Earl Tucker (1906-37) was a popular dancer who took his name from the eccentric style of dancing he performed at, among other top venues, the Cotton Club.
Tucker did not invent the dance style, as is often claimed, but he was certainly its leading practitioner in the early 20th century. It involved the ability to sway from the hips rhythmically, creating the impression of a snake’s movements. A Black folk dance style, it was one of many aspects of Black culture purloined by Elvis Presley.
Tucker died very young and only appeared in a couple of musical shorts and, most significantly, performing the first solo dance in an MGM musical, uncredited as a bellboy in Love in the Rough. He is also believed to have filmed a routine for the uncompleted The March of Time.
Cader Edwards Davis (1867?-1936) was an ordained minister who enjoyed the showmanship of pulpit oratory so much that he gave up the church and became an actor. (Although arrests for drunkenness and associating with loose characters may have been contributing factors.)
Davis wrote and performed in both vaudeville sketches and full-length plays. He wrote a tragedy which one newspaper described as “simply gross”, but which he performed around one thousand times.
Davis worked on Broadway and was respected enough by his colleagues to be elected president of the National Vaudeville Artists Association in 1919.
Edwards Davis made about 70 film appearances from 1915 to 1936, always in character parts. In 1926, he was third-billed to Harry Langdon and Joan Crawford in Tramp, Tramp, Tramp.
Davis’s parts in the 1930s were mostly uncredited, including in Love in the Rough and as Henry VIII in Madam Satan.
The International Pageant of Pulchritude was held annually in Galveston, Texas from 1920 to 1931, and took upon itself the responsibility for choosing ‘the Beauty Queen of the Universe’. Or Miss Universe, for short.
The winner in 1926 was Catherine May Moylan (1904-69), and this led to her being invited to be part of the Ziegfeld Follies of 1927, and then to a role in the original stage production of Whoopee! in 1928.
Moylan made half a dozen brief film appearances before returning to obscurity. One of these was a credited role in Love in the Rough.
Readers of a certain (advanced) age will recall the voice, though not the stage name, of Harry Leonard Albershardt (1909-73) as that of the talking horse in Mr Ed (1961-66).
Before that, he had spent many years on top of horse in dozens of ‘B’ westerns, including 39 pictures in which he played Sheriff (or Marshal, or Lieutenant) Rocky Lane. He also gave flesh to the comic strip character Red Ryder in seven films.
Lane had made his debut in a leading man role for Fox in 1929, but his career quickly foundered, which led to him doing small parts in Love in the Rough and Madam Satan. Fortunately, a career in oaters lay ahead.
Some confusion surrounds Harry Burns, who played the gardener in Love in the Rough.
IMDb asserts confidently that he was born in 1887, died in 1948, and in between was married to actor Dorothy Vernon. It says he was an actor who made 15 films between 1915 and 1920, took a ten-year break, then made another 39 appearances between Love in the Rough and 1948, two of which were in Music for Millions and It Happened in Brooklyn. IMDb also claims Burns was the father of Bobby Vernon, even though Bobby was only ten years younger, but we will not go there.
According to the AFI Catalog, Harry Burns acted in a couple of pictures in 1923-24, but was mainly a director at that time, notably of a series of films starring Joe Martin the Chimp (no space here, but Joe is worth looking up).
As a further complication, the New York Times reported, in 1939 (not 1948), the death of “Harry Burns, former film director for William Fox and other early film producers and one-time publisher of Filmograph”. It notes that, at the time of his death, he had been working as an extra and was a champion for better treatment for extra players, and that his widow was Dorothy Vernon.
Which leads to a second IMDb entry, for director Harry Burns (1882-1939), also married to Dorothy Vernon.
It seems pretty clear that there were two men called Harry Burns making films in the same period and, probably the 1887-1948 version who made appearances in two MGM musicals. The silent pictures attributed to him by IMDb must belong to the 1882-1939 Harry Burns (especially given that one of them starred the aforesaid Joe Martin the Chimp.
He was also the one married to Dorothy Vernon. He may well have been the father of Bobby Vernon, but, if so, was a father at the age of 15.
British actor Harry Davis (1902-70) performed in the West End and on Broadway before making his first film for Pathe Exchange, shortly after the company’s restructuring by Joseph Kennedy.
Davis’s screen career only lasted ten years, but he squeezed in 38 films, one of which was Love in the Rough.
It has been suggested that Davis’s portrayal of a dance instructor in George Cukor’s Our Betters (1933) established the Hollywood template for the flamboyant gay man.
Anita Louise Fremault (1915-70) was one of those rare child performers who went on to an adult career in acting and exhibited no major trauma.
Louise made her debut on Broadway aged seven, making her first film appearance in the same year for an east coast company.
By the mid-thirties, Anita Louise was playing leading roles, perhaps most notably as Titania in Max Reinhardt’s star-studded version of A Midsummer Night’s Dream (1935). She was generally the second female lead in the bigger pictures, supporting stars like Olivia de Havilland and Norma Shearer. Her final big screen role was in Joseph H Lewis’s evocatively-titled Retreat, Hell! (1952), but she continued working one-and-off on television until 1970.
In The Florodora Girl, Anita Louise, aged 15, played the hero’s younger sister.
Jane Neave Keithley (1908-44) was a local beauty pageant winner who gave up university to have a go in Hollywood.
After playing a chorus girl for Paramount, and then a small role in Metro’s The Florodora Girl, she changed her name to Jane Keith and secured the lead in Fox’s Jack London adaptation, The Sea Wolf.
Unfortunately, this was a false dawn in her career, and she made only two further appearances. The silver lining, however, was her marriage to the director of The Sea Wolf, Alfred Santell. By all accounts a story relationship, it produced four children, which makes her untimely death at the age of 36 even sadder.
Robert Joseph Edney (1859-1937) was a British actor who relocated to America and made his first films for the Chicago-based Essanay Company.
Bolder eventually took up residence in Los Angeles and, by the end of his career, had made around 120 pictures. He was a regular performer in Wallace Beery’s Sweedie series.
Bolder played the Commodore, a stage doorman, in The Florordora Girl.
Samuel B Hardy (1883-1935) abandoned his studies at Yale to go on the stage, later signing with the Biograph Company in its post-Griffith years to make pictures.
Hardy had a preference for comedy, even though he played Simon Legree in Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1918) for Famous Players-Lasky, and in The Miracle Woman (1931) he was the promoter who exploits Barbara Stanwyck’s religious fervour. His best-known role, however, was as the agent Weston in King Kong (1933).
Hardy only appeared in one MGM musical, as the gambler Harry Fountaine in The Florordora Girl.
Hardy was taken ill while shooting a film with his friend Eddie Cantor and did not survive emergency surgery.
