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It Pays To Be Poor
Chester Morris Is Cashing In As The Poorest Star In Town
By
ELISABETH GOLDBECK
IT H O U G H T Chester Morris was the whitehaired boy of the talkies from the beginning. I didn't know he had an early struggle to his name, so far as Hollywood was concerned. I thought he simply made "Alibi," was besieged with offers on every side, commanded a fabulous salary, and had since been living off the fat of the land, regarding a thousand dollars a week as mere pin money.
Imagine my surprise to find that, for four months after "Alibi" was made, there wasn't a studio in Hollywood that would let Chester in. That he suffered the agonies of failure and poverty before he reached his present eminence.
And that now, having just built a barbecue oven in his back yard, he hasn't enough money left to buy the meat.
It was that old discoverer, D. W. Griffith, who made the first tests of Chester, while he was playing in New York in "Crime." Roland West saw those tests, when he was looking for a believable villain to play in "Alibi." He wired, offering Chester a United Artists' contract.
Chester didn't want to go. He didn't have
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sense enough. It wa his manager, A Woods, who arrange the whole thing an finally hustled him to Hollywood.
Chester, that fiend^ ish crook, arrived witi the baby's bathtub un-1 der one arm and ^ straw suitcase in tin other. He was rather relieved that Roland West wasn't at the train.
Broadway Came Off
THE next day, he presented himself 'f*' to Mr. West, arrayed in spats, a derby hat, cane, and gloves. Roland took one look at him.
"H'm," he said. "Actor. Well, we don't have anything like that out here. You'll have to give that up."
Chester went to work. He finished "Alibi." United Artists, simply not Morris ' conscious, failed to take up his option. For four long months he hung around Hollywood, trying to get work. But no one had ever heard of him, and no one apparently wanted to.
"Those four months were horrible," Chester said. "I hired an agent. I hired a pressagent, and I was in a Fool's Paradise every morning at breakfast when I read things about myself in the paper. I thought I was a big shot. But I soon found out that nobody read them but other actors out of work. My press-agent {Continued on Bull page 102)