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October, 1920
27
I
perfection, "are you an out-door sort of person — you know, the kind that wins skating prizes for endurance, and goes to sleep in airplanes, and breaks in bucking bronchos ?"
"No, indeed," laughed the lady. "I stay indoors all I can, and when I'm tired of working I go somewhere — to Atlantic City, for instance — for a rest — to lie on the sand and be happy. I spend my spare moments reading — and trying to write. I'm working on a play — a stage play — right now, and perhaps I'll finish it while I'm away."
"The play is, of course, a drama," I volunteered.
"Yes, of course, and I'm writing it in collaboration with Daniel Carson Goodman. You know him, don't you? He wrote 'Hagar Revelly.' "
Remembering the novel that made so great a stir on its publication, and being much impressed at meeting the man's dramatic collaborator, I asked whether Miss Rubens contemplated following the example set by Theda Bara, and deserting the screen for the stage.
"I am going on the stage," Miss Rubens answered, "and I shall act for the camera at the same time, but I shall not play any part in any play hereafter that does not appear to me to be really worth something. Four years of screen work have finally succeeded in causing me to equip myself with a hand-made philosophy: 'If you can't
F
She has the look of the thoroughbred, perhaps more continental in her finish and poise than the average American girl of her age ; and her conversation is a refreshing mixture of naivete and book sophistication
do something worth while — stop.' I shall never play in another moving picture or go on the stage until I find a play that seems to me to have in it the elements of bigness — of greatness. In my last picture, 'The World and His Wife,' a translation from the Spanish masterpiece of Echegaray, 'El Gran Galeoto,' I felt that I was appearing in something of which I need never be ashamed — that I was interpreting a person who really mattered. Acting at its best is only the interpretation of another man's creation, and it seems to me that the whole thing is scarcely worth while unless the interpretation is of a character that at least rises above the mediocre. I can't do good work unless I like the story and I like the part. In 'Humoresque,' a picture I played in just before my latest release, for instance, I must admit that I do not like the way I played the part of the heroine." (In this Miss Rubens probably stands alone.) The trouble was that I didn't like the part, and, hard as I tried to interpret it as its author meant it to be, my heart wasn't in it."