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He Wanted An Easy Job
Acting seemed like si niee easy lit e, hut Henry Wilcoxon found that there is more than one hard way to make an easy living in movies
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■ "Sure, actors are softies," said Wilcoxon heartily.
He gave an unashamed chuckle as he okayed the accusation which through the ages has been tossed at the fellow with an artistic streak by the fellow without it. The fleer has been tossed at Hollywood recently, too.
If anybody should chuckle, it's Wilcoxon. He stood beside the hearth in his living room, six feet two inches of brawn and sinew, as the story-books say, with a curved Saracen sword in his right hand and a long, steel-tipped spear in his left. By the aid of these weapons he was explaining and illustrating a couple of scenes that had occurred in two of his pictures.
One ankle was a trifle stiff from a polo game out at his ranch and a shoulder was slightly wrenched from tent-pegging in which you ride a horse at full gallop and with a lance try to yank an iron tent-peg from the ground in passing. You have to swoosh low from the horse's back and sometimes the horse swooshes also and falls down on top of you but, as Wilcoxon was saying in his calm
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It's still an easy life, asserts Wilcoxon, even when you wear twenty pounds of helmet as he does in the rousing drama If I Were King
English voice. "It's heaps of fun, really." There were sundry abrasions and contusions likewise, but all healing nicely, thank you. They were the result of furious scenes and mishaps during work in Mr. Moto, in the Jane Withers Keep on Smiling film, and, especially, in sequences of If I Were King when (as "Captain of the Guard") he chased Ronald Colman (as "Francois Villon")
From the start, they gave him nice quiet parts, like the action shown above from The Crusades
through the byways and alleys of Paris.
"I took up acting," Wilcoxon observed, not quite concealing an "ouch!" as he moved the knee where a guardsman had inadvertently kicked him, "because it's such easy work." Hefting the spear, he added that from childhood he had been the sheltered, pampered type which would naturally gravitate to the movies and he supposed now he would never be anything else.
"Just a softie!" he sighed, blinking his blue eyes and running a hand through his light brown hair so that it stood on end.
Wilcoxon, as a matter of fact, has been so sheltered and pampered in the movies and in real life, from his boyhood up, that it's a wonder he hasn't spent half his career in the hospital. His nickname among friends is "Biff," and he has a brother in England called "Bang." The names express the Wilcoxon temperament pretty well. [Continued on page 37]