Movie Classic (Jan-Jul 1934)

// Hollywood Is a Chain Gang — But I Don't Want to Escape, Says Warner Baxter glance. No one paid the slightest attention to me. Why should they? I'm just one of what Clive Brook called 'the chain gang' here in Hollywood. "That was a swell interview with Clive, but I don't entirely agree with it. Hollywood is a chain gang, all right, but don't you fool yourself, or be fooled — not one of us wants to escape from it. You couldn't drive us away. I know you couldn't drive me away. I hope I'm an actor until the last bell rings. And if I can't be in front of the camera, I hope to God I can be somewhere in back of it. Would Be Miserable Elsewhere " T'D be utterly miserable anywhere else in J_ the world. I wouldn't know what to do or where to go. It's getting worse all the time. There was a time when I liked to take trips and be away for a few weeks or a few months. Now, I chafe at the bit after a week at sea or wherever I go. I think I may be unique among actors in that I have never said, because I have never thought, that I want to be out of it all, to escape. "Hollywood is not only the safest place in the world for an actor from the point of view of going unmolested and being allowed to live his own life, if he really wants to live that way. I even do the marketing and bring home bundles of spinach and steak off and on, and no one thinks it odd. But it is also the safest place for a married actor. "They say, and write, that there are matrimonial dangers in Hollywood; that divorce is epidemic; that marriages cannot last here, among the film people. Well, I only know that mine has lasted for more than fifteen years and I know, too, that these same people who have divorced here after a year or two would have divorced within three months anywhere else in the world. It was the people and not the place. "Here, an actor is subject to temptations from beautiful girls and seductive women, of course. The world's most beautiful girls and most seductive women are not gathered together in any other one spot. But that's one safety valve — there are so many of 'em that, after a time, it is like working in a candy shop and disdaining to eat a gumdrop. "Here, also, one actor is only one among many. He shares the spotlight, so flattering elsewhere, with all the Ronald Colmans and Clark Gables and Robert Montgomerys and Leslie Howards of the place. I, Warner Baxter, share with these men. I get only a very small percentage of the attentions and a correspondingly small share of the temptations. If I were anywhere else in the world, I would be a center of attraction — not because I am I, Heaven knows, but because I am Warner Baxter, a publicized name, a recognized 'attraction,' fresh from the Midway. A curiosity. Don't Need Romance for Escape " T JERE, too, we are among our own kind, £ 1 people with the same interests as ours, who speak our language. We talk things over ■ — the Ronald Colmans and I. We know what these flattering girls really want when they flatter. We know how much of it is for us as men and how much for us as possible stepping stones to bigger and better parts. As men of all crafts talk over the various problems they encounter, so we here in Hollywood talk over our problems and the things we are up against and why. We'd be lonely if we couldn't. "Then there is the little matter of escape. Bankers, brokers, merchants, com (Continued from page iq) mercial business men of all kinds are forever seeking what the psychologists call 'escape' from the humdrum monotony of their lives. Some of them escape by traveling. Some of them 'go back to the land.' Some of them go in for hunting, for golf; a good many of them distract themselves by playing about with delightful women — lovely women who are to them what food would be to a starving, isolated man, for they are novelties and not a part of their every-day, workaday lives. "In Hollywood we do not have to seek escape — we are escaping all the time, every day, every week, with every new part. I am never Warner Baxter for more than a week or a month at a time. I live a thousand lives and know a thousand loves. I don't have time to get tired of being myself or of being my wife's husband. Before there can be any palling, any monotony, I escape again into some other character with all his problems and passions and troubles and delights. "I can't get tired of making love to my wife. I can't wonder what it might be like to hold some other women in my arms, to kiss her, to make love to her because I have to make love to other women, year after year on the screen. I have to keep shifting from one woman to another. In real life I can — and do — love j ust one woman-. And the permanence of that one love seems marvelous, almost miraculous. "When1 played The Cisco Kid, for instance— well, by what other means could a man know such romance, such high adventure, such complete departure from himself and all of his habits and life and love? I WAS The Cisco Kid for the duration of that production, and when I came back to being Warner Baxter again, it was rather a novelty. "I always escape from myself when I am working. When I made 'Six Hours to Live,' for instance, I was absolutely that man. I slept with him or in him at night. I thought as he thought. I had, I knew, only six hours to live and I lived, more or less, accordingly. I found new values in my life and in the people around me. I did things differently. Certain layers had been peeled off life and a new aspect of things was revealed to me. The "Escapes" Hollywood Offers " (TO, there is no real excuse for a man in O Hollywood to seek pastures new, either domestically or any other way. Hollywood gives him travel — location trips are always taking us hither and yon. Hollywood gives him release into other characters, and Hollywood gives him the escape of making love to other women and yet remaining true to his wife and safe in his own home. "From the purely materialistic point of view/' thundered Warner, "it is idiocy to complain about Hollywood. It is very fine to believe that men should work for the joy of working — and creating. But men don't. We work for money and we want the money to buy us beautiful homes, give us leisure and travel and fun and importance. Where else in the world could a man of my age be as secure and as successful as I am to-day, here in Hollywood? The answer is, precisely, NOWHERE. "I had one other ambition in my life — I once thought that I would like to be a surgeon. If I had been — where would I be to-day? Unless I were the most successful surgeon living, really, I wouldn't have a tenth of what I do have. And as far as the mission of it all is concerned — the satisfying sense of feeling that you are doing something in this world to benefit your fellowmen — well, I think we of the screen are rather by way of being surgeons, too. Certainly, we do help to amputate the blues and we do benefit the circulation and we do serve as psychological outlets and emotional releases for millions of people. We do not use the knife — we use the mighty scalpel of entertainment. There is no mightier weapon. "A man in Hollywood, an actor in Hollywood, is safely married for another reason, too. You may say that it is a too-materialistic one, but you must take into consideration that with human beings, who are, after all, both body and soul, the materialistic is very closely allied with the spiritual and the psychological. What I'm getting at is that there is this reason for safety — the wife's reason. Wives Have Dreams Fulfilled " ALL women, if they are really feminine, £\ love luxury, love beautiful homes and cars and jewels and entertaining. The actor in Hollywood is usually able to give his wife these things and at an earlier age than men of other occupations. And when he does, when his wife is luxuriously housed and clothed and made to feel secure, it is rare, indeed, that she will want or try to escape from so warmly feathered a nest. If she does want to escape, it is usually into another, and equally warm nest. "Winnie and I" — he is married to Winifred Bryson — "are building our permanent home here in Hollywood, the kind of home we have dreamed of all our lives. Into this house we are putting all the fancies and ideas and notions we have picked up after years of watching other peoples' homes, the things they had in them and the things they didn't have. I've always thought, for instance, that it's rather silly the way large houses have the kitchen on one floor and no facilities for even making a cup of tea in any other part of the house. So, we are having an electric plate installed in the living room. It will be behind a carved wood panel and it won't in any way mar the appearance of the room, but whenever Winnie and I feel like making a cup of tea for ourselves we won't have to go into the kitchen to do it. "I've always felt it was rather silly, too, and decidedly inconvenient to have to move around a house, to different rooms, for games, cards, music, reading and so on. So I've built an enormous living room and put all these things and facilities into it. "But the things that go into it — outside of the comfortable chairs and plenty of them, and the smoking tables with matches and full regalia and plenty of them — are incidental to the fact that it will be a home. Such a home as only Hollywood could have given us, safely, bought and paid for — our own. "I tell you, Hollywood is the only safe place in the world for an actor. He can't be an egotist because there are too many other actors crowding into the spotlight with him. He can't plead that he wants to escape because he does escape all the time. He can't plead boredom with marriage because he has too much of love-making and outside 'romance' on the screen. He can't complain because he is comfortable, for Heaven's sake — and if he does, then he is a fool and may the thunders and lightnings strike him! I want to stay in Hollywood for the rest of my life. It would take thunder and lightning to blast me out of it!" 50