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THE DUKE OF BROOKLYN 41
The dining-room set that the stagehands had constructed on an open platform was in danger of being blown away; the tablecloth had to be tacked to the table to keep it in place; the walls of the room quivered and swayed.
It looked as though the director would have to call off the shooting for that day, which would mean paying everybody for a day's work without getting a foot of film. He paced the floor for a while, then suddenly got an idea.
"To hell with the wind!" he exclaimed. "We'll shoot the scene and insert a subtitle reading 'That day there was a storm at sea/ "
When the picture came out and the audiences read that subtitle, they thought it was part of the plot. They kept waiting for some dramatic twist of the story hinging on a shipwreck. But that was the last time the wind was ever seen or mentioned.
Another time I went on location with an independent company to Lakehurst, New Jersey. We had already shot some scenes in a New York loft in which I had worn a gray bowler hat as a part of my foreign-nobleman wardrobe. When we reached Lakeside, I got off the train and forgot my gray bowler, which was in a paper bag on the parcel rack above my seat.
It was a major catastrophe! The director began planning how to leave me out of the picture. He finally decided to change the plot of the story and insert a subtitle saying that the Due de Rochefort had suffered a sudden heart attack and had gone on an ocean voyage. In desperation I got the station agent to phone ahead to the next station. My hat was recovered and sent back on a northbound train, arriving just in time for me to reach the shooting location and earn my ten dollars.
During the summer of 1914 I took a short whirl at vaudeville in a sketch called The Grafter. The author-director-star was Ernie Carr, an old-time vaudevillian. I was the juvenile love interest at a salary of $27.50. The week we opened the act at New Britain, Connecticut, Germany attacked Belgium, starting World War I. In New York the stock exchange closed; it looked as though Germany was winning the war; people were going around