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THE MAN AND THE MIND
287
Yet when his mind is made up to any course, even the most daring, he proceeds with an utter, calm confidence, which belies this instinctive humility. In 1921, just when he was straining every resource to acquire theatres, broke the famous “Hollywood scandals.” The movingpicture stars, attractive young persons suddenly risen from poverty, found themselves possessed of incomes running between ^100,000 and ^500,000 a year. While most of them spent tawdrily and ostentatiously, they were generally far too busy for much dissipation. Moving-picture acting, under modern conditions, is hard work. A minority, however, behaved as did a minority of the Osage Indians when a quirk of fate threw $12,000 a year into the laps of every man, woman, and child among them. Heavily advertised in their merits, they were advertised also in their defects. Wallace Reid went to pieces, died, was buried to the requiem of newspaper moralists. W. D. Taylor, director, was murdered. No one knows to this day who did it, but gossip radiated from the little, intimate circle of Hollywood to the farthest comer of the globe. Finally came that squalid episode — the death of Virginia Rappe, in Roscoe Arbuckle’s hotel apartment. This accidental episode was worse, much worse, for the reputation of the moving picture than any tragedy of intention; the story, as the newspapers began to bring it out, had a soiled and nauseating cast. At the moment “Fatty” Arbuckle figured importantly in the general scheme of Famous