As one of the leading ladies during the silent film era, Mabel Normand had a natural knack for slapstick comedy and starred alongside Charlie Chaplin and Roscoe “Fatty” Arbuckle throughout the 1910s and ’20s.
Born November 9, 1893, in Staten Island, New York, Normand appeared in dozens of silent films from her first 1910 feature, Indiscretions of Betty, through her final film One Hour Married in 1927, and worked with directors Mack Sennett under Keystone Studios, D.W. Griffith, Hal Roach, and more and co-wrote and co-directed films with Chaplin, who first introduced his Tramp character alongside the actress in the 1914 film Mabel’s Strange Predicament.
A Voice Silenced
Within her short career, Normand became the premiere actress during the silent years, while also being linked to the murder of her friend director William Desmond Taylor, the shooting of her chauffeur Courtland S. Dines, and struggling with a cocaine addiction before her death at the age of 37 from pulmonary tuberculosis in 1930.
Normand’s addictions and short life and career inspired Stevie Nicks to write “Mabel Normand” in 1985. “Mabel was an amazing actress and comedian from the ’20s, and she was a terrible cocaine addict,” said Nicks in 2014. “She eventually died of tuberculosis, but it was really her drug addiction that killed her. She [Normand] was in love with a famous director [Taylor], who tried to get her off coke, and he was murdered. Rumor has it, drug dealers killed him.”
Nicks’s lyrics span Normand’s innocence and the self-destructiveness surrounding her later life.
Natural inner beauty
I guess you could say she’s just an unapproachable comedienne
Haven’t much faith in her talent
She did her work, no comedienne has not been the clown
She did her work, but her heart was quietly crying
I guess she even felt guilty, about even dying
Sad Mabel Normand
So my friend is continuing on a destructive road
His life passes before him like an unfortunate circumstance
He and his friend are at odds, he is not winning
Why does someone always have to win?
So, continue on your destructive road
Ooh, your life passes before me like an unknown circumstance
You and your friend are at odds and you are not winning
Why does someone always have to win?
…
Well, her life was a gas
Simply everything that happened
Well, the old lady said, “Yes, it was sad”
She fought a losing battle, one day at a time
She might even make it through tomorrow
Maybe in another show, natural inner beauty
I guess you could just say she was unapproachable
Baby comedienne
…
So beautiful
Sad Mabel Normand
So good
Sad girl
So beautiful
[RELATED: Stevie Nicks Calls New Single “The Lighthouse” an “Anthem” for Women’s Rights: “This May Be the Most Important Thing I Ever Do”]
Road to Rehab
Once Nicks learned more about Normand’s life, she saw some of herself in the silent actress, which prompted her to seek help for her own addictions. “I saw a documentary of her in 1985 when I was at my lowest point with the blow,” recalled Nicks. “I was watching TV one night, the movie came on, and I really felt a connection with her. That’s when I wrote the song. Less than a year later, I went to rehab at Betty Ford.”
Between 1984 and 1985, Nicks said she was living dangerously around her addictions and could have easily met a similar fate to Normand. “In 1985, I was dancing at the edge of danger myself, just like she was, said Nicks. “I was just doing so much coke. And it had already backfired on me completely. I saw this documentary, and I felt this union with her: ‘Oh my God, the same thing that happened to this woman in the ’20s is happening to me in the ’80s. How can this be?’”
She added, “Then she died, and that really scared me. She was rich, she was famous, she had everything. She had it all. And I very well could have died just as easily as she did.”
The song was one Nicks said she hoped would help other addicts. “I wanted it to be something that somebody having a problem with drugs can sit down and listen to 5,000 times,” said Nicks. “Try to let it be an epiphany for you, [an] 18-year-old person that is doing a lot of coke and smoking heroin and taking ecstasy and is on a dead-end road to hell. It’s really about what drugs can do to you. I, unlike Mabel, managed to get a hold of it.”
Nicks Never Performed “Mabel Normand” Live
In an interview with Q magazine, Nicks, who released “Mabel Normand” decades after she wrote it on her 2014 album 24 Karat Gold: Songs from the Vault, admitted that she never performed the song live, since all the syllables within the lyrics don’t make it easy to sing.
“If you take a breath, you get off the beat,” said Nicks of the song. “You’re one word too late, you can never get back on, and you’re dead in the water.”
Photo: Stevie Nicks in concert, November 28, 1989, Wembley Arena, London, UK, by Ian Dickson/Shutterstock
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