braves blizzards and rapids to rescue her backwoods neighbors, often assisted by forest friends. Son Barry, brought up from California, won a featured role requiring a fall through the ice. When the shots of Barry and Shipman’s waterlogged struggles to safety weren’t deemed convincing by the star, the boy was belt-dragged back into the wet. Shipman would have it her way. He, as stubborn as she, chose never to work with his mother again. Of the ďŹ ve shorts, only four were completed; a ďŹ nal fairy story called The Love Tree (1926) only memorialized by a few phantasmagoric frames. On screen, at least, it was a pretty picture. But the company, backed almost entirely by outside investors, wasn’t selling any work. Its ďŹ rst two ďŹ lms, tied up in distribution litigation, had dried up most of Shipman’s grubstake. A self-admitted bad businesswoman, she was parceling out IOUs to cast and crew and poaching wildlife to feed the pets. Starvation was staved off with a few poorly paying promotional appearances. January 1924 was marred by one terminal sign of the end. It wasn’t to be the ďŹ nale of Lionhead Lodge, but it marked the beginning of its death. Bert, Shipman’s partner, lover and sometimes leading man, had chanced a bit of foot frostbite while ďŹ lming Back to God’s Country, a minor malady overshadowed by the lead actor’s death due to pneumonia. Ignored nearly ďŹ ve years, the infection had festered, until the gnawing, agonizing pain outgrew his grasp of sane behavior. Bert couldn’t think, couldn’t sleep—that goddamn gangrenous lumpstump! He abandoned Lionhead Lodge for the deep winter snows, determined to reach either Spokane, Wash., or a cold death. “It was then that I saw his eyes and realized that the worst had happened ... He had broken,â€? she wrote. “He seemed to hate me. I was some terrible creature who had kept him suffering and was even now executing a ďŹ endish dance of glee over his condition.â€? And here, in a scenario almost perfectly preďŹ gured in one of the Little Dramas, is where that Bunyan-sized salt-grain really sets the avor. Shipman chased after Bert, her snowshoes somehow shufing her faster than Bert’s nine-dog sled, and caught him in time to hole up under a log to await rescue. After a local logger chanced upon the two, Shipman and Bert convalesced in Spokane, where a sacriďŹ ce of three toes was required on his part. A return to Lionhead, and a year passed with scant Shipman commentary. But it was a silence colored dusky, not golden. The following Christmas was when it all broke again. A irtatious dance with a young actor pseudonymed Sid—though no Sid ever appeared in a Shipman production—stopped cold as jealous, brooding Bert trained a gun on Shipman. Emulating the past winter’s desperate gamble, she walked coatless out onto the ice, searching for the thin spot that would open the “dark silence.â€? But her boy, her “Bareeâ€? was the one who would chase her down, take her from this wild place to Spokane and civilization. And that, the ďŹ nal little drama of that great big place, was truly the end. Shipman never returned to Lionhead. The menagerie was sold to the San Diego Zoo, her costumes and manuscripts lost in a ďŹ re, and Shipman became a nomad.
“
The time drifts by, eaten up by the daily worry dozen and the first thing you know it’s been too long—like my whole stay back here. Long—God! An eternity. But necessary, every single minute of it—and the end not in sight, yet—but the hopes—oh, so high!� —Letter from Shipman to Barry (1934)
Hollywood had shut its doors to Shipman, favoring the bosomy charms of Clara Bow and Betty Blythe, and the rise of the Big Five studio system ensured that independent productions would get no play. So Shipman wandered and wrote—screenplays, storybooks, scads and scads of letters. In New York City, she met husband No. 2, Charles Ayers,
let the old dog ďŹ nally lie quiet. Thirty years to live a lifetime, then a fallow 50 to live it all down. In 1970, a year after completing her ďŹ nal work, an autobiographical adventure painted purely in the colors of her own imagination, the screen siren passed into that long-ago sought “dark silence.â€?
“
What is a star but a far-away glimmer, an impossible goal, a thing at the end of a telescope, a faulty human drawn into close focus by continued repetition of an image, a substance to fall blazing or fade unseen? The star dies but the picture lives on, at least in memory.� —Nell Shipman, The Silent Screen and My Talking Heart
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then on to Florida, Cuba and Spain, the 1926 birthplace of twins Charles and Daphne. A new lover in 1935, the self-styled Baron Amerigo Serrao, made ďŹ lms, too. A rented house in New Mexico was vacated for its new tenant, Georgia O’Keeffe. But, from Hollywood—nothing. Though Shipman received one ďŹ nal screen credit—as one of ďŹ ve writers for the Cary Grant talkie Wings in the Dark (1935)—her face never shone silver again, no sound man ever snared her voice. Year after year of “no.â€? Year after year of romantic Bohemian starvation, garreted in tiny apartments. Tiny paychecks for tossed-off magazine fodder. But no movies. A few books and a couple decades on, Shipman gave up trying for that star, perhaps embarrassed by her faded beauty, perhaps ready to
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BOISEweekly | MARCH 10–16, 2010 | 15