Publicity still, 8x10 inches, showing Winifred Westover — the ex-Mrs. William S. Hart — as the star of Herbert Brenon's 1930 adaptation of Fannie Hurst's dark 1923 novel, "Lummox."

There is longstanding conjecture that Hart helped his ex-wife land the role, as Hart still had a financial/contractual relationship with United Artists and hadn't yet sued UA for breach of contract over his 1925 film, "Tumbleweeds."

"Lummox" was released by UA on Jan. 18, 1930. Her biggest film role and only talkie, it was to be Westover's comeback after a eight-year absence from the screen. But it was not meant to be. Critics panned it, audiences rejected it, and Westover called it quits.

Sadly, we can't judge the movie for ourselves because it is a lost film. Usually one thinks of silents when considering films that no longer exist, inasmuch as 82 percent of all silent films are believed lost. But some talking pictures are gone, too, and after this one flopped in theaters, apparently nobody thought to keep a print for posterity. UPDATE: Reportely the British Film Institute has a nitrate print, and UCLA has sound discs.

Plenty of advertising materials and publicity stills (like this one) are still out there, but as for the film itself, about the best we can offer is this New York Times review by Mordaunt Hall, published March 24, 1930:

Herbert Brenon's latest contribution to the audible screen is an adaptation of Fannie Hurst's novel, "Lummox," which is now on view at the Rivoli. It is for the most part a lethargic pictorial story with several unconvincing episodes, but the stellar player, Winifred Westover, former wife of William S. Hart, the two-gun man of silent films, commands serious attention through the sincerity of her portrayal of Lummox, the Swedish drudge, whose life is a series of bitter disappointments with selfish, thoughtless, unkind and unfair employers.

Miss Westover has not appeared in pictures for nine years, but her performance in this current film would lead one to presume that she has not permitted the time to pass without studying acting. There is a vague suggestion of symbolism in this narrative, as it has been directed by Mr. Brenon, and for that reason the studied movements of the participants, including at times the acting of Miss Westover, may be overlooked. With the exception of Miss Westover's careful and commendable impersonation, however, the characters are more often than not like puppets at the beck and call of the director, an impression which is strengthened by the halting and recitative delivery of their lines.

Ben Lyon is never really human as Rollo Farley, the fashionably attired young poet who during inebriated moments is inspired by the family servant, Lummox, to pen a sonnet on "Feet deep-rooted into the soil," when he sees the drudge in her bare feet out in the yard. Another of his effusions is suggested by Lummox's laconicism. This one, which is supposed to be a master-piece, is something about "A tower of silence under the sea." It is this rhyming reprobate who is the father of Lummox's child, a fact which does not cause him any misgivings.

The real name of the drudge is Bertha Oberg. She is called a "lummox" by Chita, a wayward girl who is taken in charge by the Society of Prevention of Cruelty to Children after Bertha calls up that society. This act was prompted by Bertha's wish to save Chita; and often it happens this servant's good deeds bring misfortune to her door.

Bertha is prevailed upon to give her infant son to a wealthy couple, and in the course of her dreary existence, years after, she seeks employment in this family, only to be told that she is too late for the job. She is befriended by one of the male servants in this house, who tells her about her boy, how tall he is, how he plays, and subsequently that the foster parents have decided to take him to Europe to have him taught the piano, the desire to become a musician having been inspired through a concertina which Bertha anonymously sends to the child.

In one of the closing sequences, which brings the story up to date, Bertha observes a poster on Carnegie Hall, and for some reason or other she knows that the pianist who is scheduled to play is her son. She buys a standing-room ticket and leans against the wall, listening intently to the notes struck by the handsome young musician. It is perhaps here that Miss Westover does her outstanding acting, the expression on her care-worn countenance being one of mingled pain and admiration.

At the end there is a pleasing touch, for Bertha, who has learned from agencies that she is not wanted as a servant because of her advanced age, enters a baker's shop kept by a kindly old widower who has several children. The woman who has been crushed for more than Twenty years is glad to be asked by the father to come and live in his home and look after his motherless brood.

Miss Westover has a placid face and her fair hair is coiled on the top of her head for this rôle. As Bertha she is sluggish in her movements and her only sign of satisfaction is a half-hearted smile. As the years roll by, Bertha becomes even slower in her actions and not until the end does she really look cheerful. Her message of spiritual goodness fails, that is until she comes to the last few scenes.

Myrtle Stedman, who will be remembered years ago for her fine performance as "The Famous Mrs. Fair," does well with a minor rôle in this current piece of work. William Collier Jr. figures in one of the episodes as a man whose wife can't see eye to eye with his mother. Dorothy Janis plays the indomitable and, afterward, penitent Chita.

A Bleak Life.

LUMMOX, with Winifred Westover, Dorothy Janis, Lydia Titus, Ida Darling, Ben Lyon, Myrta Bonillas, Cosmo Kyrne Bellew, Anita Bellew, Robert Ullman, William Collier Jr., Myrtle Stedman, Edna Murphy, William Bakewell and others, based on Fannie Hurst's novel of the same name, directed by Herbert Brenon. At the Rivoli Theatre.

Brief Union

Silent film superstar William S. Hart appeared opposite the fetching Winifred Westover, 34 years his junior, in Lambert Hillyer's "John Petticoats" (1919). Two years later, on Dec. 7, 1921 — the day after his 57th birthday — Hart left bachelorhood behind and exchanged marital vows with the starlet at his home at 8341 De Longpre Ave. in present-day West Hollywood.

Exactly nine months after their wedding night, on Sept. 6, 1922, the union produced a son, William S. Hart Jr.

By that time the May-December romance was long over. The couple separated and spent the next several years in court.

Hart devotes no more than a single paragraph to Westover and their issue in his 1929 autobiography, "My Life East and West." Most sources indicate the separation came after just three months; in "My Life," Hart says it was five months, and he provides the date: May 10, 1922.

But May 10 was actually the date of a court appearance. The couple had already separated by May 10, when a judge in Los Angeles named C.W. Guerin (Gueren?) refused Hart's motion to stop Westover from fighting the terms of a separate maintenance agreement that barred her from ever again appearing in movies.

In September 1922, just days after Bill Jr.'s birth, with divorce proceedings in full swing, Westover's attorney, Milton Cohen, tried to convince the court that Hart once ordered his wife from their home. The Los Angeles Times quoted Hart's retort in its Sept. 17 edition: "If Cohen claims I was physically cruel to my wife, I'll lick him so you won't be able to recognize him. If I can't do that, I'll drill a hole in his stomach so big you can drive a twenty-mule-team borax wagon through it."

In "My Life," Hart says Westover sued him for divorce on grounds of desertion. Why the unnecessary and damning concession? Was he implying she couldn't have beat him on a cruelty charge? Or that she couldn't have accused him of infidelity? We don't know. But from his lasting friendships (see the Wyatt Earp letters, for instance) and the intense devotion he felt from his fans (to whom he left everything in the end), we know loyalty was a virtue he cherished — and rewarded. It stands to reason that disloyalty would earn you a swift kick out the door.

On Feb. 11, 1927, nearly five years after the couple separated, the divorce became final in Reno, Nev.

Around the same time, construction started on a 22-room hilltop mansion in Newhall that Hart began planning in 1926 as a retirement home for himself and his younger, wheelchair-bound sister, Mary Ellen. It was completed in late 1927.

Life in a Fishbowl

With the passage of time, we tend to forget that William S. Hart was a major Hollywood celebrity, and that then as now, Americans relied on daily newspapers and movie fanzines to slake their insatiable appetite for information about their favorite stars. The only difference is that today, the latest gossip circulates in the blink of any eye through the Internet and TV, and fresh fanzines hit the supermarket check-out counters weekly instead of monthly.

Hart was no stranger to the courtroom — or to the cameras outside it, or to those that occasionally managed to follow him into it.

Hart, like all others, paid the price of celebrity. He had a personal life but not a private one. It's axiomatic: If you want the publicity that compels people to watch what you want them to watch or read what you want them to read (or vote how you want them to vote), you forfeit the right to stop those same cameras from seeing what you don't necessarily want them to see. This is a crucial point. If we're to understand the profound fealty Hart felt for, and from, his fans, we must view it through the lens of a man whose fans remained true to him even as the press drew back the curtain.

The shutters clicked as Hart's marriage unraveled, and they clicked again in 1936 when he took United Artists to court in New York City for breach of contract. He'd made his last film, "Tumbleweeds," eleven years earlier, and he accused the studio of failing to make good on an agreement to promote it. His insistence on "keeping it real," in today's vernacular, had been his undoing; up against newer, flashier Western stars such as Tom Mix and Hoot Gibson, Hart was told as early as 1921 to change his approach or hand over production to someone else. He refused, and Paramount Studios bid him adieu. By 1925, distributors had stopped giving his films as wide a release as the blockbusters of the day; ultimately he sued United Artists over it, seeking to recover the $500,000 in anticipated earnings he said he'd lost. Three years after their court date, in 1939, Astor Pictures Corp. re-released the film and tacked a new, 8-minute monologue onto it as an introduction. Filmed at Hart's Newhall estate, the "farewell" monologue was his only speaking role in a film and his last appearance on the big screen.

The shutters clicked again on Aug. 20, 1939, when Hart finally quashed a bogus paternity suit that had haunted him for nearly 20 years. It temporarily interrupted his film career in the early 1920s and can't have helped his failing marriage.

The shutters clicked many more times: when Hart's ex-wife sought to renegotiate her alimony; when Hart swore out a criminal complaint against a Newhall man who took potshots at a beloved Great Dane in 1940; and when his sister Mary Ellen was buried in 1943.

At the end of William S. Hart's 81½-year life, where did things stand? His acting career had ended 21 years earlier and left him feeling betrayed by studio executives. The sister he cared for and lived with was gone, as were his oldest friends. The only intimate liaisons we know about were fleeting and fickle and provided years of misery. His pinto pony Fritz and many treasured pets rested beneath headstones at the base of a hill below a secluded mansion overlooking a town he rarely visited.

The people in his life who hadn't disappointed him were his fans. (Well, except for the psycho stalker who accused him of fathering her child.) They wrote to him nearly every day, and he answered every letter and signed every autograph his fans requested every time he penned a new novel that took him on a mental jouney back to a country that existed the way he chose to remember it.

The shutters didn't stop clicking when Hart died. Not by a longshot.

Legacy Contested

Born in Oakland on Nov. 9, 1898, and schooled by the Dominican Sisters of San Rafael, the blonde, blue-eyed, 5'3" Winifred Westover made her acting debut in D.W. Griffith's landmark film, "Intolerance" (1916). She earned screen credits until 1922, when she became a single mom; she attempted a comeback in 1930, reportedly with her ex-husband's help. But but the film, Herbert Brenon's adaptation of Fannie Hurst's popular novel, "Lummox," was a box-office flop, and she retired. (Unfortunately we can't judge it for ourselves, as it is a lost film.)

Westover and Bill Jr. made their peace with Hart as he lay dying at California Luthern Hospital in Los Angeles, present at his bedside when he breathed his last on June 23, 1946.

Soon, mother and son were back in court, the pair having been all but omitted from Hart's will. The actor left his Newhall retirement estate to the people of Los Angeles County (there was no city of Santa Clarita yet); two years earlier he had donated his home on De Longpre to the city of Los Angeles (there was no city of West Hollywood yet). He also gifted $50,000 in cash to each jurisdition so the properties could be properly maintained for the enduring enjoyment of his loyal fans.

They weren't his only acts of public generosity. In 1940 he donated land and money for the Newhall American Legion to build the area'a first real movie theater where his films, and others', could be properly displayed. He donated more land and money for the construction of the Santa Clarita Valley's first high school — which the school board decided to name for him, as he learned shortly before his death.

He explained his decision to donate his Los Angeles property in 1944: "I am only trying to do an act of justice. I am only trying to give back to the American public some part of what the American public has already given to me."

Those who might have been closest to him, Westover and Bill Jr., received no similar justice, and their nearly decade-long attempt to right what they perceived as a wrong came to naught.

Westover died March 19, 1978, in Los Angeles.

William S. Hart Jr. became a teacher and real estate appraiser in Santa Monica. He retired in 1989, the same year the city of Los Angeles leased the De Longpre property to West Hollywood and transfered the balance of the endowment, now valued at $284,000, to the new city.

Bill Jr. objected to the transfer and called for an accounting. Considering how little L.A. had spent to improve the property over the past four decades, by the son's calculations there should have been $800,000 in the bank. He wondered aloud where the money went, but his protestations fell on deaf ears. He died May 13, 2004, in Seattle.

— Leon Worden, 2012