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THE THREE MUSKETEERS 85
week only paid about 3 per cent in taxes. No wonder the big names of Hollywood could live like Indian potentates.
Unless a person earned $1,000 a week he was a mendicant. If he didn't have a swimming pool, three saddle horses, four servants, and an Isotta-Franchini town car, he was just a peasant. I considered myself one of the underprivileged because in my first year in Hollywood I earned only $6,500. That was more money than I'd ever made before in my life, but it was less than a week's salary for some actors.
About that time the poker game in which I had lost $300 began to pay dividends and it soon turned out to be the best investment I ever made. My first job in 1921 came from Al Green, one of the winners in that game. He told me he didn't think much of my poker playing but liked the aplomb with which I lost, so he suggested my name for the heavy in a picture he was about to direct for Mary Pickford.
A Mary Pickford picture was always a plum for any actor, because it was sure to ring the bell at the box office and so give its actors added prestige with the casting directors. Mary had her own company at United Artists, and when I say it was her company, I mean she ran the show. Everything had to pass her personal inspection, including, of course, the actors.
I was very worried at my interview with Mary. I told her that I had once worked with her husband, Doug Fairbanks, and I tried to appear unconcerned and at ease; but I wanted that job very badly and she knew it. I got the part finally, but I had to take a $50 salary cut. I walked out of the office talking to myself. "How," I thought, "can that little girl be so sharp in business matters?" But she was only a little girl on the screen; the rest of the time she was a keen student of the dollar.
When I met Mary, she had been a picture star for twelve years and was the highest-paid actress of all time. She began her career doing child parts on the stage, and in 1909 she sought a job in pictures. It is said (probably the pipe dream of a press agent) that she spent her last nickel for carfare from her New