By Mary Lackie

“I have seen mothers stand up and grit their teeth during a performance if their child missed a line, and after the show, walk up to the child who missed a line, and shake him, and say, “You knew those lines at home, why did you forget your part today?”

This scene has been repeated many times with many variations during the 40 years that Ella Allen has taught dramatics. “It’s all wrong,” said Mrs. Allen, “There are so many selfish mothers in the world—all they want is to live through their children, to satisfy their own ego.”

Mrs. Allen, a graduate of St. Anne’s Convent School in Fort Smith, Ark., attended the University of Arkansas before beginning her career in Hollywood teaching dramatics to children. Looking back on her years of teaching, Mrs. Allen said, “I don’t know much about grown-up people—but you can’t fool me about kids.” She believes parents make a great mistake when they take away “the magic of make-believe that belongs to childhood, and create old minds in little bodies.”

Mrs. Allen, who is visiting her son W.H. Allen, Jr., in Atlanta, has engaged her Children’s Personality Development classes in entertaining at the Fort Smith Military Hospital for 20 years. The children recently composed songs which she set to music, and taped the program which the Atlanta Red Cross has distributed to the soldiers in Vietnam.

Listening to the recordings, takes the soldiers back home to their own children for a few minutes, wrote a Red Cross worker in Vietnam. “It gives the children a sense of satisfaction to learn that their talents have helped to make people happy,” she said. Her classes have entertained on TV and radio programs, in hospitals and rest homes. The tours encourage the children to do their best with the talents they have and this is the purpose of the class, Mrs. Allen stressed.

“Aunt Ella” as she is known to her pupils, began studying dramatics when she was five. While she and her mother lived in Hollywood, a friend suggested Ella audition for a move starring Mary Pickford. The movie was “Dorothy Vernon of Hadden Hall”, and the experience gained from working in the production gave Ella Allen fresh insight into her own work.

“Mary Pickford,” Mrs. Allen recalls,” was not only a fine actress, she was a lovely person, always kind and considerate of all those who worked in her pictures.” Being devoted to her mother, Mary Pickford included her in her activities at the studio. Mrs. Pickford enjoyed coming to the studio and watching her daughter perform. She would sit with Mrs. Allen, and “when Mary had a tragic line, the director would move the dolly in with the pianist and the violinist playing sad, sobbing music to accompany Mary while she cried.” Inevitably, said Mrs. Allen, Mrs. Pickford would begin to cry. “It is only acting,” Mrs. Allen would assure Mary Pickford’s mother, who would reply, “Oh, my poor little girl, she has to go through such sad scenes.”

During the production of “The Boy of Flanders” starring Jackie Coogan, Mrs. Allen met “an elegant Bostonian gentleman”. He was Jackie Coogan’s grandfather, who made many trips to Hollywood to see his grandson. “Jackie was a good, quiet, talented boy who never left the characterization of his part,” Mrs. Allen said.

After her marriage to Dr. Allen, the family still spent their summers in Hollywood and were friends of the family of one-time child star, Jane Withers, natives of Atlanta. “Jane’s mother said they were never going back to Atlanta until her daughter was a star,” said Mrs. Allen. Mr. Withers confided that “he would give up everything he possessed to be back in Atlanta with his friends fishing in the Slough,” she added.

Another child actor Mrs. Allen remembers is Mickey Rooney. “I will never forget his mother yanking him across Hollywood Boulevard. The little fellow was dressed in trousers too short for him, and a jacket that didn’t fit. He was wearing a derby hat cocked on his head, going off to work in an “Our Gang Comedy.” “Mothers of child stars,” Mrs. Allen added, “were paid a good salary just to sit on the set during a production and chaperone their child.”

The children earned every penny they were paid for their performances, but believe me, money isn’t everything said Mrs. Allen. It was her observation that the child was too often deprived of a normal life; of “a sense of reality”, and, she asks, “What was there to prepare them for a happy adulthood?”

During her visit is Atlanta, Mrs. Allen looks forward to revisiting the Trappist Monastery at Conyers. “It always gives me a spiritual boost to get out there,” she said, “and this time I want to thank the brothers for their prayers during my recent illness. If it hadn’t been for their prayers, I might have had to give up my classes, and I love my children,” she concluded.