Did you know your grandmother Agnes at all?
No, she’s a bit of a mystery. She died so young. It wasn’t until my own mother was dying, and cried out in the night for HER grandma, that I realized… huh, mommy didn’t know her mommy either.
Was there an inheritance?
You must be joking; these people were picking up grains of government rice off the street, they were so hungry.
But weren’t they farming people?
Yes, but they lost the farm; I would hear my relatives talk about “losing the farm” and I don’t think they were the only ones— I think it wiped out a whole generation of self-sufficient Irish.
So what did they do?
The one thing I know about my grandmother is a really glamorous thing… and you know what? You’re right, I do have an inheritance! All her photos!
Her photos? What do you mean?
No no, I’m just getting excited, they’re not your average photos. They’re photos of the first movie stars.
What, you mean, Charlie Chaplin?
Yeah, him— but before him, and, oh my god, you should see the young photo of Chaplin from her star book; it’s unrecognizable…The thing about Agnes, is that she was the first Nickelodeon player in Fargo, playing the piano to all the movies that showed up in town, where it must have been a year after they opened, right?
Why so late?
Fargo! In 1919! I mean it’s nowhere, but even in the most remote corners there were movie theaters. And she played the piano with a blue ribbon in her hair, that’s what mommy told me and it must have been some kind of apocryphal blue ribbon because of course my mother never saw her play.
So you were saying about the photos, were they autographed?
Oh, more than that. Agnes would write to these young people who were making movies in California, ardent fan letters, and they would send back these gorgeous prints, from what must have been burgeoning Hollywood photo studios, with lavish fountain pen inscriptions, “To Agnes, God bless you and keep you, Mary Pickford,” that sort of thing.
God bless you! Ha!
Seriously. Apparently Agnes and her best friend had a pact to run away to Hollywood, and her girlfriend went out first. There is this one letter in a scrapbook, where she writes to Agnes, but she calls her Mary, and she says, ‘Mary, this is not what we thought at all…”
What does that mean?
Remember they were very strict Catholic girls who wanted to bust out, but had not had much of a chance of that in Fargo. And they go to California and all those beautiful men in the movies turn out to be “homosexual.”
She wrote that?
No, it was something like, "They don’t like girls at all, I don’t know what to do, there is no decency’’… you know, euphemisms.
But Agnes kept playing?
Oh yeah, and she collected at least 100 of these photos, I have them all in an unsightly blue binder and I keep wanting to publish them, they’re so exquisite. Lillian and Dorothy Gish, Marion Davies, Theda Bara, Pola Negri… and you know, all the Jewish girls were made out to be wild gypsies or something, their “exoticism” was transformed into a very bizarre fake backstory.
I think half those women you mentioned were lesbians.
I don’t doubt it. Hollywood was, is, and always will be a place where scrawny kids who are older than their years show up on a bus, and if they’re pretty enough and know how to work it, they make it. Some of the letters these “stars” wrote to Agnes would break your heart. Lost cowboys. Kids who went from eating one cracker per day to wearing a lot of rhinestone paste.
Do you have anything else from Mary Agnes?
I have her First Communion prayerbook. It’s little and hand-stitched with a cover like a pearl shell. Inside, it says: "Key of Heaven."
Key of heaven!
“Agnes Williams, March 19, 1911, First Holy Communion Day.”
Photos:
My grandmother Agnes Williams, who was the Nickelodeon player in Fargo. On the street.
My grandmother’s Catholic missal
Inscription on Agnes’ First Communion missal. She was probably 7. Agnes Esther Williams Halloran died at 32, after her 5th child.
Elizabeth Halloran, Agnes’ eldest daughter (my mom) in Capri in the mid-50s
Mabel Normand and her cat
