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MONTAGUE OR CAPULET 61
ing only one picture in California, returned to New York to complete his contract, we all nodded sagely, then dashed for the Triangle Studios to get jobs.
There were four of us who used to pal around together at that time. We had much in common, for all of us were college men with fathers who disapproved of our ambitions to be movie stars. My roommate was Ned Hay, Jr., from Washington, D.C., whose father was a past grand exalted ruler of the Elks. Then there was John Bennett, a Yale man, whose father owned the Gotham Hotel, and Dudley Hill, who is now a dignified banker.
We organized ourselves into a sort of movie team under the name of "The Gentlemen Riders." This label quickly identified us to casting directors not so much as horsemen but as society types. As a matter of fact the other three were all very capable in the saddle; I couldn't ride, but I could look the part in a rented riding habit. We all showed to best advantage in dress clothes, sport jackets, riding habits, or cutaways.
One director who always called for "The Gentlemen Riders" when he was casting a picture that needed society types was Allan Dwan. It was through Allan that we landed Doug Fairbanks' second picture, The Habit of Happiness, which was shot in two studios that the Triangle Company had just taken over, one in Yonkers and the other in Fort Lee, New Jersey. Both of these studios were of the latest type; they were constructed somewhat on the order of greenhouses, large portions of the walls and roofs being of glass, so that on sunny days it was unnecessary to use artificial light.
Fairbanks played the part of a fellow who believed that laughter was the cure for all of man's ills, both mental and physical. He was the "laugh doctor." One sequence called for him to go down to a flophouse in the Bowery, where he gathered the failures and the misfits together, taught them to laugh, and thus inspired them with new hope and new determination.
Dwan decided that, rather than hire actors to pretend that they were Bowery bums, it would be simpler to go to the Bowery