Opal A Life of Enchantment, Mystery, and Madness

chapter One In February 1918, Opal Whiteley, aged twenty, and a regional celebrity known as the Little Nature Study Girl and the Sunshine Fairy, got on a Southern Pacific train in Cottage Grove, Oregon, a small town in a lush valley surrounded by green hills. Opal was headed south. Officially, she was planning to study the flora and fauna of California for the summer. Privately, she had also decided to break into the movies.She left behind a to-do list reminding herself to get in touch with Cecil B. DeMille and took with her a portfolio of publicity photos taken at the Tolman Studios in Eugene, Oregon, for which she had served as her own art director. She was pretty, striking, and small'under five feet'with high cheekbones, a wide smile, and strong-looking, slightly prominent teeth. Her thick black hair hung down past her waist, and her eyes were described as black. Opal had been photographed in several costumes and poses'as a barefoot, violin- playing Gypsy with autumn leaves strewn around the studio floor; as a waif in a little Dutch girl hat; in profile, barefoot again, as a dancer in a gauzy Isadora Duncan'style tunic with flowers in her hair; and as a crazed-looking ballerina in toe shoes. The most startling image preserved from this series is Opal with dreamy eyes, her mouth in a Mona Lisa smile, her thick hair brushed back from her oval face and cascading down over a white dress and out of the frame. Her hands are extended and half open. Three huge butterflies appear to have landed there, and there is another on her shoulder and one more on her hair. But Opal isn't looking at the butterflies or at anything at all. Her eyes are unfocused. She appears to be in a trance or in communion with something unattainable by the viewer. (This may be because the butterflies were added to the photograph later.) A lot of young Americans Opal's age were on the move in 1918. Woodrow Wilson had declared war on Germany the previous April. Doughboys and Red Cross nurses were leaving cities, farms, and small towns like Cottage Grove to take part in the bloody conflict overseas that was to determine the trajectory for the rest of the eventful twentieth century. The trenches of France, however, never loomed large in Opal's consciousness. Her journey would be one in search of fame and glamour via a child's shimmering fairyland and half-remembered princes and princesses. No one knows for sure to what extent the magical place she found for herself was real and how much of it sprang from her own mysterious inner world. Opal never came back to Oregon after her train left town in 1918. She never saw any other Whiteleys again. Nor did she become a movie star. But she did become, very briefly, very famous. Today those who know about Opal Whiteley are few in number, but many of them are intensely attached to her work and her memory. They do not necessarily agree among themselves about the details of her life or indeed about who she really was. Here are some biographical ?facts? about Opal Whiteley that have become accepted into the official canon. Some of them are true. She was born sometime in 1897 and grew up in and around Cottage Grove, a logging town in Oregon, where she had arrived in 1902, when she was about four years old. She was raised by Ed and Lizzie Whiteley. The other four Whiteley children?Pearl, Faye, Cloe, and baby Elwin'were all younger. As a child of nine or ten Opal began collecting nature specimens, chiefly butterflies and minerals, and taught younger children about them. At seventeen she was named state superintendent of an ecumenical Christian youth group and traveled throughout Oregon successfully recruiting many new members. She also gained regional recognition as a lecturer on the natural world. She combined nature studies with the uplifting religious message that children could be brought to God through the beauty of His handiwork. SheBeck, K. K. is the author of 'Opal A Life of Enchantment, Mystery, and Madness' with ISBN 9780670031450 and ISBN 0670031453.