Picture Play Magazine (Sep 1921 - Feb 1922)

What They Read 73 forgave all indiscretions when informed that Anita simply adores Ring Lardner. At last I'd found my own literary level — Mabel and Anita. Mabel says that it is a very bad thing to tell people what you read. "Tell them what you read and they'll tell you what you are," she avers. I suspect Mabel cribbed this line from "The Wisdom of the Chinese." I'm still puzzled so far as Mabel is concerned — a slapstick comedienne reading Freud ! But it seems the lower the comedy the higher the intellect. The slapstick is fine discipline for study. Louise Fazenda is one of the most versatile readers. She doesn't write a bad fable herself. Louise prefers : W. N. P. Barbellion's "The Journal of a Disappointed Man," Vornich's "The Gadfly," Lord Byron, "The Seven Purposes," George Bernard Shaw, Schnitzler's "The Affairs of Anatol," and "The Green Cockatoo," Strindberg, Anatol France, and Wilde. Just now Louise is in the throes of psychoanalysis-. Note "The Seven Purposes." Stars seem bent on philosophical and metaphysical research. Booksellers tell me this is typical of the times. The war gave our souls nervous prostration. Doug and Mary give most of their leisure to philosophy. They have been reading Herbert Spencer's "First Principles," and Mary finds value in Trine's "In Tune with the Infinite" and similar treatises. "It is part of our work to read the modern fiction and our pleasure to read the classics," said Mary with a mischievous twinkle. "We read current novels and short stories in quest of screen material, and so we need the classics as a relief." The Fairbankses have been studying French. They read Dumas' "Three Musketeers" in the original, and now are stalking the irregular verbs of Gautier and Flaubert. Judging by the list of books which Colleen Moore's representative submitted Colleen ought to be deported — Chekov, Gorky, Andriev, Artsybashev — I trust I spell correctly ! — Goncharov, and Dostoyevski. Her favorite, I believe, is Gogo's "Dead Souls." You see. Colleen is always advertised as "The Glad Girl." But don't blame her for the gladness; blame the Bolshevists. Of course this isn't true. Colleen herself told me that she had started the struggle with Emerson and was holding her own pretty well. She's conscientiously involved in Dickens, too. Colleen is nineteen. Lila Lee would come under the ban were it not for her catholicity. She loves Shakespeare and Robert W. Chambers. "Oh, and of course Stevenson, Thackeray, Dickens, and that crowd." In Gloria Swanson I found a star who actually does read the stories in which she figures pictorially. She adores Elinor Glyn. "Alexandre Dumas and Elinor Glyn, I believe, are my favorite authors," said the brave Miss Swanson. Her father is a captain or colonel or something. "Dumas because his colorful writings, with their historical background, appeal to my imaginative sense. Madam Glyn because she knows life — romantic life. I like her realness ; I like her books because she puts things so differently, because she understands human nature and makes her readers understand it." I made a note — catching the Continued on page 90 May MacAvoy makes no effort to conceal her taste for popular novels; she flaunts them, paper covers and all. Colleen Moore recently started to struggle with Emerson and announces that she \ is holding ' her own pretty well.