Talking Screen (Jan-Aug 1930)

Yust A Fearless Feller War was the cause of his turning Swedish in his impersonations and he has continued Swedish ever since. So far, he has been a Swede in all his piaures. SO FAR as he knows. El hasn't any Swedish blood and the nearest approach to a Swede that he has ever talked to is an American of Swedish descent. His father was born in Bavaria and his mother was of Irish descent. Strange as it may seem. El looks rather German but closely resembles his blonde mother instead of his dark-complexioned father, even his features being like hers. When El played in Minneapolis, billed as "The Poor Swede," a manager who feared El might offend some of the Swedish customers, cautioned him to be careful. But the Swedish folk liked him so well that they called around to see him in great numbers, talking to him in Swedish, which he didn't understand in the least. They took him for a Swede ! Eventually in his small time vaudeville playing. El met Flo Bert, who was in another aa, and when the two acts merged. [Continued from page 67} the two were teamed together. Before long they were teamed for life. Although Flo is a little too plump for pictures, she did appear with El in Happy Days, which followed Sunny Side Up and Hot for Paris. But she is content to be a homemaker now and when El starts work in The Oregon Trail, Flo will be planning delicious dinners for him in their cozy duplex flat, high on a hill far from the Hollywood studios in a part of Los Angeles where you'd never think of looking for motion picture people. Flo is a pretty brunette, a pleasing foil for her blond husband, and both of them are charming, friendly people. I'll bet their neighbors like them. El's chief dissipations are baseball and prize fights. The couple love to have their friends in, but never go to whoopee parties. A LL this talk about having to be a good fellow and mix with people to get along in pictures is not true," declared El. "If you can do your sniff, that is the point." El wants to do better and bener work, but has no desire to live in a palace and have a great deal of money, he says. Flo is busy with piano lessons, for her own enjoyment, and often El dances at home for his own amusement. He let me in on a secret. El has no ear for music ! "Sometimes," said El, "when I sing in pictures, I just learn the words and sing any tune I happen to think of. It usually fits in all right." EL'S great joy is in making people laugh, in making them happy. It has always been so with the Brendels. Even when things had become rosy and prosperous with the couple, if their act failed to make an audience laugh as heartily as usual at one performance, they would steal back to their hotel room and have a good cry. Brendel was in silent pictures for a year, in 1926, but didn't like them. But so thoroughly have talking pictures weaned him away from the stage, that it .would break his heart to have to go back to legitimate. "Yes," said El emphatically, "I like the talkies so well, I'd go into news reels before I'd go back to the stage!" Operator! Operator! reading palms and characters. She has been around. "They wanted it hot in New York, so I gave it to them," she says, shaking her auburn mane. Thump thump. Varsity Dra-ag! She tried out in Newark on the Joisey side. Schwab and Mandell saw her and grabbed her for Good News. It was hot. Zelma became a Broadway addiction with her berets, her socks, her flashy sports attire. Her perky bows and flapping shoe ties were soon trademarks. She was so good they made cracks about her plainness. Good News ran two years and then went to London. So did she. There she met Anthony Bushell, who remembered her very, very favorably from New York. They were married in two weeks, this girl from Dreamland Dance Hall and Broadway, and this Why should I winter away from the city? Why should I watch summer highways unravel? Why do you speak with a voice full of pity. Just to describe what I'd see if I'd travel? Nothing can tempt me to pack up and go — Plead till you're weak and your face becomes chalky — I'll see the world from a seat in a show; Give me the thrills of a travelogue talkie. [Contittued from page 45^ boy from Oxford, whom you have seen in the film Disraeli. STRANGELY assorted, this couple, but obviously blissful. A boy who likes Shakespeare and cricket, and a Broadway baby who talks her songs, and dances thumpthump. This feminine paradox who, offstage, says she is shy and retiring, who says she is too frank to have many friends, who has plunged her bare hands into the thick of life and wrested fame from it. Who has climbed the frenzied ladder of glory from that little town of Rock Falls, Illinois, without help. She wants to give it all up for a child. But she won't, for she has that rare gift of being a born comedienne. She can't give it up. It is in her soul. She has worked and Unhampered Education Touring brings nothing but temper and trouble — Punctures occur and need fixing with patches ; Yachting is sporty but anguish is double — Ocean spray drenches the decks and the hatches. Shine up your passport or car, if you must! Send me some postals; I'll bear you no malice ! Swallow some spray or eat somebody's dust — I'll see the world in a cinema palace ! starved and sweated for success. Even maternity would not make her forego it — this amazing ambition. So far from the Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts, all this, and Sir Herbert Tree, Bond Street, Mayfair, Peier Pan, and the Pinero of her husband. This "hello girl" who has made good, with the smiling voice, who once listened in on dull Sundays to the coast-to-coast conversations of film celebrities, and this tall ripping Englishman. Life has thrown them together, and happily. Now she sits in the copper and red splendor of a Hollywood Spanish apartment and awaits talkie triumph. A fortune teller has told her that she will marry twice again. Sweetly, earnestly, she shakes that auburn head. Marry again? No, never while Tony is alive. There could be no other for me. When you return, be it winter or summer, I'll have the news from the far-away places — "Oh, but my climb in the Alps was a hummer !" "What did you think of the Prince of Wales' braces?" Here is a tip that you should not forget: Punctures and passports consistently bore me; / buy a seat in a movie and let Newsreel photographers see the world for me! — C. Warden La Roe 94