Picture Play Magazine (Mar-Jul 1929)

48 A Nevtf Face — and Welcome Miss Lane made her talkie debut in "Speakeasy," with Paul Page. The beautiful can no longer be dumb. It is the millennium. The new audibility of old favorites heretofore silent has been, in the main, disquieting. Unless their strength has been built up by previous stage experience, most of the victims of the deadly microphone fall by the wayside, with a despairing gurgle of sibilant lisps and strident vowels. So that, to make a long story longer, is why the movies really are going in for new faces, with the legitimate theater their natural field of plunder. The newest and fairest of their booty is the girl I've been trying all this while to introduce to you. No more shilly-shallying— step right up, folks, and shake hands with Lola Lane. It will be a pleasure now. In a few months it will be a triumph. Lola is the blond charmer you may already have seen in Fox's "Speakeasy." No, you've never seen her before, unless you attended George Jessel's recent stage play, "The War Song," or caught Gus Edwards' revue on the Orpheum circuit a year ago. Ben Stoloff was assigned to direct "Speakeasy." and went to New York to shoot the local-color scenes — and to rifle the Broadway theaters for a leading lady. He learned that, even in the new order of things, leading ladies are not the result of whistling outside stage doors. That is, leading ladies who measure up to the difficult standard demanded by talking pictures. The discovery of new talent was never a cinch. Now it requires the divine spark of a C. Columbus. Few there are who can survive the double test of camera and microphone. * Stoloff tested ' from four hundred and fifty to five hundred Broadway actresses. Some photographed well, but the microphone did strange and detrimental things to their voices. Others sounded elegant, but were better heard than seen. Nowhere did the director come upon the femme he needed — a paragon who would be young and distinctive, who could act, and yet be easy on both eye and ear. He gave up in despair, and decided to wire the West Coast studio to send him anybody — anything. On the evening of his decision, he went to the theater — for the first time on pleasure bent, instead of looking for talent. The show was "The War Song," because he wanted to run back and say "Hello !" to his friend, George Jessel. He saw the play, but when he went backstage it was to nab Jessel's leading lady for a test. Taking the test and running it in the projection room were the first hints of a Santa Claus that the director had had in several harried weeks. Lola, in appearance, is a cross between Dolores Costello and Corinne Griffith — if you can fancy a girl struggling through life so blighted. Softly contoured face, wide, cornflower-blue eyes under finely arched brows, ash-blond hair that never saw peroxide, lissom, voluptuous figure. She looks like the perfect decoration for chaise longues, gardens, and other aids to femininity. Temperamentally, she is forthright and intrepid, with a fund of philosophical common sense that renders her more practical than an ornament really need be. At twenty she is well on the way to success, fame, riches. Seven years ago, at thirteen, she was a silent, moody child, rebelling against an unhappy environment. But even then, at the basis of her rebellion was logic. Maybe this, she reasoned secretly, was her metier, her niche in life. But there was also a chance that it wasn't. If it wasn't, then something had to be done about it, and she was the only one to do it. Methodically, while other little girls were playing with their dolls and having tea parties, Lola was already laying down plans. Because Lola evinced a natural flair for cooking, she cooked three meals a day for the seven in her family. With school, this occupied rather a lot of time. But she was not satisfied. Cooking for the family and going to school were getting her nowhere. She had never studied rhusic, but played the piano by ear. Indianola, Iowa, had one movie theater, and the thirteen-year-old Lola got the job of pianist there. Still insatiable, she made use of an innate talent for dressing hair, worked up a clientele, and was finally able to open and run a tiny sbop. Until she was seventeen her life revolved around her four activities — the kitchen, the schoolroom, the movie theater, and the hair-dressing shop. She had made enough money to put her sister through college, and to give herself two years of it. But she needed more. It was a driving urge to improve her status in the world, to surround herself with lovely things, to come in direct contact with the fine things the world had to offer. The movie theater instituted a new policy. During the summer trade diminished, so they dispensed with Lola's services and installed a piano that functioned automatically. Lola was desperate because of this cessation of a source of income. Leaving her sister in charge of the hair-dressing shop, she went to Des Moines for the summer months. For two years she did this, and saw to it that there were no idle moments. She was a stenographer, a nursemaid, a governess. She worked in an ice-cream factory and, having majored in chemistry at school, rose almost immediately to the position of head of the testing department. She was a bookkeeper to a secondhand clothes dealer. . She took any job she could get, never swerving from her ultimate purpose so much as to deplore her circumstances. It was in Des Moines that she met Mabel Wagner Schank, a Chautauqua entertainer well known through Continued on page 117 : :