Motion Picture Story Magazine (Aug-Dec 1913)

wiin I BEN F. WILSON, OF THE EDISON COMPANY *<f AM of the firm opinion that actors' early hardships are but the caviare that wliets tlieir professional appetites, and that without them the game and its results for most of us would be 'flat, stale and unprofitable,' " said Ben F. Wilson, reminiscent of his early barnstorming and stock days. Mr. Wilson, who fairly leaped into popularity and the approval of that apparently necessary evil, the dramatic critic, by his remarkable creation of the role of "Tim" McCormick, the political boss in the "Governor and the Boss," in Brooklyn five years ago, has long since forsaken the footlights and the welcome applause of his admirers for the more remunerative tho equally congenial Motion Picture field, and is now facing the camera lens as leading man in one of the Edison companies. Mr. Wilson's birthplace, Centerville, Iowa, was the home of the sisters, Edna May and Cecil Spooner, the Paytons, and more than one hundred other actors who have added honor to the town and a name for themselves in the theatrical world. Whether this quiet Iowa village was the breeding-place of the histrionic germ with which so many, including Mr. Wilson, became inoculated, or whether the latter's •desire for a public career was occasioned by his daily intercourse during one entire summer with the Spooner family, on a visit to their home,' he professes ignorance. He soon found, however, that his chosen vocation was not all "beer and skittles," but filled with hard knocks and with a goal— like the armful of hay to the treadmill horse — just beyond his reach. An amusing incident occurring during the first few months of the actor's theatrical life is best told in his own words, tho these fail to convey the inimitable manner of its telling. "Broke and despondent," said Mr. Wilson, "I was offered work as substitute for a night clerk in a country hotel. The clerk's father had been suddenly killed that day, and, to lessen his grief, the son had foolishly become intoxicated. "The landlord of the hotel, in offering me the night's work, had failed to inform me tliat the dead man lay covered with a sheet in the hotel's best room on the top floor, the windows of which had been left open to allow a free passage of air over the body. "Pearly in the evening a robbery had been committed in the town, the recital of wliich had resulted in the death of the clerk's father ; and all of this, together with the stoiy of the robbery and the fact that the robber was still at large, had put my nerves in an awful state. My agitation was increased during the night by the occasional tapping on the office window by the town's aged night watchman as he made his rounds and the creaking and groaning of the ramshackle old building. "Toward morning the wind arose. Shutters banged and strange noises were heard about the house, and as four o'clock struck and I realized that I must call a lodger on the top floor who wished to catch an early train, pride alone prevented me from chucking the job and hiding in one of the many vacant rooms on the ground floor. "Plucking up my courage, I managed to mount the first flight, when the oldfashioned lamp I carried, exhausting its last drops of oil, sputtered and went out. Liglitmg matches as I went, I reached the top floor, but, mistaking the lodger's room, I entered the death-chamber, the door of which was slightly ajar. 108