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150 IT TOOK NINE TAILORS
in fact, if there were any, I never even got invited. About the only social activity in which my wife and I indulged was an occasional dinner with friends like Monta Bell and his wife and Eddie Sutherland and his first wife, Marjorie Daw. By this time Eddie had left Chaplin to become a director at Paramount and had already directed Coming Through, starring his uncle, Tommy Meighan, and He's a Prince, with Ray Griffith.
The part I played in The Grand Duchess was that of a wealthy man who falls in love with an impoverished grand duchess. But she is very proud and very proper, so there is simply no way I can meet her because we have no friends in common. Finally in desperation I bribe a waiter to let me take her dinner to her. The scene in which I served the dinner called for me to do it very clumsily. I was supposed to know nothing about serving and finally was to spill soup down her neck. We rehearsed this scene over and over again. I had a terrible time trying to pretend that I didn't know how to be a waiter. After all, when you have been the manager of a high-class restaurant, you don't know the wrong way to serve dinner; you only know the right way. If a cowboy is put on a horse and told to act as though he doesn't know how to ride, he still looks good on that horse.
Mai got a little annoyed with me because we couldn't get the scene shot. He finally said, "Look, Adolphe, don't you understand? You are supposed to look like a bad waiter, not a good one!"
"I know that," I told him, "but when I worked in my father's restaurant, he wouldn't tolerate a bad waiter, and I have a suspicion his spirit is right on this set watching every move I make."
When we finished shooting the Grand Duchess and the Waiter, Mai and I were sure we had a film in the can that would do us both good, but neither of us stayed with the picture to see it through the cutting room. Mai was assigned at once to another directorial chore, and I went to work on a picture Monta Bell had been preparing for me— The King on Main Street.
Since most of this picture had a New York City background, Lasky decided to shoot it at the Long Island studios. Monta, my