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Adela Rogers St.Johns INTERVIEWS
AL JOLSON
By ADELA ROGERS ST.JOHNS
Al Jolson pulls you on your toes the moment you meet him. There is a challenge in the air. Probably a chronological report of a Jolson year wouldn't register a wasted half hour. No matter what he is doing, Jolson always will be getting or giving — something.
AL JOLSON on the screen — f\ Al Jolson on the stage — J \ Al Jolson on the radio — ■
Al Jolson on the phonograph —
He is known to millions.
But Al Jolson "in person" is known to fewer people than any other big motion-picture star except Garbo.
In his work, he is always r hidden behind black face or characterization.
The real man has submerged himself in his work from the beginning, because he thinks that his work is the only worth-while thing about him.
But there he is wrong.
Al Jolson and his wife, the popular Ruby Keeler of the Broadway stage. Jolson is very much in love. In Hollywood the Jolsons live in an apartment. "We haven't any servant problem or any guest problem and we don't have to worry about the swimming pool and the furnace", say they.
Because he is a grand person, with a philosophy as shrewd and humorous as Will Rogers', a brain that creates and achieves, and a spirit toward life that inspires. Those things are always worth while knowing about.
TT is a privilege to let you share a visit with Al -*• Jolson which I had recently and I know he would be glad to share it because Al Johson respects the public, the theater-going public, tremendously. In fact, though he didn't say it in just those words, he considers the people who go to see his pictures as more intelligent, more sensitive and more capable of appreciation than a lot of producers who make pictures.
The singer of "Mammy" and "Sonny Boy" pulls you up onto your toes the moment you meet him. There is no trace of pose or of self-consciousness about him. He takes you right in stride, as the athlete says. If he thought about it at all, it would seem a waste of time to him to be anything but sincere. But under his bright brown eye you are moved to put forth your best. There is a challenge in the air. For all his kindliness, he has no time for slackers, no understanding of them.
Probably a chronological report of a Jolson year wouldn't register a wasted half hour. No matter what he was doing, he'd always be getting and giving — something.
AL JOLSON has never, in the smallest sense, become *~*-part of Hollywood.
You know he must be in Hollywood because he makes pictures there. Those who recognize him — and many don't — may catch glimpses of him on the golf course, paying strict attention to the matter in hand. Aside from that the great artist who really pioneered talking pictures, who woke the picture producers and the American public to the possibilities of the talkies, isn't known
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