Photoplay (Jan - Jun 1922)

The Girl on the Cover A girl you haven't heard much about: Corinne Griffith By DELIGHT EVANS She is an amazing contradiction, this Corinne Cjriffith. She is, we might say, a chameleon with a soul. This new portrait shows her in one of her soft ana silken moments CORINNE GRIFFITH has the face of an early Italian angel and the hands of a twentieth-century-American business woman. Her hands are large and thin and sturdy. Her face — you do not need to be reminded of her face. She is ancient Athens in tailor-mades. She is one of Raphael's saints with a hat on. She is Sappho in a smock. She is Swinburne's poems, paper-bound. And that is really all I have to say about her. The rest will only be repetition. You will notice that the hands of great women are never lovely. The Venus de Milo may have had beautiful hands, but there is no proof of it. To get down to current cases: Mary Pickford's little hands are not artistic. Lillian Gish has unusual hands, and expressive hands, but an artist would never approve of them. Elsie Ferguson's are like that, too. Corinne Griffith's do not go with the exquisite rest of her. But they hold the secret of her success. They prove that beauty was not the only reason for her present fame and fortune. They are working hands. Watch them the next time you see her on the screen. Corinne Griffith, no matter what you may have believed about her from Vitagraph's billboards and her popularity, is not really a star. The reason I know she isn't a star is that she has no camp-chair at the studio with her name on the back. She sits in any old chair. And when I watched her one day doing the Salome sequence for the first reels of "The Single 38 Track." every time she walked some feathers fell off, and she managed through it all to keep her aloof dignity and her air of a young debutante who is indeed working in pictures for a day or so, but after that will go back to being a debutante again. In spite of the fact that she has probably performed before the camera with less on than any other star with the possible exception of her good friend Betty Blythe, Corinne Griffith is an aristocrat. She has an unconscious insolence that is charming. She is not a snob in fact, but she has all the appearance of one. When I was with her once in her well-upholstered limousine, she saw a flapper staring at her with round and awed eyes. She smiled at her and carelessly nodded: a very young American queen paying accustomed recognition to the homage of one of her subjects. She seems to have a Southern indifference. I cannot imagine her being surprised at anything. When she was discovered at a Mardi Gras. I can see her smiling faintly and almost languidly promising to come and be camera-tested. You may have heard the story of her ''discovery," and then again you may not. She went to school at the Sacred Heart Convent in New Orleans, where her family moved from Texarkana, Texas. She was a first-season debutante when she went to her first Mardi Gras. She happened to meet there Rollin S. Sturgeon, who was then a director for Vitagraph in the West. " He was immediately impressed with her charm, and approached her mother with the idea of putting Corinne in pictures. Mrs. Griffith demurred a little; then she saw that her daughter wanted to do that more than anything else, so she accompanied her to California, where Corinne was given a job. She stuck at it, and was soon advanced to leads, and in two years, stardom. She must have "held the thought" for success. There is no other way to explain it. She is not a girl who has ever had to fight for fame. She would probably be the first to indignantly deny this, but I am sure it is true. I do not mean by this that she has never worked night and day to finish a picture; that she has not worked and hoped for success. It is simply that she has always had that invaluable conviction that she was, one day, to be very famous indeed. And she is right. She is studying dancing now. It is simply a preparation for a stage career that she may undertake. She has probably had an intimation that some day a great theatrical manager will beg her to star in one of his musical comedies. She can