Chapter SeventeenROMANTIC TRUE STORIES OF SOME SCREEN FAVORITES
Anotherfilm triumph won only after a long siege of the citadel is that of Von Stroheim. Born of an old and distinguished Viennese family, the Baron von Stroheim was in another day one of those pictorial young officers who swaggered about the Ring Strasse, partook of café mélanges and fancifully whittled cakes at the smart confectioners’ on the Graben, sunned themselves where the bands play “The Beautiful Blue Danube” and other Strauss waltzes—in brief, lent themselves to that atmosphere, at once sprightly and sentimental, which made the fascination of prewar Vienna. Perhaps he lent himself to it somewhat too thoroughly, for he always smiles when you ask him how he first happened to come to this country. And the smile seems to hint at some youthful escapade.
When he arrived in this country he had no more equipment for making his own livelihood than is suggested by this background of frivolity, of leisure, and of rigid caste etiquette. Yet he was pennilessnow. Soda-fountain attendant and groom in a stable—these two jobs are only a few of the milestones passed in the wanderings of Von Stroheim from his hereditary environment. He was, in fact, almost starving when Griffith’s war-pictures presented to him an opportunity. His Austrian uniform, his scars, his typical Teutonic appearance—all these were utilised in a screen presentation of the hated German officer.
After the vogue of the war-picture had passed, however, Von Stroheim found himself in a plight almost as bad as that from which these pictures had delivered him. No use to him now was the uniform, the scars, the typical Teutonic appearance! Quite the reverse. For days he would sit in those depressing anterooms which guard the presence of the great. I used to see him in the Goldwyn Studios and, remembering with admiration his work in the war-pictures, I wished only that the change in popular taste had not prohibited my employment of him in a characteristic rôle.
“I knew all the time that I had something in me which might be valuable to the screen,” so he himself told a friend of mine in reference to this period, “but I couldn’t get myself over. I lacked the American push. I took no for an answer far too easily, and so I might still be sitting around in dingy anterooms had not something happened to me. Ibecame deeply infatuated with a girl. But she said to me, ‘No—not until I see if you can ever make good.’ Then for the first time in my life I made up my mind to succeed.”
The rest of his story is known by those who follow the history of screen celebrities. He had long been fired by an idea for the screen. Maddened by his inability to get an audience for this idea, the erstwhile Viennese aristocrat resolved upon forceful measures. He literally broke into Laemmle’s room in a hotel, and with all the fire of desperation set forth his great ideas. The result was “Foolish Wives.” This picture, notable—even notorious—among screen folk for the tremendous costliness of its production, is also set apart by the fact that Von Stroheim’s activities in it were three-fold. He wrote the scenario, he directed it, and he took the leading part. His subsequent work shows the same correlation.
The first time I ever saw this picturesque figure away from the studio was at a café where he was the object of concentrated attention on the part of the other diners. Men glared at him; women whispered to each other, whispered as if an ogre had suddenly walked in upon the feast. “There’s Von Stroheim—look at him; oh, isn’t he too horrid!” I understood then why I had so often heard him called “the most hated man on the screen.”
He must have been conscious of the antagonism of these strangers surrounding him, but if he was he gave no sign. Unconsciously as if the many hostile eyes had been directed toward some other person, he went on talking to the woman who was with him. Was he really insensitive or did he command his face to be a mask?
Afterward I heard that Von Stroheim is quite aware of the personal odium with which his professional characterisations of brutal German officer and villainous foreign aristocrat have surrounded him. Some say, indeed, that he cherishes this reputation, that not for worlds would he lift his finger to soften the hated impression. Yet as against this I have heard what Von Stroheim has said to his intimate friends.
“When Elliott Dexter goes into a café or some other public place,” he once remarked, “people exclaimed delightedly. ‘There he is—oh, isn’t he charming!’ But when I come in it’s ‘Ugh, there’s Von Stroheim’; and if it’s a man who notices me he’s very likely to start off my name with a curse. I must say it hurts a little—in fact, it often makes me feel very disappointed in the American people—to think that they can be so childlike as to confuse me, Von Stroheim, the man, with Von Stroheim, the actor, to imagine that because I play the parts I do I must be that kind of a man.”
Of course this confusion itself is a testimony to the excellence of his work, to that dramatic insight which had made numerous fellow professionals regard him as the most finished actor on the screen—with the exception of Chaplin, to whom, of course, because of the different character of their plays, he can scarcely be compared. As to his personal manner this has all the traditional grace of the cultured Continental. But there is more to Von Stroheim than the clicking of heels, the bows, the gestures, the precise phrasing with its slightly foreign accent, the air of attention which isolates the person to whom he is talking from all the world. There are many products of this mould, and, though over the American mind they usually exert the fascination of strangeness, such mannerisms do not explain the arresting quality of his personality. This lies in an expression which, both sad and gay, thoughtful and vivacious, reproduces the blend achieving the charm of his own Vienna.
Ex-nobleman and present film star! Surely no story on the screen could present greater contrasts of fortune than this story behind the screen. He himself is thoroughly conscious of it, and one day, sitting in his shirt-sleeves in his office, he remarked to some one I know, “Strange, strange, what America does for you! Do you know that if my old self, the Von Stroheim of Austria, were to havemet my present self, the Von Stroheim of Hollywood, he would have fought a duel with him? For I’m everything now that I was brought up to despise.
“When I was a young man at home I remember that one day at the dinner-table I unhooked the high collar of my uniform—just the top hook, you understand—because the day was so warm and the collar so tight. My stern old father glared at me across the table and then he sent me away from the room. ‘Low-born,’ ‘vulgarian’—these were some of the words he hurled at me as I went out. And now, behold! I sit here without any collar and in my shirt-sleeves, and when I go home to-night I shall sit down to dinner without putting on either collar or coat. My wife doesn’t mind—neither do I. There you are.”
Because of his own struggles Von Stroheim is often exceedingly kind to those trying to get a foothold in the profession. Mae Busch, for example, speaks glowingly of Von Stroheim’s helpfulness and says that it is to him she owes the chance which proved a turning-point in her career. The mention of Mae carries me to one of the most forceful examples of the fact that few screen careers are achieved without experiencing reverses.
In about the second year of the Lasky Company’s existence, Mae Busch, a little Australiangirl with big hazel eyes fringed by incredibly long lashes, was acting in one of Lasky’s vaudeville companies. For some reason or other she bolted the show in Los Angeles, and soon after this she made her first appearance in pictures as one of Mack Sennett’s famous bathing girls. While she was in Sennett’s organization she became involved in a drama of love and jealousy and revenge which had nothing to do with screen performance. The situation, familiar to many of the Hollywood colony, resulted temporarily in her professional overthrow. A pathetic little figure, she wandered from studio to studio in search of work. Unable to find it, she finally married. Perhaps, as one of her friends has suggested, the marriage was the result of gratitude on her part to the man who did not let the world’s desertion shake his love for her.
Be that as it may, the marriage proved disastrous, and for some years the pretty little Australian girl went down under the deep waters which have submerged so many others in the profession. Poor, unhappily married, the victim of several severe illnesses, who would have believed that Mae Busch would ever come back?
Those who found this belief difficult did not reckon with the mettle which is her distinguishing quality. One day she said to herself—this is the story as she tells it—“This has got to stop. Othersare getting away with it. Why not I?” This crystallisation brought her to Von Stroheim, who gave her a part in “Foolish Wives.” Small as the part was, she made it stand out. Von Stroheim praised her work. So, too, did no less a person than Charlie Chaplin. The latter, in fact, promised her a big part in his next picture.
It was about the time when she had come to an agreement with Chaplin and the Goldwyn Company was absorbed in the problem of finding an idealGlory Quaylefor its production of “The Christian.” This search is an answer to those who complain that the picture organisations are content with inferior dramatic talent and with types falling short of any real characterisation. We literally sifted the country for Hall Caine’s heroine. Beautiful and near-beautiful, famous and obscure, East and West, young and middle-aged—all were represented in those four thousand women of whom we made tests.
Of course everybody in the industry had heard of our search, but it was not until the contest had been going on for some time that the idea of entering it occurred to Mae Busch. When she did finally come to the studio she has often said that it was with no expectation of being victorious. Nobody was more surprised than she herself when out of those four thousand applicants we chose her forGlory Quayle!
How did she do it! This is the way she herself tells of the experience: “When they told me I’d have to be a fourteen-year-old girl in one test I just almost swooned. Imagine me—after all I had been through—trying to look a kid like that. But I thought to myself, “Well, you’re here now and you might as well stay by.” So I put on the short dress and—funny!—I guess I was just in the mood for it—but when I stood in front of that camera I got to feeling just exactly the way I did when I was a youngster out in Australia. Of course,” she adds quickly, “there was a great deal in this. I didn’t really care whether I won out or not—I mean I wasn’t all keyed up and nervous about it—for, you see, Charlie had promised me that part and so I didn’t have everything at stake.”
These last remarks draw attention to one of the acid experiences of the screen performer. No matter how often he or she has been subjected to these tryouts, the latest challenge always seems to make them feel as uneasy as the first. They become rigid with fear of what the new director may think of them and so, naturally, defeat the very results they so much desire.
In speaking of Mae Busch, Charlie Chaplin once said, “I always remember Mae at a party one evening when she suddenly thumped herself on the chest. ‘It’s here,’ she said fiercely, ‘something inside me—somethingI’ve got to get out!’ That impressed me a whole lot,” added he, “for I haven’t heard so awfully many screen actresses in my time complaining of any inner weight of talent oppressing them.”
It was, of course, this real fire of histrionic energy which burned down every obstacle before it. That together with all the suffering she had undergone counts enormously in her work on the screen and removes her many degrees from the puppet types which have cast discredit upon the profession.
The moment you meet Mae you recognise her as “good copy.” This is so because she is perfectly natural, and being natural with her means saying exactly what she thinks. She says it graphically, pungently, often slangily, so that almost every sentence she utters lingers in your mind as a vivid picture of some phase of experience. Far from being a highbrow herself, she is one of those vivid types in which the real highbrow delights.
Another screen performer who sailed a few choppy seas before coming into port is that delightful young comedian, Harold Lloyd. The first time I ever met Lloyd was at a dinner at which Chaplin was also present. The latter was talking on one of his favourite themes, religion or economics—I forget which—and his words, always clipped just enough to reveal his English birth, were comingthick and fast. I noticed that as he spoke a rather tall, rather serious-looking young fellow, who was one of a group in an opposite corner of the room, was looking at him wonderingly, almost wistfully. He himself was not saying a word.
“Who is that chap over there?” I asked of the man next to me.
“Oh, don’t you know him? That’s Harold Lloyd, the comedian.”
“Quiet fellow, isn’t he?” I remarked. “I’ve hardly heard him say a word.”
“He’s usually like that at parties,” replied the other man. “I’ve been around with that boy a lot and I’ve never once seen him cut up like Buster Keaton or Charlie Chaplin. He says he doesn’t feel that way when he isn’t on the set—that it isn’t until he gets on the old horn-rimmed spectacles and the rest of the make-up that his comedy catches up with him.”
“What sort of a chap is he, anyhow?” asked I a few moments later.
The answer was prompt and incisive. “The nicest, kindest, most wholesome, most sincere young fellow in Hollywood. Harold Lloyd—why, he’s the sort of kid you’d just sit around and pray your daughter would marry!”
I hasten to say that there is nothing eccentric about the view of Lloyd just presented. All thatI have since heard of the brilliant young comedian corroborates this first glowing account. When later on, too, I came to have a long talk with him any vestige of the scepticism normally induced by such universal praise vanished.
When I had this talk there was no trace of the silent young man who had first aroused my curiosity. In fact the shyness which sometimes overwhelms him at a party disappears entirely in a tête-à-tête or in a small group of friendly spirits. Then he talks a great deal. He expresses himself well and every word has a drive, the drive of his tremendous earnestness.
Lloyd, I think, would make a poor subject for psychoanalysis. He seems to have no complexes. He probably never caught any colds in his subconscious. A fine balance is the outstanding effect of his whole personality.
He is very much interested in athletics. He is a fine amateur boxer, and I suppose he gets more fun out of his swimming-pool than out of almost any other possession of his. In this he presents a great contrast to Chaplin, who doesn’t care for Hollywood’s “chilly pools” as he calls them.
If you go to Lloyd’s studio you find almost everybody calling him “Speed.” Even the youngsters on the lot make use of this nickname. These latter all seem to love him, and he is often followedby such a troop that he resembles the Pied Piper of Hamelin.
There is a great deal of the old-fashioned gentleman about this lovable young fellow. He is so earnest about his work, so determined that he is going to do everything which will make him a better actor, so modest of his achievements, and then, too, he has all the old-fashioned reverences. Mother, country, religion—all the unities so often exposed nowadays to the critical mood—are accepted by Lloyd unquestioningly.
“I can’t understand how any man could ever dissect his own mother’s character,” he once said in speaking of somebody who had engaged in this modern pastime. “After all—whatever she does, whatever her faults—she is your mother.”
No rebel, not in the least degree introspective, Lloyd is essentially a thoughtful person. He has been made more so by the accident—an explosion in his studio—which so nearly cost him the loss of his sight. Nowadays when he loses his perspective he tells me that he often visits a hospital.
“I go into that grim white place,” says he, “and I put myself back into those weeks and months when I lay with a bandage over my eyes, when everything that I had or wanted—youth and success and work—seemed to be vanishing, and I think I can see—what does anything else matter?”
ERIC VON STROHEIMWho spent one million dollars on “Foolish Wives”. He is a prominent villain on the screen.
ERIC VON STROHEIMWho spent one million dollars on “Foolish Wives”. He is a prominent villain on the screen.
ERIC VON STROHEIM
Who spent one million dollars on “Foolish Wives”. He is a prominent villain on the screen.
“CHARLIE”, “DOUG” AND “MARY”The famous trio at play after a strenuous day at the studio.
“CHARLIE”, “DOUG” AND “MARY”The famous trio at play after a strenuous day at the studio.
“CHARLIE”, “DOUG” AND “MARY”
The famous trio at play after a strenuous day at the studio.
It is due to the old-fashioned gentleman in Lloyd that he will tolerate no suggestion of anything broad, anything Hogarthian in his comedy. One day one of his advisors came to him and said, “I’ve got it, Speed, a bit of business that will go over big!”
When he heard what it was Lloyd retorted promptly, “Not on your life! If I can’t be funny and clean, too—why, then I’ll decide to be just clean.”
This year Lloyd tells me he expects to make about a million dollars. Yet it was not so many years ago when, according to his own amused word, his most cherished ambition was to be able to buy a silk shirt. His start toward this goal is as original as anything offered in the annals of motion-picture success.
When just a youngster out of high school Lloyd came to Hollywood with the intention of going into motion-pictures. Motion-pictures, however, seemed to have an equally firm intention of keeping him out. Every studio to which he applied turned him down, and finally he hit upon a unique “open sesame.” Noticing that everybody who was in costume passed through the forbidden portals without challenge, Harold decided that there was nothing obligatory about a sack coat. So he got himself a costume, and from that time forth he has stayed on the inside.
While working as an extra in one of the studios he met another young extra named Hal Roach. After some time the two of them, with only several hundred dollars to sustain their resolution, decided to go into business for themselves.
“I wasn’t any meteor, I can tell you that!” comments Harold in relating his experiences of these early days. “But we did succeed in selling a few pictures the first year. The next we sold more. Still, that limited success of ours did not seem to get me much nearer to the silk shirt. The fact of it is that we were terribly poor in those days, for every cent we made we put back into our pictures.”
This indomitable desire to improve his films makes every one feel that even “Grandma’s Boy,” that story where his irresistible comedy is developed from the most vital psychological situation he has yet chosen, is merely a starting-point in the triumphs of characterisation that await him. Anent this picture of his, Lloyd told a friend of mine that the tribute to “Grandma’s Boy” which he most appreciated came from Charlie Chaplin.
“Charlie wrote to me as soon as he saw it,” he confided to this friend, “and what do you suppose he said? Why, that the story was an inspiration to him to do his own very best work, to be contented with nothing else for himself.” And then, his dark eyes glowing with pleasure, he added,“Just fancy what that meant to me—coming from Chaplin!”
Lloyd is an ardent admirer of Charlie’s work. Also of his personality.
Harold Lloyd is to-day one of the five or six greatest drawing-cards of the screen box-office. From him I proceed logically to another name in this limited peerage—that of Norma Talmadge.
My introduction to the work of this, the greatest emotional actress of the films, came about in a way that was altogether personal and exceedingly sentimental.
One day I went up to the office of Joe Schenck, a theatrical man, who had been associated with Loew and Zukor in their earlier theatrical ventures, and whom I had known for some years. When I found him the first thing he did was to point out a velvet box on his desk. It was open, and inside curled a beautiful bracelet.
“Hmph!” exclaimed I, “what’s all this?”
“It’s a present,” retorted he. “Do you know I’m engaged to be married?”
“Well, well!” answered I. “This is news. Who’s the unfortunate lady?”
“Come around to the Rivoli to-night,” he responded with a look brimming over its pride and happiness, “and I’ll show you her work. Her name is Norma Talmadge.”