Betty Gray

Biography

Lilly Pederson entered the world as the baby of a Scandinavian-flavored household—Danish father, Swedish mother, five older siblings already hogging the oxygen. After sharpening pencils at New York’s School of Applied Art, she traded easels for easel-sitting, slipping into Harrison Fisher’s studio to become the face that launched a thousand “Western Girl” lithographs. Eight months of two-a-day vaudeville gigs later, Pathé flicked a contract across her dressing-room table in 1912; the ink was barely dry when she tumbled onto screens as the flustered heroine of Gee! My Pants. Five-foot-nothing, nut-brown hair flying, she turned into the girl every producer speed-dialed. Between 1913 and 1915 she headlined The Country Boy, pawned off His Last Dollar, and survived The Beachcombers. Wedding bells clanged in 1914—Elliot Hunt Pendleton Jr., heir to a legal fortune, swapped vows between takes. A hop to Vitagraph in 1915 delivered A Madcap Adventure and the timidly titled Mr. Tootles, projects she sometimes plotted herself under the anonymous banner of “scenario writer.” Spouse and star then detoured to Cincinnati where carburetors replaced klieg lights, but Manhattan’s sirens lured them back by 1918. Betty marched once more before the camera for the patriotic one-reeler Why America Will Win—her farewell wave to audiences. Spring of 1919 coughed up the Spanish flu; on April 20 it claimed her at twenty-six. Cedar Lawn Cemetery in Passaic, New Jersey, became the final set, the curtain lowered on a life that had barely reached its second act.