Picture Play Magazine (Mar-Jul 1929)

44 I. A Si Carmel Myers has learned to disci she plays, while she shelves her From her self-control she has the problems of an actress Myrtle Photo by Louise Carmel Myers has learned that in no branch of the show business is the parade of one's troubles an asset, but is a stumblingblock to success. EMOTIONS are our merchandise — but not for personal wear!" Beneath the gay aplomb with which Carmel Myers trailed those words on a laugh, I could sense a deeper meaning, and waited for her to express further the thought which some trivial remark had evoked. Whenever Carmel gets an idea on her mind, it means an interesting, usually exclamatory, conversation. For she is an analyst, and her observations on human nature —sometimes caustic, again kindly — are always pertinent. "Odd, isn't it, that we who live by emotion cannot give into it very much in our private lives? Feeling must be disciplined and shoved back within ourselves, for fear it might wreck this frail structure we call success. Emotion ravages the face. Only the most sublimated love beautifies. True, all experience adds lines of character. Until one is ready to play character roles, however, one cannot afford personal emotion. "The producers expect an actress to be bright and gay and pretty. Presumably she is not to take life seriously, to have troubles such as harass other folks. With so much touching her that passes by those in calmer pursuits, she really has greater worries. She must hide them away, marked, 'Don't open until later !' " Her meaning became strikingly clear as I recalled a day, soon after her mother had been taken suddenly from her, when I sat beside her bed and tried, in that futile desire we have to help, to urge her back to work. Her face was red and swollen from tears. "I can't even interview the producers," she explained. "With you others it doesn't matter how you look. But we must appear at our best. We can't take our grief to the studio. Though people are sympathetic, the camera isn't." Recalling that day, I saw another demand of that merciless yet fascinating siren — career. Many months had passed. We were talking in her Hollywood apartment. "My town house," she had gayly ushered me in. The old-fashioned family home at the beach is cluttered with those knickknacks of generations' accumulation, closely woven with the past — a spacious, comfortable place minus objets d'art, or the decorator's precise touch. Her apartment has a businesslike aspect, being occupied only on nights when she is too tired to drive to the beach. Press clippings, photographs, a script, a make-up box, appurtenances of the career which always has been a governing influence and which now engrosses her above all else, are scattered about. The Carmel of that day of tragedy had gone. Sorrow had been tucked away, courageously. A vivid sparkle seemed to ripple from her newly red hair, catching lights from her vital, gray eyes, animating her to quick repartee. She says she was born red-headed, and points to a red-headed brother, Zion, as proof. But Zion winks, and one wonders, not minding" that raven has gone red, because Carmel is such fun again. A red, incidentally, that nobody ever was born with. She had given a tea to christen it, but it isn't titian, nor auburn, nor tomato, nor yet carrot, so the job slid off our pleasantries, and the hue of Carmel's hair remains unnamed. I have actually heard this silly explanation of her