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G9
bhe Couldn't
Kid Herself
Dorothy Mackaill bluffed the world and herself for a while, but finally she achieved a balance that assures success and peace of mind.
By Myrtle Gebhart
WHAT has Hollywood done to me?" Dorothy Mackaill's cryptic brows lifted her repetition of my question off her crisp voice, and it dangled there a moment between us, before she plunged into the task of answering it.
Six years in Hollywood could not but effect changes and indent marks. A cactus coat could not escape the influences with which the film town sandpapers its personalities and redecorates them.
Four years ago she said to me, "This business offers me money and prestige; I intend to get ahead." Has she? All right, hoys, we heard you ! "I lack much imagination." Correct, and better tor her. She admitted that her illusions had been roughened and expressed a flippant cynicism, which has been mellowed by a few real heartaches into a clearer understanding and a more sympathetic tolerance. Hard-boiled bluster has become dignity.
At fourteen, working in an English newspaper office, she bluffed the editors into thinking her older and intellectual ; at school in London, in the awkwardness of a misfit, she bluffed that she didn't mind
her ostracism ; on the Hippodrome stage she bluffed the supper chappies into considering her a blase woman. On a pound or two more than passage, she bluffed her way to America into the "Follies," to Hollywood.
She got away with it beautifully, until she started to bluff herself.
When "The Kid," as she used to call herself, got Mackaill's number, the jig was up.
Her career has maintained a steady progress. It has been like a ship that rides out the gales so expertly that only its navigator knows there has been clanger. She has never achieved the extraordinary, cither in success or failure.
Her publicity, characterized by simplicity, has been less than that promoting others. A series of neat, little news notes — just that, no more. Even marriage and separation were negotiated without the customary ado. There has been nothing exceptional, unless one accepts my own view, that in maintaining level-headcdness in Hollywood one accomplishes a rarity, the distinction of being unsensational, the minority of the sane.
Miss Mackaill has
herself so well in hand that vital personal or professional matters no longer disturb her.
Curiously, her name is never bandied about. Though she is far from being a recluse, it is not slithered from luncheon to bridge tabic by the gossip brigade. I rather think her very disdain disarms them.
Her answer is a snappy "Yes!" or "No!" or "I don't know anything about that." No equivocation, no fumbling, no tactful evasions.
Any turbulence is well curtained and disciplined. Whatever the melee, she emerges undisturbed. Her handclasp is quick and firm, her walk brisk; her i give you candor. She has been called "The Deer." because of the way she throws her head back, a^ though listening. Her barbed wit can be caustic. I should not want her antagonism. One sharp phrase would lie her shrapnel.
Only one other star T have known was so brutally frank — Anna Q. Nilsson. Even when, for a brief time. she went slightly Hollywood and was given to dashing to places for the hurrah, she kidded that sort of thing and herself.
"Most important to me is that I have achieved bal