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and Elisabeth Marbury. Marie and Mrs. Belmont were chums. Whv, they even exchanged Christmas presents.
One year Marie, though she could ill afford it, gave Mrs. Belmont an expensive umbrella. Mrs. Belmont didn't have the system our Hollywood stars have employed for years— that of cataloguing and tagging their presents for future giveaways and sending them to someone else the next Christmas.
Mrs. Belmont gave the umbrella away the next vear, all right, but the trouble was she gave it right back to Marie! So an umbrella ended a beautiful friendship.
Another of Marie's social ventures was just as disastrous. Wanting to return the many hospitalities of Marion Davies and William Randolph Hearst, she hit on giving a family dinner in her unpretentious but comfortable home in Hollywood. W.R. liked simple food, she knew; she'd prepare dinner with her own hands.
Six of us were invited— Marion, W.R., Frances Marion, Lowell Sherman, our hostess, and I. While we were waiting for the honor guests to arrive, Lowell went around examining Marie's prize possessions laid out on the living-room table. One was a gilded crown, given her as first prize at an Actors' Equity Ball. It had been intended to crown the most beautiful woman present; but when both Ethel Barrymore and Jane Cowl turned up, the judges couldn't choose between them, so, to save embarrassment, crowned Marie as "the most interesting woman."
In front of the crown was a short swagger stick with an ivory cross at one end, given Marie by the Red Cross. Picking it up and examining it, Lowell exclaimed with a leer, "Ah, Marie, your goosing stick!" Before she could hit him over the head with the nearest lamp her other guests arrived.
Dinner led off with Marie's special cocktail, which I wouldn't advise trying, a lethal blend of bathtub gin and vanilla ice cream. Then came a platter of corned beef and cabbage.
The shindig broke up earlier than others I've been to. Guests left the house green around the gills, uncomfortably poisoned by Marie's family dinner. As I look back on it, it seems typical of Marie's quality, which was tragicomedy.
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