Photoplay (Jan-Jun 1920)

90 and the man who is. The fascinating, worldly, finished actor — the year-long invalid — the joyous, earnest, healthful man of today. It must be rather nice to have everybody about you so glad you are well. And then the thousands who will rejoice over his return whose welcome he will never hear. "I'm quite well now," he announced, as we sat down on the edge of a rustic well. "I still limp a bit, but that doesn't matter, for I'm playing a cripple in this picture and it will be gone by the time we get to the next one." "How did it happen?" I asked. "You got well so quickly. And you look so remarkably fine." Now you and I are hard-headed, sensible people. We, of course, think as we will and are not easily influenced. It is not necessary that we endorse what a man says merely because we listen to him say it. Because we quote him, it does not signify that we agree with him. But surely a man has a right to his own opinion as to what dragged him back from the pit. He has a right to voice that opinion. It cannot harm us to listen. Incidentally, your common sense doesn't have to stand the test of looking into Elliot Dexter's serene, happy eyes, that seem to have a light turned on behind them. "Right thinking healed me, when everything else had failed," said Dexter quietly, so quietly that it was much more effective than if he had shouted it from the housetops. "Good, happy thoughts instead of bad ones, clean, wholesome thoughts instead of wrong, poisonous ones. I have somehow learned the truth about man. That's all. Perhaps I don't understand it very well myself. It is just that 'whereas I was blind, now I see.' " He became suddenly tongue-tied, blushing as rosily as a girl, filled with embarrassment. But the courage of his convictions, a sharp sense of gratitude, brought his eyes back to mine and he went on firmly. "It works, you see. A man must be a fool who would not Photoplay Magazine believe such proof as I have had. Then, look at Monte Blue over there." His gesture rested on a tall young man, much at ease with his back in the sunshine. "Monte was bom with a fear of snakes. Used to turn sick when he saw one. His old pals will tell you he almost shot a man once, who threw one at him. A couple of days ago on location, someone put one near him. He went clean crazy. He ran around and around like a madman until he finally dropped in a faint. "But, you know," it says 'dominion over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth.' " He laughed, with that same touch of embarrassment, but this time he went steadily on. "I kept thinking that. I told him that. When you think about that, it doesn't seem right that a man should fear a snake, does it? "The next day he came up to me with the happiest grin. 'I touched one, Elliot,' he said. He showed me that he could pick a snake up. He had been healed of that fear because he knew the truth about it. "Look at the 'Chief.' Would you think to look at him now" — we both turned to watch Cecil deMille, with that brilliant coolness of his, getting ready to shoot " — that he was taken home yesterday almost blind with kleig-eye. We didn't expect to work today, because when he gets them he gets them bad and is laid up. But ihe same truth healed him in ten minutes. "Everybody has a right to their own ideas about things. I do not want to force mine on anyone. But I cannot feel right not to tell the thing as it happened to me. "I never expected to get well. I tried to be cheerful, to be a man, to make the best of it. Now I am well. You may not believe me. The world may not believe me. But / know." He smiled at me. Suddenly it was borne in upon me that I had never seen happier eyes than Elliot Dexter's. You watch for it, and you will see what I mean. After all, heaven itself can have nothing to offer us beyond happiness. t ^^^^^r^' c 1^^ «> ^J^^^B S b %p 1 ^1 Hk 'V^ aii^^^^^B 1 1 The Man Who Paints The Covers THE hardy young westerner who paints Photoplay's covers in a complete visualization of his virile and interesting name — Rolf Armstrong. He is a living proof that the picturesque artist of your imagination may not be a myth ! Those delicately wrought pictures — shining songs of color and form, light and shadow — which are marked with Rolf Armstrong's name are made in a spacious studio workshop with slanting, aged walls in New York's most fascinating old quarter. It is the workshop — proven by the furnishings which lend it its charm — of an athlete, a collector, a lover of beauty, and a real man. Mr. Armstrong came to New York from Seattle, via a stop-over for study in Chicago, about seven years ago. He has made a specialty of portraits of women — because he believes that women are the most subtly difficult, and the most worth while subjects to paint. "There are all the beauties of the changing landscape in their faces," he says. Rolf Armstrong is the brother of the late Paul Armstrong, who was one of America's most successful playwrights.