Yankee’s connection to the movies deserves a separate note. Her first film appearance came around 1923, when Captain Charles Miller chartered her to Goldwyn Studios for the silent film Wild Oranges, directed by King Vidor and starring Frank Mayo, Virginia Valli, and Ford Sterling. The film, adapted from a Joseph Hergesheimer novel, was released in January 1924. See Chapter IV for more on the Miller era.

The studio maintained that the movie was filmed in Florida, but the Yankee crew, examining the film frame by frame years later, identified the vessel’s distinctive cockpit, rigging, and hull lines throughout the footage. The irrefutable proof came in a storm scene near the end of the picture: for roughly a second and a half, a frame appeared that was unmistakably Yankee. See Appendices for fact-check notes on Wild Oranges.

Decades later, she had an unwitting cameo in the 1962 film Days of Wine and Roses, directed by Blake Edwards and starring Jack Lemmon and Lee Remick. The film was shot on location in San Francisco, with scenes at the St. Francis Yacht Club, the Marina, and the yacht harbor. In one early scene, Yankee appears on screen with Lee Remick — though, as John McNeill wryly observed, “all eyes are on her, not the boat.”