Picture Play Magazine (Jul - Dec 1929)

I i Renee Adoree is as innocent of artifice as a child, quick to anger and as quick to repent. A COMPLEX personality is easy to get down on paper. Inhibitions and nuances of temperament make fair sailing on any typewriter. But the keys balk at the unaccustomed effort to describe a child. I mean Renee Adoree, who embodies the simplicity, the directness and naive honesty of childhood. Her naivete is not coy ; her simplicity is not wideeyed ; her directness is not premeditated. She is as innocent of artifice as a child. Born in the world of the theater, and an actress ever since, there are no fragments of precocity clinging to her. She is as pungently real as the soil. Born while her father's little, traveling circus paused briefly in Picardy, she is half Spanish and half French, but temperamentally she is purely Gallic. No traces of the languor or subtlety of the Latin are to be found in Renee. She is swift of movement, candid, quick to anger and as quick to repent. Her moods are mercurial, changing with the winds, but she is not what is known as a moody person, because she is not given to brooding. When she is sad, she is just that — not lugubrious. Whatever her humor, it is always apparent. A good actress on the screen, it would never occur to her to disguise her thoughts while away from the camera. Because, unlike many of her contemporaries, she is not playing herself in real life, she is being herself. And not being herself in the conscious, back-slapping manner which is the Hollywood conception of the term. Renee does not deliberate. She does not think. She lives and breathes and feels. Emotional rather than mental, she lives in obedience to impulse, to instinct. Entirely devoid of foresight, she Renee— As Ske Is An analysis of Miss Adoree's character reveals one of the unique personalities of Hollywood. By Margaret Reid precipitates herself into many a disaster, of which, sportsmanlike, she never complains. Cleverer people than Renee can prevent much misfortune. Shrewdness is an invaluable weapon of defense. Renee lacks it herself, and is at a loss to combat it in others. Her strongest weapon is the high courage with which she faces bad luck when it comes. Her life has been a stormy one, colorful, fabulous. Her fund of personal anecdote is unlimited, but she only reveals it casually in intimate conversation. She does not realize its value as a story. It is just what has happened to her — and things happen to everybody. When reporters question her, she is apologetic for lack of material to give them. "I was born in a circus and worked there till I went on the stage as a dancer, and then I got a job in pictures, and that's all." As a matter of fact, no journalistic report could possibly encompass the drama of Renee's life. It is a Zola story, and cries out for his facile pen. In the absence of fimile, it can only be sketched lightly, for tear of infusing with unreality a career that has been far stranger than fiction. Renee's childhood was nomadic. Her home was the lumbering caravan in which Adoree pere and mere, with their little brood, trekked from town to town and country to country. All over Europe, in obscure villages, or on the edge of great cities, they would set up their one small tent. As the family increased, each new addition was trained, almost from birth, to grace the sawdust ring. At four years of age, Renee was galloping blithely around the ring, standing on the bare back of a pony. At eight, she was a trapeze artist, a tight-rope walker, a toe dancer, and an expert at helping with the pitching of the tent, looking after the horses and selling the tickets. A sporadic education was acquired along the way — during halts in Germany, Austria, Italy, Spain, Russia. Glibly Renee learned her lessons in as many different languages as Europe boasts. When she was twelve, she was apprenticed to a famous circus in Paris. As was the custom, she was to serve an apprenticeship of five years, receiving, in return for cooking, sewing, and general assistance, her bed and board and instruction in the more spectacular tricks of the trade. The owner of the show, a Turk, was not exactly a paragon of gentleness. Renee's training was relentless — a broken shoulder sustained in a fall from a galloping horse was just part of the day's work. Because of her love for horses and her understanding of them, little Renee almost immediately became ringmaster, among her other accomplishments. Standing in the great sawdust circle, a tiny figure with a whip five times her length, she directed the speed and grouping of eighteen galloping horses. Then, on a morning when the Turk was breaking in several new equines, Renee's apprenticeship ended abruptly. The new animals, being novices, would not hold their heads in and keep their mouths shut. One horse, after galloping round the ring, began to pant, his tongue hanging out. The Turk, in a burst of temper, snatched a knife from his pocket and, with one cruel stroke, cut the horse's tongue quite off. [Continued on page 104]