Motion Picture Magazine (Feb-Jul 1925)

not live in hotels and furnished rooms, that smelled of boiled cabbage. I look back and see the child I was, always sitting in corners to get out of grown peoples' way, looking on at things, putting himself clumsily to bed in rooms with chocolate-striped wall-paper, being buttoned up the back by grumbling chambermaids with cold hands, lurking about the wings in theaters, sworn at by stage-hands, breathing the atmosphere of grease-paint and rank oil from the foot lamps that is the air of the provincial theater, winding short legs desperately about high stools in all-night lunch rooms, while the plates of pies and bowls of custard on the shelves receded and grew to enormous size before sleepy eyes. CJometimes I had a part in the cast. Once I joined ^ Eddie Foy's stock company for a tour, but mostly I played the child of my beautiful mother, who acted the role of motherhood touchingly — on the stage. Sham kisses, mock tenderness, pretense. . . . Often in a crisis of my mother's affairs I would be shipped hastily away to relatives who made no attempt to conceal the fact that they looked on me as a necessary evil. My grandfather's ranch in Utah was one of these periodical refuges. I was a child of the city, accustomed to noise and people and excitement, and I hated the country ; the stillness was so intense that I could not sleep, the wide empty horizons terrified me. the barnyard with its acrid odors of manure and sodden straw made me ill. More often, however, mv mother boarded (1Z-.M3T10N PICTURR I Wiizel At the left is a scene from "The Merry Widow," in which he plays with Mae Murray. Above a portrait taken six years ago >•*.,,<* me out with people who were strangers. There was the dressmaker on Amsterdam Avenue who came to our lodgings when I was six to take me away. She held me on her knees, smirked, and patted my hand with black-kid fingers. "'What a dear little boy," she whinnied, ''we're going to be great friends, lovey ! You needn't give him a thought, Ma'am, I will take care of him as tho he was my own child." Her daughter was a prostitute. The money my mother sent for my board, clothes and shoes and little presents for me went to buy those two women drink, which I was sent out to the corner saloon to get for them. I was so short that I couldn't peer over the bar except by climbing on the brass rail. Hungry ? Oh God, yes ! Hungry enough to eat out of garbage pails, tho I dont remember that I ever did. Feet thru my shoes, abused by the dressmaker who thereby kept her promise to treat me as her own child. I heard words no child should know the meaning of, saw sights no young eyes should see. I was only seven, but I knew more about the world than many people ever discover — bitter lessons of life learned from chambermaids, drunkards, livery-stable hostlers, street women. . , , One day, as I was lugging a pail of beer back to the fourth-floor flat, I caught sight, in the crowd on the sidewalk, of a woman who had played in one of my mother's companies. I ran to her, clutching her skirts, pleading with the terrible eloquence of despair : "Take me away — take me away with you — dont let her get me — she's bad, bad!" So I was sent back to my mother. Bert Lytell was playing a youthful leading man with her in a Rochester stock theater. There was another stepfather by now, the juvenile in her company, so I was sent to school. (Continued on page 123) / 39 / ' PAS t