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GETTING THE GIRL 143
ingenue whom he had seen in The Leather Pushers with Reginald Denny. Her name was Norma Shearer.
Broadway after Dark had been a melodrama with a villain so deep in skulduggery that even his mother couldn't have forgiven him. Monta revamped the story, turning the heavy, which I played, into a Broadway playboy with a barrelful of money and with two girls in every chorus. At the end of the picture I was supposed to lose the girl to the juvenile hero.
But after about three weeks of shooting we began to realize that the virtuous young hero was a stuffed shirt and an awful bore. Monta be^an to worn7 about the way the character and the picture were turning out; he went aroimd looking as glum as a sick hound-dog. Then, one morning he rushed into my dressing room full of enthusiasm, a big grin on his face.
"I've licked it!" he shouted. 'I've got a twist for the love storv. The heavy is going to get the girl!"
It was a mad idea. It defied all tradition. There was a hero and a heavy in even* motion picture, and the audience knew from the beginning who was going to get the girl. It was never the character I played— that mustache twirler who sneered at marriage and hated babies. But after four years I had grown used to Hollywood inconsistencies. I assured Monta that in the last reel I could twirl my mustache in a heroic manner and act like a fellow who could settle down in a vine-covered cottage.
That was the way we shot the final scenes of the picture, and it worked. The fans were delighted when the lady-killer with 100 phone numbers was roped and tamed by a demure and simple maiden.
But that was the last time I got the girl for quite a while. Even though I had won her in Monta's picture, nobody else would take a chance on making me the love interest. In my next picture, For Sale (with Claire Windsor) I played that well-worn character, the jaded millionaire who will save the heroine's father from financial ruin if she will consent to marriage. Then came Sinners in Silk. That was during the "sinner and sex" cvcle, when pro