Photoplay (Jul - Dec 1921)

YOU NEVER KNOW YOUR LUCK Photoplay's artist changes his medium and paints a delightful picture with words. By RALPH BARTON The most insignificant figure in the above group is Alice Terry — one of the extras in an old Triangle production starring Dorothy Dalton. IT was my first trip ro California and I was disappointed. I saw no flowers and no trees except occasional groups of palms and eucalyptus. Even after we had reached Los Angeles I thought we were still in the desert. The fantastic, squatty bungalows — miles of them — depressed me. The climate was wretched— four seasons every day: spring in the morning, summer at noon, fall in the evening and winter at night. I looked forward to a long siege of nostalgia and bronchitis. And then I met Alice Tern7! Now I rave about California like a Native Son. You have seen her, of course, and know what I mean. Before you saw her you believed yourself safely beyond the Sentimental Age. You felt that you could never again revert to that youthful emotional state when you contemplated suicide because the leading lady of the local stock company had married the stage-manager, and when you clipped photographs of Lillian Russell from magazines and gazed surreptitiously at them during the algebra lesson. The first thousand feet of the picture in which you first saw Miss Terry melted the snows that had drifted round your cardiac plexus since Commencement Day, and the last thousand feet rendered you fifteen and maudlin. Moreover, Alice Terry can act — she is what they call in Hollywood "a great little trooper" — but it is not altogether her acting which carries you back to your high school days and makes you long to embrace another Hopeless Love. It is the way in which she unconsciously projects her adorable weakness and appealing femininity from the screen into every corner of the house. As you watch her you feel that here is a woman who does not particularly want to vote, or box, or be Alice Terry, present day, one in the films, as Eugenie Grande an aviator, or join a Reform society, or dominate her husband. Her sex appeal is a wholesome and natural one, and yet vastly stronger than that of the dear departed Vampires; and her sweetness is more alluring and infinitely less cloying than that of the Pollyannas. She makes the men in her audiences feel as romantic as they did when they first read the King Arthur tales, and there is not a woman in the house who would balk at introducing her to friend husband. I met California and Alice the same afternoon. Neither of them tallied with my preconceived ideas. But whereas California fell far short of the Californians' descriptions of it, Alice proved far lovelier than the cool, blonde, worried Marguerite Laurier of "The Four Horsemen," whom I expected to see in Hollywood. She had the poise of a patrician and the modesty of a Maud Muller. Her coloring was exquisite, and of the Dresden-doll, pink-and-white tonality. Her dancing blue eyes and the mobile corners of her small, sensitive mouth indicated the presence of a bubbling sense of humor. Her voice, almost contralto, made her pronounced Middle-Western accent seem smooth and melodious. But the thing which startled me the most — which, in fact, almost dumfounded me — was her hair. It was red-brown and very dark! The}' had gilded the lily! Marguerite Laurier's golden hair had been a wig! I couldn't forgive them and demanded to know who was responsible. Rex Ingram gave reasons for the change — ■ good reasons, I suppose, since they came from him — and yet there she stood before me twice as lovely in her own hair. I shall never be convinced that the wig was {Continued on page 97) of the most significant figures t in "The Conquering Power."