Chester Withey

Biography

On a winter afternoon in Santa Monica, 6 February 1937, Chet Withey—silent-era actor, scenario scribe and one of film’s earliest hands at the megaphone—stepped from behind a clanging streetcar straight into the path of a sedan. Newspapers filed gloomy bulletins, convinced he would not last the week. Nineteen months later he was gone; whether the crash delivered the final blow or simply hurried an inevitable decline remains unproved. He had been born to Chester H. and Mary E. Withey in Park City, Utah, then a silver-boom camp humming thirty-two miles southeast of Salt Lake. The elder Withey earned his living amid the roar and dust of a local mill, while the boy grew up to slip into the flickering new world of moving pictures. Within a handful of years after the medium’s birth he was behind the camera, guiding Norma and Constance Talmadge—sisters who would soon rule the box office—through some of their first screen adventures.