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194 IT TOOK NINE TAILORS
duce the first talking picture ever made in France. All they needed was a star! And by the greatest good fortune I was a star who could speak French as well as English.
I suggested that we try something that had never been done— that we make a picture with two negatives, one in French and the other in English. The two French picture producers were delighted with my novel suggestion. They had never thought of such a thing. Two casts— one English and one French— but only one star, one set of scenery, one director, and one camera crew. They would reap a fortune!
I made sure, at least, that I would get plenty. My terms were $125,000 for each picture and 50 per cent of the profits. They didn't like the terms, but they needed a star, so they agreed. I released the terms of the contract to the American press as soon as the papers were signed; I wanted Paramount to know that I was doing much better elsewhere.
France always has a peculiar effect on me. As soon as I land at Cherbourg, the ghosts of all my French ancestors seem to take me in hand, and I am more of a Frenchman than an American. I become as volatile and as voluble as a native, and I start to think like a Frenchman, too. Fate must have sent me to France in the summer of 1929 so that my ancestors could give me a little good advice.
I had plenty of leisure time when we first arrived in Paris, for my French producers had to get their sound equipment installed and have a script written before we could start shooting. Every morning I used to walk down the street a few blocks from my apartment, sit in the board room of the Victor Hugo brokerage office, and watch what was happening to the stock market. I had most of my money tied up in it, so naturally I was interested in watching it multiply. But sitting there among those Frenchmen I began to feel just the way many of them were feeling. The French can be very pessimistic, and many of them were shaking their heads over the way the market was going. I had a block of