Photoplay (Jul - Dec 1919)

One may imagine lier Jiscoursing on love; it's another thing to visualize this Miss J almadge enjoying a lemon merinfjue pie. "( onnie' is her nickname, though this burne-jones garden goddess might not answer thatcall. Snapped in her own Hollywood backyard. I FOUND Constance Talmadge in close combination with a large lemon meringue pie. She had taken oft" her makeup and was resting between the morning grind and the afternoon's labors in her dressing room at the Los Angele> studio where her present .Seiznick pictures are being produced. The lemon pic was her lunch. ■•I have been married nine times," said Constance, with an expression of deep delight, "once to a man I've never seen. twice to gentlemen who already have the allowable number of female appendages, and several times to passing acquaintances. Therefore, since I admit I've never been starred in a divorce drama, nor played the leading role in Chief Mourner, or the Insurance Collector. I must be sort of a ladv Bluebeard or a feminine Henry \TII. The newspapers and the dear public seem to have a per JVlatrimony and M eringue Constance Talmadge found it rather hard to philosophize on love and marriage and eat lemon pie at the same time. By Adela Rogers St. John 'Photography by Stagg feet mania for marrying me off. Every time there's a little space in the paper that they can't think what to do with, they say, 'Well, let's marry off somebody.' Then they pick on me. "Or if there's a lull in the conversation at dinner — you know the blank kind that nobody can think of anything to say that isn't about somebody's first husband's second wife — why they say, "Oh, by the way, Constance Talmadge is married.' People who dine out frequently probably have the impression that I ha\e a harem. " The lemon pie absolutely prohibiting conversation for a moment, she shrugged a pair of pretty shoulders. She says she's a bit thin, only weighs no pounds, but believime, it's no well distributed. It gives her a sort of willowy slimness, deliciously youthful and patrician. She has the most impossibly, absurdly long eyelashes, that make soft shadows on her cheeks, and her eyes, though they are saucy and full of mischief, are shaped like those of a Renaissance Madonna, so that they are a bit wistful and appealing and altogether alluring. "It's funny," she said at last, the pie half gone, "why everyone always thinks about m\getting married. Even in my pictures lately, I always start out with a husband, and though I lose him half way through the picture. I generally get him back before it's over. The whole world seems bent on forcing marriage into my cranium, and just to be stubborn, I don't expect I'll ever get married — at least not for a long, long time. "Really "ducky' marriages are nice. I should be afraid mine wouldn't be. Unless love is absolute — and I think it comes about once in a thousand times — at the end of a year there's nothing left out monotony. "As for love — that's different. Love is the sunshine of life — marriage is the gaslight. Love, like all flowers of nature, must have seasons of renewal, the returning spring. A rosebush is none the less lovely because it renews its blooms each year. To produce an American beauty rose, one must clip all other buds from the stalk. To produce a happy marriage, all other loves must be pruned away. Some people like the single, stately rose. Some like a mass of wild roses. It's merelv a matter of choice.