Actorviews (1923)

224 Actorviews me the way that dress did. And the longer the show stayed out the thinner I got. They gave me a quarter a day for meals, but I had to split the quarter with the dog. He was Rachel Lewis’ dog and roomed with me, the dog did — twenty-five cents a room for the two of us. It cost a dime a day to feed the dog, and I was getting so thin, eating on fifteen cents, that my bones were coming through the skin at my elbows. “This isn’t where you laugh! Lemme explain. I was working on my elbows in the water scene — where stage hands hold strips of cloth that were supposed to be waves. I played an alligator in that scene. You couldn’t see me, but I was the alligator just the same. My right arm was one of his jaws and my left the other jaw, and I lay on my elbows in the trough of this water scene and worked the jaws of the alligator. And the joints of my elbows got so sore I used to cry. “When I got courage enough to tell Rachel Lewis my elbows wouldn’t stand the alligator part any longer, she patted me on the back and said : ‘But what shall I do? There ain’t nobody else in the whole company can play it so good as you.’ “I believed her. Poor fish! I kept on playing the alligator’s jaws, and business got worse and worse. We were so rotten the little towns didn’t want us even before they’d seen us. They’d heard about ‘The Ballad Girl.’ “ ‘There’s only one thing left to do,’ says James O’Neill — which I tell you again, wasn’t the original James O’Neill — ‘and that’s to give ’em drama.’ So they got ‘The Royal Slave,’ which was sick with drama ; and because I said I could sew they let me make all the costumes. But the only change I got for myself was a Spanish scarf out of Rachel Lewis’ suitcase, which made me look like a piano lamp. And looking