Picture Play Magazine (Mar-Aug 1921)

The Revelations of course, so I just watched the yacht and said nothing. And finally she went off down the beach, and Hughie junior came and scrambled up into my lap, and I forgot her insinuations. But that night she came to me again. It was rather late, about half past eleven, but I was waiting up for Hugh and sewing while I waited. I had made Hugh's shirts since the days before he went into pictures, when he was a bond salesman in Chicago, and we lived in a four-room apartment out on the North Side and thought we were the happiest bride and groom in the world. And I'd never felt that our having heaps more money than we had then was any reason for my not continuing to do it. So I sat there sewing, and glancing up at Hugh's picture occasionally, for company. It's a photograph that he's never sent out for publicity, or given to the fans, but has kept just for me, and it's a wonderful likeness of my handsome husband, with his sturdy six feet of height, his square, cleft chin, and the laughing dark eyes that inspire such affectionate mash notes from girls who don't know he's married or hope he's unhappy with me. Mrs. Deane came running in just as I picked it up to brush a bit of dust from the frame. "I just came over to bring you some of the ice cream my daughter had for her sorority party," she began; then as I thanked her she rattled on, "I've been downtown to the movies with Sister Kate, and what do you suppose happened? It was a picture of your husband's that they were showing, and who should be there but your husband and Miss Burnet. They weren't making those night scenes out at the beach at. all!" . "Something must have gone wrong then — the lights, probably," I answered. "You never can count on anything when you're making pictures." "Well, maybe that was it," she admitted. "Anyway/ they were there, and when the crowd recognized them and cheered they finally went up on the stage, and-your husband made a little speech. My, but they look well together — she's so blond and little. Afterward they went into the Willoughby House for supper, and some of the crowd followed them over there, but they seemed too interested in each other to see any one else." I don't know what else she said; she just talked on and on, and I sat there hemming one of Hugh's cuffs and wishing she'd go. My throat felt dry and hot, and I couldn't seem to think. I'd never been jealous of Hugh before, not even when I first saw him play a love scene — I knew that his whole heart was wrapped up in Hughie and me, and that all the time he was thinking of how soon he'd have money enough to buy the home he wanted for us. But now suddenly I remembered so many little things — the way Carol Burnet "had clung to him when he was teaching her to swim, that morning, the realism she put into their love scenes, the queer, preoccupied way Hugh had been acting the last few days. Mrs. Deane went home at last, but I couldn't go on sewing; my thread snarled so, and I kept losing my needle. At last I just stopped and stared at Hugh's picture. I wouldn't believe that he was untrue to me, even in thought. But he's such a boy that any woman of a Star's Wife 19 could wind him around her little finger. And Carol Burnet is amazingly pretty; her yellow hair lies in little ringlets all over her head, as a baby's does, and she has the biggest, bluest eyes I've ever seen. I went into the bedroom to undress, and studied myself in the mirror of my dressing table. I'm not blond, and my hair isn't curly; it's thick and straight and so long that I can't do anything but wind it in braids around my head. My eyes aren't a limpid blue, but hazel ; almost green sometimes. Hugh has always said I was the prettiest woman in the world, and I'd believed that to him I was, because he loved me so much — now I began to wonder. And finally I just walked the living room in a perfect agony of wretched, jealous fear. • Sometimes, when the clock struck twelve and one and two, I grew panic-stricken for fear there had been an accident. ; ' The company had come down to Florida to do a feature picture the scenes of which were laid in India, and I "knew there was to be a big mutiny scene. Perhaps one of the guns had been loaded with real bullets — perhaps Hugh had been shot ! Then other times I'd just feel sure that Carol Burnet had won Hugh away from the boy and me, and broken up our home. And every time that I'd hear a car coming I'd run to the window to see if it was going to stop at our house, and then stand there wretchedly and watch it go on down the street. ,? ->■': c But at last a taxi came chugging along and stopped, and Hugh got out. He didn't come right up the walk, though, but stood there talking, and through the window the prettiest little white arm was held out to him. I knew it was Carol's. He took her hand in both of his, and I heard him say : . "Now, don't you worry, little girl ; I'll see that this comes out all right." My heart thudded so that it seemed to me it would burst right out of my body, and I crept off to bed and slumped down in a heap. I almost wished he hadn't come home at all. Anything would have been better than what had happened, I thought. Hugh came whistling up the path a moment later and let himself in. calling me softly. Then . he tiptoed into the bedroom and said, "Sally, dear !" again, but I didn't answer. Then he turned and tiptoed out to the kitchen, and I felt better as I lay there and listened to him rummaging in the ice box ; a man who's been feasting royally with a siren he's infatuated with doesn't come home and fill up on corned beef and doughnuts. I stood it as long as I could, and then I put on his bath robe and went out to the kitchen ; our new cook had moved the bread box, and from the sounds that came to me I knew he couldn't find it. "The bread's in the food safe ; Lindy thinks there are mice in the cupboard," I told him, curling up with my feet under me. I was on the verge of beginning with "Where have you been?" but I knew that would start me on a perfect harangue, and, anyway, I just couldn't do it. When he saw me his eyes had crinkled up the way they do when he smiles — if you're a fan you know that smile — and he'd hugged me up to him with one arm while he reached for the pickles with the other. There may not be as much WE BELIEVE that this narrative is the most remarkable document of its kind ever written or published about the lives of motion-picture folk. Told, as it is, simply, and with no effort or intention either of concealing anything which may, with propriety, be revealed, or of dragging to light things which had better be left in darkness, it enlists the reader's belief in the sincerity of the writer, whose only motive, as she explained to us, was to give the movie-loving public a true picture of the life behind the screen, which only such a person as she — under pledge that her identity be not revealed— could give.