Motion Picture Classic (May 1921 - Dec 1927)

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=4^ ©ojip As Related to MAUDE CHEATHAM Editor’s Note. — This is the sixth of an intimate series Classic is running on the unliappiest period in the lives of wellknoum stars, and how they overcame it. We hope these stories will he an inspiration to all who read them. No matter what Theodore Roberts says, we think his darkest hour would come if he were ordered to give up the omnipresent cigar PUFFING the omnipresent cigar, Theodore Roberts reviewed his past. “Odd thing,” said he, in his crisp, pleasant voice, “but Australia has figured in the two most important steps in my life — yet I have never been there. “The first time was while I was playing the role of Svengali in ‘Trilby,’ in New York. An Australian manager engaged me for this same part in a company he was taking back to his country, and 1 was delighted with the prospects of establishing myself in this new field. At the last moment, there was a change of plan and they took someone else for Svengali. I cannot tell you how great a disappointment this was. I had set my heart on it and grown to believe it meant my entire future. Tho I am naturally optimistic, I’ll admit I permitted myself to fret and worry over this a great deal, and it stands out as my darkest experience. However, immediately following ‘Trilby,’ I was in a. number of big successes and became well known, with, also, a big boost in salary, and then saw how truly fortunate I was in losing the Australian engagement. “The second time Australia entered my plans she led me into motion pictures, which I consider my greatest good fortune. I had been touring the country in vaudeville and had an offer to take my skit to Australia. T came to Los Angeles to close my Orpheum season, and while waiting here to make sure there were no loopholes in my contract before ^ailing, I met Cecil de Mille, who made me a proposition to go into pictures which I accepted." It is to be expected that Lillian Gish’s darkest hour would have to dp with the personal element rather than the professional “IT was when we were making ‘Orphans of the Storm,’ ” Lillian Gish said, “last summer — a terrible summer — an elongated ’dark hour’ for me. Mother was desperately ill in a hospital in New York. We, of course, were working in Mamaroneck. and working at the top bent of our several energies. Henriette was something of a departure for me. and I felt that I needed every bit of resource and vitality I possessed to put her across. That worried me. too, you see. How Dorothy and I ever got thru those days I shall never know. Every night — as soon as we had finished work — often without removing our make-up or doing up our hair, we would jump into a car and drive at full speed for the hospital in town. I sometimes think that I used to hold my breath all the way in for fear of what I would learn when I arrived. On some occasions we would return again after we had seen mother and continue to work. My pictured ride to the guillotine held little more terror for Henriette than those rides to the hospital held for me. The heat was ferocious We were nervously exhausted anyway, and there was the constant dread of photographing badly because of the strain we were under. And there was the continuous state of never knowing what we would find at the journey’s end. “I have had many saddened moments in my life — many disappointments but no hour quite so dark as that hour — that long, long hour that was last summer