CHANEY'S BIRTHPLACE CELEBRATES 150 YEARS

As the City of Colorado Springs celebrates its 150th birthday, they are looking back at some of the local legends who lived there. One of them is Lon Chaney. This article tells of his youth, his fondness for his hometown, and his enduring legacy that is represented in the city's Pioneers Museum, as well as having a local theater named after him.

Chaney at the Garden of the Gods in Colorado Springs.
Photo from the collection of Michael F. Blake.

Colorado Springs at 150 years: The local legend of Lon Chaney

By Stephanie Earls | Jul 6, 2021 | gazette.com

In 1893, a 10-year-old Colorado Springs boy named Leonidas “Lon” Chaney dropped out of fourth grade at Lincoln Elementary to care for his bedridden mother and younger siblings at home.

Like Lon’s father, Frank, his mom, Emma Chaney, was deaf. To pass the time while she convalesced with inflammatory rheumatism (an affliction from which she never would fully recover), the boy would become “the man of a thousand faces" spent three years entertaining her in her bedroom, performing pantomimes that recounted the news of the day and discovering the power of character and movement to tell a story that couldn’t be heard.

“Using every dramatic technique he could invent, Lon mimicked his friends and neighbors at play and work, and even performed an occasional skit,” wrote biographer Michael F. Blake in “Lon Chaney: The Man Behind the Thousand Faces.”

“Through this daily ritual, Chaney’s talent of pantomime, with his graceful movements and his expressive hand gestures, began to grow and take shape.”

Lon had been born into a relatively prominent family. His paternal great-grandfather was congressman John Chaney, a three-term U.S. representative in Ohio, and his maternal grandfather, Jonathan Ralston Kennedy, founded the "Colorado School for the Education of Mutes,” now the Colorado School for the Deaf and the Blind, in 1874.

Emma had attended the school, which also served as a social hub for the local deaf and blind community, and that’s where she had met Frank, a Colorado Springs barber.

Despite the family pedigrees, the couple and their children constantly struggled financially, and relocated a number of times within the city as their situation changed over the years.

“They were constantly on the move. They lived in the near-west side, off Walnut, off Spruce, in the Shooks Run neighborhood,” said Leah Davis Witherow, curator of history at the Colorado Springs Pioneers Museum. “One of the things about how we frame the past, we think people were so stable. They (the Chaneys) were an example of how working class people struggled. Their family faced a lot of adversity.”

It wasn’t dreams of a nascent Tinseltown but a sense of duty that first set Lon on the career path to stardom.

The family needed money, so as soon as he could, young Lon began to contribute, working odd jobs that included leading tours of Pikes Peak, at age 14, hanging wallpaper and, in 1900, helping rebuild the Antlers Hotel after it was destroyed by fire.

“He would do anything he could to support the family,” Witherow said.

Lon’s older brother was a stage manager at the Colorado Springs Opera House, and got him work as a prop boy at the North Tejon Street venue. The brothers formed a theater company, and wrote a play “The Little Tycoon.” Lon joined the cast and lit out on the vaudeville circuit that would take him far from home and eventually, in 1910, to Hollywood at the launch of the silent film era.

By then, Chaney was married and had a son, Creighton Tull Chaney, aka Lon Chaney Jr., who would go on to become a legendary Hollywood character actor in his own right.

After a successful career in theater, the elder Lon spent his initial years in film as an overworked and underpaid contract player for Universal Studios before leaving and landing a role that would earn his talents more of the attention they deserved, in William S. Hart’s (now lost) silent Western “Riddle Gawne.”

From there, Chaney’s star began to rise fast — and not just because of pantomimes that enraptured audiences. In the early days of film, actors did their own makeup. Thanks in part to his vaudeville days, Chaney had perfected the art of special effects makeup — an art that worked even better on the big screen.

Chaney’s pioneering portrayals of classic villains, including the "Hunchback of Notre Dame" and the "Phantom of the Opera," will stand forever as Hollywood benchmark and cinema legend.

In his brief life, and even briefer Hollywood career, Chaney performed in more than 150 movies and became one of the most famous actors of his era. He’d been recovering from pneumonia when he accidentally inhaled a bit of fake snow on a movie set, an incident that caused an infection that led to his death, Aug. 26, 1930, at age 47. He was interred in an unmarked crypt next to his father at Forest Lawn Memorial Park in Glendale, Calif.

Lon Chaney never returned to live in Colorado Springs after he became a star, but he never lost sight of his southern Front Range beginnings, the place where he’d found his voice, and where his mother, Emma Alice Kennedy Chaney, had been laid to rest in 1914 in the city’s Evergreen Cemetery.

“One of the things that made him so charming was that he never forgot Colorado Springs,” Witherow said. “In 1925, he had a special screening of ‘Phantom of the Opera’ at the school (for the deaf and blind).”

The Springs, in turn, didn’t forget about its most famous son.

“He was always visiting in 1922 and it's in the newspaper. When he was in a new film … when he came back into town, he got publicity,” Witherow said. “His films played in local theaters. Think about Colorado Springs in that era, and it’s not that big of a town, and going to the movies was such an important part of people’s lives. Everyone must have enjoyed and taken great pride in the fact that Lon Chaney was from here.”

For a modern-day comparison, she said: “It would be like having a local guy starring in a Marvel movie.”

The Chaney family legacy lives on (perhaps too) quietly in the Springs, through the School for the Deaf and the Blind, and the Lon Chaney Theater, a smaller venue inside the City Auditorium, as well as an exhibit at the Pioneers Museum.

“People have seen the marquis, the Lon Chaney Theater … but I don't think that today people realize that this was one of the world's most famous men in the early 20th century … and that his experiences here were fundamental to his acting career,” Witherow said. “I think that this (the city’s 150th anniversary) is a great time to think about people like Lon Chaney who made a big impact on Colorado Springs … and learn how we can connect them back to our own communities’ stories today.”