Modern Screen (Dec 1937 - Nov 1938)

MODERN SCREEN m BOB TAYLOR HAD A CHANGE OF HEART? {Cunfinncd from page 27) your way tomorrow in a dress made new, joyous, flattering with one of Rit's glowing shades that says your taste is grand. Rit's new formula contains "neomerpin" that makes color saturate the fabric quickly, evenly, beautifully. So easy — you'll "DYE" laughing! Go to your nearest ten cent store and insist on CRO*PAX Corn Pads, waterproof, with medicated discs for safe, sure, quick relief. Accept No Substitute. Price slightly higher in Canada ^esSS^ASssp.. CRO^PAX PRODUCTS, CLEVELAND, 0. A-^^^^ AT YOUR 5 & 10c STOREJ^^^ FOR EVERY FOOT AILMENT to the radio and fool around with the horses and read agricultural bulletins. We haven't changed. Nothing is changed. "I've come back and I've picked up just where 1 left off. I've moved into my place in the San Fernando Valley. Two miles from Barbara's ranch, Marwyck, my place is. Thirty acres, I have, with a palatial mansion of four rooms thereon ! On the goodly Taylor acres I have some horses, just to galumph around on, not to race. I also grow alfalfa, the better to feed the horses, my dear. I grow citrus and a thing called pineapple guava which, my mother and Barbara assure me, can be resolved into jelly! My mother still has her house in Beverly Hills and time marches on! "As for other items which have been hinted about my person, let's see — I do not wear English clothes. Not a sock did I buy in all England, let Bond Street beckon as it may. I did buy some English clothes to wear in the picture but what with the duty and rough wear and tear they got I gave them all away before I shipped for home. I have not a trace of an English accent, as you have observed. "I did try to acc|uire one, at first, thinking it would come in handy for the picture when, as a Yank at Oxford I am supposed to be quite Anglicized at the picture's end. But after losing my way in a maze of Cockney dialects and Kentish dialects and dialects from Surry and Shropshire and this 'shire and that, I gave it up and stuck to the Nebraskan I was born to. I have no trouble with the old familiar right hand drive because I never really learned the left hand drive oyer there. My house was twenty-five miles from the studio. I didn't know the roads nor did I have time to familiarize myself with the country and so I rented a car and a chauffeur. And felt like a damned fool, if I may say so, never having been chauffeur-driven before. "I am four months and some days older than I was when I went away, there's no denying that. But whether I am older and quieter or younger and gayer I wouldn't be knowing. It all depends, I fear, on the mood, the wax or wane of the moon, the hour of the night and what I've eaten for dinner," laughed Bob. "I cannot," he continued, with pleasurable malice, "discourse learnedly or romantically about the women of other nations, don't you know, because I didn't meet the ladies. I didn't have one single date the whole time I was away. Not one. I STILL think Hollywood is the place of places to live. I'm modern enough, I guess, to like the white new houses, the newness and beginningness of it all. It looked good to me as my plane sighted it, flying in. I do want, very much, to go back to England. I didn't have a chance to really see it. I didn't even do any of the touristy things. I did not see the Royal Family nor visit the Cheshire Cheese and sit in the chair Charles Dickens once occupied. I didn't visit the Tower of London nor the British Museum. But I want to go back and do all of these things. I want very much to go back to Sweden. I've always had a terriffic yen to travel. If I've changed in any way, it's in an accentuation of that yen. "I've been asked what I missed most, looking back on Hollywood from so many thousands of miles away. You guess ! Right. Naturally, I missed my mother and Barbara the most, and our friends. Next I missed my car. In the studio I missed, most of all, the prop boys and carpenters and electricians who, over here, are my friends. I missed not being able to call the crew by their first names. I got so that I could decipher their dialects after a time and then everything was jake. "No, I wasn't homesick. I'm not the homesick type. I knew that I was coming home again, anyway and besides, I adjust easily and happily to any environment. I'm the adaptable kind who could be equally content in a hovel or in a palace, in Paris or in Peoria. Doesn't matter a hoot in -hell to me where I live !" I said, "How did you feel about your own importance in the scheme of things when you got away and saw something of the 'great, wide, wonderful world?' How did you feel about the importance of pictures, the importance of Hollywood?" "I don't know that I've ever had any passionate convictions about my own importance," Bob said, "except that I feel that any man doing any job is important in his own little niche, however small. A nail-driver at work on a skyscraper must have a steady hand and a steady purpose or he's apt to cause the whole structure to go haywire. As for Hollywood, well, Hollywood and New York are the two places everyone asks questions about, everywhere. But you know, they don't ask so many questions about personalities as they used to do, I'm told. "Tell you one thing I learned, all right, and that's how important the foreign market is to us here in Hollywood. Boy ! The foreign market can make all the difference between a star being tops on the box office list or twenty-seventh. It's a huge market, you see, wherever our pictures are freely admitted, England, Scandinavia, France and so on. T LEARNED, too," said Bob, "why the ■•■ English actors are such swell actorsLeslie Howard, Ronald Colman, Bart Marshall, Alan Mowbray and the others. It's because they care about the theatre, never get very far away from it, will drop any movie contract, however fat, to do a thing on the stage. It's because they would rather be paid a ha'penny worth of dried herring for a good part on the stage than millions for a picture. They care about acting, the English tradition, not care about Shakespeare and tradition, not about notoriety and noise-makers blaring how good they are. This chap Griffith Jones, who has as big a part as mine in the picture, if not bigger, he's terrific. The best type of Englishman, long and lean, with aquiline features. I told him he'd be tremendous in Hollywood but I doubt that he would come here. Not while the old Drury Lane and others still use actors. "As for myself," said Bob, and now the depth of his voice was deeper, his blue eyes black with seriousness, "I don't care what I play so long as I can get out of dress suits, leading man things, romantic roles, all that tinsel. I've been limited, much too limited in the stories I've played in, the parts I've played. I'd play a Western if I could do one. I want to get parts where I can wear overalls, leave my hair uncombed and unbrushed. forget to shave for a few days. My first picture after my return is to be 'Three Comrades' with Bob Young, Franchot Tone and Margaret Sullavan, I believe. That's okay. Notliing dressed-up, fancied-up about that!" 78