Motion Picture (Feb-Jul 1931)

Girls Are Going Ga-Ga But Stardom's Just A Big Worry To Lew Ay res IEW AYRES was depressed. Lew , it ap^f peared, was in the throes of learning what every star finds out sooner or later. The surprising fact that all your troubles are not ended when you get your "break" and achieve a starring contract. That one excellent and ballyhooed picture does not mean that you are going to be able to follow it with other pictures of equal ex cellence, attended by ballyhoo of the same caliber. He was discovering the truth of the old axiom that, once having attained success in pictures, it is harder to keep it than it was to get it in the first place. Which is a bitter truth. He was just as astonished and just as bitter as other young stars have been on making the identical discovery. Lew has reached the stage at which he wails about the stories he is getting and what "they" are doing to him. He is, in short, becoming a seasoned motion picture actor. "I used to think in those first days, when I was struggling to get a job, that nothing could ever be as bad as that again," he said, mournfully. "But I didn't know. A failure then didn't matter, really. It was just a setback. But now I'm having my chance and failure might mean the end of everything for me. I might never have another opportunity! Those Cookie Days "r I ""HERE used to be times when I didn't have enough to eat. J_ Did I ever tell you about the time I lived for days and days on apples and little cookies? And I hadn't had a square meal for weeks before that. "It didn't seem to hurt me, though. I didn't get pale and wan or anything. I suppose it was because I was young then. I doubt whether I could stand it now!" By JOAN 50 Lew must be all of twenty-one and the starving period was only a couple of years ago. But he talks in the tone of an old war horse of sixty-eight or so, relating the experiences of his youth. "Those worries weren't anything to the worries I have now," he confided. "That time — when I lived on the cookies — was just before my biggest failure. My very worst one. I was living with a chap who had played in the orchestra with me and neither of us had any money. At last somebody paid us seventy dollars which was coming to us for a little sound picture the orchestra had made. "It seemed like a lot of money. We spent it all in two days. We went out and had a lot of food first and then we called up some girls and took them to the Cocoanut Grove. "We had two dollars apiece left after our 'bust.' "I knew there was no place else where I could get any money. I had had a job offered me in a filling station a while before at twenty-five dollars a week and I hadn*t taken it because I wanted so terribly to get into pictures. I didn't know how to go about getting in, but I thought that I couldn't go on trying to find out how, if I had to work every day in a filling station. "It seemed like the end. I couldn't bear to think of trying to get along any more without enough to eat and with no money to pay rent and things. "I had a little car but I hadn't been driving it because I had no money to buy gas. I took my two dollars and had it filled and started home to San Diego. I felt like a terrible quitter. I thought maybe I should have taken the filling station job. after all — at least I could have stayed here where pictures mk, if I had. "I decided I'd get a job somewhere else and save my money so I could STANDISH (Continued on page 114)