Picture Play Magazine (Sep 1923 - Feb 1924)

With the Vision Bernhardt Gave Gaston Glass started out under the auspices of the great tragedienne — but in becoming an American film hero he has not always lived up to her precepts. But the spark is still there. By Helen Odgen DURING dinner at the Montmartre, with lovely damosels smiling prettily at Gaston Glass, filmdom's most sought-after bachelor, we had chatted of this and that. Subdued lights, waiters slipping ibout like shadows, the sound of laughter— all the flowers of fashion stopping to chat. He takes their flattery with an easy, accustomed air, always polite, debonair, the Gaston that lives across the street from me and plays golf and gives enjoyable parties and never worries. A Gaston of spirit, of 'ightness and charm. But later when we sat on my porch our talk grew a bit ruminative. At my mention of the sad passing of Sarah Bernhardt, he became aroused, his voice rang with sincerity. "A dynamic, magnetic, marvelous woman ! Something about her that — that sort of goes beyond me when I try to put it into words." For a moment it was a boy who sat there, the red glow of his cigarette tip a dot in the night blackness. "She was my godmother, you know. A woman of indomitable courage. Temperamental, a genius, domineering or impulsive or tender by moods. Sometimes," somberly, "I feel I'm not living up to her confidence in me — success, money, they breed stagnation." _ For some time he talked of Bernhardt, speaking with his slight accent, an occasional fumbling for the right English word to express his chameleon thought in -definite form. After a while a thin sliver of a moon peeped out of the sky and the lights went out in all the houses on our street, and still his low tones paid homage to the greatest actress of all time. I forgot all about him, about me. Time was not, nor place. Only Bernhardt, the unforgetable. "She was a — how can I say it so you won't ridicule me? — a soul. The thing we all want to be. something in us ... we don't talk of things we feel, do we? Too much sham and pretense in all of us . . . but Madame rose above all that. She was a — a symbol." He paced restlessly up and down the porch. "She typified to my mind: truth. Cynical, bitter at times, but always truth. "When I was six, she took me, began my training. Until I am twenty— with some periods in school and art study — I remain in her company. Everything that I am, that I'll ever be, I owe to Madame. One thing she impressed': sincerity. This flattery I hate, how your friends say to you. 'Oh, Gaston, your performance was marvelous !' when I know, here in my heart, it was wib2iby He has slightly irregular features and would be undistinguished in appearance were it not for an intangible something — personality perhaps. rotten." ; He laid his hand on his heart in a gesture that didn't seem at all theatric. "Afraid to hurt your feelings. But I like truth — and to say what is in my mind also. I make people angry, my best friends. Last night I was at a preview, very bad picture. I hurry out, because I know they will ask me how I like it and if I tell what I think they get sore. Madame used to say, 'Gaston, tell the truth. Lc (liable! what you care what they think ?' " Sunburned, of undistinguished appearance, features slightly irregular, Gaston would seem but an ordinary young man were it not for an intangible something. Perhaps personality, maybe just the '"difference" of the foreigner. But I like to think it's the imprint of the hand of genius laid upon him during his childhood by the greatest of them all: Bernhardt. Some of it has been erased in his contact with American commercialism. It has at times, in some of the very ordinary films in which he has appeared, almost receded from view. But there is enough of it there yet. in the intenseness with which he feels things when once aroused from his equanimity, to suggest that he may yet do great things. Continued on page 88