This silent film star was the first of the flappers. She retired to SLO County
Colleen Moore was an icon of the flapper era, a fashion trendsetter and a silent film star admired by “Great Gatsby” author F. Scott Fitzgerald.
After she retired from movies, success in business followed.
A savvy investor, she formed a television production company with “War and Peace” director King Vidor in the 1960s and published two books, including “How Women Can Make Money in the Stock Market.”
Moore also indulged in her love for dollhouses, donating diamonds from one of her necklaces to make a chandelier for one lavish miniature home. Colleen Moore’s Fairy Castle has been on display at the Museum of Science and Industry, Chicago, since 1949.
Moore’s last full-sized home was located in the Templeton area.
Warren Groshong wrote Moore’s obituary in the Telegram-Tribune on January 26, 1988.
Silent-screen star dies at Hidden Valley home
Colleen Moore, once the highest paid movie star in Hollywood, died of cancer Monday at El Ranchito, the home she has occupied in Hidden Valley west of Templeton since 1972. She was 85.
At the peak of her career, Miss Moore commanded a million-dollar salary and helped start a fashion craze when she cut her dark hair in a Dutch Boy bob during the Roaring ‘20s.
When she snipped off the curls, worn by nearly all women of that day, author F. Scott Fitzgerald called it “the most fateful haircut since Samson’s.” It was the start of the Flapper age.
She appeared in about 100 films from 1917 to 1934, ending with her favorite, “The Power and the Glory,” which co-starred Spencer Tracy.
Born Kathleen Morrision in Michigan, Aug. 19, 1902, Miss More began her film career almost immediately after arriving in Hollywood at age 15 for a contract arranged between producer D.W. Griffith and her uncle, Walter Howey, a famous city editor for the Hearst newspapers in Chicago.
Howey, immortalized in the play, “The Front Page,” had helped Griffith get “The Birth of a Nation” and “Intolerance” past the movie censors.
When the prodigious director asked how he might repay that debt, Miss Moore recalled in her biography, “Silent Star,” Howey told him about his niece, Kathleen.
And Griffith arranged a contract.
Waiting to meet her at the Hollywood train station on the eventful day was Adela Rogers St. Johns, at the time a reporter for a Hearst newspaper in Los Angeles.
The two have been close friends for more than 70 years.
“I have never known any close friendship between tow women that lasted longer,” said St. Johns’ daughter, Elaine, who lives in Arroyo Grande where her mother, now 93, resides in a rest home.
Their friendship was one of the reasons Adela Rogers St. Johns moved to this county in the 1970s. Mary Hanson, a friend of Miss Moore, said the actress moved to Templeton as the result of her friendship with the late King Vidor, the movie producer who had taken up residence in the North county several years before.
Hanson said her husband, developer Archie Hanson, found a building site for Miss Moore’s new house and she signed on the dotted line for the property the day before leaving for Europe.
Her house was built by contractor Paul Maginot, whom she later married and who survives her. He was her fourth husband.
Miss Moore made her first film, “Bad Boy,” when she was 16. A few years later she was making $10,000 a week.
Some of her other best known pictures include “Ella Cinders,” “So Big,” the Edna Ferber play; “Sally;” and “Lilac Time,” for which she chose as her leading man a young unknown named Gary Cooper.
Elaine St. Johns noted that Miss Moore had one quality that most actresses lacked.
“She would never bang on a closed door. She was always sure that another door would open.” As a result, she developed other careers after her retirement from films in 1934.
For one thing, she learned stocks and bonds through her former husband, Homer Hargrave, once a vice president of Merrill Lynch, Pierce, Fenner and Smith, and wrote a book called “How to Make Money in the Stock Market.”
She also became well known for a $450,000 fairyland doll house that she built and moved around the country as a fund-raiser for various charities. One of its miniature chandeliers is said to have included stones from one of her diamond necklaces.
Miss Moore is survived by her husband, Paul Maginot; one son Homer Hargrave Jr,; and one daughter, Judith Coleman, all of Paso Robles.
