Picture Play Magazine (Mar-Aug 1921)

28 Romances of Famous Film Folk saying nothing at all at home about their ambitions. So, through several months, the two young people grew to be closer and closer friends. But it was a long while before young Vidor dared aspire to kiss his goddess because there was something about Miss Florence that somehow kept a fellow at his distance, even when near. "Will you kiss me?" he asked her suddenly, one night when they had come home from a party. "How dare you ?" demanded Florence Arto, just as any girl would have done, but probably secretly wishing all the time he hadn't asked, but had just done it. "He wasn't a cave man, I must admit!" laughed his wife, in telling me about it. "Aw, I just did that to give her confidence — let on I hadn't had any experience !" chuckled King in his own unctuously droll, twinkling way. Anyway, next time he didn't ask. He just did it. And neither remembers when he proposed. Anyhow, they say they don't. Maybe he never did. Maybe the friendship and companionship just grew naturally into love, and somehow they just took marriage for granted. They did get married, too. as soon as King Vidor had finished some pictures which he wanted to take to New York to sell. So their New York trip was their honeymoon, and the month was lovely September. "I went around to the studios to see how pictures were made after I had been making them !" chuckled Vidor. "I was only twenty years old then, but I had already made a great many pictures. I had no studio. I made 'em with all the interiors front porches"— Vidor grinned humorously. "My father gave me some money, I earned the rest, and I used the simple village folk in most of my stuff. Lots of bits and incidents I use now in my small-town pictures are adapted from people and things I really saw either in Houston or in some sleepy town near by. I made some industrial films and a few stories with the meager facilities I had. I directed the stories, and sometimes I acted in them, too, and then I'd get some kid to turn the camera while I performed. It got so the kids would pay for the chance to grind." He has a droll little wit all his own, has Vidor, and many of the flashes of this native and always kindly humor appear in his screen stories. He has a shrewd, keen mind, which, however, is singularly free from unkindly criticism of anybody. Mrs. Vidor is sweet, homey, conventionally nice and well bred and charming, thoroughly interested in her husband's work and in her own, but with a marvelous gift for home making despite her work. Though both accomplish so much, they never seem to be in a hurry. In short they're real folks, the Vidors. Baby Suzanne is just two years old. She's a brilliant tot with big, brown eyes and yellow hair, and the evening I was out there her beauty had been somewhat damaged by the fact that she had a swollen lip due to having tumbled down on her inquisitive little nose and knocked two of her front teeth down her little throat. But though this hampered her style a bit, it didn't keep her from giving a very graphic rendition of that childhood epic concerning Mary's lamb, nor did it subtract greatly from the inherently dramatic effect of Jack and Jill's adventures. If the Vidors are going to a party or to the theater. Baby Suzanne has to be put to bed by them Continued on page 85 A Home-Made Star Y Long before she saw a studio Alice Calhoun was destined to be a star, because she couldn't be anything else. By Barbara Little OLT would like Alice Calhoun, I know," an official of the Vitagraph Company told me. "She is the most genuine, most unaffected girl I ever knew. There is no pretense about her — she didn't acquire a new manner when she became a star. She " I interrupted his effusive description of the little lady at that point to ask what seemed to me a pertinent question. "Who made her a star?" "Nobody," he answered, unruffled. "She just was one." A few days later he telephoned to ask if I would have dinner with her. "Gladly," I murmured. "And where?" "Oh, at her home, of course," he answered. "Home? Don't be funny, you know we're in New York, and no one has a real home here." But Alice Calhoun is different. If you don't live in New York you can't realize how unique she is, and if you do, you have a right to be as skeptical as I was. "Real Alice Calhoun's home folks," he had said. It greatest gift is hardly seemed possible in what her genuineness, has been called the citv of a