Photoplay (Jul - Dec 1931)

Photoplay Magazine for September, 1931 To relieve HAY FEVER MISERY Use Kleenex in place of handkerchiefs So inexpensive you use once and destroy. . . no laundering HAY FEVER victims . . . join the thousands of fellow sufferers who have rejoiced in the discovery of Kleenex! You know how marvelously soft Kleenex is — those absorbent tissues so widely used for removing face creams. Used in place of handkerchiefs, they relieve much of the wretchedness during hay fever season when soft, dry handkerchiefs are so necessary. You know only too well, how miserable a handkerchief becomes. Embarrassing to carry, disgusting to look at, irritating to use, unpleasant to wash. Inexpensive— use and destroy Kleenex costs so little that you may destroy each tissue immediately after use. And how grateful is its downy softness to inflamed and sensitive skin! Kleenex absorbs nearly twice as fast as the softest of old linen handkerchiefs. You'll find Kleenex at your nearest drug, dry goods or department store. Use Kleenex for dusting and polishing, in place of unsanitary cloths. Buy an extra package for the automobile. It's handy in a score of ways when motoring. %£ | C* C M CV Dlmpoaable rVLLLIlLA TISSUES Kleenex Company, Lake Michigan Bldg., Chicago, Illinois. Please send free trial supply of Kleenex. Name _ — Street. City State.. The Way I See It [ CONTINUED FROM PAGE 65 ] depression. People with far more reputation and experience than I were without engagements, without prospects of ever getting any. New York, it seemed to me, was the only hope. Out of a kind of professional and financial bankruptcy, I laid out all but my last few pounds in a second-class passage to America and arrived in New York, armed with a fat sheaf of letters of introduction to film and theatrical people. "DUT the depression I found in New York ••-'made London seem comparatively prosperous. All the picture studios were closed ; all the theatrical managers were gloomily shaking their heads. A boarding house in Brooklyn succeeded my first quarters in a Times Square hotel, and, even with two weeks of a walk-on part at $50 a week, how to pay the landlady was becoming a pressing problem. I was beginning to see that my schedule of simple success might have large gaps in it. From sheer economic necessity, I took parts in road companies, with "The Green Goddess" and "East is West." Such roles were useless in building a career in America, but I had no choice. I think it was at about this time that I began to feel the need of that anchor to windward, that private guarantee against having to go through useless motions in order to stay alive, which would have sounded merely ridiculous to me two years before. At any rate, when "East is West" returned to New York, I had determined to get myself out of this fly-by-night profession, much as I liked the active aspects of it, and spend the rest of my life playing safe, earning something and saving something. I had not been a failure. My kind of success had been worse than failure. A flash of luck here, a short, quick recognition there, a touch of success in something else, with long intervals of perplexity between. And just when the last ray of hope had gone out, something else would turn up to keep me alive and tantalized for a little while longer. But I was through with it now, and went earnestly about getting a steady, reliable job. I had been a steamship clerk in London; and clerks of some sort must be needed in New York. Perhaps they were; but no one ever admitted it in my hearing. I was only too willing to devote myself to earning my board and lodging with a few dollars left over, week in and week out; the difficulty was that the opportunity to do so did not offer, pursue it as earnestly as I might. And, at that point, my erratic fate threw me back into the theater with a handsome offer from Mr. Henry Miller to play opposite Miss Ruth Chatterton in the New York production of "La Tendresse. " WHAT moved Mr. Miller to this rash step I never knew. At the time, it appealed to my new prudence as an opportunity to build up a small nest-egg for future emergencies, and I accepted it. But when I found myself back on the stage, working again at the only profession I knew, well treated, even actively praised by the newspapers, I found out that I liked it too well to give it up. This was my work, if I could only maintain my resolution to save money, and so prevent getting soaked to the skin in the rainy days of which the actor's life is full. The fact that, although an Englishman born, f could pass for an Italian, again took a hand in my life. Mr. Henry King, then planning to take Miss Lillian Gish to Italy to make "The White Sister" appeared during the fourth week of "La Tendresse" and made strenuous efforts to secure me for her leading man. It was true that I had worked a little in English pictures and that he offered me a salary well above what Mr. Miller could pay for my services; but I had no reason to suppose that I would do well enough in pictures to make the experiment worth while. Mr. King was persuasive; Mr. Miller was generous about releasing me; but in the end it was the hope of laying by enough money for a breathing spell in which to take stock of myself which brought about my consent. For the first time in my life I was actively concerned about where I wanted to go and how I wanted to get there. I sometimes wonder why my real success began as soon as I got into this frame of mind. If I were superstitious, I should say that fate was rewarding me for an effort to make sense out of myself. AT any rate, "The White Sister" and ■*»"RomoIa" which succeeded it on the same trip with Mr. King and Miss Gish, did so well by me that, while I was still in Italy, there came an offer from Mr. Samuel Goldwyn for my services in Hollywood. There could be no breathing-spell, but the consciousness of having put by a considerable sum of money, plus a certain pride in my ability to do so, had made the breathing spell unnecessary. My fan mail from "The White Sister" convinced me that there was something in Hollywood for me; and I accepted Mr. Goldwyn's offer, beginning an association which has continued seven years. The nature of that association has been bound up with my new attitude. The first picture in which he used me brought a steadily increasing reputation, so that, when the time came for him to take up my option, I found myself with several offers from other studios. I think Mr. Goldwyn offered me less money than any of the others; I know that several offers were considerably larger than his. But I stayed with Mr. Goldwyn. Three years before, I should have been possessed of only a few hundred dollars, no matter what I had been earning, and would have been quite capable of accepting the highest offer merely because it was the highest. In my old way of thinking, that would have been the logical thing to do. But, now, I still had a large portion of my recent earnings intact. I had been realizing, through my new feeling for my work, that Mr. Goldwyn's way of handling me was the way I wanted to be handled. Now, with money in the bank, I could afford to disregard the temporary advantage of a few hundred dollars more per week and assume a bit of financial disadvantage for the sake of long-run values. In other words, I was now in a position where I could forget about the necessity of keeping my job, and could devote myself to the consideration of how to do my job properly. I could afford to take the job which offered the most opportunity for me, and such an attitude toward matters would have been impossible if those lean months in New York and sad experience in the frantic, hand-to-mouth life of the theater had not bullied me into seeing things in a new light. I SOON found that being able to surrender the added revenue which might have come from a rapid succession of "factory" pictures and over-night exploitation was extremely fortunate. Mr. Goldwyn's supervision of my work was amazingly shrewd and careful. He built up what is known in theatrical terms as my "draw" slowly, cautiously and permanently. And I was beginning to be financially independent so that, when the "talkies" came