Actorviews (1923)

264 Actorviews man becoming what Roget calls potulent as against ten of his becoming what he calls a teetotalist. I give the figures to show that when Mr. Overman won the Great Sahara, the “book” was twenty to one against him. The metaphor reminds me that Mr. Overman, at the age of fourteen, began his career as a splicer of the main brace, not on the bounding main, but on the back of a restless thoroughbred at four-thirty a. m., with four ounces of raw whisky in his otherwise empty stomach. He did that every morning for many mornings, on the small-time race tracks of his native Missouri. “The horse owners had a theory,” he told me over the coca-cola in the Auditorium Bar — where a couple of years ago such fluid would not have been served at any price — “that breakfast settled the nerves. They wanted all the ‘edge’ they could get from our nerves when we stable boys took the horses out for exercise at dawn. We got no breakfast till half-past nine or so, and started the day with half a tumbler or more of whisky. So you see I began where most drinkers leave off . . . Yes, you might say that up to three years ago, when I quit for keeps, my whole life had been spent in training for this pickled part in ‘Just Married.’ My performance is getting more credit than it’s entitled to. Believe me, old man,” he said in his cool level treble, with his cool even smile, “it’s more nature than art.” Mr. Overman’s mother, to whom he is shyly devoted, made a trade with him whereby he could follow the horses in Summer so long as he came home for the Winter’s schooling. He followed them as stable boy and jockey around the county fairs of Missouri and as far as Denver and Helena. In Helena he “got the