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Father
of f/k
Sport Shirt
Ha' Rcid— kinj; o{ mcKxirama; hither ot o\cr one hundred stajje successes and a son named W^illace
By
Arabella Boone
-3na all tnc lire of a youth in
HK has pure white njir'lis eye and speech. Hal Reifl has been a figure in the worlil of the theater for over half a century — and to-day he is "idea"
^ ' ■ ' " "^ •■ in a business where "ideas" count. Reid
if you talk to him about authors being "'•^"•' " Nonsense!" hell say, "why. I've written one
hundred and twenty-six plots in my day and my head is still swarrnini; with em!"'
There is a lot of Reid. pere. in Reid the younger. Hal Reid must have looked like Wally when he— Hal— first played supers in old stage plays with Fanny Dascnport and others.
Hal Reid as he appears today. At the left, in the title role of "The
Kcrntuckian. Here, according to our shirt editor, the first ".iport
shirt" graced heroic .shoulders.
His first line on any stage was something like "Will you <iance this with mc"-' as he oflerc-d his arm with a courtly how to the beautiful and gifted woman who was the idol of .American audiences; and whose niece, Dorothy, was later to marrj his son. Wallace!
Reid read that line well — an<l it led to others, as all good things do. But first we should go back to the earlier beginnings of an actor who acted only that he might gather the material to become a playwright. Suppose wc let him tell it :
"I started in at the bottom — my object was to study audiences from the stage, to sec what they would applaud, what they would laueh at, and what would make them cry. I went to Robinsons Opera House in Cincinnati, Ohio, and applied for a job as an extra— only they calle<l them su|Hrnumcrarics in those days before the movies came. Kiraify Brothers had on their Eiehty Days Around the World.' and in it was a water scene which represented the ocean. It was necessary to give the semblance of waves, and with others I got under a 'sea cloth' — a very dusty green baize and IxWibed up ami down to make one of the waves. It was rather dusty — that water
"But I kept at it" — and then came the period when he carried spear«. or offered his arm to the leading lady. ".After eight years— in which I slowly graduated from super to actor — I felt