Picture Play Magazine (Sep 1919 - Feb 1920)

Their Wedded Life 35 Ray looks like a parlor ornament — bathe's an allround sportsman. "A Little Prayer for Rain," is no exception to the rule. They don't mind this everrecurring matrimony at all, but when the day's work is done you find Elinor down at her mother's Los Angeles apartment, and Mr. Ray at a cosy little bungalow with his real, wedded wife, Roxana MacGowan, who used to be in Mack Sennett comedies. Around the Fox Studio the Fair-Ray pair are known as "The Kids," and in their perpetually married parts they look it. But away from the studio one is struck by the seriousness of Elinor Fair, for a girl with some teens yet to go. She adores pretty clothes — but that's merely feminine with no age limit either way. When I saw her she was a picture in a smart Dolly Varden sort of frock, sitting all curled up like a kitten in a big leather chair. That is, she sat curled up in a chair for a very, very little while. She isn't the sort that stays put. She's here, there, and away while she's talking. Now it's to show you a big picture hat that's just come home, or a new fur coat that's spoiling to be worn— if only, there would be a cool day. Now it's to show you the beginning of a library — a baker's dozen or so of books of the best-seller type ; or to look over mother's shoulder as she sorts over Elinor's latest pictures while telling that Elinor inherits her temperamental qualities from her grandfather. She made her bebut in pictures when she was thirteen ; dressed up in a grown-up cousin's frock, she looked the sixteen she wanted to, and was picked by William Farnum for an ingenue role because she looked enough like Gladys Brockwell to be her daughter. And she writes stories. "I've written millions of stories — oh, yes, and scenarios, too," she told me, quite simply. "Any of them good — the scenarios, I mean?" I queried bluntly. "About one in five, I think, is really good. But I've never shown any to a manager yet." Equally naive was her answer, when she had denied caring for sports or athletics of any kind and I asked if she drove an automobile — as naive as the little girl asked if she could play the piano : "I don't know. Eve never tried. But I think I could." She isn't a bit of a "cutey" girl. There are no lispings or kittenish manners except that habit of curling up in a big chair. Her favorite picture is the one that makes her look oldest, and she is always setting_her age a year ahead of the one her' mother gives. But perhaps the most unusual thing about this unusual miss is that she says, and says it like she means it — she doesn't like boys! So there now, Mr. Albert Ray, it's lucky for you that you only have to play you're married to her on the screen ; that the sun never sets on your wedded life. Funny chap, this Albert Ray. When I asked him how long he has been in pictures — a question I have-a -habit of asking stars in their first starhood — he said: "Eighteen years." I looked at him rather hard, almost emitting the shorter-uglier word, and asked him whether he had had a cooing or crying part in his first. It seems his first appearance in pictures was on the cover of a famous weekly magazine, at the age of seven. The woman who drew the picture was a friend of the family and, fancying his Buster Brown hair cut, posed him with a big pumpkin for a Thanksgiving number. Just at this time a stage manager was fine-combing the land for a boy to play Buster in a play based on the Outcault pictures. Family friend suggested Young Al for the part, and the manager burst merrily through the traditions of the parental Rays, living comfortably on their big Virginia farm, not at all needing this addition to the family income nor craving footlight luster for the family name. ' But the boy wanted to do it and the family friend and the manager won over the parents. Buster Ray's legs grew long as the company hopped about the little towns without reaching the _ New York goal, and / as the legs couldn't / be cut off and the i hair could, young Ray graduated from Buster Brown to Peck's Bad Boy. The next step was ^ musical comedy. Smash again went the family traditions ! Back there in Virginia and later when the family moved to New York, young Albert had sung in Episcopal choirs. Always he hated the slow music. Always he wanted to rag it a bit and step out to a syncopated version of the hymns instead of marching slowly in the white-robed procession. Musical comedy, then, was more to his taste than choir singing, ^ and his falsetto voice made a hit on the stage. it.„w,as while