Legacy of Storytelling:

Colleen Moore’s Fairy Castle & the Golden Age of Film

Article by K.R.Murdy 2023

Miniatures were utilized as budget-saving methods of special effects in many early films, particularly through the 1920s, 30s, and 40s. Beyond the use of miniatures in film, the relationship between miniatures, film, and the fantastical nature of both offers an authentic experience in its viewers not unlike the early fairytales passed down through generational storytellers. Colleen Moore, actress and miniaturist, participates in this generational storytelling by combining her professional life as an actress with the realization of fantasy in miniature with her Fairy Castle. In its creation, details, and subsequent display, the Fairy Castle embodies the story of Moore, her family, Hollywood, Cinema, and the imagined denizens of the fairytale castle.

In the late 1920s filmmakers began to push the artistic and technical boundaries of film, including relying heavily on the use and development of special effects. This era saw the first developments of studio departments dedicated to the creation of special effects and their first screen credit in the 1926 picture What Price Glory?. Filmmakers utilized special effects teams to bring down the costs and complications that came with onsite filming. The teams used optical printers to combine matte paintings and miniature models with the live action portions of the picture. The optical printer was used during most of these productions and in later 1930s and 40s productions like 1941’s Citizen Kane. The printer helped reassemble multiple preplanned shots of models, animation, travelling mattes, and live action scenes to form a complete optical composition or composite image. Another common technique was traveling mattes or matte painting absolved the need to build expansive and large sets, instead replacing them with a process involving the hand painting of a scene on glass plate, then filming actors in front of it.

While the special effects presented above were commonly used, the effect that allowed for the expansion of large scale scenes, overhead shots, and the world of the fantastic was miniatures. Foreground miniatures, hanging miniatures, models, and miniature stop motion animation all aided in bringing to life stories and settings that may have been impossible, expensive or much less convincing for the era. In 1925 Willis O’ Brien and Marcel Delgado released the stop motion masterpiece The Lost World, based on the Conan Doyle novel of the same name. The film used miniature models of the expansive forest settings, dinosaurs, and other creatures. These miniatures were animated using stop motion animation, a miniature special effects process that continued with O’Brien and Delgado’s famous adaption of King Kong (1933) where rear projection was utilized to combine real-life actors with the miniature stop-motion animation. (Fig. 1) The famous German technical film Metropolis (1926) impressed audiences and critiques with its futuristic settings. Directed and worked on by Fritz Lang, the picture utilized two hundred matte paintings and over 200 painted miniature models

In the case of 1925’s Ben Hur and 1924’s The Thief of Bagdad, both films saw the benefits of special effects and miniatures after detrimental on-site production. On site in Italy a full-scale Circus Maximus was constructed and a fleet of 7 galley ships. Bad weather would make shooting impossible, and with added tensions of Italian labor disputes and a fire breaking out on the galley fleet, shooting for both films was scrapped. Production returned to California where sets were rebuilt with significant use of miniatures.

For Colleen Moore, not many of her own films used miniatures in their special effects, but due to her early acting career, Moore was surrounded by the men and women working on these projects. She had a prolific career in the silent film era. She was invited to Hollywood at 15 by director D.W. Griffith as a favor to a relative. Her film debut was a small role in 1917’s The Bad Boy, with her first lead role as Annie in Little Orphan Annie (1918). She quickly rose to fame as a popular star of flapper comedies. She personified the flapper girl character with her above-the-knee skirts and bobbed hairstyle which became a major fashion trend of the era. She was noted as the highest-paid actress of the 1920s. Some of her most notable films from this era include Flaming Youth (1923), Ella Cinders (1926), and Orchids and Ermine (1927). As the silent film era drew to a close, Moore made the transition to sound films or “talkies”, appearing in pictures such as; The Power and the Glory (1933) and Why Be Good? (1929), which was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Writing. Moore's last film appearance was in the 1934 film The Scarlet Letter where she played the star role of Hester Prynne. In 1928 Moore found herself in a depressive state, the reason for such undisclosed. (Though It is likely due to the abusive nature of her then-husband John McCormick. He was a known alcoholic whom Moore had married in 1923, shortly after her box office success film Flaming Youth. Per portably she was the subject of much of John’s abuse and divorced him in 1930. ) Her father, Charles Morrison encouraged her to divert her attention to her original love of miniatures and fairytales. Morrison had begun Moore’s early fascination with miniatures with the gift of a locket that held an infinitesimal, readable dictionary. (Fig. 2)

Moore and her father began the search for artisans and craftsmen to help realize the ideal of the Fairy Castle. The castle took seven years to conceptualize and build, the first plans being drawn in 1928 to the completion of the exterior landscaping in 1935. More than a hundred miniature experts worked on the project. Most of these experts were sourced from the special effects department of First National Films, the picture studio who was Moore’s main acting contractor. These men and women had primarily used their miniature skills in the creation of catastrophic nature scenes such as hurricanes, earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, and fires. Moore made note of several integral craftsmen and artisans including:

·      Horace Jackson - the lead architect who oversaw the design and construction of the castle's exterior and designed many of the sets Moore acted on at First National Studio.

·      Harold Grieve - the set designer who created the intricate miniature interiors and furnishings for the castle.

·      Jerry Rouleau – the construction foreman who invented and manufactured specialized tools and equipment for the craftsmen’s use.

·      Clifford Roth and Henry Freulich – Both from First National Studio, Roth wired hundreds of miniature electric circuits at the direction of Freulich, who designed the lighting to transition and reflect various times of day and seasons.

·      H.B. Crouch – a Beverly Hills jeweler who aided in the transition of Moore’s collection of adornments into miniature accoutrements for the castle denizens.

Charles Morrison – Colleen Moore’s father who was titled Chief Engineer of the project. He rented a vacant shop in Glendale California for the construction of the project and aided in the theorization and creation of materials and methods, such as the working miniature faucets within the bathrooms.

For several of the designers, the Fairy Castle project became an exercise in the conception of ultimate fantasy realized. Horace Jackson was a Hollywood art director and set designer who worked for First National Studio during the 1920s. He worked on several of Colleen Moore's films, including Ella Cinders (1926) and Orchids and Ermine (1927). Jackson was one of the first designers brought onto the project and is attributed with working with Morrison on the original castle plans. Jackson immediately sought to make the project otherworldly, desiring the castle to have no sense of reality. He claimed to find so much joy and inspiration in the project that his regular job of set design lost its savor in comparison. Harold Grieve was similarly entranced with the project. As a set designer, Grieve was well-versed in creating environments that would transport audiences into fantastical worlds. He worked on films in a variety of genres, including dramas, musicals, and westerns, and his sets were often praised for their attention to detail and their ability to create a sense of place. Grieve's experience in the genre helped supply the narrative context for the creation of the Fairy Castle. Grieve and Moore worked in tandem to imagine the denizens of the castle; a fairy princess and prince, who were collectors of the Early Fairie period of antiquities, “…King Arthur’s Roundtable for the dining room, Sleeping Beauty’s bed for the princess’s bedroom.” This premise established a narrative for the eclectic mixture of fairytales from periods and cultures of the real world.

The eclectic collection of famous fairy tale artifacts allowed for a central theme within the dollhouse and further allowance to design rooms with a paired story or cultural folk tale that reflected the room's purpose. Each room constructs a different fairy tale in the included furniture, decorative carvings and bas-reliefs, paintings, and the intricate murals on the walls of most rooms. A tour of the spaces reflects these details of integrating folk tales, nursery rhymes, fairy tales, and other imagery of the fantastic. Within the Magic Garden, the empty cradle hung in a treetop calls to mind the nursery rhyme of Rockabye Baby. The golden cradle is constructed from an amalgamation of a brooch, earrings, and pearl necklace inherited from Moore’s Grandmother. (Fig. 3) Moore reimagined a multitude of objects, but most commonly items from her large jewelry collection. She or others would reconstruct multiple pieces to make fantasy-minded décor and furniture for the castle. In this manner, Moore interwove her own family history within the imaginary Faerie history of the objects.

While the formal entrance to the castle is the Great Hall, Moore claimed that she preferred to enter through the Library that opens on the Magic Garden. Grieve chose an undersea motif for the room, portrayals of Undines can be discovered in sculptures, paintings, and other decorative objects. The Northern end of the room is painted to be representative of the Aurora Borealis, the Southern end tropical with a rainbow and pots of gold carved from sandalwood. The ceiling depicts constellations used by sailors to navigate the sea and golden zodiac signs are imbedded into a walnut floor. The arches are decorated with paintings and carvings of Lilliputian boats, Crusoe and Friday, and Kidd directing his buried treasure. This inclusion of well-known fantasy and fiction adventure novels such as Gulliver Travels, Robinson Crusoe, and Captain Kidd sees Moore and her designers stretching and reconstituting the definition of what constitutes a fairytale. (Fig.4) The most impressive aspect of the Library however is Moore’s collection of readable miniature books.

Moore had a penchant for micrographia, stemming from the early gift of the miniature dictionary. The original book collection for the Library consisted of sixty-five book printed in the eighteenth century. The books are written in clearly legible English and French. The subjects are primarily religious and the texts are exquisitely constructed in bound leather, vellum, and gilt. Among this collection is the smallest bible in the world, printed in 1840, and was a gift to Moore by one of her leading men Antonio Moreno. Moore also wished to include contemporary authors in her Library, presenting one inch square, stamped gold, leather-bound books to authors, poets and screenwriters she worked with or admired. The writers were encouraged to put down whatever they wished in the blank pages, with the stipulation of it being in their handwriting, signed and not printed. Authors such as Agatha Christie, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Arthur Conan Doyle to name but a few. Many of the further authors had connections to the screen, whether it be adaptions of their works or screenwriters of famous films. Du Maurier reproduced the first paragraph of Rebecca, Anita Loos wrote the first line of Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, Grieve penned a poem for Moore, and Warner Fabian (the director behind Moore’s hit film Flaming Youth) wrote an entry claiming that Moore was his idea of Flaming Youth. An impressive contribution was that of Edgar Rice Burroughs, who penned an entire miniature first edition of Tarzan Jr. with included illustrations. Despite this impressive collection of miniature books, there is one book in particular the is considered the most valuable in the library.

Colleen Moore's Fairy Castle features an autograph book that was signed by many famous personalities of the time. The book is filled with signatures and messages from Hollywood stars, political figures, and other notable individuals who visited the castle. Some of the famous signatures in the book include: Herbert Hoover,  Franklin D. Roosevelt, Eleanor Roosevelt, Harry S. Truman, Dwight D. Eisenhower, Lyndon B. Johnson, Richard Nixon, Queen Elizabeth II, Prince Philip, the Duke and Duchess of Windsor, Winston Churchill, Lord Halifax, Jawaharlal Nehru, the Crown Prince of Japan, General Douglas MacArthur, General Jonathan Wainwright, Pablo Picasso, Frank Lloyd Wright, Orville Wright, Admiral Richard Byrd, John Glenn, Henry Ford, Albert Einstein, Walt Disney, Carole Lombard, Amelia Earhart, and Helen Keller.

All left their autographs in the one inch book after visiting the Fairy Castle on tour. It is difficult to determine the exact monetary value of Colleen Moore's Fairy Castle autograph book, however, considering the historical significance of the book and the famous signatures it contains, the perceived value of the autograph book has been estimated at $50,000 to $75,000. The autograph book is an interesting and valuable historical artifact, as it provides a glimpse into the visitors who were drawn to the Fairy Castle and the cultural figures of the time who were impressed by its enchanting beauty and intricate design.

While the setting and base narrative of the castle is one of fantasy, Moore’s inclusion of artifacts of reconstructed jewelry, contemporary writers and the autograph book suggest a merging of Moore’s reality with the constructed space of the miniature. The constructed space allows for an exploration of these mergers and is improved by the relationship to the visual experience of authenticity. Authentic experience participates in the draw of the Fairy Castle for Moore, her designers, and the numerous visitors who have sought to view the dollhouse. The premise of the authentic experience is one proposed by Susan Stewart, a poet and literary critique who wrote extensively on the nature of scale, collection, and desire. She explains authentic experience as being “…placed beyond the horizon of present lived experience…in which the antique, the pastoral, the exotic, and other fictive domains are articulated.”

In this manner, the sought authenticity is not authentic in definition but rather a desire for idealized spaces of pleasure that, in their displacement from the viewer, allows us to imagine the existence of these spaces. This sort of authenticity is seen prevalently in entertainment media like films, theatre, and books. In the experience of watching a film or play we, the audience, maintain a distance from the actual image, this is through the physical boundaries of stage and screen. These boundaries maintain the illusion of the worlds being presented in these settings. Even stories set in “our reality” are never truly reality, instead they are staged and fashioned for use by the narrative. Even when “based on a true story”, the actors are not the person from the story, the narrative is altered to be more cinematic and even the original location can be “recast” in favor of the vision of the filmmaker. Media of this nature is constructed for the vision of the director and in service to the ideal audience who identifies with the narrative and thus deems it authentic in its portrayal. Moore participates in this construction of authentic experience not only with the direct mergers of her history and the fantasy history of the Fairy Castle, but also in the reflection of cinema within the dollhouse. Two such examples are the Prince’s Bedroom and the Bedroom of the Princess.

Within the Prince’s Bedroom (Fig. 5) Moore constructed a narrative of the Prince’s ancestry as that of Eastern folklore and fairytales. The room features no mural, only walls painted in a Russian Blue, however, carvings of the fairytale of Little Czar Salter decorated the bed and chairs. The ceiling is frescoed and meant to mimic an elegant tent canopy with four decorated pillars. Three gold chests inlaid with silver and iron are one of the room's highlights. Japanese-made, the smallest chest is dated over five hundred years old, the mid-sized one hundred and fifty years old, and the largest was commissioned by Moore in Kyoto in 1935. This largest chest features imagery of Japanese fairytales, which when combined with the mock “polar bear” rug (a representation of the Czar Saltar fairytale character), the sword Excalibur, and Apollo’s golden running shoes, exemplifies the eclectic antique collector premise expertly. The interest in creating a canonical narrative of the prince’s Eastern roots is claimed to have come from no form of inspiration by Moore, “ For no reason I can offer I began to think of the Prince’s ancestry in terms of the Eastern World.”

Cinderella’s drawing room drips with luxury, gifts reflective of other royalty, real and imagined. The floor is rose quartz and jade from China, with carved amber vases flanking the space. The vases are over 500 years old and originally owned by the Dowager Empress of China. American pop culture royalty is seen within the twin miniature portraits of Mickey and Minnie Mouse. Dressed as the King and Queen of hearts, the portraits were a gift to Collee Moore from Walt Disney. The large mural in the drawing room, painted by Los Angeles artist George Townsend Cole, depicts a Russian version of the tale of Cinderella in a Rococo style (Fig. 7). Another image of the fairytale was painted on the inside of the baby grand piano marking further who is being recognized within the luxurious drawing room.

This harks back to Moore’s roles in a multitude of Cinderella-inspired films, the most prevalent being 1926’s Ella Cinders. Moore played the lead role of Ella Cinders in the silent comedy film. The picture is a loose adaptation of the Cinderella story and follows the misadventures of Ella Cinders, a young woman from a poor family who dreams of a better life in Hollywood. In the film, Colleen Moore gives a charming and lively performance as Ella, bringing her spunky personality and irrepressible spirit to the role. The film also features a memorable supporting cast, including Lloyd Hughes as the handsome and dashing Prince, Vera Lewis as the wicked stepmother, and William Scott as the bumbling but lovable sidekick.

Incidentally, one of the few rooms not reflective of the Cinderella narrative is the Bedroom of the Princess. (Fig. 8)  The room is centered on the story of Sleeping Beauty, with the most eye catching element being the crescent shaped bed. The bed is draped in a delicate canopy and fitted with gold, spiderweb embroidered pillows and quilt. the golden webs are representative of the webbing that crossed over the sleeping form of the princess during her 100 year slumber. As such, in the lore of the Fairy Castle, the bed was the very same that Sleeping Beauty slept during her cursed coma. A treasured antique for the Fairy Princess of the castle. The walls are decorated  with murals and carvings depicting the story, in particular roses and thorns representative of the titular sleeping beauty’s name, Briar Rose.

Legacy of Storytelling: Colleen Moore’s Fairy Castle & the Golden Age of Film is an original article by Miss Kaitlin R. Murdy

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