Photoplay (Jul - Dec 1927)

I Spent a MILLION to Dress Up By Charles Ray ONCE in the dear dead days beyond recall, Raymond Hitchcock used to sing a song which I would like to make the text upon which to hang a few remarks. I have forgotten the title of this lyric that Benjamin Hapgood Burt wrote, but I can never forget the refrain which ran: "All dressed up and no place to go." Nor can I forget the blended comedy and pathos with which Mr. Hitchcock sang it. There's a reason why this should stick in my memory. In fact, there are more than a million reasons why it should so stick. For I, myself, spent more than a million dollars to dress up — and, after I had dressed up, I found I hadn't a single gol-darned place to go. But I had a place to go when I first went into pictures for $35 a week, and I have a place to go now that, as a free-lance actor, I am drawing more than S3, 500 a week. To my present goal I am going as fast as I can, but it is not of the present nor of the remote past that I would like to tell you through Photoplay. Rather, it is of the years between. Because, in the hitherto unwritten history of those years When Charlie wore clothes like this, he averaged over six hundred "fan" letters a week there is much of that best kind of comedy — the kind that lies close to a tear. There is more of the stuff of encouragement which may help some other pursuer of an ideal, some other restless chaser of a dream, to keep true to his ideal and his dream and so, before the end, snatch victory from defeat. One thing that warms my heart in the telling is the memory that at two crucial points in my career I found doors of opportunity opened to me by men who would not have lifted a hand for me if they had not done me the honor to believe I was an artist first, a business man afterward; that my work meant more to me than money, and that though I wanted money — as who of us does not? — I wanted much more, oh, so much more, to do the best work of which I was capable. I hope that does not sound high-falutin'. I don't mean it to be. But I'm not a professional writer, I'm a professional actor, and I'm conscious that when it comes to expressing myself in words I am not an expert. But I am sincere. And I feel I am not the only person in the world who hates to have sincerity mistaken for gush. Certainly, neither of those two men who helped me was a gusher. Each was a hard-headed picture producer, but each showed he had — like so many other business men have — the soul of an artist. One is alive now, so I won't mention his name. He has no more use for flattery than I have. The other has gone where no words of mine can reach him. This was Tom Ince. He gave me my start. I'll never forget him or cease to be grateful. And I'll never forget the start. I was eighteen. I'd been in a dramatic school. And then, all up and down the Pacific [continued on page 131] When he put on soup and fish, his mail dropped to nothing 47