Photoplay (Jul - Dec 1919)

" ' There is a stronger thing in life than love, and that is friendship. My ■wife and I are friends — -comrades, in every sense of the word, for two people to be able to laugh at the same things is the best guarantee of happiness I know.' There was a pause as Mr de Mille ceased 8p« THROUGH the speaking tube, attached to my helmet, Cecil B. de Mille's voice sounded hollow and sepulchral. "I am," he intoned, with an assumption of much gravity, "a great believer in the philosophy which says that nothing in life is worth taking too seriously." This was on the occasion of the first interview which ever really took place in an aeroplane. He had shut off the motor, which, incidentally, did not make me feel very com 'ortable. It was my first flight and I had an awkward idea that he might not be able to get the old engine started again. I turned, nodding a hasty agreement, and was reassured by hearing it pick up in a steady hum. We were moving slowly — that is, I thought we were moving slowly — over the oil fields on the outskirts of Los Angeles. During the entire flight, I had only three uncomfortable moments and this seeming slowness of movement was the cause of the first of them. We had reached de Mille field about five o'clock in the afternoon, the best possible time in which to fly. But we had a wait of several minutes while a search was instituted for the helmet with the speaking tube, which is not used very often and was in consequence difficult to find. "We'll be travelling, at the slowest," said Mr. de Mille, "seventy miles an hour, though you will not think that you are going nearly so fast." Lieutenant Thompson, who was there to give Jeannie MacPherson a lesson on landings, was helping me on with a big leather coat heavily lined. The plane we were to use was a big red one. Manager Flebbe, of the field, came over to ask if I wanted the extra set of controls left in so that I could see how the "ship'' was being run. "It will make it more interesting for you," said "C. B." 'But if you touch them we'll be likely to land on an ear." I said hastily that perhaps they had better be taken out;, but they were le.'t in after all. I would not, I said empatically, ' touch them on purpose, and it was explained that I couldn't possibly touch them accidentally still, I was a little worried. At the moment when we stopped climbing, I imagined that we were not moving at all. We seemed to be standing quite still with the earth marked out in odd precise little squares stretched out below us. It was then, for the fraction of an 51 instant, that I felt uneasy. I could not beheve that we were going at any seventy miles an hour (though we were), and thought that something must have gone wrong. A glance at^ Mr. de Mille reassured me. He was smiling. He smiled 1 every time I looked at him. For this I was grateful. If he had chosen any one of those moments to feel worried about some detail of his latest picture the entire flight would have been spoilt for me. "No," he repeated. "Nothing in life is worth worr>'ing over too much, but at the same time I take my work seriously — tragically so, sometimes." C. B. de Mille's nature is an almost perfect mixture of the mental and emotional. In speech he is keen, incisive, briUiant, and his sense of humor is such that one frequently suspects him of saying things for no other reason than to see how the other person is going to take them. He possesses to a high degree the purely intellectual gi ts of satire and sarcasm. With these, he has a broad fine philosophy and an ambition that is absolutely unbounded. He is, he will tell you, the best loafer in the world. He can spend hours lolling on the bank of some mountain stream without giving a thought to anything in particular, enjoying keenly the treat to his senses; the smell of fresh earth, the warm hght of sunshine, the sound of the water. ; It is for this reason that his work never grows stale.