Not all of Mack Sennett’s Bathing Beauties remained at the “knee-nudity” level of stardom. Mabel Normand continued her career at Sennett’s Keystone Studios, playing the leading lady in a variety of films. Normand’s role at the studio also included work behind the camera, but as this excerpt from her biography at the Columbia University Library’s Women Film Pioneers Project explains, it can be difficult to judge the scope of her involvement.

Normand is listed as director in company records in the Keystone Collection housed in the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, yet Moving Picture World reported in 1914 that “Mabel Normand and Mack Sennett collaborated in the direction of this picture” (680). Among more recent sources, Betty Harper Fussell and Kalton C. Lahue both credit the film to Normand alone, while three other sources list it as a collaboration (Fussell 257; Lahue 145). It was, moreover, in relation to the shooting of this film that Chaplin recalls complaining to Sennett about Normand’s “competence,” after which he claims he was allowed to direct all his films at Keystone (149). Sennett remembered events differently, however, suggesting that Chaplin’s apprenticeship lasted for “a dozen one- and two-reel pictures,” during which time he “learned [to direct] from Mabel Normand” (163–64). Finally, Normand herself later claimed in Picture Play that “For a long time, I directed all the pictures I played in, the best known of which are the Chaplin series” (46). Overall, she made eleven films at Keystone with Chaplin, and thirty-one in 1914 alone; if she did, indeed, direct all of the films in which she starred, this suggests a total directorial output far greater than that with which she is typically credited. Our research indicates that she acted as director or codirector for a total of twenty-six films made between 1912 and 1915; of these, however, our sources are in agreement on only seven titles.