Photoplay (Jan - Jun 1922)

Photoplay Magazine 32 Helcne regarded her in cool and annoying silence. Her little, dark eyes, as bright as a fox terrier's, never left Candace's face, studying, probing, hectically interested. She lighted a cigarette and inhaled it deeply, letting it sift through her nostrils so that she was rather like some barbaric, ugly idol before whom incense burned. All the time, t'andace Carr sat there, unhappily selfconscious, the blood sweeping into her cheeks just below the fair delicate skin, in a riot of color. "I'm not being clever, I mean just what I say," the girl's tone was only miliily insulting. "If a guy goes out to sell something, he's got to have a line to sell and a line to sell it with. Everybody in this business has a line, haven't they? They've all got some stunt, some pose, some type they set up and live by. Don't tell me. '""TROUBLE with you is, you're just a nice pretty gfrl. 1 And it's not enough, not in this rhinestone Bohemia, anyway. Everybody's more or less pretty out here and nobody wants you to be nice, so you start with zero. A man might like to spend his life with you, but there are ten million janes in Hollywood he'd rather spend a day with — and nobody in this trick town is looking for a life sentence. You're a prohibition beauty — no kick. And this gang is used to drinking synthetic gin." Candace Carr had lost her lovely color. It always came and went like that. "I — I think I see what you mean," she said. "Quick work," said Helene icily. "Now I'm going to diagram it. "What are you? You're a movie star on the small time — the second string — the five-reel-make-'em-in twenty-onedays program. Why? Because when the camera gets through with you there aren't many things in this world most people would rather look at. Sometimes you look so good it makes me cry. But I haven't been cutting your pictures for two years without knowing that you can't troop. Your idea of expressing most emotions is to wiggle your nose like a rabbit. As an actress, you photograph and wear clothes. When the director says, 'Expression number three, Miss Dumbell,' you are strangely absent. "But I admit, Candy, that if / looked like you and had my head piece, I'd be the first female president or something. If you're not pretty you've got to be smart, and if you aren't either you've got to be good, that's all." She stopped short, as though lassoed by the rope of her own words. "Well," she mused, lighting a fresh cigarette from the tip of her old one, "we might team. I've got the scenario and you've got the scenery. Anyway, here's what I mean. You don't register because you're stacked up against a bunch of females that could have taken Mark Anthony away from Cleopatra the first time they met. Think of the girls that are such riots — the ones that are the life of the party — everybody's favorite of the harem — the ones that get the men and sometimes keep 'em, and the specially built town cars and always keep 'em, and the big contracts that make you feel like you'd overlooked the skull and crossbones on the bottle when you took that last drink. They've all got a line." "You know I don't want to — " Candace tried to say softly. " T KNOW you don't. You're straight. But let me clear up *■ one little point for you, Candy. So are lots of other girls that are as popular as a case of Scotch. Some girls can get a contract out of a producer that will make his Wall Street backers chew the tape out of their tickers — and they won't even give him a lock of hair to put in the back of his watch. They've got a fast line. Of course, some of them will — but that's another story. "Look at Mimi Thorne. The nerve of an assistant director to begin with, and then she takes on all this Spanish senorita stuff. Her mother was a Spanish dancer from Brooklyn. Now she dances the La Paloma and plays a guitar. Somebody'll put a guitar in her coat-of-arms. Look at Lydia Brabrant, if you want somebody to cast for the life of the party. Where does she get it? The same place any respectable parrot gets his line of conversation. Listens and remembers, and her delivery's swell. I've heard her pull some of my own lines so good it took me ten minutes to recognize 'em. Look at Babs herself with that kid stuff — baby dresses that show her pretty legs and baby bonnets to set off those curls, and underneath it When she saw the expression that lay in young Major a mind like Du Barry and Catherine de Medici dished together. Look at Billy Sunday and Elinor Glyn and Henry Ford. "They picked out a good line and then they generated pep enough to put it over. But you — you're just Candace Carr, pretty as a marshmallow sundae and about as bright. Just a nice girl trying to get along. Everybody likes you. Any woman would trust you alone with her husband. Never heard a word against you. And remember that in this town the only reason they ever accept for a girl not doing things is that she don't get asked. "V/OU'D be all right running with a lot of selling platers at a I county fair, or putting on a eye-exhibition at the horse show, but this is a stake race on a fast track. There isn't a thing the matter with you, only you remind me of a minnow in a bowl with the goldfish. "You're a Mendelssohn song without words — and nobody in Hollywood has got time to write them in. A perfect chassis without a motor." Candace Carr sat quietly under the indictment, paling more and more and stroking her silver fox collar with one nervous little hand. "It's only — I suppose I'm silly, Helene," she murmured at last, and her voice was not quite steady, "but I'd like a real man all for myself. I'd like to get married, I think." "Well, if you're really pulling the glycerin because the men don't mob your limousine, we've got to think up a line. Of course there aren't an awful lot of real men. So many were killed in the war. He ought to have money and a good disposition. A line, that's what we need, and one that you can put over," finished the little dark girl, shoving the table away so that she could cross her knees in their worn tan knickers and stained puttees.