Motion Picture Magazine (Feb-Jul 1925)

Write to tke Stars THE letters the motion picture players are really interested in are those which contain honest criticism, or offer suggestions, or praise some special bit of work in a picture. These notes are the only ones read personally by the stars. It was the volume of letters of this sort from the fans that decided Mary Pickford not to make Cinderella Donna ! An old man of eighty-five has been writing charming, whimsical notes to "The Dear Little Madame" for two years. Pola's fan mail varies from the little girl "named Martha, aged ten," who writes in painful, childish letters that. "When my chum, Jennie and me play movie star, Jennie is Norma Talmadge but I am always Pola Negri" — to love letters that come under the fire law and are hot to the touch, proposals, mostly from men in the lonely spots of the earth, South American diamond merchants, trappers, millionaire ranchmen (enclosing snap-shots of lean, bronzed men with wistful eyes), sailors and, above all, foreigners, exiles in a strange land, couched in quaint terms. "You send me your picture ! You do me that honor ! Think of it, Madame Negri — me so maigre, you so great!" The Japanese are ardent movie fans, but few of them can express their honorable sentiments of sincerest devotion in English. So in Japanese city squares there are booths where a professional fan letterwriter sits all day and covers rice paper with polite compliments for Sun-Hair Mary Pickford and Hon. Chaplin, who walks in different directions. In India they go still further and sell printed fan letter-forms with the name to be filled in according to the writer's preferences. Even our own country seems to have professional letter-writers. A man advertised lately in a New York paper that he would guarantee to write a note to any movie star, put in such terms that he or she would send a personal reply ! Tho there are still many fans who believe that Santa Claus brings presents, the stork brings babies, and a two-cent stamp invested in a letter to a screen hero or heroine will bring a reply from one whose time is worth two hundred dollars a day, some of the more sophisticated movie fans invent all sorts of artful schemes to acquire their idol's actual autograph. They send presents of jewelry, candy, home-made cake, fancy-work and money, which are returned if valuable, and given to charity if not. They send their letters marked Personal or Important or Serious Matter, by air mail, registered mail or special delivery, and some of them enclose checks made out to the stars and needing their own signature before they can be cashed. Benny Alexander and others of the younger generation of actors are not exempt from love letters Hilda Highschool fills six sheets of tinted note-paper with exclamations, capital letters, and underlined words to Richard Dix or Jack Gilbert or Milton Sills "Can letters are of A several very definite classes : First in numbers are the letters from those, mostly children, who want something for nothing. They usually enclose (or mclose or even awclose) a two-cent stamp and "Will you please send me a big picture of yourself, not one of the little ones like you sent Sadie Greenhaum in the next block, last week." Sometimes they forget to en, in or (inclose the stamp. When a child who collects movie stars' pictures grows up, he becomes an autograph fiend. One of the greatest nuisances of the fan-mail reader is the writer who sends in an autograph book to be signed, or a sofa-pillow top with Roosevelt's signature embroidered in green silk and Jack Johnson's in red. It is not betraying any state secrets to say that very few autographs of movie stars which find their way on pictures or paper into the homes of strangers, were written by the stars themselves. There is one man at the biggest studio in Hollywood who can imitate the handwriting of every player on the lot. A rubber-stamp signs the photographs, and a secretary or publicity man signs the letters. When Wanda Hawley was a new Lasky star, some enterprising person conceived the notion of having monogrammed note-paper made with W and H entwined in gilt, and of hiring fifty girls to write personal letters to all the exhibitors purporting to be from Wanda, urging them, in the friendliest terms, to come to see her. The idea was to stress the intimate, human side of the business, and interest the exhibitors in viewing her first picture. But the writer of the form letter overdid the thing. The wives of the exhibitors, on their nocg^ turnal forays thru their hus band's pockets, discovered the friendly little notes all signed Wanda Hawley in a girlish hand — fifty different girlish hands and, never having heard {Continued on page 84) A woman of thirty-four wrote to Cecil B. De Mille of f erin g herself for adoption, as she had heard that he has several other adopted, children 25 PAG t