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From under my Hat
benefit of the wide, open spaces and the sunshine of California. She hated cities and thought she saw germs on everything she touched.
Instead of acting on the stage, I got busy with the war effort, since that was the year we entered the European conflict, and started to sell Liberty Bonds. I didn't realize at the time how much that experience was to help my acting career. Many were the days when Marie Dressier and I stood on the steps of the New York Public Library at Fifth Avenue and Forty-Second Street, pleading for buyers.
Mrs. Frank Vanderlip, the banker's wife, was boss of our bondselling team. The day she asked me to take six girls to Grand Central Station to sell bonds, I thought she'd gone off her trolley.
"How can you approach people running to catch trains and ask them to buy bonds?" I cried.
"I don't know," laughed Mrs. Vanderlip, "but I've seen you in action, and I know if it can be done you'll do it."
With that kind of a challenge, I scudded over to the station, deployed girls to strategic points, and went to it. The first day we sold ten thousand dollars worth of fifty and one hundred dollar bonds.
We might have made more if I hadn't turned chicken-livered when a suggestion was made to me by the stationmaster. He whispered that Mrs. Andrew Carnegie was in her private car, bound for Chicago, and why didn't I go in after her?
Today I'd have been on my knees to her in nothing flat, but then I was still shy. Standing on the library steps and being a bond huckster was one thing; braving Mrs. Andrew Carnegie in her private car was another. The very idea of libraries scared me out of my wits, and here was a woman whose husband built them like we build up the national debt. So Mrs. Carnegie got through my net and never knew how lucky she was.
Marie Dressler's social sense was as big as her frame. She thought hobnobbing with members of the Four Hundred was all this and heaven too, and turned herself inside out for the war effort and for such swells as Mrs. August Belmont, Anne Morgan, Elsie Mendl,
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