Picture Play Magazine (Sep 1921 - Feb 1922)

Famous Film Folk Crofts an actress in musical comedy when they met, all of these facts and happenings led to his becoming movie star, will interest every ambitious fan. Klumph Jlllllllllllll!l!i:lllllllllllllllllllili!lllllllllllilllllllllllllllllllllllllllllll^ though, when she thought it over, it didn't seem so funny. It made her sad to think of the many hard knocks ahead for a young man who didn't see why people did things they didn't want to. Mahel registered a hope right then that he would never know what it was to be poor, so poor that he had to do things he didn't want to, so you can see that she had started to fall in love with him already. "I'll tell you all about us," Mabel assured me with a disconcerting glance from those wonderful eyes that change momentarily from a humorous sparkle to Xragic depths and back to a confidential twinkle again, "if you'll promise never to say again that I'm pretty. No one has ever noticed that I can act because they've been told that I'm pretty. I don't deserve any credit for that, and Hugo and I both deserve a lot of credit for my acting ; really we do. I'm improving all the time; we notice it even if no one else does. Don't we, Hugo?" "Yes," he assented eagerly. He thought I had been safely steered away from that question of when he proposed, and for a time I let him think so. Mabel smiled at me reassuringly, while he talked about their pictures: of the making of "The Journey's End," the first drama to be made without subtitles ; of the disappointment that their "East Lynne" was so much greater a success than their "Pagan Love," which they liked better, and, of course, of beautiful scenes and settings, real or in pictures. Hugo Ballin doesn't particularly like to talk about art and artists and bringing the magic of the artist's palette to the building and lighting of sets, but people always urge him to because he talks so interestingly. He would rather have his friends go to see his pictures and find his theories expressed there. When he talks he'd rather just joke, and he's just as companionably lowbrow as any director who thinks that Childe Hassam is a Turkish cigarette. But one always thinks of Hugo Ballin as surrounded by beauty. "It must have been in the moonlight," I offered, "that you proposed to her. Was it in Italy, where you used to go on sketching trips sometimes? And did you sit I among the ruins of some old castle, looking out over the Adriatic while you listened to the plaintive songs of the boatmen below?" Mabel chuckled. "Yes, yes," Hugo assented enthusiastically. "And we talked about other great masterpieces, and then about "In the interest of truth," Mabel offered, "he proposed to me on rather a muggy night on the way home from a concert at the Hippodrome. And when we reached my apartment I said, 'You can kiss me good night if you want to.' And he murmured words to the effect that he didn't care if he did. I thought at the time it would have been a little nicer if he had been ^ more ardent, but afterward I decided he was much nicer Has he was. He showed lack of experience." H Hugo glared at her — at least it was a glare compared Hto the way he usually looks at her — but Mabel went on H somewhat in the manner of the irrepressible child who Hugo Ballin was the first artist of real eminence to become a motion-picture art director. will bring the family skeleton out to dance before company. "And we were engaged three years. I went back on the road in a Frank Daniels show, and Hugo went on painting wonderful pictures." The chuckle became a merry little laugh ; there's an ingenuous enthusiasm about Mabel Ballin that is wholly natural, wholly delightful. There's an air about her that says, "I'm having a lot of fun; why don't you?" "It was the luckiest thing that could have happened to me," she continued. "I never knew enough to take care of myself before I met Hugo. I was always thin and pale, and I guess I went to too many parties. I wouldn't have met Hugo if I hadn't gone to one of those parties, though, and he was so fresh and wholesome — just as he is now — that I guess he changed me a lot." "Let's go back to the studio," Hugo urged, as though fearful of further disclosures. So it was up in Mabel Ballin's dressing room that I heard the rest of the story. We sat in the little room that her husband had had decorated for her in glowing nuances of orchid and dull blue and palest apple green which looks out over Central Park. Six stories below motors sped along, casting flashing lights among the trees, and overhead the stars were just beginning to glimmer against the blackness of the sky. The spell of beauty changed her mood a little, or perhaps it was the absence of the quietly critical Hugo that made her feel free to talk more seriously of their marriage. "I felt so sorry for Hugo when he married me," she told me, "that I cried. I was used to hardship — but Hugo Continued on page 96