Modern Screen (Dec 1934 - Nov 1935)

wood. Her days were so full of excitement and thrills that she never gave a thought to the years rushing by. Her work (she didn't call it her art, then) meant nothing beyond the things it gave her. Money to lavish on friends in that generous way of hers . . . clothes . . . parties . . . the opportunity of meeting people, gay, exciting people ... a taste of fame that in turn made her exciting to the people she found stimulating. Her nights were spent in dashing madly from one party to another, always in the fastest cars money could buy. Speed . . . change . . . that was the tempo of her life. Music . . . fast music . . . faster, music ... music racing in tune to her own restless pulses . . . Dancing .... she could never have enough of it . . . and every evening it was a new lad's arms that held her ... a new lad's eyes that laughed into hers. She had found a measure of success but critics did not wear out their typewriter ribbons hailing her as a Rachael or a Duse. But Joan Crawford did not care and there is a doubt she would have known then what those names meant. IT was young Fairbanks who taught her what they meant . . . what other things meant. In all the flurry of amazement that greeted their romance no one could have been more surprised than Joan herself that she had fallen in love with this studious, sensitive boy. And no one was more surprised than she at the contentment that came to her in making his life her own. Stars . . . she had probably thought the lights that flickered before Grauman's Chinese Theatre much more beautiful before . . . but now stars became tenderness. Books . . . she had never known how fascinating they could be, how they could open a whole world before her eyes. Music . . . how different was this music Douglas loved . . . this music that ached in your heart . . . from the turbulent rhythm she had once danced to. And home became more than a name to her. All these things worked their change in her and her audiences felt that change. Slowly Joan began to emerge from the jazzy, carefree roles she had played, into fuller, more interesting ones. But there was still a long way to go before she would come into her greatest glory . . . before she would stand at the very peak of her profession. Sorrow brought her to that peak. Sorrow moving in its devious way, carrying her first into the valley, that she would the more surely reach the pinnacle. Something happened to the love that had seemed so unchanging and so sure. And the fact that there is so little known of the thing that came between them, that neither Joan nor Douglas would ever discuss each other except in the friendly, civilized way that brought them the respect of everybody, shows how much that love must once have meant. Joan's face changed subtly. Her eyes held shadows, her mouth a hint of sadness that blotted out the smile that had always come too easily before. Her heart still held the things young Doug had given her . . . stars and music and gardens, fresh smelling and sweet in a spring rain . . . home and its quiet things, its gentle things. But Doug was no longer there to share them zvith her. Poignancy came to her then, in her nostalgia for the love that had slipped away from her. And it is that yearning for something lost and unforgotten that has crept into her art. Her art that used to be her work. . . . Sorrow brought glamor to Garbo. It's become quite the thing to laugh at those old pictures of the Greta Garbo which Mauritz Stiller brought with him from Sweden. And yet the glamorous Garbo emerged from the drab chrysalis of that gauche, bewildered girl. But that was afterwards, when Stiller lay in his lonely grave and the width of the Atlantic was between him and the girl he had loved so selflessly. There is no doubt that Garbo loved him, too . . • that he is the only man she ever really loved. Only for a while she lost sight of that love in the tumultuous wooing of John Gilbert ... in the strangeness of the new life opening before her. Mauritz Stiller did not live to see the new Garbo. The glamorous Garbo, the Garbo clothed in mystery, the enigmatic Garbo who has captured the imagination of the world. But even if he had lived he could never have seen her. For it was his death that brought her solitude. Garbo shut her sorrow in her heart. And one can only guess how much remorse there was mixed in that sorrow. She could no longer endure to be with people . . . people who laughed and talked and were so unconscious of the fact that the world lay in darkness, that the light of the sun and moon and stars had gone out forever more. In her sorrow she walked alone through soft spring rains and it was as if the heavens were weeping with her. And her eyes looked beyond the poppies in California fields to the delicate pink linnae trailing in her native woods, to the primroses and violets and bluebells they had gathered in their own Swedish meadows as they dreamed of glory in the promised land across the sea. Heartache . . . loneliness became her life . . . the private life she so jealously reserved for herself. And the gods laughed as they twisted these things into a satirical gift for her. Heartache . . . loneliness . . . they because mystery and glamor to her millions of fans. SORROW gave a new career to Mary Pickford. She had worked so hard all her life. As a child trudging from one manager's office to another, as a girl pioneering as gallantly as any frontier woman in the mazes of a new art, as a woman holding the stellar position in the industry she had helped make great. For years, fate gave with an unstinting hand to her. Fame ... a fortune financiers have envied . . . love. Most prodigally of all, it gave love to her. Her mother's love that was so wholly complete it left her independent of friendship, her brother Jack's love, gay and irresponsible, brightening her days with laughter. Then the dearest love of all, the love that flamed so quickly between her and Douglas Fairbanks, the love that endured for so many years. She grew from that shadow child who had won America's heart to the woman the years had made too mature for the roles her audiences demanded of her. She tried other roles but the public would have none of _ them. She knew that her work was finished. But it did not seem so hard then to retire. She could give all her time to the ones she loved. After all, love was the most important thing in the world. In a little more than a year all that love was swept away from her. Her mother died first. She had expected that, of course, in the months when Charlotte Pickford lay helpless in her last illness, but it was no less cruel for all that. And then Jack . . . her little brother . . . Jack who had loved gayety so, and charming, stimulating people . . . Jack dying alone in a hospital in Paris. Then Douglas that different loss must have been hardest of all . . . for it was to life she lost him. Mary looked into her sorrowing heart and found the things that had seemed unimportant before. She found friends again, the old ones she had not needed before, the new ones that opened unexpected vistas for her. She found the knowledge of life that had come to her in all those years of climbing and working. And out of them came her writing and the joy in it that has given her a new kind of happiness ... a lasting happiness. For she has discovered that writing is the one thing fate cannot take away from her. Let sorrow come again . . . her stories will be the richer for it. Let age come . . . those stories will only be the more under