The Modern Screen Magazine (Jun-Sep 1931)

Record Details:

Something wrong or inaccurate about this page? Let us Know!

Thanks for helping us continually improve the quality of the Lantern search engine for all of our users! We have millions of scanned pages, so user reports are incredibly helpful for us to identify places where we can improve and update the metadata.

Please describe the issue below, and click "Submit" to send your comments to our team! If you'd prefer, you can also send us an email to mhdl@commarts.wisc.edu with your comments.




We use Optical Character Recognition (OCR) during our scanning and processing workflow to make the content of each page searchable. You can view the automatically generated text below as well as copy and paste individual pieces of text to quote in your own work.

Text recognition is never 100% accurate. Many parts of the scanned page may not be reflected in the OCR text output, including: images, page layout, certain fonts or handwriting.

To me, Will Rogers perfectly exemplifies the traits of character and the twists of personality which, summed up, are wholly American ... or at least he possesses something which all of us like to think is as American as baked beans, apple pie, an<i ice cream. I know very little more of his background and ancestry than I have read in the various magazines. I know, for instance, that he is a Westerner but he might easily be a Down East Yankee. His particular type belongs to no one part of the country. Shrewd, illuminated by generosity and mother wit, drawling, slow spoken, careless, he demands no sectional background for his setting. He is as Western as plains and cow ponies and as Yankee as Calvin Coolidge! This is the remarkable personality which, some years ago, stepped out on a Ziegfeld stage and, surrounded by Miss Baldwin asserts, with perfect truth, that Will Rogers is one of the few motion picture stars who has remained quite American in speech in manners and in approach. Will Rogers is purely American in his rangy build, his pleasant, quite un -Arrow Collar face. The sort of American we all wish we were, says this writer. the glamor of youth, beauty, exposure and theatricalism, twirled a rope and chewed a wad of gum and gradually, quite by chance, worked up his act into one which included a running, if slow, fire of exceptionally shrewd and humorous comment upon contemporary events. The extraordinary thing about this business was that Will Rogers remained himself. He took on no color from his surroundings; his idiom did not change; he did not change. His head remained unturned and his standards remained as they had been. He appeared to me, when I first saw him, as some mobile Rock of Gibraltar around whose firmly planted feet the tides of song and dance, of tulle and satin, of rouge and powder, of perfume, of heat, of applause and wisecracks frothed and broke — making no impression upon him whatsoever, and , 36 "He is, to my mind, the pioneer type. Today, lie marches out on stage and screen ... he talks, in his own fashion, over the mysterious ether... but put him back a few generations ... and he would be perfectly at home." in no way altering his personality, or, more significant still, his character. This is a man who wears what he pleases, speaks as he pleases, does as he likes and is not concerned with the changing standards of the world about him. This is a man who may, if he likes, smite a King or a President upon the startled, but not offended, back, and proffer each some good homely advice. He may, if he so desires, hail Royalty by its sacred first name and he will get away with it. In his entirely democratic I-am-who-I-am — whoare-you? attitude toward people and things there is no display of bad taste as there might be in a man of a different type. Will Rogers may commit minor crimes according to the Book of Etiquette but he can never commit one according to the Book of the Human Heart, which is very much more important and much more widely read. HE is the epitome of the things we like to think of as American. He stands for tolerance, he stands for humor, he stands for a certain calmness in every situation, for poise, for an inborn dignity, for wit, and for a great and charitable heart. He also stands for the standards of American home life which, even today, are not forgotten — standards of decency and fidelity, of fine fatherhood. No, they are not forgotten, although to some of us who read the daily papers and listen to the conversation of our neighbors, they may have taken on the outlines of a noble, bygone legend. And speaking of legends I wonder, sometimes, if Will Rogers is not, in himself, a living legend, a sort of folk lore story, a saga of American life — of what we consider the best in American life? "I imagine that he has very big loyalties and enduring friendships . . . would be a good woodsman and a good camper. And a darned good scout in every sense of the word."