Photoplay (Jul - Dec 1919)

The picture at the right deserves a poetic caption, but, looking at Mary, as you doubtless are and as we know w^e are — how^ can one ^vrite about the ocean? A TERRIBLE thing has happened to me. For years it has hung above my head, a sort of dread sword of fancy. At last it has descended. I have been interviewed — and am now writing an interview — with a perfectly normal person. I know it may not sound so terrible to you. But think — think of the weapons, the ammunition of which I am robbed at one fell swoop. Nobody ever writes about perfectly normal things. Just glance through your copy of the morning paper, or your favorite monthly magazine, and see if I'm not right. They may admire, reverence and acclaim — but they don't write about 'em. Probably the rarest thing in the world is a perfectly normal person. Do you know any? I once heard a famous lawyer deliver a brilliant address upon the subject "Are we all crazy?" Before he got through I was beyond argument. In a long and varied career of interviewing every kind of person from a President to a lizard that could go nine months without water, I have found but two — before. As for my personal acquaintances, my relations — let us draw a kindly veil. Of those two one was a six-day-old baby born in a jitney bus. and the other was a widow with a past. Perhaps hers was merely fatigue. Mary MacLaren is the third. Mary the normal had just reached home after a hard day's work at the Universal studio when I found her. At least she said it had been a hard day, but there was nothing in her serene, girlish face and figure to support her statement. She looked as fresh, as wholesome, as delightfully arcadian, from her shining, smooth hair to her pretty, slippered feet, as a hollyhock in an English garden. She has a pretty, interesting, intelligent face. She has a well modulated, medium-pitched voice. She is of a pleasing soft blondness that gratifies. but does not startle. She has all the qualifications of your sweetheart's sister — if you know what I mean. You could like her and admire her and enjoy every minute of her society and think she was the best scout and the finest kid and the squarest little sport without ever having it affect your loyalty to your own sweetheart in the least. And that, I decided, is the hold which she has acquired and is daily increasing, upon a public that first learned to know her in that famous Lois Weber production "Shoes." She's made a chum of her public and that sort of regard will outlast more violent infatuations. 56 An Everyday Diana Mary MacLaren leaves pictures behind her when she closes her dressing-room door By Louise Catherine Anderson "I often think," she said, settling back against the cushions, "that sometimes I feel rather like Cinderella and her glass slipper — only without the prince." And she was able to blush, a vivid, healthy blush, which any psychologist will tell you is a normal thing for a girl to do when talking about the inevitable awakening prince. "As I look back over the years since I left the chorus of the Winter Garden Company, and realize how many of my wishes have come true, I feel that a fairy godmother has watched over me. "When we first came to Los Angeles, my mother and I, we used to take the street car and ride through the beautiful residence districts. We weren't — exactly terribly poor, you know — but we weren't rich, either, and there were just us four women, my mother and my two sisters and myself. I'd lean out the car windows, and look at the big, rambling California houses set back in their rolling lawns, and I'd say, 'Oh, mama, if we could just live here and have a home like one of those!' I didn't dream then, nor when I got a chance as an extra girl at Universal, that it was going to come true in four short years." She lapsed into silence, her blue eyes taking in the details of her loveK home, the slope of lawn through the French doors in front, the shining roadster in the sweeping drivew'ay. "It seems too wonderful sometimes. I suppose