Actorviews (1923)

166 Actorviews “Don’t,” I cry, “make yourself sound like a trained Belasco actress, saying you owe everything to your author-manager! I know that Jimmie’s a genius; so does he. But I want to get you in this story and not my friend James Montgomery.” “There wouldn’t have been much of me if it hadn’t been for Mr. Montgomery,” she whimsically persists. “I was nobody — you know just how much of a nobody I was — when a friend took me to him in New York. And I shall never believe that it was anything but the great kindness of his heart that induced Mr. Montgomery to give me and teach me his Irene. He knew my story — my experience — everything. And he no more than I was looking for the sort of publicity that might have been — and was not — had. It pleased him to regard me as an unknown, untried seeker for a little place on the stage who might do something with a chance. He gave me the chance, and he worked over me — how he worked! — that I might make the most of it. Eight days after he gave me the part I played it — on a Thursday and Friday, in New York. “Oh, don’t think that I’m trying to tell you that I played it well!” she pleads, and her frank brown eyes under the turban of widow’s black echo the note of sincerity. “How could I have been anything but terrible with my inexperience and only eight days? I’ve still got a thousand thousand things to learn — but then there was no figure could number them. I was terrible. But Mr. Montgomery gave me the courage — and the chance — to go and make myself less terrible. And I’ve tried, really tried; I’ve lived nothing since last September but work.” “ It’s all a play, too,” says I. “Yes,” she grasps, “there is a bit of drama in it.”