Picture Play Magazine (Sep 1921 - Feb 1922)

86 The Revelations of a Star's Wife Continued from page 62 to begin work on it. And when he saw Roxane, and reaHzed what a delicate, sensitive young thing she was, he asked her to come over to his studio the next day. She was so happy when she got through with that interview that she came over to our house and turned cart wheels out in the back yard. "He just sat there and told me stories^ — sad ones, most of them," she told me, when I'd finally persuaded her to calm down a bit. "And when I'd wept on my handkerchiefs — wasn't it lucky that I'd stayed up last night and washed some out ? — and borrowed his, he told me to come into the office, and I signed a contract. Think of it — a contract — me ! Starting at seventy-five a week ! Kewpie's waiting for me now at the real-estate office, and we're going to look at apartments all afternoon." But that joyousness of hers didn't last long after she began working with Clayton Greer. She Vv^as a harp on which he played at will, and her face began to show that the melodies which he chose were plaintive ones. I have always thought that there was a morbid twist to his mind ; he did such unusual things, got such strange effects, and worked so surely on the emotions of his audiences. At first he would tell Roxane what he wanted her to do as she rehearsed a part for him ; later, when she had made two or three simple, not particularly important, pictures under his direction, and he knew what she could do, he got the results he wanted by arousing in her the emotions which were experienced by the character she was portraying. That's a dangerous thing to do with a girl who has no technique to fall back on. Emotionally she was torn to shreds day after day, and many a night she tossed abou. sleeplesslv for hours, unable to relax and escape from the tremendous strain tmder which she had been all dav. Greer didn't care, of course ; he was working for his own ends, to create an actress who could meet the demands that he would make on her later on, when he got his big picture under way To him she was no more than a piece of material which could be thrown aside if it proved inadequate or was spoiled as it was fashioned to his uses. There have always been rumors concerning the relationship between him and Roxane Laird, but I know that he cared nothing for her. As for Roxane and her feeling for him, that was another story. The first big part which she played for him was that of a girl mother whose child had been killed. It was during her playing of that part that he developed the system which he always used after that with her, the system that came so near to wrecking her life. She could have played the role easily enough if he had let her cry, but he refused to do that. "We have had too man\ tears on the screen," he told her. "AVhat I want is real grief — the stern, relentless grief that turns the heart to stone." Roxane couldn't enact that, of course. She was only seventeen ; she'd never known what grief was. .She'd gone hungry and been worried half to death over how she was to get food and shelter for herself and Kewpie, but beyond that she couldn't go. And so he taught her what grief was. They were on location in San Francisco, and he took her for a walk through one of the poorer parts of the city, not in a tenement section, hut where there were little, tumbledown houses crouched down on the side of a great, bleak hill, huddled together for protection against the merciless winds that swept in from the Pacific. "It was a squalid little house where we stopped," she told me afterward, her voice dreary, monotonous. "And there was a stringy little white crape on the door and two or three halfwilted chrysanthemums. We didn't go in ; we went around the corner of the house, and Greer drew me over to a window at one side and said 'Look in !' "And I did. There was a woman in there; she really was just a girl, but her face looked like an old woman's almost, and she was scrubbing the floor of the room — a kitchen it was. "Then I saw what she was washing up. All across it there were little muddy footsteps, straggling from the door toward a red chair — one of those kindergarten red chairs that children love to sit in — and then to the door of a room that opened out of the kitchen. And she was washing up those footsteps. And she looked — she looked like this !" I never want to see again the expression that her face assumed as she turned to me. You have seen it on the screen, and have felt that you looked on a soul in torture. It is one of the things that have made Roxane Laird famous — that portrayal of heart-searing grief. But to take a happy, laughing girl and burn into her being the ability to look like that at will — that, I think, is one of the cruelest things that I have ever known a man to do, and Clayton Greer had done it. "Greer said the funeral was to be that afternoon," she went on, her voice leaden. "I asked him why the neighbors hadn't come in to help, and he said that the child had died suddenly of a contagious disease and the people were afraid to go there. "I said I'd go in and help, but he wouldn't let me. He made me go away with him. Think of it — that woman, all alone with her baby's body, washing up his little footsteps so the house would be decent if anybody should come to the funeral ! I shall never forget how she looked, never." She never has ; her work on the screen proves that. Greer blighted her happiness and gained great rewards for doing it, but Roxane changed from that time on. She was more sensitive, more open to suggestion than ever. And, realizing that, he worked upon it. He took her to the morgue, I remember, at a time when there had been a great disaster, and a weary, stricken procession filed through the dank building, searching for the bodies of loved ones. Roxane had a nervous collapse after that — but when he used a similar situation in a picture, and cast her as a girl who had lost her mother, she gave a performance that the critics acclaimed from coast to coast and pointed out as a bit of acting that was worthy of the greatest actresses in the world. "You are getting your emotional experiences by proxy, Roxane," he told her, but when she repeated that remark to me she added, "I don't know why he says 'by proxy'— if I didn't feel those things I couldn't do them, could I ?" Perhaps Greer didn't realize that she felt what she saw as deeply as if she had had the experiences herself. Certainly he did not realize that Roxane was falling in love with him. Every one else did, though, and those who liked to gossip were saying things that would make it very difficult for her ever to face the world without his backing. She knew that, I believe. But he had so completely absorbed her life that she did not care. And then, when he had spoiled her for going on without him, he told her that he had decided not to renew his contract with her ; that she was free to make a connection elsewhere. CHAPTER XVII. Hugh and I were in the East when the announcement was made that Roxane Laird was no longer under contract with Clayton Greer. "What on earth will she do, Htigh?" I cried, throwing down the paper in which I had read it. "She has learned to do just one thing: to 'Continued on page 88