Picture Play Magazine (Sep 1921 - Feb 1922)

Photo by Hartsook Rubye de Renter, being a sunny blonde, prefers such reading as "The Seven That Were Hanged. PICTURE people are an illiterate lot if one takes into account the things written about them. They never read anything except Shakespeare. Occasionally they toss oi¥ Tolstoy as a chaser. Whenever I read one of those essays about a star who cannot wait until she gets her make-up off to immerse herself in "Macbeth" or "War and Peace" I always want to do something for her. I want to send her a copy of Ring Lardner. These poor, hard-reading stars miss so much that is worth while. They don't know that there have been any writers since the Elizabethan era. Tolstoy is admitted because he's from Russia, and they figure Russia still is in the Elizabethan era. I often wonder why stars never read the stories in which they appear on the screen. It might help if they did. As it is, I have seen an actress dragging through a comedy as if under the impression she was Hcdda Gahlcr. She had that morning-after expression. It isn't good for a beautiful girl to stay up late imbibing to excess of Ibsen, Tolstoy, and Sophocles. So I decided not long ago to call a meeeting of stars to organize a literary society. It was my purpose to show them that there are things worth reading aside from William Shakespeare and Grace Kingsley. There's Emma-Lindsay Squier, for instance. Even Joe Conrad might not be too frivolous. At an impromptu affair, held as a preliminary to the literary concourse, I felt my way by asking how George Moore stood with the stellar literati. "I hear he's left Selznick," piped one of the Shakespearean fans. "I always liked Tom much better." I decided that a literary society would not do. I started a house-to-house canvass. Most of the stars were out or were so busy reading Euripides' latest they couldn't see me. I left my questionnaires. A few days later I received lists of "My Favorite Authors." Evidently the press agents had been at work. They were fearful symposiums. They might have been prepared by Mark Twain's Blucher, who doted on Gibbons, Hippocratus, and Sarcophagus. It seemed hopeless. Was it possible that the Brains and Beauty of the world scorned the simple books that Roosevelt and Eliot recommended for our bookshelves ? I couldn't think so, Harrison Ford's library is reasonable. I had occasion to visit it when Mr. Ford gave me a list of what every young fan should read, a list which I duly submitted to Picture-Play readers along with that compiled by Miss Mary Alden. Could it be that Miss Alden and Mr. Ford were the only squat brows in the colony? Then one day while Mahlon was pouring me tea from his shaker I met Mabel Normand. She came into the Hamilton drawing-room with two books in her arm. I glanced at them and shuddered. Shakespeare and Tolstoy! I closed my eyes and felt their hides. They didn't feel like Leo and Will. They had a coarser integument. "They don't bite," said Mallei cheerily. "Haven't you read any of Stephen Leacock?" I sat down weakly and requested Mahlon to shake out another. "You haven't read Leacock !" cried Mabel. "I will send you 'Literary Lapses.' " She made a memorandum in her notebook alongside that of "old clothes for Armenian children." A few days later the book arrived at my chateau. "I have marked my favorite stories," said the accompanying note. The favorites were : "How to Avoid Getting Married." "Borrowing a Match," "Boarding-house Geometry," "How Tennyson Killed the May Queen." Heartened by Mal:)el and Stephen, I decided to resume my quest for the Illiterary. My first stop was Miss Normand 's bungalow on the Mack Sennett lot. A maid admitted me and asked me to make myself congenial with the cigarettes until Miss Normand