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82 IT TOOK NINE TAILORS
suggested my name. I was certainly offtype casting— so far off that nobody else wanted me. Practically all I had ever played up to that time had been suave cads, sneering dukes, or skulking meanies. But since Mabel was Metro's biggest star, she usually got what she wanted.
Cliff Robertson, the casting director, called me and asked me to see Victor Schertzinger, the director, at his home that night at six-thirty. I was shaking in my boots when I called on Vic because this job meant so much to me. After I had showed him some of my stills, he asked me what my salary was.
"Five hundred dollars," I told him, obeying Arbuckle's instructions.
"This part is only worth three-fifty ," he replied. "I'm afraid—"
I stopped him right there and told him I'd take it. I was through trying to hold out for $500. Besides $350 a week was more money than I had ever earned in my life.
Next morning I reported to the studio for my first acting job since 1917— three years. I was scared stiff because it had been so long since I had been in front of a camera. And I know I was lousy in the part. But Mabel Normand was one of the sweetest people who ever lived. She asked to have me in her next picture, which followed immediately. On the strength of these two pictures I went to Paramount to work in a picture that turned out to be a very big hit. It was The Faith Healer, adapted from William Vaughn Moody's play.
I was walking on clouds. The part seemed a very good one for me, because it was right down the old groove again. I was a heavy whom everyone heartily hated. The star was Milton Sills. He was the faith healer and I was the doctor who sneered at his methods of healing people and called him a fake. George Melford, the director, thought I was just right for the part, but I may have overplayed it a bit. After all, those army doctors had given us a very rough time in the Ambulance Corps and the experience had probably left deep scars in my memory. But the treatment they had given me was nothing compared to the kicking around