Q – Have any notable people lived in Montavilla?
A – Yes. Movie Star Jewel Carmen.
In the era of silent films, a beautiful face and expressive gestures could turn you into a matinee idol: enter Jewel Carmen. A 1916 edition of Moving Picture World magazine called her “a queen of blonds” and “the girl who photographs like a million dollars.” A year later, The Oregon Journal pronounced her “the belle of Montavilla.”
Jewel Carmen was one of three professional names adopted by Florence Lavina Quick (1897-1984). She was born on July 13, 1897, in the rural town of Blaine in Tillamook County, Oregon, the seventh child of Amos William Quick (1858-1932) and Minerva Gray Quick (1862-1934). (Sometimes, her birthplace is given incorrectly as Danville, Kentucky, or Portland, Oregon.) By 1901, her parents and siblings lived in Portland, a few blocks from Montavilla’s current western boundary. These boundaries were established in 1974 when the City of Portland created neighborhood associations. In earlier days, Montavilla boundaries were imprecise. So, we can accept the Journal’s designation and claim Jewel Carmen as a Montavilla notable.
In 1911, Vina completed her eighth-grade education at Mount Tabor School. The same year, her parents separated or divorced. By February 1912, her mother and four of her siblings—Alice, Fred, Vina, and Alberta—had moved to Los Angeles.
Why Los Angeles? They apparently had no relatives there. Was it the movie industry that drew them? In the 1910s, Los Angeles was the new center of the movie industry. Silent movies were exploding in popularity, drawing actor “wannabes” to southern California. Did Vina and her older sisters dream of getting into pictures? There are reasons to think that might be true.
There is evidence of family interest in the performing arts. Vina’s two older sisters, Alice and Edna, had attended Portland’s Western Academy of Dramatic Art, Elocution and Music. They performed in the Academy’s live productions. Edna may have had connections with the acting community since she married a British actor, William Henry Strong (born c.1870) in November 1911—which, of course, prevented her from going to L. A. in 1912. A few years later, Alice and Edna got acting jobs, but their younger sister, Vina—the one with no performance experience—quickly rose to stardom on the silver screen.
This era was a time when movies were growing in popularity. Movie theaters were proliferating. They had grown from three in 1907 to 16 by 1908 in Portland alone. Getting to a downtown theater would have been easy for the Quicks. They lived close to the Glisan Street trolley, which could take them downtown, where they could go to a five-cent Nickelodeon or one of the bigger ten-cent theaters. The Quicks also had the option of two new movie theaters in Montavilla: the Scenic Theatre at Stark and SE 79th and the Idle Hour at SE 81st and Stark. (For more on Montavilla’s earliest movie theaters, see Village Portland:Montavilla Memories )
Within months of the Quicks’ arrival in Los Angeles, Vina was making her first movies. While many women stormed movie offices daily looking for work as extras, Vina later related that she was discovered by movie producer Gaston Melies (1852-1915), the brother of the famous French filmmaker George Melies (1861-1938). According to Vina, she was sitting one day in a Los Angeles soda fountain when Gaston Melies approached her and handed her his card. He asked if she would like to be in motion pictures. Despite being under California’s legal adult employment age of 16, she said yes. She turned 15 in July 1912. But her family needed the money, so she accepted his offer of $25 a week.
For the Melies company, she adopted the professional name Florence La Vinci. She made at least two short films for Melies. In both, she played adult romantic roles. Her first Melies film, The Will of Destiny, was released on August 1, 1912. In this film, she plays Alice, who vies with her sister Mary for John’s love. Alice wins but then elopes with a millionaire. With this film, Vina (as Florence La Vinci) drew the attention of the movie press: a mention in The Moving Picture World of August 17, 1912, and a photograph in the August 1912 edition of The Motion Picture Story Magazine.
Her work for Melies was short-lived. In July 1912, the Melies film company left California to make movies in the South Pacific. By February 1913, she worked for the new Keystone studio founded by Mack Sennett (1880-1960). Now, Vina has adopted a new professional name: Evelyn Quick. Sennett’s Keystone Studios specialized in comedies, and Evelyn Quick performed in at least eight of them.
In 1913, actress Evelyn Quick gained a new kind of notoriety when she was called to testify in a “white slavery” lawsuit in Los Angeles. Several wealthy men were accused of contributing to the delinquency of minors, including Quick. She testified under her professional name against William LaCasse (1884-1923) —a wealthy automobile salesman—who she accused of contributing to her delinquency. Newspapers across the country reported on the trial and Quick’s shocking testimony. She was, indeed, underage—15 at the time of the alleged abuse—but the defense attorney falsely claimed she was 23. The jury was deadlocked: two of the twelve voted against conviction. A new trial was set, but charges were later dropped when two witnesses, including Quick, failed to appear.
Despite the negative publicity of the investigation and the trial, Evelyn Quick continued to play leading roles in several short comedies released by Keystone and then the Nestor Film Company through November 1913. Then, her career seemed to stall. I found no record of her whereabouts or new movies until 1916. Then, her career restarted with Triangle Films. She created a new professional name: Jewel Carmen, the one she used until the end of her career and by which she is best known.
At Triangle, she began to play starring roles with the popular Douglas Fairbanks (1883-1939), including the five-reeler Flirting with Fate (1916) and The Half-Breed, a short comedy based on a Bret Harte story. (As of this writing, The Half-Breed is available at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P_vdJyHZrR4 .)
In 1917, The Oregonian described Jewel Carmen as “one of the rapidly rising stars of the film firmament.” By this time, she was playing leading roles with super-star William Farnum (1876-1953)—including Manhattan Madness—for Triangle as well as Les Miserables and A Tale of Two Cities for Fox Vaudeville. In 1918, she starred in at least six movies for Fox.
In mid-1918–while still under contract with Fox—Jewel signed on with Keeney Pictures, which offered her a much higher salary—$450 a week. When Frank A. Keeney learned about the Fox contracts, he voided his contract with Jewel. In late 1918, she sued Fox in the U. S. District Court of New York for interfering with her ability to find employment. She claimed the Fox contract was not legally binding since she was a minor, i.e., under the adult age of 21 in New York law. The lower court ruled in her favor, but Fox appealed. The litigation dragged on for years and ended in November 1926 with a victory for Carmen. The New York Court of Appeals awarded her $60,682 in lost salary plus interest to be paid by Fox Films.
Jewel may have won in the end, but the litigation hurt her career. She did not act in another movie until 1921. In late 1918, she married director and producer Roland West (1885-1952). She talked about giving up acting for good, but West persuaded her to return to the screen. She made three more movies, all for her husband’s company: The Silver Lining (1921), Nobody (1921), and The Bat (1926); all are suspenseful crime movies and all silent.
Jewel never performed in a talkie, although she had a speaking role in a radio play based on West’s 1929 talking picture, Alibi. Sometime between 1930 and 1934, Jewel and Roland separated. For the remainder of the 1930s, they litigated over a settlement agreement. Finally, in December 1939, she was granted alimony of $170 a month and was awarded a $50,000 property settlement a year later.
The 1940 U.S. Census shows she lived in the Holly-Vista Apartments in Los Angeles. At some point, she moved to El Cajon in San Diego County, where she died in March 1984. She was cremated, and her ashes were scattered.
Jewel Carmon died in obscurity. I found no obituary honoring the Montavilla belle’s contribution to the world of silent film. However, she lives on in the writings about her and in her surviving films. Some of her films are currently available on YouTube and the Internet Archive.
Title image: William Farnum and Jewel Carmen in A Tale of Two Cities, 1917. Source: Wikimedia
This is part of Montavilla History Questions Answered, a series of history related articles. If you have questions about Montavilla’s past that you’d like answered, local historian Patricia Sanders will investigate your question. Please email your questions to history@montavilla.net and we may feature it alongside Patricia Sanders’ research in a future post on this page.