Picture Play Magazine (Sep 1925 - Feb 1926)

83 Dinner with Dorothy At which the interviewer discovers the reasons for Miss Mackaill's success and makes some predictions about her further glory. By Emma-Lindsay Squier PICTURE if you will the lobby of the Hotel Netherland in New York. Fifty gorgeously gowned young women sitting attentively waiting for a director, who, it is rumored, is going to choose one of the applicants for the part of the young blind girl in "Mighty Like a Rose." The long room is heavy with the fragrance of many perfumes. There is a glitter of jewelry — false and real — and a tumult of eager colors. Each applicant is dressed in her "Sunday best." Then picture in the midst of all this obvious finery a frail young girl in black with a shabby little round hat pressed down over pale-gold hair, big, gray eyes and a crimson mouth set in a white oval face. Not a jewel, not even the delicate shimmer of a silk stocking. The director enters and his eye sweeps appraisingly around that circle of eager, overdressed beauties. To choose from among them would be like trying to select the most enchanting single flower in a garden of a thousand roses. Inevitably his eye falls upon the one girl who is in such startling contrast to the others. The director approaches her, speaks rather hesitatingly, "Are you applying for the part in this picture ? What's your name?" She answers very simply, "I am Dorothy Mackaill." The name at that time meant nothing to the director— or to any one. True, this young girl, so recently come 'from England, had appeared in the chorus of the "Follies." She had left the ranks of the glorified American girls to make one picture in Hollywood, but it was with a small company and an independent release, so that her work had been given no opportunity to attract attention. She had decided to come back to New York and start again in the right way. "The right way," as she conceived it, would be in a part that she loved and which would serve as a definite stepping stone to the higher altitudes of fame. Hence the scene in the lobby of the Netherland Hotel. Dorothy Mackaill had other clothes, but she knew the value of contrast. The director talked to her. He was intrigued by that mysterious compelling something that is the keynote of her personality. But he still hesitated. "It's too big a part to trust to an unknown actress," he demurred. "Besides, this little blind girl has to play a violin. Can you do that?" "Not now, but I'll learn," Dorothy Mackaill told him. He laughed at her assurance. "We will begin working on the picture inside of five weeks," he said. "You can't learn to play a violin in that time." "Yes, I can," she answered quietly, convincingly. Without promising anything he allowed her to take the violin home with her. She got an instructor that same day and started work. She practiced day and night ; and there were times when her slender funds went for violin lessons instead of meals. But it didn't matter. She had made up her mind to have that part. "I figured I wouldn't starve to death," Dorothy told me, "and I could make up for not eating — when I got the part." The hardest thing was the cold, fruitless period of waiting. The director never once called her up or gave her any intimation that he was considering her for the little blind girl. She called him up twice ; once to tell him, "I have learned to play the violin," and once to say, "I have been spending' my afternoons at a school for the blind. I know how a blind girl acts and feels." The day came when the director called her and said they would give her a camera test. Even then he was very noncommittal and held out no hope that she would be given the role. The test scene was an extremely emotional one. The young blind girl leaves the home that had meant so much to her and goes friendless and alone out into the world, which to her is a vast darkness. Dorothy Mackaill told me about it one night when we were at dinner — the two of us — in her rooms at the Algonquin Hotel. "At first I was frightened — thoroughly, horribly frightened. All those people were watching me with cold, hostile eyes — or so it seemed to me. Then I remembered how a young girl at the blind school had looked — a young girl whom I had watched day after day, trying to feel her personality and get her viewpoint on life. I forgot myself. I went whole-heartedly into the character I was creating. They told me to cry, and I sobbed so hard that the tears kept on streaming down my face even when the camera stopped. When I finished the directors and stage hands were looking at me curiously, without saying a word. I thought I had failed. But the director said curtly, 'Report to-morrow. What's your salary?' And so I got the part." There you have the secret of Dorothy Mackaill's success. She gets what she goes after by reason of persistence, patience and an unconquerable determination to master details. Not many girls would have gone to the expense of learning to play the violin on the slim chance of being chosen from a group of fifty. I asked her how she would have felt if the director had not chosen her after all. But she looked at me steadily with her wide, gray eyes, and said quietly, "But I knew that I'd get it. I knew it." When I first saw Dorothy Mackaill on the screen, in "The Man Who Came Back," she had long, yellow hair that was unique and distinctive. Now the long, yellow tresses are gone ; laid as a sacrifice on the altar of "Chickie," film version of a serialized story that had been running in the daily newspapers. It has changed her, of course. It makes her look less aristocratic, but more youthful. Dorothy does not regret it now, although it was at first, she admits, a struggle to give it up. "I wanted the part of Chickie," she said frankly, "but they wouldn't take me without my having bobbed hair. There was a short argument between my hair and me, and I won out. Off it came." That is Dorothy again. She lets nothing interfere when once she has made up her mind concerning what she wants. Heaven help the moon if Dorothy decided she was going to have it ! I was outspoken in my contempt for the trashy story in which, I feared, Dorothy Mackaill's superior talents would be submerged. But she did not altogether agree with me. Continued on page 103