Motion Picture Classic (Jul-Dec 1930)

Hollywood Sob Stories spoke of a strange "Love Cult" into which she had been initiated in moonlit jungle ceremonies. Nobody realized the simple truth. Edwina Booth is not yet quite back from Africa. The cheerful, instalment-furnished bungalow living-room, with the neighbors dropping in, and four high-school brothers and sisters chatting of basketball and algebra tests, does not look haunted. Her mother wisely has not scattered any African souvenirs — skins, guns, knives, savage wardrums — about the room. "Everything I brought back," Edwina murmurs, "was something that had been killed or something that was meant for killing—" But there is a far-away look in her eyes, as if even yet she sees scenes very different from the safe, familiar, homely ones around her. "When I first came back, everyone asked me about my trip and I talked, and talked about it," she tells you. "I talked so fast, trying to get everything^ in! I guess I talked too much. The doctor tells me now to try not to think about Africa. {Continued from page 2g) What did it seem like to read of these things in the heart of Africa? "I don't think," says Edwina, smiling slowly, "I could tell you just what it seemed like. No, I don 't think /fiOttW put it into words . . ." She came from a tree-shaded Pasadena street with a church on each corner. "I used to hear those church bells in Horrors Without Relief IT'S sort of like shell-shock, I suppose. While I was away, it didn 't seem so strange or — or terrifying. Why, here at home I could never bear to see anything hurt. If I saw a kitten run over by an automobile, I was sick for days. In Africa I 'd watch them bring in the day's kill without a shudder and stand looking on while they skinned it. They make a long slash down the stomach first, you know. I don 't know whether it 's the heat or why it happens, but as soon as the slit is made, all the insides burst out with a sort of explosion. I could stand there and watch as cool as you please. But I was holding it all in. Too many new and different experiences happened to me all at once. There wasn 't time to feel everything then, so I was saving it up. I knew I didn't dare let go or I couldn't go on working." In her letters, her mother tells you, Edwina never mentioned her own suffering, the heat and flies and sunstroke and other distressing things. She did not give herself even that outlet. One has a picture of the bewildered girl (she was only eighteen and had never been away from home in her life before), tortured with fever and homesickness, sitting in the outlandishness of an African camp, with savage sights and smells and sounds all about her, forcing herself to write enthusiastically and happily to the folks six thousand miles away. She Heard The Bells AND the letters from home!" says . Edwina, breathlessly. "We got the mails only once a month. I could hear the little river steamer chugging in at midnight and I would run out and get my mail. And light a lamp and read all the letters . . ." Home letters, full of the small intimate details of crowded family life; "Dad washed the car Saturday" — "I wish you could see the new dining-rOom curtains, cross-bar dimity with yellow flowers" — "The twins are in the High-School play. They miss your help" — "And listen. Sis, if I make the Varsity football team next fall ..." 84 Bareheaded, barefooted, scantily dressed, under a noonday sun, Edwina Booth, above, led the native warriers into the jungle. Below, Edwina with the pigmies, whom she still can see Africa," she says. "I couldn 't' sleep more than a few minutes at a time, nights, and they would wake me up. Then I 'd find that it was just the voodoo drums in the native village. One night, I was sleeping outside the hut under a tree for air, and I heard Mother calling me. I got up and ran. A native boy caught hold of my arm just as I was going down the bank into the Nile." What Were Fevers, Dangers? A HOME girl. A director saw her walking on the street and suggested pictures. Two disheartening years without a break and then — suddenly the only woman's part in "Trader Horn." She didn't have to take it, you say? Then you don't know Hollywood or a girl 's ambitions. The money they would pay her was very small. Never mind, it was her Great Chance. It would make her famous overnight! The fevers, the dangers? The doctor warned her that blondes were more susceptible to the sun than brunettes, and that she was running a risk to go. Already she had fainted once in the California sun, playing a bit in a picture. She took the inoculations against typhoid and left town on the first lap of her safari with a fever of a hundred and four. "We had only five days to decide," her mother says. "I thought to myself, 'If another girl goes and makes a great success, Edwina will never forgive me. Her father tried to talk to the studio people. It was all confused, hurried, unreal . . . like a dream. Our Edwina going to Africa. I just couldn't seem to take it all in. If we'd known . . ." Trader Horn Shook His Head WHEN Trader Horn himself visited the M-G-M Studio after the company had left, he shook his head, hearing that a young girl had gone. "Some of them '11 never come back alive," he prophesied. "If they escape the sun, there's the bites of poison creatures, and if they escape that, there's the sickness . . . malaria, dysentery. It's a bad place they've gone to . . .bad." When Edwina Booth came back, the ship's doctor examined her. "She might as well be dead already," he told another member of the company. "I can't find any pulse." Five months in the interior of Africa. The men of the company wore tropical suits, pith helmets, spine pads against the insidious sun. "But of course I was playing a goddess in a native temple," Edwina explains simply. " I couldn't wear many clothes, and I had to go bareheaded." It is the Hollywood code of "Anything for the sake of the picture." For the sake of the picture Edwina spent hours under the secret sun, striking from a grey sky at the tiny nerves of the spine and the brain. Twice— for the sake of the picture — she was sunstruck. She chased wild animals, and walked barefoot through tall grass where Death might be hiding. She took it quite for granted — wasn 't it all for the sake of the picture? She is proud of the fact that they never lost a day's work on her account. "The worst was not sleeping," she rehiembers as she turns those remote blue eyes on you,". . . not more than ten minutes at a time all those months. And since I 've been home, it 's the same. I wake up, thinking I'm back, thinking I hear the drums, and the hyenas screaming and the natives chanting. Did you know that when any of the village people are sick they take them out and abandon them in the forest to die? We saw that happen. We saw them eat the day 's kill ... a bufifalo .... raw, tearing it apart with their hands. We saw dances ..." Her voice trails off. Her mother shudders. The dark rumors return to mind; Love Cults . . . native ceremonials . . . blood brothers to the black men . . . pigmies like gnomes . . . naked warriors painted into fiends with colored clays . . . With an effort she comes back to the Culver City bungalow. "But I'm much better. I can sleep an hour at a time now. I 'm ready to go back to work whenever they need me. It was terrible — -and wonderful too. But I feel as if I 've had enough emotions to last me all my life. I want to buy new clothes now, and go places and dance and see my friends, and most of all I want to work. 1 hope my next picture will be a young love story. . ' ' If there is gratitude in Hollywood for a little trouper, Edwina Booth's next picture will be in the nature of a Reward of Valor. But is there gratitude? We shall wait and