Motion Picture Classic (Jul-Dec 1930)

How Women Have Changed Them in the cradle and cry if we fail to get it? Isn't that the secret, burning ambition of every small boy in the schoolroom? To be the Big Shot with the fellows. To be a bigger shot with the girls. To excel at football or baseball or track or dramatics or something— so that envious small boys and admiring small girls may jostle excitedly and say 'Gee, there goes Bill Smith!' Oblivion Must Be Deadly "TT'S the same thing as we grow up. The J_ same thing, matured — outwardly. We pretend we don't like it. We pretend we are bored, sensitive to publicity, shrinking, avoiding. Bunk! We love it! And most of all, we love it when some pretty girl says, 'There goes — Lawrence Tibbett!' "To be conspicuous everywhere, never to have any privacy at all, never to let loose for fear of the critical public eye is tiring at times. But everything is tiring at times. And God, how much more tiring it would be never to be noticed at all ! Oblivion must be a kind of death. Refined, but hellish ... "Women, of course, are my greatest audience. "A great percentage of my fan letters come from women. Women in their thirties and in their forties. I wish I could know them all. I wish I could follow up some of the letters I get. They are the very source of adventure. Some of them promise beautiful adventure. Some of them should be turned over to Mr. Freud ... I couldn't of course. I wouldn't dare. "We are all cowards when it comes to living. "There is so much more adventure in life than any of us take advantage of ! Because we are afraid of something. Our little reputations. Our 'good name.' Our families. The feelings of this one or that. What 'they' might say. False constructions. Our careers. Everything. . . . The Eternal Need (Continued from page jo) Rogue Song,' between the acts, women did not compliment the production, nor comment on my voice — they said, 'What a lover he would make!' "1 sang just as well before I made 'The Rogue Song.' I had had my success at the Metropolitan. 1 had not made 'The Rogue Song' and everyone was different. Old friends of the family — women to whom I was 'just Lawrence,' neither very exciting nor very stimulating — well, they have changed, too. Rather hard for me to live up to that character! boy to mother, something of the moonreaching child to protect. "Women prefer to protect rather than to be protected. "When a woman protects, she is in her native element. She has the cradle again. Her arms and her heart are filled. She likes to worry and fuss and fear. "And from women men expect and care most for flattery and admiration, for comfort and pride. Beauty, to a man, may be the least thing of all — and often is. Freedom, to a man, is the most vital quality. The need to feel that he is free. 4 After ' to live "T"T TE close so many doors VV right in our own faces! Stand behind them, peering, peeking, wishing . . . It's a pity! We don't make the most of life. Adventure is the pulse of living. Women are adventure for men, and men are adventure for women. "And I believe that singers need adventure more, perhaps, than artists in any other line. All artists need it. Need emotion to recharge the batteries. Need adventuring emotionally to put color into their pigments, poetry into their words, soul into their violins. And a singer most of all. For a singer must be not only a singer, he must be an actor, too. And to get that sting into the voice, to pour forth that vehemence, to rise to that tremendous pitch and hold it — it needs a strain of wildness for food. / need it. " It's odd, how people come to believe you are the character you portray on the screen. Women who never paid any attention to me before look at me now — since 'The Rogue Song' — with different eyes. I was amused at hearing that at the opening of 'The 90 Hutrell The Rogue Song," women expected Lawrence Tibbett up to his rfile in real life. What will they expect after seeing him as Michael in "New Moon"? Ananias *s Sisters "TT70MEN do not like safe, sound V y practical men. "Women do not like successful business men. Competent men. Machine-minded efficient men. Or rather, 1 should say they do not love them. They say they do. They lie. Women always lie about the emotions. They have been brought up to lie about them, to disguise them, to deny them. They do not even know when they are doing it. "Women love wild men. "Women love dangerous men. "Women love destructive men. "Women love fanatically, endlessly, the man who promises them heartbreak and homelessness. Bitterness and storm. The man who promises them nothing at all. "Women love men who laugh — at things of which they have no knowledge. "Women do not like roues. Not the jaded, sophisticated types. They love men with a touch of naivete. Something of the The Starving Sex THE women of America are starved for romance. For glamour. For poetry. They are far more starved for poetry than for passion. "Women love to be wooed with words. They get too little of that. The American man is profligate with gifts and flowers. He is niggardly with time and that gentle, soft wooing that is the rhythm of love. Women can live forever on verbal adoration. "I believe that a man can love one woman all his life long if the woman will allow love to '1 cut its own channels, naturally I' — naturally changing with the inevitable passing of time. " No emotion remains static. "And few, if any women, and very few men, understand emotion. We are a romantically educated people. We see the fiction of love — and balk at the fact. "Women think of emotion, of love, as perpetual romance. That first roseate state is all of love to them — an aura transfiguring their lives as it does in the beginning. They do not know that a different quality must constantly replace the qualities that have gone before. "Women have no talent for, and no desire for, companionship with the man or men they have loved. "And companionship between men and women has been, it seems to me, too often disregarded, not given its proper due. Companionship can be, should be, the most beautiful emotion of all. The emotion of being necessary, of having someone close at hand who is necessary to you. " Men tire of women who insist upon perpetual histrionics. Perpetual and fiery proofs of love. Women who look to them always as the Great Lover and are satisfied with nothing else. The Most Fascinating Women INDEPENDENT women — economically independent, mentally or spiritually independent, any kind of independent at all — are the most fascinating women of all. For the independent woman gives a man the sense of perpetual chase. He is never sure of her. A woman who is independent is never wholly subjugated. At any moment, for any reason, she can say 'Goodbye.' There is no stronger hold than this." And Lawrence Tibbett laughed. He threw back his head and laughed his lusty, {Continued on page gj)