Motion Picture Magazine (Aug 1928-Jan 1929)

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Spurr THIS is the saga of an old, a secret sorrow. More years ago than either of us would dare to say, I had a Movie Hero. A Secret Sorrow. My first and, let it be laid to loyalty, my last. A Very Secret Sorrow because, in those pre-publicity days, the names of players were not given out to their adoring publics. For the laudable reason that if names were known, competitive bids would be made and the prices of stars would shoot. Up. Such being the case, fervid fan eyes fed only upon the shadowy profiles of their gelatin gods' and nothing was known of names, addresses, private lives or any of the comforts we have in our homes today. If all this was before your time, read on anyway, it's history. At any rate, this saga of an old and shadowy passion takes us back to the old Biograph days when D. W. Griffith was laboring in the vineyard with Our Mary, the sisters Gish, Blanche Sweet, James Kirkwood, Henry B. Walthall and others. Some dead and gone to glory. Some living and, Oh, Glory! During these neolithic days before "The Birth of a Nation" or Jackie Coogan or the Valentino frenzy, I used to sit in a darkened theater and await the coveted shadow of a dark, tense man with It, though we didn't 42 The J^ittleQolonel Carries On The Glory That Was Henry Walthall's Shines Again in the Talkies By-GLADYS HALL suspect It then. When he would appear, nameless and compelling, I would clutch whoever happened to be sitting next to me and shriek "There he is. That's the one I mean. That's my man." A mildly restraining "Is %at so?" would sometimes be my answer. o THE KID HIMSELF • NE night, in a ferry house, I happened to be investing in a magazine. I turned and — there he was! Life moved like that in those days. Jerkily. Like the movies. He was there. In the flesh. Himself. I clutched the Gent Who Puts Up With Me and yodeled"Look, look! See who's there! It's him!" My ungrammatical enthusiasm burst bounds and I was ushered aboard the whaler, heart too full for words and all that. Looking back on that little scene of my youth, remembering, I can never be totally scornful of the famished faces and hungry eyes surrounding the Cafe Montmartre on Hollywood Boulevard, movie openings and other places and occasions where the Great of the Screen may exhibit. For on their faces I catch a reflected glimpse of another face, as eager, as shameless, in other years — my own. I can remember how they feel though many a Kleig light has ridden the heavens since a star caused my pulses to vary. And back in those days, if anyone had ever told me that Henry B. Walthall — for it was he — would one day call for me in his car, at my home, to take me to luncheon, I would have laughed myself into a coma. Or sobbed over the sheer impossibility of such an eventuality. But it did happen. Yesterday. Cheer up, Public, any day the Wheel of Fate may turn and you will find John Gilbert or Emil Jannings or Lon Chaney at your own back door. {Continued on page pj)