Typed manuscript of an unpublished biography for silent film actress Mary Miles Minter, who adds copious pencil emendations and annotations in her own hand throughout, twenty-one pages, 8.5 x 11, no date. A selection of Minter’s comments: “Poor Mr. Engle, who was much put to it to calm down his Peggy when she came off distinctly 2nd best, Mrs. S. & Mary retaining the suite"; “An oversight a little earlier when she was barely 15 when Lloyd Ingraham & his wife took her to a party to meet young film people in L. A.—an event which confirmed her shy estrangement from what should have been her natural young film friends and playmates. She was a little too young for them, a star, of which she was unconscious but they were not. They being featured players but one of them was a star at that time except Mabel Normand"; “[Miss Minter] obeyed as ever when her mother signed the contract in June of 1919”; regarding the actor and Minter’s suspected older beau, William Desmond Taylor, “Miss Minter knew nothing of his past except his outstanding war record”; another concerning Taylor, “I love you enough to want your happiness above my own—I told him that nothing, no amount of years or younger men of anything on earth would change my love for him. He looked at me a long time and finally said: Mary, you are my little white rose—I want you, I love you with all my heart and soul—now listen earnestly to what I have to say: If you will really try to let some more suitable man capture your heart but by the time your contract is finished have not done so, then by the living God, I am going to claim you for my own. But this I require of you—that you give yourself a fair chance. We sealed the pact with a kiss.” In very good to fine condition, with some toning, and staining from the old tape which was used to affix selected revisions.
This was the only attempt to do a biography on Mary Miles Minter, and the fact that she herself made the corrections makes it even rarer. Her notes on her affair with William Desmond Taylor are especially interesting—Taylor’s murder was never solved, and both Minter and her extremely overprotective mother were considered among the suspects. A fantastic, fascinating piece of Hollywood history.
