In December 1916, the Tulsa [Oklahoma] Times began printing a column with the byline of Tildy Winks. The column appeared as many as a few days a week in either the Times or the Tulsa Democrat through August 1917 and less frequently after that, until early January 1920. From early February 1917 onward, nearly half of the columns were devoted to film reviews, little essays on the movies, and gossip. During the last four months, many of the columns were headed “It Happened in Filmland,” ending with movie theater listings, now edited by Tildy Winks. The woman using this catchy nom de plume, unfortunately, remains unknown, unlike earlier “girl reporters” such as Nellie Bly (Elizabeth Cochrane) or concurrent film reviewers such as Mae Tinée (Francis Peck) or Dorothy Day (Dorothy Gottlieb). Even the Tulsa Historical Society, when asked, found no records of her (Williams). The graphic head shot topping some of her early columns gave her a “bohemian” look, which she once admitted was scarce in Tulsa (“Bohemians Here?”).
Tildy wrote about a wide range of subjects. Often, her column appeared on a page titled “The Woman’s Realm,” and, even when it did not, she seemed to be talking to women. The tone she adopted was chatty, sometimes serious but usually humorous, even tongue-in-cheek. She composed little stories about clever Nellie, a “soda water girl,” and others, interviewing historical and mythological figures like Cleopatra, Daphne, and Narcissus (e.g., “And No Man Will Know”). Occasionally she could take women to task for shopping and flirting, but the angle she most assumed was almost feminist for the time. She supported divorce, independent single women, women in white collar jobs (telephone operator, bank cashier, salesclerk), and those joining the Red Cross or speaking out in public (despite being ridiculed by men) (e.g., “Who Is the Absolute Monarch of Tulsa?”; “Why the ‘Old Maid’”). In other words, all “brainy women.” Men, however, she could satirize for their “fussy” summer wear, their need to hold on to a woman when walking (she recommended a chain to keep them from running off), their prerogative as the real “restless sex,” or the self-love of a “coy” figure like Narcissus, “not like the other fellows somehow” (an accompanying cartoon put him in feminine facial make up) (“Oh, Joy, Oh Slush!”). A brief unsigned item even wondered cheekily if “some Bibles and Tildy Winks” would make for good reading in the new restroom for cops (“Might Put Some”).
The movies and stars that Tildy chose to write about in her columns were in sync with the other newspaper women. Almost exclusively she singled out female movie stars, especially young women, and their films. A particular favorite was “little Marguerite Clark,” “bewitching” in Snow White (1916), a “delight” in Bab’s Matinee Idol (1917), and “just herself” in The Valentine Girl (1917) (“Give Us More ‘Snow White’”; “Marguerite Clark Is Just Herself”; “Marguerite Clark’s Acting Delight”). She loved “the curls, the smile, the pout, and all the mannerisms” of Mary Pickford in The Poor Little Rich Girl (1917) (“Mary Pickford Just Herself”). But she admired Pickford’s prowess as an actress in playing the poor servant in Stella Maris (1918), although the film could only appeal because she also appeared, as expected, as the charming heroine (“Heavens Are Not Complete”). If Pickford had a rival, she thought, it was young Vivian Martin, playing “a little slum girl” in The Right Direction (1916) (“Mary Pickford Has a Brilliant Rival”). Yet few could compare with Mabel Normand, “so vivacious, so tomboyish, so delightful” in Mickey (1918) (“‘Mickey’ Proves Rare Film Treat”). Nor in a very different register could anyone, even Pickford in that double role, compare with Alla Nazimova, who “does not depend on beautiful surroundings or beautiful clothes, nor even personal beauty” and “has the sublime power of making you forget that she is Nazimova” in Out of the Fog (1919) (“‘Out of the Fog’”). Well, yes, perhaps Geraldine Farrar, who, after she “danced impishly” in Carmen (1915) seemed “a new actress” whose “magnetic personality” raised the level of Joan the Woman (1916) (“America Fighting”). Shortly after the United States entered World War I in April 1917, the most amazing, for “her endurance and perseverance,” undoubtedly was Sarah Bernhardt in Mothers of France, which was released in May. Now “an old woman and broken in health,” she imparts “a vividness” to this French film that reveals “just what war is and what it means to be a mother.” When her son dies in the war, “Bernhardt gives the most wonderful portrayal of the mute Gethsamane of motherhood” (“Bernhardt Brings All Her Art”).
Rarely does Tildy mention a film’s director, but there is one exception. Not once but twice she singles out Lois Weber. Unlike Mae Tinée, who dismissed Idle Wives (1916) as “pictorial goulash” (“‘Idle Wives’”), Winks thought the scenario for Weber’s film “excellent” in contrasting “the daily lives of society butterflies and the wives of laboring men.” She was especially struck by interior scenes, such as “the cluttered-up kitchen of a tenement apartment [in which] a tired, overworked mother is seen preparing breakfast. You can almost smell the coffee and hear the grease pop and sizzle in the frying pan as she breaks the eggs into the smoking hot lard (“‘Idle Wives’ Shows Two Sides of Life”).
In line with her comments on single, independent women, Tildy also praised the butterfly for finally divorcing her husband and returning to take up her former probation work in the city’s juvenile hall. “A Lois Weber production is always good,” she wrote, reviewing For Husbands Only (1918) in August of that year. “Somehow a woman can put in these little touches that a man would never think about,” and a man in the audience, she noted, would only notice that “there is something decidedly ‘different’ about the film” (“‘For Husbands Only’”). Elsewhere, she focuses on the work of another female pioneer, screenwriter Jeanie Macpherson, without directly naming her (or director Cecil B. DeMille). In her review for Old Wives For New (1918), she praises the scenario, which was adapted from “the sensation novel by David Graham Phillips.” Readers, she argues, will be pleased with the film, even if “some of the rather startling frankness of the book,” which “no board of censorship would admit,” has been cut. Still, she warned grown-ups not to bring their children (“Old Wives for New”).
Like some other newspaper women, Tildy could be a bit moralistic when it came to children attending the movies. She told of parents who came home from a theater startled to find their daughters “vamping” in their bedroom. “We’re having lots of fun,” they cried, pretending to be Theda Bara (“What Sort of Picture Shows”). The scene prompted Tildy to encourage parents to make sure their children went to really good shows (“more ‘Snow White’ films,” she wished, in her first review) rather than “undesirable” movies, which now were more influential than pulp fiction (“Folks Seem to Like Slush”). Similarly, like other writers, she urged adults to practice courtesy as a tenet of movie theater etiquette. Her chief complaint was with people who disturbed an audience by trying to find a seat in the middle of a screening (“Do You Practice Etiquette”). They ought to enter an auditorium, according to a theater’s program schedule, just before a movie starts.
Looking back at “the good old days,” Tildy also repeated a lot of stereotypes about the nickelodeon period: the sheet for a screen, the gum-chewing girl at the battered piano, the audience of “children and yokels” (“Remember the First Moving Picture”). But she also offers important glimpses today into the (local) exhibition of silent films. For example, she interviewed the orchestra leader of the Palace Theater in Tulsa to learn that music was more and more crucial to the experience and interpretation of a movie. A company’s “cued music robs an orchestra of its individuality,” he told Tildy, so he first watches the film to be screened and chooses from his large musical library what best will suit it. Sometimes popular tunes are appropriate, especially for lighter movies. But he favored classical music for dramatic films and mentioned, for instance, several pieces by a “late French woman composer” for love scenes. Whatever the case, a spectator may be unconscious of the well-known classical music played “yet responsive to its seductive appeal” (“Music of Masters”).
Not only would it be good to know the real name of the woman behind the Tildy Winks byline, but it would also be interesting to confirm if she was still a newspaper staff writer in Tulsa on the Memorial Day weekend of 1921. In June 1917, she had penned a stereotypical column about “darkies” and “pickaninnies” watching and waiting for watermelons to ripen—a racist story that revealed she evidently was a white woman writing for white readers (“Every Little Negro”). What was she doing in early June 1921 during what the city’s newspapers labeled a “riot” and now is known as the Tulsa Race Massacre that destroyed the Black business district and neighborhood of Greenwood, killed probably hundreds, hospitalized many more, and left thousands homeless or in flight (“U.S. Orders Race Riot Inquiry”)?