Photoplay (Jan - Jun 1926)

on Christmas The holiday problem of Hollywood bachelor a invitations in their numerical order. Those thai are not accepted will be promptly returned with courteous rejection slip-and, where future promise is shown, with little notes ol encouragement. Xovarro has invited me to spend Christmas in the Mexican style known as -(oh, well, 1 can't be bothered calling him up tor the spoiling, and anyhow you couldn't pronounce it. let alone spend it). It consists of marching around the patio in a profession carrying a plateau of snowllakes (any grade of cotton will do) with statues of Mary, Joseph and the Child. At each door in the court you Stop and sing a request for nigs. The people inside then sing six stanzas hack meaning \o," or maybe if they're real mean they sing something worse and throw something hard at you. After making the rounds asking for rooms in about thirty-six different verses and getting nothing but wise-cracks, you finally hit one where the door is thrown open and you're welcomed with candles and music and ki>ses from relatives. Gifts are thrown onto the pavement outside and you scramble merrily until you get something which probably has been stepped on. Unfortunately I'm not gifted for singing, or marching either. At about the second door w here they sang out, "Nothing doing," I'd be looking around for a bicycle or else take a park bench as on previous occasions. Regarding the merry scramble for presents where you get your bridge work knocked out and come up with a broken doll that says. " Mama!" I haven't participated since a Sunday school event when I accidentally kicked the superintendent's child and he said " Mama!" and I got drummed out, with a motto reading, "Suff:rlittlechildren." QORIXXE GRIFFITH has invited me to turkey dinner. Every day while I was on an orange juice diet trying to get handsomelike Malcolm McGregor, Willis Goldbeck. Ramon Novarro and all the other boys who take them, Corinne would call up and invite me to a chicken or turkey dinner. Xow nobody can have turkey or chicken as often as that and be honest, no matter what their salary may be. Trie only people I ever knew who had chicken every day were some colored folk and they died suddenly one night in a friend's hen roost, of acute indigestion, the coroner said — due to "inability to digest lead. I've also found that people who talk turkey usually serve canned salmon. "When friends file by they'll say, 'A smile on his face — how lifelike! — Oh, well, he's probably better off' " The last time 1 was at Corinne's she served a buffet supper where you helped yourself, and you should have seen my suit when I finished. It was a sight! Marie Prevost preceded me in making the rounds of the table, and all I got was mint jelly, that being the only thing that Marie didn't just love. I guess that all she and Kenneth Harlan eat at home are appetizers. Another thing, Corinne always tactfully suggests that you take a dip in the swimming pool before sitting down to dinner. Even when you ask plaintively if you couldn't be fumigated or sprinkled with insect powder just as well, she'll insist upon you going into the pool at least once. pOLA NEGRI gets sore every time you turn down one of her invitations. But the chances are if you accept you'll arrive to find that Pola has left foi Del Monte or Tia Juana without even leaving enough to feed the dogs. Last Christmas Pola was suddenly stricken with piety, dashed off to Del Monte and invited all the fathers of Carmel mission to have dinner with her. I like the fathers and would enjoy dinner with them, but I'm not going to take chances on Pola's secular mood. You're just as liable to find her surrounded with a bunch of deacons singing, "Lips that touch tobacco and wine shall never, no never, touch mine." Or in a psalm fest for boot [ CONTINUED ON PAGE IO7 ] 35