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136 IT TOOK NINE TAILORS
out every part in rehearsal. I discovered in this picture that all I had to do to make Lubitsch happy was to step before the camera and mimic every gesture he gave me.
The Lubitsch method produced some very good pictures, for he was a fine director; but Chaplin taught me much more about my business. I was better prepared to play the part in The Marriage Circle because of the training I had received from Chaplin in A Woman of Paris.
By the end of 1923 I was beginning to feel that I was a real somebody in Hollywood. I was making $1,000 a week, and the critics were buttering me up with very fine adjectives that tickled my vanity. One of the female reviewers said, "Adolphe Menjou has a beautiful smile, a smile as subtle and disturbing as the Mona Lisa's." I thought that wasn't half bad— being compared with one of the great art treasures of the world. Then some fellow who was probably getting expensive presents from Warner Brothers remarked in his review of The Marriage Circle, "Similes fail and would be useless in describing the finished performance of Adolphe Menjou. . . . He is the lifted eyebrow, the tongue in cheek of the movie world. With him as one of the cast the film is assured of a goodly amount of subtlety and of a worldly humor."
This sort of talk is heady wine to an actor. Get enough of it, and you begin to try to live up to it — of! the stage as well as on. Yes, indeed. They were ripening me for the Hollywood pluck, something to which every successful movie actor is exposed. Some avoid it, but most of us are plucked sooner or later.
Having been recognized by the critics as a man of the world, a sophisticate, and a connoisseur of the arts, I decided that I needed a place where I could properly entertain other men of the world, such as former nickelodeon proprietors who were now millionaire producers, former vaudevillians now matinee idols, former truck drivers now directors, and former police reporters now influential columnists. So I bought a house, spent $15,000 remodeling it, then began visiting antique shops and Persian-rug dealers.
The word quickly spread around town that another sucker