Picture-Play Magazine (Sep 1921 - Feb 1922)

Playing with Douglas MacLean No one around him can help doing it, because he plays all of the time. Bv Barbara Little Douglas MacLean is a goodlooking chap, but that has little to do with his success. It's the sparkling humor from within DOUGLAS Maclean had a midnight-supper engagement with the owner of a hig theater in Los Angeles one night, and he was somewhat annoyed because that conscientious showman insisted on keeping his theater open until the last member of the audience filed out. MacLean had a suspicion that some of them were asleep, a suspicion that was none the less painful in view of the fact that the picure on view was one of his own, called "Chickens." But in his gracious way he said nothing about it — he merely went in and sat down. A few minutes later peals of hysterical laughter rang out of the theater. "Whew — but that guy's funny!" a voice rang out. "Say, don't you think he's great?" Apparently the enthusiasm of the owner of the voice was too much for the rest of the audience. Almost to a man they got up and started to file out. Only then did the owner of the theater realize what MacLean had done. LTnwilling , to have him carry off the honors of the evening at the expense of the audience, the / theater owner rushed out and turned on the auditorium lights in all their glaring bri liance. In a moment MacLean was recognized, and had to shake hands with the members of the audience, who were too bewildered to know just what had happened. His best friends are fre quently in that same position ; the ebullient young MacLean just can't help "staging a show," as he puts it, on each and every occasion. Now, if any one asked me the color of Douglas MacLean's hair or his eyes or how tall he is or how old, I'd look even blanker than usual. I haven't the faintest idea. I didn't have even after I had talked to him for more than an hour. All that I remembered was that he had made me laugh so hard and so continuously that I ached from the back of my neck to my toes. What was even worse, I quite forgot that I was supposed to interview him. Now it may be highly commendable to make a hang man forget his profession or to distract the attention of a convict on parole from a parade of policemen, but an interviewer is supposed never to forget his duty as an interviewer. "Do you love your wife, do you curl your hair, do you answer your fan mail?" one is supposed to volley at a matinee idol. "Do you want to play Hamlet, have you ever had measles, are you immune to custard pies?" the eager questioner should continue. "Are you older than you look, can you read Sanskrit, have you " But what's the use? I didn't ask him any of those things. I will have to save them until I meet Ben Turpin or Wesley Barry. It was this way. From the vantage point of the Ince office, fifteen stories above the roar and din of Times Square in New York City, he was looking out over the intervening streets to where the Hudson River boats plied lazily back and forth. When I went in we drew up before the windows — MacLean, Miss Snyder, the great right hand of the Ince and J. Parker Read forces, and I — feeling very much as though we were sitting on the upper deck of one of the river boats. MacLean seized the opportunity to play tourists' guide and in true ballyhoo fashion began to describe points of interest along the river. His voice droned and squeaked in the intonation peculiar to megaphone artists as he pointed out imaginary sights on the opposite shore. In a moment that palled on him, though we were laughing so hard that we gasped for breath. He started telling us some of his experiences then. He told about a man who accused him of being born to the limelight, who said that it wasn't possible for MacLean to play second fiddle to any one. Just to prove to his own satisfaction that the man was wrong, MacLean went to the ofiice of his friend, the Los Angeles theater owner, and acted as information clerk all afternoon. He paced back and forth between the inner and outer office, and was so solicitous in ushering in the job seekers and encouraging the people who had to wait that they looked on him as an old friend by the time they left the office. Chorus girls looking for a place in the next week's prologue felt that with the help of this nice young man they could surely land an engagement. And the manager himself was so enamored of the kind of service MacLean rendered that he's never been satisfied with his regular clerk since. There was another story about a friend of his who fi.lled an auditorium with wax models and then invited several prominent public speakers to address them. We all took part in this story ; I represented a wax figure of Gyp the Blood, while MacLean reserved for himself the less spirited part of Napoleon. He showed himself Continued on page 98