit rangey for her years. With a face that’s going to be a model for a Madonna when she gets a little older and a pair of big, soft, dark eyes that will deal death and destruction to more than one hapless mortal man when she gets to the death and destruction age.

Just at present she’s as beautiful as an old picture, as sweet and wholesome as a bunch of buttercups that grow in a clean, breezy, upland meadow, and as fresh and unspoiled as a glass of pure spring water.

She doesn’t make you think of bread and milk and honey and clover, though, as so many American or English children do. She reminds you of pomegranates and tube rosea and magnolias and pistache ice cream, and everything else that is sweet and rich and tropical and foreign.

Yet, she’s an American girl, born somewhere south of the Mason and Dixon line.

BEBE DANIELS believes in fairies. She told me so, when I asked her about it yesterday.

She was rather busy when I ran in to see her for a minute.

You see, she has six fox terrier pups, a large black cat and an Amiable Bulldog, and when she isn’t taking care of the armfuls of flowers that are sent to her every night at the theatre she has to be teaching Modoc to speak or brushing Pansy’s hair, or making Zaza—that’s the naughtiest of all the fox terrier pups—behave herself. So she hasn’t much time for being interviewed.

“Believe In fairies?” she said, tying a large knot of violets into Zaza’s left ear, “why, of course, I do. I have lived on a ranch down in Southern California for years, and lots of times I have seen the fairy rings where they dance in the night. You know how they look like toadstools in a circle with a big one in the middle where the grasshopper fiddler sits, and the grass all trodden down where they’ve been dancing, only I never could creep up quite close enough to catch them at it.

“I WISH I could be a fairy for a few minutes myself. I’d be pretty busy. I’d change all the people who are cruel to animals. Oh, I’ve seen them kick cats and throw things at dogs, and how would they like that, I should like to know—into toads or frogs or something ugly that nobody loved, and I’d turn all the queer old women and mean old men who want to make the stage children stay at home and be lonesome instead of playing grown-up at the theatre and being happy and getting flowers and having people like them—well, I’d change them all into nasty, fat, yellow, creepy, crawly caterpillars that everybody runs away from. Caterpillars are the awfullest of all, don’t you think so?

“It would be awful to be one, wouldn’t it?” The big eyes softened a little. “Well. If they’d be real good and promise to let us go on acting and being happy, I might let them change into butterflies by and by.

“THEY stopped me down In Los Angeles, you know, and Oh, we had an awful time. They said I shouldn’t act, and I said I would and my! It was pretty bad.

“Why do you suppose they didn’t want me to act? They said it was for my sake.

“I wonder If they never dressed up and played ‘Go to vistin’ when they were little? Well, that’s what acting is to us stage children. I love it lots better than dolls or playhouse keeping or anything. This part I am playing is lots of fun.

“I’m poor in the first act and wear rags and look as sad as I can, and then I get rich and laugh. I just love it when I’m poor and sad. It’s fun to make people cry and see ’em try not to look as if they cared. Did you hear me play my little piece on the piano? I did it in Zaza. I learned it in two days. No, I’ve never taken any lessons on the piano, but I think it’s awfully easy.

“YES, of course I’m going to stay on the stage.

“I’m going to be a star some day and have my name on all the billboards and ride to the theatre in a carriage and have a maid to dress and undress the dogs for me. But she’ll have to be a kind maid, and not a cross one, and mamma und auntie will have diamonds braided all in their hair, just as many as they want, and every time I see any poor little girl I’ll take them home with me and give them a nice dinner and some pretty dresses and have somebody write a part for them to play in a nice play.

“No, it doesn’t make me nervous to play a new part. The newer it is the better I like it.

“Yes, I’m glad the papers said nice things about me, and I love it when I get the curtain calls but oh, the darling flowers, they are the best of all!

“Monday night I brought my arms full of them home and mamma cried and all the time she was crying she kept saying how happy she was. Mammas are funny people, sometimes, don’t you think so?”

AND I kept wondering what sort of a woman little Bebe Daniels will be and whether she’ll be half as happy when she’s a great star with diamonds braided in her own hair and a French maid to take care of the French dog and an English maid to look after the English terrier, and a press agent to tell amazing stories about her in the papers, and a secretary to write her letters, and a manager to exploit her as she is now when she’s just a little big-eyed girl who looks at the crowded theatre as just a big playhouse and who doesn’t see why mammas cry sometimes just because they are so very happy.