Her film career lasted just five short years, but the life-and-death acting experience Virginia Moon had gained as a Civil War spy helped her win a unique niche in Hollywood history.
In 1919, as the Jazz Age with its effervescent youth culture bubbled to life, the elderly Moon sat across from producer Jesse Lasky at the Famous Players-Lasky Studios at Selma Avenue and Vine Street.
Lasky asked her just one question: "What makes you think you can act?"
"I'm 75 years old," Moon replied. "I have acted all the parts."
And the woman who had once fooled Yankee soldiers was right. Her acting had been a deadly serious matter almost six decades earlier, when Virginia, nicknamed "Ginnie," and her sister Charlotte, known as "Lottie," were bold and effective Confederate spies.
Their father had been one of the rare Virginia planters who moved north, to Oxford, Ohio, where he freed his slaves.
Lottie, the elder sister, was no raving beauty like Ginnie, but she was a prankster, a flirt, an expert horsewoman and a crack shot with a captivating personality and many suitors.
One of them was the young Ambrose E. Burnside, the future Union general who would give his name to the thick swatches of hair that extended from his temples nearly to his nostrils. Over time, the Burnside style evolved and came to be known as sideburns.
But as Lottie and her hirsute beau stood at the altar to exchange "I do's," Lottie changed her mind, said, "No, sirree, Bob!" and ran out of the church, jilting the future military leader.
The following year, 1849, she finally met and made her match, when she promised to marry James Clark, a Southern loyalist attorney and soon-to-be-judge who called her "the damnedest, smartest woman in the world."
Lest he too be stood up, Clark, on their wedding day, is said to have pressed the hard, cold muzzle of his pistol into his true love's ribs and whispered, "There will be a wedding here today or a funeral tomorrow."
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Even though her children grew up in the North, where Lottie settled with her new husband, little changed the allegiances of a family whose roots in the South dated to pre-Revolutionary days. In fact, Virginia and her parents moved back to Memphis, Tenn., shortly before the onset of hostilities between the Union and Confederacy.
