Actorviews (1923)

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Imperial Morris Gest ORRIS GEST’S passion for his “Mecca” is the life-spark of that amplitudinous pagan orgy at the Auditorium. The very goats and camels grin contentedly behind their work when he wanders back stage. I’ll swear I heard a camel augh when Gest, asked by some dull fact-collector how much live stock he had with his show, enumerated them horn by horn and hump by hump and added, pulling at his thumb to complete the count, “ — and me.” If the fabrics of “Mecca” could talk they would call Gest a great lover. Every cloth knows him by feel. Sometimes he seems to listen to rugs, and you wonder what they tell him. There is a storied coat of threadbare velvet broidered in strands of orange gold. It is two hundred years old and came off the back of a sheik who went too close to Monte Carlo. You know, the rich authentic robe of Prince Nur Al-Din which is worn by Herbert Grimwood. When Gest lays that precious garment over your knees and strokes it as he would a living thing, it is not hard to understand why he refused to sell it as a museum piece for four thousand dollars one day when he hadn’t a hundred in his own unembroidered jeans. Old pillows are wearing new topcoats for Chicago — queer oriental weaves of luscious silk. Gest pats them where they gleam, and you obscenely ask him what those pillow-covers cost.