Box Turtle Bulletin
News and commentary about the anti-gay lobby“Now you must raise your children up in a world where that union of man and box turtle is on the same legal footing as man and wife…”
News and commentary about the anti-gay lobbyJuly 25th, 2016
(d. 1947) While little-known today, Kerrigan had been a very popular silent film star for the early film studios Essanay, Biograph, and later Universal. He typically played a leading role as a modern, well-dressed man-about town, and his films were enormously successful. Photoplay magazine named him the most popular male star among its readers in 1914, the same year he became the first movie star to publish his autobiography. In 1916, the magazine Motion Picture Classic declared him the most popular star in the world.
He killed his career in 1917 over a glib remark about his refusal to enlist in World War I. He didn’t want to enlist because he didn’t want to leave his mother alone. He also didn’t want to leave behind his partner, actor and silent film director James Vincent, who lived at home with Kerrigan’s mother. When reporters pestered him over why he didn’t enlist, neither of the true answers were acceptable. Unfortunately, the answer he gave a Denver reporter was just about as disastrous as either of the real reasons he had:
… I think that first they should take the great mass of men who aren’t good for anything else, or are only good for the lower grades of work. Actors, musicians, great writers, artists of every kind — isn’t it a pity when people are sacrificed who are capable of such things — of adding to the beauty of the world.
Maybe he was tired — it was at the end of a four-month long publicity tour — or maybe he was just tired of dodging the question. At any rate, his answer was a public relations disaster, and his career was dead.
At least that’s how it looked for the next six years. In 1923, director James Cruze made a bold and surprising move by casting Kerrigan for the lead role in the Paramount western epic The Covered Wagon. The silent feature’s epic scale and outlandish budget for its day — it was filmed on location over several months at a cost of $783,000 ($11 million today) — set a new benchmark for filmmaking made it the most popular release that year. That success opened the doors to five less successful roles for Kerrigan the next year, ending in the swashbuckling 1924 film Captain Blood. By then, it was obvious that his reputation still hadn’t recovered. But with fresh money in the bank, coupled with his cautious investments and eschewing the lavish Hollywood lifestyle, his financial future was secure. He retired from filmmaking and lived quietly with Vincent until Kerrigan died in 1947 at the age of 67.
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