The New Movie Magazine (Dec 1929-May 1930)

The Best Story About Mary Pickford Ever Written (Continued from page 107) his career and he was painfully nervous. Douglas Fairbanks, always vitally interested in great athletic events, had invited Charlie to come down to his hotel and have a quiet dinner, to get away from the continual talk and atmosphere of the training camp. Charlie went. During the evening he had a talk with Mary and she infallibly sensed his nervousness as she listened to his talk. Then, very quietly, she said, "You are defeating yourself. You are thinking in the wrong channels. I don't know anything about running or athletics. But I do know that you are allowing a lot of things to enter into this that have no business there. You are giving yourself a lot of unnecessary opponents. You think because you are older and are up against a lot of youngsters that you may be beaten. You think people are saying you are through. You have accepted the thought of defeat. After all, you have just one thing to do. Go out on that track tomorrow and run as fast as you can. It's very simple, isn't if.'" Charlie said it did sound simple, and that it cleared up all the tension under which he had been laboring. He went out out the next day and ran one of the greatest races of his life. Few women think — few women have disciplined minds. Mary Pickford is the rare exception. IT is very plain now that Mary has been through the valley of the shadow. Her mother's death was more than a great loss. It shook her life to its foundations, tore away part of herself, attacked her faith in its most vulnerable spot. For a time she crashed down into a dark and bottomless pit. Not until that very last night did she Elsie Janis, comedienne, impersonator and musical comedy star, has deserted Broadway and the stage for Hollywood. She is devoting her time to writing musical numbers and you will see some of them in the Paramount revue, Paramount on Parade." Miss Janis, by the way, was co-author of 'Love, Your Magic Spel! Is Everywhere," Gloria Swanson's song, with Edmund Goulding. 108 believe that her mother would go. For years, while Mrs. Pickford grew steadily worse, she forced back her fear behind a wall of faith, and prayed with all the reverence and humility of her heart that her mother might be spared. When death had triumphed, she walked alone in darkness, as every soul must. No hand could comfort, no written or spoken word could make her believe. The mystery of death bore down upon her — as it does at some time upon everyone — and rebellion and fear kept her company. But the light came. Life had done its very worst to her and she had survived and been consoled. From it she rose with sadness in her eyes, with a wounded heart, but with a strong and courageous spirit, a new and proven faith. Tried in the furnace of those days when she watched her mother suffer and could not help, brought low by irreparable loss, she found a stability of thought which will never desert her. "I used to wake up in those first nights after my mother left me," she said, "and my only comfort was that this thing could never happen to me again. Grief numbs at first. Then, with realization, comes pain. But if we ask for light, there comes from God that measure of help and uplift without which the world couldn't survive one day. "I kiiow now surely — oh, so surely — ■ that the same God who gave my mother to me will keep her for me. I know that if I live to be ninety, she will be beside me every day of my life. Not in any form, but in the love she proved to me and the things of her mind which I knew so well. Her love isn't gone from the world because it goes into every act of mine all day long. "Even in this life, we are separated from those we love, by differences of opinion, by work, by distance, by time. That is the way my mother and I are separated — by differing planes of consciousness. I am only afraid that I will do something here that will keep me away from her high plane longer than need be. FEAR has left me in a large measure, because I have faced it. All the great teachers of the ages have told us that we must never cling too strongly to any one thing. A materialistic sense of possession is the most terrible thing in the world and brings the most dreadful results. Love must rise above that, or we become the victim of fear at once, and fear as everyone knows is the most destructive force in the world. "Have you ever noticed that great happiness often brings fear? When we are miserable or unhappy, we don't fear much. When we are happy, it beats in our heart that our happiness might be taken from us. You must love life to fear death, you must love someone deeply to fear loss, you must love beauty and luxury to fear poverty. Yet we want to love, we can't get much happiness in our lives today without caring about things. Maybe the great saints and sages could, but it is hard for us. "So we have to feel somewhere inside us that if we try to eliminate selfishness, to love without possession, we will be protected by some power greater than we are."