Photoplay (Jul-Dec 1930)

Photoplay Magazine for September, 1930 holding a high note, expertly and musically. The applause was great. Estelle Ixjwed, and sang a little love song, by way of imore. \n<\, when she stepped into her dressing-room, Jack stood waiting for her. "I wouldn't even bet you couldn't make a watch, if you set out to do it," he told her. Only a few months prior to this, Estelle had criticized someone's singing. "I suppose you could do better?" Jack had said, the way husbands will! "I could do as well," Ivstcllc had replied. "I know I could." In New York she placed herself in the hands of a noted vocal teacher. She practiced for long hours every day, cancelling many social and professional engagements. Her tour in vaudeville and Jack's surprise when he entered the theater that day were the result. A ND it is all very t>-pical of Estelle Taylor. ■'^As she says: ".\ccomplishment to my mind is a matter of pulling your body up to your vision." Estelle was reared by her grandmother in a little house where the inflexible standards of the small town prevailed. The parlor was kept closed except when the minister paid his weekly call, or someone died, or was married. If there wasn't sand on the tloor swept into neat little geometrical patterns, it was typically Pennsylvania Dutch in every other respect. You can imagine how a girl's ambitions to go on the stage would be received in such an environment. Estclle's grandmother always regretted she let Estelle sing "Pony Boy" in that church entertainment. She felt it had put ideas into her head. In vain Estelle pleaded for an opportunity to fit herself for the stage. She was asking for something the old people must deny her. They explained patiently it was for her own good. And in those restless months they seemed quite as unhappy as Estelle. Estelle's eyes got bigger and her face got paler, as the months went on. The family doctor was a wiser man than manj'. "Let her go to the city," he told her grandparents. "Let her take a dramatic course at some good school. Then she can come home and teach elocution until she marries. She's the active kind that has to have something to do." So Estelle was permitted to go to the city. Her tuition at the dramatic school was paid in advance and she was allowed fifteen dollars a week for board. "You're to go right home from school," her grandmother cautioned her dozens of times. "You're to speak to no one you don't know." But they implanted no fear of the city in Estelle. Her first night in New York she spent every penny she had saved for months on the food she was obliged to eat while she watched both the first and second performance of Gus Edwards' Revue in a cabaret. .■\t school she really worked hard. At last her hunger was being satisfied. Here she was encouraged to express herself. Previously she had been urged to suppress herself, to fit into the conventional small town mold. The day she graduated her ticket home arrived. That meant, of course, that her allowance would cease. But she knew it was utterly impossible for her to go back to that little town and spend her life teaching neighbors' children gestures pertinent to "Paul Kevere's Ride," and "The Wreck of the Hesperus." She wrote her grandparents that she was living the way they would wish her to live, earning a meager but honest living, and that one day they would be proud of lier. She was posing for hats at three dollars an hour. The wardrobe she had brought from home was growing shabby. She had to look the other way when she passed pretty new clothes in shop windows, .^nd her meals were so plain that she used to dream of great trays of pastries and elephantine bags of chocolate caramels. But she had seen a vision and she was pulling her body up to it. Through a friend she had met at the school she went downtown to a rehearsal hall and watched George Ilobart make trj'outs for "Come On, Charlie." They were rehearsing a scene in which two girls, one of them Lilyan Tashman, interviewed Lynn Overman, who was the lead. The other girl was not giving Hobart what he wanted. P STEELE sat in an old wooden chair against -•-'the wall and watched. She found herself saying the lines and doing a little business. Finally she could endure it no longer. "Could I try?" she asked. Hobart agreed. Estelle saw the girl she played as a contrast to Miss Tashman. She acted with flamboyance and spoke in a deep voice. "The part's yours," Hobart told her. iSTovv she had to spend every minute rehearsing. There was no time to pose for hats. And her salary wouldn't start until the play opened. She could stall on her room rent, but she had to eat. She knew better than to write her grandparents for help. They would answer that a good home awaited her — and send her another railroad ticket. Rehearsals dragged^ along. Some mornings Estelle awoke dizzy from hunger. .\nd finally the dreaded day came when she had to spend her last change for an apple and a bottle of milk. There seemed nothing else to do but admit defeat, with the opportunity she had dreamed about and worked for just around the comer . , , H3 Next Mo/////— There Will Be More of These Inspiring Stories of Picture Stars Who Fought Poverty and Discouragement and Won What happened when Estelle Taylor had to ask for a salary advance on her first stage engagement. What gave Bebe Daniels the courage to apply for the title role in "Rio Rita" and the ability to carry it to sensational success. How May Allison's golden beauty got her the first stage part of her career, but how many months of discouragement and seeming defeat preceded it. How a little Swedish girl, Anna Querentia Nilsson, worked as a domestic servant in America, rather than return to her home in Sweden and forget her dreams. 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