Katharine Kavanaugh

Katharine Kavanaugh was a prolific playwright, stage actress, songwriter, and screenwriter. Her work in the film industry consisted mainly of screenwriting during two separate periods: 1916-26 and 1936-40. Although she was with Metro Pictures from 1916-21, she took a year off in 1919 to return to her native Baltimore, Maryland, where she opened an acting school for stage and film, founded a production company, and produced and directed a three-reeler, Love’s Crossroads, using local talent and locations (Cook). For much of the 1916-26 period, she worked closely with June Mathis at Metro, Goldwyn, and First National as collaborator and assistant.  

Kavanaugh was born in Baltimore on December 26, 1874. As a child, she loved to write and star in her own short plays in her backyard or at school (“How a Clever Baltimore Girl”). Kavanaugh’s parents died when she was in late adolescence, motivating her to learn the business of testimony transcripts and open her own office (“Katharine Kavanaugh”). At that point, she also began writing and starring in her own plays at Elks and Rotary clubs, churches, and schools around Baltimore and quickly gained attention in the press. A February 4, 1893, letter to the Baltimore News states that “[Anyone who wants] to see acting that is acting[,] our local ‘Enoch Arden’ and ‘Katharine Kavanaugh’ company can show it to them” (“Complimentary”). Kavanaugh was multi-talented, writing songs for her plays as well as sacred songs for worship. One writer commented that “[s]he is young and charming, with a good voice and is an excellent dancer” (“Miss Kavanaugh”). Most of her plays were light comedies. But Kavanaugh also wrote dramas that would attack male superiority (e.g., “Under Blue Skies”) and political corruption (e.g., “The Daughters of Men”), or cross racial divisions (“O Joy San”). She objected when critics labeled these works as melodramas, the implication being that she relied on cheap emotional effects. “I don’t think that that charge is altogether true, but consider the houses in which I have played and the audiences I have had to write to,” she said. “I have played in middle priced houses and to church audiences. You always have to have a loud shot or two. I have adapted my plays to my people” (“How a Clever Baltimore Girl”). 

By 1908, she had written several plays and playlets and stated that she “would like to be a great actress” (“How a Clever Baltimore Girl”). After about a decade of writing and starring in her own works, Kavanaugh married longtime colleague and theater company manager Oliver C. Ziegfeld, cousin of Follies impresario Florenz Ziegfeld, in 1910. But the article announcing their plans to wed emphasized that Kavanaugh “will not give up her dramatic life, but it is understood she will go on the road with Miss Valerie Bergere in vaudeville for whom she has written several sketches” (“Miss Kavanaugh”). She stayed with Bergere for five years. In 1916, she sent a screenplay entitled The Wheel of the Law to Metro. While performing in Philadelphia, she made a quick trip to New York City to find out the studio’s response. Metro purchased the work, which focused on capital punishment and wrongful conviction, and starred Emily Stevens when it was released later that year. Kavanaugh later recalled, “I was given $35 a week to help on the continuity. Later, I became head of the story department” (“Katharine Kavanaugh”). Although reviewers generally considered her plot “obvious” (“Obvious Story Made Interesting”), the film started a screenwriting career that lasted until 1940. 

Her position with Metro was not glamorous. One of her colleagues, Louise Boyer, wrote of their workspace in a letter to her husband: “The place … is a cubby hole over the studio–the stage, they call it. You go up a steep flight of stairs and come to a very small room, three desks littered up” (Boyer [February 8, 1918]). From that cubby hole, Kavanaugh followed The Wheel of the Law with Peggy, The Will O’ the Wisp (1917), directed by Tod Browning.  She then won second place in a Photoplay screenplay competition for her script Betty Takes a Hand, which Triangle produced in 1918 with John Francis Dillon directing and Olive Thomas playing the lead. Kavanaugh then began her association with Mathis on several productions at Metro. She later claimed three of these as “originals,” which suggests that they were mainly hers. These were The Winding Trail, Social Quicksands, and The House of Gold (all 1918) (“Katharine Kavanaugh”). Variety’s review for House of Gold indicates that Kavanaugh was again offering very risky material for the times: “If you are at all nervous or sensitive don’t go to see ‘The House of Gold’ in the evening or you will be likely to suffer from nightmare[s]. It is a frightful concoction of murder, bacchanalian revels, the incarceration of an innocent man in an insane asylum, delirium tremens, a court room trial for murder, etc.” (“Jolo”).

That same year, Kavanaugh also wrote the screenplay for The Liar, apparently based on an unpublished short story she wrote called “The Alien Strain” (Catalogue 11), where she addressed the major topic of race relations. The now-lost film reportedly opened with a scene depicting the ugliness of racism: a plantation owner in Puerto Rico beats a Black worker and cripples him for life. The main story, however, concerns a jealous man who tries to ruin a woman’s marriage by claiming she has Black ancestry, and the opening violence toward the worker appears to have had little narrative significance. Motion Picture News deemed the film a “weird melodramatic concoction,” and claimed the scene in which the heroine worries that her child may be born Black “will undoubtedly prove too strong for the average picturegoer, especially the women folks” (“The Liar”).

On February 19, 1918, Louise Boyer wrote in another letter to her husband that, “Miss Kavanaugh is a very able woman, and she is being used [at Metro] for hack work…[She] is tired [of] being nothing but a buffer between the agents for stories and [editorial director Maxwell] Karger, who has no idea how difficult stories are to get… She would develop very well as a continuity writer if she only had the chance” (Boyer). Boyer, it seems, was partial to Kavanaugh; in comparing her to her famous colleague June Mathis, Boyer also wrote, “Miss Kavanaugh is finer in perception…Miss Mathis is a shade flamboyant” (Boyer  [February 8, 1918]). In 1919, Ethel Barrymore asked Kavanaugh to write the scenario for The Divorcee because the actress also preferred her over Mathis. Of that film, Motion Picture News stated that “the plot is so clever in conception and development that each succeeding scene lays further stress on the picture’s merit” (“Ethel Barrymore”).  

Kavanaugh’s decision to return to Baltimore in May 1919 to explore an independent career suggests that she was in fact getting frustrated about her limited opportunities at Metro. Instead, she opened a school for acting on stage and screen, founded a film production company, and cast, wrote, directed, and probably also edited Love’s Crossroads. For this project, Kavanaugh worked with local actors who had never been on screen before and filmed at the homes of Baltimore residents, probably friends (Cook; “To Show”). Little else is known about Love’s Crossroads, which is presumed lost today, although one trade press notice states that the lead actress, Hilda Rose, was soon after engaged at Equity (“Baltimore Brieflets”).

 Kavanaugh also continued her playwriting and most likely stage acting during this time. The November 17, 1919, showing of Love’s Crossroads at Baltimore’s Albaugh’s Theater was accompanied by Kavanaugh’s one-act theatrical adaptation of her script for The Liar (“Ziegfeld”). Kavanaugh returned to Metro in June 1920 (“Again”). However, she staged three one-act plays and an adaptation of her screenplay for Peggy, The Will O’ the Wisp, in which she also played the lead (“‘Will O’ the Wisp’”), before returning fully to film. A December 1922 article announced that she had “[given] up her work on the stage” (“Says”) and left Baltimore to become Mathis’s first assistant at Goldwyn, where she may have contributed to Mathis’s scripts for The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse (1921), Ben-Hur (1925) and The Day of Faith (1923) (Wilson).  

In August 1925, Kavanaugh moved to First National with Mathis. There, she may have contributed to Classified, We Moderns, and The Desert Flower (all comedy hits in 1925) (T.M.C.), although actual evidence of her work on these productions is non-existent. In 1926, however, she wrote the screenplay for The Far Cry, a June Mathis production directed by the producer’s husband, Sylvano Balboni. Starring Blanche Sweet and Jack Mulhall and released in February 1926, the film told the story of two young Americans, Sweet a divorcee, who meet in Paris and then live together in Italy against their parents’ wishes. The final scene was in color. A report from the manager of the National Theatre in Graham, Texas, stated, “This picture was produced in a very lavish manner. The story is good; cast excellent. The technicolor sequences are really beautiful” (Powell). Variety found the film “more or less prosaic” where the stage play had been “far more subtle,” but still called it “a good picture” (“Risk”). That year marked the end of Kavanaugh’s silent-era screenwriting career, a profession that she ultimately found suited to her gender: “Producers prefer women in this sort of work,” she once wrote of screenwriting. “They find women much better at the detail work that really makes a moving picture” (“Says”). 

Between 1926-36, Kavanaugh wrote new plays and produced performances of her works (directed by her husband) at theaters, churches, and high schools. But her creative connection to film was not over. In 1936, Kavanaugh’s play “Every Saturday Night” was adapted for the screen. Over the next four years, eight more films based on that play’s characters, the Jones family, were produced (including one based on her original screenplay [Educating Father from 1936].) After 1940, she wrote a few more plays for Baltimore high schools. Kavanaugh died on October 23, 1942, aged sixty-seven. The Kavanaugh plays available on the Internet Archive provide great examples of her creativity, humor, and writing skills. Unfortunately, most copies of her film scripts—material that could reveal her contributions to collaborative efforts—and the majority of the silent films connected to her are non-extant. In her screenwriting career, she scored several successes both in partnership with June Mathis and on her own. Her efforts in theater and film suggest she was also talented as a producer, director, editor, and performer. But the full range and quality of her work will most likely never be known, and it might be said that she did not achieve her true potential. As Louise Boyer noted, despite all her efforts, Katharine Kavanaugh never got a real chance to develop her talents.

See also: June Mathis