“The Youngest Leading Lady in Movies”

If I tell you the story of Lucille Ricksen it may haunt you. In the way some histories do. Stories that tap at our brains, asking to be acknowledged. “Remember me,” they beg. But we can’t quite meet their demand because the story is too fragile, it lies in bits, a broken jigsaw.

I’m not sure when I first came across the story of Lucille – whether it was a podcast, a book or an internet deep dive. I’ve wanted to write about her for a while now. But there are so few sources to draw on, little threads that lead nowhere.

The key source was a chapter in Michael G Ankerich’s Dangerous Curves Atop Hollywood Heels. There is also a brief mention in Lisa Stein’s biography of Syd Chaplin.

So, here’s what we know.

Lucille was born on 22 August in Chicago. There is some dispute over the year of her birth. In Hollywood three to four years were typically added to her age, to fit the parts she was being asked to play. But Ankerich’s detailed research suggests that the most likely date was 1910.

From an early age, she worked as a model. Along with her brother Marshall, she became a well-known child model, both becoming key sources of revenue for their parents. At age 8, her parents divorced and at the request of Samuel Goldwyn her mother relocated the family to Hollywood.

By age 11, she was cast in a comedy serial entitled The Adventures of Edgar Pomeroy. This work got her labelled as “One of the most promising Hollywood actresses”. But it also required an exhausting schedule of theatre tours and celebrity events.

After the Edgar Pomeroy serials, her filming career continued at an extortionate rate. Throughout the early 1920s Ricksen appeared in a number of high-profile acting roles. In many of these films, she had to portray a character much older than her years. Ricksen completed no fewer than 10 films within a seven-month period in 1924. Stardom, immortality and all the other privileges of fame appeared to ripe for the picking, especially when in 1924 she was named one of the WAMPAS baby stars, (Western Association of Motion Picture Advertisers) which honoured 13 young women destined for Hollywood glory. Clara Bow was also on that list – another star that had to be rediscovered.

But something strange was happening in the background. Whilst declared “The youngest leading lady on the screen” by the Covington Review in 1923 at age 13, her age started disappearing from reports. Or it rapidly increased by a few years. In December 1923, the Billboard noted that Lucille and Sydney Chaplin had recently married.

Ankerich could find no such marriage licence and Chaplin was still married to another woman at this point. So it is doubtful whether any such marriage took place.

It was during the filming of The Galloping Fish in 1924, opposite Sydney Chaplin that Lucille became ill. By early 1925 her condition had worsened and she was diagnosed as having tuberculosis. She was forced into bed-rest. Her mother tried to keep the press and film contacts away from her bedside. Nonetheless the film director and screenwriter Paul Bern visited her on a weekly basis bringing flowers and magazines to read.

In late February 1925, her mother whilst tending to her daughter suffered a fatal heart attack and collapsed on top of the bedridden Lucille. Lucille died just a few weeks after her mother. She was 14.

Exhaustion? Malnutrition? Tuberculosis? Lisa Stein’s biography of Sydney Chaplin suggests an infection from an abortion? The family doctor’s words were:

"She crowded too much work into too short a time, and overtaxed her capacities. Other youthful stars have done the same thing. The result is that she has had a complete physical and nervous collapse ...so complete that she has not rallied from it as she should."

And so Lucille Ricksen becomes a cautionary tale. Her life a testament to the downsides of the pull of fame, child exploitation and the stress of celebrity. It is a story of a former time. We need to move on. And we carry the story around with us, as some sort of morality tale, or nostalgia, or baggage about an industry. A gentle haunting. A nudge to remember.

But this feels incomplete.

I have very little to say about Lucille’s talent. It is very difficult to find any clips, let alone full movies of her in action. Very few silent films have survived, despite the movies promising immortality. She is undoubtedly a beautiful child. While some might think she looked mature for her years, I disagree. She looks like a young teenager, being asked to play dress up in her later films.

The key source for Ankerich’s research was the scrap book that Lucille kept whilst touring to promote the Edgar Pomery series. He says:

Although the schedule was gruelling, Lucille had the time of her life. She diligently documented the summer in her scrapbook. She carefully pasted the newspaper clippings to the pages and wrote creative captions for each photograph.

This scrapbook was in the hands of Lucille’s nephews, boys she never got to know, who nonetheless knew it was worth preserving.

Just the word scrapbook – suggests a life of specks and flecks, of splinters and shards. It is not a fully-drawn conversation about a life.

The year is 2025. A child star dies. There are no suspicious circumstances. Nobody else is being investigated in relation to the death. We read the news. We shake our heads. We place blame on the studios, the audiences, the tabloids, the parents, the actor themselves. It has been this way for so long. So, so long.

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