George Scarborough’s play The Heart of Wetona, produced by David Belasco with Lenore Ulrich in the title role, received its Broadway première at the Lyceum Theatre on 29 February 1916 (it had try-outs in Boston earlier, under the title Oklahoma). The play’s plot concerns a young woman who confesses to her father that she has been seduced, and he forces her to marry; the man he forces her to marry is not the seducer, but another man who loves her and marries her to protect her from her father. An article by a New York correspondent of the London newspaper The Stage suggests that it was Belasco who transformed Scarborough’s original into an “Indian drama” in which the heroine and her father are Native Americans. The play was well received, and ran up 95 performances in the remainder of the 1915-16 season. Belasco planned to take it on the road with the original cast in the following season, but some of the most indispensable cast members refused to go unless they received more pay. Tensions between actors and managers were rising in these years, culminating in the 1919 Equity strike. Belasco’s response to the actors’ demands was to cancel the tour and not to produce the play again.
Joe Schenck decided to shoot the exteriors for Talmadge’s film version in California, which would provide more suitable scenery for a Western subject. He, Talmadge, director Sidney Franklin, and actors  Thomas Meighan and Gladden James set out for Los Angeles at the end of September 1918. They based themselves at the Morosco Studio, where Constance Talmadge made many of her Select Pictures. The exteriors were shot in Idyllwild in the San Jacinto Mountains. It is not clear from contemporary accounts whether the studio simply served as a base for the location shoot, or whether interior scenes for the film were also shot there.
The location shoot triggered many stories in the trade press, partly because it was quite eventful, partly because the producer’s publicity departments were in particularly high gear – it is clear from the recurrence of similar phrases in the stories that they were pieced together from press releases. The shoot took place at the height of the 1918-19 Spanish influenza pandemic. The major film producers called for a halt to the production of films, since many theatres were closed for fear of infection, but films already in production were exempted from the ban, and The Heart of Wetona fell within that category. The disease directly affected the production, however, since (according to one account) Sidney Franklin, Thomas Meighan, and Gladden James all contracted it, though in a mild form. More seriously, Dark Cloud, the actor cast as Chief Quannah, not only contracted the disease, but died from it, on 17 October. A new actor had to be found – not, as the stories claim, “another redskin,” but the London-born Fred Huntley – and several of his scenes had to be reshot. There were also more normal accidents, with falling horses and stunt-related injuries. The stories claim that the extras were all “real” Comanche, and that Talmadge was invited to a Comanche feast and made an honorary “Comanche princess.” How seriously can we take these claims? To get a full Comanche cast, the producers would have had to bring them from Oklahoma; there is no mention in the stories of such a thing. We therefore assume that the extras were recruited among the wranglers and stuntmen who usually played Indians in California-made Westerns. Many of these were Native Americans, so probably there were Comanche among them, but could the production have found enough of them to constitute some kind of Comanche community at Idyllwild?
Talmadge’s performance as Wetona is a clear instance of what she called “characterization” – a part in which she plays a type quite different from her own public persona. Her propensity for this led in other cases to her playing different characters in the same film – different people in her dual-role movies, but sometimes also the same people in very different circumstances (Mary Turner before and after her three years in prison in Within the Law) or at different times in a story with a long time frame (Polly Pearl as a music-hall singer and finally a barkeep in The Lady). The plot of The Heart of Wetona does not offer occasions for these kinds of switches, but there is a brief moment which displays Norma’s talents for moving in and out of character types. When we first see Wetona, she is wearing riding breeches and a blouse, and her hair is up – she appears much as Talmadge herself might if going riding. In the next scene, she is wearing an elaborately beaded jacket and her hair is in two braids, transforming her into an “Indian maid.” The narrative justification for this switch is that Wetona has just returned from college in the East (a consideration that makes nonsense of the pidgin English displayed in her dialogue titles, as critics noted in 1919).

Ben Brewster, Lea Jacobs