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This Chapter is from Emeralds in Tinseltown: The Irish in Hollywood, written by Steve Brennan and Bernadette O'Neill, and published by Appletree Press
The Irishman, the Mermaid and the FoxThe Hollywood Career of Herbert Brenon - part 3 of 4Brenon was filming yet another one of his now-famous ‘mermaid movies,’ Neptune’s Daughter with Annette Kellerman on location in Bermuda. Brenon had carefully positioned his cameras around the giant glass tank in which he would film an underwater swimming scene. Every dangerous moment of this spectacular shot had been carefully planned. A villain would attack Kellerman underwater. But she would fight off and strangle him. It was a key scene and Brenon wasn’t taking any chances. He made a final check on the cameras, satisfied himself that the lighting was as he wanted it, repeated some instructions to his assistant directors, then climbed up the steps to the top of the giant tank, took a deep breath, and dived in. Reluctant to entrust the crucial scene to an actor, Brenon had decided to play Kellerman’s attacker himself. The cameras were rolling, and Brenon and Kellerman grappled underwater. Kellerman fought and struggled and gripped Brenon around the neck. Then it happened. The tank burst with a gunshot explosion. Shattered glass and water cannoned outwards hurtling Brenon and Kellerman with it like flotsam. They were both badly injured in the mishap and Brenon spent a month recovering in a Bermuda hospital before he could return to the set. When it finally hit the nickelodeon circuit, in 1914 Neptune’s Daughter set a new record of ticket receipts for the industry and made his bosses at IMP very happy. It was also the movie that would prompt William Fox to hire Brenon. Fox was moulding the career of screen siren Theda Bara at the time and Brenon was assigned as her director. He made two very successful pictures with Bara, The Kreutzer Sonata and The Clemency Case. Fox was pleased with his new director and was happy to entertain the young man’s idea of taking a crew to Jamaica to make a great spectacular called A Daughter of the Gods. Following the war with Fox over A Daughter of the Gods, Brenon formed his own production company and poured his financial resources into a film called War Bride that would depict the hardship of the wives of servicemen who had gone to battle in World War I. Just as Brenon’s film was about to go on release, Fox vindictively rushed out a picture with a similar theme and backed it with an enormous publicity campaign. Brenon’s independent film was swamped and crashed at the box office. Bitter and angry, Brenon was finished with Hollywood, or so he said. He was headed to England and to hell with Hollywood. He did move to England for a time, but it was a brief sojourn. Ever since he had steamed out of Kingstown to London as a boy Brenon had been an itinerant, but if there was one other place he could call home it was Hollywood, centre of the world of the craft he loved – the movies. So it was to Hollywood that Brenon inevitably returned in 1920 declaring, “I found the English fearfully handicapped by undramatic, phlegmatic temperament and a bad photographic climate.” Hollywood, in the form of his friend the Russian-born producer Joseph M. Schenck, welcomed home the prodigal son. Schenck hired him to direct the silent screen star Norma Talmadge in three pictures that would put Brenon’s name back in the limelight. He became one of the biggest names in the industry, directing such stars as Clara Bow, Pola Negri, Betty Compson, Ernest Torrence and Betty Bronson. Brenon thrived for decades in Hollywood and was celebrated as one of its most brilliant talents. But by the late 1920s something was happening in the movie industry that was about to change everything for Brenon.
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