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THE STRA
Photograph by Ernest A. Bachrack
NGE CASE !
♦ ♦ ♦ An actor who hates
acting. A star who would rather not be a star. Successful in the movies as he is, Eric has only one ambition— to become a great writer. He means what he says, too
By CHARLES GRAYSON
I WAS living in a small house on the edge of the Pacific when I became acquainted with the strange case of this young fellow who heretofore I had known merely as a pleasant acquaintance and a brilliant actor. One night, working late, there was a pounding on the door and he crashed in out of a windstorm— his hair wild, his clothes dishevelled, his eyes excited and afraid.
"I saw your light," he said (he was living in a cottage farther down the beach) ; "and T don't want to be alone. Do you mind?" He was silent for a moment, then he explained : "I've just finished reading 'Savage Messiah.' " He refused a drink, a seat by the fire, to talk — merely continued to pace about the living-room. Then suddenly his restless glance fell on my typewriter. Slumping down before it he was quiet for a long time. Then slowly the keys began to rattle.
Eric Linden is affected by books like "Savage Messiah" — because he is affected by all accounts and details of the poverty and richness, the glamour and misery, the largeness and the smallness and the complicated strangeness of life. That is because at twenty-two he has more creative temperament than nine-tenths of the people in the celluloid city — and knows it. And fears that he may waste this gift before he can give expression to it.
For Eric wants to be a writer. He wants to be a writer more than any writer I know. Instead, he paints his face and drives in each day to a studio to do work he hates with the whole-souled hatred of a man who detests his job.
IF I only had myself," he once exclaimed, "God, I could get along on water and birdseed! But if I did chuck everything that has to do with acting, what about my mother and brother and sister? I've got to keep going