Photoplay (Jul - Dec 1936)

98 PHOTOPLAY MAGAZINE FOR SEPTEMBER, 1936 THE STARS' SHOES SHINE WITH WHITTEMORE'S Adrienne Ames, lovely motion-picture star "'They look like netv, Marie!" "/t'a Whittemore's new White,* Miss Ames, the finest I've ever used!'" IN HOLLYWOOD, where perfection in dress is essential, Whittemore's Polishes keep the shoes of the stars fresh and gleaming! In the wardrobes of the hig studios — Paramount, RKO-Radio, Columbia — rows on rows of fine shoes are kept in perfect condition with Whittemore's. Probably many Hollywood stars don't even know that their shoes are shined with Whittemore's. But they do know that their j'ootivear always looks like new! Whittemore Bros making fine dressings for all kinds of shoes for nearly a century. Use Whittemore's for Hollywood perfection in shoe appearance! have been / n hi Marker, wardrobe mistress for Columbia, inspecting W hit temore-shined shoes. # Paulctte was thoroughly a kid having a good time. Are Paulette and Charlie married? Don't ask me. I don't know. I doubt if very many people do know. I know what I think. But what you think — and what you can prove — are rather dissimilar. I know that when I've been with them, Paulette and Charlie have always appeared thoroughly happy, seeming to enjoy themselves and life, with a very definite appreciation. Thai's the Charlie Chaplin and Paulette Goddard I know. \ V/HO now? I know Carole Lombard, the " girl who gamely fought her way up from extradom to her present heights — and who is probably the most "regular feller" in the whole movie field. And the adorable pixie Arline Judge. And the inimitable and limitless Norma Shearer. who came to our funny little "Wop dinner" party on her very first excursion into Hollywood night life. And, to harken back for a moment, the Jack Gilbert whose keen wit and eccentricities made him one of the most amazing of Hollywood figures. And the time that Fleek stood in line to buy three tickets to a movie theater — and how she got the last laugh — And — And — And — I'm awfully lucky. I know a lot of grand people! They're all "picture people," too! You ought to know them. Perhaps you will — Filming the World's Greatest Love Story [ CONTINUED FROM PAGE 48 ] • This sensational new White gives an even newshoe whiteness that does not flake or rub off. In three generous containers— hot tie, jar or tube. slipping into the tomb to find his Juliet against a sound background of air-transport motors? At the carved metal doors Leslie Howard stood patiently waiting. Ralph Morgan, in green velvet, stood flexing his rapier. Photographers stood yawning behind their waiting cameras. Time and a small fortune passed by. "Try it again now," Cukor called finally. Romeo, muttering immortal lines, forced the seal of the tomb; he was accosted, swords flashed . . . "There was a train whistle in that," shouted someone from a sound booth. THEY got the scene at last, about five' thirty. In the meantime Cukor gave me, in essence, the story of a motion picture — the greatest, most fabulously expensive production of all time — from the viewpoint of his own directorial chair. "I've learned more about my work," he told me, biting into the polished red apple I'd brought as a gag, "and about Hollywood and its stars than I ever thought it possible to know. And I'm so pleased with the result. "Shakespeare wrote his masterpieces for the screen, you understand. That sounds insane, but it's quite true. He didn't think about the limitations of the early English stage when he picked up his quill to scratch on paper deathless love scenes, bitter hate and the innermost dramas of human lives. He wrote 'Juliet' in twenty-four scenes — more than any tiny theater could have thought of staging in his day. "He wrote continuity, envisioned close-ups, flash-backs and all the other magic the movies have. He imagined feasts with "twenty cunning cooks' without remembering that they would have to look like small luncheons or buffet suppers on any stage. Everyone knows the limitations of the Seventeenth Century theater." The nuisance of noise on the set, the many delays, were obviously forgotten. He hurried on: "They had no grand setup at all then — mi ^pace, no paraphernalia, no props. You imagined everything or you didn't understand anything. People walked back and forth in front of a backdrop, which the audience was asked to see as a garden one minute and as a ballroom the next. Shakespeare with his vi\ id imagination, ignored all this. "Every scene he wrote for 'Romeo and Juliet' is shown in the picture version, When the wealthy and noble Capulets invite their powerful friends to a banquet, it's a banquet — with all the trimmings. When there's a street fight you know somebody's irked at somebody else in a big way. And all the hitherto unexplained lapses in the play, which had to be ignored because stage scenery could not be changed every other minute, are detailed on the screen — so that now — for the first time — the full meaning of the story is clear. THERE was a short interlude while he took ' the tomb scene again, was informed that three passing trucks had betrayed the mood, and came back again to the stool beside me. I asked, "Making 'Juliet' must have made a big impression on Hollywood, didn't it?" and he replied, "No one really knows howmuch it has done for us. It has taught us an infinite number of facts about the business of movie making. It has taught the stars who have played in it the final compromise between overacting and too much restraint, between the nasal inflection in speech and the broad 'a.' "And its success with the public opens to the studios the opportunity for combined art and costume pictures — which is the third and final step the industry had to take. " You see, in the beginning we had to be contented with modern stories about contemporary modern people — we had to present them in Twentieth Century houses, dressed in Twentieth Century clothes. That was our little world with a fence around it." He started in on the jar of candy I had brought with the apple. "When some producer finally dared give the public a picture about people who lived a couple of hundred years ago. that was the second milestone. Hut there was still a fence — the scripts had to be written by modern writers and the treatment had to be thoroughly contemporary. No one dared touch the magnificent things created by the masters of the pas) " 'Too much art for the lame-brained public,' said producers and directors. What they really meant was that they were afraid to try. And what they overlooked was the point that genuine art has a universal appeal if it's presented unpretentiously, as it was intended to be. "When that preview audience the other night suddenly came out of its collective shell and appreciated Shakespeare, delighted in