Picture Play Magazine (Mar-Aug 1920)

THE world seems much concerned with ladders. Usually new hats, parlor rugs, and little pleasure trips hang near the lower rungs. As we ascend further the "fruit" ripens from roadsters and bungalows into touring cars, mansions, and coupons ; and we pluck as many as we can, as decently as we can. I think the prize plum of all — even more than a RollsRoyce — is the satisfaction of having made good. I've been asked to tell just what sort of spikes I wore — since I seem to have ascended a few rungs. But to tell the truth, I always feel as though I wore rubber heels. That doesn't mean that I didn't hear any loud knocks or that I didn't ever travel with men who regarded "shined" shoes as a sign of effeminacy. I did. But my rise to actual stardom was so quiet that I never realized how far I was getting. It is no false modesty which leads me to say that I was a little bit surprised when I was made a Goldwyn star ; any one in the profession will understand, because they know the distance between a leading man and a blazing stellar light. Yet there is something incongruous to me in the idea that the son of an Irish cattleman — as my father was— should become an American screen favorite. When I was a lad over in Erin, the ghosts of feudal serfs still sat on our Blarney stone ; and no matter how brilliant the hue of the native shamrocks, we could not live on them. So, eventually, a jaunting-car was secured and our parents and their six children prepared to set out on an adventure for prosperity. There followed one of the curious incidents of my life. With family goods and family piled in the car, it developed that my father, that incorrigible Irishman, didn't know where he was going ! He had thought of Dublin and of America, but devil if he had been able to make up his mind! My mother did it for him. She wrote the words "Dublin" and "America" on two slips of paper and tossed them about in baby Joe's cap. Then I drew one out and the paper read "America." And that's a true tale, as true as my name, which is Thomas Joseph Moore. I haven't forgotten the trip in the steerage. We landed in New York, but immediately went to Toledo, Ohio, where we had relatives. ' There the twin spirits of my soul, tribal and wandering, tugged with each other. Irksome family errands were the deciding factor. At the age of sixteen I ran away, and reached Jersey City, in some way, without the nickel to cross the ferry to my goal, Manhattan. But I finally got there; and for a year I did all sorts of jobs, the most aristocratic of them being a mixer of soda waters. At the end of that year I had just enough money to buy one suit of clothes and go home to brag and show myself off. But the wanderlust was on me and soon I was off again. This time my brother Owen, also destined to be a motion-picture star, went with me. We struck Chicago as poor as a pair of the proverbial church mice. One day chance dictated that we should see an advertisement for supers in a dramatic version of "Parsifal"— those were the days of the "Parsifal" craze, when performances lasted ten hours — and got the jobs. So it was that our stage careers began. From the first I liked the atmosphere of the theater ; perhaps I can best describe my reactions by saying that my super job was the first in which I felt thoroughly at home. When a man finds a job like that, he has found his vocation, I think. "On the strength of my "Parsifal" experience, I got a job with a road company, which went broke. I remember pawning my only possession, my suit case, not overheavy from its contents — in Owen Sound, Ontario, for